Category Archives: Eating

Feels like winter now!

During the night we had strong winds and rain. It was a cold front which finally chased our beautiful weather away. Oh well, had to happen sometime. BUT I was surprised to notice to our northwest … was that snow on top of the mountains?! The mountains are a little taller than our nearby ones up there so I guess it was just high enough that the rain fell as snow.

This is Thanksgiving week back home and we are again invited to the feast at Susan and Gary’s house. We decided to move it to Saturday for the convenience of the Italians who are invited. So far it is: Susan and Gary, me and Luther, Denise and Jim (visitors from the US), Simona and Simone, Fabio and Fabio’s parents from Milano. Simona, Simone and Fabio were there last year and enjoyed it. Fabio’s parents don’t speak English so Susan is seating Luther next to them so they can talk. I am making the cranberry sauce again. Denise and Jim brought the fruit with them. Yay! Ely is again cooking our turkey. Should be a nice celebration and I am looking forward to it. Missing my sister though. It is such a family holiday to me. But I’ll be seeing her soon so that takes some of the sting out.

The Umbertidese are gearing up for Natale or Christmas season. They have strung small lights across the piazza and up and down the little streets. I looked at my blog from last year and see they brought the tree November 22nd so we should be seeing that soon.

Tasting the oil

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On Saturday we drove over to Calagrana where Ely is being held hostage by her son who has broken out in Chicken Pox! She put some of the Olio Nuovo into two small tins for us to try.

First I toasted the bread on the stovetop (wish I had had a fire to toast it over!) until it was nice and charred.

Next I drizzled the pretty green oil over it.

My report. It was delizioso!! Peppery and acidic. Nothing like I have ever had in the U.S. Ely tells me it is best used for drizzling on bruschetta, soups, meats, or salads rather than using it for cooking.

We are enjoying a really, really beautiful November here. The temperatures are near 70F every day with bright blue skies. We are so lucky! It has been nothing like the last two years which, the locals say, were very uncommon.

Here is the river with the changing trees.

Finishing the picking and our visit to the oil mill

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What a day! We started out early to Calagrana to begin picking at 9AM. Ely had an appointment at the mill for between 2:00 and 2:30. There were seven trees left to pick. The crew was: us, Ely, Ely’s friend Catarina, one other woman and the gardener. We picked non-stop until around 1:00 when we were pretty well finished. We left Ely to load up two vans with the boxes of olives and we were to meet her and follow them down to the oil mill in Pierantonio, the next town down from Umbertide.

The mill was a busy place! It being all new to me I was fascinated. Ely and Catarina drove the vans onto the scale. They weighed them and then we unloaded the olives. Then they moved the vans back onto the scale to be weighed empty. Turns out we picked 700 kilos of olives! Next they load the olives into a giant vat and the olives are sucked down from the bottom where they climb a sort of ladder and blowers blast the leaves and stems away. Next they go into the washer and up a ramp and into the hoppers. There were essentially five hoppers so they could process five people’s olives at once, each in turn being finished into oil. In the hopper there were big, round blades that blended the olive paste for 45 minutes. While this was going on as each other hopper was ready they turned a handle and the paste drained out, under the floor, and was separated into the glop, the oil and the water. The oil then trickles out, through a filter and then into the containers.

It was fun watching the other people as they waited for their oil. Everyone was happy and smiling at everyone else. The olive harvest is a happy time! The work is done. The trees have done their work as have the harvesters. Happy customers carried heavy containers of oil to their vehicles. There was an amusing group of 5 “boys” (all looked to be in their 60s or 70s). They had a shared grove and they worked together to harvest it. Then they had to divide it up. It was amusing to see them watching that scale like hawks to be sure no one got more than anyone else!

The final numbers for Ely’s harvest were…700 kilos of olives, pressed into 88 liters of oil or about 12%. So 12% of the olives were oil and the rest – skins, pits and water. Ely was happy but not ecstatic. It was a good-ish year.

Here is the off-loading of the fruit from the vans into the big vat.

The vat filled up with “our” olives.

