Don Genova's Blog

Parma Palate - I Graduated!

I Graduated!
Earlier this month I received my Masters of Food Culture, Communicating Quality Products from the University of Gastronomic Sciences near Parma, Italy. To see photos from my grad week in Italy visit my Facebook photo albums here and here.

What's Next?
My Food For Thought show on CBC Radio is continuing, as is my All You Can Eat podcast.  In January I will be teaching an introductory course in Food Culture at the University of Victoria. As soon as details are confirmed I'll post them here, but you can expect lectures in my favourite food products such as cheese, olive oil and cured meats, with lots of tasting! 

I'm amazed at how quickly the year passed by.  It was a fascinating course in an intriguing country.  No, I don't speak that much Italian now, but I can certainly make my way around, in that I can mostly understand the answers when I ask for directions!  To review the postings I made from Italy, and the places our class visited outside the country, follow this Parma Palate category link on this blog.

Parma Palate - Nine Months in 17 Minutes

I have been back in Canada for almost two months now, and it's about time I posted our mammoth slide/music production that condenses all of the adventures my class at the University of Gastronomic Sciences had over nine months of classwork and field trips.  Sure, you won't get the significance of many of the photos, but I think you will certainly get the sense of the camaraderie and spirit we developed as 24 of us from widely-varied backgrounds.

The show runs 17 minutes and it will likely take a few minutes to buffer into your player before it starts playing and depending on the speed of your internet connection.  Classmates, I'll be posting this to our Facebook Group in two parts, since it limits the length and size of the videos you upload. Click here to view.

Food For Thought - Favourite Food Moments from School

This week with the help of some of my classmates I look back on some of the most memorable food moments from our nine months here at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Colorno, Italy.  You can listen to an MP3 of the 6-minute audio file by clicking here.  Those are all my classmates in the photo at the left.

That's Slow Food President Carlo Petrini, who came to lunch with us on a boat docked on the Po River.  I'll have a special treat for you to watch on this blog in a day or so.  Our nine months in Italy, compressed into a 20-minute photo and music show.  Stand by!

Food For Thought - Barcelona Public Markets

This week on Food For Thought I talk about the public market system in Barcelona, Spain.  At right is a photo of La Boqueria market, one of the most diverse and vibrant markets I have ever visited.  The City of Barcelona runs 46 public markets in the city, 40 of them sell food products.  The City believes having a good public market system will lead to happier, healthier communities.  You can hear all about it by listening to the mp3 of the 5 minute documentary here .  If you have any grasp of Spanish you can visit the markets website here.  You can see a photo album of the market here.

Parma Palate - Second Anniversary

My wife Ramona came to visit me in Italy to coincide with our second anniversary...yes, it's already been two years!  We spent time in Milan, Florence, Siena, Panzano, Venice, Bologna, Colorno and Rapallo on the Italian Riveria.   I made up a fully captioned photo album on my Facebook site...because I find the photo interface much easier to work with than Typepad.  So you can see the photos by going to this link.  And, it only took me two years, but I managed to organize a lot of our photos from our wedding and honeymoon into a musical slideshow, which you can watch by clicking here. (it may take a while to buffer into your media player, so please be patient.) Enjoy!

Food For Thought - Wine Barrel Making in France

This week I feature a documentary on my visit to the Francois Freres Cooperage in Burgundy, France.  I watched the barrel-making process from raw log to finished product, and you can listen to the mp3 of the audio file here .

Photos in this blog are courtesy of my roommate, Andy Chou.  I was busy recording audio, so I'm glad Andy was snapping away with his usual vigor.

In the photo at the left you can see one of the coopers moving a wet barrel onto a fire made of oak wood-scraps. The fire and water will help the staves of the barrel be bent into place by a special machine as the last hoops are placed on the bottom of the barrel.

Here are some of the oak logs the coopers start with. Francois Freres Cooperage is one of the few barrel makers that purchase the raw logs from the French forest ministry and process them into slats and age the slats for up to  3 years before making them into staves and assembling them into finished barrels.

