Busy Hands, Wandering Thoughts

Well, I've made it to the end of my first stint of WWOOFing, and I feel like I should share my thoughts about my experience so far with my reading public, such as it is.

While I've written about specific tasks and experiences, all the stuff between the lines seems a little more important. All of the work I've done in Italy - stacking wood, hoeing, weeding, harvesting anything at all - have one thing in common: my hands are busy, but my mind is free to wander. In short, I've had time to think. Lots of time. Here's what I've been thinking about, more or less:




I have found that I enjoy working hard, being outside every day, eating well, sleeping deeply and waking early. Slowly, this trip became less about Italy and more about the work I've been doing while I'm here, and in turn WWOOFing has become less an inexpensive way to see the world and more an indefinite (but economical) internship.
I have certainly learned skills while I've been here, but most of these skills (winemaking, olive harvesting, etc.) don't translate directly to my life. The values behind these skills, however, certainly do. I've come to value even more the creating of something out of almost nothing - or at least from the rawest of ingredients. Before coming to Italy, I was already baking bread and pizza from scratch. Now, I want to grow the tomato, onions, garlic, etc. I want to milk the cow and make the cheese. I want to grind wheat I've grown. I want to bake it in my wood-fired oven.




I've always daydreamed about the perfect kitchen; now, I'm taking that to a whole new level. I'm thinking about everything from large-scale project to the smallest of details. How long does it take a newly planted orchard to produce apples? How much could I charge for apple sauce at a farmers market? How much apple cider vinegar would a small bed and breakfast use in a year? How much do used shipping containers cost? How well-insulated are they? What if I half-buried them in a hillside? People pay HOW MUCH for heritage turkeys?! Could I attach a small grain mill to a bicycle? Would I grind my own meat for sausages, or do I let the butcher grind it? Etc? Etc? Ad nauseum?




In short, I've been thinking. Right now, I'm going to keep learning as much as I can. I'm considering another stint of WWOOFing in the states next year (this cycle of earning money in the summer and traveling the rest of the year seems oddly sustainable). Right now, I love what I've been doing, and I'm going to keep doing it until I'm sure whether or not I want to do it for the rest of my life. Then, if I've become irretrievably possessed, I'll get started on that homestead.

(An aside: Florence is great, and I'll have a post on my food adventures in Florence and Bologna soon!)

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Location:Toscana, Italia

Cooked Water: A Recipe

I'm nearing the end of my first WWOOF stretch, and next week I promise a post reflecting my thoughts on my experiences so far. One more week of manual labor, then off on a little touristing in Florence, Bologna, and environs. Then off to London before my tourist visa expires for a little touristing with my favorite expat and my mother, who is hopping the pond for a little mother-daughter Scottish Christmas vacation. Then, back to work!

Meanwhile, in the present, I've been spending many hours reading a few Italian cookbooks, one the Big Book of Regional Cuisine:




I spent quite awhile translating a few recipes (minus the many mysterious oven temperatures and grams), from the very simple to the amazingly complex. Imagine, if you will, a dish consisting of a crispy shell of delicious risotto encasing a steaming mixture of meatballs, sausage, tomato sauce, and fresh mozzarella. That sounds like a once in a lifetime type of recipe. On the other hand, I noticed a great tradition in all of the different regions of Italy a skill of making a delicious, simple dinner from whatever might be lying around the kitchen. There are a few different recipes along the same lines, but the Tuscan version is called Acquacotta, or literally "cooked water." This seemed like one of the easier recipes to "translate" to the American kitchen, but be warned it hasn't been tested and the measurements are guess-timated from my own soup-making intuition.

Acquacotta

Serves 4, 30 minutes total cooking time

Ingredients:

1 cup fresh mushrooms (preferably porcini)
2 small peeled tomatoes, chopped
2 cloves garlic
2 eggs
16 small pieces toasted bread
1/4 cup grated parmesan
4 tbsp olive oil
Salt, pepper

Cooking Instructions:

Clean the mushrooms, remove the legs, and coarsely chop.
Cut the garlic in into slices and brown in a medium pot with the olive oil. Add the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes, stirring often.
Add the tomato and about 8 cups of water. Season with salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Simmer for 15 minutes.
Distribute the toast between four bowls and sprinkle with about 2/3 of the parmesan.
Beat the eggs in a bowl with the remaining parmesan. Sprinkle the egg mixture into the soup, mixing well.
Distribute the "cooked water" between the bowls and serve immediately.


