Me talk pretty one day

What, you expect me to try to top Sedaris?  I remember reading this essay in grad school, and laughing so hard I couldn't breathe.  Now that I'm taking an immersion language course in a foreign country, I actually find it funnier than ever.  Fortunately, the language teachers at Comitato Linguistica are incredibly kind, supportive, patient, and energetic, and would never admit that spending time with us is at all like having a cesarian section.  Even if it is.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Jeremy and I were put in a mid-level class -- not quite beginner, but certainly not expecting much from us in terms of understanding or being able to talk.  They assume that we know past perfect, and started us out on imperfect, if that gives you a sense of the level.  We have four hours of class each day:  two hours of conversation, and two hours of grammar.  It's enough to get me thoroughly exhausted, but does still leave the afternoon to do something (today, we went to the archeological museum, which alas had very few explanations in English, and a very cool medieval garden run by, apparently, alchemist monks).

(Jeremy in front of the "tree of the cross," surrounded by rosemary plants trimmed to look like like astrological symbols.  Medieval monks have a wacky gardening aesthetic, turns out.)

The students at the school are almost equally split between older Europeans and young Middle Eastern men who are "getting ready" to go to University in Italy next year.  In our conversation class, we have the earnest Israeli Jawadat, the almost frighteningly smart Jordanian, Mohammed, and the faintly frightening Jordanians Rami and Amer.  Rami decorates his notes with swasticas, and told the class today that he didn't know who his mother is because his father has so many wives (I'm pretty sure he wasn't kidding about that).  When asked what scared him, Amer said "God.  Only God."  Mohammed explained that he had six siblings because the oldest four were all girls, and his father needed boys.  All the Middle Easterners tend to come in late, haven't bought the book, and have never done the homework (although Mohammed is smart enough to do it in his head on the fly.  The rest, not so much.)  All of this makes me wonder about the status of going to university in Italy.  Is it the equivalent of a party school?  Is this where wealthy sheiks send the sons who can't get into Harvard or Oxford?  Is it better or worse than sending your son to Gonzaga?

(Jeremy and Julia trying to fix Julia's camera)

We have made some friends among the Europeans.  We get along quite well with Julia (Switzerland), Sophia, and Tanya (Germany) -- indeed, I think we are all going to take a cooking class together next week.  During the break between classes, we all huddle in the bar next to the school (which doesn't mean here what it means in the states), talking English, which they talk and understand with great comfort.  We also know Philip from Germany, Ina, from Holland, and Frank, from Luxemborg.  I've never known anyone from Luxemborg.  I'm not entirely sure I could locate it on a map, other than by process of elimination.  All of them speak English pretty darn fluently.  Americans really are unusual and sad for not knowing any other language.  The good news is that being multi-lingual already doesn't seem to make learning Italian any easier, so I don't think Jeremy and I are falling behind.  In fact, I have to say I think Rosetta stone prepared us pretty well for everything but listening to Italian.  Listening and comprehending, that is -- I can listen pretty well, and Jeremy is great at making up what he thinks they are saying.

The strange thing is that sometimes, I swear I am forgetting things faster than I am learning them.  Jeremy and I both draw strange blanks -- yesterday, he forgot how to conjugate essere (to be -- a verb he learned ages ago and uses all the time correctly).  I was totally incapable of understanding when a nice man in a book store asked me what city I was from, a phrase I know perfectly well and was expecting.  But then, we have moments of brilliance.  I was able to explain to a woman in a great bookstore that I wanted book of Italian short stories with simple sentences and vocabulary, but not for young adults.  I came home with some Calvino.  My hope is that I am good enough at reading that I can work on building my vocabulary, and my sense of what "sounds right" in the language.  Jeremy spent twenty minutes chatting apparently comfortably with a guy in a guitar store -- but then, there is no place he is more comfortable than a guitar store.

It is strange to be back in a classroom as a student after so many years standing in the front of the room.  I keep wondering if I'm one of those lovely smiling-and-nodding students, or one of those irritating brown-nosers.  It is frustrating not being able always to formulate the questions I want to ask, and it is really frustrating to not be able to express myself with anything approaching elegance or precision.  On the other hand, I am getting enormous satisfaction from successfully buying salami and cheese, which I would not, in the States, consider a grand accomplishment.  So far, the balance is on the side of Italian.

