Side Of Spaghetti: #13
A peek into a very Italian week!
Monday 6/16/ Tuesday 6/17- And we’re off folks! This is going to be a twenty-four hour travel day, so I started off with a coffee at Octavia and then popped into Poppy’s to get my friends Janet, Daniel and I lunch for the airpot. I met them and their adorable little daughter, Sloane, at their place and we headed to JFK. Janet and I shared a turkey sandwich on focaccia and a artichoke and fresh mozz on baguette, both delish! We had a layover in Dublin and on the flight there the person in back of me got extremely angry with me for putting my seat back, which really confused me because the seat was designed this way. It is designed to go back, and I was not the one to design it. Am I missing something here? We got to Dublin for a very long layover and I ate some Irish cheddar potato chips and drank 1,000 cups of tea. Made it to Rome, sped up to Tuscany and checked into La Forra, one of my favorite places on earth. It is kind of like a second home to me, and all the travel tension melted away as soon as we arrived. We had a lovely dinner in their restaurant. We had mixed antipasti, pepiso ( a peppery beef stew), mushroom risotto, gnocchi, vegetables in agrodolce and a bottle of trebbiano. Then bedtime, finally.
Wednesday 6/18- I started the day with a run and pumped some iron in their little gym while listening to a Rewatchables ep about Marathon Man. We had some errands to run in the morning, then headed to Antico Forno Canu in Montevarchi for lunch. We all had tonno e mozzarella salads and a ton of fresh out of the oven schiatatta, which is like a chewy sourdough focaccia. So good. We went to the mega COOP supermarket, which is the absolute best supermarket I have ever been to. Their veggie section is like the Union Square farmers market. They have every kind of Italian cheese and meat you can dream of. Pasta, olives, tinned tuna and olive oil for days! Went back up to La Forra and had a nice long swim. Some of the other wedding guests began to trickle in and we all had dinner at an adorable spot in Radda called Le Forchette. We shared octopus carpaccio, caprese, bruschetta and eggplant rollantini. For my main I had chicken with porcini mushrooms and it was delicious. Beautiful view and happy people.
Thursday 6/19- I did a solo hike and then got a cappuccino and stared off into the Tuscan countryside. Pure bliss. I spent some time at the pool and then headed to Radda to this amazing alimentari to grab some food for dinner at our little villa within the hotel. I bought a giant chunk of a still warm mozarella braid, marinated anchovies, a pastry filled with prosciutto and cheese and some high quality spaghetti. I stopped by the COOP to get some stuff for lunch and dinner, then back up the hill to make a giant salad with radicchio and tuna. I made some meatballs and sauce for the big dinner and then back to the pool. Did a pickup at the train station of more guests and then prepped some more stuff for dinner. We all had aperitivo on the patio with many great snacks and cocktails. I drank negroni’s and some wine from a jug that I bought at this spot called The Wineria. You get like two gallons of pretty freaking amazing wwine for like fifteen euros. For dinner I made aforementioned meatballs with some penne (not my choice on the pasta shape but it was still great), spaghetti vongole with these amazing tiny clams and a gorgeous caprese salad. Janet made a giant tuscan kate salad, and we all sat around a big table and laughed and laughed. After dinner we had some more wine and I got to bed late.
Friday 6/20- The summer solstice! I started the day with laps in the pool and then a cappuccino. I headed to the COOP to get ingredients for the wedding and headed over to Fattoria Ramaggio which is an incredible butcher selling the highest quality meats, to buy three humungous Fiorentina ribeye steaks, or Bistecca Fiorentina, for the wedding. I went back up the hill to my friend Jennifer’s STUNNING winery, Podere Ciona (book a tasting if you are in the area!!) where the wedding is being held to start prepping. I made salsa verde, and Italian style salsa macha, blanched Romano beans, yogurt dip for crudités, anchovy butter for the steaks and some caponata Siciliana. Came back to La Forra to get changed for the wellcome dinner at Le Panzanelle over in Lucarelli. This is one of my favorite restaurants in all of Italy, and they made us a beautiful dinner for twenty-five people in their garden. We had meat and cheese, eggplant rollantini, and chicken liver and classic bruschetta, followed by pici algloine (a thick rope pasta in garlic cream), mezze rigatoni with a ragu of porcini and sausage, fab steak, the best fried potatoes with rosemary and salad. It was perfection. On the way home we encountered a gored deer carcas in the road which my local friend Alberto later told us was most likely attacked by a wolf. We also saw many foxes and wild boars crossing the road.