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Location:Bibbona, Livorno, Toscana, Italia

Collected Observations from Bibbona

What a week to be in Italy! Just as I arrived to the first place with a TV in it (and on during all meals, by the way), Italy blew up! Torrential rains, floods, the Fall of Berlusconi - exciting, to say the least.

Anyways, I'm in the northeast of Tuscany, about two miles from the coast on a small family farm. They have olives for their own use, plus a huge variety of vegetables that they sell to regular customers and at the local market. They have a pretty large greenhouse, plus another few acres of vegetable gardens.




My work here has been pretty mixed, so instead of describing something like the olive harvest, I'm going to throw out a few things I've learned from the work and the television.

1. In Italy, even pets eat pasta:




2. All day in the fields, olive grove, or garden, we listen to the radio. One day, I was doing more daydreaming than radio-listening when all the sudden I hear the name "Steven Pinker." Huh? I took he's psychology class with him. They cite something he said recently and start a call-in conversation about it. That's funny. Next day, same scenario and all the sudden they mention an artist that I'd met at the castle last month (apparently Pink Floyd wrote a song about her). The wonders of Italian radio.

3. Strawberries produce more in their second year. If you plant them in containers, let them sprout, and then freeze them, they think they're already in year two!




4. Garlic, obviously, is a bulb. You plant one clove, and a whole head grows out of it. I spent a day breaking apart garlic to plant, separating the good cloves from the bad cloves. Good cloves are the curved ones, which they say grow into nice big heads. The straighter cloves go into the sauce instead of the ground. Maybe an old wives' tale, but it's tradition!

5. The smell of a rotting onion is one I will always recognize, after two days of sorting onions to sell, onions to plant, and onions to throw as far away from my olfactory range as possible.




6. Everyone in Italy seems to be 100% ready to be on television. I know American television is full of people who may have no business being there, but this is something that has really struck me about Italians. They seem to always be willing to share an opinion on national television or call into the radio station to tell the country what three certain songs meant to their lives. When one certain game show comes on, I can't help but laugh in glee. It's a show where eight people stand up on a dais with a number pinned into your chest and a folder containing the prize money amount. The player has a list of eight occupations, and one by one they come to center stage and the player has to guess their job description correctly for the prize money.

7. Italians drive videocameras like they drive cars. There are lots of them, no rules, and no control. Every time you see a news report, half the screen is taken up by other reporters, or the camera is zooming in and out willy-nilly, or they zoom in on a face from across the street and bounce the camera around. Even the interview shows or game shows I've seen have odd camera angles from across the room, or behind someone's ear. Schizophrenic, a little disconcerting, and somehow perfectly Italian.

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Location:Bibbona, Livorno, Toscana, Italia

Olive Harvest

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but I've been quite busy doing what I'm about to describe to you. Wednesday, I leave for another farm ("No English Spoken"!) to do some more of the same.

First, a view of the castle from the top of an olive tree:




Late fall in Italy means the olive harvest, and that's probably what I'll be doing for the next five weeks (one more week here at the castle, then I move on to a farm further north nearer the coast). While there are various mechanized methods of harvesting, here they use the old fashioned way: by hand.

These olives are ready to pick when some of the olives on the tree start to turn purple and black:




First, you lay out a net under a tree to catch the olives:




Then you reach up with your hands or a small rake and start pulling olives off the tree one branch at a time. Some people use ladders, some stay on the ground, and some like to climb the tree and attack from the inside. Somehow, I always feel safer in the tree, even if I'm balancing on one foot at the very top.




After we've pulled (almost) every last olive from a tree, we lift the net and gather them into one corner, where we pull out any large branches.




We then tip all the olives into crates, where they wait to be taken to the press.




