I just finished a thoroughly enjoyable book, and since one of the main characters was food, and since the Julia Roberts movie version is coming out next month, I thought you might want to hear about it.

But I’ll be brief. This is the Internet, after all, and let’s face it, I’m no Jane Austen…

Eat, Pray, Love is the memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert’s year-long journey around the world to recover from an ugly divorce, an ill-advised rebound boyfriend, and an identity crisis, with a nifty four-year depression wrapper around the whole thing. Once her divorce is final, she’s free to travel, and she spends four months in Italy (eating), four months in India (praying), and four months in Indonesia (learning how to love herself, and others, again).

This book was a good read for many reasons.  Here are a few:

It’s insightful. Liz moves the story along quickly, which keeps it interesting, but she also manages to sprinkle lots of interesting factoids about history, geography, and religion while staying on topic. In fact, those factoids are very much a part of her journey – the food and the locales play as much of a role as the actual characters she introduces.

She’s funny. Liz tells the story the way she would tell it to her best friend – a conspiratorial tone injected with levity throughout. She has this way of revealing just how flawed, short-sighted, vulnerable, intelligent, and wonderful she is, all at the same time, and all while making you chuckle.

Homegirl can EAT. So much so that she earns the nickname “Groceries” during the Indonesia stint, which makes me think we might have been separated at birth. She refers to Italy as having so many pleasures that four months was not ample time to sample them all… so she declares a “pleasure major” – a double major, actually – “in speaking [Italian] and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).

I was actually a little worried at first, because the book was looking a little like a feminist rant against society’s married-with-children expectation for women. But she quickly turned introspective and philosophical, and ultimately the story becomes a journey that almost everyone can relate to on some level. After all, we all have our own version of crazy, right?

Annnnnd, being a food blogger as well as a COMPLETE FREAK, I kept track of all the food she mentions in her “No Carb Left Behind” tour of Italy. Ready?

  • spaghetti alla carbonara
  • gelato: pistachio, honey, hazelnut, grapefruit, melon, cinnamon-ginger
  • pizza (actually, margherita pizza with double mozzarella, which is so good she “has a relationship with it”)
  • roasted endive
  • chocolate pastries with double cappuccinos
  • penne ai quattro formaggi (penne pasta with four-cheese sauce)
  • lamb and truffles
  • carpaccio rolled around hazelnut mousse
  • pickled lampascione (bulb of the wild hyacinth)
  • frozen rice pudding
  • oxtail
  • homemade limoncello liqueur
  • intestines of a newborn lamb (really? really.)
  • a self-made lunch of soft-boiled fresh brown eggs, asparagus, olives, goat cheese, sliced salmon… and a fresh peach for dessert “still warm from the Roman sunlight”
  • a dinner of bruschette, spaghetti cacio e pepe (spaghetti with cheese and black pepper), and a small roast chicken
  • risotto ai funghi (risotto with mushrooms)
  • octopus salad
  • turkey breast and stuffing (at Thanksgiving)
  • “pasta stuffed with a puree of crustaceans, octopus, and squid, with cockles and julienned vegetables, swimming in an olivey, oceany broth”
  • “airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with pistachio, bread chunks floating in aromatic oils, tiny plates of sliced meats and olives, a salad of chilled oranges tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley”

Whew! That’s enough to make anyone want to travel alone and eat their way through a European nation.

In all seriousness, I was actually inspired by the book, and nudged by the universe, to try making gelato for the first time. I already had a homemade ice cream habit, especially during the summer, but logistics were keeping me from experimenting on the scale that I preferred.

I didn’t have any disposable ice cream containers, you see… and you can only eat so much ice cream before you have to start giving it away… and you can only give away so much before you run out of containers. And then you become the hey-can-I-have-that-container-back lady. Not fun .

But last winter, I finally found these quart size paper cartons online… which means that I was poised and ready to give away lots of frozen desserts this summer.

My only other problem was a lack of reference material. Until recently, I’d been shopping around for a good book on ice cream, and just couldn’t find anything I could get fired up about. But at the exact moment when Liz got me all stirred up about pistachio gelato, Bon Appetit suddenly (and randomly) posted a feature on their BA Daily Blog about this gelato cookbook, along with a sample recipe from the book, and the flavor was – wonder of wonders! – pistachio.

Look for a few gelato posts in the coming months… It was clearly meant to be.