Wednesday, 18 ottobre 2006
(Continued from Poggio Antico)

San Gimignano is called the “medieval Manhattan” because of its many towers. It is one of the most beautiful Tuscan hill towns, making it a mecca for tourists. The city itself was lovely, but the views from it were absolutely stunning.

Our bus parked near the bottom of the hill and we walked up to the center of this pedestrian-friendly town. I immediately made a beeline to the farmacia, which was in the center piazza, marked, as all pharmacies are, by a green cross. Italian towns don’t have the big stores that offer everything - each little store has its niche. When I got there, the farmacia had just closed at 2 for an afternoon break until 4:30. Knowing that pharmacies stagger their hours in Firenze, I stepped into the tourist information station next door.

I stood at the counter until it was obvious the person behind the counter was not going to acknowledge my presence, then said, “Scuse…”

She looked up at me with irritation. “Is there another farmacia in town?” I asked meekly.

“It opens at four!” she snapped and looked back down at her magazine.

“But,” I tried again, “is there another farmacia in town?”

“NO!” she barked, not bothering to look up this time.

I have to admit that when I was told to go to these tourist information stations for the best information, no one said that they had to be polite about it. But my irritation at her rudeness got my mind off my queasy stomach long enough that I realized that I’d be okay until 4:30. Although, by God, that pharmacy had BETTER open back up. I had little trust in my luck in this matter by now.

By this time I had totally lost Sandino, so I wandered around the little shops and galleries in town. This was the first length of time I spent on the trip when I was not compulsively snapping photos, because Sandino had the camera. I felt the pangs of addiction, and then I enjoyed my solitude. I talked to a tapestry weaver who incorporated his tapestries into sweaters and shawls. I watched a potter turn tall bottles in his studio shop. I climbed up to the highest level and sat, looking out over the landscape.

There was one disjointed moment in a gift shop when “Stuck in the Middle with You” was playing over the sound system.

I went into an art supply shop to buy a sketchbook, and the proprietor, an older man, did not switch to English when I attempted to speak Italian. We spoke at length about colors, etc. and I was delighted every time I made sense! He was quite friendly and patient and addressed me formally, using Lei, which impressed me. I selected several small items and totaled it up as costing 25 euros, handing him the money. He asked me if I had one euro, and I assumed that I had miscalculated the price and it was 26. Then he handed me five euros back. He had given me a discount without me asking for it. This was the only time I experienced such Italian charm (other than Spannocchia), and I appreciated the encounter.

Finally, the farmacia opened and I bought 10 pieces of Dramamine gum for 10 euros. That came to about $1.30 a piece, and they were worth every penny. Even though San Gimignano was a tourist town, I noticed that the prices still seemed lower than Firenze. I bought a cheese grater in a olive wood box, a purchase I would later find to be unusable, but it’s pretty.

I kept running into classmates (this was a really small town) who told me that Sandino was looking for me. We finally found each other and treated ourselves to gelati. I recovered my precious camera and snapped a photo, looked at it, and told him he would hate it because he was eating ice cream with his stomach poked out. So he posed for another one sucking it in.

At the bottom of the hill, before getting on the bus, I finally had my first European squat and pee experience in a public bathroom. I had wondered what the heck everyone had been talking about - except for some differences in how to flush them, the toilets so far had all been familiar sit-down versions. It’s not so bad, there are ridged tiles that you put your feet on and a handrail for balance. And no, the toilet paper was not like wax paper, or craft paper. It was regular toilet paper. It was given to you by an attendant as you walked in, who you tipped.

Sandino is responsible for the other photos in this post.

To be continued…
Next post: Working at Spannocchia.

That old charge of elitism in regards to those who advocate local and/or organic food raised its ugly head again over at Grist Magazine. Tom Philpott, a guy with whom I’m usually sympatico, addressed elitism by writing about trying to buy a local meal for a celebration in Chapel Hill for under 30 bucks, beginning with spending half of it on a bottle of wine from Italy.

Man.

Then he buys steak. From Montana. Because he can’t find local meat in Chapel Hill on Sunday. Part of this is simply not knowing the territory. There’s an Earth Fare in Chapel Hill that sells N.C. free range chicken. I don’t shop in Chapel Hill, but it’s known to be a great place for local food. But you have to plan ahead. You have to be flexible.

Because what every locavore knows is that sometimes you go with what’s available, not what you’re craving at the moment.