Saturday 6/21- Wedding day! Started bright and early with a trip to the COOP! One of the lovely gentlemen from the wedding helped me with grocery shopping and we had a very fun time. I got up to Ciona and began prepping. Janet, Daniel and our friend Brock were there picking and arranging fresh flowers from Jennifers garden, it was like a dream. My friend Alberto and his buddies arrived at around 3pm to help me. Alberto tended bar, and Niko helped me in the kitchen. He was an excellent chef and also very hot and I was tempted to marry him. The other two strapping young Tuscan men set up the tables and worked as servers, and everyone was so much fun to work with! For the wedding I made a huge aperitivo spread with mini frittata sandwiches, all kinds of cured meats, caprese, olives, pickles, Italian potato chips and schiacciata. The dinner was family style and I made charred Romano beans and chickpeas marinated with lemon, vinegar and red onion, topped with burrata from the Maremma region of southern Tuscany, and classic tomato bruschetta. For the main course I made risotto al limone with roasted cherry tomatoes, Bistecca Fiorentina, roasted branzino wrapped in fig leaves that I picked off the tree just off the kitchen, caponata Sicilana and a huge radicchio salad with pecorino and lemony onions. Janet wanted a classic ribbon icing white cake and I found the perfect one at a bakery I like in Montevarchi called Diana. We also served a big watermelon with a spoon in it for people to dig into, cherries and tiny pastries from Antico Forno Canu. Alberto mixed drinks and the servers poured Podere Ciona’s delicious wine, and honestly, it was the most beautiful wedding I have ever seen. Total perfection. I got home at around 3am and woke up a few hours later to the most wild thunderstorm that any of us have eve witnessed. It was very special.
Sunday 6/22- Last day in good old Montevarchi! I started the day with swimming laps, then headed to grab some schiacciata to bring Jennifer as a thank you. Drove back up the hill to her place to chat and eat said schiacciata. Headed back to La Forra to say goodbyes to a few people who were leaving, then over to Alberto’s house to meet him and his wife Azzura’s brand new, month old baby, Lara! SO SMALL! We had a lovely chat and I admired how tiny Lara’s fingers and toes were, and then I headed back out to run a few errands and pack. The eight of us that were left went for dinner at one of my very favorite places, Danile e Riccardo in Montevarchi. Daniele and Riccardo are a lovely couple who own and operate the restaurant, one in the front and the other in the kitchen and it is the sweetest restaurant on planet earth and just as delicious. There is no menu, they just bring each person a huge antipasti platter with like ten different little bites that are all incredible. There were three little crostini, chicken liver, white bean and sausage, a tender and delightful square of sformito, a mini eggplant crepe, a wee fried meatball, beef tartare, beef carpaccio and like two other delicious things I am forgetting. Each little bite is perfection. For pasta they served phenomenal spinach tortteloni with a tallegio fonduta and broccoli puree. We were all stuffed so we didn’t get secondo, but if we had it would have been the same price, 30 euros, which includes unlimited local wine and vin santo, and house made cantucci and chocolate tart. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, Daniele, our wonderful host and server is covered in Dachshund tattoos! We went back to La Forra and drank wine and talked until it got late, and I went to sleep happy.
This was a beautiful trip, but also an emotionally complicated one. This part of Tuscany has felt like a second home to me for a long time, and over the past year some personal relationships have become strained, and that made this visit feel sad. But there was so much beauty and kindness in the celebration and all the amazingly sweet new friends that I made, that while the heaviness in my heart was still there, it didn’t overwhelm me. I felt lucky to find new meaning in this special place, and I left hopeful that one day the fractures will mend and I will return to a place I love that feels richer than ever because of this experience.
Love you!!
Ciao for now,
Z
