Market Day is Saturday

Market Day is Saturday

In this neighborhood, Saturday is market day. A string of city blocks nearby is blocked off and filled to the brim with produce, fish, cheese, flowers, housewares, clothing… and people. It seems to be when everyone does their big marketing for the week, going home and filling their tiny fridges and cupboards with Italian veggies, fruits and cheese, mediterranean fish, and cheap sundries.

When I was first living here in 2009, it took me a few times to figure out “the system” for buying from the vendors, and then overcome my timidity with my then more-limited Italian. I know the protocol now for waiting in line off to the side, but I still get mixed up over exactly how many green beans come in a kilo… quite a few! Requesting my food in metric amounts is still a guessing game for me.

Then there’s the foxy game the vendors play to upsell a little each time. I ask for 2, they put 3 in my bag. I ask for a half kilo, I go home with somewhere between half and a whole kilo, even though they weigh each order.

And I have yet to find a produce vendor that handles the goods with a gentle touch. It matters with tomatoes, apricots, nespole, plums, figs and others! They use the open produce bag for target practice, flinging each tender fruit toward the bag’s gaping entrance. (Sometimes I’ll observe a vendor for a while and decide not to buy from one that throws the fruit around. It doesn’t leave me many options though.) By the time I walk home with my day’s purchases, I’ve got spoilage already.

All that said, the array not only offers edible delights but a visual one as well. I enjoyed shooting panoramas today to give a sense of the surroundings (those these don’t show the throng of people, nor the clothes and sundries.)

(Click on the photos to see them enlarged.)

Lovely fruits and vegetables.

All sorts of seafood, much of which I’d never seen until I came here.

Olives, canned tuna, pickled foods.

Produce galore.

Produce galore.

Breads and rolls.

Breads and rolls.

We need more olives.

We need more olives.

Yet more produce.

Olives, pickles foods, dried fruits.

Olives, pickles foods, dried fruits.

Nuts and olives.

Nuts and olives.

Salted cod, olives, dried foods and others.

Salted cod, olives, dried foods and others.

More produce, lots of greens.

Many different cheeses and meats.

A meat and cheese vendor.

A meat and cheese vendor.

Today I brought home erbette, rucola, lattuga, fagiolini, pomodori, olive, cipolle, cima di rapa. (leafy greens, arugula, bibb lettuce, green beans, tomatoes, olives, pickled onions, broccoli tops.)

Figs and Borlottis

Figs and Borlottis

Fresh figs are in at the Saturday street market just a couple of blocks away, and they share the display with the magenta-splashed Borlotti bean pods! I bought some of both green figs and black, and enough borlottis to make a pot of something. (I also bought some picadilli tomatoes, slender green beans, pickled onions, dolce “sweet” green olives and cherries.)

As a kid, my only exposure to this fruit was in the form of highly-sugared “Fig Newtons”. Little did I know that the cookie’s core comes from a soft, sweet fruit, that needs no sugar (wonderful when wrapped with prosciutto). I wanted to do a side-by-side taste test of both green and black figs, so I strolled the market to find the best prices, best fruit and best fruit-handler! (Good fruit and pricing is easy to find. A gentle handler is not.) I ended up with enough figs, ultra-ripe and needing to be eaten promptly, that I’ll be eating several a day hoping to keep ahead of their  ripeness.

Borlotti beans caught my eye when I was living here a couple of years ago. Now, during each time in Italy, I’ve got to buy at least enough of the pretty beans to sit myself in a chair for half an hour and shuck the soft shells for a meal. I’ll cook up a pot of the speckled beans, with some fresh sage, garlic, fresh tomatoes, red pepper, zucchini and maybe some pancetta.

Steve Parle’s post will get you started on cooking borlotti beans.

Shopping at the Street Market

Shopping at the Street Market

On Saturday, three blocks from my house, is the weekly street market selling fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, cheeses, olives, preserved foods, household sundries and clothing. It’s a hub-bub of people buying their provisions for the week.

You have to know “the system” for shopping there. Decide what you want, then go stand in line at the side, and wait your turn to request your purchase. You do NOT pick out your own produce! And you do not simply ask one of the stall vendors out front for what you want; you will be cutting in line in front of others. (I had to learn this a few years ago through observation.)

