Linde en vlier

De lente is voorbij en de zomer doet hard zijn best. Nog zijn de nachten fris en de blaadjes groen. De vlierbloesems zijn al verdwenen van de bomen. In flessen in de koelkast wachten ze, tot siroop verwerkt, af tot ze in onze magen verdwijnen.
De siroop maakte ik door een drietal handen vol bloesems samen met stukken citroen en limoen met water in een pot te stoppen. Het geheel stond lekker in de zon te broeien, twee etmalen lang en werd toen door een doek gezeefd en met suikerwater tot siroop verwerkt. Lekker fris!

De lindenbomen bloeien nog, op de lange stationslaan van Scurcola (precies één kilometer lang en de meest rechte straat die ik ken). In competitie met de talloze bijen die de bomen doen zoemen van zoetheid plukten we de trosjes. Deels gedroogd zullen ze in de winter in thee verdwijnen, het andere deel staat eveneens in een pot te zonnen tot siroop.

That was nothing!

In the previous post I wrote about being excited to find many gambe secche and to try them out. Well, that that time's funghi hunt was nothing compared to the next ones! One of the good things about living here right now is that I have a lot of time to explore and to be swept by whatever current is passing by. So a short walk to the postoffice turned out to be a funghi hunt with a real expert. We encoutered an uncle on the street who was just on his way to collect funghi and he offered us a ride and free advice. Hours were spent in the fields and it is a great thing to be outside, surrounded by beautiful mountains, breathing fresh air, searching for free food!
That day, we looked for prataioli, boleti pinophili and again gambe secche. And after hours of collecting, chatting, drinking homemade limoncello at the uncle's house, I came home with this bag in my cold hands: 1,5 kg!

Collecting food yourself is exciting: contrary to growing food in a garden (which I'd like to start next year), which entails the slow process of seeing seeds sprout and plants shooting up in the air, there is the fast excitement of finding the things you are looking for. You start recognizing the places in the grass where boleti are hiding, and the ring shape that gambe secche make. There is some greed in it, but fortunately the quite early sunset here in the south of Europe puts this to an end. It is slow, though, and collecting is not the end, for this 1,5 kilo worth of edibles needs to be cleaned before consumption. Removing snails, legs, slime and grass, meanwhile pondering over in which way they will end up on the plate.
After cleaning and sorting:

Now, the question is: what to do with this abundance? Here are some answers.
The prataioli:
- went into a salad (the fresh pink ones)
- were chopped finely into a thick soup with nothing else but butter, flour, pepper, salt and stock. (The soup was described 'Nordic'. I took it as a compliment.)
The boletus pinophilus is not very valued by Italians as it is a very watered down, C-class 'version' of the famous porcino, still I liked it:
- 'classic Italian style' in red wine, garlic and peperoncino and eaten on fire-roasted bread.
The gambe secche
- were eaten with linguine
- were put to dry.
Finally, all leftovers and also results of another hunt were made into risotto.
Here is a picture which shows some kitchen marvels and my excellent computer skills:

And as winter is coming, I will spend some more time in Scurcolan fields armed with nothing but a knife and a plastic bag....

Dry legs

I moved to Italy now one month ago. From January on, I will start my new job as translator for INRAN, the Italian national institute for nutrition. Until then, I will focus on learning Italian and exploring my new home and its surroundings. Fascinated as I had become in Berlin by eating 'found food' from my roof terrace, I am happy to be able to explore this further here in Italy. It is autumn, and warm days where I can sit outside on the amazing terrace and read a book find their counterparts in heavy rains and thunderstorms. (Yesterday night, a lightning and thunder were right above the house and both struck so hard that the windows shook in their frames, the cat stayed under the bed for hours and my own body seemed to be electrified with adrenalin and maybe even electricity....) Autumn brings interesting weather and many things to find.

The first ever mushrooms I picked myself are called 'gambe secche', dry legs, and are apparently good in pasta (but hey, in Italy, everything which is not ananas or banana or peanut butter seems to be good with pasta! It is great that I finally can live without eating the dreaded 'Nudeln', the German blasphemisation of pasta....). Gambe secche have long stems which are quite hard and not very enjoyable. After having picked them on a field at sunset their legs were brutally removed and the crowns were carefully placed on newspaper so that they can dry. Interestingly, today they began to release their spores. Resting high on a shelf in the kitchen (to shield them from the cat and her omnipresent hairs), they throw a wave of their smell into the room every now and then: a bit irony, and downright weird. As they are still drying, I have no clue about how they taste, but I read somewhere that they are sweet and therefore are sometimes used in cookies. I do not have the abundance, nor a working oven to try such interesting experiments, but I trust the Italians and their pasta!

berlin roof food

I have a huge roof terrace with many plants on it. The plants that were planted in spring all died from the month-long drought early summer. When it started to rain again, new, 'unplanned' plants came up, and some of the spring plants did survive. Now is the time to harvest, and I am ever so happy to be able to eat a meagre amount of stuff I consume from my own 'backyard' in the city!
There is enough to make a salad rumex and tropaeolum with turnip and watercress:

and my favorite pasta-comfort-food, penne with salvia, butter and parmigiano:

Pearls

This blog is often in the back of my head, searching for stories to tell. Yet I have been quite busy these last weeks, and the stories I could tell would be about writing a MA thesis in Political Philosophy, working in the office of the project to set up a ordening system for all the digital and analog stuff produced by us, preparing for a trip from Paris to Copenhagen and leading a group of young kids on a school trip through Berlin. I know there are many blogs managing to write possibly interesting stuff about exactly these subjects, but in me, "the writing muscle was not tickled" (would you use these things with a serious tone in spoken language, I would call such sentence a "pearl") for a while.

I need to stumble upon things, and exactly that happened. Well, not exactly stumbled. I was in the Story of Berlin museum with the group of school kids as I found a memory card on the floor there, just beside the official GDR state officials' car. I asked my group if anyone had lost it, and of course, only about three kids heard this, so I took the card in case someone would come to me to ask for it. No one did. The card ended up in my room and today I decided to see what is on it to detect any possible relations to the kids in my group. To my surprise, I found not a familiar, but a somehow kindred spirit.

The card contained three pictures of people whom I did not recognize. All the other pictures were of food products! Either cans with typical German meat products, seemingly of good quality, or with the products on a plate. I wonder with which purpose they were made, as they are made with some care and try to display the products in the best possible way. Was it the butcher who made the products who wants to advertise the products? A restaurant who has them on the menu? A tourist with an obsession for picturing food products?

The files do not carry any descriptions, and that makes it hard to tell which food comes from which can.









I will write the butcher mentioned on the can, maybe it was his card, and this story will have the happy end it does not deserve. For still: MEAT IS MURDER. And that is where the kinship ends!