Category Archives: Living in Turin

Salone del Gusto: so much food, so little time

Salone del Gusto is a huge food exhibition/market/trade fair/convention held every 2 years in Torino. I went this weekend with a friend, somehow we managed nearly 5 hours of walking around, trying free samples and discovering new foods. It was good fun, but very tiring, so in lieu of some actual prose, here is a bullet-point summary.

Things it reminded me of: the Perth Royal Show, if you only went to the dairy tent aka the best part of the show; a giant indoor market; the vendor exhibitions at physics conferences, except people are selling food rather than vacuum systems and atomic force microscopes.
Flavour combinations I encountered that I never would have thought of myself: Tomato & vanilla; olive & orange; grappa-flavoured soft cheese.
Things I wish I’d taken a photo of: the intricate, delicate bread sculptures from Sardinia, the marzipan fruits from Sicily, some of the traditional costumes people were wearing, especially in the International pavillion.
Though I did get a photo in the Puglia section:
Best stall: it’s a tough call, but there was a French cheese stall, with amazing goat cheeses, and the owners pretty much only gave samples to people who asked in French. Delicious cheese plus confirmation of stereotypes, oh yeah.
“Je voudrais, um… uh…” *waves wildly at cheese* “oh, merci!”
Worst stall: The Australian one. (They were from Tasmania — another confirmation of stereotypes? Sorry…) They were just really disorganized. Maybe they were really, really, jetlagged?
Purchases I’m glad I made: Stilton cheese from a very friendly stallholder from somewhere in the west of England who very much enabled my “oh but when will I next have the chance to buy stilton”; some kind of Lebanese cheese I forgot to ask the name of; a jar of fennel sauce/pesto/whatever-you’d-call-it.
Purchases I regret: Juice from local juice bar — it was watery, like actual juice, I don’t think they had the “juice bar” concept quite down; a disappointing almond granita. Lesson learned: stick to things you can sample before buying!
Purchases I regret not making: More cheese. Why did I not buy more cheese?! And canoli. I didn’t buy canoli because I find them really hit-or-miss, but in retrospect, I should have taken a risk.
Three pieces of advice: 1. Dress smart — comfortable shoes for lots of walking, no tight waistbands. 2. If you’re thinking of buying from a stall but don’t want to lug around the cheese/wine/pickles/bag of onions/whatever, take a photo of the stall number, because you’ll never remember where it was later. 3. If at all possible, go during the week. It was packed on Saturday afternoon. Great for people-watching Torinesi from all walks of life get excited about food, bad for stress levels as you’re constantly in crowds.

On language skills and dried fruit.

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When I first moved to Italy, it used to really bother me that I couldn’t understand the conversations I was overhearing around me. What are all these people talking about? I’m missing out on so much!

And then I went back to Australia for Christmas, where I understood everything going on around me, and I realized the truth. Most of what you overhear, you don’t want to overhear. Those 2 weeks in Perth, I swear about 90% of conversations I overheard were either people making loud phone calls on the bus to reschedule their colonoscopies to work around their urologist’s appointment, or bros telling their gym buddies about the new Paleo-kins diet they were on where you’re only allowed to eat spinach, bacon and protein powder and maaate you just have to try the spinach-bacon protein shakes I make, I’ve been slamming them down, every meal, they’re amazing.

These days, my Italian language skills have improved and while I’m far from fluent, I’m starting to think the level I’m at is somehow optimal. I can usually understand what I hear if I actively listen, but I can still tune out conversations on the bus just by not paying attention — even if someone says something outrageous, I’m not going to pick it up unless I’m listening for it. And my spoken Italian is rubbish, but I’m starting to think that’s for the best… 3 stories to illustrate:

