Food is Important

There is a well-kept secret in Italy that needs to be brought to light. It has taken me months of research and undercover work to collect all of the details, but I am now ready to share this secret with the world: fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables are much better than their imported, lab-ripened counterparts.

As the majority of my reading audience – all two of you – hails from America, this nugget of truth might come as a a surprise; I know that I always took for granted the year-round availability and overabundance of broccoli and oranges in my local Hannafords. Looking back on it, I should have stumbled upon this Italian secret years ago. The oranges I eat in September are always dry and flavorless, and the peaches I eat in January feel like they have been frozen. If I had been more observant, I might have seen Chiquita stickers on this produce reading “Chile #2306”. If I had been even more observant, I might have noticed that the apples at the orchard down the road in September were much better than the supermarket variety in March.

Unfortunately, nobody has ever called me observant. I took living in Italy for almost a year before a beam of light from the heavens struck my forehead. I remember the moment it happened: driving through orange groves in Sicily, I realized that I had been eating a lot of oranges in the past two months. They were cheap and consistently delicious. Looking around, I realized that I had been eating oranges straight from those very trees, fresh and having traveled less than a day’s journey to my mouth. If only this could happen in America!

Now, I am not advocating an “eat locally” attitude, because only hippies feel the need to buy New England artichokes. I don’t mind my food travelling to reach me, but I do mind my food tasting bad. Getting only fresh produce really eliminates this problem, with the only consequence being my choise of vegetables is limited. I won’t be able to get broccoli in the summer, and I won’t be able to make peach cobbler in the winter (unless I use canned peaches). Having lived under such a repressive food conglomorate-lacking world, I can honestly say that things are better this way. I haven’t had an orange in two months. But that’s OK with me, because we are in the midst of peach and cherry season. They are so good, I am eating at least three peaches and a kilo of cherries a day. Will I be sad when the peaches are gone? Yes, but that just heralds the beginning of some other season (clementines, if memory serves) and I will have avoided the risk of eating crappy peaches for the rest of fall.

There are pros and cons of our two produce availabilty systems, but the biggest setback I have encountered here was last week when I couldn’t find broccoli for my quiche. I had to use zucchine (note the proper Italian spelling). On the positive side, in Italy the consumer wins. In the middle of cherry season, the farmers can’t get rid of these things because there are so many, and the result is a huge drop in prices. Think less than a dollar per pound for the good ones. The oranges in Sicily were around 25 cents per pound. Peaches right now are going for 50 cents per pound. In the fall two years ago, I paid one euro for seven pounds of clementines.

On occasion, I will get a craving for something that I cannot find. But overall, I find that the lack of ingredients inspires more culinary creativity and at the least results in constantly evolving dishes. A lot of my visitors this winter were dissapointed in the caprese salads here. That’s because tomatoes aren’t in season in the winter. It’s a late summer dish. Tourists.

Next time you go to the supermarket, think about what you are buying. Are those apples even fresh, or were they gassed to get color and texture? As for me, I don’t have to worry about stuff like that. I just need to worry about weather the Italians have banned DDT yet.

Photo Annual

Now Presenting, the 2007 Courmayeur Photo Annual
Make sure your sound is on.

Sorry Dana

It seems that my eulogy for ski season was a bit early.

We got five days of gorgeous weather, and although Courmayeur is now closed, Cervinia and La Thuile were still open, as is the Toula. Dana and I skinned around up high one morning and then skied the Toula in the afternoon, in snow conditions that we have called "breakable mush" or "bottomless corn". I don't know why it doesn't consolidate, but it is hard to ski because it sucks you under. I now present some brief videos of Dana on that run. Sorry, Dana.





And my Favorite: Watch the end...



Dana showed he could still rip it up, though. Here he is going down one of the steepest lines of the year at La Thuile on Wednesday.

The End of the Ski Season

The end of the ski season is upon us. Dana, Miky, Weeze, and I went to Sicilia for Easter. I was away from the mountains for ten warm spring days and now the snow is a brown color, screaming to the few faithful skiers, “get your turns in now, because I am just going to get darker and darker, until one day you will be skiing in last year’s cow plop.” The whole town is different, too. Normally a sleepy town, Courmayeur has shut down after Easter. Hotels are closed, free bus services are halted, and – the biggest kick in the testicular region – the Val Veny tram is closed. For the loyal readers who remember my first few blog posts, I used to have to take a bus to the main tram. This is what I have to do now, except that the free bus service is no longer operational. Great idea.

Also while I was away, the bus services that didn’t shut down changed their schedules. So even the buses that charge you don’t show up at their normal times. Trying to get to the tram this morning, I got the distinct impression that Courmayeur wanted me to end my season. Well guess what, Courmayeuresi: you want my blood? Take it! Take my blood! I am going to keep pushing along until I am skiing on cow plop, just like Samuel L. Jackson in The Negotiator. I still enjoyed myself today, despite breakable mush, and if it gets sunny the skiing will still be great.

