Hazelnuts, Wine and the Flu

Tomorrow we are leaving for a farm closer to Turin. Leaving is always a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, it is always exciting to see some place new. On the other, the farm we are leaving is quite lovely and will be missed. But that's the nature of the experience we signed up for. Anyhoo, I have a few more pictures for you. Might as well post them while I know the internet connection is good.

Our host has a rogue pumpkin vine growing up a tree! A cursory glance makes it look like the tree is producing strange fruit.

Here is a shot of Josh collecting hazelnuts. It's a pretty easy task. You just shuffle around in the leaves until you find a good looking nut or five. They tend to cluster in little divots in the ground.

But you can't pick up every nut! If the shell is still attached to the leafy bits, then it's guaranteed to be empty.

At the end of the day, we lay out the nuts on some burlap bags to dry out. They generally sit out for at least 24 hours before being packed away.

This morning we took a field trip over to Mombercelli, which is 3km away. It is a tiny village about the size of an intersection. We spent 10 minutes wandering around the place while our host mailed some stuff at the post office. Then we visited the cantine, which is Italian for a wine cellar or grape cooperative. This place buys the grapes of local growers and turns them into wine. They have free wine tastings for whoever wants to show up.
We sampled four wines and a port, all made from the Barbera grape. I have unfortunately come down with the flu and really couldn't taste a difference between them. The only one that stood out was the most expensive, which had been aged for four years, one of which was in an oak cask. I definitely could taste the oak. Most expensive is also a relative phrase. I believe the bottle sold for 12 euros, while the rest were around 5 or 6 euros. They also had a number of table wines for sale, which could all be purchased for under 2 euros a liter. If only good wine was this cheap in the US!

As for the flu, I am feeling better. I'm on day three of sickness so far and have experienced every symptom on the books except nausea and diarrhea. Thank heavens for the small miracles, I suppose.

Hazelnut cake!

How can we stay at a hazelnut farm and not post at least one recipe that uses hazelnuts? Well, here is the cake I made for Saturday's dinner at Maria's. The recipe is from this blog.

180 g butter, cubed and softened

120 g sugar

5 eggs

1 Tbsp vanilla extract

120 g flour

60 g cocoa powder

1 tsp baking powder

180 g roasted hazelnuts, chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F and grease and flour an 8 inch cake pan.

Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa together into a bowl.

In another bowl, cream the butter and the sugar. Add the vanilla and 1 egg, and beat until the egg is incorporated. Add the second egg and beat until incorporated. Next add two tablespoons of the flour mixture and the third egg. Continue adding the eggs one at a time.

Gently fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture. Stir in the hazelnuts and pour the batter into the cake pan.

Bake for 40 - 50 minutes, or until the cake is firm to the touch. Let it cool completely before removing from the pan. Eat!

Pictures of Asti and Pizza

Our guidebook says that Asti was once called the City of 100 Towers because at some point in its history, towers were all the rage. If you had money, you had to have a tower. So the city's elite set about building towers, and there are still many that remain today. Some, like this one, look like they're about to fall over. Some were shortened so they didn't stick out. Why would you go through all the trouble of shortening a tower?

Another tower in the square near where we ate lunch. Mostly we spent the day wandering around, looking at towers and peeking inside of churches.

Dinner was pizza at Nona Maria's. Here's a picture of the great lady herself, elbow deep in the bucket of pizza dough. She claims to have used 5 kilos of flour in the making of this!

She has obviously been making pizza for years. She was quite skillful at shaping the dough.

Here is Maria's husband, Angelo, tending the wood fired oven. They had an interesting technique, wherein they let the wood turn into coals and then placed the pizzas on top of them.

Here's a shot of the first half of the pizzas.

This is an Italian table--there's always room for everyone, no matter the size of the crowd!

They have animals. Cows, turkeys, chickens and one mean pony who bites.

Oh, how we suffer! The work here is very hard and we are looking forward to the day when we can leave this wretched place!

