Jammin’ in the Kitchen

29 Sunday May 2011

Posted by farfalle1 in American recipes, Uncategorized

Tags

Cherries, Cherry Jam, Jam Making, Pectin

When we restructured our house ten years ago we planted many fruit trees, among them a sweet cherry tree. It grew and grew but gave us no fruit. Then four years ago we had five cherries – great excitement! The next year we had fifteen. The year after that there were more than we could count, but we were able to eat them all in one sitting. And this year – ta dah!

More than we could count AND more than we could eat.

Clearly it was cherry jam time.

Jam is much easier to make than jelly – none of that time-consuming drip, drip, drip to get a clear jelly. For anyone who likes instant gratification in their preserves, jam is the way to go.

Here are the ingredients: the cherries, sugar, and a pectin product made from apples, among other things. Apples, guavas, quince, plums, gooseberries, oranges and other citrus fruits, contain large amounts of pectin, while soft fruits like cherries, grapes and strawberries contain small amounts of pectin, according to Wikipedia. Pectin is what puts the ‘jel’ in jams and jellies, so if you’re working with a low-pectin fruit you want to add some to make a good jam. I once made cherry ‘jam’ without adding pectin, and ended up with a lovely cherry sauce. In the good old days people simply boiled their fruit and sugar mixture until it was reduced to a jelly or jam. I’ve tried this and have ended up with a sort of sticky goo. For me adding pectin produces a better result. Sure-Jell, Ball and Certo are some of the name-brands of Pectin in the U.S., and many grocery chains sell it under their own label. I’ve read complaints about liquid pectin; some people have trouble getting it to set.

The Fruttapec above is called 2:1 because the recipe calls for only 1/2 kilo of sugar to a kilo of fruit. Many jam recipes call for equal weights. I know! It’s a great way to take something healthy like a cherry and turn it into something a lot less healthy. So, even though 2:1 jam is still full of sugar, you can feel very virtuous because you’ve reduced your intake by half.

All you have to do is mix the pectin with the sugar, then add the room-temperature prepared fruit (cleaned, and in the case of cherries, pitted). On that subject, here is the best purchase of the year:

Made by a German company, it is marketed as an olive-pitter, but it works just fine for cherries. You put the cherry in, squeeze the handle and the pit (and only the pit!) pops out the bottom. It’s fun, and a great time saver. The first day I made jam it took me an hour and a half to pit the fruit with a manicure tool, a wee spatula-like thing. With the new tool the next day it took less than half an hour.

You put the mixture on high heat, and at the same time boil up a pot of jam jars, lids and any other tools you will use. In addition to the pitter I use a jar-lifter, barely visible on the bottom right of the photo, and a wide-bottomed funnel for getting hot jam into the jars.

You bring the jam mix to a full roiling boil stirring all the while:

Once you’ve achieved boil, set a timer for three minutes. Then remove the pan from the heat and stir for a minute; then get as much of the foamy scum off the top as you can – it’s easier for some fruits than others (for cherries it’s difficult). Add three TBL of lemon juice, put back on the high fire, and boil for one more minute. Then it’s jar time.

Remove a jar from the pot of boiling water, fill it with hot fruit mix, remove a lid from the boiling water and screw it on, not too tightly. Then set the jar on a folded tea towel to cool. You’ve made jam!

Make sure your vacuum jars have sealed. If they haven’t, either re-do the process, or simply eat the jam right away.

Here’s your reward:

Yum!

Oddly enough, cherry jam does not seem to be prevalent in Italy. The jars I’ve given Italian friends have produced more curiosity than delighted recognition. One taste has been sufficient to turn them into believers, so maybe one day soon the grocery shelves will be groaning under jars of cherry jam. But I’m not going to hold my breath; instead I’m going to hope for another banner crop next year.

Spring Wildflower Walk

21 Saturday May 2011

Posted by farfalle1 in Flowers, Hiking in Italy, Italian flowers, Photographs, Rapallo, Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

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La Crocetta, Montallegro

It was a beautiful spring day, not too hot, not too cool, when four of us set out to have a walk and a picnic. We left from La Crocetta, the apex of the pass over the mountain on which the Captain and I live, and walked to Montallegro, the pilgrim church about which I’ve written in the past. We didn’t set out to have a wildflower walk, but that’s what we ended up having.

For some of the flowers we were too early:

and for some we were too late:

but for oh so many we were there at just the right moment.