And every locavore knows that if you don’t have money, you don’t go for the steaks (unless they’re on special!). I buy what I can afford, and that means making careful choices. I’m not poor, but I sure ain’t rich. I do what I can, and by switching over little by little I’ve found that I don’t really pay any more for groceries than I used to when I bought a lot of processed food at the grocery store. If I chose filet mignon instead of stew beef, then yeah, that would be a budget-buster. If I ate chicken breasts a couple of times a week, that would be expensive. You learn strategies. You adapt. Eating local is not elitist or only for the wealthy, but they have a lot more choices, just like they do in a regular grocery store. Just like they do in life.

And Tom Philpott knows this. I know that he does, because I read his columns. He has a lot of good ideas in this article, and he does address the fact that time restraints are a big problem for working folks looking for local food, but I wish he’d written about a normal meal for two, one that costs, say, under $10. Like my husband and I eat all the time. It’s not as hard as it seems.

Today was a pooky day - I went to bed feeling very run down, and woke up with swollen glands and a headache, so I stayed home and read in bed most of the day, finishing A Thousand Days in Venice, a nice true Italian romance. It has a recipe for a stuffed pumpkin that I’d like to try. I need to find mascarpone.

While I was laying around, I simmered some chicken stock most of the day with herb stems and veggie trimmings that I stash in a plastic bag in my freezer and some carrots from the Back Forty. Turned out the “soup bones” were all wings, so I strained it all, picked out the meat, and put it in the fridge to chill so I can skim off the fat tomorrow.

Tonight I browned two pounds of hamburger, added half to the tomato sauce I made on Sunday, and put the other half in the fridge for chili later this week. We ate spaghetti tonight. I added some of the olive paste that I bought at Poggio Antico, but I’ve yet to cook any of the pasta I bought in Italy. I’m thinking that I’ll put some pasta in the chicken soup.

Loulou pointed me to this recipe for quince brandy. It looks like an interesting blog that I’ll have to check out, but not tonight - off to bed early. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes - it feels like all my energy is vacuumed out of me, and I collapse for a day, then I’m okay. I wonder if I just need the solitude that desperately - but it wouldn’t explain the lymph glands this morning.

I want to get away from the feeling that I should be doing something productive every minute of the day. I definitely waste a good bit of time, but the point is that instead of relaxing I feel guilty about it. I do spend more time than is healthy on the computer, that’s for sure. But I don’t veg out in front of the TV, and I spend a lot of time reading. Yesterday, I didn’t do much other than play on the computer and cook.

I cooked breakfast for lunch - eggs (Back Woods Family Farms), sausage from Moore’s Pork (pasture-raised, sold at Piedmont Triad market), grits (Old Mill of Guilford, milled from corn grown in Yanceyville), and extra-sharp cheddar cheese (the Molners). Then for dinner, I marinated a sirloin tip roast (from Rocking F Farm) with olive oil (Deep Roots Market), garlic (Handance Farm), and rosemary, thyme, and lemon thyme from the Back Forty, turnip greens from the community garden row, and mashed potatoes (Weatherhand Farm) with gravy. So it was a Eat Local Day. I find that most of my home-cooked weekend meals are locally sourced, without me giving much thought to it. It’s become a way of life.

Weeknights are more chaotic - we seldom end up eating a real meal. We eat out or I eat leftovers from the weekend and Sandy might not eat at all if he eats a late lunch. It bothers me greatly, but after twenty years of marriage I’ve figured out when to fight my battles.

We ran a couple of errands and went to Ed McKay’s, one of my favorite places to waste money. If I went there more often, I could really get into some trouble. As it is, it looks like I may need to do a book purge and sell some stuff. Yesterday’s visit netted me hardcover copies of A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon and Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors, a real find! They usually have a good selection on their free shelf too. I picked up a free copy of Memoirs of a Geisha to give to a co-worker. Other women love shoes and jewelry - books and food are definitely my weaknesses.

I’m especially happy about the Madison book because it has several pages and recipes about quinces. The first quince dropped over the fence from my neighbor’s tree into my yard this weekend. Quinces are a pain in the neck to deal with but they have a heavenly aroma. If I did nothing but pile them in a bowl to perfume a room it would be wonderful but I feel compelled to cook them.

