mercredi 19 octobre 2011

Get thee behind me Roma!

Firenze

With the museums I wanted to see today closed, I decided to have a food day. Walking through Firenze is ever pleasant, but passing piazza Ambrosio to find a traditional outdoor market is perfect, yes perfect.

My favourite snack in Italy is a handful of grape tomatoes with a ball of fresh buffalo mozzarella. It's as though someone stole a piece of cloud from the heavens and added salt. Walking about with these two miracles of modern man in your hands is like holding yin and yang. With the syrupy insides of each alternating from bite to bite, it's indecent to please yourself so much in public.

I came upon a salumeria in the market with not only the highest quality of boucheries I've seen yet, but also everything is unrefrigerated and cut by hand. It makes the process slow, methodical, and more worthwhile, with each meaty slice unique.

The Porchetta, oh the porchetta. The skin perfectly crisp with the flavour of christmas potatoes; the loin, tender with the juices of pesto and rosemary, tied with string and left on a board never to be refrigerated and thus dry up or lose its texture.

Sopressata, sweet sopressata: with every humble flavour and texture the boiled down head of a pig can offer. These guys, somehow manage to stuff fresh herbs in between the layers of yummy perfection.

I think it's worthy to note here that everything you know about Italian cured meats is wrong. At least, depending on which region you're in one word can mean many things, and it certainly doesn't mean the same thing from region to region. Never use a meat's name as you know it. You will be laughed at. Sopressata is different in Tuscany than it is anywhere else, and I'm pretty sure that it's what Roman's call coppa "alla romana" but I'm sure that Italy would disagree.

Pranzo was at a local Trattoria that was once known for local Toscana cuisine. I had roast potatoes, (roasted in fat), and porchina (thinly sliced pork chops), again the most tender I have ever had. These guys know pork! Tuscany, land of the happy hog, wondrous Wilbur.


Earlier this week I spent much of my time with my friend Renato who was eager to come along with me to Firenze. He has a friend that does all sorts of really neat sculptures here and he enjoys staying at his workshop. We spent the better part of his stay biking around together, to lookout points, on the river, and so forth, exchanging in Italian and English.

The thing about Firenze is that it's lost in time in the most spectacularly functional way. Here, men in tweed suits ride old singlespeeds, the only excuse for dieting is poverty, shoes are always taken to a cobbler, and with a couple beers, the church steps are the ultimate Sunday hangout spot.

I miei giorni sono passato in giro sul ciottolo, guardando gli fabbricati chi paiono come opere d'arte, qualche volte mi siedo sul lungo dal fiuve.

My mornings are spent in a spacious sunny garden, with espresso and a book. Cats scurry around playing in what seems like a paradise. I'm being housed by the loveliest of people, Serenella and her three beautiful daughters. Every evening they sit down for multicourse meals together, sharing stories, talking about what they're learning at school and enjoying their mother's cooking. They invite me to join them on the daily, and how could I resist, considering that Serenella's "quick" home cooking is the best I've had yet in all of Italy: a true Toscana mama, with a taste for simple delicious traditional foods. I had my first Pappa al pomodoro here, my first biscotti alla toscana, my first saltinbocca alla romana, my first true pesto alla genovese, and my first truly peaceful week since I arrived in Italy.

samedi 15 octobre 2011

7 AM Venezia


Listen. Can you hear how beautiful it is? Let me describe it for you then.

Your feet patter against the cobblestone, and with every few steps the acoustics of the echo broaden or narrow, over each bridge, behind every narrow turn. The sounds of cars, airplanes, and scooters are only a memory. The bristles of a sweep shuffle near a caffè preparing for the day. Down a corridor where only water can pass, you hear faint whispers in Italian: Venetians waking, rising, and of course, bickering. An old man walks a cart of vegetables past youngsters unlatching gondolas, allowing for the lightest ripple of a tamed ocean.

E come sei trasportato a una età antica, semplice, diversa, e bellisima.

Then ten o'clock rolls around, and all you hear is tourists, but it still looks beautiful.

Chaque fois que je rencontre des Français en Europe, ils sont géniales. Des Français en Italie enfin, sont les meilleurs.

