Good to hear from you again. Can't wait to hear all about it. The food, the place, the food, the wine, the place, the food, uh... and how you all are doing. :)

Hope you are having a smashing time and enjoying every single second of it.

We're settling in nicely. Witnessed our first neighbourhood stoush this morning. The family across from us went at it hammer and tongs with the family beside us. Have no idea what it was about but I recognised lots of "ignorant" and "stupid" being hurled around. Only in Italy!

As you'd know, Spatz, the supermarkets here are to die for. We were in our local one yesterday, not a big one, and I counted 14 different Pecorinos from the surrounding districts and towns. And, finally, REAL prosciutto and pancetta! I think I'm in heaven!

Ciao

The description of the neigbourly stoush gave me a good laugh, having witnessed a few in my travels! Let us know when you've had your first fully-fledged argument in Italian! Send pics of that too!

See ya, mudlark

PS: couple of inches of rain in Adelaide, finally!

Fresh ones. Cut in nice slices and crumb then. Fry in plenty of good butter.

Can just picture the market and the supermarket. And the finbars at both of them. :)

We've found the nicest potatoes. No idea what variety they are - they're just called, in Italian, new potatoes - but they're amazingly buttery. They're quite large, mainly oblong. They roast beautifully, crisp on the outside and melting on the inside.

Opposite the local supermarket we found a co-op run by a couple of local farming families. They sell meat and poultry that they raise organically themselves, along with local wine, cheese, honey and EVOOs. A free-range chook, maybe 1.3kg, is around OZ$8. And I saw one of the giant Chiana T-bones, the basis of the blissful Bistecca Fiorentina, on display. We'll be back!

The party itself the other night was a wonderful experience. Host was a builder, a friend of our guardian angel. He has built himself - without any approval at all, I think - a very nice house in the bush on the Tuscan/Umbrian border. In the paddock below the house is a swimming pool, bar area, covered eating area. And even toilets fashioned from wine vats tipped on their side. He has regular open houses. You take a bottle and end up drinking his mate's home-made red in magnum-sized bottles. Plenty of nibbles - crostini, etc - until they wheeled out a seven foot long loin of pork roasted with crackling with a fennel-based stuffing. One of his six brothers is the designated carver. Most of the guests seemed to be his clients and building team - Poles, Romanians - who speak their own language, Italian, some English, and about five other languages. Very friendly, very welcoming.

Oh, and as we walked back to the car later, thousands of fireflies were dancing in the bush.

Sigh ...

I am extremely jealous...How I miss multiculturism! Italian food, coffee, and the staff at Ginos and old papas in freo

sigh

Helen

Finbar, what a stroke of luck with the extra garden space, have fun! The party sounds great, more stories with food please! Italians really make great use of fennel, don't they - which btw is particularly good at my local market at the moment (grown by italians, of course!). Anyone got any good fennel recipes? I usually just eat it raw or braise it and scoff the lot, but I should probably learn to do something else with it.

Cheers, mudlark

PS: what grows in the Italian 'bush'. What's it like....is it rambling and dense or does it have more of a 'structured' feel to it, like more northern forests. That really intrigues me, i never got a chance to get out into the countryside in Italy. My only experiences of natural places in Europe were in Scandinavia, which were so alien, a really bizarre feeling for a nature-nerd like me, very disconcerting.

Once you get out of the cultivated areas around here - bearing in mind that we're perched overlooking the Val di Chiana, one of the country's great breadbaskets - the bush is pretty rambling and dense. Driving to the party the other night, we were climbing up into the hills on a VERY narrow road with dense bush on either side. Lots of pines and oaks. Of course, everywhere you look there are the typical/famous (for Tuscany) pencil pines as well as plenty of umbrella pines.

As I say, we're in a pretty heavily cultivated part of the country. Further south in Tuscany, and in Umbria to the South East, there are some wonderful dense forests.

