Rain in Umbria

It's been raining here in Perugia.  Sunday morning was fair, and Jeremy and I walked around the parts of the centro that we hadn't yet seen.  Since then, it has been socked in.  Plus, I was feeling a little under the weather yesterday (nothing serious, just a headache).  So, I did here what I would have done at home:  made soup.  I still had my beautiful round zucchini from the market, so I headed off, in a torrential downpour and with Jeremy by my side, to the grocery store.

Italian grocery stores are tiny.  The Coop in Florence was the size of an american grocey, but both the supermarkets within walking distance of the apartment are about the size of small boutique back home.  The Coop here doesn't even have a meat section (although it is next door to a butchers).  We've been going to Meta (the Meta?), what has a total of six very short aisles.  One row is devoted entirely to cookies.  One is cleaning supplies, and another seems to be nothing but soap and "feminine hygiene."  There is an entire row devoted to tomatoes, and one devoted to olive oil and vinegars. Wine gets its own row.  That doesn't leave a lot for everything else that one might expect to find in a supermarket.  The dairy section is about ten inches wide; fresh pasta has about three feet.  You would think, that with so little room, it wouldn't take me long to find things, but Jeremy and I searched for about twenty minutes before we found anything that resembled bouillon or stock.

What Italian grocery stores do have are pre-made packages of soup basics:  carrots, onions, celery, and parsley.  I think this is proof that people still cook in Italy.  It's brilliant.  How many times have I bought that exact combination?  Those ingredients are the basis for almost all stocks and soups, not to mention gravy and a whole lot of french sauces.  Here, they also have adorable little yogurt-style containers of chopped pancetta, which in this case I passed by in favor of simple ground pork.  I also bought some of the store's pre-made pesto to put on top of the soup, which was at least ten times as good as any pesto I've had anywhere in the states.  Pesto here has more cheese, I think, and they aren't afraid of the anchovies (but don't tell Jeremy that is what he is tasting, or he might never eat pesto again).

The soup I made was very simple:  ground pork, diced carrots, celery, onions, cubed potatoes and zucchini, a can of crushed tomatoes, water, and some powdered chicken stock (I put in a little more of this than I should, which gave the soup slightly more of a canned taste than I would have liked.)  I served it with a little pesto on top, and an arugula salad on the side.  It wasn't the best soup I've ever made, but it is hard to go too far wrong when you are starting with Italian produce, which is all flavorful, ripe, and fresh.  Plus, even the canned tomatoes here are superb.

On Sunday, we braved the rain for a dinner at a restaurant called Dal Mi'Cocco.  It has a fixed menu, and serves typical Umbrian food (or so we've been told).  Once we managed to get a reservation, make the reservation, and get through our initial conversation with the waiter, it was a particularly stress-free meal, since we didn't have to make any decisions.  Food just appeared before us, we ate it, and the next course arrived.  We had two pastas, a fettucine in pomodoro that they called a macaroni, and a penne with a creamy cheese and red bell pepper sauce that they claimed had no cheese in it other than the parmesan on top.  Meat was the typical mixed roast:  great chicken, good pork, and very strong lamb.  I like the lamb here, in small doses -- you sure aren't going to mistake it for anything else!   Jeremy finds it too gamey for his tastes.  A panzanella, a very sweet cake which was inedible until Jeremy figured out to eat it while drinking the grappa shot and which then was really good, and a bottle of the house wine, all for 13 euros.  I love it when restaurants here give me a digestivo.  I suspect it happens all the time for Italians, and most of the time to out-going Americans like Laura and Erik Schmidt, but it is a fairly rare occurrence for us.  I like grappa, although Mirta will always have a warm place in my heart.

The only other thing to report is that I was attacked by a mime last night.  Jeremy had a work Skype, so I left the apartment around nine to give him some privacy.  Perugia is a very safe and safe-feeling city, but it is not entirely comfortable for me to be a woman alone anywhere in Italy.  Italian men are very open about giving me (and all women -- it's not personal) a very obvious once over, even when I am with Jeremy.  It makes me self-conscious, since I keep thinking I have made some sort of cultural faux pas, whatever the female equivalent of wearing shorts in a city would be.  When I'm alone, those appraising looks are often followed up with some sort of banter, which is equally harmless, but which I don't understand and aren't fluent enough to get out of gracefully.  None of this happened last night, thankfully.  But, as I walked down a surprisingly empty stretch of what is normally a very busy street, I was approached by one of the ubiquitous white-garbed, white-faced mimes.   He stood directly in front of me, grabbed my hands, and gave me the double air kiss, which I accepted.  Probably a mistake, but I have a hard time being openly rude, even when I know it's a set-up.  Then, he held out one hand for money, and wouldn't let go of me with the other.  It took me several good tugs before I could get my hand free.  Here endeth my solo passagiata, and I high-tailed it back to the apartment.  I even had a smear of white on my face as proof of my struggle.

