Walking Home Through the Farmland

Italy Journal

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

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Walking Home from the University

Today, I drove to the University for a massage, and I decided to leave the car for Peter and walk home through the farmland to get my exercise. I was so glad I did. The pictures tell it all. It’s a beautiful, crisp, Fall day.

Colleen

A Visit with Tiziana

Italy Journal

Oct. 22, 2012

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Visit with Tiziana

It’s always so nice to get an invitation to visit in the home of a new friend. I was so pleased to receive an invitation from Tiziana, a German teacher who teaches in the same middle school as Rossella. I met her on a walk with Rossella and her group of women that walk every Wednesday, and she wanted to speak English with me as much as I wanted to speak Italian with her, so that’s what we did. I spoke Italian, and she spoke English. It worked really well.

She picked me up at the hospital, and her house was towards St. Michele, where I walk past the honey farm sometimes. It was a beautiful home, and I found in the back yard a large grassy area…and a chicken coop! The mansion behind them had at least 4 acres of grass with cows and a donkey on it. Anyway, after a lovely cup of decaf coffee, we went to the backyard and fetched the 4 fresh eggs that the chickens ungraciously gave up to her. We had to block their path to get to the eggs without a fight from the hens. Tiziana gave me two of those fresh eggs to take home, and later I enjoyed them very much.

I met her 17-year-old beautiful daughter and her husband, and I hope we can all get together soon to get to know each other better.

Thanks again for a lovely visit, Tiziana.

Colleen

PS I threw in the picture of my lovely flowers from my lovely husband and the first pictures of Monviso with snow on the top. Winter is coming!

Salon di Gusto

Italy Journal

October 24-29, 2012

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Terra Madre/Salone di Gusto

Oh, buddy! I can’t even start to tell you about our experiences in the Terra Madre/Salone di Gusto Festival.  Think 5 football fields placed in 5 adjacent huge warehouse-like buildings with 8 double rows of about 40 vendor booths in the length of each building. Each section was named Pad 1, Pad 2, Pad 3, International, and Pad 5. Then, in the connecting HUGE corridors were Food street markets and Vineyard wine tastings…almost another football field worth.

Of course, Italy’s regions had about half of the space filled, and Pad 5 was filled with  about 8 large temporary classrooms where tastings of all sorts went on. The International hall was divided by continents and contained food as well as craft items, like the pointy knitted hat Peter bought to use as decoration in our house (too small for Peter).Near the UNISG (Peter’s university) booth were the SAAFON (USA’s Southern African American Food) participants. We learned that there were almost 400 USA delegates/visitors at the festival.

Three times during the long weekend, Peter, his classmate Kelly and I led English tours for people who wanted to hear about and taste presidia foods (endangered and being address aggressively to save them by Slow Food). They were very well done, and we enjoyed meeting everyone and helping them enjoy an in-depth discussion of the Black Bee Honey in Sicily (only 2 hives existed when they were discovered a few years ago!), the Irish cheese made from fresh milk, salumi with surprise squares of lardo (yes, lard, but it makes it soooooo tasty!) inside from Abruzzo, Black Bread and white beans from Sicily, and black pepper from Malaysia.

Special events for me during Terra Madre/Salone di Gusto were:

1)   The Opening Ceremony the night before the festival started. All sorts of people spoke, played music, sang; and the last speaker was the initial organizer of Slow Food Carlo Petrini, who lives around the corner from us in Bra. Also, later in the week, a Facebook video was sent out in which “Carlini” was dancing with the Youth Network at an evening party. Peter’s classmate Charlotte thought that was the highlight of the whole festival for her.

a.     All of the nations who were present had delegates who carried their flags for all to see, then the delegates sat in a prominent place on stage. It made me have goose bumps when the American flag was brought in by one of the University students!

b.     The message of each of the speakers was about how their country was making sure everyone had good, fair and clean food for all. Especially exciting was the progress in Africa, where an emphasis of starting 1,000 school gardens was realized over the last year. Now, all of those schools serve home grown foods in their lunch programs, and the students have planted, cared for the plants and harvested the fruit of those plants themselves. USA’s Alice Waters was an important proponent that made this possible. She was there, too.