I got some more fennel at the market today as well as one of the potato varieties that I have yet to try - can't remember what its called - I'm not sure what I'll do with them yet.

cheers, mudlark

My stumbling Italian is gradually improving. The fifteen months of lessons are coming in handy. I know the rules, I just lack the vocab. It will come. Robyn is doing very well for someone with no experience of the language at all. She's now sailing into shops and coming out with what she went in for. She asked me to cut and paste your little list for her. Thanks for that, it's a good summary.

I planted out three toms - Kellogg's Breakfast, Marianna's Peace and Pink Gaetano - in the tiny garden in our front courtyard. I've had to trim back some of the overhanging trees to allow enough sunlight.

But, the other day, I planted out another three (of the same) in the growing space generously donated by the English friends - Jean and Aziz - we've met. Their five acre olive farm on the slopes below the ancient town of Cortona is glorious. The vegie patch is walled, and huge. I've been given as much growing space as I want to use for the next couple of years. They're only about 20 minutes drive from us.

I've posted a couple of photos on the online photo album I get with my Telecom Italia free web space. I've attached the link below. Some people haven't been able to access the site, but most have. There are two albums - the tomato one, and another, bigger one, full of shots of our town, the dogs, et al.

And, no, I don't want to leave.

We were thinking of you tonight when we had our tea. Home-made pasta, meatballs with sage and masala. The pasta was dunked in the frying pan with the meatballs and masala sauce before serving. Lovely italian recipe. Can't remember its italian name now as we had to have a glass of red with it.

Salute!

A wee tale I know you'll enjoy. On Saturday night, we were taken to an outdoor theatre performance at a local farm. The farm owners are arts nuts and host all sorts of festivals and performances in the paddocks around the house. The show was staged by a 6-person theatre company from Naples. I struggled to make sense of any of it with my limited Italian. Lo and behold, the local Italians struggled to follow it. The actors spoke in their Naples dialect. Only in Italy ...

Oh, and I've noticed that my online photo album has disappeared from the ether. I'm just about to email Telecom Italia to find out what's going on. In Italian. Wish me luck.

The views are absolutely stunning! And I can't wait to check out the walled city beyond your vegie garden - all the history you are living in, your village, your house, stone walls, ruins, more stone walls.... WOW! I've been talking about travelling to Italy (and some other spots in the Mediterranean such as Dubrovnik) with some of the people I stayed with in Europe, and the reports were all great. It's all I can do to stop myself from starting the planning already, really! I figure I should probably wait at least 3 more months tho?!

Have you and Mrs Finbar eaten any of your tomatoes yet? What sort of crop are you getting? Are your plants healthy in the climate there? Hope you've been using your diplomacy skills with the 'gardener' and working in sync. together etc, hehe

PP, green with envy.

I haven't seen much evidence of fungal problems on the existing toms in the vegie patch - they're mainly what the locals call "Salad Tomatoes" - or on my three in my front courtyard. Carlo, the Italian gardener, has been spraying the ones in the vegie patch with that horrible blue-coloured mix of copper and sulphur. I've told Jean and Aziz - the owners - about Daconil, and I've been trying to track some down online via a UK supplier.

The beds at the farm - pure 100% clay - need an awful amount of work. It's been frustrating trying to find things like blood and bone and potash here. The local garden centres are nothing like what I'm used to. Most of them specialise in trees, with very little focus on the "home gardener".

The walled town on the hill in the distance behind the vegie patch is Cortona, setting for that mawkish book (and appalling film adapted from same), Under The Tuscan Sun. At this time of year, it's full of American tourists, but as the weather cools down it reverts to its extraordinary charm and beauty.

Well, back to it!

Berlusconi owns most of Italy, so I could probably burn anything that comes to hand and burn something of his. But I take your point. With autumn on its way, the open fire will be getting a work out, thus plenty of wood ash. Not sure how to measure it, that's all. I know it's pretty potent in terms of adjusting the pH.