The ladder where the leaves are blown off.

The washed, de-leafed and de-stemmed olives.

The hopper full of our olive paste. This was after about 45 minutes. You can see the pooled up oil on the right of the container.

Anticipation!

Here it comes!

Liquid gold. So fine!

Finally, after Ely got home she drained a little into a glass jar for me. I will pick that up tomorrow and we will have some bruschetta. I’ll report on that next.

Helping with the harvest!

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I was so excited to find out our friend who owns Calagrana was harvesting her olives and needed help. I had a couple of reservations as to whether I could hold up to the physical effort (not as young as I used to be!) but thought the opportunity was too good to pass up.

We didn’t leave Umbertide until around 11AM so they had been working a couple of hours. The olive grove is way up on top of the mountain spread out around a lovely casale (big farm house) owned by Ely’s English friend. Ely and Alberto tend to the trees and manage the harvest and production and share some of the oil with her. A win-win situation. She had a neighbor helping her plus a couple of other pickers and the gardeners of the grounds. Her neighbor had brought what Ely called a basher. It had long tines which vibrated in different directions. You lifted it up into the tree to get at the high branches and it shook the olives down.

We helped spread the big, green nets to catch the olives and put up stakes to hold up the down-hill side so the olives wouldn’t roll off. We hand harvested the lower branches. There was a mixture of black, fully ripe ones and green ones. The mixture makes the oil more flavorful. We worked until about 1:30 and had to leave because my Italian class was at 2:30. Also we discovered that you must dress in layers as the morning is very cold and by noon it is hot in the sun while working (we were baking). Dress like an onion, Ely said. We told Ely we’d come back tomorrow (properly dressed this time) to help finish up and accompany the fruit to the mill for the crush. Here are some pictures:

Luther managing the nets.

Tree partly harvested.

You place the metal stakes at the downhill side to catch the rolling olives.

Bin full of olives. The leaves need to be mostly removed from the box.

After you knock them all off the nets are gathered and the olives are rolled into one spot, then dumped into the crates.

Olives ready to be harvested.

Ely and Luther hand picking while Catarina works the “basher” on the opposite side.

Trip to Abruzzo

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This is another trip report so if you are not interested just skip this post.

We decided just last week to take a trip for two nights to the province of Abruzzo. We had long wanted to go to Ascoli Pecena in the Marche region too and it is just north of the Abruzzo border. This province is just south of the Marche on the Adriatic coast.

We left in a rainstorm which only got worse as we drove along. We headed east when we reached Spoleto and headed into the magnificent gorge through the Appinine mountains. In fact there is no way to get to any of the coastal towns on the Adriatic without braving some very rugged countryside. In this case the Corno river cut a deep gorge to Norcia, which is famous for it’s lentils, cured meats, and truffles. After we left Norcia and headed up into the next range of mountains the skies REALLY let loose and we could hardly see the road. We also were behind a truck. This all made for a very slow trip.

We finally came down out of the mountains and passes into a pretty valley in which Ascoli Pecena is situated. We bypassed the town this day and headed south into the foothills to find a recommended lunch place. Little did we know that this was a hill town and presently, we were in a cloud! We groped our way up and up with fog lights blazing and very short visibility until finally the GPS said we had arrived. We actually couldn’t see them but the city walls loomed just ahead. Later we found out you can see the Adriatic from there. There are lots of benches for viewing. Also there is a large fortress. Who knew!?

We walked around in the lightly sprinkling rain. It was a very pretty little town and is supposed to have the narrowest street in Europe.

We found the restaurant in a hotel on one of the main squares. Zunica 1880 has been a family operation since 1880. The dining room was lovely and empty. We were well taken care of by a nice waiter who right away brought us the Nuovo Olio pressed just two days ago! It was bright green and grassy and very peppery in the throat. A treat.

We had a lovely Montipulciano d’Abruzzo to accompany the fine meal.

I was amused at the picture hanging on the wall. It was obviously a painting of the room we were sitting in. Notice the chandelier in both the room and the picture. And the walls, curtains and furniture were the same.