Here’s something I learned from this expedition: I am hopeless at identifying wildflowers. I have two books on the subject, both related to flowers in this area, and I still find it almost impossible.

How I wish this blog had ‘smellovision’ so you could smell the sweet acacia:

These, by the way, are a culinary treat when fried up in a batter. Yum.

And I wish I could attach sound to this so you would hear the wind sighing through the trees. It sounded exactly like a Fellini movie (I’m thinking Amarcord, I guess, which I recommend you see if you haven’t already).

Here is a web album of the gorgeous flowers we found along the path. I identified the ones I was able to, but most of them remain a mystery. If you’d care to help identify, please, feel free! I’d be grateful.

If you’d like a quick video of the trail from La Crocetta to MontAllegro, you can ride along here on a February outing with mountain biker ‘guru63byric.’

Web album of wildflower walk:

Wildflower Walk from La Crocetta to Montallegro

Lizards Here and There

16 Monday May 2011

Posted by farfalle1 in Animals in Italy, Animals in the U.S., Arizona, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

chuckwalla, lucertola, lucertole

Here in Italy we live with the sweetest and shyest little lizards, called ‘lucertole‘ (prounounced loo-chair’-toe-lay). In fact, I just took one from our interior stairs and released him outside. They look like this:

Of course in America everything must be Bigger – including the lizards. These fellows, called chuckwallas, live in the rock pile outside our house in Arizona. They are absent in the winter, sleeping in their stony nests, but in the spring they come out to bask in the sun and engage in other typical spring behavior.

A poor photo, but the only one that shows rusty back patch

In all fairness, we see plenty of smaller lizards in Arizona, as well, most of them a dull brown and moving so fast it is impossible to get a photograph. And, according to Wikipedia, most of the lizards are cousins to one another and share many traits. Like the lucertole, the chuckwallas are very shy and don’t let us get close with a camera.

The chuckwalla’s tail looks like we should be able to count the rings on it to determine his age, but I don’t think that’s true. It also looks like it should unscrew and come off; it probably does come off, though we’ve never seen that. The little lucertole frequently do lose their tails It’s part of a defense mechanism when they are attacked by predators. They can sharply contract a muscle which detaches the tail without loss of blood. The predator thinks the still twitching tail is the animal; the lucertola stays very still until the predator has left with the tail. The tail stops twitching after a time, but by then the rest of the lucertola has run away. Every summer we have a whole sub-family of lucertole living around the house that are nick-named Stumpy. Their tails do grow back, but never completely, which tends to leave them with an unfinished look.

There’s something about seeing a lizard, so prehistoric, timeless and ancient in appearance, that makes us feel humble, and maybe even a little smaller than the animals we are watching.

Giro d’Italia – What’s all the Fuss?

09 Monday May 2011

Posted by farfalle1 in Italian festas, Rapallo, Uncategorized

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Bicycle races, Giro d'Italia, UCI World Tour

What we’ve been regarding as an A-#1 headache this week turns out to be a bicycle race with an impressive pedigree. As Wikipedia succinctly puts it:

The origins of the Giro are similar to those of the Tour de France, a competition between two newspapers: La Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere della Sera. La Gazzetta wished to boost its circulation by holding a professional road race based upon the Tour de France and similar to the Corriere della Sera-organized car rally. On August 7th, 1908 the newspaper’s founder Eugenio Camillo Costamagna, director Armando Cougnet and its editor Tullio Morgagni announced the inaugural Giro d’Italia to be held in 1909.

On May 13th, 1909 at 02:53 am 127 riders started the first Giro d’Italia from Loreto Place in Milan. The race was split into eight stages covering 2448 kilometres, 49 riders finished with Italian Luigi Ganna winning the inaugural event having won three individual stages and the General Classification. Ganna received 5325 Lira as a winner’s prize with all riders in the classification receiving 300 lira (at the time the Giro’s director received 150 lira a month salary).

Luigi Ganna

The race has continued, with interruptions for wars, ever since and has, like so many sporting events, become ever bigger and more commercialized. Wikipedia gives an exhaustive account of the race, its various elements and many of its winners here. Two of the three cyclists with the most wins (5) are Italians Alfredo Bindi and Fausto Coppi.

Alfredo Bindi

Fausto Coppi

Belgian Eddie Merckx also won five races.