I am feeling worse about the end of this ski season than I have ever felt before. The town has changed, most of the other ski bums have gone back to their summer jobs, and the rest of them have gone on to summer activities, like rock climbing and smelling bad. I think the main reason that I am so depressed about the imminent lift closure is that I have never been a full-fledged ski bum before. I ski a lot, and I bummed in Utah for a month, but never for a whole season. Now I am left with a sense of emptiness. It’s like graduating: you have successfully completed an important step in your life and it’s gratifying, but now you have no idea what to do with yourself. I hope I can get a few more good days in before having to decide…

A video/photo journey to Refugio Elisabetta

Last week Dana, Weeze, and I went to Refugio Elisabetta. We decided that we were getting too fat from our slothlike skiing habits and monstrous eating habits. With so much lift-accessed powder to ski, and so much food to get for free from Gianni - the gay barista who has taken a liking to me – we aren’t really culpable. Blame the system, man. Regardless of the cause, though, we used our combined powers of deductive reasoning to infer that, seeing how much snow you can find from the lift and how lazy Italian skiers are, if we actually had to earn our turns, we would have first tracks for days. By golly, our prohibitively expensive college educations finally paid off. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

From the Youla cable car, we skied down into an untouched bowl.Our tracks are in the sun, but you can’t see them. Sorry. Then, we put on our skins and skinned up and over the next ridge, bootpacking at the top as the clouds continued to lift.

This put us into the top of an even bigger bowl, and we skied shallow, smooth powder

all the way down to the Lago di Combal, where the sun was shining on Refugio Elisabetta. You can see it right at the base of the pyramid in the middle of the picture.

As we finished the hour-long skin, clouds started to move in and we ended up with an inch of new snow, on top of the other few feet of untouched. We saw some old heliskiing tracks coming down to the hut, and we were worried about not getting any good turns. But the hut was comforting. Although it is officially closed in the winter, there is a room with mattresses, blankets, electricity, and a table. We could see why Italians don’t like backcountry skiing…

The next morning, we woke to bluebird skies, and picked out the most obvious line, as seen from the hut.

This picture was actually taken at 7 PM, after we skied the face for two days. You can see our tracks if you look closely, but the face is north facing so it is shady most of the day. This is what it looked like when we first skied it (credits: Weeze getting first rips with Dana providing the soundtrack):

Gosh that was good skiing. It was a hard and long skin to get there, so we headed down after one rip. But then we realized that it stays sunny until 8 PM now, and we skinned up the other way to the Pyramide Calcaire. We got to the col at around 7 PM, so the depth perception was way off and the photos are crap. But suffice it to say that we didn’t need depth perception for snow so powdery and untouched (possibly not skied this year).

And yes, it does drop off steeply below Dana.

The next day when we woke up after 12 hours of sleep, the clouds were socking us in. We decided to skin up to the same stuff, and when we arrived at the top, this is what we found:
Someone had skied everything out! Just kidding, those are our tracks (mine are the high ones, but that is Dana in the picture) after two days of skiing. Another prefectly sunny day! We took a few more laps on the upper part, and skied back to the hut after a second perfect day of skiing. The final damage looked something like this:

As you can see, we were making small, low speed turns, just like the italians., and there was nothing left to ski after the second day. The next day, we headed back into the front country. A whoppng hour and fifteen minutes from the hut, we were on top of the regular ski mountain again, attracting funny looks with our big packs.

The moral of this story is simple. The Italian Backcountry sucks. It takes too long to get there, there is nothing good to ski, and the huts are dumpy. The italians are absolutely right when they say that everything good to ski is groomed nightly. As for me, I might not be checking my email for a while. Please address correspondences to Refugio Elisabetta.

Prosciutto and Me

Italy is the home of probably hundreds of delicious “salumi”. The word salumi is not to be confused with salami, which in itself is not the same as the American product that shares the same word. Salami Piccanti, in Italia, are what we Ameicans call pepperoni. Pepperoni, in Italy, is the word for peppers, which has absolutely nothing to do with our bastardization of the word, I imagine. Pepperoni here are pretty much just like peppers in America. You’ve got your red, green, and yellow, and they are all wonderfully succulent, unless you buy them from the Eurospin. Not very exciting.