The other night, I’m on the tram, it must have been around 11pm so it’s quiet but not empty. Everyone is minding their own business; two guys get on. One is very obviously drunk, the other is his loyal friend who is really hoping to get him home as quickly as possible, hopefully without too much drama. I make the mistake of listening in. The drunk guy is discussing his girlfriend, who’s dumped him earlier today. How could she?! But whatever, she was no good anyway, he was about to dump her. But how could she?! It’s all her fault anyway. But how could she duuuump meeee? At which point, I’m very glad that a) it was his stop and his friend made him get off, and b) I couldn’t think how to say “Maybe she dumped you because you’re a tedious drunk,” because that would have been mean and probably gotten me into a fistfight.
A few weeks ago, I was cycling to work and pulled up behind another cyclist at a red light. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something moving. It’s a spider. On seat of his trousers. I did consider trying to say “hey, there’s a spider on your butt!” but I decided against it because it didn’t look like a dangerous spider, and I could just imagine the follow up, “No, really, it’s a very dark coloured spider and you’re wearing light beige trousers and it’s moving around so it was visible in my peripheral vision, I really truly wasn’t checking out your butt while waiting at a red light, really…” So awkward! Not to mention, the only Italian I could think of was less like “butt” and more like “arse” and he’d probably just think I was yelling obscenities at him.
Yesterday, I was at the supermarket buying grapes. This one’s a longer story, because on the face of it, there’s no good reason for me not to have asked one of the other customers, “do you reckon any of these are seedless?” But I was worried they might ask why I was after seedless grapes, and then we’d be in the realm of things that are hard to explain even in your mother tongue.

So the story with the grapes is this. Saturday, I was feeling especially crafty, so I decided to make my own mixed peel (candied peel, if you’re American). Turns out, it’s really easy, I used this recipe and it worked splendidly:

This might end up in a Christmas cake, if I don’t eat it all first.

In this case, success is followed by hubris. What else could I preserve? Glace cherries sprung to mind, but of course I’ve missed the cherry season by several months (next year!). Why not… raisins? So there I was, buying grapes, and refusing to ask for help finding seedless ones because I didn’t want to have to explain, “well I made my own mixed peel even though you can buy it, so now I’m thinking I’ll make my own raisins even though you can buy them and I swear I’m not that sort of person normally.” (It didn’t help that a lot of the how-to-dry-raisins instructions I found on the internet were on Mormon lifestyle blogs. I made sure to buy beer and coffee along with the grapes, to preserve my own self-image.)

Turns out the kilogram of grapes I bought were not seedless. But hubris is followed by madness, so I sat down with my kilo of grapes, and a knife, and I cut every single grape in half and pulled out the seeds. Every. Single. Grape. About halfway through, I checked in with myself:

Self, what will you do if this all fails and you don’t end up with anything resembling raisins and you’ve wasted all this effort?

Well, what else would I be doing on a Sunday night?

So now I have 2 trays of grape halves in a very low oven, maybe they will form something resembling raisins, or at least something close enough that I can soak them in booze and put them in a Christmas cake.

Come on ugly grape ducklings, you can turn into beautiful raisin swans!

Maybe I should spend my Sunday nights on Italian language learning, instead.

How to make peanut butter cookies (with bonus story!)

Signs of autumn

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I grew up with hot summers and mild winters; autumn in Perth mostly just means the evenings get longer and it becomes bearable to be outside in the middle of the day. For me, chilly mornings and hazy light and falling leaves still feel like something out of a story book, something I never quite believed existed.

Also, will I ever get over the ‘let’s make everything pretty’ architecture? Probably not.

So I’ve been doing autumn things, like getting in as much gelato as I can before it’s too cold, and making plum jam. Buying fruit for that, I had the opposite problem at the market to usual — normally I’ll ask for half a kilo of something and the stall-holder will try to sell me at least a full kilo, if not two. Buying 4kg of plums, on the other hand, I had to hold up fingers and very clearly enunciate quattro chili, to the great amusement of the seller who probably couldn’t imagine why the strange foreign girl wanted so much fruit (I counted 48 plums went into the saucepan, plus those that I ate fresh).

Actually, most of autumn seems to be about food: plums and fichi d’india and mushrooms. One of my lasting mental images of Torino is from the first autumn I was here, walking into the fruit and vegetable market at Porta Palazzo in the middle of the afternoon, with golden sunlight that you could almost touch and stalls upon stalls of produce, with so much of it completely different to what was available a few weeks prior. It was one of those moments where I marvelled about where I am now, having done nothing to deserve any of it.

I had another moment like that the other night, it was a drizzly evening and I took the bus home, looking out the window at the lights from the shop windows reflecting off the paving stones of the street. I was listening to my “you listened to this as a teenager” playlist on my phone, and I realized that actually, going home to my cozy apartment in a beautiful city was more or less exactly what I daydreamed of as a teenager. Which was a good thing to realize, I think: it’s my birthday in a few weeks and I find it very easy to ask my self so, what do you have to show for yourself after this many years?? And this year I have an answer. I am literally living the dream! And it has nothing to do with achievements or goals met, which is a relief.

