People, places, products

It is February and the sun is shining on my face. It is warm outside, very warm. In the mornings I wake up of the sound of hundreds of birds and when I look out of the window I can see these exotic looking colourful birds flying around in the garden. In that same garden some beautiful plants are working hard to cope with the heat of the sun and to produce the most delicious produce for our daily meals.

That’s right, that doesn’t sound like the view that I would have from the apartment in our cute little hilltop town in Piemonte, Italy. Because there I would see the neighbours looking out of their window as soon as they noticed that there was life in our apartment (curious Italians!). The songs of exotic Australian birds have replaced the sounds of the church bells in La Morra. With mixed feelings and a bit of pain in our hearts the Drover and I have said goodbye to our lovely Italian friends and to the great Italian wine producers in ‘our’ town. It was time for a new adventure, and that adventure has started a few weeks ago here in Adelaide, South Australia.

Latte Crudo - part 1

"Muhuu" was the sound that we heard when the milk was being poured in the glass bottle, "muhuu". But this milk was not warm like it would be when you milk a cow. No, this milk was ice and ice cold. It does make you feel a little bit closer to the cow and the source of that fresh milk, when you get you latte crudo (raw milk) from a vending machine in the middle of a little town and it even says "muhuu' to you.

Raw milk from a vending machine, you will think? Yes, in Italy this is possible. They might not like it up there in Brussels, but in Italy you can find 1445 raw milk vending machines in 92 different provinces. Seventy of these machines only have organic raw milk for sale. All of them contain milk that is coming from local farms, so the milk does not have to be transported over long distances and therefore is better for the environment. Buying your milk from a vending machine has more environmental advantages though, since the milk is not being bottled and you can just buy one glass (or plastic) bottle once, and keep on using it. And of course, you support your local farmer by buying milk this way, while there are no middlemen involved; the milk goes directly from the farmer to the consumer and the farmer gets the full price.

In season: peperoncino

A view thoughts on eating products from the right season and some recipes to preserve peperoncino...

Lately when I visit markets in the area, or when I enter a supermarket, I find big bunches of various types of peperoncino everywhere. Finally! During the last months we always had to use dried chillies when cooking, while the fresh ones were not in season yet and therefore not available. Actually I guess this is a good thing about Italy. Even in the bigger supermarkets there still seem to be seasons, something we completely lost in the average Dutch supermarket. Whenever you feel like eating strawberries, lettuce or green beans, you can find them, while this is actually summer produce. When it is not possible to get the products from the Dutch soil, you will just find products imported from all different places in the world, causing an enormous ecological footprint. Or products come out of one of the many greenhouses we have at home, which has quite an ecological impact as well. In Italy this seems to be a bit different, although I would not be surprised if this is also changing slowly.

Of course it is a very difficult debate to decide what choices are best to make when it comes to buying food. We are maybe a bit spoiled these days, that it is possible to make seasons 'disappear' by importing products in the 'wrong' season from different countries. You could argue that this might also be a good thing when you look at the social factors, because by importing green beans from African countries in the Dutch winter you support the local economy in those countries. But if you would purely look at environmental factors, what would be the best choice to make? Eating locally, eating organic, either local or from far, eating food from greenhouses or from the direct soil? I find it all quite difficult and although I have a great interest in this topics for a few years already, it remains a complex field of study.

Italian breakfast and the dynamism of a man

Did you know that it is possible to become a dynamic man, by eating biscuits for breakfast?

Italy would not be Italy without Mulino Bianco, a brand known for it’s biscuits that Italian mamma’s love to give their children for breakfast with a cup of warm milk or orzo (barley coffee) to dip them in. But according to Mulino Bianco, biscuits are just as good a breakfast for adults that supposedly become very ‘dynamic’ by having five or six Batticuori (beating hearts), Spicchi di Sole (patches of sunlight) or Abbracci (hugs) in the morning, combined with una tazza di caffè, a small tub of yoghurt and some fresh fruit. All the different packets of the biscuits have a suggestion for a real colazione all’italiana (Italian breakfast) that comes with one of the ten principles of the morning meal like ‘taste the flavours’, ‘start the day with warmth’ and ‘find your own rhythm’.

Curious as I am I wanted to know more about the story of these ten principles and thus had a look on the website. It turns out that Mulino Bianco has developed a model of the real Italian breakfast with the help of scientists from various disciplines. The model shows a food pyramid that has biscuits and breads (sweet breads are also part of their range of products…) at the bottom of the pyramid, therefore being the most important part of the meal. The biscuits are being followed by milk and yoghurt, fruit, hot drinks, sugar, honey and jam and at the small top butter. Not only can you find more information about the different categories of the breakfast pyramid, you can also learn more about the importance of love, trust, warmth, energy, care and the pleasure of starting the day with the family around the breakfast table. The project supposedly has ‘a great scientific and cultural value’ and gives guidelines to start the day full of warmth, pleasure and balance. Obviously this is exactly the way the Italians like it, seen the amount of choice in and the quantity of Mulino Bianco biscuits in the supermarket aisles!

Food and culture. Food and identity. Food and sustainability. Food and love.

In the spring of 2011 I moved from my hometown Gouda in the Netherlands to a beautiful hilltop town in the Langhe area of Piemonte, Northern Italy. Surrounded by vineyards and hazelnut orchards I was going to study Food Culture and Communications and I would become an expert in eco-gastronomy. Unfortunately things did not turn out to be what I had expected, and for various reasons I decided to stop my study programme. Making this decision was not easy, but luckily I was not alone in my hilltop town. The Drover, my boyfriend, private chef, baker and limoncello maker, came all the way from Australia to experience the Italian food adventure with me. He showed me that studying and learning is not something that you can only do in schools and universities: self-education could be the most interesting path to follow.

“How do you know all this?” is a question I have asked the Drover very often, when he was telling me another story or when he was sharing another bit of his knowledge with me.