Stone knives and animal skins

One of the great paradoxes of my life (at least, my life of the moment), is that Italians care deeply about food, have the highest quality of produce I've ever seen, and seem able to make big feasts, and yet their kitchens often look like this:

 This is, in fact, the kitchen in my apartment, midway through cooking dinner tonight.  You might notice the plate being used as a lid, beccause the only lid is on the pasta water.  You might notice the complete lack of steam coming from said pasta water, even though it had been on the burner, on high, for half an hour.  You probably can't notice that only two of these burners are on at a time, and only one on high, because our landlady assured us that two burners on high would blow the power.  She also told me to be sure to turn the water heater off before I turned the stove on, for the same reason.  Italy does not always feel like a first world country.  It's certainly not a developing nation.  Is there a category for degenerating nations?

Before you feel too bad for me, or think I'm complaining, you should probably know that the rest of the apartment looks like this:

and is located here:

So, no -- I'm not complaining.  Just acknowledging that Italian appliances are not up to Spokane standards.

Last night, Jeremy and I went out to eat, partly out of exhaustion and partly out of necessity, since all the supermarkets are closed on Sundays.  We ate at a little place behind the Duomo called Osteria della Gambera, and it was half good, half outstanding.  Jeremy had a free form ravioli stuffed with mozarella di bufalo and porcinis that was terrific.  The cheese was creamy and the mushrooms had a deep, rich, grilled/smoked flavor that filled your head when you bit into it.  My tagliattelli primi was good, but not that good.  For our secundi, our ordering fates reversed.  He had a very nice agnello, three thin lamb chops in a hazelnut crust.  The lamb was flavorful and tender, but looked overcooked.  I had seppie aristoto (roasted cuttlefish) on a broad bean puree which was a knockout.  The grilling/roasting process had intensified the sweetness of the cuttlefish, which was almost the consistency of great pasta:  tender, but with a little resistance.  So, so good.  We had a bottle of Montefalco, an Umbrian red wine, which was also fantastic. Bigger than a Chianti, but similarly great with food.  It was not a cheap meal, which is fine because it was a memorable one.

Today, we were back at the supermarket, where they had fresh porcini.  It took me three times longer than it should have, but dinner turned out well.  Oreccette with porcini and cream, chicken thighs glazed with balsamic, insalata verdura and some more Montefalco.  Yum!  (Note:  very un-Italian of us to eat the meat and the pasta at the same time.  Old habits die hard, I suppose.)

In non-food news, we had our first day of school this morning.  We had to take a written test, in which we were given four paragraphs in Italian, in increasing difficulty, with several words missing or letters missing from words.  We had to fill in the blanks.  It might as well have been letter-salad for me at first, but eventually I managed to get most of the first two paragraphs filled in.  I made some stuff up, forgot stuff I should have known, and guessed wildly, but I don't think it was a total embarrassment. Then there was the oral test.  Again, the beginning consisted of blank incomprehension, but I was able to ask them to slow down, and then I got along okay.  I screwed up some verb tenses, but could answer most of their questions.  I was not so sophisticated as Jeremy, who I believe even pulled out a correctly formed and used present participle!  At the end of the day, we were placed in the 1B group -- still beginners, but at least not complete beginners.

We are also tired almost beyond bearing.  Neither of us slept more than a handful of hours last night, since our bodies thought we were trying to sleep through the day.  We managed to take only short naps this afternoon, so hopefully we will make it through the night tonight.  Fun new Italy fact:  here, there are no over-the-counter sleep aids.  No Nyquil, not Excedrin Pm, nothing.  I guess we are going to have to beat this jet lag the old fashioned way -- stumble through our first days like zombi americani.  So, it is off to sleep for me at nine pm, just when the rest of Perugia is heading out for passagiare and cena.    

Nostro primo pranzo nella Perugia

I'm in Italy!

For the next month, I'm going to be using this space not for its normal purpose, describing my attempt to be a foodie in Spokane, and instead talk about my trip.  Of course, me remaining me, even in Italy, I will still be talking a lot about food.  Because, man oh man, do Italians know how to eat!

Yesterday was either a very long day, or two very short days, neither of which contained any sleep, depending on which way you looked at it.  We left our house in the capable hands of Alissa and Amy a little before ten in the morning, when Heather took us to the airport.  Funny -- the most trouble we had with people during our entire trip occurred in the Spokane airport, where the Horizon clerks announced that we had an "illegal" lay-over in Seattle (really, there's a law about the length of lay-over?  Seems doubtful to me), and that our bags probably wouldn't make it to Rome, and that the airline wouldn't pay for our bags to find us, and that we should probably just reschedule the whole thing.  We did not follow their advice.  