The logs are carefully marked and split into wedges, avoiding the use of any of the heart of the tree which may be weak or diseased.  After the wedges are milled into the slats, they are stacked and placed outside in the elements for aging.  The slats lose quick a bit of weight as the moisture in the wood evaporates over time. 

I put together some more photos in a little photo gallery so you can follow the process.

In Canada, both the Sumac Ridge Estate Winery and the Jackson-Triggs Estate Winery (pictured at right)in BC’s Okanagan Valley use Francois Freres barrels.  Sumac Ridge winemaker Mark Wendenburg prefers them to ferment his chardonnay wines, much in the same way they are used in Burgundy.  At Jackson-Triggs, winemaker Brooke Blair says the barrels impart a nice, toasty smokiness to the wine. 

All You Can Eat Vol36 - Classic Crete

This week on All You Can Eat, I take you to the Greek island of Crete where I experienced an excellent week full of culinary tourism.  In the program you will hear two of my Food For Thought documentaries, then a feature interview with the man who was our guide for these amazing adventures.

One day we started our morning atop a mountain where shepherds (or are they goatherds?) were milking their herd of goats.
On top of the mountain there are no milking machines, not even any electricity to run them if there were!  Instead, the men use highly trained dogs to round up the goats from wherever they are on the mountain, then herd them into a pen, pushing them forward so the men can grab them and milk them by hand, rapidly squirting the milk into a large can set into a concrete holder.

Here are my classmates MJ, Bronwen and Betsy enjoying some fresh cheese and raki.  This was all taking place at about 10am, and raki is a fairly powerful liquor, somewhat like Italian grappa.  Hour of the day means little to the Cretans, however.  When I met the grandmother of the man whose place I was staying at around 8 one morning, she quickly offered me a shot of grappa.  Since I had already imbibed what seemed like 25 shots in two days of our trip, I graciously declined.

From the mountain we descended a few minutes into a village where the local cheese makers process the milk we had just seen being obtained from the goats.  They make several kinds of fresh and aged cheeses there, which we got to taste...along with more raki!

Just when we thought we had had enough drinking for the day, and were chock full of cheese, it was back into our vans to visit another tiny mountain village...where the whole complement of villagers was waiting for us.

The typical dress for the men of Bis-dye-ee (phonetic spelling) are these hunter-style pants, usually black or tan, and black shirts, with a sharp knife stuck into their waistbands.

Before we went inside the village community hall we were treated to the sight and smell of goat roasting beside hot coals.  This is a traditional way of roasting meat in Crete, skewering the meat on spikes and resting it on stakes pounded into the ground so the fat drips away from the meat without creating flare-ups.

When we were finished with the greetings outside, we trooped inside the village community centre to see a massive display of foods lining the perimeter of a large room. Each woman in the village had brought a different traditional dish for us to try.... over 40 in total.  There were pastries made with homemade strawberry and apricot jams, tiny fried pastry pockets filled with sweet cheese, savory pockets stuffed with spinach or wild greens, pork with wild greens, cured olives, umpteen artichoke dishes, rabbit and much more.  There was no way we could try everything, but we did our best, along with tasting as many homemade wines that were pressed upon us.

The days that you hear about in the documentaries are a prime example of the kind of culinary tourism Kostas Bouyouris wants to bring to Crete.  As you saw on my blog last week, Kostas is an agronomist who is also involved with a Soil Health association and culinary tourism.  He was with our class for the entire week and really gave us an authentic taste of Cretan life, not just through the food, but the music, art and above all, the people.  If you are interested in reading more about what Kostas is involved in, visit the Mediterranean Association for Soil Health website. Much of the English side of the site is under construction, but there is an email address to contact for further information.  For culinary tourism on Crete, which I highly recommend you experience at some point in your life, visit the Agrion Terra website.

SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE!!!  My classmate Marta loves taking portraits, both posed and candid of all of us when we are on our field trips, or 'stages' as they are known in our program.  I downloaded some software called Photoshow which allows you to mix music and photos together with some special effects, and so I sifted through all the photos and put together "Classic Crete" .  It is a .wmv file and hopefully it will just start playing in whatever player you have on your computer once enough of it has downloaded. The file is about 50 megabytes.  Enjoy!