Tomorrow:  cooking class in Todi with our fellow students!  Pictures and a blog sure to follow!

The Pig and the Saint

Yesterday was Saturday, which means market day here in Perugia.  I was very surprised and disappointed to discover that Perugia does not have a central market, nothing like San'Ambrosio or Mercato Centrale in Florence.  This has pushed me into some of the small, speciality food stores -- butchers, bakers, etc. -- but it has also meant that I have spent a lot more time tiny Italian supermarkets.  On Friday, the school told us about a big market being held outside of town on Saturday morning, so a number of us students got together to head out.

We met at the downtown minimetro station.  It was the first time Jeremy and I had taken the minimetro.  We were supposed to take it to get to the apartment, but couldn't find the one near the train station, so we took a bus instead.  The minimetro is my new favorite thing about Perugia.  It is, as the name implies, a wee subway system.  Imagine the Seattle monorail, designed by Italians, and functional.  There is one track that runs from il centro down to a large park outside of town, with about four stops in between.  It runs about every three minutes, and costs the same as a bus ticket.  I'll try to get some video of it, because nothing I write will express the extreme cuteness of these fast little cars whizzing by.

So, we took the minimetro to a large market, which had some of everything:  food, meat and cheese, chickens, housewares (mostly imported from China), clothing, shoes, flowers and plants.  It went on for aisles and aisles.  I bought some beautiful round zucchini, more porcini (these had a much stronger, earthier taste, almost bitter, than the ones I bought in the supermarket), and some arugula.  I bought salami cinghaili, which tasted a lot like my salami, but with smaller chunks of fat, (Jeremy says my salami is better) and some pecorino fresco.  I even bought a dress!  I think I was the only one of our group that bought anything.  But then, I think I'm the only of our group who cooks.

About every fifth stall was a porchetta truck.  Porchetta is a suckling pig, deboned and rubbed with herbs and garlic, rolled back up and slow roasted.  It is Italian pulled pork, and hence, delicious.  At the market, they sold porchetta sandwiches, which is traditional -- just meat on bread.  As it happened, I had bought half of a kilo of the stuff from a small butcher shop the night before, so we had leftovers waiting for us back at the apartment.   It is, as good pork should be, fatty and rich, with a background of garlic and oregano, and the occasional punch of fennel when you hit a fennel seed.  The skin is still on, which adds a little chewiness, but the rest of the meat is meltingly tender.  I once tried a porchetta-style recipe at home using loin roast, and it really needs the fat to make it work.  It might be possible to come close using butt.  I'll work on it, and let you know.

After lunch, Jeremy and I were going to head out to Deruta, a small town known for ceramics, but we misread the train schedule.  We thought that, since we were reading the train schedule, we should go to the train station, but that was wrong.  We should have gone to the bus station.  U, apparently, stands for l'autobus.  Who knew?  So, instead, we got on a train for Assisi.  I'm not sure Saturday was the best day to go to such a major tourist site, because it was crowded, crowded, crowded.  But, the weather was perfectly glorious, clearing up completely after a foggy morning.   Basilica San Francesco was amazing. The lower Basilica is dark, and the walls are crowded with busy, dark frescoes, some by Simone Martini and some by Giotto (although, if I remember college art, there is some debate about whether they are really by Giotto or someone Giotto like.  I have to say, they didn't seem fully Giotto-esque to me, although they were incredible.  Some of the faces seemed wrong, but maybe they have been repainted or were painted by an apprentice.)  The upper basilica is much lighter, and the frescoes are in paler pastels.   There is some weird stuff happening up there -- visions of dismantled buildings, men holding up slanting buildings.    One could spend years looking at the art in that one building; it was way too much to do justice to in one sitting.

After the basilica, we walked a good deal of the town, which is cute and, did I mention?  touristy.  It's no surprise:  Assisi has been a pilgrimage site since the twelfth century, so they have a lot of experience selling crap to foreigners.  As a joke, I told Jeremy I wanted a St. Francis bottle opener, and to my dismay, I found one.  Yes, I bought it.  We were going to head home on a six o'clock train, only to find out that we had yet again misread the train schedule.  The six o'clock only runs on week days, so we found ourselves with an extra hour to kill.  Thank god!  We walked to another church in the lower town, Porziuncola (also called Basilica Santa Maria degli Angelli) a huge eighteenth-century affair that isn't even in our rather crappy guidebook, and inside that monolith was the most beautiful little chapel, which according to legend was St. Francis' own, original chapel. Inside the beautiful little chapel is the best annunciation I have ever seen.  Mary's expression is a wonderful blend of scared, shy, and confident.  Then we had terrific gelato, and strolled onto the train back to Perugia.  The later train meant that, for the second night in a row, we missed some sort of festivities in the Piazza here, but maybe we will catch them tonight.