At Potentino, they press at least every three days, and the sooner you press the olives the better. They take their olives to a very well-regarded press ('frantoio') a few towns over. There, you empty your small crates into their very large ones, they weigh your olives, and then the olives wait their turn to go into the press:










The whole operation is very high-tech, and being one of the best presses in Italy, they don't allow anyone to photograph the inside of the press.

A few days later, they call to say you can pick up your new oil, which is much greener and spicier than the same oil after a few weeks or months. Here, with some mozzarella straight from Naples:




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Location:Potentino, Seggiano, Toscana, Italia

Svinaturra

Over the last two weeks I've been here, we've spent quite a few days in the cantina. As I wrote in my post about the grape harvest, the grapes for red wine are de-stemmed and pumped into oak vats to ferment. After about two weeks, it's time to remove the grape skins from the wine and start to age it. Large producers do this with a machine, but Potentino uses an old-fashioned hand press.




After we pump out all of the wine we can, we're left with the soggy skins at the bottom of the vat.




At this point, someone gets inside the vat and starts filling buckets with the skins, which are tossed into the press. Someone stands inside the press and stomps on the skins.




This is different from the other kind of stomping, which was to crush the fresh grapes. This time, we're just trying to get at much in each press as possible, which means packing it in (and squishing the juice out) with our feet. Depending on the sogginess of the skins in question, you either struggle knee-deep in the gooey grapeness or you rise all the way to the top of the barrel on raisins. Inside the vat, you scoop as fast as you can at first, and slow down as the alcoholic fumes start getting to your head. After we fill the barrel of the press, we start on the long, slow process of the actual pressing.




The press moves down millimeters at a time, cranked by hand, and the wine slowly runs out.




When we just can't turn the screw anymore, we sit down and wait a few minutes, and then start again. When the press has gone as far down as possible, we take off the barrel and chip away at the hard fruitcake of grape skins.




These get bagged up and taken to a local distillery to make grappa (the pressed skins already smell like grappa when you get too close!).




The rest of the week is the beginning of the olive harvest! It has been a little cold and windy over the last few days, but it should be back up to the sixties this week - perfect tree-climbing weather!

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Location:Il Potentino, Seggiano, Toscana, Italia

Up in the Chestnut Grove

Last weekend we went to help a local family gather chestnuts in their chestnut grove. Chestnuts only grow between five hundred and a thousands meters above sea level, and the local mountain seems to be prime chestnut territory.




Families from the small surrounding towns have a plot of a few acres on the mountain and late every fall they go and spend a few weeks gathering chestnuts and sorting them into two different categories. The whole, unblemished chestnuts are sold by the kilo and the blemished chestnuts are either sold to local farmers to feed their pigs or milled into chestnut flour, which is used to make sweets and sometimes even pasta. Chestnut trees cover almost the entire mountain, and each family's grove is separated only by a line drawn on the rocky ground.




Each little grove has a hut with a fireplace and sometimes a stove, but no running water or electricity. During the chestnut season, families spend the whole day up the mountain, and lunch is cooked in the huts. When we arrived, we were given pails and burlap sacks and shown where to start gathering. Chestnuts fall from the trees inside of spiky outer shells, which really really really hurt if you touch them (they even pierce most gloves).




We were just gathering the nuts that had already escaped their spiny protections, and we filled our tenth and final burlap sack just in time for lunch, a delicious three-course meal provided by our hosts.

Coming up (after I take a few more pictures of the process on Monday): pressing wine out of the fermented grapes! Then, the olive harvest!


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Location:Seggiano, Grosseto, Toscana, Italia

Vino Etrusco: Stickiest Day Ever

So I've made it to my next temporary home, which turns out to be a honest to goodness medieval castle surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, with views of surrounding hilltop towns (of a few hundred residents each) and a path down to a beautiful river. I promise to include more pictures of the interior of the castle in a later post, but here's one to pique your interest:




I've also once again happened upon a large group of young people, but these are a little more international: three South Africans, two Australians, an Irishman, and two Texans. The castle is owned and run by three Brits, and there's an Albanian-Italian family that lives here and runs the farming and some of the bed and breakfast housekeeping. The Brits speak English and Italian, but I've fallen into the role of interpreter for the day-to-day work.