My big complaint is that although the produce is displayed so beautifully, and the quality is so high, the handling of it all is so rough! Ask for such tender things as tomatoes and apricots and they will arrive home bruised and punctured from having been roughly pitched into the bag.

It still feels like high-pressure shopping to me after several years. But whether I stock up for the week there or not, the Saturday street market is always an opportunity for gathering beautiful images. In addition to the gorgeous berries, lemons, olives and fish, I enjoy the “Street Market Script” used to write out the quick signs. (Some have begun to use computer-generated signs and they’ve lost all character.)

 

 

Still Life with Toilet Paper

Still Life with Toilet Paper

First day in town required some grocery shopping. A few things to eat (favorites I’ve missed), and a few things for the house.

Starting from the back, left to right:

  • Cherry tomatoes – sugar sweet and full of flavor. Who needs candy?
  • Fresh Mozzarella di Bufala – the real thing
  • Whole milk for my coffee
  • Granola
  • Toilet Paper
  • Balsamic Vinegar
  • Fazzoletti – Tissues
  • Cutting Board – from the “Euro Store”
  • Rucola – Arugula, for my salad
  • Romano Green Beans
  • Gorgonzola Dolce – I can’t find this in Seattle. It’s gooey, creamy and very mild with random streaks of Gorgonzola goodness
  • Yogurt – Plain, nonfat
  • Liquid Hand Soap
  • Beet/Cabbage Kraut – from the Austrian-influenced deli
  • Balsamic Vinegar Cream – A reduction of vinegar. I like LOTS of it on my salad! $17.00 at De Laurenti’s in Seattle. 3,40 Euro here.
  • Red Pepper – big and luscious
  • Plastic bags – 20, to line my sorting bins for paper, plastic, glass and trash
  • Bresaola – Thin sliced cured beef. (Also available in horse meat.) Can’t get this in the U.S. because of fears of Mad Cow Disease.
  • Nespole – Fruit about the size of an apricot, with a bi-lobed seed in the middle.
  • Scamorza Affumicata – Smoked Scamorza cheese, tied with a cord for hanging in the smoking process.
  • Bread – also from the deli. Dense, moist, hearty. Atypical Italian, but more common in northeast Italy.
  • Pears

Today’s shopping cost 48 Euro ($61 U.S. at the current exchange).

Here’s my “Still Life with Toilet Paper”
(click for a larger view)

And then I had to arrange things in a decorative manner:

Catanzaro Calabrese Waves

Catanzaro Calabrese Waves

It’s no joke that I’m in the “presidential suite” at the Palace Hotel, in the region of Calabria, the town of Catanzaro Lido. The waves of the Ionian Sea are rolling in just off my private balcony. I could throw a stone (hard) and it would land in the water, on the other side of the Via Lungomare – the road along the sea. I will sleep with the sound of incoming saltwater tonight.

When one “leaves their options open” or “plays it by ear” sometimes there aren’t many options left, thus, the Presidential Suite, with it’s brocade-clad, padded walls. But after the raucous three nights in Cefalu and Taormina Sicilia, I needed some quiet and something unlike Disneyland.

Last night I slept a much-needed, holy sleep. Today I amused myself with exploration. First thing, I went to the little travel agency next to my hotel to buy my ticket for a long train ride tomorrow. At the agency, I met Valentina and Aurelia, and a man they know from Naples. We all laughed and talked for half an hour and it was the kind of personal connection I needed. (When I returned to my room tonight, Aurelia dropped by a beautifully packaged gift of some homemade soppressata. How dear! I happened to have brought some “Seattle Spices” along with me in case I needed a gift, plus some personal note cards, so I wrote out some notes to the two women and stopped over to drop them off.)

Aurelia’s Soppressata is delicious, with a slight smokey flavor:

After the travel agency, I hit the road… and then stood there. I found the newsstand where I could buy a city bus ticket, then I found the bus stop and asked a young guy if I was in the right place to go to the city of Catanzaro (the part up on the hill). I was at the right stop and the bus was “10 minutes away”. Hopeful and anxious passengers started gathering, and waiting, and complaining. Congested traffic on narrow streets in Catanzaro Lido was almost comic. (Imagine two cement mixers passing each other! They did so in the extra width of an intersection, likely well-practiced.)

