Waiting for a white Xmas.
I'm getting ready for a European Xmas. Have bought a tree and filled it with the small decorations I've been buying at each place I've visited. I decide to make Panforte as gifts and it turns out perfectly and then I look out the window and it's snowing! Tiny flecks of white are drifting down throughout the town. I'm so excited, I race from window to window. This is how Xmas should be. Even though I am Australian born and have sweated through boiling hot Xmas's, my genes are cold climate still and I feel that this is the real deal (or I've watched too many European movies).
The sunsets have been stupendous, iced and coloured like granita, peach, strawberry and nectarine colours soften over the white covered peaks. P.S. In the first photo, right in the middle is our house with the blue roof and shutters.
I shop for Xmas foods and buy a bottle of Bombardino and wait for the kids to arrive, the daughter from Hamburg and her friend from Berlin. They arrive, the Bombardinos are made as we wait excitedly for more snow but it's already dispersing. The sister-in-law says it is too cold for more. We are hopeful and don't believe her. Over the next few days, as we look at the weather, there are little snowflakes showing but it never happens. She was right.
For Xmas eve, I make polenta (which is the national dish here) and a chicken cacciatore lustrous with tomatoes and plump olives and for dessert, pears with chocolate sauce flavoured with orange rind and topped with mascarpone flavoured with crushed amaretti.
This apartment, although ours, was decorated by the sister-in-law in her own inimitable way and there are few things that are obviously great memories for her but which creep us out (or she didn't want them in her apartment). There's a few scary Balinese masks and a collection of Aboriginal artefacts that don't sit well in a northern Italian mountain village home. I usually take them down when I arrive because the sister-in-law rarely visits but she's having Xmas with us so I put everything back up, including the 70's shag pile rug that is in varying degrees of yellows which I usually roll up and put behind the lounge.
Xmas day arrives but not accompanied by snow. We spend quite a bit of the day looking out the windows hopefully. I have cooked some sort of bird that the sister-in-law has bought, she calls it a peasant. I suggest it may be a pheasant but she is adamant that it's a peasant and she is not a woman to argue with! It's too big for a chicken and too small for a turkey, so I feel it could possible be a pheasant Anyway, I make a stuffing with fennel bread, pancetta, lemon rind and clementines; brussel sprouts with sage, walnuts and pancetta and we have a pear and chocolate strudel. And...another Cassata has been sent from Oscars in Palermo. Our first Italian Xmas done right! That night we peer out the windows in between taking Xmas selfies and drinking Hugo Spritz's made with Prosecco and Elderflower liquor.
The next few days we continue to hope for a proper white Xmas but are sorely disappointed We drown our sorrows in Panettone warmed and served with pistachio cream paste (which is addictive) for breakfast, warmed Bombardino's, Spritz's and walks around the lake. The lake at this time of the year is beyond beautiful. It's almost iced over and is surrounded by the russet and green colours of the forests and tinted turquoise and mint where the ice hasn't quite glazed over. We wander in the hushed silence of the chilled air and are amazed at the way the ice forms, it's intricacy and patterns.
It's the last day of an extraordinary adventure of a year. Another of the daughter's friends arrives and we're told that the bar by the lake will be open for a New Years Eve party so we walk down at 9.30 but all is quiet. We return to the one bar in town that is still open and have a drink there but they're about to close so it's down to the river again but all lights are off so it's home again. At midnight, the neighbours let off illegal fireworks and the night is done.
Evidently, New Year's day is the day to feast in Italy and so for lunch I have made the Turkeys wife. We still can't work out what this translation is but the wife cooks up nicely and we feast on more Cassata and then go down to the lake to skim stones across the water. The sound they make as they bounce across the ice is eerily satisfying.
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