A Bountiful Harvest

I want to marry Maria’s brother. Never mind the fact that he’s at least my father’s age, if not older. Age is a trifling matter in this case.

Maria was visiting her family in the region of Campania, near Naples, this past weekend, and while there she visits her brother. Maria’s brother makes or grows EVERYTHING! His workers make both red and white wine from his grapes, olive oil from his olive trees, and sometimes she brings me tomatoes and lettuce grown in his gardens. One time her daughter, Laura, made a Moroccan dish with a rather leggy chicken raised by GUESS WHO? If Maria told me her brother was knitting yak’s wool sweaters for the family for Christmas this year from his resident herd of Tibetan yaks, I’d believe it!

Yesterday it rained nearly all day, quite heavily at times. About 5:00 PM, my lights flickered and died, so I jumped into bed praying the power would return before my frozen foods thawed. I hopped into bed as it was so dark there was naught else I could do. Two hours later I was relieved to hear the familiar grating and clunking of the rain-swollen wooden front door and the tinkle of the overhead bell which heralded Maria’s arrival home from Campania. I leapt out of bed and dressed by feel in the dark, hoping I hadn’t selected a black bra to wear under a white, sheer top, and peeked out my front door. I was amazed to see that Maria had turned on lights in the hall….and they worked!! I whined at her about my powerless predicament and she came upstairs and led me to the fuse box, by candlelight, and showed me where the circuit breaker had flipped. Problem solved!

After unloading all her goodies from the car, she trudged upstairs and gifted me with not one, but two 8 ounce balls of mozzarella di bufala, which is made from the rich, white milk of African water buffalo. I was inordinately relieved to see that the bag containing my milky treasure had the name of a shop on it. I had just begun to envision her brother, The Great Giaquinto, slipping into his dark basement and hunkering down to milk a water buffalo before returning above stairs to whip up some world famous homemade mozzarella in his Tuscan kitchen. Maybe, like a alchemist who turns base metal into gold, The Great Giaquinto tosses various and sundry ingredients into a caldron, waves a wand, and POOF!, out pop edible treats.

Maria invited me to go shopping at Coop with her this afternoon, but first, we waited for her friend who needed a ride to the hospital. We effectively bottled-necked traffic on via Roma as her friend reached the car, opened the door, and fixed me suspiciously with her gimlet eye as I beamed at her, angelically, from the backseat. We drove 10 minutes cross-country to the hospital and on the way I noticed a good number of farmers harvesting olives. After making the hospital drop it was off to Coop for the necessities of life like sanitary supplies, chocolate, and hair color.

When we returned to our house on the hill, I was in for another treat. Maria asked me to bring a small glass bottle down to her…the only bottle I had was a large olive oil bottle so I trotted it downstairs and she obligingly returned it full of……newly pressed olive oil! From The Great Giaquinto’s olive trees! She warned me that because it was new harvest oil, it was very thick with olive solids and I would only need to use a small amount. I promptly toasted some ciabatta bread and drizzled it with liberal lashings of the peppery, opaque, greenish-gold oil. Heavenly! It’s a good thing I dragged my waffly thighs up to Bramasole on a walk today.

I have so much slippery olive oil I might just break out the rubber sheets and invite some friends over for a Mazola party!