All You Can Eat is brought to you in part by GoDaddy.com, a domain and webhosting company. And to take advantage of GoDaddy.com offers such as 10 percent off any order, use this code when you check out:  eat3

One day we started our morning atop a mountain where shepherds (or are they goatherds?) were milking their herd of goats.
On top of the mountain there are no milking machines, not even any electricity to run them if there were!  Instead, the men use highly trained dogs to round up the goats from wherever they are on the mountain, then herd them into a pen, pushing them forward so the men can grab them and milk them by hand, rapidly squirting the milk into a large can set into a concrete holder.

Here are my classmates MJ, Bronwen and Betsy enjoying some fresh cheese and raki.  This was all taking place at about 10am, and raki is a fairly powerful liquor, somewhat like Italian grappa.  Hour of the day means little to the Cretans, however.  When I met the grandmother of the man whose place I was staying at around 8 one morning, she quickly offered me a shot of grappa.  Since I had already imbibed what seemed like 25 shots in two days of our trip, I graciously declined.

From the mountain we descended a few minutes into a village where the local cheese makers process the milk we had just seen being obtained from the goats.  They make several kinds of fresh and aged cheeses there, which we got to taste...along with more raki!

Just when we thought we had had enough drinking for the day, and were chock full of cheese, it was back into our vans to visit another tiny mountain village...where the whole complement of villagers was waiting for us.

The typical dress for the men of Bis-dye-ee (phonetic spelling) are these hunter-style pants, usually black or tan, and black shirts, with a sharp knife stuck into their waistbands.

Before we went inside the village community hall we were treated to the sight and smell of goat roasting beside hot coals.  This is a traditional way of roasting meat in Crete, skewering the meat on spikes and resting it on stakes pounded into the ground so the fat drips away from the meat without creating flare-ups.

When we were finished with the greetings outside, we trooped inside the village community centre to see a massive display of foods lining the perimeter of a large room. Each woman in the village had brought a different traditional dish for us to try.... over 40 in total.  There were pastries made with homemade strawberry and apricot jams, tiny fried pastry pockets filled with sweet cheese, savory pockets stuffed with spinach or wild greens, pork with wild greens, cured olives, umpteen artichoke dishes, rabbit and much more.  There was no way we could try everything, but we did our best, along with tasting as many homemade wines that were pressed upon us.

The days that you hear about in the documentaries are a prime example of the kind of culinary tourism Kostas Bouyouris wants to bring to Crete.  As you saw on my blog last week, Kostas is an agronomist who is also involved with a Soil Health association and culinary tourism.  He was with our class for the entire week and really gave us an authentic taste of Cretan life, not just through the food, but the music, art and above all, the people.  If you are interested in reading more about what Kostas is involved in, visit the Mediterranean Association for Soil Health website. Much of the English side of the site is under construction, but there is an email address to contact for further information.  For culinary tourism on Crete, which I highly recommend you experience at some point in your life, visit the Agrion Terra website.

SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE!!!  My classmate Marta loves taking portraits, both posed and candid of all of us when we are on our field trips, or 'stages' as they are known in our program.  I downloaded some software called Photoshow which allows you to mix music and photos together with some special effects, and so I sifted through all the photos and put together "Classic Crete" .  It is a .wmv file and hopefully it will just start playing in whatever player you have on your computer once enough of it has downloaded. The file is about 50 megabytes.  Enjoy!

Food For Thought - Crete Culinary Tourism

This week on Food For Thought, I take you back to the Greek island of Crete where I experienced an excellent day of culinary tourism.  Listen to an MP3 of the audio file by clicking here. We started our morning atop a mountain where shepherds (or are they goatherds?) were milking their herd of goats.

On top of the mountain there are no milking machines, not even any electricity to run them if there were!  Instead, the men use highly trained dogs to round up the goats from wherever they are on the mountain, then herd them into a pen, pushing them forward so the men can grab them and milk them by hand, rapidly squirting the milk into a large can set into a concrete holder.

