cut the crusts from thick sliced white bread. fry gently in olive oil in which fresh basil and oregano has been added. very gently.
we like penne. penne is our daily ... bread? pasta.
the sauce is a salsa in disguise - a tapenade ... you can heap it on bread or on pasta or in soup ...
1 eggplant. 1 red pepper. 2 tomatoes. 1 small onion. 1 garlic clove. 2 celery stalks. a handful of capers and black olives. sweat the eggplant first with salt. but this you know ...
slice all small. quarter inch. as small as you can go. but a nice cut. always show a nice cut. toast a handful of pinenuts to garnish btw.
sautee garlic and onion. then celery, then eggplant, then pepper, then capers and olives, and finally the tomato just before you turn off the heat. ground salt and pepper to taste. basta.
I'm eating the crostini so fast the pasta will all go to my hips now as my stomach is full - I have a love affair with my hips. sort of a love hate relationship. since i was a girl i've liked having broad hips (but it took me a lot longer to accept my big feet) - but then summer comes and they seem to get in the way - yes my feet and my hips! but i love them, none the less ... Is it summer or Italy I miss ... I don't know. The warmth of olive oil on toasted bread, the fragrance of pinenuts long after they have been eaten ... making pasta at the end of the day almost tripping over the girls in the kitchen and hubby opening the wine - we only had a chilled bottle of white and sadly NO red ... which I would have loved - stirring the celery, tomatoes, onion and garlic into a pasta sauce (my girlfriend Gina told me pasta sauce should be made in the 9 minutes it takes to boil the pasta) slower and slower as I recalled summers in Sienna at a little house we rented. oh I do hope summer comes soon! ciao! katrin
You leave the house at 5 in the morning so you won’t hit any traffic jams on the way back through Italy but you needn’t have bothered because you hit them anyway. A long hot cruel 40 kilometer traffic jam just before Bologna because some semi has decided to kick it and rests now in a ditch at the side of the road. A truck stop. A rest stop. The truck was tired and just decided to heave it over to the side but tripped. So now you all have to have a look and the line crawls slowly but resolutely towards the big city. This is Bologna. It certainly is.
Now sitting here in front of the small house under the stone awning. Across the walls dart lizards who wait until you take their picture and then move on into the rafters with unlucky little bugs caught in their mouths. There is no way you have yet found to the lock the doors. So you leave them open. You need a coffee, want a coffee, there is an espresso machine in the kitchen which sounds like an old tractor when you turn on the ignition. Much more silent is the iron you drove with through three countries to iron the clothes you threw into the suitcase the night before, the night of leaving. This is a much more satisfactory way of packing one which you will remember for the future. Besides the espresso machine you have found, in the bathroom, an iron. Sometimes it is a problem finding an iron in a hotel. Especially on a Sunday. Here in the northwest of Tuscany in an old stone farmhouse an iron is as accessible as towels and toilet paper. Toilet paper you also brought. In front of you are peach trees and apple trees, a long dirt lane that winds through the rolling hills, past the lake, juniper and blackberry bushes and off into the distance where a herd of goats graze. Beside you a smaller lake surrounded with bulrushes, filled with warm water and water lilies, populated with dragon flies and frogs who watch you as you swim in the morning. Just a bit further are zucchini and tomato plants, beans and sunflowers. And grapes. Lots and lots of grapes for wine and then lots and lots of olive trees for olive oil. Wine and olive oil sit on the table just inside, a gift from the landlord. Between the lake and the main gate are fields of purple and white wild flowers and trees full of obscenely large pinecones. Beneath lay hundreds of pinenuts still in their shells. 24 bucks a kilo. After shelling 5 you see why they are 24 bucks a kilo … Behind you the big house and the gate, the lane to the old church and further on over a hill Milan. Looking much smaller than you remember it or perhaps you were smaller.
In the Cathedral there you go for the holy water as soon as you enter. People, they dip their fingers in like they’ll burn themselves. Who are these Vampires anyway? Its not perfume for God’s sake. You’d think they’re anointing themselves with myrrh the way they graze the end of their finger along the surface. You are much more generous, much more confident of your status with Him, you practically have your whole hand in the font and generously splash yourself with repentance. For some reason there are a few coins lying there at the bottom of the font. Can you still buy plenary indulgences? Is it so casual now? “Bob, grabbing a few indulgences for Kathy and me, can I get you one? Betty? Indulgences? Well I’ll toss in a couple of bucks anyway…”
There is no sound here except the birds and the dogs. Occasionally a shot rings out in the distance. At night the air is full of crickets and frogs. The sounds of them not literally crickets and frogs filling the air. Yes a shot or two shots actually about 15 minutes apart. Shotgun. 12 gauge I would say. I don’t know this is Tuscany not Sicily so it wouldn’t have been anything very nasty, no sawed offs or pump guns. Look, this isn’t going to work very well if I have to continually qualify what I’m saying here… you have paid much more than you are paying for this place for a grotty little hotel room in many many cities. The town on the other side of the hill is called Grotti as a matter of fact. There is a small bar on the sunny main street in front of which sit men in t-shirts playing cards and generally acting out the stereotype. Grotty little men. One of the landlords dogs lurks just behind the lavender bushes. Watching me. Waiting for left over bits of Veal. Sit BooBoo sit. Good dog. You find the door keys on the third day hanging above the porch light. The porch light you discover on the second day looking for the interior light. Can’t be bothered to lock doors anyway and so leave them open.
