Friday, October 30, 2015

All About Olives



It's olive season in Maberga.


Neither of those bottles is our oil*.  David did this with our olives this year...


How gorgeous are those jars?!  

Wait, a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Some of you may recall that picking olives is not really my favorite job.  I'm pleased to say that I made huge strides in my I-hate-olive-picking attitude this year by employing a simple strategy:



David and I invited some people we're rather fond of to come help us with the job.


Yep.  That's my parents, all the way from Wisconsin just to pick some olives.

Ok, not really just for the olives.  We also ate a lot of food together,

had lots of nice chats, and some cut-throat games of cribbage (the result of the throat cutting was some ass kicking, women won).

And we planted grandma Serpe's oregano seeds which they carefully transported to us from Uncle Mike.




thank you thank you thank you, mom and dad for making it all the way to visit us again this year.  This was the BEST trip EVER.



* the bottle on the left was purchased and is from last year's crop.  the bottle on the right was pressed last week by our neighbor Franco.  See the difference in color?!

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Find the Zucchini



I love autumn.  Love it.

I love the weather in autumn. The morning chill. Cuddling under blankets in the evening with a book.  I love the start of a new year (yes, still on academic time).  I love wearing sweaters and my birthday is in the autumn.  Knitting with wool is infinitely more pleasing than knitting with cotton and the mums bloom in autumn.
 It's the beginning of the soup season and the american football season.   Family comes to visit in the fall.  Peppers are picked and roasted.


All these things make autumn hands down my favorite season.  But you want to know what the very BEST part of autumn is?  Well, I'll tell you.  In the fall I get to play Find the Zucchini.  Awesome.  Yep, every morning in the autumn I run up to the orto for an exuberant game of hide and seek with the last survivors in the otherwise dead and weed-encumbered garden, the zucchini.

The orto in autumn

The zucchini in autumn

Gotcha!


This guy almost beat me.


And there's nothing I like more after a lively game of Find the Zucchini than some egg, salami, and zucchini pasta for breakfast.


Happy Autumn.