Don Genova's Blog

This is a real meal:  A half-pound hamburger made from freshly ground beef and coated with crispy bedcrumbs, oven roasted potatoes, red, ripe tomatoes, sweet onions and special sauces that are as far away from the House of Ronald as you can imagine.  This is one of only two meals on offer for lunch at McDario's, one part of the expanding empire of Dario Cecchini, celebrity butcher of Chianti.  Dario is the opera loving, Dante-reciting butcher featured in Bill Buford's book Heat, and in every food or travel writer's story who passes through the little town of Panzano, deep in the heart of Chianti wine country.

This is Dario, posing for pictures, which he does often at his shop, holding up two gargantuan steaks.  We know them in North America as porterhouse cuts, but these 'babies' are the raw material for something called 'bistecca alla fiorentina', a Tuscan specialty.  You just grill these babies on high heat with a little salt and pepper and that's it.  They are supposed to come from the Tuscan Chianina breed of cattle, but a few years ago Dario held a funeral for the Chianina…saying the breed no longer supplied the quality necessary for such a cut.  He now sources his beef in Spain!  

It's always great visiting Dario and his butcher shop and restaurants in Panzano, but the real reason Ramona and I were there was to catch up with my friend Judy Witts Francini, otherwise known as the Tuscan Diva. I met Judy ten years ago on my very first trip to Italy and we stay in touch frequently via social media and whenever I visit Italy or she visits North America.  Judy is an ex-pat American who has seized Tuscan life by the horns. I admire her ability to switch seamlessly from English to Italian and back again as she guides tourists through Chianti, Florence, Sicily and more.  At the public market in Florence she knows all the vendors by name and her tours leave you with a real sense of the people and the food of the city.

Judy's first self-published cookbook is a real delight. Secrets from My Tuscan Kitchen provides any cook of any skill level a perfect introduction to the recipes of Tuscany, all of which are 'Tuscan Husband Approved' by Judy's husband Andrea, who was gracious enough to guide his car for us around the winding roads of Chianti after lunch.

Wherever you find Judy, you will find some sort of fun, and this day was no exception.  After lunch at McDario's she announced it was time to head off to Azienda Agricola Casamonte.

Now we're talking pork…and prosciutto made from these Cinta Senese pigs, a very rare breed that the owner at the Azienda, Ray Lamothe has been guarding from extinction by slowly building up the herd from a low of 360 animals in the world at one point.  Now on his farm alone, he has over 600 pigs. I'm going to do a full blog on Ray and his products in the future, but we had a fine tour of the farm and his rooms where he ages prosciutto, salamis, bacon, guanciale and more.  Later we tasted some of the prosciutto, a little saltier and stronger flavoured than say, prosciutto di Parma, but very tasty all the same.

Pic of the Day:  David Rocco is a Food Network host and cookbook author.  His show La Dolce Vita is shot in Florence, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see him enjoying a McDario in Panzano, researching a new book and getting some photography done. A bigger surprise was seeing one of his colleagues sit down and realize it was someone I had worked with at CBC Radio years ago!  See, everyone comes to Dario's in Panzano.

Anyway, Judy invited David and Co. to join us at Ray's, so I hung over the official photographer's shoulder and grabbed this nice shot of David holding a Cinta Senese piglet.  Ray said, 'you can hold him, but he's still asleep. When he wakes up, he will either start squealing, or pee on you.'  Luckily for David, the piglet only squealed.  We were squealing with delight after our wonderful day with Judy and Andrea and all the rest of the folks we met. On the downside, this was our second last day in Italy.

 One of our few rainy days found us in Assisi, joining the squelch of tourists paying homage to St. Francis in ponchos and umbrellas. Even the birds tried to stay out of the rain, sparrows hopping underneath outdoor tables, pecking at crumbs, swallows and swifts screeching their piercing cries as they returned to their mud nests plastered underneath the ancient eaves of San Francesco's medieval cathedral.