Here are my classmates MJ, Bronwen and Betsy enjoying some fresh cheese and raki.  This was all taking place at about 10am, and raki is a fairly powerful liquor, somewhat like Italian grappa.  Hour of the day means little to the Cretans, however.  When I met the grandmother of the man whose place I was staying at around 8 one morning, she quickly offered me a shot of grappa.  Since I had already imbibed what seemed like 25 shots in two days of our trip, I graciously declined.

From the mountain we descended a few minutes into a village where the local cheesemakers process the milk we had just seen being obtained from the goats.  They make several kinds of fresh and aged cheeses there, which we got to taste...along with more raki!

Just when we thought we had had enough drinking for the day, and were chock full of cheese, it was back into our vans to visit another tiny mountain village...where the whole complement of villagers was waiting for us.

The typical dress for the men of Bis-dye-ee (phonetic spelling) are these hunter-style pants, usually black or tan, and black shirts, with a sharp knife stuck into their waistbands.

Before we went inside the village community hall we were treated to the sight and smell of goat roasting beside hot coals.  This is a traditional way of roasting meat in Crete, skewering the meat on spikes and resting it on stakes pounded into the ground so the fat drips away from the meat without creating flare-ups.

When we were finished with the greetings outside, we trooped inside the village community centre to see a massive display of foods lining the perimeter of a large room. Each woman in the village had brought a different traditional dish for us to try.... over 40 in total.  There were pastries made with homemade strawberry and apricot jams, tiny fried pastry pockets filled with sweet cheese, savory pockets stuffed with spinach or wild greens, pork with wild greens, cured olives, umpteen artichoke dishes, rabbit and much more.  There was no way we could try everything, but we did our best, along with tasting as many homemade wines that were pressed upon us.  I have to be honest:  the homemade wines we had in Crete were not very good...downright bad, actually.  They tasted more like wine vinegar than wine, and after a week of drinking them, I certainly didn't develop a taste for them.  Most of the restaurants we went to serve their own homemade wine as well, if you go you may want to ask if they have any wine made at a winery.

We did visit a Boutari winery on Crete, and I was impressed with the wines we tasted there.  The webpage for this 70-acre estate says it is called "Fantaxometocho", which means "ghosts' glebe". The name that was given to the place "Fantaxometocho" was taken by the legend that was created in order to protect the glebe from sea dogs.

That's what the webpage says.  Our guide at Boutari says the 'ghosts' in the name actually represent the people who used to sneak into the vineyard and steal the grapes!

The day that you hear about in the documentary above is a prime example of the kind of culinary tourism Kostas Bouyouris wants to bring to Crete.  As you saw on my blog last week, Kostas is an agronomist who is also involved with a Soil Health association and culinary tourism.  He was with our class for the entire week and really gave us an authentic taste of Cretan life, not just through the food, but the music, art and above all, the people.  If you are interested in reading more about what Kostas is involved in, visit the Mediterranean Association for Soil Health website. Much of the English side of the site is under construction, but there is an email address to contact for further information.  For culinary tourism on Crete, which I highly recommend you experience at some point in your life, visit the Agrion Terra website.  My next All You Can Eat podcast will feature my full-length interview with Kostas, so please check the link within the next week or so.

SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE!!!  My classmate Marta loves taking portraits, both posed and candid of all of us when we are on our field trips, or 'stages' as they are known in our program.  I downloaded some software called Photoshow which allows you to mix music and photos together with some special effects, and so I sifted through all the photos and put together "Classic Crete" .  It is a .wmv file and hopefully it will just start playing in whatever player you have on your computer once enough of it has downloaded. The file is about 50 megabytes.  Enjoy!

Food For Thought - Crete, part 1

This week on Food For Thought, part one of my edible adventures in Crete, where I harvested wild greens and ate raw artichoke hearts, right in the field where they were growing. Here is the audio file of the program for your listening pleasure. 

Here I am pictured with Kostas Bouyouris, an agronomist who is also involved with a Soil Health association and culinary tourism.  He was with our class for the entire week and really gave us an authentic taste of Cretan life, not just through the food, but the music, art and above all, the people.  You'll hear much more from him on next week's show. In the meantime, if you are interested in reading more about what Kostas is involved in, visit the Mediterranean Association for Soil Health website. Much of the English side of the site is under construction, but there is an email address to contact for further information.  For culinary tourism on Crete, which I highly recommend you experience at some point in your life, visit the Agrion Terra website.