2)   The USA meeting, in which all Americans were invited to attend. The meeting was opened by NATIVE AMERICANS from 4 different reservations who played music, sang and spoke about how the native Americans have always joined their spirituality and reverence/respect for the earth. They encouraged everyone to turn away from the negative influences of big business and artificial ways to grow food and to focus on the treasures we have on Mother Earth. There was one lady who is only one of 5 people on earth who still makes certain items in the traditional weaving way.

3)   The EAT IN, where 60 people gathered to eat supper together. A group of university volunteers arranged for donations of foods for this event and made a fantastic feast for us. It was free for those who signed up quickly.

4)   The Chocolates Tour in which we participated. Some of Peter’s classmates were the tour guides for this. It couldn’t have had a more receptive group! YUM!

5)   Meeting several of the parents and other family members of some of the other students in Peter’s cohort. We’ve all become family now, so it was extra special to get to know some other family members.

6)   Meeting lots and lots and lots of people from all over the world.

The weather was pretty good. It turned quite chilly on the last day, but we were ready for it, and the only time we had to go outside was to and from the car when we didn’t get there early enough to get a spot underground.

There was a very important FIRST that happened during Salone di Gusto. Peter and our Italian friend Enzo conducted their very first official research for starting the gastronomic tour company together, “I Travel, I Taste, I Learn.” It was very exciting for both of them to gather information and contacts, knowing that they would be able to share this experience with our tour groups starting next fall, 2013. You will hear more and more about these irresistible plans as they are finalized.

If you ever get a chance to go to Terra Madre/Salon di Gusto, please consider it. It is a lot of information and sometimes overwhelmingly crowded, but the purpose for being there is to encourage the world to provide decent food for EVERYONE. How cool is that!

Colleen

What a Great Weekend!

Italy Journal

Friday, October 19, 2012

Street Market with Nina

Nina and I took in Bra’s street market this morning and ended up in Pollenzo for lunch with Sarah…and Francesco…and Theo…and Rick, as our pizza group continued to grow. We laughed at Theo because she kept accepting our offer of pizza but then insisting that she had not come over to join us for the purpose of eating our food. I finally suggested that she go away and come back and announce to us that she was here to eat our pizza with us, and she did it! Then, she felt much better about eating our pizza, and we were glad not to hear her apologizing the whole time!!!

Nina and I ended our fun day with affogato at Caffe Vittorio! Stupendous!!!

Emanuele’s Traditional Swiss Pasta Dinner

Oh, my! What a delightful time we had at Emanuele’s house tonight. He invited about 7 people over to his house to treat us to a traditional Swiss pasta dinner. It seemed like our macaroni with yummy meat sauce (no tomato in the sauce), cheese, and topped with… homemade applesauce! We were all duly impressed with the combination of flavors. It was great fun to share that with other Swiss people as well as others from around the globe.

Thanks, Emanuele, for a very special invitation to an exceptional event. You’re the best!

Colleen

Italy Journal

Saturday, October 20, 2012

The Perfect Outing!

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We will remember this combination of events as the perfect Saturday outing!

Sarah, Theo and Nina went with us to Dogliani to pick up the cingali salumi (wild boar salami) that we ordered last week. Sarah and Nina got all excited about the sweets and the natural cotton shirts that were on sale. I got a mock turtleneck tan shirt with a pull-over jacket to wear with it.  Then, we walked all over Dogliani and wondered at their beautiful architecture.

From there, we went by Monforte di Alba, where Peter showed us around yet another quaint hill town. We visited a hotel there, Hotel Villa Beccaris, where Peter still insists I stayed with him some years ago. I have no recollection of this lovely spot with the huge tree in the back, but he did say I was jetlagged at the time. Anything can be forgotten in the midst of jetlag.