Eddy Merckx

The Giro d’Italia is one of the three jewels in the crown of the overseeing agency, the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale). The other two are the Tour de France (est. 1903) and the Vuelta a Espana (est. 1935). These three races comprise the Grand Tour of professional bike-racing. (The UCI season consists of twenty-seven races held world-wide over a ten-month period.) Until 1960 The Italian race began and ended in Milano, the home of the Gazetto dello Sport; since then the city of departure has varied annually. For a while the finish city also changed, but since 1990 it has, again, been Milano. Since 1965 there have been nine starts outside Italy, and in 2012 the race will begin in Denmark.

So it’s a very big deal that the Giro is not only passing through Rapallo, but actually stopping here overnight, and then passing through again tomorrow on a route from Genova Quarto to Livorno. Most of the downtown of Rapallo was closed to traffic in the afternoon and will be again tomorrow.

And this is where the A#1 headache comes in. We’ve been unable to find any definitive announcement of which roads are closed during which hours. The Captain had an errand in Sestri Levante, about forty minutes to the south on the coast road, the Via Aurelia. When he went into town this morning he asked a policeman if he’d be able to get through and out of town mid-afternoon. “No Problem!” was the reply. Unfortunately when he set out he found the road was closed, so he couldn’t go. The Aurelia was also closed where it enters town, as was the other road that connects Santa Margherita and Rapallo. Bleachers have been erected, and no doubt there’s been no end of festivities, speech-making and shirt-presenting. But anyone who wants to get anywhere that involves traversing Rapallo is pretty much out of luck. And because so many streets have been closed and cleared of all parked vehicles, there is no where to park even a scooter. It is, to say the least, inconvenient. BUT, it is a very big deal, kind of like having the Super Bowl or the World Series or the World Cup in your home stadium. So we shouldn’t complain… well, maybe just a little.

This edition of the Giro has been described as one of the most difficult in many years. In honor of the 150th anniversary of Italy’s Unification the route encompasses the whole boot:

Note there is even a jog to Sicily, where the cyclists will bike up Mount Etna. The entire route covers 3,524.5 km (2190 miles) in 21 stages, which range individually in distance from 12.7 km. to 244 km. The normal day appears to be in the neighborhood of 200 km. I can’t imagine. Twenty-three teams left Torino on the 7th of May, and presumably all twenty-three will finish in Milano on May 29.

Not only can I not imagine pedaling two hundred plus km in one day, I can’t imagine the kind of planning that has to go into carrying off an event that involves so many people moving over such a great distance over so many days. As disorganized as Italy sometimes seems, it takes logistical genius to carry off this race, road closures, grand-stands, publicity and all.

So we wish them well, and, to be honest, we wish them well on their way. It’s great they came to Rapallo, and it will be great to be able to drive out of town again.

For some lovely photos of Stages One and Two of the race, click here.

Addendum: It’s a terribly dangerous sport. Five to ten racers die in race-related accidents every decade, according to Wikipedia. Sadly, the list of names grew by one yesterday when Belgium’s Wouter Weylandt died of a skull fracture coming down the hill into Chiavari. There is an account of the incident here. So, no – there was no merriment in Rapallo last night and the podium ceremony was cancelled. I suppose these young men know the risks when they undertake the sport, but surely each of them believes a deadly accident could never happen to him. It’s seems such a terrible waste of a young life. Expatriate joins all the others who are greatly saddened by this death, and whose hearts go out to the victim’s family.

Citizen Salamone

04 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by farfalle1 in Italian bureaucracy, Italian habits and customs, Italy, Law and order, Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Italian bureaucracy, Italian citizenship, Trattoria del Sole

Meet Italy’s newest citizen, The Captain, aka Louis Philip Salamone.

The procedure, I can’t call it a ‘ceremony,’ took place in the office of the head of the Ufficio Stato Civile, Dotoressa De Filippi this morning and was more casual than solemn (I would have liked a bit more ceremony, myself). Nonetheless, for us it was the culmination of several years of work and waiting, and we were both thrilled with the outcome and moved by the Captain’s new status.

At first we were afraid we were headed for a problem, one which has reared its ugly head in past administrative wrestling matches. Whenever one gets a document, carta d’identita, permesso di sogiorno, etc., one must put place of birth on a form. By place of birth Italian bureaucracy means town or city. The Captain’s U.S. passport lists place of birth as ‘Wisconsin.’ This led to no end of trouble early in our stay here, but for some reason the good Dotoressa merely shook her head and commenced redoing the various declarations (they had to be further altered to correct the Captain’s misspelled middle name). Then began the ritual ‘signing of the many forms,’ which occurred no fewer than four times.

