Croissants aux amandes
September 27, 2011 § 5 Comments
The funny thing about having a blog is that sometimes I get confused and start thinking of it like a diary. I start writing and quickly realize that the blank word document I’m filling up with words is completely unpublishable. And then I have to start all over from scratch. It’s unfortunately like admitting that my life isn’t as fancy and perfect like the pictures ready to be uploaded.
Awhile ago, we had a perfect Saturday morning in San Francisco — the sun was out for once, and on the drive home, we stopped at a café — a little hole in the wall, with brilliant sunflowers atop each industrial table — in the area for a cappuccino and pastry. I thought of it when my mother said the family was going to the connected restaurant that night for dinner. I thought of it during a particularly hard week at school, which, thankfully (big decisions made, tears shed and cakes baked) is finally over. I thought of sitting in the café as I readjusted my morning routine in my dorm room, which I am ashamed to say generally consists of energy bars and instant oatmeal.
There are days here when I can’t believe how much I missed these friends while I was away; and then there are days when being back here feels like being locked in a little box with no air to breathe (the humidity maybe doesn’t help that matter). Sorry I think I reverted into diary mode, but the truth is, something like the picture below would never have happened here, simply because the idea of doing approximately 1,000 turns and folds of the dough is unfeasible given the lack of time and equipment on hand. It’s frustrating, and oh I could go on and on about it, but I’ll stop — there’s an almond croissant waiting for you, soft, crusty, with marzipan spilling out from the edges and almond flakes falling off the sides.
I made these for the September Daring Bakers‘ Challenge, which was “Fresh, FLuffy, French Croissants.” To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the dough, I found it rather salty when not accompanied by a sweet filling, much more like a very buttery roll than a flakey pastry. The recipe we used was from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two by Julia Child and Simone Beck, and it took about 20 hours from start to finish, including an overnight rise in the fridge. I definitely think croissants are something to be attempted at least once in a lifetime, but I can’t say a repeat is in my future anytime soon. Not when there’s a bakery around the corner.
*The Daring Bakers go retro this month! Thanks to one of our very talented non-blogging members, Sarah, the Daring Bakers were challenged to make Croissants using a recipe from the Queen of French Cooking, none other than Julia Child!*
Ushering in Fall
September 26, 2011 § 2 Comments
It’s hard to believe it’s fall when the air still hangs damp and heavy, broken up by droplets of rain that seem to cling to the skin, alongside clammy, greasy sweat. I just so love East Coast humidity. But one of these cloudy days found us piling into the bright-red bug convertible and driving the fifteen minutes to Tehrune Orchards. It was Apple Day at the orchard apparently, though I did my research and the real Apple Day, in celebration of local distinctiveness and finding common ground, is actually on October 21st. Lies.
Nevertheless, we enjoyed picking Empire and Red Delicious apples, riding the wagon, cruising through the corn maze and celebrating when we reached the exit, and picking wildflowers. We ate fluffy cider donuts, coated in cinnamon sugar, from a paper bag, and peered at the cases of ginger and oatmeal cookies and racks of apple cider in the general farm store. We forgot for a few hours that we were grown-up college students and rode the parked tractor, poked our heads through the farm animal scene cut-outs and practiced our milking skills on the wooden cow. Then we piled back in the cars and drove back to campus, back to our readings, problem sets and the daily grind.
About a week later, the apples cored and cut, coated in brown sugar and vanilla bean, were piled into little baking dishes and topped with a generous heaping mound of crumbly oats and browned butter.
Crisps were one of the very first things I made in the kitchen, if you exclude the concoctions of shaved chocolate and milk I used to love when I was four-years-old. Every so often, I would pull my only cookbook of my very own, Fanny at Chez Panisse, from the shelf and make a fruit crisp, sometimes doubling the topping to make sure there was enough. Sometimes enough wasn’t enough and I remained unsatisfied with a 2:1 topping to fruit ratio. Nowadays, I go by look and feel for the topping. I use my hands and throw ingredients around, a method that tends to work out well in the dorm kitchens, which are just barely stocked enough to be functional.
