'Tis the season

A faithful reader has urged me to take a break from extolling our thrilling new bathroom and instead provide some insights regarding the local food scene. "How about some posts on seasonal food, or is the food similar all year round?" this reader wants to know. "How much is local, and how much imported, and do people care?"

Produce here seems to be much more seasonal than in California, which means there's less variety but much of it seems fresher. Carrots, celery, peppers, fennel, zucchini, and eggplants are always available, and so are bananas and lemons. But I started seeing romaine lettuce for the first time a few weeks ago--evidently is doesn't grow well earlier in the year--and the plums and apricots that were abundant last summer have been replaced by oranges, mandarins, clementines, and persimmons. People do seem to care about sourcing, since markets show whether produce, meat, and other foods are from Italy or from other countries--Spain, France, Morocco.

The produce at our local supermarket.

Certain foods are seasonal in that they're associated with the holidays. Chestnuts, walnuts, and other nuts started appearing at all the markets a few weeks ago, and everyone was offering special deals on seafood, which people eat on Christmas Eve and I believe on New Year's Eve as well. But the seasonal food that's been most noticeable is panettone and its variants, along with all the other sweets that are part of the Christmas season here. (And it is the Christmas season; other winter holidays go mostly unmentioned in this still very Catholic country.)

Latteria 55's windows were full of variations on panettone

Panettone is a sweet yeast bread studded with candied fruits and nuts, and we've gone through several, ranging from a delicious and rather pricey one from the Latteria downstairs to a discount panettone that really wasn't worth eating.  

So were the aisles at Paladini, a gourmet emporium.

Other seasonal delicacies are less popular and more niche. Two examples are those slabs of sweetened chestnut paste that we tried last year (and feel no need to try again) and pannerone, a cheese native to Lodi, a town about an hour northwest of here. 

I saw a slab of pannerone on the counter at the Latteria and found it very appealing, with its creamy texture and profusion of tender little dimples. 

After ogling it for a week or two, I finally bought some. But when I got it home and tried it I was sure it had gone off. I'd purchased a small piece wrapped in plastic, rather than a chunk off the big wheel. Could my piece have been sitting around too long? Because it tasted not just cheesy but weirdly bitter. 

The next time we were in the shop I asked for a taste off the big wheel, and it had the same slightly alarming flavor as the piece I'd already bought. "It's bitter," the lady behind the counter told me. "You eat it with pears, or honey. It's seasonal, only in winter." 

Americans don't like bitter flavors; to us it signals danger, spoilage, poison. But Italians love amarezza--their word for "bitterness" even sounds a little like amore, right? Look at their array of bitter aperitifs and their enthusiasm for escarole, cima di rape, and other bitter greens. 

A quick online search revealed that pannerone is bitter because it's made without salt and with extra rennet. I also learned that very little pannerone is made, which indicates that even most Italians perhaps find it a bit much. I've tried eating it with pears and with Danny's apricot jam from last summer. Paired with something sweet the cheese is edible but still not what I'd call delicious. I'm not surprised that panettone is vastly more popular than pannerone. 

Another sweet that's big at this time of year is torrone, Italian nougat, made with honey, egg whites, and nuts. One of the booths at the tiny (and frankly rather disappointing) Christmas mercatino in our piazza was devoted to Sicilian candies, including multiple kinds of soft torrone.  

The torrone are those big brown, white, and green lumps on the upper right.

The local version uses the same ingredients, but whereas the Sicilian torrone looks sort of like half-dried cement, local torrone is so shiny and white it could be mistaken for some kind of textured plastic construction material, and so hard it's a challenge to break it into pieces, let alone chew it. It's also stunningly sweet and, after the first bite, quite addictive.

This is from a case at Caffe Madeleine, but torrone was being sold all over.

Yet even though there were lots of seasonal specialties, mostly the Fidentini kept eating the same things they always eat. Anolini, little cheese-filled pasta rounds served in meat broth, are traditional holiday fare, but they're also traditional the rest of the year. Ditto the fizzy wines, the pig's ankles stuffed with pork sausage, the Parma ham, the puffy fried bread called torta fritta. 

Ditto also a relatively new arrival, but one that's been embraced wholeheartedly: pizza. Our favorite pizza take-out keeps making the same pies, regardless of the time of year, but in December they delighted us with a different holiday box every time we showed up. This one was my favorite.

 In the words of another faithful reader, "Pizza on earth."

Finito!

