Italia

Piemontese Food

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I’ve been in the US this week–and what a quick week it was! I came home for Sarah’s wedding and got to catch up with family and friends a little too. Heading back to Italy and the Sinio gang this afternoon.

Before I left Italy (actually, a long time before I left), Gigi and his family took me out to dinner at a great little restaurant where we had spaghetti with fruits of the sea. Anna isn’t a big fan of fish, so she had pizza instead, and Gigi introduced me to a great new digestivo called San Simone afterwards. Yummers!

nonna.jpgCristiana and Luciano (Chanin in dialect–pictured above) also invited me to eat with them. This time at their house for a wonderful and traditional Piemontese dinner. Cristiana’s gradmother (left) and Carmela, Walter, Bea, and Guiseppe joined us as well. We started with cocktails and then moved into the kitchen for the real feast: focaccia (Chanin used to be a bread maker!), torta salata (like quiche with lots more veggies), vitello tonato (boiled veal, sliced thin and served with a homemade tuna and anchovie mayonnaise), asparagus with fonduta, two types of lasagna (pasta al forno), roasted bell peppers with garlic, that had been slow-cooked in oil for two hours, the cheese course, bunet (a traditional custard dessert made with amaretti cookies and cocoa–everyone has their own secret recipe for bunet), and strawberries (diced and macerated in their own juices)! You can imagine how full we were afterwards–but everything was soooooooo good!!

Coming Home Next Week

Ciao, peeps! What’s up? Lots going on here–construction is coming along slowly but surely. This week the bianchisti painted all the rooms in the hotel and four bathrooms were installed. We’re working on the lawn and garden a lot–starting a professionally landscaped garden is a serious undertaking! I had no idea. But after spending hours picking weeds out of the lawn by hand I have a newfound appreciation for the task!

I’m coming home next week! I’ll be in LeRoy from the 7th-14th-ish and hope to have time to catch up with everyone then!

Carne Cruda

meat2.jpgOkay, so this entry isn’t exactly next in chronological order, but I have all the pictures ready to go and can’t wait to tell you the story (and besides, it’s my weblog and I don’t have to go in chronological order if I don’t want to. mwah hahahhahaaha). Anyways…

A few weeks ago Carmela (of the circolo) invited us to go meat shopping with her. The special thing about this particular trip was that the market we went to was actually a local farmer’s house. They raise animals (all sorts!) and when they need money (or perhaps for some other reasons that remain secrets), they butcher one of their animals and sell it to the community (read: friends and family).

So, it’s 9:30 on a Wednesday night and we’re driving up one of the treacherous winding roads that weave through the Piemontese hillsides. These roads are actually two way streets, but there’s no way to tell until you see another car heading straight towards you (very skinny, no lines, barely paved). After a while we pull onto another road in even worse condition which turns out to be the farmer’s driveway. (It’s dark folks, electricity is costly here!).

 

I am seriously not exaggerating when I tell you that we were greeted by twelve barking dogs. (How many can you find in the picture at the top?) And I’m sure they had more somewhere else (in fact, there were two more strictly house dogs inside). The whole family greets us with Buona Sera(s) and kisses (when saying hello and good-bye everyone gets two kisses–one on each cheek, usually air kisses).

Ines

We go inside to their living room where they’ve set up a 10 foot table and a meat slicer. The table is covered with various and asundry cuts of meat (veal to be exact). Carmela (wearing orange in the previous picture) and the other woman that was there immediately starting picking which cuts they wanted and piling them in a big plastic bucket and some random bags. When they were finished there, Ines took us into the garage, where they had set up another ten foot long table that was also covered with meat and bones (note the nooses and wall of tools in the background).

We went through the same process in this room and when we were done making our selections the son (who looks unlike any 27 year old I’ve ever met) brought out the grinder and grinded up the parts we needed ground.