Oddly enough, for better or worse, Italy has rejuvenated the little white rat. Bounding around like a two year old! Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Cheers Mantis

I yanked all the tomatoes out at the farm the other day. Including, tragically, my Pink Gaetano, Marianna's Peace and Kellogg's Breakfast. Late blight. We'd had a visitor, I hadn't been out to check for about ten days, and when I finally got out there my heart sank. I started yanking. Carlo appeared. Protesting. Why was I pulling out the tomatoes? I told him, only I didn't know the Italian for blight let alone late blight. I've since discovered that blight, in Italian, is paliga. I could only tell him, in Italian, that the plants were diseased. He denied it. Troppo acqua, he said. Too much water. We'd had a lot of rain. Bullsh*t, I told him, in Italian. I showed him the blackened, festering fruit. Troppo acqua, he maintained. Fool. He stomped off, I kept yanking.

The three plants in my wee front courtyard at home were also showing nasty signs. I yanked one to save the other two. I have plenty of fruit on the Pink Gaetano and I'm trimming more and more ugly foliage every day. So it's a race between the disease and the cooling autumn days.

Diseases of unknown type, possibly fusarium wilt, attacked my plants in Autumn the past couple seasons. Theoretically I should be able to grow an autumn crop, but it seems too much of an uphill battle here in my neck of the woods.

PP, sipping an organic cab sav purchased at the Organic Fair this afternoon. Almost "creamy" it's so smooth!

And here's the gardener with Carlo The Imposter who was on his way to do some Whipper Snippering (with Snowy for company):

Snowy has put on weight. In fact, for some strange reason, she's born again. She's belting around like a five year old, with few of her old neuroses. If only I could make such claims.

We're planning another, adjacent vegie plot for things like pumpkins, zucchini, et al, things that take up far more space than their return warrants. The main patch, while spacious, soon fills up with vining things. Aziz, Jean's hubby, not a gardener, claims we already have more than enough vegie-growing space. So the plotting and planning and designing goes on in secret.

In the distant background is the amazing mist. Autumn has hit. We wake up to pea-soupers that gradually clear into drifting mist. Usually, at around 3pm, the sun burns away the mist and we end up with stunning blue skies and glorious sunsets.

You must be fit with all that outdoor work. BTW, who built the fences around the new plot?

PP

We are having a fantastic spring here and it's a jungle out there. Grass, weeds, seedlings. The slugs and snails are taking over.

Hope you get interesting seeds for your vegie patch! :)

Ray - I did some measuring yesterday to mark out the beds. I'm not using the far end. It will either be kept for chooks or maybe even a glasshouse. So, leaving the far end out of the equation, and allowing for access paths around the perimeter, it's about 16m long by 6.5m (at this end) and 5m (at the other end). Big enough to keep me amused. I'll save a bed for you to potter in next May!

Zia P - we haven't used anything on the cabbage and cavolo nero. If we see bugs, we pick them off, and we haven't seen any for the last month or so. It must be getting too cold for them. I suppose it's an organic garden. Carlo sprayed the toms this year with that horrible blue copper/sulphur stuff which is, technically, organic. I'll be using the Italian version of Daconil next year. Not strictly organic, but preferable to that horrible blue stuff. He also sprinkles granular, water-soluble fertiliser around without understanding that it does nothing for the soil and disappears after a couple of heavy showers. I'm going insane trying to find blood and bone - farina d'ossa - here. The nurseries have heard of it but never seen it in retail packs. The fencing around the plot? Carlo and a local chap called Augusto did it. Augusto owns some land - chockers with olive trees - surrounding the farm. His family and another local family harvest Jean and Aziz's 950 olive trees for them. In fact, they're starting later this week. Mrs finbar has had her designated olive tree earmarked. I'll have the camera ready when she harvests it. Jean and Aziz aim for premium quality oil so there's no erecting nets and shaking the branches to drop the olives into the nets. Every single olive is taken by hand. Good luck Mrs finbar!

