Despite a few snowflakes in the air and beautiful Christmas window displays in town, I was a little late getting into the holiday spirit this year.  But once I secured my little potted Christmas tree from a local nursery and adorned it with my memories of Christmases past, I began to feel festive.  Add to that a huge dose of sappy holiday movies and I have even been caught humming a few carols around town.  I have started the holiday baking, eight loaves of banana bread yesterday and a bunch of sugar cookies, but am now at a standstill because I am out of vanilla.  Friends Gill and Adrian brought me a supply during the summer, but I used the last drops yesterday.  Finding vanilla extract here is kind of like searching for Brigadoon–it rises out of the mists of the supermarket very very infrequently.  I am undertaking to make my own from a recipe that I have sussed out online, and it seems an easy enough project…but it takes about two months for the vanilla beans to work their magic.  Will keep you posted on that.  In the meantime, I need a quick solution…

Last Sunday Janet and I (but really mostly Janet) hosted a small holiday drinks party.  Janet was searching for a way to keep busy after Ken’s death and we both liked the idea of getting together with good friends to toast the holidays.  Drinks parties aren’t really done here so we weren’t sure if our Italian invitees would come, but come they did.  (Only a few of them were able to open my ecard invite, stymied by the english instructions to “click on the envelope” to read it.  Janet followed up with phone calls once we realized the problem.)

We had about 20 guests, a nice mix of expats and Italians and everyone seemed to enjoy the food and the company.  We made mostly finger foods that were more American and Australian than Italian and hoped that our Italian friends would try everything.  They did and raved about all of the bite-sized quiches, meatballs, crab cakes and sausage rolls.  I took a chance on making eggnog, which was a virtual unknown here, and that too was a big hit.  Spiked with a Scottish whiskey it was thick and creamy with a nice dash of nutmeg.  The only disconcerting thing was that the Italian egg yolks are so orange that you could see little specks in the drink.  I stirred it vigorously and jealously guarded the list of ingredients until everyone had tried it and liked it!

This week will bring more baking and then next week is Christmas.  I am spending my Christmas Eve with Anna’s family again at Polizano.  She has asked me to bring the onion dip that I made for the party.  It’s an Ina Garten recipe and is kind of reminiscent of the Lipton onion soup dip we used to roll out for Superbowl parties, but oh so much better!  Christmas Day will again be spent with Marinella’s family and I am already mentally preparing for the three hour feeding frenzy.  It’s an amazing lunch with tons of courses, all  wonderful.  Really looking forward to that!  Christmas evening will be spent with Cinder Winifred who is still hanging in there, although sleeping most of the day.  She did rouse herself for sugar cookie dough scraps the other day and cheerfully performed clean up duty.

I hope everyone has a safe and healthy holiday and that you are spending time with your loved ones.

Buon Natale!!! and Merry Christmas!!!!

My little Christmas tree…

My very first Italian Christmas tree from four years ago…it spends the off season in Marinella’s garden

Sugar cookies for everyone…

I was pretty proud of my crudité creation…

Desserts included Janet’s famous mince pies

Hostess Janet with Anna who was a fan of the eggnog!

Andrea bravely sampling a crab cake… Si, polpa di granchio!

With the rain pouring down for two days now and the beautiful Tuscan landscape obscured by a thick gray fog, it’s a relief to know that most people have gotten in this year’s olive harvest.  A few posts back, I was lamenting the fact that my friends, who usually call upon me to harvest their olives, hadn’t pressed me into service this year because there were so few olives on the trees.  Instead, I’d cheerfully helped my friend Tania with her olive oil bottling and had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to *GASP* pay for olive oil this year, when along came Charles and Peter.  I had been hearing about Charles and Peter for three years from Janet and Ken.  They are British expats who have been building a house in the Val d’Orcia and although I felt like I knew them from Janet’s recounting of their house building saga, our paths had never crossed.  Then Ken died.  I met them at the memorial service and it was Peter who drove us down to Viterbo to do the cremation. I will write separately some day about the craziness of that experience including a high-speed chase of the hearse and Peter being measured for Ken’s coffin, but by the end of that very surreal day, Peter and I were fast friends!

