Pici Party

On Thursday after our wine tasting, we returned to Cretaiole for a class on how to make Pici, the local pasta, followed by a group dinner.

Let me just say that I am normally not a fan of trips where groups activities are organized, partly because normally when we take a week-long vacation, we like to just relax and keep to ourselves a bit, but at this time in our trip, it has been fantastic to have all these pre-decided group activities to attend.

Everything is voluntary, so nobody has to participate in anything they don't want to, but it has been really nice after so long by ourselves, to take part in things with other people. And as I have mentioned, Isabella, Carlo and Luciano have been wonderful. They are so energetic, passionate about sharing their lives with us, and about sharing what they love so much about this part of Italy.

Plus Luciano has been the best Italian teacher I could ever have had. He speaks slowly, using the simplest of words, always brings his dictionary, corrects me occasionally in the gentlest of ways, and most of all, he lets me make mistakes. As long as he can understand what I'm trying to say, it's all right if I've used the wrong conjugation or agreement. Especially since I can only speak in the present tense! But as long as I clarify today, tomorrow or yesterday, we're ok.

Anyway, back to the pici class. Pici, as I mentioned, is the local pasta, and it is kind of like a very long, very thick and chewy spaghetti. Pasta in Italy is a whole different animal to what I have tasted in The States; thick and chewy, cooked in water with a whole lot of salt. Isabella laughed at us Americans when we said we cooked pasta with no salt or a pinch of salt. She said you need "a bunch" of salt, and that if salt was so bad for you everyone in Italy would be dead. I have to say, she has a point there.

To make the pici, Isabella dumped out mounds and mounds of flour, and then scooped it out to make an oval wall of flour. Into the middle of this well she added a dozen eggs, water and olive oil. The original poor peasant recipe contained only water, but now they add eggs. The oil was added for us amateurs, to make the dough easier to work with.

She then blended the eggs, oil and water, while incorporating flour from the sides of the wall. The biggest challenge with this part, she said, is not breaking the flour-wall too early and having eggy water pour all over your floor.

After a little while, the mess of liquid and eggs became more solid and she was able to break the wall and incorporate the rest of the flour. Then she started kneading the dough in a way that of course looked simple, but once she partitioned the dough into four sections and gave us a try at kneading it ourselves, proved to be difficult.

Here we are with Phil, Ellen, and our dough baby. I'm afraid this might be the only baby our parents get from us!! Once the dough has reached the right consistency, it is pressed down into a slightly flat oval, then strips are cut. Holding the strip the left hand, you take your right hand and begin rubbing the palm across the dough, hard, while moving to the left. This is supposed to yield long, round strips of pasta, which are then coiled loosely, dipped in cornmeal to avoid sticking and placed in boiling water.

This is, of course, easier than it sounds, and to get a uniform length of pasta is almost impossible. We wound up with think, fat worms, or strands so thin they broke as soon as we picked them up, or lengths of twisted pasta link coils of rope.

In the end, however, they all tasted delicious. Isa boiled them and served them with her pasta sauce made from veal, beef, tomato paste, onion, carrot and celery ( I think that's what she said was in it), and Carlo grilled us up a massive amount of home-made sausage and ribs.

They were the most delicious sausages and ribs ever. The thing I've learned the most about Tuscan food is the simplicity of everything. Most dishes contain only a few ingredients, intended to highlight each ingredient rather than obscure. So bruschetta is simple bread and tomato, sometimes with basil or rubbed with garlic. RUBBED with garlic, not drowned in 15 cloves so that you can't taste anything else.

Pasta dishes are super simple as well, not overburdened with sauce, and often just sprinkled with pecorino and pepper. The sausage Carlo made contained meat, fat, salt and pepper, and nothing else. The ribs were just ribs, sprinkled with a lot of salt and rosemary.

Starting a meal with bread, olive oil and balsamic vinegar? Doesn't happen. I haven't even seen balsamic here. The bread is made for dipping in the sauce of whatever else you've eaten and that's it.

And the pasta here, so much better than any I've had anywhere else; so dense and chewy, even the dried pastas are better. I don't know why it's so different. Is it the amount of salt in the water? The cooking time? I will have to experiment at home.

Wine For My First Harvest

Wednesday I participated in my very first grape harvest, and I have to say, I thought it was glorious.

Cretaiole had already planned a group visit to Icario Winery in Montepulciano for today, and the night before we found out that they were going to be harvesting the grapes and we were invited to join in.

We got very lucky in that the sky was clear and blue, but the temperatures were only in the sixties, so we didn’t roast. The Aussies in the group were telling us about their experiences of harvesting in Australia in temperatures of 110 degrees, and let me tell you, it did not sound fun.

