It is HOT today. Maybe not Houston hot, but for the first time in my adventure in Umbria I understand what some seasoned Italian travelers meant when they said it might be a little “uncomfortable” at the end of August in landlocked central Italy.

I feel like Italians have an almost pride in their pain the same way they do their regional pastas, so I wasn’t about to believe their doom and gloom scenario, either. After three weeks of mild, lovely weather with a few rain showers in between, I was convinced they were all just prone to this exaggeration in the same way they’ll pooh-pooh any shape of pasta other than the ones they were weaned on. I had no evidence to believe them when they said this loveliness was just a fluke and that soon I would roast under the Umbrian sun.

Roast we did today. Like beets at 450 degrees under tinfoil.

We were too steamy or “Panica-LAZY”, as Bossy proudly said, to make a third trip (a full fifty yards!) back into town to pick up arugula and vegetables for a lunch time salad. Our only other option: the sad tatters in our fridge, which seemed at the time like we were completely giving up, but turned out to be one of my favorite meals of my trip so far.

It’s not every day that you walk by François Mitterand on the road to Paciano. Unless, of course, your friend, the Bossy Blonde, has decided that the flattened frog on your morning walk should have a name and that it should be of a dead French man, and that she only knows of one. I am totally in favor of this. I am decidedly all for the anthropomorphizing of any and everything (I have named all of the cars I’ve ever owned, obnoxiously enough) and why not memorialize the man whose last meal was a tribute to the particularly cruel, yet delicious, cuisine of his homeland (the outlawed eating of ortolan, anyone) by naming roadkill after him?

Anyway, after two full weeks of the daily sighting of Monsieur Mitterand in all his squashed glory, he was absent today, no longer a mile marker for my morning routine, having most likely been washed away in the torrential, unseasonable downpour we had in Umbria on Saturday. A storm that started just as our poor, mistreated and overworked Fiat gasped back into town after a ridiculous “little drive” that should have taken 45 minutes.

We had set out to go to a cheese factory outside of Todi with the idea to then carry on to Orvieto for some lunch and bubbles, but it quickly devolved from a great plan into a two and a half hour carnival ride on roads that Bossy later described as like “driving on radiatore, radiator shaped pasta” through the insane mountainous landscape. It was BRUTAL, and only salvageable as a day because there was CHEESE (my favorite being the black truffle pecorino) at the finish line at Caseificio Montecristo.

cabbage and guanciale salad: cucina povera. who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?

cannellini soup: A road to Rome isn’t necessarily the road to Rome

Why? Because soup is cheap, delicious and easy. Kind of like me.

a weekly attempt to eat well and to savor life. or to see how much food I can get on my clothes.