What was supposed to be a post mostly about jam-making has turned rather introspective… But then, autumn does seem to be the season for spending time thinking, doesn’t it?

Walking vaguely Rome-wards: Chivasso to Lamporo

The time I ate donkey meat – festival delle sagre

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“Does asino mean what I think it–”

“Sure does.”

“Alrighty then. How many plates shall we get?”

Asino is Italian for donkey, and the context was a food stall selling meat-stuffed pasta. I’d gone with some friends to the Festival delle Sagre — the Festival of Festivals — a weekend food festival in Asti, south of Torino. Imagine an agricultural show/county fair with a ferris wheel, but with almost all the exhibits being food stalls. There must have been at least 50 of them. And not nasty showgrounds food. Each stall featured one or two freshly-made dishes, the local specialties of villages in a region known internationally for its food.

And now add in the fact that every stand has wine, typically included in the price of food. And you can buy an empty glass that comes with a holder so you can wear it around your neck as you walk around. Genius!

WINE HOLDER

As soon as we’d arrived, we realized we were going to need a strategy for all this. We started with a reconnaisance — walking around, sussing out what options there were. Truffle risotto! Polenta with wild boar! The options were dizzying. By the time we were halfway through our recon run, it was getting hard to not buy everything in sight.

Once we had the lay of the land, we decided on our first stop, which was by far the highlight of the savoury options — friciula, a fried bread-y-pastry-y thing, with fatty pancetta. It came recommended to us, and it was a good call. Fat and starch and salt and everything delicious. “It’s funny, everyone back in England seems to think Italian food is healthy,” said S. We looked at what we were eating and laughed.

Hard at work serving wine to wash down the artery-clogging goodness.

Our second stop was the agnolotti d’asino, the donkey pasta. I have to admit, I’m not really a huge meat eater and while I could tell the pasta was different to others I’ve had, I don’t know how much was the donkey meat and how much was the flavourings they used. It was tasty, but. And a good discussion starter — if horse is ok to eat, why not donkey? Or to go a step back towards Australian thinking — if cow is ok to eat, why not horse…?

While we were walking around, thinking about what to get next, we hit on the optimal food-finding strategy: hang around the central area where the tables were, look at what other people are eating, and if it looked good, ask them where it was from. It was through this, plus a discussion of whether polenta is similar to ugali, that we ended up with polenta and wild boar stew. (The verdict: polenta is not like ugali, but it is good.)

At this point we were extremely full. “No you finish the polenta; no you; no really, I can’t” level of full. We had to make some serious decisions about desserts. I think we got it right: zabaglione (custard but amazing custard made with wine not, like, custard powder custard), and “chocolate salami”, which is possibly the best chocolate slice I’ve ever had (it doesn’t contain salami, if you were wondering). Two very different options, both delicious.

It was a happy sleepy train ride home, full of food and wine. We are so doing this again next year.

A walk out of town

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The other week, as I was popping down to the shops to buy some eggs, I noticed an odd sticker on a lamp post. It was a cartoon-ish figure of a pilgrim, and below it was an arrow labelled “Roma”.

“Odd choice of street art,” I thought. Except there, across the street, was another, placed exactly as if to show hikers that yes, they were right to cross the street and keep going.

Turns out, I live on a walking trail, the Via Francigena. Or rather, one of the Vie Francigene, since it turns out there’s several routes which diverge and converge as they make their way towards Rome. This clearly needed some exploring.

So after lunch I set out again towards the shops, and kept going. The trail headed for the river and more or less followed it exactly. That day, I made it to San Mauro, about 10km from central Torino, before I turned back and walked down the other side of the river.

Trail sign! Rome seems and implausible goal.

Trail sign! Rome seems an implausible goal.

Going past the Jewish section of the cemetery on the way to the river.

This lamp post will be warm in winter.

Under the bridge…

And through the trees.

