View from the kitchen window

The final week of the carnival celebration culminated in not one but two days of thunderous parades up and down the corso until after midnight complete with music (who knew Valledolmo has 6 DJS?!), confetti, tractor drawn floats, costumes, and more young people than I ever knew lived in this town. It was hilarious and loud and a total blast! Chiacchiere for all!

Baking at Simone’s

But now out of the fun and onto class work: Good, Clean, and Fair is the manifesto of Slow Food, an organization started in 1986 in Italy, and is an undercurrent to our daily discussions here. Slow Food works to preserve taste and diversity through seed saving with the Ark of Taste, cultivates curiosity through the Chef Alliance (like the UW Seed to Kitchen program I participate in), and protects local products at risk of extinction with the presidia project like many of the cheese, honey, grains we’ve seen.

We put these three tenants under the lens to support good, clean, and fair food in Valledolmo. Along with five students from the University of Palermo we looked into bakeries, grocery stores, bars, and produce shops, doing participatory observation and discovered more about the customers (mostly old) and vendors (many family businesses and all that entails). There is good food available in Valledolmo but from what we saw, it’s not the romantic vision of Italian countryside eating. Rather its packaged food, sweetened drinks, pizza and on. There is a real desire to have an American diet especially among the middle class, and it feels like there is a real threat of traditional foods being lost in the future.

It was a nice celebration to prepare traditional treats like the classic street food arancine with the students. Our fried rice balls (for lack of a better term) were filled with ragu, ham and cheese, béchamel and pea, or wild fennel, pine nut and dried currant — each was heavenly! And not something I’d make at home but definitely could be sold from a bicycle food cart at the Fox Point Farmers Market (new life plan??)

We finished the week by preparing cassata in the traditional style and al forno (baked). Too close to tell which one was better- better taste again!

On Saturday Shannon and I took the early bus to Palermo (another beautiful sunrise in the Madonie) to walk through the market with Linda, an American chef and badass, who lives in Palermo. We bought fish and veg and cheese as she generously answered all our questions about how to make it work as a freelancer living abroad while cooking us lunch in her charming apartment. Grazie Cheeky Chef!