Mexican Chocolate Pot de Crème
September 20, 2011 § Leave a comment
The first time I put chili powder in a baked good, the face my little brother made told it all. Not like that in itself is all that unusual; generally, anything that isn’t vanilla, lemon or cinnamon flavored meets with that reaction from him. It can make baking at home rather boring, with a couple of people on diets and the only person who eats unashamedly being such a picky eater. But anyway, they were chili chocolate chip cookies — the slice and bake kind — and they were a bit of a let down. Too much cinnamon, not spicy enough, and a little hard, in the stale kind of way. Not a disaster, in fact my mom ate them straight from the freezer for about a month afterwards, but not capable of convincing the brother to give new flavors another chance. Thankfully, I had a chance to try again with a new dessert, and best of all, a new audience, which was a bit more receptive to adventurous sweets.
We occasionally throw dinner parties, and, when not in the middle of summer, they don’t always involve the picnic table, the backyard and barbequed fish — though this being California, they still, quite often, do anyway. For this one for instance, I made a trio of desserts: goat cheese custards with red wine reduction, tiny, spicy ginger drop cookies, and these little pots of Mexican chocolate custard. The grainy texture of Mexican chocolate and the heat that arrives after the initial smooth sweetness come through in the finished custard, giving the dessert more of a bite than your standard pot de crème.
It was one of those dinners — as it had to be with three desserts — that seemed to last forever in good company and I sent our guests home with huge bags of ginger drops at the end of the night. A couple of weeks later I got a package in the mail, with a book about the independence struggle in Algeria which we had discussed at dinner. I like surprises. And I love getting mail. Maybe that explains why I had ten billion pen pals as a young girl. And why my dorm room is decorated with postcards.
Mexican Chocolate Pot de Crème
Adapted from The Perfect Pantry
I submitted this post to the Sugar High Friday dessert blogging event, which bakes under a different theme every month. September’s theme was “Sweet Heat” and you can find the roundup of desserts here at the end of the month.
Ingredients:
2 cups whipping cream, chilled
6 oz. Mexican chocolate (2 disks minus one small wedge), finely chopped
5 large egg yolks, at room temperature
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
Preheat the oven to 325°F.
In a saucepan over low heat, heat the whipping cream to the simmer. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the chopped chocolate until the chocolate is melted and the mixture is smooth. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, vanilla extract and salt. Then whisk in the chocolate and milk mixture. Pour the finished mixture through a strainer into a large clean bowl.
Place 6-8 small ramekins in a deep baking dish, such as a brownie pan. Distribute the mixture evenly among the ramekins. Pour hot water into the roasting pan until it comes halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Cover the pan with aluminum foil, and bake for 25 minutes or until the custard is just set around the edges.
Remove the pan from oven and remove the custards from the water. Let them cool and then cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or overnight.
Fig Buckwheat Scones
September 16, 2011 § Leave a comment
I’ve packed all my clothes and books into seven moving boxes and brought them down to the UPS. I’ve stashed together energy bars and dried fruit to get me through the semester, and handpicked the cookbook collection that will make the trip across the country. I’ve thrown together a bag to get me through the week at school before my boxes arrive and printed out 150 pictures for my dorm room wall. Junior year here I come.
This is a quick post because I am in the midst of running around campus, filling out forms to switch majors and going to new departmental luncheons. In between going to class and catching up with people I haven’t seen in over a year, I am dashing down to the boathouse for practice and trying to organize a trip to the apple orchards this weekend.
But since I know the seasons are changing and this is soon to be irrelevant, I figured it’s now or never. We haven’t gotten into the kitchens since arriving on campus, but these scones were one of the last things I made in my home kitchen. We brought home three cartons of purple figs for this torta, which really didn’t need too many of them. I simmered them down into a fig butter with some sugar and a split vanilla bean, and spread it between cakey layers of buttery scone, made with earthy buckwheat flour. The scones are soft enough to fall apart in your hands, but hold up well in swirl form. Be careful to not over mix the dough, it’s okay if it looks a bit inconsistent, with flecks of flour and butter, even as you’re throwing into on the floured-countertop and rolling it out.
