Month: February 2024

Eat like a peasant—and enjoy it

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If you’ve been following this blog, you know that The Spartan Woman and I went back to New York for the holidays. It had been a few months since we saw Daughter No. 1 and her family and we still have some stuff to bring back with us. I can’t say that, other than family and friends, I missed anything else except for one thing: Asian takeout.

Staten Island, where we spent three weeks and some, has this image of being a sort of Sopranoland, its residents a larger version of the cast of Jersey Shore. That’s only partly true, and applies only to some neighborhoods. Our daughter lives on the North Shore, which is a multiethnic paradise. And after a few months of mostly “Italian food”—I dislike the term because there really is no unified cuisine here—we were craving the offerings of our former Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan, and Turkish haunts.

Maybe we overindulged. But our kid has a baby, and trying to be good guests, we thought we’d make it easier by ordering out. It was a nice change from Umbria, even if this area is increasingly cosmopolitan, with sushi and Chinese food fairly commonplace. But one thing we didn’t miss: American (or is it New York) price tags. For one Saturday lunch, we order four banh mi, three bubble teas, and a Vietnamese coffee. Total bill, $115. That would have bought a fancy meal here.

SO BACK IN OUR HILLTOP RETREAT, we prepare a lot of wintertime comfort food. That pretty much means soups and pasta. We don’t eat meat, but with such a huge variety of vegetables, legumes and grain products, that doesn’t cramp our style.

Note: The dishes described here are vegetarian, not vegan. If meat is a must, you can serve these dishes as first courses, or read another post and come back next week. I don’t give recipes per se, so you won’t see exact quantities or cooking times. Anyone who cooks regularly can probably come up with something good. I don’t usually follow recipes; I use techniques my mother taught me as a teenager when she broke her arm, and I had to step in to cook family dinners.

After years of propaganda about the superiority of “Northern Italian” food, the South here is rising again, at least when it comes to culture. Maybe it’s down to TV shows here like Mare Fuori (The Sea Beyond) which portrays the lives of a bunch of photogenic kids in juvenile detention in Naples. One of our favorite Neapolitan dishes is pasta e patate. Yes, you can mix starches.

You can look up recipes here and here. While there are various versions, you basically make a soffrito—onions, celery, carrots—and sauté it. Add diced potatoes. When they’re halfway soft, add water or vegetable broth and a squirt of tomato paste (a couple of canned tomatoes or some purée will work too). Let that cook awhile, and then, making sure there’s enough liquid to boil pasta, toss in a couple of good handfuls of mismatched pasta, all those odds and ends that you’ve accumulated when you haven’t cooked the whole package. Improvise if not. Then, at the end, add cubes of provola cheese. This last bit may be hard to come by in the U.S., so I’d suggest diced hard (not fresh) mozzarella.

Beans and greens might be an easier combo to get behind. We make lots of variants of this basic comfort dish. It’s easy. Take good beans, whether they’re borlotti (cranberry), cannelini, or ceci/chickpeas. Cooking them from scratch is best, but canned beans are fine, too. Sauté a clove of garlic and a little hot pepper flakes in olive oil. Add the beans, stir. Add cleaned and chopped greens, like escarole, kale, chard, or even spinach. Make what’s in the pot as dry or soupy as you wish. If there’s a fair amount of water or broth, cook some soup pasta (orzo, ditalini, small elbows, etc.) directly in that pot or cook the pasta separately and add for a drier dish.

It’s best to keep to the basics with this, but you can optionally add a Parmigiano rind to the cooking liquid, or mix the beans or add another grain like farro. Add grated cheese if you want, but the soup/pasta dish should be able to stand on its own.

A post like this wouldn’t be complete without lentils. They’re an Umbrian staple. For example, it’s traditional to cook lentils for New Year’s, the pot of lentils symbolizing the riches that you hope the new year brings. Umbrian lentils are really small and don’t break down into brown mush. When in New York, I found that Trader Joe’s vacuum-packed French lentils are a pretty good substitute.

This dish won’t break the bank and is really easy to prepare. Do that soffrito thing again. It’s onion, celery, carrots. Add about half a pound of raw and rinsed lentils after the vegetables are soft. Stir around then add about 500 ml/a pint of water. Add a squeeze from a tube of tomato paste, or a dollop from a can of paste. Let the lentils cook until they almost done. At this point check how much liquid is in the pot. You’ll be adding a cup of ditalini or similar pasta so, if necessary add some water, keeping things on the boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente. Serve with grated Parmigiano, Grana Padana, or even Pecorino cheese. And this is the result:

Job no. 1: Stay warm

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Central heating is a good thing. I love that you can walk over to the thermostat and, miracle of miracles, set it for a temperature you like and like magic, the furnace rumbles into life and warms the air to that temperature. Set it and forget it: Modern life, ain’t it great?