I pulled out Weaving Contemporary Rag Rugs to try to jumpstart my re-entry into weaving. I was thinking that I would weave a double width rug as I did with the last one (now defunct from defects and cats and at the bottom of a mulch pile). This one I might do the width of my loom and put into my studio so that it doesn’t get peed or thrown up on. One thing for sure that I’ve learned is that I am not going to be so frugal or lazy that I use strips that are too short. I’ll either use those to tie up tomatoes or sew them together before I weave them in.

Wednesday, 18 ottobre 2006
(Continued from Spannocchia sunrise)

After an early breakfast and a spectacular sunrise, we all got on a rented bus to go to a biodynamic farm, Poggio Antico, and then to San Gimignano for a much anticipated field trip.

This day was bittersweet for me - my excitement about riding through the hills of Tuscany and seeing all the beautiful landscapes turned to horror when I became extremely carsick after only reaching the end of the road from Spannocchia. I could not look out the windows and struggled for a little over an hour not to get sick on my favorite jacket on the bus. I don’t remember ever being so sick in a situation that I could not stop and get out. It was sheer hell and I was doubly miserable because I was missing all the beautiful scenes of Tuscany that I was hearing discussed around me. All I could do was sweat and focus on not throwing up.

THAT was what I forgot to buy in Firenze. Dramamine. Again.

The bus driver was very unhappy about driving on the “white roads” and Charlie and Debby were in constant negotiation with him. “Next time you rent jeep!” he said over his shoulder as we hit a section like a washboard.

I stumbled off the bus at Poggio Antico green to the gills, but I made it through. Then I had to deal with it again on the way to San Gimignano, but this time it was not so long a ride and I sat in the front seat.

Poggio Antico was a lovely farm community. A lot of different foods are produced at Poggio Antico and you could buy many of their products on site. We went into a barn where dairy cows were, for various reasons, inside, and Roberto explained their philosophy, which I will not try to explain here because biodynamic agriculture is very complicated. I’ll just say that biodynamic farmers have particular methods and additives that they use to raise the vitality of the soil, and they are very attuned to nature.

Roberto told us about the process of growing, harvesting, and pressing the olives into oil in their modern frantoio (olive mill). Afterwards, we went into the farm’s store and bought olive oil, pasta, and other products to take back with us. Charlie and Debby bought a variety of cheeses for our picnic, which we tasted along with fresh fruit and salad. A big treat for Sandy and me was a bottle of raw milk that we shared, with just a little for one of the farm cats. Sandy was bowled over by the freshness and taste and so was I. But I grew up drinking raw milk - he had never tasted it. Hopefully we will get a chance to buy this legally in the coming year. Although it is illegal to sell raw milk in most U.S. states, including North Carolina, it is not illegal to drink milk from your own cow, and we may get a chance to buy a cow share from a local farmer.

To be continued…
Next post: The medieval Manhattan.

It’s been a holiday weekend for the Tar Heel Taverners, and most of them had their minds on anything BUT one of these. I went to my mom’s, and for once there were NO leftovers pressed upon us to bring home. As the weary travelers filed into the Tavern, one by one, it became clear that everyone thought that everyone else had brought the food.

That is, until the fabulous Zha K arrived. I’ve had the privilege of eating Thanksgiving dinner at the K’s house twice, and boy, do they put out a spread. My first acquaintance with a deep fried turkey was at their place. Everybody thinks that I’m the Slow Food blogger, but what they don’t know is that I’ve learned a LOT from Zha K.

Trish, super-mom at Bubbles and Baubles, had a busy Thanksgiving, too, but it was bittersweet.

Erin has had about the toughest year that anybody could imagine, but still she found reasons to be thankful at Poetic Acceptance. I think that we all need to send Erin a little extra loving energy this holiday season.

Over at Moomin Light, oldest son made the most incredible sculpey creatures for Christmas presents. What is a sculpey creature, you ask? Go take a look!

Billy Claus the Blogging Poet is calling for all things holiday, including Christmas, “Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Día de la Virgen, Boxing Day, Victory Day (Bangladesh) Winter Solstice, Second Day of Christmas, Immaculate Conception, Constitution Day (Taiwan) St. Lucia Day, Discovery of Haiti Day, Ganga-Bois, Feeding The Sea, Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas Day (Hungary) The Emperor’s Birthday (Japan) Kayin (Myanmar) and even Festivus.” Wait a minute. EVEN Festivus? It should be at the top of the list!

Whew, just reading about all that holiday activity wore me out. Be back after a nap.

