Daily Archives: 4 July, 2011

Pizza with pig fat

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Ruth wrote about it back in January of this year but I’d never seen it before.

However, as I now ‘weekend’ nearby (how jealous are you, Ruth?), it seems only logical.

Friday night we were late getting down.  Too late to go and eat with F’s parents and, so, F, having not eaten much lunch, suggest we drop the dogs off at the house and go for a pizza.

Seemed a good idea to me.  I don’t know any restaurants in the town and so learning of which ones to go to is important (for me).

We went to Bati Bati right in the centre of town.  It looked nice.  Rustically rough but clean looking.  We went into the back part of the restaurant.  Everything was white except the floor.  Unusually for the town, not everywhere was marble!

I then saw – pizza with lardo di Colonnata, aubergine (egg plant to you Americans) and asparagus.

Now, I do really like lardo and lardo di Colonnata is produced in a town (maybe village) nearby and is reputedly the best.  They serve it thinly sliced – but I mean really, really thin – almost see-through.  The combination of the lardo, the aubergine and the asparagus was divine and, surprisingly, very light!  I loved it.

F has now promised to take me up to Colonnata where we can get some of the real thing.  I resisted suggesting that we should do that first thing in the morning.

The only problem will be to slice it thinly enough.

But there is a bakery that bakes bread in a wood oven (so the sign says) near to the house and the idea of a thin slice of lardo di Colonnata on a piece of warm bread is making my mouth water already!

I guess it’s official now.

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I guess I have reached the ‘I am an old codger’ stage of my life.

It’s not really my age, as such, it’s my attitude.

Saturday night was the ‘Notte Bianca’.  This is an Italian thing.  Once a year, roads are closed to traffic and the shops and bars stay open until late.  By late, I mean 2 or 3 or later.

There are often ‘discos in the street’, stalls and street traders selling tourist-type crap.  There are food and drink stalls.  And people wander about.

I suppose the reason it can be done here is the weather.  It’s warm and it lends itself to staying up till the early hours of the morning.

F apologised a number of times and checked I wasn’t bored.  St, an old friend of his, has been having problems with her 30+-year-old marriage.  Or rather her husband has been having problems, if you see what I mean.  She has lived in the town all her life and feels she cannot confide in anyone who lives there – so F was an obvious choice.  It seems a lot of people are having problems right now.

Anyway, obviously they were talking in Italian.  I suppose I could have tried to follow the conversation but it seemed rude to do so, me not being an old friend.  So, I didn’t.

We went to a bar and found a seat (which was lucky).  And they talked whilst I looked around.  And I catch myself wondering why the young people (especially the girls) think that wearing a pair of shorts or skirt that barely covers your bum when you have tree trunks for legs, think that it can possibly be attractive?

I suppose it is the same as when I was a teenager and I suppose the older generation thought much the same about us as I think about the youngsters of today.

But, that’s not entirely fair.  There are women of F’s age wearing the same sort of thing although it’s noticeable that the women of that age generally wear something that suits their figure.  Not always, of course, but mostly.

We left about midnight as F didn’t like a friend of R (his best friend who had joined us with his entourage later) who announced to everyone, and in front of her 10-year-old daughter, how she really needed a fuck tonight.  I only learnt later that was why we had left as I hadn’t understood.

Possibly it’s as well that I don’t understand sometimes but F and I do agree on stuff like that.  As we used to say in the UK – it’s not big and it’s not clever.

However, I did enjoy the evening.  Watching the people.  And St seems very nice.  Bless her, she’s still in love with her husband after almost 40 years of knowing him.  Shame he’s such a barsteward really.