Fruit Dazed

The market is bursting with color and vibrant with all the delightful fruits and vegetables here at the height of the season, as the produce stacks up and the shoppers become laden down. We've gotten enough cool weather to make even the most listless renew their interest to do more than just eat prosciutto crudo and melon or figs alternated with mozzarella and ox heart tomatoes(cuore di bui). Now people are beginning to cook a bit more, but there is still just so many fruits and vegetables to choose from, what's a girl to do.

Get to making stuff, time's awastin.....

So I have been peeling, slicing, dicing and baking; canning, freezing, gelato making and eating, eating and eating as much of this luscious fruit as I dare. 

Apricots, plums, the first of the pears, 
and berries of every variety.

Rose currants, blueberries, blackberries and red gooseberries

Did I say gelato making? I actually meant sorbetto. What a delight and revelation making fresh fruit sorbet of every persuasion has been this summer. The freezer is stuffed, we need some eaters!

Strawberry kirsch sorbetto

Before  and after...

Strawberry sorbet with a chorus of berries

And Peaches

 

to make a southern girl not even think about missing the peaches back home.

The little green ones are actually ripe and a local favorite variety, i persi d'le vigne, or the peaches of the vineyard. Who knows? it's a local dialect name. What I know is that for looking green and under ripe, they are quite tasty.

Huh?  Smashed peaches?

No, they are called Pesche Tabacchiere, or peach snuff boxes. Perhaps they are called this because they are small enough to fit in your hand and sweet enough to take away the sweet craving that hits frequently when we have these in the house. They have been around for a few years, but it took me awhile to get past my suspicion of their unusual shape and price to actually try them. The insistent urging of one of our market vendors finally had me giving in and now I almost regret it, as I can hardly resist them when I spot them in the market. They tend to be a bit pricier and most come from the south of Italy, but some of our local growers have started to have added them to the delectable array of peach varieties to tempt and treat us. Peach Blackberry amaretti crisp has been a favorite lately.

Then we get to the apricots and plums, yum...yes yum.

Ramasin and Claude Reine

We have the first of the local plums coming in, our Piemontese Ramasin, as a harbinger of all the colorful ones to follow before the end is nigh with the Santa Claras. Not ready for that just yet.

The greenish golden one on the right of the Ramasin are named after a queen of France. Silly me though they were named after the person who cultivated them and at one point even thought they were named after a before my time actor named Claude Rains. 

And what is summer with out tarts tarts and more fruit tarts. 

Sunny side up brioche apricot tarts

I just can't make enough of the variety of  tarts there are to make, individual, free form, galettes, pies and on and on..

Apricot Thyme Almond Tart

and  last but not least

 

Apricots in local moscato wine. 

Divine, just divine.

To finish off all those apricots after so many tarts and sorbets.

We will so enjoy this when these become a distant summer memory.

That's what I've been up to, what about you?

Funky Sneakers

When I saw these at the market the other day, they stopped me dead in my tracks as gave them a good look and whipped out my camera.

Yes, these look like your average fashionably colorful converse style sneakers, but then when you get a closer look, you see they take on a new angle on an old favorite.

High heeled sneakers, tennis shoes, trainers, or what every you call them.
I call them funky and fun
with lots of Attitude!

Probably won't be buying a pair as I am not much of a high heeled girl. They get stuck in the dirt or between the stone path to our house, let alone my penchant for twisting an ankle, but I must say they hold a certain allure. Would you make room in your closet for these?

Garden Angels at the Mercato

If you were looking for those wooden angels to put in your garden or maybe some people dressed up to hover around picking off potato bugs or slugs from your garden, then I must say this post will disappoint.

If you are like me and have a small garden plot or limited seed starting area and you find yourself wanting to put in a garden now, or perhaps you don't have the inclination to start all those seeds inside, watering, tending, fussing; then head straight to our Pinerolo market in the spring and you'll find what I have come to think of as garden angels. These folks have just about every variety of seedlings you might need to get your garden going, pronto. Yes, you can usually find hardy little seedlings in their pots for 10 to 20 cents a piece, but then you have all of those black pots to deal with. Fortunately, some of the people I buy flowers from will readily take them back, but my experience in the states was that they would not reuse them as they didn't want to or couldn't sterilize them for another season. Then you will have all those containers to haul to the recycle center. Happily, I have found several people at the market that are happy to reuse them. I also have them entertained because I always bring along my canvas bag or two full of the plastic bags you collect along the way with your purchases and I try to not collect new ones if at all possible. Not always possible, but it's a good start. Apparently, I am a bit of an oddity,(but you already knew that, didn't you?) as I recycle my way through the market every week with my ample supply of used plastic bags. I'm sure I'm getting the enviable name as a "bag lady", but at least I bring a chuckle, smile or a perplexed look to their face, if my style of purchasing is new to them. I do get a fair share of, "Brava" as well, and it keeps the plastic bags at bay.

But I digress, yet again.

The real beauty of this style of seedlings is that they are all bare rooted and fairly large, so you get a good jump on your "insta garden" including flowers all for pennies. They range in prices from 5 cents to 15 cents each and can fill in nicely, especially if you have a small little plot. I find that I am not always able to use up a full packet of seeds if I want to have a variety of plants in my little plot. I fill in my empty spots, as our season is always a few weeks behind everyone else in the valley and it gives me a quick jump to the season as I wait for my seedlings to grow up and take over. It's a nice balance and I have come to enjoy my help from my market garden angels. Do you have any helpful garden tips from your part of the world?