Our plane from Spokane to Seattle was slightly delayed, and our plane from Paris to Rome was slightly delayed, and it took forever for our bags to come out of the carousel (which they did, eventually, just fine), and we got hopelessly lost inside the gigantic Roma Termini train station, which meant that we missed the quick, direct train from Rome to Perugia, and had to take a much slower regionale, with a transfer in a small town called Terontola.  We had an hour wait between trains, and were worried that we wouldn't be able to find an open supermarket once we were in Perugia (or would be too tired to even try), so I left Jeremy with the bags and headed out into the town looking for transportable food.  I found a small grocery attached to a butcher advertising "sopprasseta nostri produzioni" (of our own making) in the window, so in I ventured.  I asked about the sopprasseta, expecting to find a salami-like product, only to be pointed to some enormous headcheese looking thing with lumps of fat the size of my ear.  On a different day, I would have been game, but after being awake for going on thirty-six hours of continuous traveling, I was not looking for a food adventure.  I was looking for comfort food.  I managed to buy some coppacola, some pecorino staggione (which, turns out, is in between fresh and aged), and some bread, and made it back to the station before Jeremy had time to get nervous.  I think this was all rather brave of me, considering how little Italian I know and how no English anyone in Terontola seemed to speak.

We ended up arriving in Perugia just in time for a magnificent sunset, negotiated the local bus system and found our apartment all surprisingly easily, especially given how punchy we were from lack of sleep.  Our apartment is beautiful, and Anna, our landlord, was waiting to greet us and give us a tour.  I can't believe how enormous it is -- twice the size of the place we had in Florence!  It's on a quiet side street maybe two blocks from Piazza Italia, one of the main squares in town and home to an outdoor antique fair, at least on the weekends.  There are some problems:  one of the beds has a mattress apparently made of wood.  There is a full tub and shower, but no curtain, so how to use the shower without soaking the entire bathroom (which is plaster walled, and hence not meant to be a shower stall, as many Italian bathrooms are) is something of a mystery.  The internet connection is very slow, which is a big problem for Jeremy, who needs to be able to do some work here.  And, the stove has very, very little juice, which is a problem for me.  It took me 45 minutes to boil water for pasta!  These issues seemed almost overwhelming last night, but today, after ten hours of sleep, they seem small and manageable.

Grocery shopping in Italy is both a joy and a set of challenges.  One of them is that supermarkets are not open on Sundays, or particularly late into the evenings.  We were very happy and lucky to hear from Anna that there was a Despar open until eight on Saturdays within a close walk, so we decided to go buy a little food there.  We didn't have it in us for a full, restaurant meal, and we knew that we might have trouble finding food on Sunday, so it seemed prudent.  We found the place easily enough (Perugia seems much easier to negotiate than Florence so far), and found it packed with people.  Specifically with young people.  All buying beer.  So, apparently, a college town in Italy is a lot like a college town in America!  We ended up with some fresh tortellini, splurged on some good olive oil, and bought breakfast cereal and milk.  I realize that this is going to sound strange, but we are both really excited to be able to buy Special K here.  The Special K one can buy in Italy is not like the Special K in the states.  It is more substantial, more roasted, I think it has more whole wheat in it, and is just altogether more delicious. 

Jeremy and I both slept soundly and long (with the help of some Nyquil capsules, just to make sure we got a full night's worth of sleep even when our bodies thought we were getting a full day's worth).  This morning, we had our Special K and headed out to explore the town a little.  There's a cute bar around the corner from us where we had coffee while the Italians around us had there after church beer.  Really -- all of them were drinking beer at noon on Sunday.  Even the little old ladies.  I think I even saw a dog with a bottle of Moretti.  We walked the streets, found our school for tomorrow morning, saw some views, and tried to get the lay of the immediate land.  It is incredibly beautiful here.  Perugia is a hill town, although not one on a particularly high or precipitous hill, unlike Montalcino or Montepuciano (the other hill towns I've been to).  The city walls are intact, and the old town is wonderfully old, with lots of tiny, enclosed streets and lots of big, open piazze.  It feels like a bustling young college town blended with an ancient fortress, which a) is exactly what it is and b) is exactly what I was hoping for.  

After our walk, which was cut short by a thunderstorm, we came back to the apartment for our first lunch, comprised of the cheese and meat and bread I had so bravely bought yesterday.  It tasted mighty good.  Tonight, dinner out.  Tomorrow, our first day of class.  Now, I think I might be ready for a little nap . . . 

