Giorno dieci

Today, we left the winding hills of Tuscany in the North of Italy for the region of Lazio, home to the capital, Rome. While Tuscany was picture perfect, and is certainly a hub for all things food and wine, we were eager for change. The drive was a pleasant 2.5 hours and would have been quicker were it not for the pouring rain.

Our rendezvous today was with an Englishman Johnny, who fell in love with Italy and with an Italian woman 27 years ago and never left. He is the 4th such person we have met that has been sucked into the slow food culture and lifestyle of the Italian countryside. In addition to being a culinary tour guide, he is a food/travel writer, olive oil expert and according to him, a sculptor as well. We met up with a friend of his who runs an agriturismo. These are state subsidized B&B’s that produce food of some sort; cattle, produce, wine, olive oil, cheese…

We had a delightful lunch from produce picked merely 15 minutes prior to eating. Zucchinni with balsamic and pine nuts, local cheeses with house made jam, Orichiette pasta with a cauliflower puree and parmesan cream and then a simple salad of arugula, cabbage, apple and almonds. For dessert was a freshly whipped Sabayon. We of course had some local red wine “Unknown” and espresso. After a few laps around the garden to digest the food, and a shot of their house made bitters as a digestif, we headed off to a well respected olive mill.

Traditionally, Lazio and more specifically, Sabine where we are, is a poor part of the country. Most growers do not have their own mills, but instead take their olives to the local press. Here, we got to see the very high-tech process of extracting olive oil and we were able to taste the olive oil just seconds old. It was fresh and intense, but Ryan and I agree so far that we far prefer the oil from Carlo in Tuscany among others we have tasted. However, we’ll just keep that to ourselves.

From here, we ventured to the foothills of Sabine to a small house, where a woman has gained notoriety for making incredible, fresh Ricotta. She was a tough woman, farming the estate as well as responsible for her herd of 400 sheep from whose milk her Ricotta is made from. She has a piercing glare and could be a very beautiful almost Demi Moore-like woman with a little work, shaved armpits and a bra. But we weren’t there as talent scouts for the next Ms. Lazio, we were there for her Ricotta. She only produces a very tiny amount and just watching her and waiting drove me mad. It requires a great deal of patience which I do not possess, but the pay off is worth it. Creamy, fresh and unmistakably goat, this unpasteurized cheese, like most others we’ve had, was out of this world.

Our B&B for the next 2 nights is in the medieval town of Casperia. This town, like so many others, speaks about a time when all towns and regions where in a perpetual state of warfare. It’s built into a rocky mountaintop and has only 1 entrance. It too, like San Denato in Poggio, is fake-like deserving to be in the next Lord of the Rings. Bad news is no cars inside the village and the B&B is at a highpoint, so we had to carry our bags up the narrow stepped streets. Good news is, I didn’t pack like a girl like Ryan, who brought with him a small pharmacy and clothes for all seasons, just in case.

I find myself at the moment with an hour to kill resting by an oversized medieval fireplace before our evening outing. I took the nap of naps…

Post nap, we went to Johnie’s little Enoteca which rightly so, he calls more of a drinking club than a bar. We arrived in American fashion, early before the locals, but slowly but surely, expats from different countries trickled in for good food, good wine and English conversation. After a few glasses of wine and some more of that pungent sheep’s milk Ricotta, we walked down the small narrow ancient steps of Casperia to a small pizzeria at the foot of the fortress. We were greeted by a large jovial man with a Bin Ladenesque S&P beard. He was the proud chef and owner.

Dinner started with a painfully delicious (why didn’t we think of that) spread of crispy flatbread, garbanzo beans in olive oil with celery and chili flakes as well as some beans with olive oil and garlic. There was also some finely diced and sautéed mushrooms with all sorts of innards like liver, heart, kidney…but that didn’t even seem to be an acquired taste b/c the local we were with skipped right over it. The main course was a giant pizza baked in their wood-burning oven. This pizza was long and oval shaped and broken into different sections each with different flavors. I can’t definitively say it’s the best pizza I have ever had but if it wasn’t, it was certainly up there. Arturo’s coal fired pizza on Houston Street in NY still holds a place in my heart.

Dinner was great and made even better by the fact that we shared this great meal with Mary and Mary, two Irish women from Dublin, friends for the last 20 years and here on a cooking expedition. If I was to try and find a common theme to the best meals we’ve had here, it’s the genuine spontaneity of some of the conversations we’ve had with some of our meals.

Again I find myself sitting by a fire and a bid you all, a good night.

-Arturo