“If the person to whom the office belonged was sitting at the cluttered desk, then I wouldn’t be here looking through the personal notes and family photographs covering her workspace. But, the owner of this office was not able to invite me in or ask me to leave.” Kenneth Corn gives us glimpses into two lives in this post - a slice of life from the clues on a missing person’s desk, and the range of emotions felt by the stranger whose job is to document it.

Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock explains that It’s all connected if you are smart enough to see it. I get what he’s saying, but I disagree that you have to be smart. I think that awake would suffice.

Etbnc wrote a post this week that is a perfect companion, I think - To be wise is to see.

Scrutiny Hooligans seems to be pretty thankful about the election. He is disseminating the Congressional Democrats’ plan for The First Hundred Hours. Pretty ambitious!

Late breaking news: This just in from Waterfall: hiking blogger runs almost 17 miles on Blue Friday. Details at her place.

Finally, we leave the Tar Heel Tavern with this reminder of our choices from Christine Kane, who shares Why Gratitude Makes You Happier and Wealthier for a special Thanksgiving dessert.

Use your power of focus to hone in on the beauty and on what makes your heart smile or sing. Recognize the spirit in your life. It’s all around you waiting to be noticed. In the words of Franz Kafka, “It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Next week, the Tar Heel Tavern will be hosted by Nicomachus. Slots for December’s Tavern have been filled, and that’s one more thing to be thankful for! If you would like to host in January, please email Erin at erin AT poeticacceptance DOT com.

Today Sandy took apart the dryer, vacuumed and pulled out all the lint, and put it back together again. And it works. I’m impressed. We had to do this because we could smell lint burning the last time we used the dryer. The filter is poorly designed and it’s easy to get lint down behind it. Usually I like Kenmore appliances, but this one has not been a winner.

I went to the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market first thing this morning, as I do every Saturday morning. On the rare occasion that I can’t go, I feel so deprived. This morning I bought eggs, chicken soup bones (backs, necks and sometimes a wing, in other words), and sweet Italian sausage from Back Woods Family Farms. Wes has some nice handcrafted kitchen shelves and bread boxes for sale that I’m tempted by. I bought my usual half-gallon of milk from Homeland Creamery, my usual oatmeal and honey soap from flirtateous Glenn at Mimi’s Soaps, and Yukon Gold potatoes from Weatherhand Farm.

A relatively new kid at the market is Dodge Lodge Farm. He advertises his produce as chemical-free and sustainably raised, he sells a variety of produce that other organic (certified and non-certified) vendors don’t have there, such as yellow onions, pomegranates, and peanuts, and you usually have to stand in line at his tables. I asked him about the beautiful cucumbers he had for sale, along side tomatoes, yellow squash, and green peppers. He raises them under Canadian-made row covers that greatly extend the season for him, but he says that it has reached its limit. I bought onions, yellow squash, and green peanuts from him. I see squash casserole and boiled peanuts in my near future!

I’ve been simmering tomato sauce on the stove all afternoon, with my canned and dried tomatoes, onion and pepper from Dodge Lodge, basil from the vase on my kitchen counter, and garlic from Handance Farm. I suddenly remembered the dried tomatoes the other day and decided it was time to start doing something with them. I’ll probably make lasagne tomorrow, the Americanized ricotta cheese kind, no meat, and I thought I’d try that no-knead bread that was in the NYT last week. I’ll have to start it before I go to bed, though. Wait, can’t, no yeast. Bummer!

I unloaded the firewood and kindling from my car and put it in some large Mexican pottery pots and a couple of wood bushel baskets on the front porch, so it almost looks like a winter decoration scheme. I will not have to deal with wet kindling this winter. Then I unpacked the greenhouse, blanched at the instructions and the large number of parts, and repacked the greenhouse. Not today. Besides, I’ll have to buy a drill and I am not facing those crowds.

So I spent a good part of the rest of the day moving my weaving books and other art supplies and inspirational crap out to the studio, and unpacked the yarn I moved out there earlier this year. I wove about four passes on the dish towels I warped up about three years ago and quit. I’m thinking about selling my 15-inch 8-harness loom because I don’t like using the hand levers. But I’ll have the studio organized and ready to go by the end of this weekend. Winter will be the time that I can work out there comfortably, and hopefully I’ll get some screens on the windows and door so that I can work out there when it gets warm too. I’m going to start cutting my rag piles into strips for rag rugs, and I’ll save the smaller pieces for quilts. That’s the plan.

