ON HAVING YOUR SANTA AND EATING HIM

The tree and decorations have been taken down and put away and it's all over for another year, God willing - but it wasn't over for me before two other feste had been crammed into the season!

On Sunday I was invited to Chiara's for lunch again and there we were treated to two kinds of lasagne, this one with aita [chard]....

... and this one which contained meat and tomatoes:

Then there was a spezzatino of pork:

After the fruit, there were dates and homemade torrone,

some of Chiara's Christmas cake and some special, traditional, handmade biscuits:

There was also Chiara's chocolate cake:

Yesterday was the Epifania holiday in Italy and I invited a friend to tea.  I made date and cinnamon cookies [top left]. I'd found the recipe in an Australian magazine and, although they didn't come out scone-like as the recipe suggested, they did resemble the photo in the magazine and tasted good.  To the right of them is a plate of crackers with my [tardily made] cranberry sauce, because you just have to have a taste of cranberry sauce at Christmas. In front of the date cookies is a plate of cheese bites with cotognata [quince paste]. I also cut up the last of my own Christmas cake and made yet another raspberry upside-down cake.

Putting the sugar Santa on the raspberry cake - and I assure you I bought six so did not use the same one each time! - I was reminded that, at Irma's on New Year's Day, a young niece of Irma's decided she didn't want to eat any cake but did want to demolish the sugar Santa.  "He won't come next year if you eat him!" said her mother, at which the little one started to cry.  "No, no, it's all right - he'll come!" we all chorused, until she smiled again and finished him off.  

I also made a semifreddo of candied Sicilian zest - and decorated it with the last Santa!

But never mind - in Italy it is always possible to have your Santa and eat him!

NEW YEAR AT IRMA'S

My friend Irma always comes up with original and refined menus for special occasions and presents her dishes very elegantly so I was delighted when she invited me to lunch on New Year's Day.

To begin, there was couscous salad and that is potato that Irma has so cleverly cut into star shapes:

There were also home-cured olives

and these pastries which, sadly, I had to pass on as they contained fish:

There were spiedini, too - and we're still only on the antipasti!

The pasta with ham and mushrooms on a purée of zucchini was a triumph,

as was the main dish of tender pork:

Afterwards there were these little chocolate cakes

and orange peel candied by Irma's sister:

I made the raspberry upside-down cake again and was a little concerned because it sank in the middle a bit this time, but it's amazing what you can do with a few cake decorations!

Then there was a very special panettone

and an equally enormous pandoro:

As you can imagine, we were all very content by mid-afternoon!  Grazie, cara Irma.

COURTYARD COOLERS

The late Jennifer Paterson's "Suffolk Lemon Pudding" is a dessert I have often made here and my Sicilian friends seem to like it, especially when I explain that it's a sort of semifreddo. My friend Irma is fascinated by this dish and I was flattered when she rang me a few weeks ago to ask for the recipe as she wanted to serve it at a party she was planning.  I hadn't imagined she would make four of them but she did!  You can see them in the bottom picture among the other cool and tempting dolci on the table:

The company of friends, a song from Irma's talented daughter and "Suffolk Lemon Pudding" in a moonlit Sicilian courtyard - what better way could there be to spend a summer evening?

GIFTS

I am writing this post in response to the Italy Blogging Roundtable group's invitation to post on Italy-related gifts. 

In Italy this is the Christmas of sobrietà or austerity so I wonder just how many people here will be echoing the words of one Josephine March in those oh-so-famous opening lines of Little Women:

" 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug."

Well, it depends, I suppose, on what you mean by austerity and how you think of gifts.  If austerity means not going mad at Christmas, Italians tend not to anyway:  Sure, the children receive presents but not by the sackful and the festival is not regarded as a contest to be won by the family who can provide the biggest, most expensive and greatest quantity of gifts.