Here are some of the fava beans and artichokes we harvested on our morning walk.  For the first time in my life I found out you can eat the pods of the fava beans!  When they are young and fresh, you can just remove any 'string' from the tip and side of the pod, then cut into lengths of about 2 inches, and boil until just tender.  They were fantastic mixed in with the other wild greens we harvested. 

I will have much more about my time spent in Crete in next week's posting.

All You Can Eat - 500-year Old Olive Trees

This posting for volume 34 of All You Can Eat is a work in progress, as I want to add some photo albums and video clips as I go along.  So if everything isn't quite here yet, keep checking for the added content in a couple of days.  The podcast takes you through part of my most recent field trip to Puglia.  You will find a couple of other postings with photos here and here, so this one is meant to fill in some of the blanks not yet covered.  The photo you see at the right is of a traditional Pugliese song and dance troupe that entertained us the first night we arrived at our hotel.  They were truly energetic and had our class all up and dancing with them even before dinner and wine, so you know they were good.  One of their specialties was the tarantella, a frenzied dance that was supposedly invented in the 16th century to help cure victims of tarantism, supposedly caused by tarantula spider bites.  Here's a short video clip of one of the dances.  And dinner was pretty good, too.  Here's a captioned photo album of a few of the dishes we enjoyed that first night.

Our last day in Puglia involved a lot of raw fish.  Here is just one of the platters we were offered to eat at lunch.  The squid and shrimp were fine...but the octopus.  Well, I took too big a bite and I chewed and I chewed and I chewed, and then it started to get a little much for me so I ended up spitting it into my napkin as surreptitiously as possible.   The other platter consisted of raw mussels and clams as well as two kinds of sea urchin, one 'regular' and one that was in the midst of spawning, to the roe was milky with a spermy-looking substance.  The mussels and clams were sweet and fresh, but the urchin couldn't compare to the sweet, mango-like urchin I've had on the West Coast of Canada. Here is a clip of classmates Betsy and Daniel getting up close and personal with their mussels.  Nice face, Betsy!

This box of unlikely looking seafood contains something the fishermen on the docks of Brindisi were calling 'white truffle of the sea'.  Right. Not exactly to all tastes, including my own, it was very strong, but I managed to choke it down, even though what was inside the thick skin of the 'sea truffle' looked like a big ball of phlegm.  I've put together a little sequence of my tasting of this seafood in this photo album.  Photos by Betsy, thank you.  I was using my still camera when she had her own try, and I think I caught her face just at the moment when she was struggling not to throw up her particular 'ball of phlegm'. Have to wait to have the photos developed...gee, what a concept in this age of digital technology.

The first documentary you hear in this podcast is about olive trees in two different places, the Marche, and Puglia. Two quite different groves, with the most mystique, if I can call it that, about the trees in Puglia, a grove where the age of the average tree has been pegged at 500 years.  Also just as fascinating, a trip underground to a subterranean olive oil mill...quite the undertaking for the time it was built, which was sometime before 1423.  The people who restored the mill know this, since they managed to find a document from 1423 which detailed the expansion of this mill.  When you think about it, it was a pretty remarkable feat of engineering to carve a cave out of solid rock that would fit 15 to 20 workers, a couple of horses or donkeys, and the olive mills and presses.  Why underground?  Apparently back then it was cheaper to dig than to build, easier to secure, lower, constant temperatures which were more conducive to making quality oil, and the presses could use the roof of the cave for support.

Here is a nice wide shot of part of the mill, but it is really much larger than what you can see in the photo.  I've put together a photo album of Betsy's pictures of the olive grove and the mill, along with this short video clip of the mill owner showing how the press worked.