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week the new bathroom was a hub of activity, as the muratore, the plumber and his helper, and the electrician all worked at getting everything put together.

The plumbers and the muratore confer. If only I could understand what they were saying!

The sink and toilet went in, including the bidet attachment on the toilet that seemed to reassure everyone that we weren't entirely uncivilized, even though we weren't willing to squeeze a separate bidet into the room.

The plumber's agile assistant connects the sink.

Next the shower and its surround went in and the towel-rack-radiator and the mirror and the lights. By lunchtime on Friday the bathroom was more or less complete. But the plumber informed us he'd have to come by again later that afternoon to install something in the shower, although neither we nor the architect knew what it was. The logistics didn't work out, though, and he wasn't able to come. Then Danny noticed that the door to the room didn't shut, either.

Past experience with home renovations has taught us that sometimes the last little details that get left undone can take days or weeks to be resolved. I didn't want to jinx things by prematurely announcing to the world that the work was completed.

Today, Monday, the plumber's assistant came over, installed some kind of doohickey on the door to the shower, and adjusted the hinge on the door to the room. Everything works. We are now officially finished.

So here it is, going around from left to right: the towel rack....

...the sink and toilet...

 ...and the shower.

Now we have to buy towels, bathmats, and some other accessories, and Danny is putting together a cabinet to go in the corner next to the shower. In other words, we are still not really done. But the construction project as such, this season's big effort, has been completed--and, in our opinion, very successfully.

La periferia

Our apartment is in Fidenza's centro storico, its historic center. Even though the town was heavily bombed at the end of World War II, and much of the centro (including our building) was constructed many years after the war, Fidenza's downtown still has plenty of old structures and quite a lot of Old World charm.

One of the churches down the street, for instance.

In part because the center is the part of Fidenza we live in, and in part because like any tourist my reflex is to highlight things that look the way I expect a quaint Italian town to look, the images of Fidenza on this blog probably give a somewhat skewed impression of what the city is really like.

In fact the majority of fidentini live not in our immediate vicinity, but in la periferia, the suburbs spread out to the southeast and southwest of the original town. Unlike typical American suburbs, Fidenza's are mostly apartment buildings, not single-family homes. After the war Fidenza became something of a boom town, with a lot of industry (glass, machinery, chemicals, construction), a lot of jobs, and a need for a lot of new housing. Apartments provided an abundance of housing quickly and compactly.

I gather that the large blocks of multiple lookalike apartment buildings were originally public housing, although now a lot of the apartments have been privatized.

However, many of the apartment buildings are one-offs, in a wide range of styles.

A lot of them look unmistakably Italian to me, the way they try to synthesize slickness and the rococo, 

These are mostly buildings I pass on my way to and from the indoor pool where I go to water aerobics.

None of this looks particularly picturesque or Instagrammable, but it also doesn't look at all like the U.S., at least not any part of the U.S. I've ever been to. For one thing, Italians apparently really, really like balconies.

Most locals would rather live out in the periferia rather than downtown, which is no doubt why apartments out there seem to be more more expensive. The streets are wider and quieter, there's plenty of space, and more and bigger stores.

 

This lady was cruising by the glassworks, Fidenza's largest industrial plant, on her way to one of the big supermarkets on the outskirts.

There are smaller stores, too. Above is one of the ethnic markets where we get such non-Italian essentials as oatmeal and distilled vinegar. I am not sure if the place is owned by a person named Heera Ashian or the sign is in some kind of pidgin. 

A big advantage of the suburbs, now that most people have cars, is the abundance of parking. The downtown, with all its pedestrian-only streets, can be a hard place to live if you have to hunt for a parking space all the time. The periferia is much more car-friendly.

Although Fidenza has expanded considerably over the years, there's not the kind of suburban sprawl we see in Northern California, where one town bleeds into the next. Here the suburbs fade out into open space and farmland.

This parkland along the Stirone River is west of town.

This road through fields is south of the apartment buildings shown above.

The town's agricultural past lingers on in the remnants of grand estates that still endure amid the apartment blocks. Some of the stately houses that once presided over the lands surrounding the old city have been subdivided into apartments themselves or turned into banks or offices. But not all.
.

This one still seems to be a single-family home, surrounded by vineyards, orchards, and a fence with signs saying "attenti al cane"--"beware of the dog"--although I've never seen a dog there. Just beyond the spacious grounds are apartment buildings and traffic roundabouts.

Apartments have encroached much nearer to this old mansion. It appears to be abandoned, but perhaps an Italian Miss Haversham is still in residence. Perhaps la  periferia isn't entirely devoid of the picturesque.