After lunch we visited Iluminati winery. Everyone was very busy with the crush. This winery was bottling and labeling wine to go to Russia. It is a big operation as you can see from the pictures. They took time to let us taste and we bought a few bottles.

We headed back to find our Agrigurismo, Emidio Pepe. It is an organic winery and normally serves dinner. For some reason they were not doing so on our visit. We were the only people there the first night and were joined by two other parties the second night. We had such a big lunch we had bought a picnic and had it in the common area where we watched TV and sat out on the porch. It was still raining and foggy so we would have to wait until the next day to see our surroundings. The next morning was rain-washed and partly sunny and I really loved the view. As you can see they haven’t brought in the red wine grapes yet. We snagged a bunch for our picnic and they were so Sweet!

After breakfast we headed out towards Pescara. Luther wanted to visit more wineries and I had hoped to see Pescara which is on the coast. There is a good, fast, toll road all the way down the coast. We got off and fought our way through sprawling, ugly suburbs and lots of traffic. Ugh! finally got into the hills and started looking for some wineries. We tried the GPS. It was not much help. It could find the towns but not the street addresses which were generally outside of town. It was beautiful countryside though and I snapped some very nice pictures of the olive trees.

After much looking we homed in on one place called Torre dei Beati. We asked and got directions. We couldn’t find it. We stopped again. We went – no go. Again we stopped. This time I asked and what a surprise. We were at the end of a tiny road that dead-ended into a farmyard. The woman I approached to ask if she knew where it was asked me what language I spoke and I said Englese. Turns out she was from NYC and had a very thick NY accent. How strange and what a small world! She clued us in that there was bad blood between the two wineries on her road. We again looked and found a very big operation but that was all. We gave up and went to find lunch.

We stopped at a fish restaurant called Carmine. Loved the name. The food was excellent and we had the wine from the winery we had still not found. Yum.

The seafood wasn’t bad either!

After lunch we were still determined to find. That. Winery. Persistence wins the day and we did find it. It had no sign at all. They were heavily into the crush too but the wine owner and maker was super nice and spoke good english. We enjoyed tasting his wines and looking around his place. Of course we bought some wine!

This is a picture of the big crusher at the winery up the hill.

Vines heavily laden with grapes.

At Torre dei Beati they hand picked and sorted their grapes.

The tasting room.

Luther with the winemaker

I am not sure if The Wine Guy will write about this place so the rest can wait.

Following another picnic dinner we left for home on Friday. I had wanted to go to Ascoli Piena so we first visited a winery (what else?) then the town. It was a lovely place, said to have the most beautiful piazza in italy.

Colonnades around the square.

We headed homeward planning to stop in Norcia for lunch. We went up through the passes and mountains, passing a place I really want to return to called Castelluccio. We had chosen Vespasia for a fine, last lunch.

We were the only people there. It is a hotel so has to stay open. Our captain named Andrea was super nice and had spent 15 years in Orlando, only returning to Italy last year. For love. He married and has a 2 month old son. Her family lives in the Montefalco area and has a winery with apartments that they run.

The lunch was spectacular with many “gifts”. I had the poached egg on potatoes and potato foam with black truffles. yum. Luther had the trout. We both had the special pasta. Here are some pictures. Sorry I took so many! Gift one, olive oil and crackers.

Gift two, Pork belly.

Rose and Montefalco roso.

Luther’s trout.

My potato, egg, truffle dish.

Our pasta.

Sorbet and truffles.

Grappa for Luther.

We had successfully completely filled every nook and cranny in the Porsche with wine and had just enough room for the luggage. A fun trip!

Back home.

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We have been taking it pretty easy since we returned. I did the laundry and we went to the store to stock up on food and wine. We are embarking on a diet so I wanted to get healthy things to eat. I want to cut down on our favorite thing to eat…pasta!

At our local Coop they had a sale of the bright yellow chickens that they have here. I had never bought nor cooked one since we’ve been here. There is one disadvantage to these birds and it will be obvious to you when you see his picture.

