Last week was blessed with plenty of perfect late summer/early autumn weather, with warm-but-not-hot days and brisk nights, and long afternoons with melancholy light. I had to travel to Milan for work twice, and both days I couldn’t stop staring at the view from the train window across the fields of eastern Piemonte and to the alps, which are still bare of snow this early in the year. These are the sorts of days I think of when you say autumn, which feels a bit silly because autumn here is mostly overcast days and drizzle. But even if my ideas of autumn are more often ideals than reality, I do love the season, especially in these early days before the winter darkness gets too close.
Here are some things I would like to do this year (this list is short partly to keep things achievable and partly because a good chunk of the weekend time I’d usually spend on planning/writing a blog post was spent on working on items 1 and 2 — at least I’m getting started on my resolutions early!):
- Continue eating gelato regularly until it gets too cold to reasonably stand around outside with a cup of frozen stuff in my hands. Once it stops being so hot I need gelato, I have a terrible tendency to forget about it, which is daft.
- Find a tea and/or tisane I like. More to the point: find a tea I can smell well enough that it doesn’t feel like drinking hot water. Experiments so far suggest fruity tisanes work, but I would love to find a more traditional tea.
- Get out of Torino at least on a day trip at some point. Maybe go for a walk somewhere? Go to Liguria and enjoy the beach without the crowds?
- Collect and press some leaves.
- Work on my stew/casserole skills. I don’t have a good go-to stew recipe, and it will be a challenge to find one without onions, but there must be something out there!
(I’m impressed with myself: only 60% of my ideas about autumn revolve around food, if you take this list as representative. I would have imagined more like 90%.)
Where's Zoe now? 
I was planning to make this gratin next week: http://food52.com/recipes/16599-celery-and-fennel-gratin
It looks great–and no garlic or onions!
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Oh, sorry, wrong one. Should be: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/fennel-apple-and-celery-root-gratin-recipe.html
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Interesting! I’m a fan of savoury dishes that use apples, I’ll have to give this one a try.
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I love that one of your resolutions is to not forget about gelato.
Do you call herbal tea “tisane” in Australia? We call everything tea in the US (at least I do), but “tisane” means herbal tea in French, so now I sometimes use it in English (to people who also speak French) to make the differents between teas, but you live in Italy not France so that’s probably not what you’re doing unless it’s also the same word in Italian, and now I’m curious.
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I’d always called herbal tea, herbal tea before I came here – the Italians borrow the word from French I think. And I think I have seen it in English, but probably in the context of someone being a bit “look how cultured and French I am” ;)
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I bought sage and eucalyptus tea yesterday in the hope it will help with my cold. That probably doesn’t help you much though.
Can’t you just take a recipe and leave out the onions?
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Yeah, I’ve been leaving onions out of things, but it turns out a lot of recipes rely on onions to have any savoury flavour at all! The things you learn… :)
Sage & eucalyptus sounds interesting. I’ve had plain eucalyptus tea before (back when I could smell normally) and I liked it, maybe I should try it again. That’s the slightly annoying thing, I don’t know until I try things whether I can smell them, or I can’t smell them, or the scent has changed. Bah!
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