Lunch on the beach: the 5 most challenging dishes (enjoy life)

2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:20

How do you behave for the lunch on the beach? Are you among those who "no, never, never, sand, heat, confusion: I prefer to go home or to a hotel and eat in peace"?

Do you drop by the greengrocer and the baker and go to the sea with a supply of plums, peaches, focaccia and stop?

Or you equip yourself with portable refrigerators full of all the good things, regardless of digestibility and line that, by now, you have had a good time in the costume rehearsal - and lost it?

If I know you a little, I can say that many of you are part of the latter category. Or at least they would like to.

Being the kind of bather who, regardless of the snobbish glances of the most sober, can't wait to set the bed with food, lots of food, to swallow with a beer. And who cares if digestion is slow: you can always take a postprandial nap, right?

If you are part of this category, you will choose preparations that reflect the most genuine Italian tradition, that of the national Albertone struggling with macaroni, with a particular fondness for pasta.

Of course, it will not be light dishes. But the beauty is to win the challenge with the heaviest recipes ever brought to the shore.

We have classified them by establishing our own top five of the most challenging (and good!) foods to take to the beach.

5th place: the omelette

There are different ways to do it. You could mix eggs with vegetables from the garden, cook them in the oven and even use only egg whites to reduce the saturated fat content, bringing a nutritious but light dish under the umbrella.

But, of course, you won't do any of that. What will happen will be that you will calculate 2 whole eggs per person plus 2 for the pan. In the mixture, flavored with a lot of salt and a lot of pepper, spaghetti, provola, salami, mortadella will end up, for a macaroni omelette a span high, well fried above and below in a generous dose of your best extra virgin olive oil.

Packaged without drying it too much from excess oil. Thus, at noon, it will emerge from the greasy and shiny container. Irresistible.

4th place: cold pasta

Nothing to do with fusilli or farfalle salads dressed with ready-to-eat sauces. Nor with the most loving versions with the cherry tomatoes of your plant, fresh cherry mozzarella, hand-torn basil, the best tuna in oil, savory Taggiasca olives and other small selected delicacies.

No, cold pasta is exactly what the name implies: pasta left over from the night before, kept in the fridge until it's time to transfer it to the thermal bag for its journey to the beach umbrella.

And do not tell us that you have cooked too much by mistake, or that you have not thrown it away because you are avid followers of "permacucina", the trend that invites you to eliminate food waste and recycle always and in any case.

You have made more, with lots of tomato sauce and the usual, excessive supply of oil, for one reason only: the cold pasta, pierced directly from its bowl, is very good.

3rd place: the roast chicken

On the way to the sea, the scent of the rotisserie draws you into its coils, like a fragrant thread of Ariadne, and takes you to the counter where the well-browned chickens call you, sirens for the throat.

Unless you are tied up, new Ulysses, to the bike rack, it will be impossible to resist the call of the succulent birds, dripping with their fat or - better still - with butter and garlic as in use on the Côte d'Azur (and those who go to the sea from those part will prove me right).

Bought hot, the spit-roasted chicken will arrive at lunchtime still lukewarm.

And if at the shop you have neglected to grab a swollen bag of chips, send one of the children to the kiosk to get a tub or two of hot French fries and tots of mayonnaise that the breast, as you know, is always a bit dry.

If, however, you find chicken a bit challenging, don't give up on the rotisserie stop: there are always arancine and supplì to try.

2nd place: meatballs with sauce

Here we are truly in the imagination of the Italian on the beach in the 1950s. Which, as the half clicks, exhibits the hood of meatballs, fresh or recovered, with all the flavors and smells of tradition, from garlic down.

Rolled, floured and fried, well fried, then sauté in a generous sauce of tomatoes, onion, parsley. As big as big apricots (those small as cherries are for young ladies) they are eaten in bites, getting your hands dirty with sauce, sometimes even swimsuits and sarongs.

The pleasure is assured, the heaviness too, but what does it matter? You can always accompany them with a seasonal side dish: caponata or ratatouille, as long as they are made, as tradition dictates, with fried vegetables.

1st place: lasagna

If the cold pasta is very good, the lasagna more. As a nutritionist would teach (yes, a little drunk, but oh well), it has on its side that it is a rather complete, if not exactly balanced, single dish. Because there are carbohydrates, proteins and fats.

All represented in considerable quantities by the egg puff pastry, béchamel sauce, ragù, the inevitable oil, parmesan.

In short, it satisfies and weighs down the right amount to guarantee wonderful siestas in the cool of the pine forest, and who cares if you can take a bath not before sunset.

Do you want to give the pleasure of breaking the layers and making big mouthfuls of pastry and stuffing in spite of the neighbor on the deckchair who, sadly, picks up a stirred salad or gnaws a chewy pizza?

By extension, those who love lasagna on the beach will not disdain timbales, pies and baked pastries of the most varied, as long as they are rich in ingredients and condiments.

Well dissaporians: now we are waiting for you to tell us yours. That perhaps, in this roundup, we have missed something. Greasy, heavy, totally inappropriate. Which is how we like it.