As I waited with everyone else, I was pleased that I was having a snippet of REAL daily life of a Catanzaro citizen. (There wasn’t a tour group in sight.) An hour after waiting, I got on the bus with just a small, general map of the two Catanzaros, and absolutely NO idea where I was going, what I would see or when I would get off. How lost could I get? I could always get a cab if it came to that.

I marvel at the systematic chaos that is traffic in Italy, and especially here in the south. It all seems to work, but slowly. There are very few stop lights and much bravado, and it took forever for the full-size city bus to make it through Catanzaro Lido. We stopped at the train station, then through little pocket towns like beads on a string that seem to comprise greater Catanzaro.

We kept winding up toward the hill top. What was I looking for? People. Curious sights and signs. Something to catch my eye. History. I could find the duomo – cathedral – on my little map, but couldn’t determine where we were in relation to each other.

I rode until the near-northernmost point of the city and got out at lunchtime. In a little grocery, I bought toothpaste, shampoo, 50 grams of mortadella and a sliver wedge of some lovely blue cheese. At the neighboring baker’s, I bought a square of focaccia with tomato sauce, which they heated for me. I carried my stash through the city amidst 10-story apartment buildings and scrawny, stray cats, and found a little park bench in a windy spot. I lay the meat and cheese onto my focaccia, folded the whole thing in half and had an amazing sandwich, washed down with San Pellegrino.

Since it had taken nearly 2 hours to get UP to the top, by 3:00 I figured I’d better start heading back down to the hotel. It was a quicker journey somehow, and I got off at the west end of town to walk, look, shoot and shop for dinner and my train lunch tomorrow. It’ll be a 7-hour journey tomorrow, with one shuttle ride, three coarse, regional trains and two quick train transfers. There’ll be no time or place to buy food, so this afternoon I stopped at the bakery for a couple of fresh rolls, at the meat shop for fresh buffalo mozzarella, at the produce vendor for fresh peas in-the-shell, datterini tomatoes, two mandarins and a pear, and the pastry shop for a couple of biscotti. That ought to be a lovely train lunch!

How did I pick Catanzaro in the first place? I was in Sicilia and just had to get out of Taormina. I was heading east to Puglia and Catanzaro was in between. It’s also the hometown of my first Italian “professoressa”, Enza. And… quite simply, I was able to find a hotel room available.

Tomorrow, from the ball-of-the-foot here in Calabria, to the heel in Puglia.

Market Lunch

Market Lunch

How can there be any other way to eat? The Saturday market is now just one block away from my apartment and it goes on for blocks. The selection of meats, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, and other delicious things makes the market a must-stop. Apparently everyone local thinks so, too.

Ahh! Grana Padano! Note the pattern on the side of the cheese wheel. When you see that diamond-shaped imprint, you know it’s the real thing.

Why have butter when you can have lard (or olive oil)? Yum! A slice of lard on a good hunk of bread: Yes!

My purchases today included:

  • Bouquet of anemones for my friend, Ewa
  • “Sweet” Olives from Puglia – Green and meaty
  • Cherry Tomatoes from Sicily
  • Pomodori di Pachino – Green and red skinned, crisp tomatoes
  • Pickled Artichoke Hearts and Onions
  • Ravioli stuffed with asparagus and fresh ricotta
  • Basil – dirt still on the roots
  • Eggs – handwrapped
  • Peas – fresh in the shell
  • Mozzarella – freshly made
  • Mortadella of Wild Boar with Black Truffles and Pistachios (!!!)

I couldn’t wait to get home and shove it all in my mouth!
Oooo! The Mortadella with truffle!
The pickled onions and sweet olives!

I cooked the ravioli while I cut up the tomatoes, basil and some of the mozzarella. When the pasta was finished, I shelled the fresh peas right onto the hot ravioli, then dumped everything together and drizzled it all with bright green extra virgin olive oil and some crema di balsamico, a reduced balsamic vinegar from Modena.

Oh… Wow. Mmm.
…And this food is not “gourmet”. And it’s not being sold at high-priced, specialty grocery stores. This is daily fare.

This is how we should all be eating.

Ciao da Milano!

Ciao da Milano!

Friday, April 29. The Milanese are still wearing their winter jeans, puff jackets and scarves. I’m wearing black linen capris and sleeveless blouses. I arrived in Milano Wednesday at 9:00 a.m., to a morning warmer than Seattle… yet I’m glad to have brought a little summer jacket.

