Half of the phone conversation was spent trying to describe the next thing I wanted to make with Nonna. "You know, those biscuits with the almonds in them? They were really crunchy? And thin?"
It turns out that there are a lot of different types of crunchy Italian biscuits containing almonds.
"You sometimes have them in your cupboard!" That wasn't a useful statement either!
Finally a light bulb went on somewhere.
"Paste Secche! You want to make past secche. Almond bread."
This is what happens when you grow up in a bilingual family which uses a Southern Italian dialect and then decides you only get to learn proper Italian. Which is different, by the way, from the language my grandparents speak.
Or maybe I just never caught the name of the thin, crunchy almond biscuits I used to eat at an alarming rate. They are so thin you see, you can eat about 17 at once.
And now the best part is that I know they are almost as easy to make as they are to eat - four ingredients, two trips into the oven, and a very sharp knife.
