We visited a caseificio, or cheeserie, today called I Formaggi del Pastore. It is owned and operated by the Monni family who moved here with their herd of 300 Sardinian sheep in 1960. These sheep have milk of excellent quality. Land was scarce in Sardinia but Umbria was full of abandoned farms with lush pastures.
A photo of a photo in the shop.
I know them because they sell at our Saturday kilometer zero market and are my favorite cheese source. Besides the Pecorino cheese, from the sheep, they sell goat cheese which is unusual here, also fresh mozzarella, fresh ricotta and fresh eggs. They have other Sardinia specialties like cheese filled pasta which makes a quick and delicious dinner. We visited the farm for the first time today. We are scouting out possible places to take our niece and her husband who are coming to visit the first week in October. She would like to see them making the cheeses. We were unable to see the proprietor today so we will try to talk to them Saturday at the market.
The farm is just below the pretty hill town of Montone. The views on the roads to the farm are nothing short of amazing.
Montone seen from below
Of course we bought some cheese. This one is classic semistagionato Pecorino. That means it has been aged for three months. It is still soft but it is firm. It’s my favorite. Luther likes stagionato, which is aged from three months to one year.
Hopefully, if all goes well we will be taking Rachel and Alex back to the caseificio to see the process. I will, of course, be taking pictures. Ciao!
We are preparing for a new trip. We have house/cat sitters arriving on Sunday. We are meeting up with my sister and her husband for another small ship cruise. Again on the Windstar line. This ship holds 300 people. We will fly to Amsterdam and depart from there and sail down the coast to Bordeaux. Then fly home. I will, of course do a trip report. Right now many preparations are being made. Getting the apartment ready for our sitters is the prime importance. And also, of course packing for ourselves. We are almost ready. Still just need to make up a second guest room since our sitters are two women who want separate bedrooms.
Last night I finally tried the outside wood BBQ. I made a garlic, yogurt marinated chicken thigh recipe. It came out well but I needed either more oil on the grill or not skinless thighs. They tended to stick. They tasted good though. I will use this grill more now.
Stay tuned for my upcoming Trip Report. Buon fine settimana a tutti!
The weather today must be one of the top ten days ever on this beautiful earth! Cool breezy, sunny, puffy clouds, crystal clear air. Simply amazing. View from terrace at Calagrana. Am I right? Is it not perfect?
We joined four friends from Canada. One old friend and three new ones. Our friend Karen comes every summer and rents in Tuscany but not terribly far from here. They were blown away by the beauty of the restaurant and it was perfect as always. I loved my starter. In fact four of us got this. It sounded so good. Grilled peaches on a tomato bed with prosciutto.
Next will be some of our pastas. One a tagliolini in a creamy sauce with truffles, the other Fishioni (a type of pasta) with sausage ragù, arugula and pecorino cheese. So good!
The dining terrazzo full of happy diners.
Great seeing friends and sharing a delicious meal. Buona domenica a tutti!
I was, for some reason, craving this particular pasta from Sicily. A super simple dish which comes together very quickly. All you do is take about 6-8 anchovies in oil and put them in a pan with a couple tablespoons of olive oil and cook mashing them until they melt into the oil. Add a handful of pine nuts and cook a bit, then a chopped garlic clove and a handful of soaked and drained raisins or sultanas and a few stalks of minced parsley. I also put in some hot pepper flakes (natch😉). Cook the spaghetti and drain, saving some water, and toss into the sauce with some water as needed to make a creamy sauce. Serve with grated cheese if desired. Super fast, super easy, and super yum.
It pushed my pasta craving buttons perfectly. Tonight, southern fried chicken and potato salad! I’m nothing if not eclectic. 😄
Tomorrow we lunch with friends at Calagrana. We had a lot of big storms yesterday afternoon into the night. The world nearby is washed clean after weeks of drought and it is beautiful now. Clear with brilliant blue skies and puffy clouds. It is very cool with highs about 22C today and downright chilly in the night. Loving a break. The heat will return.
Here’s a picture over by Assisi up on Monte Subasio. My friend Doug Hunt took it. It is the road to his house. The colors are amazing and the world so clean after the rain. Enjoy! 💕 Umbria is so beautiful!
