briciole

il momento presente tra frutta tropicale e un vulcano / the present moment between tropical fruit and a volcano

[cliccare il link per andare alla versione in italiano] 'Ōhi'a Lehua and ferns growing on lava Life sometimes makes us stop in the moment and reminds us that the only time we have is that moment. It did it to me recently, while my husband and I were vacationing in Puna, the south-east district of the Big Island. At the Maku'u Farmers' Market, along the Kea'au/Pahoa Highway bypass road, a mainlander like me had only the present to taste the phantasmagoria of fruits on display, like papayas, soft-spiked rambutans, fluorescent fuchsia dragon fruit. There was no hoarding for further than the... Read more →

abiu, annona atemoya, carambola e rambutan / abiu, atemoya, starfruit and rambutan

[cliccare il link per andare alla versione in italiano] abiu, atemoya, starfruit and rambutan: four types of fruit (frutta) I have recently had the pleasure of eating while vacationing on the Big Island of Hawai'i I fell in love with abiu two years ago, when we visited the Big Island for the first time. I talked about my first encounter with the fruit in this post, but I did not have a photo of it when ready to be eaten. Before taking the photo above, I partially scooped out a bit of the pulp (polpa) to offer a closer look. [The... Read more →

capodanno sull'isola di Hawaii (seconda puntata) / New Year's Day on the Big Island (part 2)

[cliccare il link per andare alla versione in italiano] In a previous post, I described the main motivation behind our recent trip to the Big Island of Hawai'i. Here, I will share a few other images, some of them food-related. When you say you've been to the Big Island, people ask you whether you stayed on the Kona side (on the the west coast) or the Hilo side (on the east coast). We stayed in the Puna district, south of Hilo, near the current volcanic activity. As an aside, in preparation for the trip, my husband consulted Hawaii The Big Island... Read more →

limetta / lime

(the English lime is also used in Italian) I didn't know lime existed until, some time during my childhood, a TV advertisement showed a small green fruit, called lime dei Caraibi (Caribbean lime), together with a bright green shampoo (shampoo) — or maybe it was a bubble bath (bagnoschiuma). The association established by the advertisement between lime and green-colored personal hygiene items has been hard to erase from my mind, so buying and using limes does not come natural to me. Before I get out of the bathroom, let me add that the Italian word limetta has another meaning: nail file.... Read more →

formaggio fatto in casa con le pere / homemade cheese with pears

A year ago, I wrote about the combination of cheese and pears in a post called cartolina da Orvieto (postcard from Orvieto) after enjoying it in a restaurant. I recently enjoyed the heavenly pair at home and a good portion of the enjoyment was due to the fact that the cheese was of my own production. The road from labneh to my first small wheel of cheese was not without bumps. My first attempt at mozzarella and at cottage cheese were both failures. In the first case, I was able to save the curds and used them in a gratin dish;... Read more →

prugna (a.k.a. susina) / plum

Whatever the name used to refer to it (prugna o susina), this is a fruit I have always liked, so much so that last June we planted a small plum tree (prugno, o susino) in our garden. It is doing so-so and will probably be moved to a more suitable location in the fall. Since prugna may remind you of prune, let me clarify that the latter in Italian is prugna secca (literally, dried plum). I like pretty much all varieties of plums (prugne o susine), though I miss the one that was my favorite as a child, golden in color... Read more →

mela / apple

I am not a breakfast person: when I get up, the first thing I crave is something hot and liquid, which translates into a cup of black tea, followed by another cup of black tea, followed, an hour or so later, by a cup of coffee made using my stovetop coffee maker. It is not until mid-morning that I turn my attention to something solid and that something has been, for more years than I can remember, una mela (an apple). Una mela al giorno leva il medico di torno (an apple a day keeps the doctor away), you may remind... Read more →

noce / walnut

The fruit of a deciduous tree (also called noce), consisting of an external hull (mallo) surrounding a hard shell (guscio), which contains the edible seed (gheriglio). My aunt Lucia used chopped walnuts (noci) and egg whites (chiare d'uovo) to make croccanti for Christmas, then delivered small packages of them to family members. My father remembers cracking the walnuts his sister would use. At my parents' house, a tray of walnuts and hazelnuts (nocciole) was always on the kitchen counter and as a child I loved using the schiaccianoci (nutcracker) to extract the gherigli from their shell. A bottle of home-made nocino... Read more →

fico / fig

Fresh figs from the farmers' market brought back sweet memories of fig picking. Different kinds of figs (fichi) ripen at different times during the summer, so when I was in Italy, summer was a season of continuous fig eating. I remember neighbors arriving at the house in my dad's village with baskets lined with fig leaves, full of sweet-smelling fruit: they never lasted long. My mother would spread peeled figs over slices of bread for a nutritious snack for me and my brother and I have been doing the same for my husband. The summer bounty gets stashed away in the... Read more →

pesca / peach

[pèsca] peach [pésca] fishing The local farmers' market is so full of peaches (pesche), I have to write about them. I hope it is clear from the audio snippet that the word pesca is pronounced differently to disambiguate the two meanings. The fruit of the peach tree (pesco) owes its name to ancient Persia: in fact the Latin word persica is a shortening of the whole name of the fruit mala persica, Persian apples. It appears that Prunus persica arrived in Persia from its original China and from there reached the Mediterranean. My father calls the fruit with its Latin name,... Read more →