Pictures of the Lake

Ah, Morcote, the whole reason we started out on our walk. I don't know how well you can see things in this picture (I have a high res version on my computer), but there are two churches, a castle and a bunch of neat buildings tantalizingly visible from the far shore.

Here we are at the ferry stop. This is about when the realization that the lake was bloody huge set in. Also, the guy in this picture is Amir, our fellow wwoofer from Sweden.

Here is the wonderful $16 view from Serpiano! That's how much it cost to ride the cable car up the mountain. It was worth it!

Ah, yes and here we are at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Sarcastic Remarks.

One last pic before we took the train back to Arcisate.

Cats

Lexy doesn't agree with me, but I think the best cat in the Western Hemisphere is here at Il Cuccio. Her name is Pepe and she is the perfect combination of cute and deadly. Pepe wants to be petted at all times, under any circumstances. She might climb into your lap, or she might sit there let you pet her while you stand over her favorite chair. She might curl up in said chair with her sister Lucy like a furry, oval yin-yang. Also, two nights ago she killed a snake. The night before that, we heard a brief, horrendous screeching of cat voices and later, while petting Pepe, discovered claw wounds on her face and a little nick out of her right ear. So when she's not squinting with cat-joy while you scritch the back of her head, she's out kicking ass. My kind of cat.

It's hard to capture any of these qualities on film, really, but our fellow WWOOFer Cody has some nice shots of her, so I'll see what I can do for you. Meanwhile, she is a short-haired tortoiseshell cat, gray with black stripes like the Gilmers' old cat, Mack. When I get old I will get a cat like this and life will be okay.

I want to talk to you about two things.

One of them is my shoes. Before I left the country, my mother bought me a pair of shoes, intended as walking (not working) shoes. They are black - if I wear light-colored shoes all I see is my own feet - and for once in my life they are not Vans or some other Airwalk clone. No, these are not cheap skater shoes to be worn heedlessly until their death. I have weird feelings about these shoes. Are they awesome because I want them to be awesome? Or do I feel like they're awesome because they're so awesome? Regardless, I find myself cleaning them like a mendicant, wincing over every spot of dust and regretting every scrape with a feeling not unlike religious guilt. Mother, you needn't have worried that I would work in these shoes; I would go barefoot on gravel before sloshing through mud and briars in these. I would rather kill a man, or at least punch him right in the face and not say I'm sorry. Call me a lame old square, a sell-out tool of the corporations, whatever - that's all fine as long as you don't touch my @#$%ing shoes. I will bite you. Okay?

Great. Pictures of my shoes in next post, maybe.

The other thing is: spiders. Now some of my friends and family members know that I have an ambivalent relationship with spiders. For a while I despised them all due to a nightmare I'd had in which a gigantic spider with an armored carapace menaced me outside the shed at my dad's old house in Abingdon. I killed them on sight for about three years. Recently though, due in no small part to a short story I began writing (entitled, yes, "The Boy Who Admired Spiders"), I have been trying to chill out and appreciate them. The variety of species alone is cause for wonder - here in Italia as well as at home. They love to spin webs among the grape vines and nest in tiny, dried-out husks of grapes that will never be. I have seen tiny green spiders, little ones so white they're almost translucent, long ones with bodies almost as big as my thumb (although Lex says she's seen wolf spiders at home that are bigger) and dozens of "daddy long-legs" arthropods.

But one day at La Monda, I encountered the most hideous, disgusting, evil-looking spider of my entire life to date. And by "encountered" I mean "unexpectedly touched with my bare finger."

Listen: I am not particularly squeamish. In high school biology, I cut open the skull of the fetal pig and removed its brain without missing a beat. On my dad's farm, I have hauled boxes of rotten potatoes and mounds of decaying hay reduced to primal black sludge. I grew up turning compost piles and I have seen gross human injuries in person since I was very young. Okay? But this spider was so nasty I almost tossed my cookies right then and there.