The Son & The Grinder

 

Then we headed back into the living room where he took out a big saw and started hacking though the bones we had chosen to take home for stock. Ines (the farmer’s wife) started cutting up the bigger pieces of meat we had chosen and tied them with string so we could more easily use them for roasts, etc.

When that was all done, we hauled all our purchases into the garage and put them on the scale. I was suprised to discover that the meat was not especially cheap.

After shopping they took us round back and showed us their sheep and goats who had just had babies the day before. This is by far the most memorable food shopping experience I’ve had here. I mean, I visited every open air market in a two hour radius last week, so I’ve got some shopping experience under my belt, but this night of meat…we just don’t have anything like this in the United States…do we?

P.S. For an update on my social life, see Roomies Around the World.

Grinzane, etc.

grinzane_gate.jpgCiao, Amici! Sorry I haven’t posted in so long! Lots going on here! Allora….the last time we spoke I was doing a stage at Grinzane Cavour, the castle in this picture. That was the week that Jay and Denise were in Verona at VinItaly, so I was walking two hours to Grinzane and two hours back every day (though some friends gave me rides a couple of times). I loved the walk (especially when it wasn’t raining) and learned a lot about the area by having to navigate on foot! (That second-to-last picture is of the rain jars I told you about earlier…).

Anyways, I learned quite a bit at the restaurant in Grinzane…how to make homemade pasta and sugo for tagliarine, a basic meat sauce with mirepoix and not too many tomatoes, bonet, a chocolate custard sort of like flan with amaretti cookies baked in, brasata–beef cheeks braised in dolcetto, grisini–thin bread sticks that are very popular here, plin–a typical ravioli that you pinch with your fingers (that’s why they’re called plin, which means “pinch” in Italian), and lots more!

My Italian friends complain because I only write about them and never about my own family, so I’m going to try and incorporate both from now own. To this end, here’s a half way decent picture of me and Phoebe, mia sorella. Taking a good picture of us is no small feat, and this is the first good one in about twenty years!

Community Togetherness, Castle Ghosts

So, Denise and Giacomo were supposed to come back from Verona today, but their power steering exploded! Everyone’s fine, but alas, they’re still in Verona.

I went clothes shopping with the circolo gang this afternoon (Carmela, Bea, and Giuseppe). Didn’t actually buy anything though.

There was a town meeting for Citt� Aperta tonight. Citt� Aperta is a local festival where the vineyards and restaurants invite everyone to come check out what they’re doing, and what their town has to offer. I attended and took diligent notes of what I imagined they were saying. The biggest topic of discussion at tonight’s meeting was the pullman car they’re renting for the day. There was much argument over which route the car should take, since it’s too big to fit through the town’s main streets (hellow, you can barely walk through the town’s biggest streets!).

Afterward the meeting I went back to the circolo for a gelato and to try and learn Sevens, the game all the old guys who only speak Piemontese play (yeah…good luck with that one, Shira).

I didn’t remember until I got halfway up my driveway that I hadn’t left any lights on in the castle (afterall, Giacomo and Denise were supposed to have arrived earlier that evening). After standing there for a few minutes trying to gather up the courage to walk through the pitch-black cortille, I decided to go back to the circolo and borrow a flashlight. (The castle is scary at night in the dark sometimes!!)

Well, I went back into the bar and the entire place looked up at me. Somehow they all knew why I had returned. (Maybe I have “chicken” written on my forehead in Italian or something).

To make a long story short, the entire circolo escorted me back to my front door. *laughing out loud* I didn’t even ask! While I was trying to figure out how to say “Can I borrow a flashlight because it’s dark and I’m scared” they all just got up and got their coats on!

I felt like such an idiot walking up the driveway again with a Piemontese entourage; but I’d rather be a safe idiot than a dead one. So I sit here writing this, thanking the darkness (that scared me earlier) for hiding the tears of happiness that this curious people keeps evoking.

Do you know what it feels like to be so completely embraced by an entire village?

I do; it’s wonderful.

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