October Newsletter
My favorite season to cook- and to visit Italy
Today, forty years ago, I arrived in Florence to study Italian, and here I am! Time to celebrate. I feel grateful daily for my Italian life. My “rebirth” or in Italian personal “rinascimento.” Here is how it began, click here.
Fall has always been my favorite time to travel. The crazy summer crowds are thinning out, and the harvest season has started in the countryside. The grape harvest is on right now; as soon as they finish, it’s time to gather the olives.
Below is at the local “Consorzio,” a local winery where you bring your grapes and are paid by weight. The Consorzio then makes and bottles the wine. You can buy in bottles or bulk wine. You can bring in a demijohn, damiana, that holds 55 liters and then bottle it yourself at home. It’s so much fun, but a warning: You usually get a little drunk doing it.
A visit to the Mercato is all the inspiration I need. We live seasonally here. Yes, I do buy food from other parts of the world, like bananas, but I find more flavor in the food if I buy seasonally and locally. It makes cooking easier.
The market is now bursting. I saw my neighbor come back from foraging; she goes daily now. Hot days following rain bring us wild mushrooms. She found these lovely porcini mushrooms. If you are going out to eat now, ASK! Porcini are usually served grilled or fried. The insalata di porcini is another favorite, where they slice them thinly and serve like a carpaccio, raw, topped with shaved parmigiano cheese, and drizzled with olive oil.
My favorite fall combination is also pear and pecorino cheese. Tuscan pecorino cheese is delicate, not salty, like the pecorino Romano.
You can find them in tortelloni ( a fairly new trend)
or in the classic combination served at the end of a meal.
Apples are also filling the market now.
Italians at home like to end a meal with fruit. In old-school trattorias, you can still order a bowl of fruit for dessert. They bring a bowl with a selection of fruit and you pay for what you take.
The first thing I make is a Tuscan apple cake. I have a collection of recipes. This is a dense, rich cake with raisins and nuts. Traditionally, when you use raisins in a recipe, they are soaked first and then drained before being added to the cake. In my recipe, I soak them in Vin Santo and add the Vin Santo to the cake. Years ago, I made a cake from the Silver Palate cookbook that added a sweet dessert wine to the cake instead of milk, and I loved it.
My recipe is popular with clients who make it for Rosh Hashanah which is October 4th this year.
I am including the recipe PDF as a little gift. The video class is included for the paying members.
Today at the market, I was treated to a large selection of beautiful squash.
I am pulling out some of my favorite recipes. Pumpkins, or zucche, as they are called here, can be used in so many different ways. Zucca is a single pumpkin. They are in the same family as the smaller “zucchini”- ini is added to a word to mean smaller.
Risotto, gnocchi, oven-roasted or in soup. Each region of Italy uses them differently.
On my website I have a lot of recipes:
Enjoy!
What’s cooking in your kitchen?
When I lived in the USA, I used to look for recipes to plan a menu and then shop. In Italy, I do the opposite. I shop first and then look for recipes.
Planning a whole menu around something you can’t find can be frustrating. Creating a menu around something you found can be exciting.
I also love having a good pantry; the dispensa, is where you can build your meals.
Learning the basics, practicing techniques makes you a better cook.
Learn once recipe at a time.
Next week I will talk about Rice in the Italian Dispensa. It’s not just for risotto.