Turns out St. Francis had a soft spot for birds, at least judging by one of the huge frescoes painted on the wall of the upper basilica. He is depicted preaching to a group of birds, and the story goes that he was on a journey through Umbria when this group of birds stayed quietly on their perches instead of flying away when he approached. He preached to them, praising their nobility and all the great features like the ability to fly that God had given them.

They thought he was cool.

We made our way through three different churches on this wet day, each of them making us marvel at the architecture and artistry involved.  Then we were 'churched out'.  Time for lunch.

  We stopped at Trattoria Degli Umbri for one of the best lunches of our visit to the Italian mainland.  Since it is summer truffle season, I felt compelled to order an antipasto that featured a black truffle paste crostini, followed by a truffled medallion of veal tenderloin. Yum!  Ramona loved her taglioini served with a luscious but light lemony sauce along with oven roasted sweet, sweet, sweet cherry tomatoes. The highlight of the entire meal was this salad of pearled farro (spelt berries) with arugula, mache, cherry tomatoes and pecorino cheese. Nutty and chewy, the farro was a perfect foil to the bite of the arugula and the creamy sheep's milk cheese.  Oh, and I have to mention the house-made tiramisu and panna cotta we gobbled down for dessert.

Pic of the Day:  Under the gloomy skies, a bright red Vespa caught our eye, cowling decorated with delicate waterdrops, gleaming in front of some greenery clinging to the brickwork of a nearby hotel.

Italian scooters not only drive me crazy, they make me green with envy.  Scooters dart in and out of traffic like the wasp the Vespa is named after. When I'm driving I curse how they cut me off or roar by with inches to spare on either side of the car. When I'm walking I admire their sleek lines and ability to get almost anywhere faster that I could on foot, or by car for that matter.

I'd love to have one to motor about with in Vancouver, fuel efficient, traffic busting, right? But as I am frequently reminded by my safety-conscious wife: Car drivers in Vancouver don't get scooters; they'll crush you.  And, they're not very much fun to ride in the driving rain.  Oh yeah, it rains in Vancouver.  Sigh.

As we hit Orvieto, the Umbrian city closest to Rome, Italy was playing a World Cup soccer game.  The streets were empty, but we could hear the play-by-play of the game echoing down the narrow cobblestoned streets from every direction. Then we came across a bar in a square, big screen tv mounted near the doorway, a crowd of locals gathered around, gasping at every close call, howling indignantly at every perceived foul.

We tore ourselves away from the game, and wandered off to find the massive duomo, which was built beginning in the late 13th century. The excuse for such a large duomo in a small city? While Pope Urban IV was passing by in the 1260's a Communion Host conveniently dripped blood on an altar linen.  This was considered a miracle by the pope, so a suitable shrine was needed to house the bloodstained linen, and hey, presto!, the cathedral was commissioned. (thanks to my Cadogan travel guide for that info) 

The duomo really is spectacular, although on this particular trip we first circled around the rear of the complex, which looks quite shabby and in need of much repair. Obviously the money all goes into the front of the church, which literally takes your breath away as you march around the back corner to the front.  The day was clear, the skies, well, they were sky-blue, but a brisk windy was blowing, and as the clouds scudded by a spectacular vista was created.

Pic of the Day: My friend Judy Witts Francini had recommended a B+B to us, and Judy’s recommendations are usually gold, so off we went, armed with a list of directions a page long which took us past roundabouts, dirt lanes, the 8th largest church in the world and finally to Agriturismo Alla Madonna del Piatto, with a view of Assisi’s San Francesco Basilica. The skies had closed in and dumped a few showers on the area, just in time for us to arrive and capture a photo of a faint double rainbow from the view from our room.  Not bad, eh?  Very nice accommodations and more than helpful advice on touring the area from the owner, Letizia.  Tomorrow, more on San Francesco and his love of birds.