I don’t really understand why they feel they must leave everything on the bird. I am sure no one eats the head and feet! I chopped off those bits with a cleaver. I particularly hate doing that part. Once I had him looking good I followed a recipe I found on the internet. I chopped up a bunch of onions and used them as a bed for the chicken. I placed him breast-side down and sprinkled liberally with salt. Then I roasted him at 350 F for 20 minutes with the top on the pot. Then I raised the temperature to 400 F and took the top off and roasted him for 25 more minutes. Finally I flipped him over and continued roasting for another 30 minutes. He got nice and brown and the onions had absorbed the chicken juices. I just needed to caramelize them a bit more. He turned out tasty and tender. I discovered that this type of chicken had very little breast meat. Here is the finished product.

Sighişoara, Transylvania

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Romania trip report index

Part Four

Sighişoara is a lovely town. Pronounced ziggyshwara. It is fairly large when you count all the outlying suburbs but the historic part is the Citadel. It started life as a Church on a Hill, which became a fortress. It floats above the modern, lower town. It was built after the Tartar invasion of 1241 which scared the bejesus out of everyone so they fortified. Now it has hotels, inns, restaurants and more souvenir shops than you’d ever need. One thing though, it is a living town, not just a tourist area, with school children laughing through the squares and small streets, church bells calling the faithful.

Streets and scenes of Sighişoara.

We did the walking tour this morning. There are several gates and towers. Nearest our hotel is the Bootmakers Tower now housing the radio station. The main gate is the Clock Tower which is just next to the Monastery Church, now Protestant. There are also the furriers tower, the tailors tower, and the butchers tower. We hiked up the covered staircase, built in 1666 and has 175 wooden stairs. It carried the German school children to the school above. The school is just next to the Church on the Hill (Biserica din Deal), considered the most valuable historical monument in the town. It was built in the 13th century but stands on the site of a much older chapel.

Monastery Church

Main gate.

Mechanical clock in main gate clock tower.

175 steps up a covered staircase brings you to the German School and the Church on the Hill.

Door in the Church on the Hill.

Murals dating from 1483 were destroyed by a fire in 1776. A recent restoration brought back fragments of the frescoes.

Tombstones in the cemetery behind the church.

View from town up to the Church on the Hill.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Sighişoara is the birthplace of Prince Vlad Dracul aka Vlad the Impaler. He lived his first 4 years in this house, now a restaurant.

All the souvenir shops had T-shirts.

We had lunch in T. Josef Restaurant and Winebar just down the hill in the lower city. It was a pretty, dark paneled room with a great old bar. It was situated in the Park Central Hotel. It had good food and we decided to have dinner tomorrow evening there.

My tomato soup.

Bucharest, Romania

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This is going to be a trip report so if reading stuff like this is not your thing you can stop reading now. Also, I will be posting these after we returned. I tried to write them as we traveled but had to wait to return to have access to my pictures.

Romania trip report index

Part One

We flew from Perugia airport on Wizz Air. Despite the name the flight was on-time and fine. The odd habit of people in parts of Europe to applaud when the plane lands was performed enthusiastically.

We took a cab and it was rush hour. Wow what traffic. We are glad we are not driving. Our cab driver spoke Romanian and French. This turned out to be the norm. Who knew the second language in southern and eastern Romania was French?! The time is an hour later than in Italy so we got to our hotel after seven. We are staying in the K+K Hotel Elisabeta. We had booked a restaurant called The Artist for 8:30. It was too rushed for me. We walked on the advice of our hotel. We got a little lost and finally arrived about ten minutes late. But we were glad we went.

The food was really good. The service, less so. It is a small restaurant with about 13 tables. It is in the old town which is chock-a-block with eateries and drinking venues. They have an interesting idea to let you try a bite of each course if you want. It’s called Spoonfuls. We tried that with the appetizer. It was great! There were also some “gifts” from the chef, one of which they poured a liquid into the dish and it steamed like dry ice. Pretty nifty. Another was a tall glass of gingery palette cleansing liquid. My entree was pork “ravioli”, really one big sandwich. A nice dinner.

