Temptation is My Sicilian Lover

You can keep your damn twinkies.
You can keep your damn brownies.
Keep your pasta and rice and chicken fried steak.

You want temptation?

Stay with your Sicilian in-laws for three days and just see if that brick-oven in the backyard doesn’t kick your ass.

How do you say no to a woman who is only four feet tall and looks as if her heart might break if you don’t have another pizza?

You don’t.
You eat it.
And you like it.

And you don’t complain.

When your boyfriend’s white-haired father is pulling crispy-crusted pizza pies out of a wood oven that he and your boyfriend built by hand, brick by brick, you don’t say no.  You don’t even think about it.

When you’re spreading ricotta cheese that you and the four-foot mother-person have made from scratch earlier that day across hearty bread, you don’t protest.  You smile, breath deeply, inhale the scent of steamy carbs, slap a few garden-fresh homegrown tomato slices on top and clamp your teeth.  Better yet, add some anchiovies bathed in oil (these were brought by the small man with enormous eyebrows) and then clamp your teeth.

When the old, white-haired father-man offers you another glass of his homemade wine (acquired from a stash of barrels in the back shed) you take it.   You take it, you drink it, and you take the next one too.

You do not count.

Are you getting this?

When, after you’ve had two scaciatta, three personal pizzas and countless (remember the rule about not counting the wine) glasses of hooch, you are offered a calzone, you do not decline.  You call upon the gods to save you, you repent all your carby sins, and you clamp your teeth down around the hot, steamy, fresh love-pocket.

Then you eat the fruit.
And the dessert.

And you drink the espresso because if you don’t, you will definitely die.

This is a fitness blog written by a foodie.  This is a fitness blog written by a foodie with a Sicilian lover.  Don’t say I never warned you.