Vegetarian Harvest Soup

Jeremy has a certain disdain for vegetarians. I'm not quite sure what is at the heart of it, but much of it is his love for meat, and some of it is his observation that vegetarians are often not healthy. I do realize that it is possible to be a very healthy vegetarian, but being so requires a good deal of knowledge and thoughtfulness about diet.Fairly early in our relationship, I asked Jeremy what would have happened if I had been a vegetarian when we met. He said, without pausing, that that would have been a non-starter. So, being less than half a year out of a fifteen year relationship with a woman didn't give him pause, but being a vegetarian would have killed the deal. Good to know his priorities. I respect vegetarians a great deal. I think they have the moral high ground, and the more I know about the meat producing industry in our country, the more convinced I am that the world would be a better place if we all were vegetarians. I was a vegetarian for several years in college, but the truth is, meat tastes really good, so I'm not anymore. Now, whenever I get idealistic, Jeremy puts a thick grilled ribeye, just a scosh under medium rare, in front of me, and I am altruistic no more.

I do, occasionally, have altruistic friends, and sometimes I even cook for them. Such an occasion arose last weekend, when we threw a dinner party in honor of Keya, the newest member of the English department, and clearly a very, very good person. The kind of person who doesn't kill other animals that she may live. A vegetarian type of person. We did a largely Italian meal. Keya brought a wonderful mushroom pasta, and I made the chickpea and goat cheese crespelle that I described in an earlier post. This time around, I managed to not put any sauce on them, but I did drizzle them with a little truffle oil as they came out of the oven. Pretty darn tasty. We also had a super simple arugula salad, with thin sliced shallots, parmesan, olive oil and balsamic. Oh, and a little cured pork (in the form of prosciutt0) for the meat eaters.

I get pretty excited when I get to cook for people other than Jeremy, so I tend to go just a tad overboard with the dinner parties. I always think they are going to be casual, easy affairs, but then somehow, by the time people are here, there's truffle oil and table linens involved. Add to that my insecurity about cooking vegetarian -- how much food does one make when there is nothing that seems like a main course? -- and I decided to make a soup as well. It turned out to be overkill, but good overkill.

The initial thought was to do a ribollita, which is a great tuscan vegetable soup thickened with bread, but I was uninspired by the traditional verdura I found that day. Then I remembered, distantly, a recipe I had seen on Cooks Afield for an apple and rutabaga soup, so I went down that path. After I had cooked everything together, Jeremy and I agreed it still needed something. What actually happened is that I kept chasing him around the house with spoonfuls of soup with different additions, asking if it tasted good yet. We tried it with cream (good), toasted hazelnuts (oddly bad), basil (neither here nor there). The final winner: a coriander oil garnish. The extra fat gave it a better mouth feel, and the spice gave it a little more depth and interest. So, without further ado:

Fall Harvest Soup

One small onion, diced

One apple, diced

One sweet potato, diced

One rutabaga, diced

2 tbls maple syrup

Broth (I used vegetable, but chicken would work)

Olive oil

1 tbls whole coriander

1/4 tsp cayenne

salt and pepper

Sweat the onion in a tablespoon of olive oil until translucent and tender -- a little brown is fine, but you don't need to caramelize it. Add the apple, sweet potato, rutabaga, and stock to cover, and simmer until everything is very soft, about half an hour. Blend with an immersion blender (or whatever you use to make soup smooth), and add the maple syrup. If the soup is too think, add more broth; if it is too thin, simmer it uncovered until it is thicker. When you have the consistency where you want it, salt and pepper aggressively to taste.

About five minutes before you want to serve the soup, but the coriander seeds and cayenne in a small pan with about three tablespoons of olive oil. Heat gently, until the oil smells of coriander. Drizzle a spoonful of oil on the top of each bowl of soup. I left the seeds in for a little texture, but if you want the soup smooth, then avoid them.

I'm not even sure that this soup would benefit from bacon -- but, I might have to test that hunch at some point.

In two days, I'm off to Italy for a month, so look for some Italian food posts in the near future!

Does this count as professional development?

I believe that, in an earlier post, I raved about the enormous farmer's market in Portland. Located in the beautiful park blocks on the campus of one of my illustrious alma maters, Portland State, this market has it all: truckloads of beautiful produce, great coffee, great pastry, great bluegrass, and loads of stalls selling small batch, artisanal products. There were pickles of all kinds, preserves, cheeses, breads, and my favorite, charcuterie. One stall had pork, Elk, and bear salami, plus a number of delicious pates. I don't know why, but it had never occurred to me that normal people could make salami. I remember my witty friend Mike once saying to me, "last night, I made mayonnaise and a CD, two things I thought only God could make." I think salami fit into that category for me.

So, it being me, I became determined to take on this little project. How could I not? It combines my well documented love for all things cured, salty, and pig-based with my admittedly amateur interest in chemistry. It's consistent with my food values, such as staying connected with your food, being able to control ingredients and source them yourself, and staying off the grid of mega-agra business as much as possible. Plus, it's just so cool! What better way to spend my precious sabbatical time?

