Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

Fo
od
123
but the diversity of its food and the-the-the ingredients 
that diff erent parts of, cooks in diff erent parts of the 
country rely on, is-is vastly diff erent, and learning about 
those diff erences—whether it’s part of the country uses 
one kind of cheese, part of the country uses another kind 
of cheese, some parts of the country which are very rich 
in terms of having animals that they can use will have 
a lot of meat in the diet, other parts of the country that 
are, that are more impoverished don’t have so much meat 
in the diet, some parts of the country use tomatoes in 
almost everything that they cook, um, versus another 
region of the country that doesn’t—and just learning why 
the people in diff erent parts of the country, um, use cer-
tain ingredients, don’t use other ingredients and-and the 
wonderful things that they can make out of the simplest 
combination of ingredients is-is what I’ve really enjoyed 
learning about.
Well, as an example of sort of the simplicity of cook-
ing, um, when I was in Rome once and-and on one of 
these cooking tours, um, I learned about a very simple 
pasta dish, which has nothing more in it than, um, a can 
of tuna and a little bit of oil, garlic. Garlic is an impor-
tant ingredient in Italian food, um, which adds spice 
and complexity. Um, all of these ing—, simple ingredi-
ents—the-the tuna, some chili, red chili fl akes, um, and 
the garlic—are cooked very briefl y just to warm them up. 
Th
en you cook pasta, um, a, something like a spaghetti or 
a linguini kind of pasta, and while the pasta is still warm, 
right out of the water, you add it to this warm mixture 
of tuna and oil and garlic and chili fl akes, and then you 
add to that some, a-a fresh green, um, something sort of 
spicy or bitter like arugula, or what, uh, what the British 
call rocket—I never quite understood why they use that 
diff erent term, but they do—and the heat of-of the sauce 
and the heat of the, of the hot, fresh cooked pasta sort 
of wilts the green vegetable and it all comes together in 

---