Have you seen that kind with the fat, bulbous bodies the size of acorns? I mean, disproportionately large, to the point where a reasonable person's only conclusion is that they are either swollen with young or bloated with poison? If you haven't, STOP LAUGHING. I touched one of those spiders, okay, and it felt scaly. I won't even show you a picture of it, it's so gross. I would hate for you to, say, puke all over your computer, or weep so copiously with terror that you shorted out your keyboard.

In any case, Lexy and our Swedish friend Amir made fun of me mercilessly until I went back into its lair (i.e. the high tunnel where we'd been pulling up old tomato plants) and confronted it. I am not lying or even indulging in hyperbole when I tell you my *@$#ing heart was pounding. I put on my gloves, zipped up my rain jacket to cover my face (because the only thing worse than an evil spider is an evil spider ON YOUR FACE) and picked up a garden stake with which to dislodge the villain. Let me tell you that while things that move very quickly intimidate me, things that move slowly make me sick. I sat there for close to a minute poking this creature with a foot-long wedge of plastic and it barely moved at all. Finally, when my adrenaline threatened to give out, it hauled its bulk off the string I wanted and down the metal pole toward, I don't know and frankly I don't care. It was gone and I was free to leave. I've never had a more primal confrontation with evil, except that time I was working for the Democratic Party of Buncombe County and I got stuck outside a polling station against a fat little Republican lady from New York City who told me seventeen times that Rudy Giuliani was "the best thing going."

... and now back to your regularly scheduled updates.

Nona Maria

No news is good news, as they say. Nothing too exciting has happened recently, but I thought I'd break the radio silence and let you all know that we are well. Well and overfed. We've been helping out in the vineyards of our host's neighbor, Maria. The work is fairly easy. Our only task is to fill up a large cart with grapes each day, something which can be accomplished in as little as four hours. This cart is then taken to a local cooperative, where the grapes are sold. I believe that the fields are planted entirely with Barbera grapes, which are generally used to make table wines and in blends with other stronger tasting grapes. With lunch each day we've been provided with two bottles of their homemade wine. It's not fantastic, but it goes well with the food.

Ah, the food. Italian farmers eat huge lunches and in return for helping with the harvest, Nona Maria has been feeding us lunch. Eating lunch wears me out. I'm not tired when we break for lunch, but afterward, it is all I can do to stagger back to my bed and pass out for an hour. Lunch includes, but is not limited to, salami, a pasta course, a meat course, a vegetable and side dish course, a cheese course, dessert, coffee and a shot of limoncello. By itself, this would be a tremendous endeavor, but Nona Maria is there the whole time insisting that we consume ever larger quantities of food. We've become quite adept at using the word "basta" (enough), but it seems to only marginally reduce the amount of food she puts on our plates.

Luckily, today we have a break from Maria's kitchen. We're hanging around Il Cuccio doing yard work and gardening. Lunch today was reasonably small and I'm spending my siesta time writing this update instead of lying in a food induced coma. Tomorrow evening Maria has promised to get the brick oven fired up to make pizzas. She says there will be 20 different kinds of pizza and there is no doubt in my mind that she is underestimating by at least 10. But in the morning, I think we will all be venturing out to Asti. The Saturday morning market will be fun and also that amazing gelateria near the train station needs to be visited again.

Ciao a tutti.

Il Cuccio

We made it to our new farm with only minor travel issues. I tried to disembark from the train at Rho station instead of Rho-something or other station. Luckily we figured out that it was the wrong station before the train left, otherwise I might not be typing this to you right now :( It was a long day of traveling. Asti is only a two hour's drive from Varese, but it takes over five hours by train. We had to make four transfers all in all. Then in Asti we sat for three hours waiting for a regional train that would take us the 11 kilometers to the small town near the farm.