But American Pepperoni, or Salami Piccanti, are really good here. Imagine a Slim Jim, or a typical-supermarket American Pepperoni. Then imagine feeding those products to your dog, because that is what Italians would do if you showed up in Italy claiming that American Pepperoni are edible. Salami Piccanti are just one type of salami here, and all of them are better than anything we have in the Land of the Free. Which brings us back to salami in general. Salami here are 100 percent pork products, deliciosouly ground and blended with their own fats. There’s nothing I like better than fatty meat, and there are more kinds to try than I have been able to get my hands on. Each region has their own salami, with the meat ground to different fineness and different spices added. You can find them hung from the celing at any fine grocer. Salami here rock my world in a way that “salami” in America never could, and I think Francis Scott Key would agree with me.

Which brings us finally back to salumi. What you know as salami, in the Home of the Brave, does exist here. It is called “Hungarian Salami”, because, if you think about it, it really is just a giant version of the traditional salami, and every knows that Hungarian meat is bigger, right? But Hungarian Salami here is actually a salume. Where does one draw the distinction? Well, you need a meat slicer to serve this stuff, and it is sliced thin and presumably eaten on sandwiches, instead of served by itself, by homeless people. How could I be so insensitive? Because Hungarian Salami is arguably the least prestgious of all the saulmi in Italy, with the only other contender being mortadella. Other more fanciful salumi include the esteemed proscuitto crudo, coppa, speck, pancetta, bresaola, mocetta, lardo, culatello, and cotto.

Italy, for all its culinary ingenuity and prowess, reaches its peak at raw meat. I have been here for a few months, and I still cannot stuff enough salumi into my fat face. I might be in love with prosciutto crudo. I don’t care if it’s di Parma, San Danielle, or Toscano. It doesn’t matter if I eat it plain, with grissini, with cheese, or draped over melon. Just as long as it is raw, fatty, and salty, I will eat it. Today after skiing (there’s the skiing reference) I might have eaten over a pound of Crudo, but maybe I didn’t and I just wish that I had. The other salumi are great, but give me the crudo!

A lot of food snobs reading this might say, “but Hannafords sells prosciutto crudo for $14.99 per pound!” I retort by first pointing out that the fat bald guy who is cutting your crudo has absolutely no idea how to do it. You’ll end up with pieces of cured skin, or he’ll cut away all of the fat on the outside. The slices will be too thick to chew, and he will just plop them all down on top of each other like they were some cheap cold cut, virtually eliminating any chance of your true enjoyment of the product. Look at this picture:

Note how the slices don’t overlap. They are thin and have fat around the edges, with no skin. And then I would tell you that each slice costs less than half the price it would go for at Hannaford. That is exciting.

I hope we have all learned something today. From pepperoni to salami to salumi, if it is raw the Italians know how to do it better. I need to go eat some more right now.

Skiing and Culture

My friend Ian is pretty much doing the same thing as I. Except that Ian skipped winter and headed south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In fact, he headed south of the equator. And then he headed west and lost a day of his life to end up in Australia, "the land of the receding neck line" or some such reference to the harlots who inhabit the presumably clay abodes that comprise the shelter for most of the savagaes who live in such an uncivilized country. I was also reading Admiral Lord Nelson's History of the West Indies (HRM Press, 1806) and apparently Australia is full of criminals as well as wild natives. Bon Voyage, Ian!

Oh, and Ian is also working. He has a legal Visa, and pays for an apartment. He probably receives compensation for his services and pays taxes. Like me, Ian has a blog. It's pretty much what you'd expect from someone who beat out the likes of me to win his high school's literature award: well written, well-researched, thoroughly spellchecked, and largely self-inflating. You can find it HERE. Ian actually inspired me to start a blog, so I should probably credit him for that. While I'm at it, I'd like to thank Ian for teaching me how to dominate the Foosball table, and I'd like to apologize for being so much better than him at the aforementioned test of testicular strength.

Maybe I have a slight blog inferiority complex, and it was not helped when I received the following email from Ian:

"Hey, your blog has a lot of spelling and grammar errors; why don't you talk about things other than skiing you snow slave?"

Well, I am going to ignore the former comment and I'd like to offer a rebuttal to the subtle accusation that I all I do in Italy is ski. I have been very busy with a variety of activities that may or may not be more worthwhile than curing cancer, and I will now offer proof with photo and dictatorial documentation of said activities.

1) I have been very active in the viticultural sector of society. As a matter of fact, I just spent almost thirty euro on wine. 18 bottles of wine. You read that properly. Thank you, Eurospin.

2) I did what every stereotypical Italian does - went to the Opera. Michela and I went to the Teatro alla Scala, supposedly some big-time opera house, and saw Madama Butterfly. Don't believe that someone with such a sweet goggle tan would go to the opera? Check this:
3) My good friends Adam and Hannah were here last week, and we went on an epicurial expedition of epic proportions. We saw some major sites and ate far too much food.

So I have been doing at least three things that have nothing to do with skiing. And I swear that even if it weren't raining, I would have done at least one of these three things.