Last Sunday I went to my friendly neighborhood goat battle. About a kilometer down the road, there is a ‘campo sportivo’, which is a big grassy field with a track around it. I often go running there, it is fabulous. It is also the location for occasional festivals, parties, and barnyard battles. I’ve written about […]
Strawberry, Mint & Black Pepper Jam
Last year I made too much jam. How much is too much jam, you ask? Well, I have 6 fruit trees that had a very good year (3 plum, 1 cherry, 2 pear), I liberated some seemingly abandoned trees of their fruit, and I bought that which I could not grow or find. We were […]
Have some sausage: polenta con salsiccia
Where I live in Valle d’Aosta, Italy, polenta con salsiccia is the ‘go-to’ way of preparing polenta. It is basically Italian sausage cooked in a tomato sauce and eaten with polenta. This dish is good, I mean really good. Good enough that I’ve been sneaking occasional bites of it, and I’ve been a strict vegetarian […]
Polenta: The Day After
If you are like me, you always make far too much polenta. The bag of polenta meal seems so small, and it can’t possibly be enough to feed everyone, right? Ok, I’ll add just a little bit more. Wrong. That little bag of polenta can feed 10 people. Which means I still have enough polenta […]
Polenta Ostenga con Gamberetti… Italian Shrimp & Grits!
I wrote my last post, declaring my love affair with spring, a mite too soon. Yesterday I woke up to a snow storm. Needless to say, it made me quite disgruntled. In need of something to warm ourselves up from the unexpected winter blast, we held an impromptu polenta party last night. There is nothing […]
Spring in the Alps and a Tasty Springtime Snack!
Oh, I love spring! Winter in the Alps is hard, long, and cold. This week winter has officially come to an end. Yes, I know that for the rest of the northern hemisphere it ended nearly a month ago, but in my neck of the woods official dates regarding seasons don’t mean much. This week […]
A Polenta Rainbow
Last weekend was my time to shine as an American in Italy. On Friday, I played fiddle in a blues concert dedicated to Mississippi John Hurt-particularly strange given that I’m not a blues musician- , on Sunday I taught an American pie making class to a bunch of Italians (they loved it), and then my […]
A Polenta Gathering
Polenta, I love you. Yes, I know that I declare my undying love for every food I write about. It is because there is so much great food in the world. But polenta holds a special place in my heart (and stomach). Before I moved here, I thought polenta was the stuff that came in […]
A Vending Machine Tour of Valle d’Aosta
Yesterday we had friends from Piemonte visit us for the day, so we took them on a personalized tour of my own making of the region. A vending machine tour. Because Aosta has some pretty spectacular vending machines. You’ve already heard about my dairy farmer neighbors with the raw milk vending machine. That was our […]
The many faces of radicchio (and oven roasted treviso radicchio)
I love radicchio…..I don’t know why, but I’m simply enamored with bitter vegetables this winter. I never really noticed radicchio when I lived in the US, but in Italy, I simply can’t escape it. I walk into the vegetable market and I am literally faced with a wall of more types of radicchio than I […]