Our consolation prize was the amazing gelateria near the train station in Asti. Our guidebook says you can judge the quality of your gelato by the length of the line at the shop. I was in line over 20 minutes, but it was worth every second. I had a cone with mango and peach and Josh got one with chocolate and mint. There must have been over 30 flavors to choose from, but the place was so packed I didn't have a chance to read most of the labels. In this country, gelato practically needs its own guidebook. (Maybe I should write one, that way I can do all the research myself...)

Our host tells me that her neighbor is in desperate need of help with her grapes, so we may be grape picking again. It's a whole heck of a lot easier than weeding, that's for sure. La Monda was a beautiful place, but I won't miss all the weeding we did.

Well, I'm beat. It's just after 9pm and I'm ready to pass out. Ciao a tutti!

Remember that time we accidentally went to Switzerland?

Today we accidentally wandered into Switzerland. We took the train to Porto Ceresio, which is on lake Lugano. We knew next to nothing about the lake and environs. I was under the assumption that the lake was quite small. There is a beautiful looking city called Morcote located a mere 300 meters across the lake from Porto Ceresio. From the town you can see lovily old buildings, a couple of churches and even a castle located halfway up a mountain. I had the brilliant idea that we could walk around the lake and get to Morcote in under an hour.

We embarked on a pathway along the lake. About a kilometer later, the pathway ends and we picked up our route along a nearby road. We rounded a bend...and were confronted by a security check point and a bunch of guards. Looking like dazed and lost tourists we wandered over to a friendly looking man in a gray uniform and inquired if we could pass. Si, si, of course. Is it still Italy over there? No, no, it's Switzerland. Woah. What could we do except keep going?

We continued until we came to a very conviently placed map next to the road. Oh, it looks like there is a ferry that goes all over the lake. Let's go down to the next ferry stop and see if we can get to Morcote! Brilliant. What do you think funivia means? Let's look it up. Oh, funicular. Up the mountain maybe? Cool, let's go see. A little while later, we find both the ferry stop and the funicular station. The ferry costs $25 for a day pass, which is a little steep. Plus the times were inconvenient for us. And did I mention that this lake is actually really large??? Then we looked up the funicular, which ran every half hour and cost $16. Why the hell not?

At the top is a place called Serpiano, which we gathered is some kind of hotel and resort. We bought over priced espressos and sat for an hour to admire the incredible view off the balcony. I took a bunch of pictures, but am too tired tonight to resize them. Hopefully we will have a convenient internet connection at the next farm we are going to and I will load them soon.

We walked around the woods a bit and then took the 1:00pm car down. The town we were in was called Brusino Arsizio. We wandered around for a bit looking for a cheap place to have lunch and failed miserably. Switzerland, it turns out, is an incredibly expensive place. So we hightailed it back to Italy to find a pizzaria, were we ate for 6 euros each. And that, dear friends, was our adventure in Switzerland.

Tomorrow we are leaving the wonderful La Monda and heading to a hazelnut farm near Asti. Hopefully we will be able to update you all on our progress soon. Ciao for now!

Assorted adventure pics!

This is a view from the far side of the river in Bobbio, where I went last week with the two other wwoofers at Casa Rossa. It hasn't rained in months, so the river is more of a creek these days.


Josh, getting his grape face on.

This is the crazy building Josh and I stumbled upon while looking for the church. On the left of the picture, you can see wild hops. The whole building was covered in them.

A shot from a different angle.

Church adventures! You can see the church clearly, but there doesn't appear to be a way to reach it.

Oh, what's this? Could it be a path leading up the mountain? No wonder we missed it the first time!

Ah ha! Stone steps! This must be it.

Yay! We made it! Isn't it a pretty building? It was totally worth the trouble to find.

A shot of the garden at La Monda.

No work animals at the farm, just Josh to pull the cart.

Look at all the apples we've picked!

This chicken is saying: "I can has cheezburger?"

Finito.

Pictures!

Perhaps if the internet connection were faster and I had had less wine with dinner tonight, these pictures would be in a particular order. But that isn't so.

