festa della zucca

We made several trips to our local Festa Della Zucca over the past week. We've seen this festival grow from a small tent of locals to a rowdy and crowded large tent with a wooden floor...still mostly of locals, just in the matter of a couple of years.
(How you like that comparison? I'm tired.)

While I don't have any photos of it, the offerings were simply divine: tortellini alla zucca, pumpkin gnocchi, pumpkin risotto with black truffles, roasted pumpkin, pumpkin gelato, pumpkin beer, fiori di zucca fritti, and fritelle di zucca! Mamma mia. Soooooo good. All of it home made. All of it very, very tasty (even if the tortellini is a bit sweet.)

And the pumpkin exhibits were also quite interesting. It's one of those times that I wish I had brought the big camera...but I didn't...not once, even. Sigh.

The Festa Della Zucca has, sadly, ended.

I think it's time to get it going in my kitchen.

First let me check for a can of Libby's.... said no one in this country. Ever!

Have a great weekend! 

you might reconsider that horse...for dinner

Sunday night we went to a local festival, La Festa di San Giuseppe, for dinner; it's the first festa of its type in these parts and has become our "Kicking Off the Season" one to attend. This one is in a very small town, as are the others, but it is huge in terms of number or visitors. On a Sunday night, this place was hopping.

Very Cheap Wine
So Cheap It Needs to Be Cut with Water

We go for the cheap wine taste of the local culture, but the kids go for the benefit raffles and rides. While each sagra or festa has a different mode of organizing things, one common element is that the meals are taken in a great tent filled with long tables that are shared among the diners. This can lead to interactions with strangers.

Pick some lucky tickets kiddo!

This happened last night.

Menu Choices
Can you distinguish the American "1's" from the Italian "1's"?

This festa offers bistecca di puledro as a choice, which is horse steak, steak of a foal...a horse under a year old. Baby horse. I know, I know, I know.  But...just step out of your cultural norms for a minute and accept that people live differently. Most local Italians I know would never consider eating a "gambero killer," but I could never get enough crawfish...it's one of the things I miss about the States: crawfish, those little crustaceans that live in the mud!  So, if someone wants to eat horse...so be it. Who am I to judge? Crawfish, horse, mule? What's the difference, anyway?

But I'm not ordering it. Ever. Probably.

Instead, we ordered quail, which is the specialty of this festa, quail stuffed with herbs and wrapped in bacon and roasted on a spit over a wood-burning fire.  As a group of strangers joined our table, Richard pointed out that a couple of the plates were indeed bistecca di puledro. You see...it looks like beef. You really can't tell the difference.

Giddy up! Gnam, gnam.

But there is a difference. Oh, yes there is...

As the kind, elderly, well-dressed gentleman from the country allowed me to snap a photo of his modest dinner, which is accompanied by polenta that is FRIED in the drippings from the roasted birds, he gave my dear husband a bit of advice:

Foal for dinner makes for thoroughbreds at night.
In the bedroom.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
You might want to reconsider it, sir.

I pretended I didn't understand him.

I love my life.

Local? Lucky you! This festa in Villaganzerla will be open this upcoming weekend as well.. There is still time to get your magic horse steak...or at least order it for your unsuspecting husband. Let me know how that goes if you do.

Baby Bumpers!

corner view

corner view :: what to do in your country

This amazing woman, Fiorenza, created this sheet of pasta with a half kilo of flour, five eggs, a pine board surface, a cherry-wood pole/rolling pin that belonged to her husband's grandmother, and, most importantly, her hands. And when she was finished, she received a healthy round of applause from all of those in attendance at her cooking demonstration. She then humbly continued creating cappelli di zucca in the tradition of Montova in the region of Lombardia at a local pumpkin festival near my home this weekend.

Learning to make pasta or admiring someone who completes this task entirely by hand is certainly something to do in my country of Italy.

Another thing to do would be to pay Fiorenza a visit for a taste of her pasta or anything from her kitchen, for that matter:  Agriturismo Loghino Sabbioni. I hope to do so soon.

Corner View is a weekly appointment shared by people around the globe, an appointment started in the spring of 2009 by Jane in Spain and currently hosted by Francesca over at Fuori Borgo. We welcome you to join us; next week's theme is "roadside."