Fig Butter
1 Lb. figs, stems and skins removed
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup port
1/8 cup bottled lemon juice
One vanilla bean
Cut the figs into quarters. Place the cut fruit in a sauce pan over low heat, mashing with a fork if needed. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise, and scrape the inside into the pan, before throwing in the entire bean. Cook down for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally with a spatula to prevent the bottom from sticking.
Add sugar, port and lemon juice, zest and vanilla and continue to cook for 15 more minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and take out the vanilla beans. Spoon the mixture into a bowl and let cool (if you wish to save the fig butter for later use, it keeps about a week in the fridge, or you can can it).
Fig Buckwheat Scones
Adapted from Good to the Grain
1 cup buckwheat flour
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 ounces cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
1 recipe fig butter
In a large mixing bowl, combine both flours, sugar, salt and baking powder. Add the butter to the dry mixture and work in with your hands, until the mixture feels like small grains of rice. It is important to do this fairly quickly, in order to keep the butter as cold as possible. Pour in the cream and mix with a spatula until the dough just comes together.
Transfer the dough to a well-floured surface (it will be quite sticky). Using a rolling pin, roll the dough into a rectangle about 8 inches wide, 16 inches long and ¾ inch thick. Spread the fig butter evenly over the dough rectangle. Roll up the long edge of the dough so that you get a log 16 inches long. Using a sharp knife, cut the long in half. Place the two logs on baking sheets, lined with parchment paper and chill in the refrigerator for half an hour. While the logs are chilling, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
After 30 minutes have passed, remove the logs from the refrigerator, cut each log into six even slices and place each roll flat on the baking sheets, 6 to a sheet. Bake the rolls for 38 to 42 minutes, until the edges begin to brown. Let cool (or don’t) and eat the same day.
Blackberry-Pistachio Macaroon Tart
September 7, 2011 § Leave a comment
Blackberries on the side of the road are a glorious thing. A prickly, sometimes painful, mess, but beautiful nonetheless. Nearing the end of summer, the bushes have been combed over time and time again and usually boast only a couple of edible berries, but I get excited seeing them nonetheless. Blackberries in Italian farmland, blackberries along Route 1 in Mendocino, blackberries in green paper crates at the market, blackberries in my grandparents’ backyard that never quite made it into the night’s crisp, blackberries on the hill where I run above my house. I could eat them until my fingers are stained purple forever.
Luckily this one batch of blackberries turned out to be pretty sour. Plump, deep purple almost black, so juicy that they ruptured in between my forefingers, and pucker worthy. I let them sit on the counter for a couple of days (you know that saying that a little distance makes the heart grow fonder), but in the end, they only started growing a bit of mold and looking pretty sad. So I picked through them and tossed the rest in the freezer, vowing to return to them after Labor Day weekend.
Baked, they meld into tart, jammy pockets beneath chewy flakes of coconut. They soak into a thick shortbread crust, gently teasing out the natural sweetness of the browned-butter. The bars are finished with a colorful flourish of pistachios. And suddenly those blackberries, so wholly disappointing, are once again transformed into showstoppers, just in time for the end of summer.
Blackberry-Pistachio Macaroon Tart
Closely Adapted from Super Natural Everyday by Heidi Swanson
I remember the day I met Heidi. I was sitting at a long table at a book event for Good to the Grain and thought she looked familiar, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it until she introduced herself. It was at the beginning of last summer, right before I started my year off from school, and when I told her my plans and tentative plans, she said “Good for you.” It was also the day I first realized that non-wheat flours didn’t have to just be weird grains that my dad snuck into pancakes when I wasn’t looking.
For the crust:
1 ½ cups whole wheat flour
¾ cup unsweetened shredded coconut
¾ cup light brown sugar or natural cane sugar
½ teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons butter
For the filling:
2 cups unsweetened shredded coconut
½ cup light brown sugar or natural cane sugar
4 large egg whites
8 ounces fresh blackberries, halved
1/3 pistachios, crushed (raw or roasted, unsalted)
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter your tart pan of choice. The original recipe uses an 8 by 11 inch tart pan but I did just fine with my long, rectangular pan.