Here is the vineyard at our first farm. Our host estimates that he has 6 hectares of vines on a 21 hectare farm. I have no idea how that converts to the English measurement system...

The casa rossa of Casa Rossa fame.

An archeological site in the Centro Historico, Rome.

A cool looking fountain. Don't remember the name, though it's probably famous. Josh and I just kind of wandered around the city without really knowing where we were.

The Colosseum! How exciting.

A cool looking sculpture and arch near the Colosseum.

A building with neat statues on it. Also probably famous.

Grapes! From our first morning of picking. Each yellow basket held about 25 kilos of grapes. The building is the old cow shed were we ate our meals. I like that they hung all the old farm tools on the side of it.

Boy do I have a lot more photos. I just need to take the time to resize them, because even small photos take forever to upload on this slow connection. Straight from the camera, they are upwards of 24 mb each! Anyhoo, I hope you've enjoyed what I've posted so far. Buonanotte.

A long work of passion

Today was wet. Yesterday it drizzled on and off, but today it poured. Instead of making us labor outdoors, Pierro set us to work coring apples. The farm sells a lot of them, but the rotten and ugly ones get turned into “mousse di mele,” a delicious substance somewhere in between apple sauce and apple butter. We were tasked with cutting off the gross parts and removing the cores. After our mid-morning tea break, Josh decided that he wanted to get out of the kitchen and do some of the weeding that we didn't get to finish yesterday. I spent about ten minutes in the cold rain with him before hightailing it back to the apples and the warm kitchen.

After lunch (pasta with eggplants and capers), the rain let up briefly and Pierro had us out under a high tunnel picking the flowers off of basil plants. This sounded like an easy task at first. About an hour later, Pierro came to check on our progress and, seeing that we'd only made it 6 plants down the row, offered these words to us: “It's a long work of passion, no?” Cold, damp and tired, but ultimately having a good experience in Italy.

La Monda

We are in a truly beautiful place. The grounds are lovely and the town is a sleepy little thing a little to the east of Varese. Less than four miles away is the Swiss border, which on sunny days you can see from the back porch. The house itself is quite large, and is maintained by an anthroposophia society. (Google that, it's really quite interesting.) Our duties mostly include weeding, with a little bit of picking fruits and veggies thrown in there just to keep it interesting. The weather has been quite dreary the last two days, and I am looking forward to some more sunshine.

The "farm" is really just a glorified vegetable garden, but they certainly raise a huge variety of fruits and vegetables. I've seen apples, squash, beans, broccoli, tomatoes, grapes, figs, potatoes, hazelnuts, persimons, raspberries and more. They have a little store attached to the farm that sells their produce along with other organic groceries. Most of the food we eat comes from the farm and is generally vegetarian. We have had a couple of really good soups, though I would be hard pressed to tell you what was in them.

There is a small church perched on the side of a mountian overlooking the town. Josh and I were told that it was only a 20 minute walk away, but after 40 minutes of walking yesterday we hadn't reached it. So now we are determined to get to the place. It looks like it has a great view of the city and surrounding towns. On our walk we passed an abandoned building that was completely covered in hop vines. Maybe it is an old brewery? The next time we make a try for the church, I will bring along my camera and take pictures. The building itself is quite unusual looking.

Oh, I have so much to say and I don't know how to get it all out in a coherent fashion! That will be all for tonight, I suppose. Ciao!

How many is a crowd?

Apparently a couple of other WWOOFers asked to come to our farm early, so we may or may not be leaving early and going here. We must discuss amongst ourselves first. But check out the image gallery - the place looks beautiful.

Casa Rossa

We are staying on a beautiful farm in a beautiful country. The work here isn't hard and the food is plentiful and delicious. We start off every morning in the vineyard around 8:30am. We work until noon picking grapes and then we break for lunch. Lunch usually consists of lots of pasta and fresh vegetables and always ends with coffee. I usually nap and relax until work picks up again at 2:30 or 3:00. We go until 6pm and all told probably pick around 1000lbs of grapes each day! Then it is dinner followed by wine/beer and talking. Generally we're in bed by 10pm and it all begins again the next day.

