FuoriBorgo

Happy New Ears

(Orecchiette = "little ears", and I owe the title of this post to Jeremy)

We were very grateful to our neighbor when, over a month ago, he told us to help ourselves to as much broccoli as we wanted from his garden: he had over-planted, and had also got a spectacular yield this winter, which meant far too much broccoli for his family to eat.  We only eat vegetables and fruit that are in season, and at this time of year broccoli (and cabbage) is what the land offers.  However, we've never had so much broccoli in such a short time, and I ended up trying some experimental cooking to use it.  

It wasn't always a huge hit.  But we reached a new low the day I concocted a broccoli, garlic and haricot bean soup: that evening, as Rebecca sat down at the dinner table, she covered her nose with both hands and announced that there was a bad "garbage" smell in the kitchen.  And since I was unwise enough to burst out laughing, the boys felt authorized to expand and embroider on Rebecca's comment, and ... well, suffice to say that I did not make broccoli and haricot bean soup again.

And so I went back to cooking our family's favorite broccoli dish: orecchiette con i broccoli, a traditional pasta dish from the southern Puglia region.  Orecchiette ("little ears") are something of a specialty pasta, and after weeks of buying it, it occurred to me that I could simply make it myself.  I often make tagliatelle and lasagne, rolling out and cutting the sheets of pasta with a little hand-cranked pasta machine, but I'd never made any other type of pasta before.  I was surprised how easy (and inexpensive) it is.

 

 

All you need is regular and durum wheat flour, and some water.  Here is a fairly good how-to guide in English (don't be intimidated by the initial statement that "it takes experience, ability and practice" - it doesn't!).

And, to be honest, once I got used to the idea that I could make pasta without a machine, I realized that what I most enjoyed about it was making it exclusively by hand, with no mechanical tools at all!

Thank you, sun!

 

 

It's amazing, in the heart of winter, how one beautiful day of sunshine and vivid colors can restore one's spirits.  Happy rest of the weekend!

Dear sun,

Dear sun,

I know it's January, but you are very far away out there, gilding the distant edges of the steel-gray sea in your golden light.  Won't you come and visit us?

If you come, we'll open our windows wide to let in your rays.

If you come, we'll hang out clothes on the line, and let you dance with them.

 

If you come, we'll let you chase the snow off the cold ground.

If you come, we'll all walk outside and play with you.

Has anyone seen our sun?

Autumn lanterns

At the crossroads where our little lane begins is a tree that is totally unnoticeable most of the year.  Until the fall, when among the neighboring olive trees, with their evergreen leaves, it turns orange and gold.

Amidst the autumn foliage are its plump, round fruits, waiting for the day that the tree will display them in their full glory.

The day has arrived:  the last of the leaves have fallen, and on the bare branches, against the pastel-colored fall sky, the bright red-orange fruits are a welcoming and cheerful landmark on our way home.

The persimmons are not quite ripe yet, but the wind brought down a few last night, which I gathered eagerly, and sliced one in half to see the magic surprise - the same one that Lecia found.

This is where we live in the autumn: at the crossroads marked by the bare tree, whose red-orange lanterns hide a magic star.

Into the fall

My neighbor was sitting outdoors in our lane, sorting through the end-of-season green bean plants they'd pulled up in their fields: the good green beans were going into a basket for dinner, while the shriveled, dried out ones were going to the rabbits, plants and all.  She looked up, and gazed at the hillside across the valley, where the trees seemed to have turned to fall colors overnight.  "Winter is coming early this year," she said.

She does this often:  she'll look at the sky, and at the color, shape and direction of the clouds, at the woods and at her fields, and predict the weather.  And she's usually right.

We helped her with her work.  Rebecca was eager to do some sorting, and followed her instructions.  We live far from our own families, and to me the comfortable, playful manner that my children have when they're with our elderly neighbors is heartwarming.  And these people have a lot to teach them:  they've been paying very close attention to the weather, to nature, and to people, for a lifetime.

We had green beans for dinner.  "We" is Tom and I, as Rebecca could not be persuaded that the objects she'd been sorting that morning were edible, and the boys - oh, poor boys, I almost felt sorry for them - couldn't believe their eyes: just when they thought that the deer had taken care of the whole season's worth of their least favorite vegetable, a brimming bowl of them appeared on the table.  They were allowed to skip the green beans.

Simple lifestyle ~ an announcement

I'm thrilled to announce that I've been accepted as a new writer at  Simple, Green, Frugal Co-op.  I'll be posting at the Co-op two to three times a month, and I will post a link here when I do.  This is Monday, the beginning of a new week, and the beginning of something that I'm really looking forward to!