I also promised to repeat the tips about the purchase and storage of olive oil:

So how do you choose a good quality oil?  If it says extra-virgin on the label, that means it is the first, cold pressing of the olives. UPDATE: In studying for my olive oil technology exam today, I realize the idea of first cold pressing is out of date.  Because modern mills use a continuous centrifugal press, there is no second pressing of the olives.  To read more about the grading and production of olive oil visit the Olive Oil Source. If you choose to purchase extra-virgin, then you  need to smell and taste.  Unfortunately, it’s not like going to a wine bar where you could try 3 or 4 different wines in an evening.  Some gourmet grocery stores may have tasting stations and that’s a good start.  An oil should smell fresh, perhaps grassy or fruity, not rancid.  The taste is a personal discovery.  Some people like oils with a real peppery finish that leaves a bite in the back of your throat.  Others want something smoother.  It depends on what you are using it for, dressing a salad, drizzling over some warm vegetables or garnishing a soup.  Buy small bottles to start with until you find something you like. Keep your oil away from heat and light, and use it up within a few months. And remember, like wine, every year brings a different harvest and different flavours.

Parma Palate - Ah, Puglia!

Okay, so Ah, Puglia is a play on words, as Puglia used to be known, and you can still see it on many maps, as Apulia.  I thought it was an appropriate title to start this post as we enter into the last day of our field trip in this region.  Over the past couple of days we have seen the best Puglia has to offer in terms of landscapes, quaint villages dating back to medieval times, and of course food and wine.  The shot at the left (photos by Betsy Manning again in this post) was taken in a marine park where the delicate shoreline ecosystem is being protected.

Before heading to the marine park we spent some time in an ancient olive grove...which was also the home to some beautiful wildflowers, as ably demonstrated by classmate Jessica in this photo.  All the olive trees in this grove used to be owned by a single nobleman.  After the Second World War and Italian reformation, the land was redistributed to local farmers in plots deemed large enough to support their families based on subsistence farming.  In amongst the olive trees other crops such as peas and fava beans were planted.

The average age of these olive trees is 500 years.  That's FIVE HUNDRED YEARS!  The physiology of the tree trunks are a great example of Mother Nature's ability as a sculptor. The trees can survive almost any trauma.  Quite often they get a disease which eats away at the inside of the trunk, but the farmers do what they can to remove the dead wood and the trees continue to thrive, with an elaborate twisting of the trunk and major branches that go off in all directions.  Even if an old olive tree is burned to the ground, or chopped off, or damaged by cold weather, eventually new growth will sprout again and the life cycle continues. 

One of the highlights of the day was visiting a subterranean olive oil mill that was recently refurbished and turned into a museum by a major olive oil producer in the area.  We learned that many mills were built underground centuries ago for a number of reasons, one being security, another is that a cave can keep the temperature low during milling operations, or at least have temperatures more easily maintained.  When the owners of the mill were researching its history, they discovered a very important document.  This document detailed the expansion of the mill, and it was dated in the 1430's!

This is a line of what were once 8 separate presses. The owner of the mill is demonstrating how these presses were turned by hand to extract the oil and water from a paste that was made from crushed-up olives. The paste was made by pouring ripe olives into a basin with a couple of millstones that were turned by donkeys or horses. This was one more reason why the mills were carved out of the rock.  The roof could withstand the upward pressure of the presses as they were cranked to extract the oil.  The oil and water would then drain into holes carved into the stone in front of the presses.  The oil floats on top of the water, and could then be drained off.

I'll leave you with one more great shot from the "the White Town" ("La Città Bianca", in Italian), Ostuni. We stopped there for a short visit and went within the walls of the medieval city.  Check out the Wikipedia link for historical info.  Off to Brinidisi now for the afternoon fish market...more posting to come!

Parma Palate - Hitting the Road

Last weekend a few of my classmates and I rented a car to tear over hell's half acre. We started on Saturday with a drive into Liguria up and down mountain roads, to the seaside, and an interior 'island' for eel and trout...this is one of the restaurants I went to in Liguria, called La Brinca.  You think that means 'on the brink'? It was nicely perched on a cliff overlooking a terraced green valley.  And the food was pretty good, too!  Here's a photo album of the trip, complete with captions at the bottom of each photo.