Our first day we had a most excellent breakfast and headed off for a walking tour. Bucharest, having been the most repressive communist country, is a city in transition 26 years after the fall. It has gorgeous Orthodox churches, modern buildings next to decrepit crumbling ones. There are horrible communist buildings that are very ugly but there are also many old houses that survived communism which are beautiful if in need of a lot of TLC. Ceaușescu tried his best to raze the city but a lot managed to remain. I think it will become gentrified eventually.

After our long walk we headed back to the old town where we had lunch in a touristy place. I had a basic caprese salad. Back to the hotel to kick back for a while before dinner at Bistro GUXT. It turned out to be nice. The owner was very enthusiastic about wine, food and beer. I liked that it had a few Asian inspired dishes. So, I had a nice half portion salad with Gorgonzola and pears, and for an entree I had spicy prawns in coconut milk with rice. Lovely after such a long time without anything like it.

So that ended our first day. Here are some selected pictures. I hope it gives sort of an overview of the differences throughout the city.

The first four are of the oldest Eastern Orthodox church. Such beautiful detail.

This was just a random frieze on a building which I thought beautiful.

This was the Armenian cathedral.

Turns out their were many famous Armenians that immigrated to Romania and beyond. Cher and Steve Jobs are just two. They had a memorial to them.

The good the bad and the ugly. First the ugly. Note the added air conditioners.

There was a good bit of Dada inspired architecture. This one needs major help but note the facade.

Could be beautiful. Needs TLC as many buildings do.

Beautiful French influence in many of the buildings.

New roof. Venetian window.

And the bad old days of Communism. This is Ceaușescu‘s Palace.

Guest-less for now

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Our latest guests, Steve and Shiromi have gone on to new adventures in Turkey. We very much enjoyed their stay. After our visit to Gubbio we decided the other big town to see would be Perugia. We did some shopping and explored what is left of the fortress built after the Salt war. It was commissioned by the Pope as a symbol of Papal power and was built in 1540. They rased an entire borgo (over 100 houses plus churches and monasteries) to include the houses of the Baglioni family whom the Pope hated. It is eerie to wander what were the streets of the borgo and see the remains of all the houses, which were built of stone as opposed to the brick of the fortress. Here are some photos. It is hard to show the scale of the place. the ceilings are very tall.

This is a street sign (!) underground.

We also visited the enormous Etruscan gate. It was built 2,400 years ago and used no mortar. Impressive.

When Cesar Augustus conquered the city he carved his name into the gate.

Relaxing in the main piazza. Note the little buzzer in the center of the table to call for service. I’d never seen this before.

We had a lovely lunch at Ristorante Antica trattoria san Lorenzo. We had been here before and enjoyed the very innovative cuisine. Steve and Shiromi enjoyed it too. We all had the lunch special. This first picture is the little “gift” from the chef before we got the appetizer.

This was the rabbit.

We bid Steve and Shiromi goodbye on Thursday. Since then we have been relaxing a little. Right now Umbertide is having the week-long concert festival called Rassegna Bande Musicali Citta di Umbertide. The concert bands come from towns all around us and are very good, most performing excerpts that are very familiar like the march in Carmen. Sorry for the blur!

I also learned an interesting factoid. Here in Italy you are buried on a Friday, married on a Saturday, and christened on a Sunday! I enjoy watching the weddings from our window. Yesterday there were two that I noticed. The first had an impressive Lincoln stretch limo. The picture below is of the second wedding. This bride was really rocking it out! They had a very loud sound system set up and a DJ spinning the tunes. And note her red shoes!

Tomorrow we greet Ron and Linda, Americans who live in Florence. We met them in Virginia before they moved to Italy about 5 years ago. We were at that time just dreaming of moving here so we picked their brains about how they were accomplishing it. They don’t have a car and use the rails to travel. We’ll pick them up at the station and visit some places they can’t reach by train. I am looking forward to seeing them.