We ended up in the town square at Bar Grappollo d’Oro to have lunch. It was exceptional, and the mother/cook there gave us some cogna (vegetable mixture to put on bread during aperitivo) as a welcoming gift.

We gave Theo the option of getting gelato back in Bra or dropping by Cherasco for chocolates. She never even took a breath…chocolates! Fortunately for us, the great candy shop that Nina and I found this week was closed, and the greater chocolate shop Riccardi’s was open. Mauro had fun helping us pile up bags of chocolate on anything imaginable –all fruits, all nuts, many veggies like peppers, etc. We’re already looking forward to adding his shop to the places we take our tours later. We will be back, Mauro!

We thought our day was complete as we enjoyed our chocolates on the way back to Bra, but we met that evening to have dinner at the wonderful restaurant on Piazza Roma Bottoglino. Theo bailed to go to the Speakeasy that some of the students were putting on, but the rest of us ate well. Our reservation was at 8:30PM, which was normal for Italy but very late for us. We were ready for bed by the time we got home about 11:45!

What an extra special day! Thanks, all of you!

Colleen

Italy Journal

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Sunday Supper with only Enzo and Lisa

This morning, Sarah and Nina dropped by to print Nina’s train ticket and say goodbye to us. It’s been lovely getting to know Nina, and we look forward to her and Derek joining us for one of our gastronomic tours!

In the afternoon, Kendall came by with an empty plastic container from some Sunday Supper and wanted information from Peter about places to take her parents when they came to visit next week. He’s great with that information. We gave her all the info and phone numbers from yesterday, La Torre in Cherasco and about a restaurant in Torino, and she was very pleased.

We didn’t have a school-wide Sunday Supper this week because of all the events we have sponsored during the week, but we did invite ourselves to Enzo and Lisa’s to make up for an invitation earlier in the week from them that we had to decline so Peter could do his homework. They were gracious to take us in, and Enzo outdid himself with Waldorf Salad made from walnuts, apples and some other something that just made it that much more wonderful. I didn’t recognize that other ingredient. He also made some salmon, just for me, and it was divine. Then, we had risotto made with chunks of pumpkin, covered in a salsa of caramelized onions with yum, yummier, and yummiest other ingredients. To end it all, he had poached pears, and we ate the pears and poured the sweet sauce over the panna cotta that we brought. Enzo added some chocolate/hazelnut balls with a whole grape inside each one to surprise our tastebuds. All that combined with wines that Peter and Enzo had chosen, and we were well fed and terrifically happy with our visit with good friends on our walk home afterwards. We were especially excited that Enzo decided to go with us to Salone di Gusto on Thursday to meet some of the producers for the tours later. Enzo is very enthusiastic about working with Peter on this dream…if you call introducing people to travel, land, food and producers in Italy “work!?”

What a lovely weekend!

Colleen

Dinner Society Oct. 2012

Italy Journal

Thursday, October 19, 2012

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Dinner Society

This has turned into a week of parties. Tonight, we hosted another Dinner Society event with 16 people here for a potluck meal. Peter used the ravioli that Nina and I bought early this morning. We had to borrow an extra pasta pot from Sarah to make one pot of 2-minute tiny ravioli and the other with the larger 3-4 minute ravioli. Then, the tiny ones were mixed with ragu, and the larger ones had a pesto sauce. Great job, Peter! Although we never tell people what to bring, all parts of the meal were covered to perfection.

The Dinner Society events are sponsored by the University Student Union. All students are invited to attend or host a group. Each of the hosts decides the arrangement and design for the meal, and the university assigns the students to their host’s location randomly…sort of. I think they may look at where people live and/or requests to be with a certain host. We took the liberty of adding a favorite professor and a few other people who were without plans for the evening…no problem.

We had a lovely mixture of nationalities and ages, and I made a list of the participants in advance to help everyone learn the names quickly and remember them later. I expected that some of the undergraduate students would not be able to speak English because their classes are taught in Italian, but no one had any problem communicating.

Thanks, everyone, for a wonderful time!!!

Colleen