A Tuscan View - from Umbria

The birds and the bees

27th April 2008

Forget the bursting buds of Spring, forget the birds and the bees. For a sure sign that more clement weather is on the way check out this remarkable transformation.

It was with some trepidation that we took our beloved hound (one year old this week) for his first haircut warned, as we had been, by the vet that it might look “un po brutto”, (a little ugly) but, as temperatures started to climb, the hair had to go.

Just look at what a handsome and expressive face had been lurking beneath all that wool. At first he seemed more vulnerable and, strangely, slightly more intelligent however, after a brief identity crisis, he is now back to his normal stupid self and feeling mighty confident about his furry charms. Strutting his stuff down Chiusi main street with hardly a backwards glance at all the lady-dogs swooning in his wake.

Best thing I ate:
Bistecca alla Fiorentina

I am enamoured with my butcher. He has Al Pacino eyes and the lazy smile of a well fed wolf. I know he likes me and he knows I like him. Why? because we both like good meat.

Yesterday, when Marito was buying some bistecca (steak) and I was waiting outside with the dog (our noses pushed up against the window), ‘Big Al’ refused to cut marito’s steak thicker than mine, despite his protestations because, said Al, (gesturing towards me with his chopper), “I know she likes her meat!”
So… if you’re ever in Chuisi, and you require the services of a good butcher, you know where to go – 70, Via Porsena, Chuisi.

For a bistecca that’s butch and bloody with a salty crust, here’s how;

The steak (about as thick as your thumb)
Some olive oil
Sea salt, black pepper and a stem of fresh rosemary
A heavy frying or grill pan

Rub your steak all over with olive oil, use the rosemary to brutally brush it on, crushing the herb and releasing the fragrance. Grind the pepper over both sides and (controversial I know), a good grind of sea salt too. This gives a lovely salty crust to the meat.
Put a little more oil in your pan and get it nice and hot, (it must be hot for this to work), then slap in the steak and press it down into the pan, don’t move it about.
Let it cook for 2 minutes, then turn it over, grind a bit more salt over it and press down again.
Let in cook for 2 minutes more and it will be ready, (the faint hearted may wish to cook it for a bit longer). I sometimes add a couple of cloves of garlic, squashed in their skins to the pan, or throw in a little wine after removing the meat to make the beefy juices go a bit further.

Apologies to vegetarians. I like vegetables too, promise.

Vladimir and the villagers

13th February 2008

This ‘optimistic’ blog struggles to retain its optimism sometimes; red tape, ever escalating prices, never escalating temperatures and a dog whose diet of stolen foods makes for a vet’s bill much higher than it ought to be.

To give you an idea, last week he claimed; one pound of butter, a babybel cheese (including wax and wrapper), two pairs of sunglasses, various items from the cat litter tray, and as much of our rubbish as he could shove into his mouth before we caught him.

Having said all that. I was then privileged to witness the most extreme example of Italian’s love of their mobile phones. I have discovered that there is nowhere and no occasion in which you cannot or should not answer your phone. But there had to be a limit, and now I think I have found that limit. At the vets, taking the temperature of my dog, you might have thought that she could miss a call, but no. With one hand up my dog’s backside and the other ferreting around her white coat for the mobile, even the dog had to laugh.

Had a fantastic afternoon, without the dog, photographing the railway station in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. I put a few of the best ones in the sidebar…

The stupidest thing I did today;

Dipping out of my ‘theme’ for a change, I found out something very useful today which might stop me doing something stupid in the future. According to local legend, our builder, Vladimir, once ‘took on’ a whole village after a dispute in a bar. I must remember that.

The puppy bribe

29th June 2007
On the scale of ‘bribes for young girls to accompany their parents to a foreign country’, I imagine a pony probably scores a maximum 10, with the promise of long walks in the woods and clean country air more like a 2. We tried with the ‘puppy bribe’ (8 or 9).
It worked, and the girls have waited very patiently for me to come up with the goods. Now the waiting is over, their dog-shaped good-behaviour star chart has been completely filled up with gold and silver stars and, after a long search at animal rescue centres, pet shops and in the free-ads at the vets, I was able to bring home a fluffy puppy.
It was a bit of a struggle for me to choose the right type of dog. I had so many specifications and conditions which had to apply; medium size, good with children but not a Labrador, intelligent, male, not white (my wife’s peculiar request), preferably Italian, not long haired, not smooth haired, easy to train, not a scary guard dog etc.
However, if you put all that into Google, you actually come up with a Lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian truffle-hunting dog. And that’s what we’ve got, and his name is Tartufo, born 22nd April 2007.

Tartufo

I paid for him, but he may as well have been a rescue dog; over 200 blood-sucking ticks on his back (the most the vet had ever seen on one animal), a cist on the back of his neck and one of those ‘misty-blue’ eyes you see on old dogs – not very appetising. However, he did come with a bag of truffles the owner had collected that morning, found by his mother.
It’s a lot like bringing home a baby – no idea quite what to do with it – but so far it acts much like a baby too, sleeping a lot and eating a lot, nothing else.

The stupidest thing I did today;
Fell in love with a stupid, tick-ridden dog which, unfortunately, looks a little like a poodle.