Books for your Kitchen - "Recipes from an Italian summer"
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 3:21PM | The Tuscan Gun This is the time of the year I miss home the most… it almost hurts.
This is the time of the year that I always lived the Tuscan country side at its best!
For me and my whole family, living in the lush hills just above Florence is always been a given, my great grandfather really spoiled us! Now that I spend most of the year in Los Angeles with Deb and the girls, I do realize how my growing up has been kind of magnificent… it is a very frustrating struggle now, to try re-create a somewhat close experience for my kids here, in one of the biggest metropolis of the world.
Summer is around the corner, and all I can think of is the old vegetable garden in Fiesole that my grandmother Lola taught me how to grow and harvest… I remember wicker baskets and wood boxes being filled up daily with every kind of vegetables… without any preference, we used to pick what was ripe in the morning, and we would decide how to prepare it. Were we going to use the fresh Zucchini in a salad for lunch, or could we make a risotto in the evening?
Me: "Please Nonna, can we fry the Zucchini Flowers for lunch?"
Lola: "Yes, but let's hurry up before Nonno comes back from work, otherwise he'll throw his usual fit about using beer batter instead of my mom's recipe!"
I also remember playing with chicken and chicks; it was amazing to me how my grandmother was able to know his birds by name, all of them. It was a coup of about 20 very proud animals, all shiny white with red and yellow beak, strolling around with their chest pushed out, running to Lola every time they saw her… Either to be fed, or to have their neck pulled, I could not figure out why all that love for Nonna.
Dumb beautiful birds, they really could not register and process the chain of events!
They were food, nothing more, food that was "grown" with love, devotion and a daily attention; I personally always thought they also were a great decoration for the kitchen door, when they were hanging upside down, before we started working on them.
Oh, what a digression here…
All I will be thinking today will be the old chicken coup I want to fix and put back to work in Fiesole; I cannot wait to see Deborah chase the birds out of her laundry line, or maybe cook me some fresh eggs in the morning, before I get out to go check the fields.
Today I feel at home in Tuscany, even if I live one block from one of the biggest malls I've ever seen in my life!
Today I have a clean kitchen counter! A new cookbook is wide open on the old tiles, a few recipes are marked with coffee stained post-its. I am armed with a notepad and a pencil for the third time this week, getting ready to hit the Farmers' Market, once I've made my decision about what to cook tonight… Will call the wife, toss around a couple of ideas...
Today I am happy, and I thank my new cookbook: "Recipes from an Italian Summer" (Phaidon Press NYC).