Ten years ago, when we moved to this remote hilltop village, several of our friends and family said they thought that raising children in a small rural community, far from the vibrant urban lifestyle we were used to, in an area where there wasn't even TV reception, might slow their intellectual development, and be bad for us as a family.

Oh, it hasn't been easy.  But our children have thrived in this setting so far, and have been enriched by it in countless ways.   Meanwhile, Tom and I have learned a lot about ourselves, about self-reliance, about life in a small community, and about what things matter most in life.  I also believe that living this simple and sometimes demanding life has actually brought us closer as a family. 

To have been accepted as a writer at the Co-op, where I'll be able to contribute to its effort, and share some of the things I've learned, seen, and thought about over the last decade, is for me a great compliment.  Wish me luck!

Fresh pasta

Rebecca and I went to my neighbor's house to get eggs this morning, but she didn't have any: she'd just used them all to make fresh pasta for a family gathering in the evening, to celebrate the birth of the first great-grandchild.  She had a back-ache and was working slowly, all hunched over the table, and frequently sat down to rest.  As always, her sewing kit was on the kitchen table, surrounded by the sheets of fresh pasta, and when she had to sit down she'd immediately pick up the little flannel squares she'd cut out of an old sheet, and continue hand-sewing the hems on the burp cloths for her granddaughter's newborn.

Fresh pasta is ridiculously easy to make, and has only two ingredients, flour and eggs.  I use this little hand-cranked machine to roll out the dough and cut it to size, but my neighbor, who often cooks for her extended family, has a large electrical one that kneads, rolls and cuts the dough, creating a range of shapes: tagliatelle, tagliolini, linguine, capelli d'angelo ... 

Her back was really giving her problems, and so I offered to help, and finished the tagliatelle for her.  At one point I inquired whether she shouldn't take a pain killer, and she looked at me in disbelief.  "Haven't I worked enough in my life already?" she said.  "If my back aches, it just means that I have to sit down and rest."

Rebecca and I didn't come home with eggs, but with a gift: a nice plate of fresh homemade pasta, which we cooked for lunch (after some further hand shaping).

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I blogged about some aspects of this special woman's life here and here.

For winter

I'm excited to announce that Ancient Industries is taking a virtual holiday this week, and visiting with FuoriBorgo in my corner of the world: the first post is here!

The August days are getting shorter, and have a hint of autumn: the grass is drying and turning golden, the sun sets behind the hill while we're still sitting down to dinner, and we're starting to switch on the lights in the evenings.  But the soil in the garden and the water in the irrigation tank are at their warmest, having soaked for months the hot sun, and this is prime summertime: after months of hoeing, manuring, sowing, watering, weeding, pruning, training, and protecting from pests and animal invaders, summer is finally yielding its riches.  Because while not much is certain when you're relying for your food on the unpredictable rhythms of nature, if the weather has been kind, August is when the shelves are beginning to fill up with good things laid away for winter.

This has been a good year so far (apart from incursions by deer here, here, and here), and our shelves are nicely stacked with a variety of preserves.

So far, we've made the following from our garden, local orchards and forest: 
- fruit: canned peaches, and peach and apricot jams (17.5 pounds!)
- wild berries and fruit: cherry, blueberry and elderberry jams (a first, which I'm not sure I'll repeat) 
- vegetables: canned tomatoes and tomato sauce
- leaves: lots and lots of pesto from basil
- flowers: dry herbs, which still need to be stripped ... I'll post about this soon!

We also have a jar of my pride and joy: caper buds, which I must confess I'm very excited about!

This year I picked capers for the first time, and had a go at salting them.  Capers are the flower buds of a spiny bush, Capparis Spinosa L, which grows wild around the Mediterranean in the sunniest and most improbable places.  In our area it grows on stone dry-walls, its long and graceful branches emerging from between the stones, filled with thick, green, round leaves, and with white and purple flowers that are a marvel of nature.

Capers are widely used in Italian cuisine, but are normally only available pickled in vinegar.  The best are grown in Sicily, on the Aeolian Islands, where some years ago I first tried capers preserved in salt.  These were a revelation for my taste buds, and since then have been the only capers I've used (available here, from a company that unfortunately only ships within Italy). I haven't sampled my own capers yet - I'm waiting for Tom and the boys to get back so we can try them together.  Which seems only fair, since they helped with the picking.

