Italian cooking on Italy' s birthday

Italian Chicken Soup

 
1 hen or chicken

1 carrot. 

1 red onion

1 stock of celery

2 potatoes

water

Chicken soup is made by bringing to a boil and then simmering hen or chicken  in water, with various vegetables and flavorings. The classic Italian chicken soup consists of a clear broth, often served with small pasta,small ravioli or tortellini. 

Chicken soup has also a reputation  for  colds and flus, and  is considered a classic comfort food. Traditionally, chicken soup is prepared using old hens too tough and stringy to be roasted or cooked for a short time.  Old hens are to be preferred ,when available, for soups even if this will take more time to cook
Cook the hen/chicken in abundant( at least 3 liters) water with a pinch of rock salt. Bring to a boil with high flame and then let it simmer. Let it cook for at least a couple of hours if it is a hen , otherwise an hour is usually enough, skimming it  regularly.

Wash and  slice the vegetables. Cook them in  another pot with 2 liters water and a pinch of salt for 40 minutes. When the hen/chicken is cooked ,take it out from the broth and cut in pieces to be served with  pickled, mayonnese ,or with the cooked vegetable or  sauté in a pan with  oil, sage, rosemary  and wine.

Filter the broth through a  canvas to get rid of all the possible fat. Mix the broth with the vegetable broth and let it cook for half an hour.

Now your broth is ready to be  served  with any kind of small soup pastas cooked in it for 10 minutes.

Time for "Caldarroste" in Tuscany

It’s the time of the year to sit in front of the fire and eat a handful of hot caldarroste (roasted chestnuts) with a glass of Chianti wine. What else could you ask for?

Large parts of central and northern Italy are covered with castagneti (chestnut woods) and for centuries chestnuts have been the main winter food source . This is reflected into the variety of chestnut dishes, both sweet and savory, which are still popular today. During October and November, chestnut festivals are celebrated across Italy to welcome the chestnut harvest and signal the end of the harvesting season.

Chestnuts can be eaten raw, roasted , boiled or dried or candied or in chestnut flour.

Try the following recipe for

 Caldarroste (Roasted Chestnuts):

With a small, sharp knife make a cut in each chestnuts The cut allows the steam to escape while they are cooking Put the chestnuts in a chestnut pan.

Roast over the fire for 15 to 25 minutes or until the chestnuts are tender and the shells are beginning to open.

The tricky part is actually knowing when they are done. If you over-cook or under-cook them, they will get hard and the inner skin will be very difficult to remove.

Now the hard part: peeling them! You need to peel them while they are still hot. Let them cool just enough to touch them.

Be very careful not to burn your fingers!

Ferragosto Italian Summer Holiday in Tuscany

'Ferragosto' is an Italian holiday celebrated on August 15. Originally, it was related to a celebration of the middle of the summer and the end of the hard labour in the fields. This holiday was celebrated in the Roman Empire to honor the gods. In fact, the present Italian name of the holiday derives from its original Latin name, Feriae Augusti (Holidays of the Emperor Augustus) . This traditions continues nowadays in the “Palio dell’ Assunta” in Siena on 16th August.
In time, Roman Catholicism adopted this date as a Holy Day of Obligation to commemorate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary—the real physical elevation of her sinless soul and incorrupt body into Heaven.
Nowadays Ferragosto is the holiday day in summer when some people join beaches , mountains resorts or countryside to find refreshment. For those who do not have summer holidays it is at least a day for a pic nic,an excursion at which a meal is eaten outdoors (al fresco ), ideally taking place in a beautiful landscape such as a park, beside a lake or in the countryside .

June: Time for Homemade Italian Nocino

It’s the end of June time to prepare your homemade Nocino. It’s sweet-bitter, thick and syrupy, with a dark color like a ink. In Italy there are a lot of recipes to prepare Nocino, every family has his secret in composition, time and handling. In Spilamberto a small town near Modena was founded a Association for Nocino, the members are all women and yearly they organize contest where is given a prize at the best Nocino of the year.Nocino is made with unripe walnuts, still soft in their green husks. The time to make nocino is June 24. Traditional Italians recommend the walnuts be

harvested on the night before San Giovanni, June 24 because in this days the nut-husk is rich of substance, but also because we consider this night magic especially for picking aromatic and medical herbs.
Nocino must serve at the end of the meal as a digestive It is something to be sipped in small amounts, from a tiny glass after meal, and this is how I enjoy it.
Perfect also on Panna Cotta
In the past, after to had filtered the Nocino, the nuts remained inside the bowl was infused again with white vine to obtain a special vermouth.



Nocino

30 unripened walnuts
1½l alcohol (95°)
750g sugar
2g cinnamon
10 cloves
400ml water
1 lemon
Cut the walnuts into 4 and infuse them with all the other ingredients in a 4½l glass bottle. Close tightly and keep it in a warm place (in the sun) for 40 days. Shake it every now and then. Then filter it and bottle it (taste it a few days beforehand and if it is too strong add some water).Suggestion: In Italy walnuts are gathered the night of the 24th of June.