Almost there

Last week the work on the new bathroom seemed to be moving pretty slowly. Now everything has accelerated. On Monday the tiles started going up on the walls.

Since nothing in this building is exactly square, the muratore had to cut a lot of the tiles to fit. This he did with an electric saw out on our balcony, so that the whole neighborhood got a taste of the dust and grit that are now all over our apartment. 

I was sure the proprietor of the parafarmacia on the ground floor or our downstairs neighbor, neither of them shy about speaking up if they feel condo rules are being violated, would be outraged by this. But the muratore assured me that this sort of this is perfectly acceptable, and indeed we never heard a peep out of anyone. 

The tiles went up very quickly. By Tuesday afternoon the first coat of paint went on the walls and ceiling above the tiles, and then the muratore and the tile guy grouted all of it. 

By the end of the day the room started to look almost finished.

This morning the second coat of paint went on and the elettricista came by to do something or other. Tomorrow the plumber will start putting in the fixtures, and then the electrician will come back to hook up the lights and the new radiator-towel-rack. It looks like we really might be done by Friday. We are thrilled.

Bathroom update: the floor

Apparently the most popular tile for Italian bathrooms is a style that imitates the look of wooden boards--"finto legno" fake wood. At least two of the contractors we talked to during the estimate stage assumed that's what we would probably want, too. Here's the look:

Not our bathroom.

Maybe this seems glamorous to people here because wood floors are a rarity. All the houses and apartments we've been in have been tiled throughout, not just in the bathroom and kitchen.

But ceramic fake wood was both too Italian for us and not Italian enough. Instead we wanted terrazzo tiles, similar to most of the other floors in our apartment, but with a little more color.

Here's a closeup of the tile we chose. The color isn't exactly true (it's lighter in real life), but you get the idea.

Yesterday morning the muratore arrived with a tall, dark, handsome sidekick who was never introduced to us but appears to be the tile guy. After the two of them scraped down the newly laid cement floor and cut up some tiles, adding another layer of dust to our already grimy apartment, the tile guy set to work laying the terrazzo pavers.

By lunchtime the work was done. Now the cement holding the tiles will need to dry over the weekend. The blue nubs are spacers holding the tiles in place.

On Monday the floor will be grouted and we hope the wall tiles will start going up immediately thereafter. So far I like the way it's looking. 

The past isn't past

Italy is well known for being a place where tradition and the past hold powerful sway. Not only is everyone around here happy to eat the same five or six kinds of pasta all the time, for all time--tortelli di zucca, anolini, and so on--but they live in a landscape full of things that are in fact no longer there.

Caffe' Whatchamacallit

For example, there's a nice pasticceria where Danny and I often have a cappuccino after our qi gong class. It's the Caffe' Madeleine, and they make very nice pastries as well as excellent coffee. But when I proposed meeting Pam there once, she looked puzzled. After some discussion of exactly where this cafe she'd never heard of might be, her face cleared. "Oh, Santi's!" she said. Santi was the name of the family that owned the place decades ago, but according to Pam that's still what everyone calls it.

Similarly, many public buildings in town go by the names of what they used to be. The old classical high school is now a community exhibition space called the Ex Liceo (the former high school).

Christmas lights go up on the old high school.

A variety of community groups and municipal offices are housed in a former Jesuit monastery, the Ex Gesuiti. And the community film theater where I go to the movies every week is in what used to be the municipal slaughterhouse, now known as the Ex Macello. 

The Ex Macello includes a gym, a clubhouse for seniors, and the mycinem@ theater on the right.

In the U.S. we would probably not call a community theater "the Former Slaughterhouse." If the place wasn't sold off to real-estate developers and turned into a mall or a parking lot, it would be named after a popular mayor or whoever gave the most money for the theater seats. No one would even remember that it used to be where cattle were butchered.

Coming along

The initial excitement about our new bathroom gave way to anxiety as the work seemed to lose steam. Once the plumber and the electrician had come through to lay their respective pipes and wires, the muratore didn't appear to be making a lot of progress.

He's the fellow who does most of the work of actually deconstructing and then recreating the new space, and "mason" or "bricklayer" seemed like an inadequate term for someone so central to the project. But when I examined the gouges he'd cut into the walls--le mura--for the pipes and wires, I saw why these people are called muratori. There's no wood framing, no sheetrock. Building here means tearing apart bricks and cement and thick plaster and then putting together more of the same.