So when Peter and Charles called and said they needed help with their almost 240 olive trees, I was elated!  OLIVE OIL!

I spent this past weekend helping “the boys” as Janet calls them.  Their trees too had very little bounty, but we undertook to do those that had something to offer.  Normally the harvesting would have begun a month ago and the new oil would be really spicy.  Unfortunately with a house under construction and a bazillion details to follow-up on, the guys just hadn’t had time to get it going.  Traditionally, the olives in this area were harvested around this time and into December.  It’s a recent trend of beginning the harvest earlier and it makes the oil a little more piccante!

Saturday was sunny and gorgeous and the guys and I, and their two basset hounds, Harold and Maude, headed out to their soon-to- be-ready new home.  With any luck they will be in the house in another week or two, but it’s been a very slow process.  The house is gorgeous and I was treated to a tour before we got down to work.  They even have an outdoor pizza oven so most of the day of harvesting was spent talking about recipes and how many things we could thing of to cook in their oven!

The property which boasts even a small vineyard may one day serve as a B&B and the setting couldn’t be more magical.  The views of the valley are extraordinary.  And I also learned that the property was at one time part of the estate of La Foce, which was home to Iris Origo and her Italian landowner husband.  Iris Origo’s book War in Val d’Orcia is her first-hand account of life in this valley during WWII.  It’s a beautifully moving diary detailing the everyday struggles of the people during the war.   Peter even showed me the caves that they’d unearthed where allied prisoners of war had taken refuge during the German occupation.

As for the olive harvesting, we were all old hands at it.  Netting the bigger trees, chatting as we worked and gathering kilo upon kilo of purple, green and multicolored olives.  Peter actually knows the varieties since he had to get certified as a farmer when they were buying the property!  It was a great day.  One tree even offered up over 40 kilos of olives.  The second day brought a couple of other volunteers– Robert, one of Janet’s Australian friends who was visiting and thought harvesting might be more fun than shopping with Janet and his wife, and Wanda, a local teacher and longtime friend of Janet who really went above and beyond when Ken was sick.

Day two was a bit cloudier and at one point the fog started to roll in, but it was still an enjoyable experience.  Because we had done most of the trees requiring nets, we gathered the remaining olives into baskets.  Robert sported one of the traditional Tuscan hand-made harvesting baskets around his waist and I had a fanny pack that I loaded up and which required doing a woman-giving-birth-in-a-field type squat to empty it!  (And please note when harvesting with Brits and wearing a fanny pack — fanny has an entirely different meaning in the UK, not your backside but your lady parts!  Charles and Peter were constantly chuckling when I talked about the fanny!)

We finished up on day two with about half of the yield of last year, but with the hope that the coming year will once again bring laden trees.  And the 300 kilos that we did manage should net me a little oil to get me through the winter!  Thanks, boys!

Charles and Peter’s house…almost ready!

The back of the house…

wood burning pizza oven

Peter laying out impossibly big nets under the “giving tree” which provided over 40 kilos of olives

Charles eating one of my special olive harvesting brownies during our lunch break

Robert, an olive harvesting natural, climbs up a tree to get every last olive!

Stop fannying about!!

Beautiful late harvest olives…

My friend Kenneth Hobbs died today.  He suffered a massive heart attack two weeks ago and never made it back to us.   You’ve heard me talk about his work.  One of his paintings is even on this site.  But I haven’t talked much about who Ken was outside of his paintings.  He and his wife, Janet have become my Montepulciano family.  Sunday lunches with them, glasses of red wine and long conversations form some of my favorite memories of my time here.  Ken and Janet moved here over 25 years ago, expat newlyweds on an adventure that never stopped.  They shared a love of travel and art and music.  Just three weeks ago I was toasting him bon voyage on his trip to France to visit the house of Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence.  Monet and Cézanne were two of his favorite painters and inspirations for Ken’s beautiful paintings.