We will have the weekend off. We are currently trying to decide if we will stay around the local cities or if we will try to take off for Asti. There is supposedly a festival there this weekend so we might give it a go.

I have pictures from Rome and the farm on my laptop, but I won't stress out the farm's internet connection by trying to upload them. I will try to put them up this weekend when we get a better connection in town. Ciao!

Piacenza

Yesterday we decided it was best to leave Rome a day early (you can actually hear the your money being sucked out of your wallet--a faint swooshing sound tinged with regret...). We phoned Casa Rossa and asked if it was alright to come early and they agreed. We tooked the cheapest train (41 Euro) to Piacenza, which was not surprisingly also the longest. It took about 6 hours to get here, but the scenery along the way made me forget all my worries. Everyone in Rome speaks English and no one in Piacenza does. The husband, Francesco, of Casa Rossa speaks English well, but his wife, Laura, only speaks a bare minimum.

Casa Rossa has another American wwoofer staying there and the three of us manage to communicate with the locals fairly well. I can understand Italian, thanks to all the French I have had. Josh has a great accent and Lisa has the best vocabulary. Together we practically make one person! So far we have successfully made our way from the farm to Piacenza and ordered food. That is about all I can ask for, really.

Speaking of food, finding the Pizzaria was quite an adventure. Francesco and Lauras daughter, Giovanna, gave us the name of a local Pizzaria that she claimed was the best in town. I promptly lost the piece of paper with the information on it. So we set out from the bus stop armed with only the vaguest idea of the name of the place. We got lost. We asked an old woman if she knew of the place and only understood two words from her: duoma (church) and a sinestra (to the left). Thinking we would never find the place, we wandered past a church and toward the left. I saw a different pizzaria and was too hungry to bother going further. I happened to throw one last glance down the street and I saw a small awning with the word Tosello written on it. Increduously, we walked over to the shop and it was the Pizzaria we were looking for! I have to agree that it was pretty awesome food.

Work on the farm begins on Monday. Today we are wandering around Piacenza and tomorrow Francesco has suggested we head over to Bobbio and hike along the river. Sounds like a great idea to me!

(In case you have not noticed, there does not appear to be an apostrophe key on Italian keyboards. So, do not mind my grammar, or my spelling for that matter. I already know that I am a terrible speller, so no need to mention it! :)

When in Roma...

Somehow I imagined that we would spend our two days in Rome sleeping away the jetlag. Hardy har. We walked around the city for almost 6 hours today. There is so much to see! I took a bunch of pictures and will post them when I can. We ate dinner at a wonderful little pizzeria in Trastevera (the non-tourist part of town), but otherwise spent the day mingling with the great tourist hordes in the old city. So far I have showered twice and we have been here less than 9 hours! Rome is hot and muggy, but over all an extremely beautiful city.

Map

Somewhere in Charlotte with my parents watching a Beatles movie. Something about a giant ring and hooliganism.

I have altered a map I found on the internet and added red dots to represent where we will be staying.

Hmm. The map is really tiny. Or maybe it's just the screen on this tiny netbook? Anyway, we will Start in Piacenza, then head up to two farms around Turin, then down to Sicily (still trying to find the right farm) and finally back up to a place just south of Pisa.

WE ARE FLYING OUT TOMORROW!

Charlotte to JFK. JFK to Munich. Munich to Rome. Yay!

There's no need for sarcasm.

On the menu today:

-Monsoon Malabar coffee, 2-3 cups;
-re-packing backpacks, 1-2 hours;
-Thai leftovers, one carton;
-the drive to Charlotte, 3 hours;
-last farewells, brief but no less meaningful for that.

See, I've got this cheesy format DOWN, don't I?