Cool, but also complicated. Salami is what is known as dry cured, which means the meat is never cooked. Instead, it is transformed via a combination of salt, nitrites, and good bacteria. The key is to find an environment where the salami can slowly but consistently lose water content, that is conducive to good bacterial growth but retards bad bacterial growth. Traditionally, salami were hung in caves, which provide cool, moist, consistent conditions. More and more, I think I would really like to own my own cave. They seem fundamental to good cheese, good wine, and now, good salami. And, handy for surviving nuclear fallout, mitigating the impact of global warming, or riding out the end of modern civilization. Yes, buying my own cave is definitely on the to do list.

In the meantime, I found a very handy website chronicling how to MacGyver a pseudo-cave using an old refrigerator. Thank you, Matthew Wright, for knowing how to write complete, clear instructions! I pretty much just bought everything he told me to buy, often using the links he provided. Amusingly, when I bought the humidifier and humidity controller together on Amazon, they recommended a Charcuterie cookbook and the refrigerator override. Apparently, I am not the only Amazon customer with this idea. My only quibble with Mr. Wright is his sense that one could set oneself up for salami making for less than a hundred dollars. The sausage stuffer alone cost that much. I now understand why salami is so damn expensive.

It took me a while to gather my equipment and my ingredients. I had to wait for one of the pig farmers at the farmer's market to slaughter another hog so that I could purchase the fat back, which apparently is usually thrown away as waste meat. Wasting meat is bad, especially when it is delicious, delicious pork fat. By the way, all the pig I used was locally and humanely raised by farmers I have met personally. I ordered arcane powders called things like Cure #2 and Bactoferm. I am now on the Northern Tool mailing list (they made the sausage stuffer), so if any one needs, say, a combine, or small generator, I know where to get one.

Finally, three weeks ago, I was ready to get started. I decided to begin with a simple sopprasseta style, which means not hot and fairly large pieces of fat. Dicing the fat by hand took a long time, but everything else came together fairly quickly. Working with the hogs casing (oh, Super 1, how I love that you sell hog casings) was not as disgusting as I had feared, although they do smell really rather awful. Stuffing the sausage itself needed two people, and we got better as we went along, getting larger, smoother sausages with less air trapped inside. Then, it was just a matter of hanging them and waiting to see what happened.

There was some fuzzy mold growth, which is bad, but it never penetrated the casings, and I was able to wipe it off with vinegar. Other than that, everything seems to have worked the way it was supposed to. There are some pretty serious risks involved in eating home-cured salami. Bad bacteria can cause food poisoning, and there is a small chance of botulism poisoning, which is very, very bad. But, everything I read (and I did read a lot about the process) indicated that, if things went wrong, it would be obvious. The meat would be stinky, squishy, fuzzy, off color, and generally not like salami. But my meat lost the requisite 35% of its weight in the amount of time I expected it to, and came out firm and dark and remarkably salami-like.

Last Friday, I tried my first bite. Jeremy was more than happy to let me poison myself in the name of culinary experimentation, so he watched me eat four small slices and waited for me to race to the bathroom. As he explained, one of us had to be able to drive to the hospital, so he was just being practical. I admit that I was nervous enough that I barely tasted it. The next day, after twenty-four hours with no ill effects, I was confident enough to eat more and even serve a few slices to nervous dinner guests (none of whom have reported any symptoms). Since, I have put away nearly a whole salami by myself, with no ill effects, so I am confident that it is safe to eat.

But, is it good? Was it worth the effort and expense? It is good, meaty with a nice hit of bay and black pepper, and not overwhelmingly salty. I'm not sure it is noticeably better than stuff I can buy, especially if I compare it to the yummy stuff they sell at Saunder's. In the future, I want more spice and more garlic. But it is definitely good enough to make me want to keep working on my recipe. After all, this is only my first batch, and salami-making is a craft passed down from generation to generation in some parts of the world. Plus, my friend John, who hunts, has promised me a couple of pounds of meat from whatever harmless woodland creature he murders this fall, so that I can try game salami. (Can you tell that I am somewhat conflicted about hunting?) In the meantime, I have seven sticks of really quite good salami in my fridge, and I'm about to leave the country for a month, so I'm looking for homes for them. Any takers?

I have one more problem you all can help me with. I need a name for my salami. I'm not going into business, but still, branding is important. Okay, it is completely not important, but it sounds like fun. My current contenders are "Go Pig (or go home)" or "Maiale Vecchia" (which is Italian for "old pork." Surely, you can do better!