At 86 Ken still painted daily, producing a legacy of work that covers most of walls of Janet and Ken’s home and also those of one of our local restaurants.  Ken whistled while he painted in his attic studio and when I would sit outside in the afternoons with Cinder, it always filled me with a sense of peace to hear his melodic whistle echoing down the street.  From a naval officer in World War II, to a creative director on Madison Avenue (one of the original Mad Men, he liked to say), Ken was a story teller.  He told them in words, in photos, in fiction and in his paintings.  He was a collector of toy soldiers, a lover of classical music and a great reader.  He made a delicious ragù and although he never spoke much Italian in public, usually relying on Janet’s language skills, he loved Italy and he loved Montepulciano.  British by birth, he still had his cup of tea every afternoon, but in the mornings he took a cappuccino and brioche at the local bar.  He was a the epitome of a gentleman, but also had a wicked and bawdy sense of humor.

In addition to sharing a bond as Leos and a love of carrot cake, we also shared a passion for the local dessert wine, Vin Santo.  We made it our mission at Sunday lunches to try most of the Vin Santo produced here and considered ourselves relative experts on the subject.  I never tired of listening to his stories, especially those about meeting Janet who he often proclaimed was the love of his life.  There will be a small memorial for Ken on Tuesday, but the real memorial will be in the summer.  In August, when Leos thrive, we will celebrate Ken’s life with a walk in the nearby Tuscan countryside that so inspired his work.  We will sprinkle his ashes, drink some wine, eat some carrot cake, and remember.    Addio, amico mio.

Janet and Ken…

Some of Ken’s work…

For the past couple of years I have helped friends get their olive harvests in.  It’s one of my favorite times of the year!  And those of you who have been following along with my story know that saying I am appassionata about the olive oil in Tuscany is an understatement.

It’s WONDERFUL!!!  And it’s doubly wonderful when it’s first harvested.  The spicy, fruity, verdant oil tastes and looks phenomenal.  My harvesting efforts have always netted me a few bottles of this precious oil and I just sleep better knowing it’s waiting for me in its place of honor in my kitchen.

So imagine my panic when first my friend Adrian, followed by another friend Franca, told me that they weren’t harvesting this year.  Come mai?  Well unfortunately, we had a huge snowfall in the winter that caused damage to a lot of trees and this was followed by a immensely hot summer.  The result…very few olives.  Adrian shook his head sadly when I announced that I was ready to pitch in for the annual raccolta.  “The trees have hardly anything on them, it’s not worth doing this year.”  NOOOOOO!!!

And then along came Tania!  Tania is a friend who I met while working at Poliziano.  She loves our wine and so brings lots of tourists to us during the season.  She and her husband began a small olive oil production a few years ago in nearby Monte San Savino and it has grown.  They get their olives from their farmer neighbor, Raul, who has a bazillion trees and then they press at a local olive mill.  Most of their business is in the States and what started as a few friends requesting oil has evolved into a pretty impressive operation.  Knowing that my work had ended for the season at Poliziano, Tania asked me if I’d like to help out with the all important bottling and labeling of the olio nuovo to send to the US.  This required only about two seconds thought on my part.

Yesterday, we went to their local frantoio, olive mill, to start the work of bottling every size and shape imaginable from baby 100 ml bottles to 3 litre cans.  I hadn’t been inside an olive mill before since I was sick last year when Adrian invited me to go along for the pressing.   It was very modern and state of the art.  I wasn’t sure what the bottling work would require and since I am known to have a bit of a Lucy Ricardo tendency to get myself into mischief, it did cause me a little anxiety when I thought of being a part of an bottling assembly line.  (Think chocolates being shoved into mouth!)  As it turned out, it was a very relaxed genial atmosphere and most of my work was on the tiny bottles in a small room that was perfumed with the tantalizing smell of olive oil.  The mammoth bottling machine, which kept stalling and had at all times four or five Italians conferring and or arguing with each other, was left to those in the know.  Tania assured me that the conferring and arguing happened every year and was a vital part of keeping the handcrafted machine running!

