I’ve been home from Italy for a week now, and I can no longer claim jet lag as a reasonable explanation for my lack of posting; I’m going to sum up, with as much efficiency as I can muster, the last tidbits of the soupapolooza! goes to Italy summer.

There was a shin-dig for Ferragosto, which is an Italian holiday that has something to do with the ascension of Mary, but don’t ask me what that means since I was raised by godless heathens, thankyouverymuch. But nonetheless, Bossy and I chose to celebrate this holiday by braising a shinbone (called a “stinco” in Italian, tee-hee) and inviting our international friends over for some drunken reveling.

There were also two more trips into Florence, both unsuccessful in their promise of the now unicorn-like vintage silver gelato spoons. On the first excursion, a Sunday, we blindly brought the Cinquecento into the city center without consulting a map. It wasn’t pretty, made even less pretty when we found ourselves squeezing (and screeching) down a one-way street exactly the wrong way. We did get another excellent lunch and dinner (pizza!!!) with Beefcake and the Baron before we drove back to Panicale, dejected and stuffed.

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.

PostedAugust 21, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriessalad, positively piggy

Tagssalad, viva italia!, recipe, guanciale, cucina povera, panica-lazy, positively piggy, august adventure, umbrian adventure, soupapalooza!, cabbage, vintage gelato spoons, lunch, your arugula is only 50 yards away

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Driving up switch back after switchback on a single lane road through the Apennines, Bossy turned to me and said “[Blonde] and McClure are keeping our eyes on the road.”

We had just made the two hour trek from Panicale to Norcia (the “Disneyland of sausage” according to the owner of our villa and the Bossy Blonde’s sometime boss, the Contessa di Mozzarella), and were heading towards Castelluccio, the place where the best lentils in the world are found. All of this sounds well and good, I am sure, but we were winding up this steep, steep mountain like a corkscrew and there was barely a guardrail keeping us from plummeting to our deaths in the valley below.

“Neither [Blonde] nor McClure are billy goats, so this is good.” I said, trying my best not to rubberneck when we noticed an ambulance scraping an unfortunate motorcyclist off the road while four of his distressed, luckily leather-clad, biker friends looked on in panic about a mile or so up the climb.

I’d never really given lentils much thought. They’re beans and I’m American. I eat black eyed peas on New Year’s Day because I’m both southern and superstitious, but other than that I wouldn’t say that they really have a place in my diet. But Bossy has made a couple of batches of lentils since we’ve been here and I’m kind of obsessed with them now. Even our Italian friends have been super impressed with the flavor and texture of her recipe, though one of them did tell me that lentils are basically just eaten in the winter for them, too, just like our black eyed peas.

PostedAugust 20, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriespositively piggy, soup

Tagsviva italia!, recipe, panicale, the Disneyland of sausage, Castellucio, lentils, billy goat gruff, motion sickness, umbrian adventure, august adventure, Apennines, Italian adventure, Norcia, Its a small world, Bossy

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Bossy and I almost turned around when the thunderclouds opened up on us as we exited Firenze Certosa off the A-1 (the wrong exit, by the way, but more on that some other time); we were both wearing flimsy sundresses, after all, which had seemed like a perfectly appropriate sartorial decision to make for a mid-August excursion in land-locked Italy. It had been unseasonably comfortable in Umbria, but there was no reason to think it would be 60 degrees and rainy, unless, of course, either one of us had actually bothered to check the weather report.

But we had a two-fold mission for the day-- to pick up a painting for the owner of the villa we had taken over (Bossy’s sometime Boss, the Contessa di Mozzarella), and to have lunch with a fabulous artisanal food exporter, let’s call him the Baron of Borgo de’ Greci, whom Bossy had been provided with a cursory introduction to through mutual friends.

I suggested we turn right back around to Panicale as soon as we finished our errands, as this was not a proper introduction to the city due to my lack of a sweater and wellies. Bossy suggested that my “creature comfort needs” were a little “needy”.

But anyway, we managed to find our windy way into the parking lot of the train station and into the back of a taxi right as the rain REALLY started, and I have to say it was kind of magical, if not a bit cold.

PostedAugust 19, 2010

Authormelissa mcclure

Categoriesquick pics!, gear and miscellany

Tagsaugust adventure, umbrian adventure, florence, viva italia!, vintage silver gelato spoons are like unicorns, soupapalooza!, Beefcake, Bossy, officina profumo di santa maria novella, the Baron, panicale, contessa di mozzarella

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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.

olive oil gelato: the Baron of the Borgo, Bossy, Beefcake and Bologna... and a club sandwich at the Four Seasons

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

walking in a lentil wonderland: lunch on the moon (or just the highest settlement in the Apennines)

lunch in the big city: the rainiest day in the history of Florence

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.