Prosciutto, goat cheese, and arugula...and pumpkin

Our favorite restaurant in Houston hands down is Dolce Vita. For the past few months, we have tried numerous times to have a date night there, but have been met w/ a few obstacles: Hurricane Ike, power still out due to Hurricane Ike, not open on Mondays, and bad day at work. Finally, Sunday we happily made our way to our favorite spot. We have tried to stray from our favorite (as in, never ordered, but mentioned to each other we might order a different pizza), but there is something about the combo of tomato, mozzarella, prosciutto, and arugula that is just too darn good to pass up.



They also have amazing appetizers, which brings me to the actual point of this post. We decided on shaved brussel sprouts and potato/goat cheese croquettes as our appetizers this past Sunday. The croquettes were amazing and seeing as how it is time for Thanksgiving, I am going to attempt to make these little buggers this Sunday for our annual 'Pre-Thanksgiving' feast. Wish me luck and send suggestions if you have any :)

All of this prosciutto and goat cheese talk brings back a strangely favorite memory from our honeymoon, I Tre Fratelli in Florence. I realize that when you are out of the country, you're supposed to try as many different things as possible, but on our 4 day stay in Florence (one of which we took a day trip to Sienna) we ate here twice :). It's a tiny hole-in-the-wall style sandwich bar with no seating and consists of a counter where two brothers prepare over 30 different types of sandwiches - using many different types of salami, meats and cheese. For about 4 euro, you can order a sandwich and a small glass of chianti and sit on the side of the street and people watch. I really wish we had a picture of this place. It seems strange that with over 1000 pictures from our honeymoon, there isn't a single one of this lovely place. Again, we didn't stray from our favorite and each ordered the prosciutto, goat cheese, and arugula. It's ridiculously easy to make - we re-created this (well - w/ whole grain bread instead of the yummy crusty bread) a few weeks ago after church and it was pretty accurate! Hopefully I'll have the same luck with the croquettes this weekend!