FuoriBorgo

celebrating with Action Pack

The Action Pack Magazine for Kids - Celebration issue is out!  It's a wonderful issue: 80 pages of tutorials, craft projects, recipes and more aimed at kids 7-12, with contributions from different corners of the world (see here) ... including remote middle of nowhere, Italy!   I'm excited to have contributed with two projects: a Nativity scene project which uses uniquely nature finds (I can't even begin to tell you how much fun we had working on this), and a Christmas cookie tree tutorial (inspired by the cookie tree we improvised last Christmas).  

Working with Kathreen has been great: she's a fantastic editor with all the right ideas on how to make projects better.  Back when I first started working on this, I asked her whether she thought it was appropriate to have a project for kids that required the use of a saw.  Her reply was: "we are all about enabling kids to do more stuff, not less!".  

Yes, Action Pack is truly about enabling kids to do more stuff, and, I dare say, your kids will love this Celebration issue.

Action Pack Celebration issue is available here - and as a reader of FuoriBorgo you can get a 10% discount off everything at the whipup.net or action-pack.com store, just use the discount code: WPContributor

a gift-away!

Thank you all for entering my gift-away! I'll be hosting another made in Italy gift-away soon - the winner of this handmade set of olive wood spoon & spatula is Elizabeth A, happy cooking (and please contact me with your address)!

A giftaway, a gift from me to you - or to one of you, anyway!

~ My gift-away: a handmade set of olive-wood cooking spoon and spatula, about 29 cm long, hand-wash only ~

They're a spoon and spatula, hand-made by an artisan in Imperia from local olive wood, one of my favorite kinds of wood.  Olive wood is quite difficult to carve: it's very hard, and it's often hollow.  But it has gorgeous, intricate grain, and is the best kind of wood for cooking utensils.  Because it has a high content of olive oil, it tends not to absorb cooking flavors, and holds up to wear and tear and washing extremely well.  If you like the look of olive wood, and the feel of hand-made utensils in the kitchen, this is a great gift for you.

If you'd like a chance to receive this gift from me, please leave a comment by Thursday morning, when I'll announce the winner!

some thoughts on the value of food

"Since when has food been (culturally) devalued so much as to become expendable? What happened to the concept of food as something precious that nourishes our body and souls? I say "souls" because food is not just about a bunch of nutrients that we gulp down, it is also a matter of taste, and consuming food is a daily ritual that connects us with the land and the people who produce our subsistance, and the loved ones with whom we share it around the table. I suspect that the fact that food has become cheap stuff that we pick from the shelf, often unaware of where it comes from, has something to do with the fact that from precious, food has become expendable, and liable to be wasted in colossal amounts."

These are some of the questions I ask today in my post at the co-op here.

 

a gift-away

Thank you for entering my gift-away, and for telling me how you found my little space here - it was very interesting to read about the intertwining connections in this blogging comunity!  I'll be hosting another made in Italy gift-away soon - in the meanwhile, this lovely terracotta pot from Umbria will go to la ninja, happy cooking (and please contact me)!

A giftaway, from me to you, to thank you for taking the time to come here, read my words and look at my photos, and share you thoughts in the comments when you're inspired.  The other day I saw from the stats that I have visitors from 100 countries - pretty nice!  And I received an email that made my day from someone who wrote that she's been reading me for two years - quite a while!  So, here's a thank you gift from me to all of you (or one of you, at least this time around).

~ my gift-away: a terracotta pot with lid, made in Italy, diameter 21cm, capacity 2 liters.  It can be used on the stove top, oven, and microwave.  It's dishwasher safe ~

It's a gift I've chosen with care - a classic Italian terracotta pot, made in Umbria, perfect for the slow cooking that dishes this time of year require: the warm and warming soups and stews in the piping hot pot at the center of the table, that make sitting down to share a meal in the cold season so much cozier.  Terracotta pots come from the traditional country style of cooking: they're made of a simple material that is healthy, and efficiently retains and distributes uniformly the heat.  They're made to cook very slowly, allowing the ingredients not only to be cooked through (which any pressure pan can do much quicker), but to give that harmonious flavor to a soup or a stew that only comes with slow cooking.   There's nothing better than a lentil soup - made with simple and genuine ingredients: lentils, garlic and herbal salt, and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil - cooked in a terracotta pot at the end of a chilly day!