Make the crust: Brown the butter on the stovetop. In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, coconut, sugar and salt. Stir in the browned butter until the mixture is crumbly but not dry. Press the mixture firmly into the prepared tart pan and bake for 15 minutes, until just golden brown. Let the crust cool while you prepare the macaroon filling.
In a mixing bowl, combine the coconut, egg whites and sugar. Distribute the blackberries evenly over the baked crust. Spread the macaroon filling on top of them (the end effect is prettier if you let some of the blackberries peek through). Press down the coconut filling.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until the peaks of the macaroon are deep, golden brown. After the tart has cooled, sprinkle pistachios over the top.
Fig Ricotta Torta
September 6, 2011 § 2 Comments
This past weekend, we all piled up in the car and headed north. We drove through the rolling hills in Marin, the peaks covered with the dry, crusty yellow grass that makes up much of the Californian landscape, stopped at the Healdsburg Bakery for buttery soft sticky buns and cappuccinos, pulled over to the side of the road for fresh-picked strawberries, small and deep red. We drove into Ukiah wine country, where, just two months shy of 21 I was relegated to taking pictures of the vineyards while my parents tasted at the bar. We drove through the redwood forests and then were dumped down onto the cliffs in Mendocino where waves broke in a wash of kelp and white water.
It was an impromptu trip of sorts (in fact, we booked the hotel room when we were already a good hour outside of the city), fashioned after a week of failed searching for an available campsite in Big Sur. We didn’t pack any special treats for the car trip and didn’t stop at any renowned restaurants. Instead we sampled beer at the Ukiah Brewing Company, tasting the difference between light and dark brews, beer made with wild flowers and made with hops (which was particularly interesting after the article I wrote about hops). We inspected a forty-year-old woman’s dreadlocks hanging down to her waist from a nearby table at the Mendocino Café, which seemed a bit confused about which ethnic cuisine it was trying to emulate — Thai burritos, nachos piled high with guacamole, Brazilian seafood stew and Indian-style curry. At nightfall, run-down hippies with long hair sat on the sidewalk, nursing beer bottles; they would still be there the next morning, peddling scraps and jewelry. We sat by the fire in our room at the Inn and ate waffles made with kamut and oat flour for breakfast at the Inn’s vegetarian and vegan restaurant. A seal glided up beside my kayak in the glassy water that morning and a walk down the highway to the shore saw swelling waves breaking on black rocks covered in moss and slimy green plants that looked like miniature palm trees. Then, we joined the long line for morning coffee and piled back in the car for the drive home.
As is typical for the end of holiday weekends, the drive back to the city was long, slow, and annoying. Around the start of the Golden Gate Bridge, the cars around us started a game of call and answer with their horns. By the end of the Bridge, we were all ready to get home.
Fig Ricotta Torta
Adapted from the Food Network
This tart is perfect for the end of summer, when you’re still clinging to the last of summer’s fruit but craving a dessert that’s a bit more substantial to embrace the cooler weather.
Pasta Frolla:
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup (stick) unsalted butter
1 egg
4 tablespoons milk or water
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups flour
Ricotta Filling:
1 1/2 pounds ricotta
1/2 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Extras:
1 egg
2 tablespoons honey (pick something with a fairly mild flavor)
6 medium sized purple figs
Mix together the sugar, butter, egg, milk, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl. Fold in the flour, just until a dough begins to take shape, being careful not to over mix. Flatten the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30-60 minutes until firm.
While the dough is chilling, make the ricotta filling. In a large clean bowl, cream the ricotta and the sugar. Mix in the eggs one at a time, then add the vanilla and stir until just combined.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Take the dough out of the refrigerator and cut the disk in two (you can reserve the second half of the dough for later use). Roll out one half of the dough into a 10-inch circle. Press the dough circle into a greased tart pan and trim the excess overhang. Fill the tart shell with the ricotta filling until it looks full but not overflowing (you’ll have some filling leftover — you can bake it up like a custard or reserve it for later use).
Peel figs and cut in half. Press each half fig, inside facing up, in a circle pattern, into the ricotta filling. Drizzle a bit of honey on top of each fig. Whisk the remaining egg in a small bowl, and, brush the exposed edges of the tart dough with egg, using a pastry brush.