We arrived at the vineyards, were taken by truck down to the vineyards and, armed with a plastic bucket and a pair of shears, we were sent out into the rows. These grapes don’t grow too low, so while there was some bending over required, there was not so much of it that you feared you might never stand up straight again.

The grape we were harvesting was a varietal I had never heard of before, but which they told us was usually grown in Northern Italy. Icario uses it in their entry level wine, blending it with Sangiovese.

I didn’t think about it while I was working, but afterward, Steve mentioned that it was therapeutic, working in the vineyard, and I have to say I agree with him. You can’t think too much when doing the work, you just get into a groove and move from bunch to bunch, cutting, looking to see if there is any mold in the grapes and either cutting it away or discard the bunch, place the bunch in your basket and move onto the next.

Periodically, the tractor advances through the rows and people riding along with it collect your basket, dump the contents into a big tray, and return the basket to you to be refilled.

There is something so beautiful to me about those bunches of grapes, so dark purple and full to bursting. The weight of them was something I didn’t expect, some of the fruit so ripe that it burst when you touched it. And the sweetness of them. Not cloying, but just so wonderfully….ripe. Like no grape I have ever tasted before.

After about two hours, we were taken back up to the winery itself where we saw the trays of grapes that we had just picked get poured out into a long tray which jiggles the clusters of grapes toward the de-stemmer, where the grapes are separated from their stems, partially crushed and funneled into large stainless steel tanks where they will begin the period of maceration (where the juice and skins and seeds all soak together to impart color, flavor, tannins, structure to the wine. Then fermentation will begin.

I will have to try to get a bottle of the 2010 wine when it is released, so I can drink it and say, “I picked this fruit!”

From there we were led to a long table where we had lunch and of course, some of Icario’s wines.

Lunch was pecorino cheese, prosciutto, salami, and bruschetta with what may have been the best tomatoes I have ever tasted. I am not a fresh tomato lover normally, but these were extraordinary: deep, ripe red, sweet, and mixed with fresh basil and olive oil.

I have noticed in Italy that none of the bruschetta we have eaten has contained any garlic, which I think is lovely. Bruschetta in The States is always screaming with garlic, and I think all it does is mask the taste of the tomatoes and olive oil. It is very possible though, that if a restaurant is using un-ripe tomatoes that maybe they need that garlic to mask the flavor.

The first wine we tasted was their white, NYSA 2008 Bianco Toscano, which is a blend of 60% Pinot Grigio, 30% Gewurztraminer, and 10% Pinot Nero (Noir) vinified to be white instead of red.

This was one of the most interesting white wines I have ever had. It is aged in oak barrels which imparts its dark color, and the little bit of Pinot Noir in it gives it a lot of oomph and body. I also found it fascinating that this Italian winery s making a white wine from grapes which I would much more readily associate with Alsace than with Italy.

The first whiff of it, when it was very cold still, yielded a lot of golden delicious apple and grapefruit pith and peel, but as it warmed up, the sweet scent of honey, caramel and apple cider started to dominate. On the palate, the apple was strong,er than the citrus, and a caramel/butterscotch flavor lingered.

We also sampled one of their reds, the Vino Nobile de Montepulciano 2007, which is a blend of 80% Sangiovese, and 20% Colorino, Canaiolo and Merlot. This wine was much more what I ave come to think of as a Tuscan wine, with black cherry, red cherry smoke, leather dried and stewed fruits, violets and that light tinge of iron all emerging.

It was an absolutely lovely day.

Up, Up and Away

Sunday morning we got up at 6am, drove to a house near the town of Montisi, and went for a ride in a hot-air balloon. It was fantastic.

I had never been in a balloon before, and I really had no idea what to expect. Our “pilot” Chris, and Robert, who runs the balloon company (both men from England) prepped the balloon in the yard of Robert’s house.

First they stretch out the balloon fabric on the lawn and then “cold inflate” it by blowing air into it from a huge fan. One the balloon gets to a certain point, they switch to the hot air, which I believe is lit by propane tanks attached to the basket. The balloon goes from lying on its side to floating upright above the basket.

Steve, the pilot and I got in the basket, and, with a few more blasts of hot air, we left the ground. It was such a strange sensation to be standing in a basket, suddenly airborne.

We had a beautiful clear sunny day with very light winds. We floated, as you do, over houses, towns and fields. We saw a herd of white cattle running out to pasture, saw the different colors and patterns of brown plowed fields and rich green ones, stands of olive trees and grape vineyards.

The funny thing is that dogs apparently can hear the sound of the gas when it periodically is fired to blast hot air into the balloon, so as we floated along, we could hear a chorus of dogs barking in our wake.