It was a long day of filling bottles with bright green oil, adding lids, closing them with a pincer thingy, and then labeling.  As I write I have blisters on both palms because closing and pincering the bottles was my job.  You don’t really appreciate all the steps that go into making that final pretty bottle of oil until you spend a whole day doing it!!!  As we finished bottles, Tania’s husband, Keith filled a pallet with box upon box of oil in preparation for its flight to the States.  I can highly recommend this fabulous local oil if anyone is in need of some.   Tania and Keith’s website is:   http://www.lartedellolivo.com/

At the end of the day I arrived home tired but with some delicious NEW OIL!!  Those baguettes that I made on the weekend will be perfect for the oil’s debut on some bruschetta!

My friend Tania takes me for a tour around Frantoio Paggetti

Arriving olives start their journey…

Fancy machines do the actual work of crushing the olives…

And then the oil…need I say more?

This is Raul, the man behind the oil. His trees produce the olives!

Adding the labels…

Hard at work…

This morning as rain pours outside and wind batters my kitchen window, I am sipping espresso and recovering from a night of feasting and tryptophan-induced lethargy.  While the actual Turkey Day might be a couple weeks away, for me it was yesterday.  My friend Terry and her husband Vince proposed hosting a early Thanksgiving for those of us expats who haven’t experienced one in a few years.  Terry is heading  back to the States next week so we took the opportunity to celebrate this weekend.  It was an intimate party of seven people but with enough food for a small army.  Our Australian friend Janet was able to join us but her husband Ken is in intensive care in Siena after suffering a heart attack and fluid in his lungs earlier in the week.  He is 86 and we are quite worried about him, but he is slowly showing signs of recovering.  That positive news gave us an additional thing to be thankful for this year!   Terry and I resolved to give Janet one night away from the worry and stress of traveling back and forth to the hospital.

Planning a Thanksgiving feast in Italy is not without challenges.  There are no cranberries or sweet potatoes to be found in our small village.  But thanks to some of Terry’s recent house guests, both items were tucked into suitcases and brought to us (Thanks, Bonnie!!!).  The next issue was the turkey.  It’s not a dietary staple in this neck of the woods, so you don’t find them in the supermarket with regularity and if you want one you must order it in from the butcher.  The first time Terry tried to order a turkey in Italy, she said that when she went to the butcher to pick it up, she was presented with a 28 pound behemoth of a bird that looked as if it were 15 years old.  She was pretty sure some family pet had just been killed so the American lady could have her turkey dinner!

This year Terry employed the help of her enterprising friend Alessandro who procured two beautiful turkeys.  There was some tail feather cleaning to do as the Italian birds do not come pristine ala Butterball.  They were in fact much more reminiscent of the turkeys my family raised each year when I was young– one look at an errant tail feather brings me immediately back to the smell of hot water soaked birds that we rapidly plucked for our annual feast.

While Terry took on the preparation of the sides and the birds, I took on the stuffing and the desserts.  I grew up in a family where there were always many pies, so I of course prepared three desserts.  Since for some incomprehensible reason not everyone likes pumpkin pie, I decided to do a pumpkin cheesecake and then an apple pie and a maple walnut (no pecans here).

So where do you get the pumpkin?  There is no Libby’s solid pack pumpkin, so  if I wanted pumpkin, I was going au naturel.  If our forefathers in Plymouth could construct a feast out of what they’d harvested, surely I could cook up a little pumpkin.   My first order of business was trying to figure out how to differentiate between pumpkin (zucca) and squash (zucca) when I explained what I wanted!  In the end, I went to our town’s fruit lady, Franca, armed with a photo of pumpkins and she immediately pointed out what I needed.  The cooking pumpkin was greenish, squat and really large!  I told her how much of the pulp I was looking to have at the end, and she got out her big knife and carved up half of it for me.  Once home, I baked it in the oven until the flesh scraped easily out of the skin and then with the help of my hand mixer, I had pumpkin puree!  It was actually very satisfying to do and tasted great.  It was almost a shame to hide it away in a cheesecake.  I will spare you the homemade gingersnaps that I had to make for the crust and the caramel sauce which required two attempts!