No one worries weeks or months ahead about the task of feeding their relatives, as that is something they do most Sundays and the task of producing the festive meal is not turned into a kitchen marathon which leaves the poor hostess in need of valium, a gallon of gin and a spa cure lasting at least a month.  

When you are invited to someone's house over the holiday, you take along something to eat - usually a dessert -  and a pensiero or small gift if you like.  [Pensiero = thought; telling, isn't it?]  But your Italian host will already regard your company as a gift and all he or she really wants is for you to relax and enjoy yourself.

Next year marks the twentieth anniversary of my association with Sicily, the region which I now call home and over these years I have received many gifts from my Sicilian friends:  Every Christmas, when I was in the UK, my friend Gina used to send a package of the white torrone [nougat] that I like and other friends would send little mementoes of Sicily that I treasured:  an ornament, a book, a candle scented with orange blossom.  And at Christmas 1994 two friends gave me a Sicily map pendant which I wear nearly every day.  "We want you to always have Sicily close to your heart", they said and so it is.

The little girl who gave me this tree decoration in 1993 is now a confident woman of 26 and I don't suppose she remembers that Christmas at all.  But I do and it is enough:

Recently a friend gave me this bauble from Caltagirone, the pottery town and as I look at it on my tree this year I am reminded of my first visit there:

Two years ago my friend Lucia, scandalised that I didn't have a crib, brought me these figures:

Every Sicilian home displays a crib at Christmas and often the figurines are family heirlooms.  Sicilians like to place typical figures from the recent past in their cribs and we have a famous and beautiful example of this tradition in Modica's Church of Santa Maria di Betlem:

In Sicily you learn that the past is also the present and I am so grateful to my friends here for that lesson, at no time more evident than during the Christmas I travelled to Segesta with Irma and her family.  As we walked through a Greek house, Irma and I mused upon the women who had lived there and wondered what their dreams had been - not so very different from ours, we concluded. 

Christmas, as the March girls discovered, is about finding joy in the company you have and the most precious gift I have received from my Sicilian friends is the love with which they surround me.

The Italy Blogging Roundtable blogs are:  ArtTrav, At Home in Tuscany, Why Go Italy, Italofile and Brigolante.  I'm sure you'll enjoy their posts on this subject and many others.

A LIGHT LUNCH WITH IRMA

My friend Irma can always be trusted to create elegant, light new dishes from simple ingredients so it was a pleasure to have lunch with her on Friday and taste these:

For a light pasta sauce for two, brown a garlic clove in 1 tablesp olive oil, then take it out and add about 500 gr unpeeled cherry tomatoes or medium-sized, peeled and chopped vine tomatoes.  Season and cook them slowly over a low heat for about 20 mins or until they cook down.  Then stir in 1 tablsp Robiola  or Philadelphia cheese and cook for about another five mins.

Then there were thin pieces of veal - not quite as thin as scaloppine - cooked in olive oil with rosemary and capers.

Grazie, Irma.

NEW YEAR'S EVE LUNCH WITH IRMA

Irma is another friend who is a wonderful cook and this is what we ate for a long lunch today:

There were home dried tomatoes with a piquant dressing

followed by this elegant pasta dish of ham and chiodini mushrooms, invented by Irma

and served on a basil purée:

Then there was roast pork

prettily served with a fennel and orange salad and apple purée:

Now, I have to say I'm proud of this.  I had invented a semifreddo of white torrone to take along as a dessert.  I got the idea from a magazine but the recipe seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, so I adapted the semifreddo of marrons glacés recipe from Il Cucchiaio d'Argento and it worked very well.  I found the chocolate letters and numbers in the supermarket.  [They are by paneangeli, if you're in Italy.]

After that, there was Irma's cobaita [or giuggiulena in dialect]

plus mustaccioli biscuits filled with nuts and fig paste and nucatoli honey biscuits.

Now I have to find room for a dish of lentils, to bring myself good fortune in the New Year!

Happy 2011, everybody, from Simi and me! xx woof!