Robin-like birds started singing early this morning. By the time I looked at the clock, it was 5:00 and they had already roused a chorus. I slipped back into sleep, and when I awoke, it was then the doves I heard, cooing in the courtyard trees.

The sky is overcast. There’s a bit of a breeze, and we had both sprinkles and sunshine by day’s end. The church bells just started chiming. It’s a quarter-til-6:00 in the evening. Why aren’t they waiting ’til the hour?

– – – – –

On Wednesday, the short train ride from the airport brought me to Cadorna Station in central Milano. I caught a cab to the apartment I’ve rented for this week, in the hip-and-artsy Navigli district, just blocks away from my old apartment and one of the grocery stores I always used to shop at.

Late morning, drowsy from the long travel and a little hungry, I went across the street to Trattoria Madonnina with its city-wide reputation… for coffee and lunch served by an unhappy waitress. I sat on the courtyard-side, jasmine-covered patio, with red-checked tablecloths and red, plastic chairs. (The WC is an old-style pit toilet with white, ridged ceramic foot pads for accurate positioning.) The morning was slow and relaxed with a cool, mid-spring sun and Milano’s classic hazy-blue sky. Neighborhood locals passed through the courtyard with their big, round “ciaos”.

I stopped in to the grocery to see my friend, Justine, cutting prosciutto in the meat department. She’s the meat cutter at the store and has the most beautiful smile. It touched my heart that her face lit up to see me and we gave each other an excited, european, two-cheeked kiss and chatted between customers.

It feels as if it’s only been 2 weeks since I was last here. As if I was back in Seattle just to check on a few things and see family, friends and clients. Actually, 9 months have passed since I packed up and left Milano, but it feels like I’ve come home, as I walk these familiar streets and hear the city’s sounds of sirens and courtyard conversations, soccer cheers and scooter accelerations.

In planning these two months, I gave myself the luxury of a fairly unplanned first week here in Milano. I haven’t even told all my friends that I’m here yet, because I haven’t wanted this week to be a full flurry of gatherings. I’ve taken my naps and slept as needed to get over the late-nights’ crush to leave Seattle, the long travels and resulting jet lag. I’ve focussed on getting systems up and running. I reactivated my Italian cell phone  with its rechargeable SIM card, unlocked my ancient (1st generation) iPhone (thanks to Luigi) and transferred the SIM card from one phone to the other. I was allowed use of the wifi at the Design School and have spent hours online, sitting amidst design students in the computer lab while I booked air and hotels for Sicily and Puglia for the coming two weeks.

Connectivity-hooked that I am, with no wifi in this apartment, and inconvenienced by only being online when the computer lab is open, I bought a “chiavetta” – little key – from TIM, one of the Italian carriers and the supplier of my cell phone SIM card service. Very patient Valentina at the TIM store on Corso San Gottardo explained my options and then waded through setup with me. I can now use the key modem independent of wifi availability throughout all of Italy (though it won’t work on my iPad because of device power issues).

Logistics. Though vastly less disruptive to my “life system” to come abroad for “just” 2 months rather than packing up and moving here, it’s still a big effort and taxing. How often do I figure on doing this? Once… twice a year? Would two weeks satisfy me? Will I always want a month or two or more? And to what end? Am I naive in feeling I have some sort of tie to Italy and her people, the friends I’ve made here? Am I holding a glamorized, fantasy of living partly in Italy? And where does that come from?

It’s Friday evening and there’s chatter in the courtyard, an enclosed canyon of a space between several of this big city’s 5-story apartment buildings.

Still moving slowly, I’m not compelled to go out tonight. Rather, I’ll make myself a salad of fresh greens, Sicilian tomatoes, long-missed bresaola, scamorza affumicata, some oil and vinegar. Maybe this weekend I’ll head down the bike path on an already-borrowed bike for some fresh ricotta cheese, and then later meet up with a girlfriend to check out the latest art museum show.

Here just two days so far, I’ve shopped for olive oil and intimates, cured meats and internet keys. At a quarter-til-eight in the evening, the doves are cooing again.

I’m back in Milano.
Ciao!

Farmers Market Lasagna

Farmers Market Lasagna

Seattle’s chilly summertime is winding down with scattered sunshine following cloudy mornings. Warm evenings are rare, but, once again, the waterside neighbors initiated a dinnertime potluck along the shoreline last Friday, the start of a holiday weekend. I vowed to bring “something Italianesque”, and told them I likely wouldn’t know what it would be until mere hours before I headed out my back door to cross the street.

