Focara di Novoli part 2

For the story of the Focara click on this: my write up on the Focara last year. This year I'll just give you some photos.

There's always a ton of lights for these festivals. This one I'm taking trying to get the church in the photo. If you look closely you'll see it.


This one is looking right down the heart of the lights. There's noone around because the fireworks just went off way down after the end of the lights. In a few minutes the street was packed with people heading against us. We were salmon swimming upstream until we arrived at the fire. Don't arrive just late. Arrive really late or early!


I don't remember this from last year. These wooden buckets are filled with anchovies in some strange yellow paste. The white bucket has what I think is sardines. I knew I should have taken a picture of the names because now I don't know, Marco auitemi, ti prego!!


Another photo of the yellow fish. I didn't try it. Sorry, but I had a panino of questionable meat. I didn't want to add fish to that equation.

The normal vendor you see at these festivals. Lots of nuts and dried stuff.


Another one. How much nuts and dried stuff do Italians use? He also had olives, figs, and other things....I'm always amazed at the number of people selling almost the same things.


Here we are sneaking a peak in a local restaurant. This place was FULL of smoke. There must have been a problem with their wood fired oven. It was a sweet smelling smoke but thick.

Whining

Ok, I’ve been whining a lot again. Time to get back to good stuff. There are some things I like about winter and Italy. One is the new wines (that’s a given) but along with the vino novello there’s roast chestnuts. Here they go together like peanut butter and jelly (which by the way, don’t go together here in Italy!!) Now we’ve all heard in that Christmas tune “chestnuts roasting on a open fire” but I’m pretty sure that I’ve never had them until I arrived in Italy. Now everyday (from October until sometime in January) I pass the contraption you see in the photo. The veggie place has this super excellent chestnut-roasting machine made by Rosalba’s husband. It has a drum (with little fins) that rotates like a washing machine only slower and over flames that cook every castagna to perfection. I’ve never even tried to roast my own chestnuts and why should I with this thing just a few hundred feet from my front door? So many times I’m coming back from shopping or the gym and I catch that smoky sweet smell. It’s all over and I have to get at least 2 euros worth to snack on. Then at home I proceed to throw one of the shells on the floor to the delight of the cats. They bat it around until it either gets under something where they can’t reach it or I’m walking around and not paying attention and suddenly I hear a loud CRUNCH under my foot. Once they actually managed to push the shell under the throw rug in the hall. I almost fell on my ass at the surprise of stepping on a rug that crunched.

I may have mentioned it before but another thing I love is having the shudders open. The sun is our friend again. I would like to have the shudders open year round but I learned from the locals that in the summer that’s just not a good idea. Your apartment gets hot quickly and it won’t cool down. This time of year I get to welcome the sun in to try to warm the place up.

Another thing I love is how green the countryside is this time of year. For a couple months there in the summer it’s so dry and brown but now it’s nice and wet and green and it will be like that until May or June. It’s like Ireland. Ok maybe not that green but it’s all backwards to what I’m used to. In the Midwest by now all the trees are bare it’s looking bleak and winter like. You’re hoping for a snow to make the cold weather worthwhile. Here there are a few trees that loose their leaves so there are some trees that are bare like it’s winter but everything else is too green for me to accept that it’s winter. I mentioned how a large part of the park Torre Gauceto burned in August with the hot, dry summer we had but if you go out there now you can’t tell. Sure it doesn’t have the taller trees and some bushes it had but I think it will recover quicker than people are predicting. I also think the Gargano area will recover quickly too. I would like to drive up there to see. I bet the natural areas are recovering faster than the man made houses and businesses that burned. Mother nature is good like that.

This photo below is of an interesting sunset we had Sunday night. It was really low in the sky so it was almost hidden by the other buildings around me. The clouds were thick and just had this one hole that allowed sun through for about 5 or 10 minutes. Then right in the middle was this one palm tree that sticks up above the buildings. I’m taking this photo from the 4th floor (5th to you Americans) and that tree is about the same level as my apartment.

Day 10 Recipe from Jeff?

So today I thought I would do a food blog. It kind of came to me last night. I was coming back from the gym and I stopped in the veggie place. I joked with Rosalba that I wanted to make rape but I didn't have any orecchiette at home (and I was too lazy to walk the other direction and get some). She says, "That's OK. You can make "Rape Stuffate" This was a new one for me. What's it take?
Picture of the ingredients

The list of ingredients:
1 kilo of cleaned Rape (turned out to be way to much for me so I have some for lunch today)
2-3 tomatoes (I used 5 or 6 cherry tomatoes because I wanted to buy a big bag of cherry tomatoes for the weekend)
1-2 cloves of garlic
2 bay leaves (Foglia d'alloro, sometimes I call these "foglia d'oro" or "leaves of gold" because I could swear that's what they say)
peperoncino
olive oil

You heat up about 2 cups of water (with a little salt) and add all the above cook for about 10-15 minutes and there you have "Rape Stuffate".

Just like she mentioned the smell when it's cooking is great. I was a little disappointed how it looked at the end. The red of the tomatoes tends to wash out the dark green of the rape. Maybe I did something wrong and the tomatoes were supposed to be added later. I don't know. Hey this isn't a foodie blog!!! It tasted good but then again it's all ingredients I like so I expect it to.