Somewhere in the midst of the signing the Captain took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the Laws of Italy. There was no hand on heart, no holy book, no blood asked for or given, just a verbal promise to be a good citizen.

In the midst of all this the phone rang, and our proceedings were interrupted by a long discussion of what the caller’s daughter had to do to get her passport.

It certainly detracted from the feeling that ours was a special moment, but we quickly got over it. Then the Dotoressa read a lengthy declaration to the effect that the President of the Republic had accepted the Captain as a citizen and showed us the Presidential decree, a photocopy of which was given to us later.

A quick handshake, and the deed was done.

I thought my Captain looked so handsome in his suit – it’s perhaps only the second time he’s worn it in the ten years we’ve been here. I wish I could fit into clothes I had ten years ago! He did not have a red, green and white tie, so he chose a green and white tie which we decorated with a bit of red and white ribbon, a not entirely unItalian thing to do.

Today was the end of a long road that we began in 2005. The quest began in the office of the very knowledgable and always helpful Anna Maria Saiano, the head of the Genova branch of the U.S. Consulate. She led us to Signore Bevilacqua (Mr. Drinkwater!) who sent us to Dotoressa De Filippi in Rapallo. She was disinclined to give the quantity of help we needed, so we returned to Sig. Bevilacqua in Genova, and he got things going for us.

There are many ways to become a citizen, one of the most common being ‘lineage.’ We had assumed this would be our route as both the Captain’s parents were Sicilian, one by birth, one by blood. However, because the Captain’s father became an American citizen before the Captain’s birth, in effect renouncing his Italian citizenship, it became more complex. We would have to go back to the grandparents, born in Sicily not all that long after the unification of the country. Two world wars have had their way with that island – the odds of finding all the requisite birth certificates were low.

We resorted to a ‘naturalized’ Citizenship, possible after five years of residence if either of the parents were born in Italy. There are other routes to citizenship, which you can read about here. Gathering all the requisite data took some time, but was not especially difficult: 1) the application 2) Marca di Bollo (stamp) for E14.62 3) Income tax returns for three years 4) Father’s birth certificate 5) Captain’s birth certificate 6) FBI certificate / arrest record (done through fingerprints taken in Genova and sent to the US) 7) our marriage certificate 8) residency certificate proving length of residence in Italy 9) Permesso di Sogiorno 10) notarized copy of passport. All documents in English required certified translation, which we were able to procure from an office in nearby Chiavari. The Captain did the translation himself; the certifying administrator didn’t speak English.

What the Captain didn’t have to do, which aspiring U.S. citizens must, is learn a lot of history and take a difficult test. I’m happy to tell you that the Captain has read the history of Italy many times over, because it interests him, and I’m sure he could pass tests in both language and history. But isn’t it interesting that in the U.S. there is a test to prove you are worthy, and in Italy it is simply a question of having the correct papers and forms? Bureaucracy! Having watched Craig Ferguson’s (The Late Late Show) citizenship swearing-in on TV I was surprised there was not a bit more pomp and circumstance, and at least an upraised hand when giving the oath.

Once we filed the application and all the attendant paperwork we simply had to wait. The State had two years (actually seven hundred thirty days) in which to process the application and render a decision; they didn’t go too many weeks over. News of our success reached us when we were in the U.S., and a visit to Dottoressa De Filippi was the first order of business when we got back to Rapallo. We were surprised to learn that the Captain was the twenty-seventh new citizen she had processed already this year.

So it was an exciting and momentous morning for us. The Captain pursued citizenship for several reasons. In a way it closes a circle that was opened when his father left Sicily for Ellis Island in 1921. It makes life here much less complicated: no need to be traipsing off to Genova every few years for permission to remain. Mostly it just gives official confirmation to something the Captain has known all his life: he is Italian.

All that remained for us was a quick celebratory lunch at the delightful Trattoria del Sole across from the petrol stations on Via Mamelli where we took advantage of the daily special: penne with funghi; fried achiuge (sardine-like fish), carrots, potatoes, wine, water and coffee, all for the princely sum of E 8 each (Ligurians have the reputation of being tightfisted with their money – who are we to go against type?).

We hadn’t eaten here before, though the place has been beckoning to the Captain for some time, and were charmed to find examples of the owner’s art and crafts on the walls.