So obviously, having reached San Mauro, the obvious thing to do was set out the next Saturday, get the bus to where I’d left off and keep going. The first 10 minutes was through the suburbs, and I wondered if I’d misjudged and was about to spend the next few hours walking past peoples’ apartments. From one of them, I could hear someone practising the piano, and old tune I couldn’t quite place (and they couldn’t quite play). It was a hot afternoon, and I was tempted to bail or at least make a substaintial gelato break before I went any further. But once I reached the farmland it was good going:

Country style trail marker!

Looking back on the Superga.

Navigation was never difficult.

On the banks of the Po.

Peaceful afternoon.

It took me a bit longer than I’d planned and I developed a good sized blister on the ball of my left foot, but I made it the 19 km to Chivasso which conveniently has a regular train service back to Torino. (I certainly wasn’t walking back!)

So. On to Rome??

Ten things you should know about hiking

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A post about something recent! Some friends and I went hiking last weekend.

Everything feels like more of an adventure if you get up early for it. Even if you’re only up early because you woke up an hour before your alarm, and you decided to get out of bed and clean your apartment.
If your plans involve Italian trains running on time, they will be delayed, pushing everything back until your hike is an after-lunch hike.
Which isn’t a problem, because a picnic lunch in a village in the Alps is pretty great in its own right. Especially with fresh bread and cheese and sausage and fruit.
It turns out the haze you always thought was air pollution must be partly just humidity, because even in this valley, it’s there. You won’t get the crystal-clear mountain air you’d been daydreaming of during the week, but the haze does make the landscape rather painterly.
When the trail mostly follows the road, you can go fast, even when the clouds come in and visibility is low. This will seem like a good idea at the time. Your stiff muscles and awkward-baby-giraffe gait 3 days after the hike will disagree.
Cows and calves are almost as cute as sheep and lambs; cowbells are useful for warning you there are cows on the road when walking through clouds; it is impossible to resist mooing loudly as you pass a herd of cows, even if you’ve passed 4 already.
A woman with grey hair and wellies will pass you as you pause for a drink, and wish you a pleasant hike. One minute later, she will be nowhere to be seen on the road, even though there are no side paths. Probably she is a farmer and has gone into a field. Maybe she is a witch.
In the end, even going fast, you won’t reach the lake the signposts were vague about the location of. You will however witness the clouds lifting and the sun coming out over a meadow of wildflowers, complete with a mountain stream and views to higher hills beyond.
Nettles are real, and they do look just like on the box of nettle tea you used to drink in Australia. You’re only going to realize this after you walk through a patch of them.
Homemade fruit cake you weren’t convinced about while in the city will taste amazing when you’ve just walked from 1400 to 2000 metres above sea level. (You need to go hiking again – you’ve got nearly a quarter of the fruitcake still in your fridge.)

Cyclists of Torino

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If you see all of these on a single commute, you should yell BINGO and wait to receive your prize:

The phone-talker. If someone calls you, of course you should answer and continue cycling one-handed on a main road during peak hour. It would be rude to just call back later.
The sms-writer. Fortunately for my tendencies to worry too much about other people, this one is rarer than the phone-talker. Possibly because how long are you going to survive anyway if you do as the phone-talker, except now you’re writing a text message with one hand and steering your way through traffic with the other.
The smoker. Usually cigarettes, but I did once see an older gentleman with a pipe, wearing a suit. He sailed past me going down via Nizza. He had quilted pannier bags. Even considering I live in Italy, this was a new pinnacle of me feeling comparatively un-stylish.
The umbrella-user. It’s raining. You need to get somewhere and the bus isn’t convenient. A rain jacket wouldn’t suit your outfit. So you cycle while carrying an umbrella. Obviously.
The “make do with this ToBike”-er. ToBike is Torino’s bike sharing scheme. Mostly it’s pretty amazing, but sometimes, thanks to vandals, you arrive at a station and the only bike left is missing a seat. Or pedals. Or both brakes. Or all of the above. If you don’t have time to walk to another station, it’s amazing how well you can ride on a bike with only one pedal.

Saturday highlights, 23 March 2013

Where's Zoe now?

Living a long way from where I grew up.

Category Archives: Living in Turin

Salone del Gusto: so much food, so little time

On language skills and dried fruit.

How to make peanut butter cookies (with bonus story!)

Signs of autumn

Walking vaguely Rome-wards: Chivasso to Lamporo

The time I ate donkey meat – festival delle sagre

A walk out of town

Ten things you should know about hiking

Cyclists of Torino

Saturday highlights, 23 March 2013

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