Then Sandy and I went to see Casino Royale, the new Bond remake, and all I can say is, Hello, Daniel Craig, SO good to see you. He is the first Bond I’ve been able to stomach since Sean, and not only that, he makes a damn fine one. God, I hated Bond movies all these years. I think that I read all the Ian Fleming books when I was in high school, and being dragged to those Roger Moore travesties on dates during the seventies was torture. No one could get me to Bond movies after the seventies and I couldn’t sit through one for ten minutes on TV.

I received two lovely books in the mail this week - A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi, and Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayes. I’m going to put down Fast Food Nation and dig into one of those now. Maybe fire up the wood stove. Life is good.

So, we’re back home from my mother’s house, where we mingled with a few relatives and family friends and stuffed ourselves silly, as usual. We didn’t do the 100-mile Thanksgiving, but considering that my mother obtained and prepared it all with no thought to my locavore philosophy, she did pretty doggone good. The corn, field peas, and green beans were frozen and canned from her summer garden, within 100 yards. The sweet potatoes were from a farmstand within 10 miles. The turkey even was probably from within 100 miles, but it doesn’t count because it was probably factory farmed. It was all delicious, and nothing was from a box or a can. Next year, we’re gonna try to do it up totally locavore-style.

The pecans were from her trees, although frozen from last year’s crop. That was one tradition I missed this year - the trees didn’t produce. Sometimes that happens. Usually I am quite sore from obsessively stooping and gathering pecans all Thanksgiving day. This time the area around the trees was flooded anyway so it was just as well. Now I am sore from the fire ant bites I received picking up fallen limbs today.

The family that lives behind my mother often raises their own chickens, goats, cows…and this year they had pigs. When I walked back near their fenced pen they ran over to the edge and grunted and wagged their tails! Gosh, it was nice to see somebody raising happy pigs. It makes it really hard for me to eat pork whenever I am reminded of what intelligent, friendly creatures they are, though.

The huge old oaks that mark my mother’s property line are dying and that is very sad for me. Everytime I go down there I haul back a bunch of lightning seasoned wood for our wood stove. This year was no different except that we drove the Toyota Tercel because of continuing problems with the Rodeo. I was surprised at how much firewood I was able to load into the trunk. Mostly it will be for kindling but I needed kindling. I have an order in for a pick-up load of seasoned hardwood next week that will give us plenty of heat this winter.

We decided that we are going shopping for a replacement for the Rodeo very soon, and it will probably be a small station wagon or hatchback this time. When we bought the Rodeo, we were doing reenactments and hauling lots of equipment long distances to events that were sometimes out in the middle of fields, and we needed a lot of secure storage space. That’s not an issue any more since we rarely go to reenactments any more and when we do, we don’t have to take the regiment’s kitchen tables and seats.

On Thanksgiving afternoon I was talking to my mother’s cousin Harry, a very conservative, elderly farmer, and touched on a few things that I do, when he suddenly brought up permaculture. I literally did a double-take and said, “Did you just say ‘permaculture’?” Not only did he know what it was, he is a subscriber to Acres U.S.A. He doesn’t practice any of these ideas, because he says that he is too poor shape and is a little overwhelmed by them, but he has been subscribing to and reading it for 15 years at least. He talked about Joel Salatin. He even had a hat with him with “Acres U.S.A. - A Voice for Eco-Agriculture” on it. I told him that I never knew that there were other radicals in the family! Makes me want to go subscribe to it right now.

Another interesting thing that came up was that my mother, her friend, and Cousin Harry all remembered when there were local canneries where you took your produce and canned it, in cans. They all disappeared a long time ago. What a shame. Mama and I also reminisced about when we drank raw milk from Mr. Cook’s cows down the road, and how healthy we all were, and how good it was!

My mother retired from the post office this past summer at age 82, and is now painting watercolors to supplement her Social Security. She showed me a lot of her new work, and it made me want all the more to get cranking on some painting, weaving, knitting, quilting…I’ve got the jones (double meaning, there - the Jones side of my family seems to be the arty side, as well as the agricultural side) but now I just need to focus on a project and begin.

Today is Buy Nothing Day! Celebrate it with your friends and family!

Wednesday, 18 ottobre 2006
(Continued from Piggies Fantasy and Reality, Wild and Domestic)

I am thankful that I was able to see this sunrise at Spannocchia.
Next post: Poggio Antico