We sipped fabulous champagne while we basted and fixed our final preparations last night, and then oohed and aahed as the beautiful turkey came out of the oven.  As Vince carved the Turkey we marveled at the amount of breast meat on the Italian turkeys, finding that much like the beautiful women here with small waists and big bosoms, our Turkey was very well endowed.

We then took a page out of the Italians’ book and didn’t finish our feast in twenty minutes but sat at the table, talking and drinking a delicious Brunello, content not only with the food but to spend time with our friends.  Janet who had never experienced a Thanksgiving before, got right into the action and loaded her plate with a little of everything more than once.  Our Italian friends who eat everything separately would have been appalled at the amount of foods touching each other, but for us it was a delightful remembrance of home and holidays spent with our families.  I knew the night was a success when after the desserts Terry declared, “I’m stuffed, I feel sick!”  I smiled happily, we had managed to have a little bit of our old home in our new home!  It was wonderful amalgamation of traditions and cultures.

I have much to be thankful for this year.  Not only my friends and family but also the realization of my dream of becoming a published author.  I hope you all have wonderful holidays this year and that you are safe and surrounded by your families!

As for Cinder and me today?  Why turkey sandwiches of course!!!

Roasting my first Italian pumpkin…

Libby’s who?

Terry’s beautifully appointed table…

Il tachino

Terry preparing her gravy

Janet’s first Thanksgiving

Feasting with friends…

Just a little something I whipped up in my spare time!

The aftermath… cleanup and leftover distribution!

Today is my first full weekend at home in about three weeks. The harvest has finished at Poliziano and the 2012 vintage is now in the fermentation cellar and perfuming the air with yeasty deliciousness. The season is finishing up and as tired as I am after 11 hour days for 7 months straight, after the 3rd of November, my wine-slinging, tour-giving self will be surely be lamenting having too much time on my hands. In other words, Oh Crap Here Comes the Winter. I am a bit in denial, not yet having forked over the money for this year’s heating oil. Cinder is already burrowing under her flannel blanket at night, so I have maybe another week or two before I must give in and do it.

But today is gorgeous. Sunny skies and 70 degrees. Janet and I met up early this morning (okay 11:00 but that’s early for Janet who doesn’t have a Weimaraner who insists on 5:00 am) and we struck off to explore what was billed as a food market. In the end, it was much like the normal market that we see every Thursday. Don’t get me wrong it’s good stuff, scarves, jewelery, shoes, handbags, and tons of local cheese. But I had hoped for one or two stands with some nifty products from other parts of Italy that we don’t get here. Last year, there was a guy with dried cranberries and apricots, two things which are almost never found here. I bought a new tablecloth and the realized when I got it home that it is almost identical to the one I have!

I also trekked up into town to see my friends and had a good catch up chat with Antonella and Caterina.

The book!  First of all I want to say thank you to everyone who has been emailing me and messaging me and generally being supportive and lovely about the book.  I appreciate all of the wonderful reviews and I am so happy for the positive reaction and that so many of you have related to the story.  Yesterday, we got the final back cover proof and the book is on its way to the printer. For those of you who are waiting for the printed version, it should be for sale on Amazon within the week.   Just in time for Christmas!!!

I will post the direct link here again for convenience. 🙂

At Least You’re in Tuscany

http://www.amazon.com

My friend Terry hosted a lovely luncheon to celebrate my book’s debut. You are only seeing the picture of her house because too much champagne was drunk and I forgot to take pictures! Managgia!!!

Hand selection of the “Asinone” grapes at Poliziano.

Next step… the individual grapes are controlled by hand! It’s not rated one of the top ten wines in Italy for nothing, folks!

Autumn produce at the mercato…

Antonella set up a beautiful display of local pastas and jams outside her grocery store