In Milan just before a really big rain and you’re making your way through the uniformed huddled masses of t-shirts and shorts, open sandals and knapsacks, cameras and sunglasses. They are lining up to pay homage to the gods of uniformity. The gods of the armchair traveller. They are lining up for pizza. In Italy. You wouldn’t think pizza was so big in Italy being such a junk food staple back home. It must be big in Milan because there are four pizza counters and not one is empty. So you duck into the back alley and find someplace that is empty. A glass of local white wine, some warm goats cheese and ham on a garlic smeared crust of toasted bread and afterwards fig gelati stuffed back into the hollowed out shell of the fruit. Oh and an espresso so thick you could dance on it served with a spoon made out of chocolate that slowly melts as you stir the sugar into the deep, oily blackness. You should eat the local fare when you are abroad but somehow you just can’t bring yourself to eat pizza in Italy.
The hills in the area are full of decaying and collapsing houses, old farms and villas. The Swiss are buying them up for a few dollars, renovating, and sticking price tags on them more reminiscent of those back home. Someone has bought an entire hilltop town and surrounded it with chain link fence. The leaves of the trees are brown with the dust kicked up from the unpaved roads as I travel from public road to private road. Raised dust so they can see you coming, so you can’t sneak up on them. Deformed roads, “Deformata di strada”, where you play dodge’em with the flocks of pheasants sneaking across for another try at the fields of sunflowers. The night air is warm but moving, spreading over the hills like a hand wiping away the flies. When you finish the climb and make your way back down into the dell, past the church, the air changes both temperature and thickness. Suddenly the air is cooler, thinner and it smells of salt and grass. It’s like dipping into a pool on a hot day, breaking the warm surface and finding the cooler waters below. The air splashes you in the face. There are no signs here on this road, no house numbers. They are the anonymous homeowners. They are the Swiss in Tuscany.
Siena is the place to go if you want to pay 8 bucks for a beer and 15 for a hamburger and chips. You can pay 16 for a burger and chips but this is served open faced with silver cutlery and a cloth napkin. This is at the edge of the cathedral in Cologne. Come to think of it this 15 buck hamburger joint is at the edge of a cathedral too. And a bottle of water at the edge of the cathedral in Siena is the price of a six-pack at the Coop in the village. There is something about the prices at the foot of God. God has high overhead. High property prices. There is something about the ticket prices near the stage that defy imagination. What price the wages of sin? You know, in comparison, it’s a damn fire sale the price of sin. They’re damn near giving it away. Ever check out the price of a hamburger near the train stations of this world? Near the all night electronic stores and cheap watch and postcard boutiques, the sex stores and streets full of stagnant water even during the summer? Near all that sin? This is dirty, messy, complicated. It is bedlam. But a hamburger will cost you a couple of bucks from a McDonalds or a Burger King there and the foot of God, even though he is omnipresent, seems far out of sight. You don’t even know which way to look. Sin is far cheaper, far more accessible, without hassle and without pride. You don’t feel so nervous or cheated when you sit in the cheap seats, when you’re sinning at a fast food joint. You know you are paying for what you get. You can’t sin this way at home. It’s too streamlined, too global, too packaged. But you always feel you could have done better somehow. In the front rows, at the hamburger stands of the righteous you always marvel at the buying power of the hamburger, the beer, the silly portion of pasta or the poorly turned out salad. Shit, you think, could have done this salad for a buck and still had it looking edible. And this pasta? Hell the kids could do that up better and the peas would have still been green. For this hamburger, you could have bought groceries for a week at home you know? You think you’ve been cheated somehow. Like after working this hard, paying so much and giving up other pleasures you would have been rewarded with a hamburger that brings tears to your eyes; a hamburger that you wouldn’t want to eat because it radiates “hamburgerness”. But you are mostly disappointed. And feel somehow guilty. The wages of sin? Forget the wages of sin; the wages of piety are taxed to the teeth. You get to sit in the front row but damn it’s expensive.
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