Spatz - the odd thing is, I've hardly seen a snail here. We've had tons of lettuce and radicchio and other snail-attracting things in the garden, but barely a snail. I have no idea why. Lots of other mysterious looking insects, though. I'm yet to discover whether they're friend or foe. Although I did recognise the aphids on my broad beans.

There are many things that we take for granted I'm sure, but I never thought Blood and Bone would be one of them. I'd have thought it would be available anywhere. Good luck!

PP

I'll be lifting the lot of them this week and storing them for winter.

Next came two generations of carrots adjacent to each other (with Cavolo Nero keeping them company:

And then onto the new patch. Which is ever-so-gradually starting to take shape. This is the low side of a fairly sloping patch and I'm using rocks reclaimed from the site to edge the beds to stop the beds disappearing over the edge. And that's three tractor loads of sand ready to be amalgamated with about twenty tractor loads of cow manure to combat the clay:

And there's the original patch, in the distance, through the fog, from the entrance to the new patch:

I watered the beetroot today. They'll come out later in the week. A few alliums dotted around the place but the beds are mainly winding down for winter. I'm off to the nursery for planting garlic which will go in around December 21st.

Yes, the oil is scoffable. If I can work out how, I'll try to send you a bottle.

Yes, we are in heaven. Yes, we know the state of Sydney. Currently, wild horses wouldn't drag us back.

The oil looks great. Got the basil growing and the buffalo-milk mozzarella is available over the road. Just need the tommys. 52 growing. Will be months before I see a fruit other than some cheater Sweet 100s already ripe for the plucking. :(

How did your tommys work out in the end? No EB I suppose. What will you do to occupy your time in winter? Excavate a cellar and make a lot of wine? That might get me over.

Ciao for now :)

The tommys didn't make it. Late Blight wiped everything out. I've never seen it before. I have now. It's unpleasant. Next year I'll be spraying.

Make wine? Why? We're in the middle of one of the world's great winemaking areas. We've taken to scoffing the odd Brunello, one of the great reds. The little trattoria in the hills above our town has a stunning wine list. All the great local wines and at - relative to what you'd pay for the same wine in Oz - nifty prices. I usually go for a 1997 Brunello at about $60 a pop. The same wine would be $300 at Buon Ricordo or similar. It's made just down the road in Montalcino. Must pop over and get some at the cellar door. We'll take you there when you visit. And to Pienza, home of some of the great pecorinos. Just down the road.

You will be pleased to hear my Lleytons Greens have doubled in height and the view of the two-storey units is fading, that the Indian Mynas are chirping, and the only pig in site is the beer-swilling swine on Friday nights. And, worse, I'm fast running out of grow space.

Late Blight sounds nasty. I've only read about it. Thought about pinching your old green plastic or metal 8ft tomato stakes the other day. Boy, are they hard to find. Anyway, keep us posted. Fun - no headonism - under the Tuscan sun.

Oh, and did I tell you fresh porcini are available all over the place? I've made two or three fresh porcini risottos (or risotti) to work out the best method. The flavours are glorious, much more subtle than anything offered by the dried porcini. Our Guardian Angel here extracted a porcini risotto recipe from one of her local restaurateur mates. I haven't yet tried it. But the esential herb, apparently, is a local wild mint. There's tons of it out around the olive farm. I'm going to grab some and pot it up.

Mrs finbar scoffs the fresh porcini at the trattoria in the hills. She's had them simply chargrilled with the wild mint, and also deep fried, would you believe. They slice 'em into thick matchsticks, dust 'em, then deep fry. Crunchy on the outside, melting on the inside. Delish.

I knew about your corner hardware but figured the green stakes must be everywhere if there. Wrong.

There are mushies and there are mushies. I do hope you share some of the recipes at some point in time, even if we have to subs. the ingredients.