Apart from the dogs below and the occasional noise from the hot air, being up in the balloon was incredibly still, quiet and peaceful. It was surreal to think there we were, floating 3,000 feet above the ground, in a basket. There was a bit of Willy Wonka about it.

After about an hour and a half we landed in a field with nothing more than a slight bump, tilt, smooth and easy. Chris told us that if the winds are stronger, you can have an “exciting” landing where the basket tips completely onto its side and drags along while the people inside of it fall on each other and get quite cosy.

Robert, who had been driving along following us, met us at the field and while Chris put the balloon fabric back into its sack, Robert prepared a breakfast for us all of local salami, bread, an amazing sheep’s cheese, melon, grapes, almond cookies, plum preserves, and, of course, Champagne!

It was a wonderful experience, and if you have the opportunity to go on such a ride, take advantage of it.

Wine for Not Wearing Pants, Part II (or, Wine for Making an Entrance)

We left off yesterday with a production of Merchant of Venice I acted in in New York many years ago, in which I walked on stage one night without pants. If only I could say that this incident was the only mishap of the production, but alas...

One night, my Lorenzo and I were onstage, me lying with my head in his lap. We were supposed to be gazing at each other romantically while being serenaded, before being surprised by Portia. At the time I had long hair, and Lorenzo's costume included a vest with buttons. As we gazed at each other, I attempted to lift my head up to kiss him, only to be brought up short. I tried again and then realized that my hair was caught on one of his buttons. He attempted to untangle the hair without being too obvious, but nothing worked. This being a production in a tiny theatre, the audience was basically three feet away from us, and happened to be partially filled with my friends. I could hear them giggling and whispering to each other "Jocelyn's hair is caught".

Finally Portia entered, and knowing that we had to jump up in alarm, Lorenzo took hold of the hank of hair and tore it free of the button in one clean jerk. Luckily this actor had long hair, too, so he understood that he needed to hold on hard to the hair so that I wouldn't feel like it was being yanked out of my skull.

The worst incident of the run of this show, though, was the night that Lorenzo and I completely missed our entrance. In the play, there is a bit of a break between Jessica and Lorenzo's escape, and their re-emergence in another scene. Normally Lorenzo and I would go to the dressing room, which was down a flight of creaky wooden stairs, we would hang out for a bit while he played his guitar softly, until we had a sense that it was almost time for our entrance, when we would quietly make our way back upstairs. A lot of dressing rooms have monitors in them so you can hear what is happening on stage and know exactly where they are in the show, but this being a low budget show, we had no such luxury. Instead, you just had to be on top of things and pay attention.

On this particular night, we went down to the dressing room as usual, chatted, laughed and sang songs. We must have Kumbaya-ed it one too many times, because I suddenly had a very bad feeling that we had been downstairs too long. I jumped up from my chair and ran to the bottom of the stairs to hear where they were in the show, and was horrified to realize that we were supposed to be on stage.

Now the idea, when something goes wrong in a show, is to try to get through it smoothly so that the audience doesn't realize that anything has happened. What should have happened that night is that Lorenzo and I should have quietly made our way up the stairs and waited for an appropriate moment to make our entrance. Yup...that is indeed what should have happened.

But is that what happened? Nooo, it was not.

I went into full-on headless chicken mode, flapping at Lorenzo "We missed our entrance!!!!!" and then plowing full-speed up the stairs. Poor Lorenzo came running after me hissing "Wait for me!!!". But did I wait? Noooo, I did not. I must have sounded like a water buffalo clomping up those creaky stairs at full speed. I didn't wait for a good moment to make my entrance, I didn't wait to make sure that Lorenzo was with me, I didn't even stop to catch my breath. I exploded onto the stage, panting and sweating. There was nothing subtle about my appearance on that stage. I might as well have lit my hair on fire and then run around screaming "I missed my entrance I missed my entrance!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" A split second after I burst on stage, Lorenzo burst out after me.

Everything on stage stopped. The other actors stared at us and we stared back at them, wild-eyed and breathing heavily. For a split second no one moved. Then, as always happens, someone started saying their lines again and the show continued, adrenalin rush and all.

My wine for making an entrance is a Gaja Brunello di Montalcino "Rennina" "Pieve Santa Restituta" 2004 from Tuscany. This wine is smooth, mellow, silky and round with a nose of black cherry, currant, roses and cinnamon with black cherry, tobacco and leather on the palate. Brunello is often considered one of the best wines of Italy, and I could see why. It is the kind of wine you want to have with a rich Italian meal. Who knows, it could even make you feel content, in spite of the fact that you might have recently missed an entrance, lost a hank of hair, or neglected to put on pants.