Wednesday, September 25
Croce a Uzzo, Pistoia, Toscana
Highlight: The single best plate of pasta in my life
Lowlight: Jet lag
When I woke up for our first real day of vacation in Italy, I was really confused by my phone which read 07:00 and also Wednesday. Yesterday morning, it read Monday. In my travel-addled brain, I could not account for losing the entire day of Tuesday. I should also say that the hour of my awakening was not of my own choosing. After a fitful night, I was awoken by a rooster joining the stags in the vocal fray, with the local church bells gonging away for added insult.
The next thing I noticed is that I had no internet service, but I was in no condition to run it down. Ultimately, we made our way downstairs to join Lyn and Neal, and after chatting for a few minutes, Neal went into the kitchen to make really great coffee, the best we would have in Italy, in his oversized moka pot. Stay tuned for more information about moka pots in about another week.
With the excellent coffee, he served a plate of cornetti, aka croissants, from a local bakery. I think we were all surprised they were sweet pastries rather than typical croissants. No matter: they were great. During our chat over breakfast and coffee, we were entertained by Bella the cat who is surely spoiled and gets a bowl of milk for her breakfast.
Apparently, Bella came with the property along with long-haired Sherry, who is super afraid of people, though she did run through the living room on occasion. And then two other neighborhood cats came running in the open French doors onto the patio. This small village apparently shares a bunch of semi-feral cats who make the rounds from food bowl to food bowl.
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| Cornetti e Caffè |
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| Bella Gets Her Milk for Breakfast |
The coffee was so welcome and helped me cut through the fog of jet lag just a little bit, enough to consider the day ahead of us. Neal and Lyn wanted to take us down the mountain into Pistoia for market day, to show off their town, and to have some lunch. No matter how tired I was, I was ready for my first real Italian experience. While other Italians questioned why we would visit Pistoia (as in looked down their noses), we found Pistoia charming and we would visit again.
The coffee also helped me deal with the lack of internet on our phones. I discovered that I needed to turn on data roaming. When I went to set up Ann's phone, the settings screen did not match mine. I have always noticed minor differences in our two phones that we bought at the same time from Apple with supposedly identical configurations. In playing with Ann’s phone, I discovered that it is dual SIM (and mine is single) which obscured how to turn on roaming data.
While waiting outside to head into Pistoia, I got my first chance to look around the property and surrounding properties. I was much taken with the massive Star Jasmine growing up the walls and with the prostrate rosemary dripping down the retaining walls of the steep hill. I also got to see my first lemon tree up close. Seeing them roadside flying down the interstate in Florida does not count. Moreover, the ubiquitous olive trees laden with unripe fruit had me thinking wistfully about my olive tree in McMinnville and wondering how much fruit it might have in now its 6th year.
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| Massive Star Jasmine |
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| Lemon Tree |
After breakfast, Neal drove us down a supremely winding back road, so narrow and with blind curves that required sounding the horn to alert oncoming drivers to our presence. Soon enough, we found ourselves downtown with a lot of others attending the Wednesday market. We wandered about the city center with Neal narrating the sights. Prior to going for lunch, Neal and Lyn took us to a small cafe where they introduced us to the owners, a young couple, and where we had a much needed coffee.
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| Spikes Atop a Wall |
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| Built and Rebuilt, Time and Again |
After coffee and another brief walkabout through the central piazza of Pistoia, we made our way to a local restaurant where we had lunch reservations, Taverna Gargantuà, right in the city center. We proceeded in true Italian fashion to have a 3-hour lunch, before heading back to the house in the hills.
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| The Special Board Says "Pasta Made Daily in our Workshop" |
I was not sure why Neal and Lyn chose this particular restaurant, but I am glad that they did. We had a wonderful meal with an excellent Morellino di Scansano, a wine that I selected because I have always liked it. Though not quite local, it comes from La Maremma, a coastal part of Toscana where the local cultivar of Sangiovese is called Morellino, little cherry. I love the light body and bright acidity of this wine.
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Podere 414 Morellino di Scansano
About as Good as Morellino Gets |
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| Bruschetta di Pecorino e Salsiccia Cruda |
I am always on the lookout for new things to try and when I saw an antipasto featuring
salsiccia cruda, raw sausage, I had to order it for the table, a first for all four of us. Out from the kitchen came sliced bread topped with broiled pecorino cheese and raw pork sausage. I only ordered it because I know that Italy's meat inspection system is far, far better than ours. I was very pleasantly surprised and I loved it. I think everyone shared this sentiment.
Speaking of crostini, I was aware in the depths of my chef brain that the tradition in parts of Italy including Tuscany is not to salt bread. There are a lot of competing stories to explain this, but it is a reality of eating bread, especially in Tuscany. To my palate, salt helps bring out the wheat flavor and I miss it when it is absent. But as they say, "When in Rome...."
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| Ann Ordered Tagliatelle with Fresh Porcini |
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| Pici all'Aglione: The Best Pasta Dish of My Life |
For lunch, an antipasto and a primo is plenty to eat, no secondi necessary. Off the daily special board, Ann ordered a delicious primo of fresh tagliatelle and fresh porcini. I loved it and it was far better than the same dish that she ordered later in our trip. I took a flier on
pici all'aglione, not knowing how the aglione ("large garlic" aka elephant garlic in English) would be incorporated in the dish, but not really caring because I will order pici, an absolute favorite cut, pretty much any time I can.
I have few words to describe the dish that I was served. I have eaten thousands of plates of pasta in my life and I have made countless heaps of pasta both during my professional career and at home. And this particular plate of pasta at this particular restaurant at this particular time with these particular friends transcends them all. It was the most perfect dish of pasta I have ever eaten. Stubbier and thicker than I have ever encountered before, these pici were impeccably rolled and cooked. And the very simple tomato sauce with a hint of elephant garlic stayed out of their way; the sauce let the impeccable pasta shine.
I was so impressed with this pasta that after lunch, I went specifically over to the storefront pasta workshop,
il laboratorio, where the restaurant retails its pasta. Behind the retail counter, two women were handmaking the pasta. I told them in my best broken and incorrect Italian how great the pici were. It was smiles all around. If I lived in Pistoia, I would probably never make pasta again and I would likely be fat as a hog!
After lunch, we loaded up in the car and saw a bit more of Pistoia on our way out of town. I tried to use this trip to familiarize myself with traffic patterns, practices, parking restrictions, etc. In two days, I would take the rental car and be on my own, turned loose on Italy.
Back up the hill, we all took a nap, the jet lag being real, in preparation for a light dinner with two couples from the neighborhood, friends of Lyn and Neal. It was really a lot of fun to meet their friends and we enjoyed a little wine and good conversation. For dinner, I helped Neal arrange a couple platters of prosciutto, mortadella, soppressata, crostini di fegatini, and cheeses. Can I just say how much I love chicken liver spread on crostini?
After dinner, we went to bed around midnight, to hear once again the stags bellowing in the night, seemingly within 50 meters of our open window. The difference this evening from last evening was that the neighbors in the adjoining house had left their two dogs out. The larger of the two, the big black shaggy one named Quattro, decided that it was his mission to bark loudly each time a buck bellowed. Even though Quattro was in a deer tizzy, I managed to get to sleep. I imagine sleep deprivation was helping quite a bit.
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