Bake the torta for 45 minutes or until the filling is set in the middle and golden brown on the edges.
Děkuji, Praha
August 28, 2011 § 1 Comment
Well that’s it kids. Summer is almost over and I am on a plane back to San Francisco. It’s time to leave behind the train travel, the first pumping to deep house music, the beer (well, the real beer anyway) and most importantly, friends from around the world that somehow made their way to the same places as I did. But before it sounds like my summer was all travel and parties, let me point you in the direction of the project I have been working on in the last two months: my final article at my internship with The New Presence: Czech youth find outlet outside of political system
I could never have completed this project without the continuous help of several people I met in Prague, who went out of their way to put me in contact with their friends, family and colleagues. If at first, this project was just a story idea on a list of several, it stood out as the most interesting to me, and also the most difficult to pull off. Why? Because it required countless interviews with Czech youth, people, whom believe it or not, I did not effortlessly run into in every day life.
I am not sure why it is that whenever you go abroad, you are more likely to meet a lot of expats than actual natives — and I am not talking Americans here, I am talking Spanish, Italians, Russians, Dutch…. But the people I left behind across the ocean are lasting friends, with whom I hope to keep it touch with and whose help in writing this article was invaluable. So thank you, thank you, thank you, I hope to see you all (and Praha) again very soon.
Cinnamon Twists
August 26, 2011 § Leave a comment
The house is pretty silent at four in the morning. Outside it’s still dark and inside, I am sitting in bed (my very own bed, finally) wide awake. I have the kettle on for some black currant tea and I’ve already stirred together the crunchy peanut butter to slather on top of rustic baguette with a drizzle of wildflower honey. In my room, there’s my unopened bottle of Moet champagne, my Fry boots and my two teddy bears, Polar Bear and Little Bear (I was a creative youngster), right where I left them when I boarded the plane to Prague back in June. In a couple of hours, my mom will be awake, spooning peanut butter cookie dough onto trays to put in my brother’s lunch, but for the moment the kitchen is all mine. I pour oats into a ceramic mixing bowl and ladle out a quarter cup of maple syrup. Next, I chop raw almonds and hazelnuts and use a tiny spoon to stir everything together, coating the oats and nuts in syrup. I have always loved little spoons — the ones you use to stir sugar in coffee — and I use them whenever possible, even when they’re not practical. The smell of baking maple syrup wafts through the house and in half and hour there is a tray full of nutty granola sitting on the kitchen counter, ready to be topped with dried apricots and cranberries.
A few hours later, the dark sky has been replaced with a city drenched in thick fog, white mist descending on the rooftops and blurring my vision from the window of the houses across the street. Fresh coffee seeps in the press and I’m taking the yeast out of the fridge, clearing the black marble counter top of the morning’s breakfast. Whole-wheat levain toasted and spread with creamy goat cheese or honey. Tart blueberries and juicy yellow nectarines, much smaller than their European counterparts, only about the size of a baby’s fist, flesh easily pulled away from the pit. I’m pouring over what kind of bread to make, thinking about flours, dense, grey buckwheat and powdery whole-wheat. Honey or molasses.
Before I can decide, I get called away for the morning’s run, a 12-miler through Golden Gate Park, past Stow Lake, along JFK Drive, where I used to spend Sunday mornings bike riding with my parents, before I became terrified of turning on a bike. There’s no explanation for that one, no horror story of a bike accident, just me not liking operating things that move. Down by the cliffs, cold, wispy air brings in the scent of the ocean and there’s no question: I am home.
Cinnamon Twists
From All Recipes
Cinnamon twists have consistently been what my younger brother and I used to order at the neighborhood coffeeshops and bakeries. Wanting to recreate them at home, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to go the yeasted brioche dough route or the puff pastry route. This recipe is like a sweet brioche dough, and it worked quite well, but I think if I made them again, I would roll the dough out into much thinner strands and make the twists much smaller, for a much higher cinnamon to bread ratio and bit more of a crunch.