If you'd like a chance to receive this gift from me, please leave a comment (I'd love to know how you've found FuoriBorgo!) by Thursday morning, when I'll announce the winner.

Slow Food: buy less, spend more, don't waste!

The press conference at the Slow Food Cheese festival we went to a few weeks ago, was quite an eye-opener for me in many ways, and a call to action: 22,000 tons of edible food are thrown away every day in households in the United States, and 4,000 tons in Italy. The results of this massive waste, coupled with the widespread industrialization of the food supply, are far-reaching and severe.  We need to stop wasting food, and buy less food overall.  And we must spend proportionately more on the food we do buy, in order to get high-quality food that's healthy, safe, and priced to give the farmer a fair income.

I'm writing about Slow Food: buy less, spend more, don't waste! at the co-op today.

before the €

We were reading about the beginning of WWII in Nicholas' history book, when a sentence about "the falling value of the Mark" raised a question about what, or who even, Mark was.  So we got out a little box with random (old!) coins left over from our various travels of years ago, to look at the coins European countries used to use before the Euro - so familiar to me, and so totally unknown to my children.

Ten years since I began to use the Euro, I still say "it's not even worth 2 Lira", when I refer to something of no value at all, and I now wonder what my kids make of it.  Those pre-Euro coins were pretty, with so much symbolism from the agricultural and natural world - the olive branch on French francs, a plough and a head of wheat on the humble 10 Lira, the salmon on the Irish flóirín ...

Sunday

Here's a corner of my kitchen table on this rainy March weekend: despite the gray weather, the boughs and blossoms from our Week of Colors announcing the arrival of springtime.

I published the final version of the List of International Seed Catalogs, 2011.

Happy Sunday!

Grayness (a week of colors)

This is the time of year when winter grayness gets to me.  As often seems to happen In March around these parts, last week we had snow, strong winds, and very low temperatures.  Yet I know that March also brings daylight savings, flowers blooming and trees blossoming, and spring colors filling the landscape.  

I'm going to have a week of colors here, to take my mind off the grayness and focus on the coming colors of spring, and to explore a little March's spectrum of chromatic possibilities.  Please join in if you'd like!

A Week of Colors:

Monday ~ Pink
Tuesday ~ Yellow
Thursday ~ Green
Friday ~ Black  

Wait, isn't black a non-color - the absence of color?  Possibly.  But black has been my favorite color (or non-color) off and on for long periods of my life, and I wanted to dedicate a day to it.

Hope you have a colorful Sunday!

I ♥ colanders

make your own free Shape Collage

There's no kitchen tool that I use (and photograph) more than my colanders.  Yes, I have two colanders, which is a good thing for those times when, for example, one gets used not only in the kitchen for draining and dripping or defrosting; or for carrying flowers or harvest vegetables from the garden; but also as a helmet during a brief, intense game of knights and castles, only to be discarded and forgotten somewhere in the fields for days (yes, it happened!).

Which of your kitchen tools do you love most?

in passing : two years

I finally had the time to prepare and cook the ten artichokes that had been sitting as a bouquet on our kitchen table for several days.  As I was taking photos of this remarkable winter flower bud, by far my favorite local winter vegetable, I realized that this was the third time I'd tried to capture its peculiar spiny appearance for a post.  I'd previously written about artichokes here:

Market Day, on February 6, 2009 ~ the second post I ever wrote!
Food beneath the spines, on March 9, 2010  

And now again, in 2011.  Which made me realize that this blog turned two years old this week.  In fact, had the previous weeks been more restful, I'd be able to write the post I had in mind, about how significant it's been for me to open a window onto this wonderful blogging community from my isolated village.  As things happened, though, I was only able to notice this anniversary in passing.  Sometimes life, like artichokes, can be a little spiny, though there's still a lot of goodness to be found inside.

Thank you for two wonderful years!