I wanted to try my hand at making homemade pasta. Regrettably, over the course of more than a year in Italy, I never took a cooking class! No one ever took me aside to show me how to whisk an egg into a well of flour, bring it up into a dough, knead it sufficiently, roll it out and slice it into handcut noodles.

Feeling intrepid, I located “Uncle Bill’s” web site offering an ingredient list and method for “Homemades” (noodles), and found a YouTube video showing a quicker process, How to Make Pasta from Scratch in 5 Minutes (using a food processor instead of the time-honored flour well). I then called my friend, Sally, and asked to “steal” her hand-crank Marcato Atlas 150 Pasta Maker.

It really did only take 5 minutes to mix up my first ever pasta dough and handcut a bundle of tagliatelle.

Thinking about our neighborhood dinner, I conjured a “Farmers Market Lasagna“? The day before, umbrellaed market stalls had filled the street at Burien’s Town Square and I browsed for a tasty collection of veggies to nestle between wide sheets of fresh pasta. I scouted the best of each vegetable, added them to my shopping bag, then went home to cut, grill, simmer and prepare the following:

  • Grilled eggplant
  • Roasted, thick-walled, red peppers
  • Roma & beefsteak tomatoes, peeled, seeded and cooked down to a chunky sauce
  • Caramelized Walla Walla sweet onions
  • Freshly-made pesto Genovese of basil, pine nuts, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, salt and some grana padano cheese that I brought back from Milano
  • Fresh mozzarella and ricotta

Fresh pesto is vivid green and always scents the kitchen (and the cook’s hands) with the smell of a summer garden. Making a batch, you might as well make enough for friends and the freezer! (Clean the interior surface of the jar after you’ve dished it out, then cover the pesto with a skiff of olive oil. This keeps the pesto from oxidizing and turning black, and from getting moldy. Store it for a week or so in the fridge; for longer storage, keep it in the freezer.)

Not quite jam, pesto is still good when smeared lightly on a slice of Tuscan-style bread!

Look at the silky smooth, beautiful ribbon of pasta, just waiting to be laid down into the lasagne dish! Just a couple more turns through the finer settings on the Atlas and it was ready to go. The Milanese “Amaretti di Saronno” tin has been my flour can for close to 30 years. Prescient.

My maiden noodles were set out to dry a bit while I finished rolling and cutting. I don’t have noodle drying racks, so occasional flipping on the cookie sheets was going to have to suffice. (I love the big mess of a fully-involved kitchen!)

I cooked my pasta sheets in salted, boiling water for only about 2 minutes, drained them, oiled them a bit to prevent their sticking, then started the layering of vegetables and cheeses. (The smaller lasagna went into my freezer for another day. Mmm.)

Since everything was already cooked before it went into the pan, the Farmers Market Lasagna only needed enough heat to melt the cheeses and blend the flavors. When it came out of the oven, I wrapped the dish in my apron, and carried it over to the neighbors. Eight of us enjoyed appetizers in the upper yard before winding down the wooded trail to the bulkhead beach and the rest of our dinner.

Over the course of the evening, we enjoyed an outstanding selection of Italian wines, including a Chianti Classico Riserva, Brunello di Montalcino and a Barolo! The sunset couldn’t have been much prettier.

There’s nothing like a bunch of “grown-ups” sitting around a fire singing camp songs and old hymns. Barbara tried to get us headed in the right direction when singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” as a round.

I’ve talked to many people around Seattle that don’t even know their neighbors (let alone eat and sing camp songs with them)! Returning to my neighborhood, and the friends around me here, has been one of the big joys of my homecoming.

My Raw Meat Salad

My Raw Meat Salad

I’m going to miss my Insalata di Bresaola, my salad of dried, cured (raw) beef. Boo hoo. They can’t bring bresaola into the U.S. from Europe because of the mad cow disease X years ago…

But a nice salad with a bed of rucola (arugula), some bufala mozzarella (fresh mozzarella from buffalo milk), tomatoes from Sicilia, cucumbers, bresaola, some ground pepper, salt and oregano, drizzled with flavorful olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar… Be still my beating heart. Mmm, mmm good!