If the boys helped with a lot of the picking - with capers, cherries (here) and apricots alike - Rebecca has been my chief assistant during these last few evenings of intense work in the kitchen, when it's cool enough to work over my boiling pots.

Here's how I'll remember this August: the two of us together, busy preserving our food for the winter, Rebecca taking sips now and then from the peach juice I made her for the occasion.

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Sorry for the long post, but it was really a long process: from planting, to growing, to picking, to preserving - and soon we'll get to just the savoring!

Lunar landscape

These are the tomatoes I picked today.  "What on earth is wrong with this woman?" you're probably wondering.  "Why is she picking green tomatoes?!"  I'm picking green tomatoes because all of the local gardens around here are rapidly becoming a lunar landscape.

 

My 83-year old neighbor recently wrote a desperate and moving letter to the local press and public authorities.  The first sentence read:  "Our valley is becoming a lunar landscape: wild boar and deer are destroying our fields."  Neither animal is native to this area, but whereas the boar don't jump, and a simple fence can keep them away, you'd have to surround our whole valley with very tall fences in order to keep the deer out of its extensive gardens and orchards, which is virtually impossible.  Deer devour the vegetables and eat the fruit off the trees, often breaking branches in the process.  They even chew the bark off the olive trees, which kills the trees.  What the deer don't eat, they stomp on and destroy.  That's why I picked the tomatoes while they were still green ...

This morning, in fact, I found that during the night something big appeared to have fallen from the moon, right into my tomato plants.  A deer had jumped the wild boar fence and grazed among my tomatoes, snapping off branches and knocking over the canes that hold the plants upright, and generally trampling everything in sight.  Fortunately, the actual damage was fairly limited, but I decided not to risk another nocturnal visit, and picked some tomatoes to protect them from future destruction, even though they were still green.  Instead of ripening in the sunshine on the vines, they'll ripen indoors in crates ... just like store-bought tomatoes.  It's quite frustrating, but at least they'll get eaten by us, and not our horned neighbors.

I was upset, but Rebecca was thrilled.  While we picked, she kept looking at me with a sneaky grin, saying over and over: "Green?!?"  And I'd reply over and over that yes, just for today it was ok to pick green tomatoes (usually I have to remind her of just the opposite).  Which made me even angrier at these leaping quadrupeds: didn't they know how important it was to be consistent when teaching a toddler?

Now, why couldn't the deer do their moonlight dance in the zucchini patch instead, which just keeps on producing and producing zucchini (long after we have any more desire to eat them, I must confess)?

When a small community gathers (around a broken heart)

This post took a surprising turn ... quite unexpected, really, but here you go ... a piece of my heart, of my "true self".

When we moved to this isolated village years ago, neither Tom nor I had ever lived anywhere but in large cities.  We came here looking for a life in the country for our growing family.  In the years to come, though, an unexpected thing happened.  We found that the biggest lesson we were learning wasn't about nature but about people - not about life in harmony with nature, but about life in a small rural community.

The other night we gathered together for the neighborhood festa, a little street party celebrated here every year.  We sit on simple wooden planks set on plastic crates along the walls of a quiet lane, and pass around food prepared that afternoon by some of the village women, together with wine from the local cellars.  People chat and laugh, kids run around in the darkness of the surrounding fields, which flicker with fireflies this time of year.

Most of our neighbors were born here, or married into the village from a short distance away.  They've lived their entire lives farming these isolated hillsides, and few have traveled.  Many stopped formal education early in grade-school: they've learned the lessons of life and wisdom not from books, but from eking out a living from the land, barely enough to sustain a family. 

It was they, our neighbors, who knocked at our door one cold day in February a few years ago to bring me pansies, and sat with me in the kitchen when all I could give them was my tears. They came with pansies at a time when nobody else had even called me.  They sat with me, and I told them about our little stillborn baby.

And a year later, at a time when the phone remained silent, and people on street in the nearby coastal town would look away when they saw me coming, a woman holding hands with two little boys, a woman whose belly had been big a few days earlier and was now empty, though she had no little bundle in her arms.  That time, too, my neighbors came knocking at our door, to bring us the new wine they'd just finished making.

And a year after that, when by now I knew not to expect any phone calls or any words, they came knocking at our door, and hugged me.  Was there anything more precious to bring to a woman who'd just given birth to her third stillborn baby?

They never knew about the fourth little baby, whose heart had stopped beating at the beginning of the second trimester, and nobody learned about the tiny one that I miscarried alone in my house.

These are our neighbors, farmers for generations, with whom we sat together the other night on improvised benches, and shared a meal while the sun set behind the mountain.