Learn Italian immerse in the Italian real lifestyle

Imagine yourself trying to answer a question to your language teacher sitting in a classroom with a window a blackboard and some other students watching you, waiting for you. So embarrassing ….
Now imagine yourself talking with your teacher ,sitting in a garden, with poppies watching you and birds talking before you. Next day a conversation, walking in a middle age town, sipping a glass of wine .

So relaxing….

This is what our learners do when attending our Italian language classes, steeping themselves in their Italian experience to the maximum.

After teaching Italian to foreign students for years we realized that everybody needs a relaxed atmosphere for better immersing in the new language. That’s why we started this different way of teaching student and teacher or two students and teacher for 3,4,5 or 6 hours class per day .

We sit in the garden of Podere Le Rose or walk among vineyards and olivegroves, in Florence we enjoy the beauty of the town while sipping a cappuccino or visiting a typical Italian market.
Of course great experience in teaching is necessary as you never know what you are going to explain that day :it goes with the learner necessities.
Let’s mix :
*some grammar as familiarity with the grammar of a language enables you to understand it, and also to construct your own phrases and sentences.
*some useful phrases taught by a native speaker who knows when to use them.
.*learning words in context from written and spoken material, using TV, newspaper , whatever is around you is in Italian.

We’ve been interested in languages for as long as we can remember. The first language we studied was English. Since then we have acquired fluency, or at least a fairly good conversational ability in various foreign languages, and now we still try to learn as much as possible in every language we “ meet” .Why?

Speaking a language is communicating with the others………

Flower Market in Greve

As every year for the last ten years, she waits to see some of us appearing on the door. When she sees us, she aks “Quando è la mostra de’ fiori?” (When is the flower market ?)... She refers to Greve flower market: it is a tradition ,it means Spring for everybody here in Tuscany and her question means “Are you going? Could I come with you???”

This is our eighty-five years old neighbor, so active and so interested in planting something every spring and having a few vases of flowers. And the Greve Market flower, the first weekend of May , is the best occasion to buy and especially to enjoy the arriving of the Good Season.
Colours : nuances of pink, red ,orange, green and blue. Roses, gerberas, dahlias, clematidis ..Even this rainy year all the flowers enchant your eyes and their perfumes inebriates you . Greve square is so charming then and you can feel yourself immerse in flowers like only a little fairy could be. It’ what our neighbor told me.

Big event in Poggio S. Polo

Big event in our small ,small village : Poggio San Polo.
Cerimony in San Polo in Rosso convent with political and religious authority, Archibishop of Fiesole ,representatives from the Chianti League , the choir Radda in Chianti with children’s choir and many people

Poggio is the top of a hill, S. Polo refers to St.Paul (properly spelled Paolo in Italian ).
For Catholic this year is the 2000 year from conversio of saint Paul’s birth so it’s a special year for our village and for S. Polo in Rosso Church, a convent 10 minutes walk from us.



Already Etruscan people lived in the area and cultivated grapes.The village and the church go back to the 1300, before Michelangelo and Leonardo time and were on the border line between the always fighting towns of Siena and Florence: the heart of that Chianti nowadays so well known for its wine : Chianti Classico .
Now we are 40 persons, Italians from 3 to 89 years living in medieval houses surrounded by vineyards and olive groves.

30 years ago Poggio san Polo was abandoned :everybody left to town to find a work as agriculture was too hard.
20 years ago new families moved here from different parts of Italy: the lake of Como, Radda and Florence (our family). And then other three Italian families joined the village. In January 1997 in the village two children were born with 2 days difference (January 22 & 24) . Strange?
Then in the last years other 5 kids join the community.

You can meet people which are involved in different jobs: country workers, carpenters, a pediatrician, a banker , an architecture, Italian Cooking teachers , 2 family are involved in welcoming in their homes tourists from all over the world.

Poggio S. Polo, the tiny village in the middle of nowhere is living again.

Sunday Lunch in Italy

Many times people ask us how Italians eat, if they prepare their meals every day, if families eat together and if they use frozen food. With great surprise we answer Italians are very traditional and for most families meals it’s the time for talking, a couple relation is always based on one of the partners’ capacity in cooking. Eating or inviting for dinner at home is far better considered than eating at a restaurant.And even if pasta is not home made, the sauce is .

Sincerely we usually base our answer on people we know, friends, neighbors or what we hear by other Italians but today an article written on an Italian magazine helps us .

From "Torna il pranzo delle domenica " by Fiammetta Fadda, Panorama magazine Jan 15, 2009
http:// www.panorama.it/edicola/panorama/2009-03-162-71

“What do Italians eat at home on Sunday meal? The preferred menù is organized as follows : salami, pasta, stuffed or not, roasted meat and potatoes, salad, cake and gelato. The same one as 50 years ago ,on which nouvelle cuisine, happy hour , finger food, molecular cooking have passes without leaving any effect.”

Don’t smile :this is Italy!