Either this requires a fair amount of time where nothing much happens, or our jovial muratore had another gig he was working at the same time. But little by little cement went on over the channels for the new pipes. And yesterday the tiles for the floor and walls arrived, which indicated things were moving ahead.

The tiles for the floor were moved into the back end of the kitchen, along with a lot of bags of cement and grout, in addition to the construction dust already in residence.

The tiles for the walls are currently camped out in the hall outside the front door. As you can see, we're not shying away from pattern.

Today the muratore showed up first thing (which in our household means 9:00 a.m.) and set to work building a new floor. He used some kind of laser device to make sure everything was straight and spent a lot of time measuring and remeasuring. He certainly looks to me like he knows what he's doing.

Note the red laser lights,

We could hear his little cement-mixer going and when I peeked in he had already laid down half of the floor.

By lunchtime the kitchen and dining room were blanketed with a layer of cement dust and the new floor was done.

Those are wall tiles sitting on the "box," the floor of what will be the shower.

The cement will spend tomorrow drying, and then on Friday, if all goes as planned, the tile guy (I haven't learned yet what Italians call the tile guy) will put in the terrazzo floor. Next week the wall tiles will go up, then the shower and toilet and sink and the lights. Valentina the architect says we will be done by next Friday. We shall see.

This season's project

After months of puzzling over estimates, discussing options, and general worrying, we finally launched our first (and, I hope, last) major renovation project here in Italy: a new bathroom. More accurately, a crew of extremely competent workmen appeared Monday morning and got the project started.

The existing bath is on the hall with the three bedrooms. The new one is in a slightly awkward location, back behind the kitchen.

That's because there was already a good-sized room there with plumbing for a sink and toilet. We assume it used to be a laundry, but we've already put the washer and dryer in an alcove in the existing bathroom, and we've never used the odd room behind the kitchen for anything but storage. It was the easiest place to put in a new bathroom, so that's what we're doing.

The first step, which happened on Monday, was to tear out the terrazzo tile floor.

It was a noisy, messy job, carried out by one very hard-working guy. All the debris was carried down to the street in buckets.

As you can see, it's not just the tiles, but the cement under the tiles that had to come out. It all got dumped into a truck parked in front of the building.

We live on a pedestrian street but you can get permission from the city to park there while work is being done. You just need to apply for a permit, pay a fee of a few euros, and put up a security deposit of many hundreds of euros more.

Today the plumber and his "ragazzo" came to install the new pipes and the "box," the floor of the shower. This picture looks like abstract expressionism, no?

The plans that previous owners filed with the city show the room as a closet, rather than a laundry. (I assume that meant lower taxes.) So even though the rudiments of plumbing are already there, the city required that we hire an architect and pay several hundred euros in permit fees, as if we were starting the new bathroom from scratch.

Our architect, Valentina, came by yesterday to see how things were proceeding. She brought along her little girl, who is absolutely scrumptious.

Valentina and the plumber were discussing where the shower head should go, while I tried to follow along. Of course we ended up doing it the way they suggested. 

Here's the crew later that day, examining the "tubi" (pipes) that had just been laid down. 

That's our plumber in the foreground, his "ragazzo," and, in the hat, the "muratore," a word that translates as "bricklayer" or "mason" but actually means the guy who does all the demolition and construction, including installing the tiles. 

Here's the plumber again. This picture doesn't do him justice; he is really cute. He speaks nice, clear Italian that I can mostly understand, he's patient when I try to speak Italian to him, and he says things that I can tell are very funny even if I'm not quite sure what they mean. I think he's scrumptious, too. 

Ringraziamento

Although we mostly try to partake of local culture when we're in Fidenza, and not be the sort of expats who spend all their time pining for peanut butter, shredded wheat, and other U.S. treats that are hard to come by here, we made an exception for Thanksgiving. It's  Danny's favorite holiday (lots of food, no presents), and he loves the traditional Thanksgiving meal. Thus we were going to cook a big turkey dinner and find some people to share it with.

We invited Pam and Romano to join us, our upstairs neighbor, Pia, and my language-study buddy Franca and her husband Gianluca. Aside from Romano, none of the Italians had ever had an American Thanksgiving dinner before. Italians are notoriously leery of eating anything too different from what they've grown up with, but we deliberately made this meal as authentically American as possible, with no concessions to local foodways.