St. Francis and the wolf…redux

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Last year we had company, Kaye and Jeff who were very interested in the legend of St. Francis and the wolf. See post for the legend. We had tried to visit the church in Gubbio where a wolf skeleton was found buried beneath the floor but it was closed. Kaye was bummed. So yesterday, with friends of Kaye and Jeff named Shiromi and Steve, we tried again to visit the church and it was open!! We descended into the crypt and found the stone that was covering the grave as well as a stone cut of the wolf and St. Francis. It was very cool.

Stone cutting.

Stone from the grave.

Upstairs in the same church we found a surprise. First I have to tell you that every May Gubbio has an enormous festival/race. The town is divided into three neighborhoods. They compete to carry something called a Cero or candle up from the bottom of Gubbio, to the top of the mountain. The Ceri each weigh around 700 pounds. In the back of the church we found the stored ceri. They are immense. They attach to a frame and are carried upright. They must be very top heavy. The crowds are frighteningly large. We have not gone as we have been warned. Here are the three ceri (sorry for the blur).

It was a hot day and we did some good hill climbing. I also found a ceramic shop I had been looking for. I will return to buy a thing or two there. Here is an old iron ring to which horses were tethered.

And this one I just thought was pretty.

We had lunch at Ristorante Lupo (Wolf ) at the request of our guests. Here is a picture of Steve’s pretty carpaccio dish. We also got another Buon Ricordo plate while here.

For our breakfasts with Shiromi and Steve I decided to try a new coffee cake. It has been a hit. It is very moist and keeps well getting better as time passes. Shiromi told me I had to share the recipe so here it is.

Marmalade Cake – 8 to 10 servings
Adapted from the Boonville Hotel

1 small to medium orange
1 lemon
6 ounces raw almonds
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
4 large eggs, ideally at room temperature
½ tsp. table salt
1 ½ cups sugar
2/3 cup olive oil
Confectioners’ sugar, for serving

First, get to work on the citrus. Put the orange and the lemon in a saucepan, and cover with water. (They’ll want to float. Don’t worry about it.) Bring to a boil over medium-high heat; then reduce the heat to medium and simmer for 30 minutes. Drain, and cool.

Meanwhile, toast the almonds. Preheat the oven to 325°F, and set a rack in the middle position. Put the almonds on an ungreased sheet pan, and bake until they look golden and smell warm and toasty, 10 to 15 minutes. (I tend to get nervous about burning them, and consequently, I always try to pull them out of the oven too soon. Don’t do that. Let them really toast.) Set aside to cool completely. When the almonds are cool, pulse them in a food processor until finely ground, the texture of coarse sand. Set aside.

Set the oven to 350°F, and grease a 9-inch round springform pan.

When the citrus is cool, cut the lemon in half, and scoop out and discard the pulp and seeds. Cut the orange in half, and discard the seeds. Put the lemon rind and orange halves in the food processor – there’s no need to wash it after grinding the almonds – and process to chop finely, almost to a coarse paste.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour and baking powder.

Combine the eggs and salt in a mixing bowl. Beat until foamy. Gradually beat in the sugar. Fold in the flour mixture. Add the citrus, almonds, and olive oil, and beat on low speed to just incorporate. Do not overmix. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake for about 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool the cake in its pan on a wire rack. Remove the sides of the pan. Before serving, dust the cake with confectioners’ sugar.

Note: This cake tastes even better on the second – or even third – day, as the flavors meld and mellow. Store it at room temperature, covered with plastic wrap.

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Today we took a nice walk, stopped for coffee in the Piazza, and were joined by our friend Michelle. They are also having an antique car show here which we visited as they were setting up. We plan lunch at Calagrana a bit later. It is a pretty day so it will be nice.

Nancy Goes to Italy

A record of an American's dream to live in Umbria

Category Archives: Eating

Feels like winter now!

Tasting the oil

Finishing the picking and our visit to the oil mill

Helping with the harvest!

Trip to Abruzzo

Back home.

Sighişoara, Transylvania

Bucharest, Romania

Guest-less for now

St. Francis and the wolf…redux

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