Day 4 Pasticceria

Today is a day of rest so I’ll post more tomorrow. Hey, nobody said the blog had to be long. For the photo I’ll leave you with something I bought today. This little tray is their 5 euro special. I picked out most of them but let the guy behind the counter talk me into a few. I like those chocolate sandwich ones the best. I stopped in to the Pasticceria this morning only because I had to leave a special order for Tuesday morning, but I couldn't help buying something.
Oh yeah and “boun viaggio” to Erika and Valerio. They were married back in August and left for their honeymoon this morning. They are spending over a week in Tokyo. This photo is from last night in the store. Marco Ruu and Antonella jumped in the photo too.

Havin' a heat wave!

Well Mother Nature has turned up the heat this week and just in time (well maybe we sweated and whined through a few days) the air conditioning came on at work. Meanwhile at home I haven't turned on the AC YET but I think tonight I may give in.
The heat means you don't feel like cooking so the picture is what I did the other night instead. It's all the ingredients for a piadina. Piada (flour tortilla), cheese, and prosciutto crudo (di Parma-of course). You just spread on some cheese and lay on the crudo and then toast slightly. I guess really I could go out for something like this, because they are made at several little stands by the sea.
Only Friday to go then... The beaches aren't usually crowded in June but I imagine this weekend they will be.
Look! Mara sat still and allowed me to photograph her! I thought I would share it.

Escosazio, the photos

Read about the Escosazio here. Now we have photos. I went to the restaurant again Friday night with the Gym crowd. It may be our last dinner before the gym closes for the summer. Last weekend was warm. This weekend was hot! It's going to be hard to keep going when your sweating just standing around.

This is the meat counter. Remember you go up and just pick out what you want. We sat down to eat at 10:45 PM so the some things are getting close to empty.

This is a close up of some of the "bombette" and I see some boscauole (that's how it's spelled on the sign) in the top middle tray of the picture. The top left of the picture is one of my favorites. It's like beef wrapped in bacon. The ones on the top right that are wrapped in zucchini were better this time than I remember. I thought I didn't like that one.

This is where they cook any piece of meat that can be stuck on a stick. Notice the bags of wood chips under the grill. I forgot to ask what type of wood they use.

Finally, some cooked up for us. They actually bring out the meat in stages (I can't really call them courses) so nothing gets cold. This would be the primi (or sausages) dish. The antipasti is meatballs and french fries but that actually was gone too quick to photo.

This is one of the last "stages". Is that a salad? Don't be silly. There is a steak cut into strips under under that rucola and Parmesan cheese. Although I think they do have a salad.

John, Don't worry most restaurants are NOT this meat related. They are more seafood based which is what makes this place so special.

Bacon

This morning was a good slow morning started off with old friend, bacon. You see I had given up on it because I heard somewhere that you couldn't get it Italy. All they have here is pancetta and that just doesn't cook up crispy like bacon.
This all changed when Natalie and I visited "Il Salu...mino" together during her visit. She asked me if they had bacon and before I could answer Mino heard "bacon" and said "Si, Si". I was amazed. Here I was going what I heard through the grapevine and it was so wrong. Mino said that Levoni makes bacon and they are very proud of the "original style" in which they still make it. I had no clue how bacon is made so I thought the only real test is to try it. His first slice was ridiculously thick and the second too thin but now he cuts it just right every time. And yes it tastes so frickin good. I would say it's perfect but I haven't had it in so long that I may be biased right now. I'll grade it against mom's the next time I'm in town for some BLTs. MMMmmm BLTs...
Some of my fondest memories of bacon takes me back to the good old days of working at Hardees for the morning shift. I would cook up 120 strips of bacon before the place even opened. I could snatch up a piece hot off the grill when it's just turning crispy but not quite there. MMmmm. I hope this is just a passing greasy kick that I'm on. I think not too long ago I was talking about all the good healthy food I'm eating now. Bacon doesn't fit into that category.

Ice Cream

While back in my hometown for the holidays I naturally thought about Italy and gelato. This led my parents to think back to a little place in Cincinnati. Established in 1908 Aglamesis Brothers could be considered a historic landmark (getting close to 100 years!). My parents talk about this place, as I’m sure I’ll talk about the places in Italy some day... meeting up with friends, going there on some special day and, of course, good ice cream. All this set me into motion and being the purest I am I couldn’t put it on my website without going there and tasting it for myself. I had the double chocolate chip pictured here and it definitely makes the grade. You can see from the interior photo that store holds on to that nostalgic charm you would want in a true ice cream parlor (not a chain!). I didn’t notice until now that there standard ice cream is labeled as "French style" and they have Italian ice or sorbet. I guess I have to go back and try that. Although… the website says they deliver, but I’m pretty sure it won’t make it to Italy.

Food of the Day

It seems in Italy there is almost a different food that should be eaten every around every holiday. Today, for some odd reason connected with the Immacolata, we were having puccia for lunch. I thought puccia was bread with olives in it but evidently it is also a type of panino. There was a 10-minute discussion on puccia from Brindisi verses the others in the region and I won’t get into here because mainly I was dieing of hunger and not paying attention. Where are these pucce? That’s all I could think about.
So the food arrives late but that’s ok until it became painfully obvious that we are very short. Everyone was SUPPOSED to get 2 pucce because they are pretty small. Our original group of around 15 had grown to 32 people so we ordered 70 (the day before) just to be sure. Well in the end it seems that we only got 50 pucce and most of those were eaten before this was realized. So I got screwed (along with about 5 others) because I didn’t attack the sack of sandwiches like a wild dog. Somehow I did get the above photos with my phone before the panini disappeared. I’m just a little pissed off right now. I wouldn’t be so upset if this was the first time we were short, but it seems to happen a lot. One of the drawbacks of doing things in a large group!! I did get my 5 euros back since I didn’t get anything to eat. I sure hope that they called back to the store and asked for a refund.