Ce matin, j’étaie en train de regarder d'une fenêtre grille, un sculpture de David avec la tête coupée de Ronald Mcdonald (génial, non?) quand j'ai rencontré Michel. Avec ces deux cameras extrêmement fortes, lui aussi prenait en avantage le matin vénitien.

Après un couple d'heures on a retrouver son amie, aussi de Provence, Carole. Donc, on est rendu un trio fabuleux et c'était claire que la journée avait un grand potentiel palpable. On a passé la journée en plein style, marchant dans les ruelles, mangeant de tiramisu, et marinant dans la beauté de Venise.







mercredi 5 octobre 2011

Appertura e Pizza Tonda

t seems that in most things, greatness comes in surges or spurts. One shouldn't seek to create always in times of negativity. Negativity is easy and can become a habit.

As today was probably the best day I have spent in Roma, it is also probably the day I should write about. Wednesdays always seem to be my best day in Roma, largely because it is the day of the week that the cyclopicnic falls upon. The cyclopicnic is a devout but small group of picnickers that believe in the bike revolution and good eats, but today's wonderfulness had many parts.

This morning I went to Andremo's pizzeria, in Travestere, and spent a few hours talking to Andremo about pizza and Italian food while he shaped countless pizzas to order and in taglio. Witnessing his work gave me confirmation that working with dough is a tender sort of therapy, that creating and shaping the most supple of culinary goods is next to godliness; dough is after all a living thing.

Probably the most exciting part of Andremo's method is his oven. He carefully calculates the temperature of his oven for each type of pizza. Hovering around a whopping 300 degrees celcius, his pizza proves that an electric oven can create blistered, extra crispy, ultra-risen, pizza with less energy and waste than a wood oven. Obviously wood oven pizza is very different, but the use of electricity is a noble pursuit, looked down on by some, and acknowledged by others for what it is: the future.

I have never seen a more pleasant afternoon in a restaurant: one man cooking to his heart's content and another schmoozing with the customers. It was a social centre of Zza.


I walked along the river after with my friend Francesco a bit, talking about Dante and movies and Italian culture, eventually he hooked me up with an internet connection and some movies to watch: one of the most generous souls I've met thus far.

I took a moment to read some of my book, "Mi chiamano la signora delle erbe. Non perché io abbia conoscenze di botanica, o erboristeria, o magia naturale, ma semplicemente perché ho imparato a vivere con le erbe e delle erbe, ad amarle e rispertarle, a chiamarle per nome, ad aiutarle quando posso, a cibarmene, a curarmi con loro."

I got lost along the river with my bike, a pleasant sort of lost as I was early for my picnic. I was basically on the lachine canal but in Rome (so it was deserted as their were no bikes). I eventually made it to Villa Borghese to sit with like-minded individuals to enjoy food and wine in the grass.

It seems that other than these select few, nobody bikes in this city. Long gone are the days that the bicycle was the main transportation necessity of a man. Now everyone rides motorbikes and scooters. I honestly think this is Europe's biggest problem. Many blame the rising numbers in obesity on the onslaught of American fast food corporations, and they may be right to do so (fast food is Satan), but if you look deep down into the culture of Italy, you might find the bigger piece of the puzzle. Italian culture has never been one to worry about fat or carbs. Let me stop you before you scream, "Sugar!" at me.
-nor sugar-
Buying juice at a supermarket is something I flat out refuse to do. The common juices, or at least any juice I've seen in the last month are mostly sugar. The ingredients usually list water and sugar within the first three, so the idea that the sugar in soda pop is a new ingredient for Italians is silly. Sweets are part of their culture. Cornetti, the popular breakfast food are just croissants coated in sugar syrup and stuffed with sweet custard. You don't taste the butter (if there is any), only the sweet. Thus perhaps it isn't the way Italians eat that is changing their country's physique from fab to flab, but the way they go from A to B.

In any case when you do see a bike it's either straight out of ladri di bicicletti (vechio o vintage) or a mountain bike. Who can blame them?

Shocks are important on cobblestone.

It is a frequent occurrence that a roman street is repaved to just about two feet away from the extremities of the length of the road. Whenever I'm biking along one of these streets I envision the man in charge of repaving the road. His workers ask him, "Why don't we repave this road all the way to the curb?" He taps his cigar and ash falls to the cobblestone. He answers, "Per che non mi piace le bicci."