Turkey is eaten here, but only in pieces; thighs and necks seem to be the most popular, while the breast mostly shows up as cold cuts. To get a whole bird, Pam had to go to the halal butcher down the street and order one a week in advance. She also volunteered to make the cranberry sauce. I've never seen fresh cranberries here--"red blueberries," the Italians call them--but Pam has figured out how to make excellent cranberry sauce using dried craisins.

Our menu was pretty basic: roast turkey with bread stuffing, Pam's cranberries, and gravy, plus mashed potatoes lightened with celery root, squash gratin, sweet-and-sour onions, buttery green beans, and--a staple from my mother's family--Perfection Salad, a melange of finely chopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper suspended in vinegar-and-sugar gelatin. Most Americans below a certain age find this last item unnerving, and I could only imagine how weird it would look to our Italians.

As usual, Danny started preparing the meal days in advance. He'd brought wild rice from California for the stuffing and had been saving up dried bread for weeks. (His recipe also includes onions, celery, butter, pine nuts, raisins, and fennel seed.) He bought a few turkey necks and made broth for the stuffing and gravy. He cooked the onions and soaked and precooked the wild rice. He found fennel seed at the Chinese store. The night before and the morning of he got everything ready and put the turkey into the oven.

What would Thanksgiving be without a crisis? About a half-hour into the 17-pound turkey's sojourn in the oven, the power went out in our apartment. That meant we'd gone over our electricity allowance. In Italy electricity is expensive and you can choose to either get a cheaper plan, with a lower upper limit, or spend more and not have to worry about it. Since we're not mining bitcoins or running a server farm, we usually can get by on the cheaper plan, but every once in a while our American tendency to just turn things on pushes us over the line. On Thanksgiving Day we discovered--after Danny ran down to the cantina under the building several times to fiddle with the electric meter--that we can't run the oven and the dishwasher at the same time. So the oven went back on, and the full load of dishes had to be washed by hand.

Then our guests arrived and it was showtime. When Danny brought out the turkey, there was general astonishment. Franca had never seen a whole turkey before, let alone a whole roasted one, and insisted that Gianluca take a photo of this marvel.

Gianluca's portrait of the turkey.

And here are the side dishes.

Onions, stuffing, squash, gravy, potatoes, Perfection Salad with mayo. (Camera shy: green beans)

(Note that, like all serious Thanksgiving aficionados, Danny cooked most of the stuffing inside the turkey, as I'm pretty sure the Constitution requires. That dish of stuffing in the photo is extra, suitably moistened with turkey juices. Note also that Perfection Salad is supposed to be presented unmolded, but this was my first time using leaf gelatin instead of powdered and the salad ended up a little too squishy to stand up on its own.)

I'm happy to say it was all really delicious.

The Perfection Salad is the green blob at 2 o'clock.

For us Americans, though, it was delicious in a very familiar way. For the Italians, the meal was downright exotic. As expected, the Perfection Salad was viewed with trepidation, but Franca--who's both an Americophile and an unusually adventurous eater, for an Italian--tasted it and loved it, and that convinced Gianluca to sample it and admit it wasn't bad. (I'm not sure Pia ever actually tried it.) [Postscript: she insists she did, and liked it.]

Another Gianluca photo. Romano isn't slapping me, just doing some Italian gesticulating.

Later Franca told me that although Gianluca dislikes turkey and they never have it at home, he tried Danny's and then went back for seconds. And she was crazy about "the stuff...no, the stuffing! I love it!" That's what we call winning hearts and minds. And stomachs.

Dessert awaited--Pam's pumpkin pie and her apple crisp, plus some gelato from the gelateria across the street, But first we went for a little walk in hopes of sharpening our flagging appetites. We watched a few kids stagger around the ice rink that had been installed a few days earlier in Piazza Garibaldi and looked in the windows of the shops. They were mostly closed, not because of Thanksgiving, of course, but for the Thursday-afternoon riposo that most businesses on our street observe every week.

This post is really highlighting my deficiencies as a foot photographer.

Back at our place we tucked into Pam's desserts. You can buy neither ready-made pumpkin pies nor canned pumpkin around here, but Pam, an expert casalinga, roasted her own to make the filling for her beautiful crust. The pie was wonderful, and so was her buttery apple crisp. Though they're very different from Italian sweets, our Italians seemed to love them.

Both desserts were eaten or carried off by our guests, but we still have most of the tub of fiordilatte, pistachio, and hazelnut gelato to work through. We've already managed to polish off almost all of what was left of the turkey and sides, and there's turkey soup for dinner tonight. Then I hope to get back to eating local. Starting with that gelato.