This heating thing triggers my after-all-this-time-I’m-a-semi-newbie reaction. Getting basics down, like food, shelter, transportation, and language is at the heart of the immigrant—or reverse immigrant—experience. It’s what makes living here different from taking a vacation here. Travelers only have to figure out how to feed themselves, and it’s pretty easy in Italy. And they’ll figure out how to get around, unless they’ve taken a tour that comes with a big bus and lots of company. Living in another country forces you to relearn basic life skills; it’s like learning to walk again. I’m pretty good with most basics, but I’m only learning the central heating basics because we haven’t been here much before in the dead of winter.

I think about central heating a lot during the winters on our mountain because we have a high-maintenance kind of central heating, and tending to it and using it takes up more mind space than where to set the thermostat. Sure, we have the essentials: thermostats, pipes going around the house that end up in radiators. We even have a couple of dee-luxe radiators, the kind bathrooms houses have here that look like laundry racks and warm up the bath towels. There’s a furnace, too, a pretty new one from Germany that my friend Ruurd told me was the best brand. I’ll take his word for it.

What our central heating setup lacks is a steady source of natural gas. Instead, we have a tank. it’s a big tank for sure, though I’m not exactly sure how big because it’s buried in the yard right next to the lavender bush. It looks like the entrance to one of those bunkers in Albania that the paranoid ruler Enver Hoxha installed thoughout that once-repressed country. Only our lid conceals a receptacle and a gauge telling us, usually, that we need to buy more gas.

That should be easy enough, right? Not so fast. (And trust me, this was almost a shock to me, a confirmed urbanite, who never had to worry about how to supply life’s basics.) Luckily, it hasn’t been the coldest of winters. But these stone houses don’t hold the heat easily, a boon in the summer but not so much right now.

I have a contract with a large Umbrian provider of propane, or GPL as it’s called here. Theoretically I call and they deliver. Only their operators seem to think that their job is to protect the delivery drivers from actually making deliveries, and at the very least to keep delivery dates a secret. Right before leaving Italy to spend the holidays in New York I called the company. When I dared to ask when I should expect the delivery because it’s Christmastime and we need to buy gifts for the fam, I got “next week.” When? Next week. What day? Next week. You get the idea.

No one came that week. So the following week, I called again and ask that same nosy question. I should mention at this point that we were down below 10 percent, a percentage that according to my agreement with the company should trigger an immediate delivery. What I got on the other end was the Italian equivalent of “la la la la” to avoid hearing the question. But then shortly afterward, my mobile phone rings and a delivery driver asked for directions to the house.

At this point life was looking really good. The guy found us, hooked up his hose and delivered the gas for a princely sum of about €800, or $870, give or take. I paid with a card tapped on his portable card reader, and for awhile it looked as though my perfectly good Visa card was rejected. Happily, I learned later via a call from the gas company that the charge went through.

GAS ISN’T THE ONLY FUEL we burn. Like a lot of people here who have to deal with high gas and electricity rates, we have a fireplace that’s hooked into the heating system. In theory it’s an elegant thing. We build a fire and once the chamber heats to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees F) a pump switches on a takes over from the gas furnace. If we get a good enough fire going, the house gets toasty and we aren’t burning expensive natural gas, just expensive wood. And we can bake potatoes in the ashes, which is something you can’t do with a gas furnace.

But that requires us to start a fire. And fire requires wood. There are lots of wood vendors around these parts, because utilities cost so much here. You can buy wood stacked in neat boxes, and you can buy lots of wood from guys who drive up with a dump truck and leave a huge pile for you to deal with. We chose the latter, trying to be 1-frugal and 2-forward thinking enough when it came to quantity. We were running low on wood, so I made a call and to our usual supplier a town away, unlike the gas company, the wood dude said he could deliver in about 10 minutes. Sold. The guy came as promised, and since he’s a local and has delivered to us before, we gossiped about the neighborhood characters.

Take a look though—we received a huge pile and had to move all that into the house in organized bundles. The te Spartan Woman lived up to her nickname, organized how we were going to tackle the pile and hauled tons of wood. Literally. In all, the two of us carried and stacked 25 quintales, or 2500 kg. That’s over 5,500 pounds.

Not bad for old people.