This week, the highlight was making wine like the Etruscans did thousands of years ago. Most of the wine they make at Potentino they make the modern way (although they do use a handpress), but every year they make one small batch of Etruscan wine. Just across the river on the neighbor's land there's an Etruscan wine stone!




We went out in the morning and picked grapes, pretty much the same way I did last week. But this time, instead of throwing all the grapes in the de-stemmer and pumping the juice and grapes into the wood vat, we took them down to the stone by the river.




We pulled all the grapes off the stems by hand and threw batches of grapes in the top basin, stomped until we had broken all of the grapes we could, and then filled buckets of juice from the bottom basin, and juice and skins from the top basin and filled a stainless steel container on the truck.




Then repeated. All day. At the beginning, people couldn't wait to start stomping. By the end, we had to ask people to please stomp some grapes so we could all stop being so sticky.




After we had finished, I went with a few of the others and jumped into the freezing cold river, which seemed like the only way to get all the grape juice off. We had to scrabble down a rocky slope to get to the swimming hole, and every time I tried to stretch my leg out, my thigh would stick to my calf, etc. I can't remember a time when I was stickier in my life.




The Etruscan wine will ferment for about three months in a steel vat (no oak barrels), and won't be aged, so it will make a very simple wine, hopefully without the slight nose of feet...

Coming up: the olive harvest, more castle pictures, a dress-up birthday party, and more!

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Location:Potentino, Seggiano, Grosseto, Toscana, Italia

Vendemmia!!

Lots has happened around here since the las time I posted, most importantly, the grape harvest (aka la vendemmia)!

First, a picture of the main Spannocchia compound from another hill:




Last Saturday, I went to an expo in Florence with Riccio, who is in charge of all of the salume they make here. They raise a local heritage breed of pigs here called Cinta Senese (literally, Siennese belt for the white stripe around their shoulders). They make prosciutto, salame, mortadella, lardo (cured pork fat), and many more products we don't often see in the U.S. We took samples of all of these and gave them out at the expo (called WineTown), which was in the Mercato Centrale in Florence.




And the awesome building:




When I make it back to Florence, I'll definitely be spending plenty of time here checking out all the awesome foodstuffs in the main market on the first floor of this building.

We also did the grape harvest this week, which was super interesting. We would go out into the vineyards armed with a pair of clippers, and we coiuld spend all day clipping bunches (called a grappola) off the vine, picking off any dried grapes (too much sugar!), and filling up box after box with grapes.




Then the box gets picked up by someone on the back of a tractor and hauled back to the cantina, which is in the main villa. Spannocchia makes three kinds of wine: white and red table wine, and vinsanto, a sweet dessert wine. For vinsanto, white grapes in relatively loose bunches are hung up to dry in the start of a three year process.




For white wine, the bunches are de-stemmed in a machine




Before the grapes are pressed in an old-fashioned hand press:




For red wine, the grapes do through the same de-stemming machine, but the skins are kept with the juice for a specific time in a large oak vat for the beginning of the fermentation process.




And after a few months or years, it shows up as wine on the terrace at 7 pm every night:




And on the dinner table just after:




While life has indeed been pretty good here at Spannocchia, I realize as I leave that it's not really the place I'll be missing. I recently realized that the next few months are going to be full of new fascinating people to whom I'll have to say goodbye almost instantly. The interns, volunteers, and even some of the guests here (notably intrepidmom.ca) have been great, and I'm sure it will a similar situation everywhere I go. I guess I can only be thankful for how small the modern world has become, and how easy it is to keep in touch with people.

So tomorrow I venture further south in Tuscany, where I'll stay for a month, of things go according to plan. Hopefully I'll catch all four necessary busses tomorrow! I leave you with some photos of the beautiful place I've been, including more grapes, some ruins, etc.
























Also, two pairs of legs found while stacking wood, which now greet people on the way up the (two mile) driveway:




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Location:Spannocchia, Siena, Toscana, Italia