Dough:
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
3/4 cup warm water (110 degrees to 115 degrees F), divided
4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup warm milk (110 to 115 degrees F)
1/4 cup butter, softened
1 egg
Filling:
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup warm water. Add 2 cups of flour, sugar, salt, milk, butter, egg and remaining water and beat on medium speed for minutes. Stir in enough remaining flour to form a soft dough. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 6-8 minutes. Place the dough in a clean, greased bowl, cover with a damp cloth and let rise in a warm place until dough has doubled in size, about 1 hour.
Punch down the dough and divide into. Roll into a 16-inch by 12-inch rectangle. Brush with butter. Combine brown sugar and cinnamon; sprinkle over butter. Let dough rest for 6 minutes. Cut lengthwise into three 16-inch by 4-inch strips. Cut each strip into sixteen 4-inch by 1-inch pieces. Twist and place on greased baking sheets. Cover again and let rise until doubled, about 30 minutes.
Bake twists at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes or until golden brown.
The Ending
August 23, 2011 § Leave a comment
I was sitting on the ground the other day, in the dirt between the rows of the vegetable patch, picking green beans and yellow peas, and talking to a guy from Australia, who is now studying in Sweden, just outside of Copenhagen, which is one of my favorite cities. As we dug underneath the leaves of the plants, searching for our small treasures, we talked about how this was this third attempt at an undergraduate degree, having started his studies twice in Sydney and consequently dropping out. The first time, he said, he was the middle of an economy lecture when he realized he didn’t want to be doing what he was doing and decided to leave the room. And so now we found ourselves all scratched up from moving wood and trimming vines and sitting in the dirt of a farm in Piemonte.
If you told me a year ago I would be spending the last two weeks of my summer on an Italian farm, waking up at 5 a.m. with the crowing of the rooster, running at the sunrise to the next town over — where you might find another corner store and bar — and tossing and turning in bed in the scorching heat of midday before the evening shift of work started, I would have laughed in your face. As I type, I am sitting in the back of a rickety old caravan, driving up the twisting roads into the mountains, on our way to tomorrow’s market. This morning, I was setting out jams and honeys at another market in Alba, going around to the other stalls to taste pungent organic goat cheeses, slurping out the middles of stringy green figs from sticky hands while walking down the alleys of Alba, white truffle country. My forefingers are red, cut and bloody from hours of cutting out the rotting spots of apples, fallen before they could be picked, and my legs are covered in long red stripes from where blackberry branches have been ripped across them. But there are four containers fill of tiny, sweet blackberries to sell at the market, and a blackberry clafoutis sitting in the kitchen cupboard leftover from dinner last night.
Maybe it doesn’t sound like your idea of a good time. Maybe it’s not really mine either. But there are moments when, covered in sweat, you feel like it might be worth the effort; brief, small moments when it seems like the world has turned itself right side up again. Sitting in the back of a tractor, after three long hours of moving chopped wood close to the house in preparation for the winter, with the wind in my face, my body jumping with every dip in the dirt and gravel road, just might make it worth it. The bite of half a purple fig, the very first one off of the tree, handed to me by the grandmother of my new “Italian family” while berry picking at noon and a spoon of hazelnut goat milk yogurt while sitting on the hammock after driving home from the market. The minute you walk into the one bar in town, a twenty minute uphill walk from the farm, and grab a beer from the fridge, imported from Germany, and ignore the strange looks from men who have spent their entire lives on a stool in that bar. Dipping your hands in the washing basin next to the grocery store, where you can pick up the bare necessities (many types of sausages, milk, and chocolate hazelnut cream filled cookies to name a few) and watching the German and Swiss motor bikers cruise by, the bikes practically parallel to the ground as they round the curves in the road. Scavenging for wild blackberries on the walk home from town, hoping they really are wild, or that at least the neighbors won’t notice us. The red sun rising and falling and collapsing into bed at 10 p.m., exhausted and drunk from the two liters of wine plunked down on the table at dinner. Or maybe it was the spoonful of hazelnut gelato, made from fresh cream and hazelnut cream, the specialty of the area for which there is an entire festival next weekend, from a small teacup at the end of a drawn-out dinner, that seemed to emerge from the storeroom out of nowhere, that really got to me.