The story of our Italian family is a long one. In a nutshell, it started as soon as we moved into our last apartment. The place was full of the dust of construction and everything needed cleaning. My friend Susan introduced me to Vera, who cleaned her house. A super interesting and intelligent woman from Bosnia originally and then Slovenia. To avoid an arranged marriage (Islamic parents) she fled to Italy and became a nanny. She met her future husband, married and had two beautiful girls. And she began her own business.
Vera cleaned for us and we engaged her to chat with us in Italian after cleaning. Time passing and we became good friends. Eventually we were adopted by Vera and family and we adopted them. We all love good food and relish the different cuisines. Not normal for Italians. So that’s the back-story.
Sunday Lunch was the first in months. I hadn’t seen Vera since February. Now that we have a table and furniture we asked them for Pranzo. I decided an American lunch was the best thing given the heat. The menu was chips and salsa to start, sweet and spicy. Pulled pork sandwiches with hot sauces and coleslaw, grilled hot dogs with the fixins. Potato salad. And for dessert, peach tiramisù.
It was so nice to see everyone again. I had missed them so much. It was a lot of fun. Here are some pictures. Graziano is very tall and has made some tall girls! And beautiful redheads.
Since it is too hot to cook much, we have been eating pretty much all salads, all the time. Last night it was an Insalata all Greco — Greek salad. Can’t go wrong with that. Night before last it was a salad of hard boiled egg, tuna, tomatoes, cucumbers and cannelloni beans drizzled with olive oil. Tonight it’s cold pasta with sautéed garlic shrimp, green pepper, new red onions, pickled zucchini and celery. I topped it with a little homemade ranch dressing with plenty of fresh herbs.
Tomorrow is market day. It is also the peak of the heat spell. So I plan to get up and get to the market bright and early before it gets too hot. Stai fresco!
Yup. Italy is one of the countries in Europe that’s getting slammed the next week or so. I was feeling especially sorry for the tourists in Rome and Florence. Man is it HOT! 🥵 They predict 40s starting Monday. 42C Wednesday — that’s 108F. Compound it with crowds of sweaty people and waiting in-line (no shade) to get into the sights it will be miserable.
It is natural for people to want to see the “Big Three” major sights (Rome, Florence and Venice) especially on their first trip to Italy, but I strongly advise against it in any hot and high season. Especially this year with an over abundance of tourists after Covid. So what if you’ve got to wear a jacket? It’s so much better than what is going on here now. I was talking to my Italian teacher yesterday and she got rather worked up about it all. She is adamant that Italy needs the tourist dollars, and it does, but why can it not be spread out into regions with less crowds and just as amazing things to see? Not to mention you’ll see the REAL Italy. These mega tourist destinations will be a very sad initiation to Italy. There are so many undiscovered places. Tuscany is always overrun. But Umbria, Le Marche, Abruzzo are all wonderfully uncrowded and all in the center, equally easy to reach. Go to the “Big Three” in winter, late fall, or early spring, and in summer the countryside and small towns. ~~~~~~ In our new apartment we are getting used to managing the temperatures. I open the windows at night when it is this hot at 10pm-ish. And leave them open all night. I’ve got fans in every room pulling the cooler night air in. I watch the morning temperature closely and shut all the windows and shutters when it hits 80 outside. It stays fairly cool inside. It doesn’t get above 80 when the temperatures outside are mid nineties. The fans help a lot. At night we decided to move upstairs to the sofa bed. There are two AC units up there but that’s a big room with no doors and open stairwell to the downstairs so it doesn’t get terribly cool. But better than downstairs. Also, a bonus, it’s very quiet in that area.
Today I got out early (for me) to the market. I bought a bounty of veggies. Tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, arugula, cucumbers, potatoes, squash.
Believe it or not, between us we eat about 30 tomatoes a week.
Another thing I have to do is figure out how to make meals in this heat. Italian kitchens are usually tucked away from the main living areas. That’s good and bad. Our kitchen has a door to shut it completely off. Until today I thought that was stupid. I also have a very big hood that really pulls the heat out. So shutting the door, opening the windows and using the hood keeps it mostly cool and isolates the heat in that room. I still try to cook early, while it is cool, for dinner that night.
Today, when I came back, I roasted three tomatoes with garlic and I pressure cooked cannellini beans. Our dinner will be pasta, tossed with this sauce, beans, basil, pecorino cheese and bread crumbs. Served room temperature.
