Italian food trip!

Italian food has always meant comfort food to wonder | wander | women, but we forget it's had years of being Americanised before it arrived in the Philippines. My earliest memories of eating 'Italian' were declaring that pizza was now my favourite food after watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Genius Kitchen - Sicilian Calzone

In Sicily we rediscovered food we thought of as familiar. It wasn't a matter of thick or thin crust, or the sauce recipes used for pasta.

Italian food is all about freshness - the freshest of ingredients, grown, caught or harvested from as close a source as possible.

Wine from your neighbour's vineyard. Tomatoes from your grandmother's garden. Lemons from the orchards that are less than an hour's drive out of town. And of course, Sicilian blood oranges.

We had market-bought and home-grown ingredients wherever we went - the man in an English park peddling pomegranate and orange juice:

Homemade bread and - our favourite staple - delicious, cold-pressed virgin olive oil straight from the island farms:

A sampling of wine from ancient vineyards revitalised by volcano-fed soil and modern agricultural science:

Even the potato chips were made fresh with new farm potatoes:

And of course, dessert! We stuffed ourselves with pistachio-crusted cannoli made for us on the spot, set off by the delicate tang of rice pudding infused with Sicilian lemon.

Not counting all the gelato we ate, of course!

But my favourite food, even more than dessert (I know), was the seafood. Sicily is an island with very rich waters, and we reaped the rewards.

I devoured a whole seabass flavoured with nothing more than a light drizzle of lemon- and garlic- infused olive oil. It was baked in a salt crust and our friendly server had to chisel it out to serve me!

The octopus was tender and buttery, with the tang of herbs and a slight, delicious char.

And there was fresh squid! Incredibly soft and yummy, and served on the loveliest plate in a garden overlooking the ocean. I ate all of mine and some of my uncle's too.

Needless to say, we had a wonderful time. I'm incredibly grateful to have been treated to a tour of the Italian foodways and how their beautiful country feeds the body as well as the soul.