Worse luck for me, you're not a fish eater. Scored a bounty of yellowfin tuna last weekend. Kept them on an ice slurry, filleted, skinned and removed the bloodline, a bucket of firm pink flesh.

Fresh tuna is heaven. That's my brag. And n/a in Tuscany I think :)

On a different score, I'll have you know I've developed a taste for Pinot Gris, tarter and more summery than Grigio, but local renditions are a bit like your green stakes. None too easy to find.

Bought some anchovies in a little tin that came from the Bay of Biscay for $14.95 the other day. I could spend a motza on cheeses in the fromagerie across the road. But really I think I'll just have to eat and breath Europe vicariously.

What I want to know is whether your music tastes have changed yet?

Pouting Pepperina

Quick-and-easy green fish curry for me tonight. Loads of homegrown basil and my own line-caught fish is the most I can contribute. Lemon grass is still to young and I haven't a kaffir lime tree. Yet.

Oh, and btw, nice new beds PP. But flowers! Lol. I'm not yet game to grow my produce in full view yet, either :)

Grub. Cigarettes are half the price here. Bona fide parmesan is less than half the price, buffalo mozzarella is about a quarter of the price, EVOO the same, excellent Pino Grigios are about $8 in the supermarket, same with excellent Chiantis.

Zia P. Got your email, been slack replying to a lot of emails. Sorry. We'll be here in 2007, definitely, and probably for quite a bit longer. No, my music tastes haven't changed. Bolstered by the fact that Jean and Aziz, who own the olive farm, are well connected. Pete Townsend is a friend, and Aziz was a year behind David Bowie (before he called himself David Bowie) at school. He was in the same year as Peter Frampton, but none of us acknowledge that.

Finbar, I didn't really know what your tastes in music were, but somehow just imagined you dancing in the village square perhaps, clapping hands etc while the local musicians played and sang with great gusto? Haha!

PP

Finbar,
Well if price is any indication of quality our produce is better. Sadly, of course, it is not. Sounds like Tuscany in incomparable. Australia is getting smaller by the minute. Little Johnny will send us all packing soon.

I have some great tommys growing, though. Some of the best in the world. Rare and delicious. So do drop by often in a month for the impending tomato porn :)

Adam. There are flies in Italy. Tons of them. And, strangely, they hang around long after summer. I'll have a word to David. It could take a while. There's usually a queue.

But will you ever be able to enjoy Tomato Taste Fests like we had at Rutherglen last year over there... huh? ..huh? Huh??? *mentally intoned with a rising-bragging voice, but knowing that we're gonna miss the Finbars in March*

PP

The ID cards are optional. We need to carry identification with us that confirms we're legally entitled to live here (because we've been here way beyond the tourist's three months). We could carry our Permessi, but they're A4 sheets of paper. The ID cards, which carry the same basic info, fit into our wallets.

The view out the bedroom window this morning:

Dermott, at the front gate, wondering what the white stuff is:

Mrs finbar and Snowy proving the maxim that Italy sees the best and worst of fashion:

And, out at the olive farm, work on the new vegie patch is suspended:

I can feel a hot house coming on. More escavation, a large timber frame and plastic wrap. I'm sure you'll get plenty of moral support here as well.

Plenty of humidity, that's for sure. A touch of EB, some bacterial speck, thrush and tinea.

Are you thinking of getting into bottling? I'm sure you could organise to have a Vacola delivered. Without the patch what are you going to do?

We were meant to have a bona fide glass glasshouse well before now. Hold ups with the work on the house delayed it. The house took priority. For some reason. It will be in place next year. In the meantime, before spring, I'll create a temporary structure at the top of the new garden to give the spring plantings a flying start.

Last night we took some visitors up to our local trattoria in the hills above the town. Great food, as always, including my usual pici with cinghiale ragu and a glorious marscapone dessert that I've had before. It verges on tiramisu but stops short. All in front of a roaring log fire. Had to scrape the ice off the windscreen before we could drive home.