I also made pesto. I have four plants and they are all doing very well. I keep it producing by snipping the branches just before they bloom. I go down to the two itty bitty leaves below the big leaves. This allows those small leaves to grow and it doesn’t get rangy and ugly.
Remember my puny tomato plants. They are heirloom American tomatoes. A gift from my friend Joanne. Just look at them now! They look a bit messy. The basil is beside the olive tree. There are three tomatoes and a jalapeño plant. The tomatoes try to encroach on the pepper so I keep them tied up. I figure the tomatoes will ripen when we are on our cruise in August/September. My luck! My house-sitters will benefit.
I have a post half written about our upstairs kitchen reno. That is upcoming. Keep cool y’all! And Buon fine settimana! A la prossima!
I decided to christen our terrace with all its new furniture with a small Fourth of July celebration. A few friends came and we had guacamole and salsa and chips for a pre-lunch nosh and then four salads for us to enjoy. Basmati coconut rice with shrimp, chickpea tomato artichoke and roasted pepper, smoked salmon avocado egg and greens, and sesame peanut noodles. It was fun. The weather was lovely, here we are minus Steve, our photographer!
Thanks for coming everyone and Happy Fourth of July!
Sadly I must report the loss of our fish, Qui. I found her/him floating in the “pond” this morning. He was fine yesterday. The cause of death is not known. Sad to loose him/her. We are trying to decide whether to get another. Qua and Quo are doing fine. ~~~~~~~ We had friends over for dinner last night. We are still working our way into entertaining upstairs here with no kitchen. I decided three salads would be nice since it was hot outside. I did all the hot cooking, rice, toasting pine nuts and coconut etc early in the day. Then later I assembled what could be done ahead of time. The last minute stuff was just before our guests arrived and I took all the salads up on my cart on the elevator to the 3rd floor. It all worked out perfect. Our guests have sold their home here and are leaving for a new life in Florence. The are ever thoughtful and brought a beautiful, shade loving plant for us. We will miss them 😢
~~~~~~~ Tonight we had a nice mozzarella di bufala with the amazing new tomatoes.
Our friends gifted us a plant. Evidently he didn’t like the full sun he was in. We wrestled him up to the terrace. I had a perfect spot for him. Then we had some vino to celebrate.
We had to go out a buy a pot for him, and a smaller one for our mint. So we went to Pollice Verde. This means “green thumb” in Italian. It is a very quirky place with everything from pet foods, to plants, salt for the water softener, soil for planters, dog houses and chicken coops. When we were checking out we noticed a sign that said “buy the set! 5 chicks with 20 chili of food.” 🙂
I’ve been working on the terrazzo. I have managed to get the irrigation up and working. Good to know we can go away and the plants will get water. I’ve got the herbs all done. I have been buying and planting flowers, hostas, and I ordered ferns on-line. I even found water lilies for my “pond”. Here are a few pictures.
The new Gabbeh rug I ordered came. I love it.
I have been working with our architect on the kitchen designs. We are leaning toward an induction invisible cooktop. It is very cool. You can cook right on the countertop and then use that same space for other things. There is a possible September start. Yay! Here are pictures from the brochure. Captions below pictures.
See the faint squares on the countertop? It marks where the burners are.
Lunch on Lago Trasimeno yesterday with friends from the US. They come almost every year and stay near Cortona. Shirley used to be my boss eons ago. She always brings me things from my wishlist. Thanks Shirley! We always meet for lunch when they come. This time at Ristorante Rosso della Sera in San Feliciano. A long time favorite of ours. Yesterday was Republic day, a national holiday. Here are a couple of pictures. It was a perfect day for this.
From our table.My trout.
Finally a not so fun thing. I have a toothache, and it also seems to affect my sinuses on one side so I suspect an infection. I finally made myself go to the dentist, because there is a lot of pain now. A surprise to me, dentists don’t have X-ray machines here. I’m so used to that in the US. He prescribed antibiotics and an X-ray at the hospital. I started the antibiotics but have to wait THREE WEEKS for an X-ray! Geesh.
Today is glorious too. Here is Monte Acuto from our terrazzo. And my haul from the Saturday kilometer zero market. Good food in our future!