After the restaurant there were more winding roads to negotiate until we got to the autostrada.  This was the first time I drove a car in 4 months, and I thoroughly enjoyed being behind the wheel, both in the mountains, on the highway and right in the city.  The city was Genova, where we made a whirlwind visit.  Let me tell you, it's kind of weird to see your last name plastered all over the place!

There was a very impressive duomo in Genova, but of course as foodies we were even more excited to find an artisanal food market just around the corner.  It was loaded with little stalls selling cheese, cured meats and sausages, olives, honey, olive oil and on and on.  I picked up a great selection of olives, including some pickled garlic that was the most mild I have ever tasted...don't know how they do it!  The other great find was a pork sausage laced with truffle.  Should have bought two of them!  Some of the cheeses looked pretty sketchy, actually.  There were so old they didn't even look edible, but obviously these cheeses had certain qualities appreciated by certain cheese lovers.  Because we became just a little hungry after our explorations we stopped at a very typical restaurant and enjoyed dishes of marinated mussels, calamari and fritto misto, a mixed 'fry-up' of battered shrimp, squid and small fish.  Wasn't that great but hit the spot.  We drove all the way back to Parma and Colorno.

On Sunday we went to a little town called Isola Dovarese, not far from Colorno, about halfway in between Cremona and Mantova.  The restaurant was called La Crepa. It's called Isola, or island, because of the river that surrounds it on three sides.  We were surprised to find  fish on the menu, so we had the fish antipasti, which consisted of  marinated eel, as well as warm trout with polenta.  I also enjoyed a rabbit ragu on top of thick but tender squares of pasta.

Then we went on to Mantova, one of the most significant religious towns in this region. Why? Because St. Andrew's Basilica was built to house relics, vials containing earth soaked with the blood of Christ that were reportedly brought to Mantova by the soldier who pierced the side of Christ on the cross.

On the food side we tried some tangy yet sweet mostarda made of clementine oranges so I bought some to serve with cheese and other goodies, I'll have a photo of that later, but here are more pictures of  La Crepa and Mantova in the photo album.

Arrivederci, Roma!

10pm, Trastevere neighbourhood:  Our trip is coming to an end.  We have had an absolute blast exploring Rome and have eaten quite well for most of the journey.  Today we stayed in the apartment and I cooked up an antipasti platter of fresh, tender asparagus, blanched, then drizzled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper.  Add some sausage, cheese and olives and we practically had a complete meal!

But I couldn't stop and used the rest of the ingredients we had purchased in the market this morning:  Fennel, cherry tomatoes, radicchio, fava beans, basil, shrimp and clams. Everything was sauteed together and served over fresh spaghetti noodles.   Didn't even have room for the salad course.

Now it's off to bed to catch an early flight to Frankfurt, then home to Vancouver...with jet lag and culture shock in store as I have to fly to Calgary on Wednesday for the Canadian Media Guild convention.

Look forward to posting some photos soon...Ramona got to have lasagna today, finally!  And I enjoyed a lovely oxtail stew.

Ciao for now...

Rome, Gustatory Heaven!

Trastevere District, 3pm:  We have checked into an amazing apartment to hold what is now a party of five:  My sister and her son, her partner, me and my wife Ramona.  The apartment is right in the middle of the Trastevere district of Rome, very close to Vatican City and other must-see sights.

But when we checked in, the info guy from the rental agency told us we were lucky because there was a great restaurant just around the corner.  We took his advice, (the place was also mentioned in an old issue of Gourmet we had photocopied) and went into Osteria Le Mani I Pasta for lunch.

This place serves homemade pasta, and much more.  Our friendly waiter brought over a dish of white beans with olive oil, garlic and lemon juice for us to taste.  Amazing flavour, great mushed into slices of bread.  Then our appetizer, a huge plate of breasola (thinly sliced air dried beef), with fresh water buffalo mozzarella, arugula, segments of blood orange and thinly sliced grapefruit!  We swooned.

My main course was also a delight..fettucine with ricotta and pancetta, creamy and fresh, Ramona had spaghetti with tiny clams, shrimp and bottarga (salted, dried tuna roe), along with the sweetest cherry tomatoes and chili peppers cooked into the sauce.  Stupendous flavour.