The farm makes you crazy, crazy from the heat and the exhaustion, and the never-ending lists of tasks to be completed, and the feeling that you could never shower enough times in one day, or ever escape the sounds of the roosters and the dogs barking and jumping on you and licking your sweat, crazy from the need to get out. It might be the hardest thing this city girl has ever done, committing to two weeks in the middle of fucking nowhere. And strangely, it’s not the work that’s getting to me, not the long hours spent weeding in the sun and the repetition of tossing large branches, some covered in thorns, into the back of the tractor. It’s not the fact that this house is filled with strange smells — most not all that enticing — or that I have been turned off of apple butter forever after seeing the state of the apples that are used to make it, let’s say the cast-offs of better times. Rather the hardest part of this place is feeling like I have been thrown into the work without being welcomed into the home, that they smile and say you are part of the family and then get angry when you don’t understand vague instructions given in halting French, or worse, instructions in Italian to which you can only stare back blankly. The hardest part is hearing the woman tear into her husband after every little thing that goes wrong (and even just when he is slow on the uptake) and having to choke back a second piece of the blackberry clafoutis, which is, after all that, far too cloyingly sweet and made with even the hardest, dried-up berries, because she couldn’t bear to sacrifice any.
So yes, I had an alternate ending to this story, and this post. I had a couple of paragraphs written about not quitting despite being far out of my element. I had paragraphs written about the golden sun setting as I sat in the back of the caravan and about the universal language of the kitchen. But the people and the shouting and the snapping got to me. It’s a beautiful region, filled with mountains and valleys and cresses and rows of grape vines that stretch as far as the eye can see, but I’m leaving. Sometimes you just have to pick up and leave.
Gypsy Soul
August 15, 2011 § Leave a comment
I’m sitting on a regional train heading up the west coast of Italy and kicking myself because I don’t know why I ever thought eight hours spent on a train would be a good idea. And then two hours spent in the train station. And then another one and a half on a bus to Alba. The little boy sitting diagonal from me has long since finished his panino and exhausted the possibilities of playing with the kids in the compartment next to us. The man across from me has removed himself for about ten cigarette breaks since our departure in Formia. My train ticket has been checked five times. And still there’s two hours to go.
I have tried watching the Italian countryside out the window, fields upon fields of sunflowers, the Mediterranean Sea glistening on the other side, children’s clothes and dishcloths hanging out the windows to dry. I’m starving, and already missing the home cooking I had gotten used to, but the rickety cart that bangs down the aisle selling panini and chocolate bars has little appeal.
About an hour ago, we passed the five towns of Cinque Terre, where I spent a weekend at the beginning of July. It was a lazy weekend that somehow managed to jam-pack clubbing in Milano, swimming, sun-bathing and uphill hiking and eating a few too many gelatos and breadcrumb stuffed mussels from high perches overlooking the sea. Now from the train window, I see the rocky shore where we stopped for our first swim in Corniglia and the steep set of stairs that brings you from the Manarola train station to the center of town.
As we arrive in Genova, many of the passengers disembark and I finally have space to put my feet up. Only an hour to go. I start thinking about getting on a plane and going home. It wouldn’t take much longer than this train trip. The little boy is passed out with his mouth and eyes half-open, but I’m pretty sure he’s asleep. His father sitting next to me is reading some inane book in English, very slowly. I’m listening to Colder Weather, and while I’m pretty sure it’s warmer here than it is anywhere else, it seems to fairly accurately reflect this journey. Except instead of road-side diners, I’m seeing a lot of beach town sandwich joints called bars. That is, when I am not seeing someone’s clean underwear hanging out the window. Now both parents are passed out too and I’m trapped in this compartment, right as I was considering tracking down that pitiful food cart and trying to score a Kinder bar.
The famous gelato shop in Gaeta had Kinder flavored gelato. And Snickers gelato, only they called it Mr. Nico. And Nutella of course, only for some strange reason that was one of the flavors they rotated out over the course of the week. Damn, the cart just passed and the man didn’t even look up so I could ask it to stop. Though, it might take me a little while to figure out how to ask that. Maybe I’ll be ready by the next time it passes by.
Soufflé Days 