July 4, 2012

 Our fourth of July dinner was a big success. Jim is getting a well deserved reputation in Italy for being a good cook. His favorite moments have been when our neighbor made lemon granita after having it at our house and asking him to give her the recipe. She had never seen long grated strings of cheese. Jim had used a lemon zester to make grated cheese for burritos. Enrica was so impressed she purchased a lemon zester, came out in the street with her cheese when Jim was walking by and had him show her how to grate cheese into strips.

At the store you can have hard cheeses ground up to look like what we know as parmesan cheese in a green can, (obviously it is much better) but long strips of shredded cheese do not seem to be known here. After bringing the paper hat to Africa, Jim has now brought shredded cheese to Abruzzo.

I love having dinner with all of our friends, but when you don’t really speak the same language there is an element of playing charades all through dinner that makes it pretty funny. Enrica and Salvatore’s daughter came with them. She knows some English. Salvatore does too, but he likes to mix it and me up with German and French. He is a serious joker. Enrica brought a great cake to dinner and she left it with us. Most cakes seem to be a lemon pound cake, but then different things are added. In this case homemade blackberry jam and chocolate.

Today Salvatore took Jim out to teach him how to tie up tomatoes. We thought he wanted Jim to come work in his garden, but it was for instructional purposes only. Jim said that Salvatore pulled up some weed that he used to tie up the tomatoes. He also gave Jim swiss chard from his garden. While I was walking out to paint, I met a man who owns some chickens that he keeps in a building on Via Sotto Castel. He was gathering weeds to feed the chickens. Salvatore told us that our houses were built in 1800. He has an old photo to show us sometime. And so ended another successful social event. I can’t believe I wanted to go to sleep at 9pm. The day had just started.

It is hard even for me to imagine how I get from here to there.