Volterra AD 1398 | Medieval Gaming

The likelihood of Richard and I traveling over hill and dale to attend this type of festival is fairly slim. Okay. Honestly. We would never engage in this type of entertainment. But now we have this little person to consider as we wander about here and there, and the older she gets, the more we are forced welcome the opportunity to consider her needs. There is generally hell to pay when we don't. So, instead of spending the day being fussy over wine, cheese, oil, shopping, landscapes, music or art, we agreed to check out the medieval festival. You know, for the kid, to broaden her horizons ... poor deprived child. 

It wasn't all that bad. Another favorite part of the day for all of us, besides our Mona Lisa masterpieces, was the guinea pig gambling. Oh, yes, you read that correctly!

It goes like this ...

Put up the money and select your lucky numbers. (Also show off artwork from nearby Medieval art school...unicorns?)

Hope for a good run as the medieval carnies prep the gaming apparatus.

Let the games begin! The basket is lifted and the protagonist is ready.

With taunts and jeers gentle urging from the betting crowd, the little guy chooses a numbered hole for safety.

It turns out that our numbers were not so lucky after all as the piggy failed to choose even one of our numbers as he scurried into a dark hole. The winner walked away with a mystery prize inside a brown paper bag. Looked a lot like vino to me :) Bummer...good thing we weren't there for the wine.

da Vinci's masterpiece, restyled

Just plain family fun!

Richard's work took him to Tuscany this weekend, so Young One and I followed along for a bit of a "last hoorah" of summer travel. Wouldn't you? Come on, it's Toscana. While there, we did a bit of time travel to the middle ages at the Volterra AD 1398 festival in the ancient hill town of Volterra in the province of Pisa. Young One, in particular, had a very good time at the kid-friendly event, but we all three loved the Mona Lisa portraits, even if she is a bit of an anachronism in this setting. (Well, isn't she? A woman of the Renaissance? Help!) No bother, anyhow... While I cannot explain the excitement in placing our faces in this hanging painting, it had all three of us giggling and in stitches for a long a very long time.

I hope to share more photos of the festival (which is by far the best of its kind that I have experienced) here soon. It continues through 26 August.

La Zucca

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Ghizzole Festa della Zucca

Pretty & Delish
What else do you need on a Friday night in the nearby paese?

I suppose this means Fall is upon us.
 I wish that Mother Nature would turn down the thermostat a bit.
Can we say "Heat Wave"?

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peas in the paese

A coveted gift at this time of year is the bag full of fresh peas from the neighbor who is, among other things, a seasoned pea farmer. Since we are currently eating our fill of peas at the local sagra and restaurants, we decided to shell these and save them for darker times when a taste of spring will be much welcomed at our table. He shared that he is up to his ears in peas and is personally sick of them.

Bisi di Lumignano

These are no ordinary peas. This variety was introduced to the surrounding hills in the year 1000 by Benedictine monks and are considered a valued delicacy. Don't expect to find them in your local supermarket; the good farmers in the paese cultivate only enough for our local pea festival and for distribution to area restaurants, where city dwellers flock for a taste of the bisi. You can read more about our famous peas here or here (in Italian).

The pea festival, Sagra dei Bisi, continues in the paese this weekend. Those thousands of peas served at the festival are shelled entirely by hand. Entirely. That fact alone should get you out here this weekend. That...and my brownies and my chocolate chip cookie pie that will be found at the sweet table. A tip: order the risi e bisi. You won't be disappointed.

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Bisi is the local dialect word for piselli which is the Italian word for peas.

scenes from Montecchio Medievale

Many flock to Verona to visit the famed Juliet's balcony; however, a more local legend has it that the feuding families called the hills of Montecchio Maggiore with its twin castles home. This weekend the historical - cultural - reenactment society La Faida hosted its annual medieval festival at the castles: Montecchio Medievale.

The festival exceeded our expectations, and it was the perfect outing for a little girl who watched both The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Gnomeo and Juliet in the same week.  (I love it when unrelated things coincidentally fall into place that way.)  I think her favorite part was the conversation with the guy making the chain mail armor, ring by tiny ring. My favorite part was our opportunity to climb all the way to the top of one of the castle towers, a tower usually not open to the public.

And did I mention that it's entirely free?

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You can read more about the local legend, which is based on the fact that Vicenza's own Luigi Da Porto (1485-1529) was one of the first author's of the tale that lives on in Shakespeare's words today. (Okay, so it's a stretch ;)

More images of our day are here on Flickr.