Now we have to go and climb the Spanish Steps to work up our appetite for dinner.

Ciao!

Italy, a sweet perfume

Sorrento, 6pm -  Not much time to write lately, as we have been busy getting from place to place.  Today we arrived in mainland Italy at Naples, then made our way down to Sorrento for the first of two nights.  Just a couple of things to note now, more later.

Highlights:

Orange blossoms and orange trees laden with oranges, the aroma is from heaven!

Lemon trees abound in Sorrento, home of Limoncello, a lemon-based liqueur.

Pastries to die for in Sicily, many of them based on almond paste.

A communist-themed restaurant in Catania, around the corner from a baroque Cathedral trying to shine in a very dark city...

Shrimp cooked in lemon leaves...

..and a desire to eat less traditional Italian fare this evening.

Sicily-Salt and Cheese

Trapani, Easter Sunday-We have spent the past couple of days exploring the mountain top town of Erice, 2500 feet above Trapani, and the salt flats between Trapani and Marsala.

Erice is stunning, a medieval town with cobblestoned streets worn smooth over the years.  The day we negotiated the hairpin turns up the mountain was clear and warm, and my sister swore she could see Mount Etna and a plume of smoke in the distance.

Lunch was a delicious affair made up of several different pastas, but even before lunch we visited a few pastry shops to see the beautiful marzipan pastries and lambs all ready for Easter.  Even the cannoli are stuffed with a sheep's milk cream, and we haven't had a bad cappucino yet.

My most dominant images of yesterday were all the windmills we saw along the salt flats.  They used to be used to grind the large chunks of salt that were gathered from the flats after all the water had evaporated.  A visit to the salt museum in Nubia showed what backbreaking labour it must have been to carry the large buckets full of salt from the flats in the oppresive summer heat. There is still some salt production in the flats, but most of the windmills are abandoned, some missing their colourful red tops, a silent testament to another age when salt was used as a currency and a method of paying Roman soldiers.  Sale=Salt, salary=wages in salt.

We had an excellent lunch in a small, family-run restaurant in Marsala, I enjoyed a fiery penne arriabiata and a moist and flavourful grilled swordfish steak...followed by a crowning touch of mellow Marsala wine.  My sister liked it so much she bought a bottle from the restaurant owner!

We enjoyed a picnic dinner last night to give our bellies a rest, but I purchased a variety of sheep's milk products to test.  Highlights:  A very, very fresh and mild pecorino, a slightly-aged pecorino with black peppercorns, and then two ricottas, one flavoured with lemon, the other with pistachio, one bright yellow, the other green.  They tasted strongly of their flavouring and made a wonderful dessert with a few grapes and chunks of fruit and nut laced chocolate.

Today it's down to Mazara del Vallo to explore the Arab quarter and stay overnight near the seaside before heading to Agrigento and the Valley of Temples.

Ciao!

Ciao from Sicily!

Hi everyone...we are on day 3 of our trip to Italy and thoroughly enjoying ourselves.  That is, once Ramona and I finally got here...it is a long story, but suffice to say we could not fly directly to Palermo from Rome after a flight booking error and we had to take a plane-bus-train-ferry-train-taxi to get to our hotel.  A long day!

Food highlights of the past 24 hours...

-Seeing piles and piles of fresh artichokes and fava beans at the Trapani market, along with piles and piles of fresh fish at the lively fish market next door.

-Eating the Arab-inspired fish cuscus at a restaurant last night, along with a thin-sliced wafer of compressed and dried tuna eggs on a piece of bread with a nice, fresh tomato on top.

-Sampling sweets in the sky-high town of Erice, then downing plates of gnocchi, strozzopreti and other pastas at a very pleasant restaurant in that town.  (details to follow)

-savouring all the cheeses made with sheeps milk so far, including fresh pecorino, and creamy ricotta at our breakfast this morning.

Have to run, it is Good Friday in Trapani and we are off to see the procession of the Misteri, carvings that are hundreds of years old representing the passion of Christ and the Stations of the Cross...then, more food!

Arrivderci for now,

Don