Knowing that I'd been feeling a bit jaded last night, Stuart encouraged me to snooze my alarm this morning, and as such I didn't get to the geese until 7.20am - by which time it was fully light and they seemed a little miffed at having been left longer than usual (or maybe that was just my guilty perception). To assuage my guilt, I took the last of the lettuce with me and fed it to them as they came, blinking into the daylight out of their overnight house.
My next early morning task was to go down to the apartment and collect up all of the linens that needed changing and set the washing machine going. After that, I set about starting to plan some meals for the week ahead so that we would be able to compile a comprehensive shopping list.
After Stuart had got up, we had breakfast and agreed on a meal strategy for the week. Our New Zealand couple arrive on Wednesday - and have asked if their friend can join them for a couple of days as well, so if I thought that providing three square (and economical) meals a day for just one extra person was challenging over the last couple of weeks, this week will test my catering skills on a whole new level! Thankfully, my wonderful husband has agreed to help cook up some meals for the freezer this weekend, so the mid-week pressure should be eased a little - at least for the first week of these HelpX-ers' stay.
Once we'd compiled two shopping lists - one for Esselunga and one for Lidl - we set out in the car. First things first, we drove to Altopascio to fill up on methane. It was a mundane trip, but it felt good to see the outside world and have a change of scenery. The countryside is really starting to change at the moment - the greens have finally fully committed to turning to autumnal browns, yellows and oranges, and we saw three different sets of people out picking olives, with nets spread under their trees (a rare sight this year, thanks to the vast majority of crops in the area having been decimated by olive fly), as well as a gent tending to his vines, post-picking.
After Altopascio, we headed for the complex of shops situated just after the turning to Collodi on the road to Lucca. With a massive cook-off planned for the weekend, we realised we would need some more containers for the food, for putting in the freezer. For some reason, half of our Tupperware containers seem to have vanished or else lost their lids since we moved from Abingdon. Actually, I'm not sure that that's really the case - it probably has more to do with the fact that we rarely used more than two or three plastic boxes at a time in our old life, and it's only now that we are realising just how inadequate our Tupperware collection really was! Anyway, we thought we'd try a large shop we'd stumbled across there when looking for washing line the other week.
Before embarking on the shopping though, we decided to treat ourselves to a coffee at the incredibly busy café there. We've passed through this complex of shops on a number of occasions, and this café always seems to be full of people, with more people spilling out onto chairs and tables on the pavement. Today was no exception. We chose to sit inside and the noise from the number of people bustling around - friends greeting each other, women coo-ing over a new baby, old gents passing the time of day and families buying pastries - was deafening! We had a second round of cappucino ginseng in an attempt to galvanise ourselves before heading out to start the shopping.
First, we picked up several Tupperware boxes, then Stuart headed to the electrical shop to see if they had any carbon monoxide detectors/alarms. While he did that, I went into the post office to pay our latest Telecom Italia bill. He came out empty-handed, but the shop owner had promised to email him when he found a suitable product.
Next, it was time for the dreaded Esselunga shop. We managed to get around the shop relatively quickly, given the enormous amount on our list, and piled all the shopping into the back of the car before heading to Lidl. Doing 'the double' on the supermarket shopping makes sense economically - there are definite savings to be made, which matter to us a whole lot more in our new lifestyle where we have less than half the amount of money coming in than we used to have - but, for someone who dislikes supermarket shopping at the best of times, drawing up in the car park of the second supermarket of the day brings a certain sense of life draining away... Nevertheless, round two was a necessary evil, so we divided our labour and while Stuart went to find cheese and salamis, I dashed around picking up milk, fruit juice and toilet rolls. We were pleasantly surprised to find that, with two tills open today, there was only one person ahead of us in the queue, and before we knew it we were paying and leaving the shop.
On arriving home, we went back and forth (and back again) to the car to unload all of the shopping, and then attempt to find homes for all of it. Part of our economy-buying strategy is to buy certain things in bulk - and definitely to buy things that are on special offer in bulk. That's all well and good if you have a spacious kitchen, but our excuse-for-a-kitchen can best be described as 'compact'. So that is how you end up with tins of tomatoes and bags of pasta on top of bookshelves in your office...
We were feeling pretty peckish by the time we'd unloaded all the shopping, so we sat at the patio table and had our lunch - it actually felt warmer outside than inside the house today, and with the sun just peeping through the clouds, the last thing we felt like doing was clearing away lunch and heading indoors to do more chores. But, there's no rest for the wicked - and none for trying-to-be Tuscan farmers either, it seems.
After I'd stood on the bottom of a pair of stepladders to stead them while Stuart replaced the 'LNB' on the satellite receiver (whatever that means...), we headed indoors and, while Stuart did some tidying and rearranging to try to find some extra storage space, I made a start on the mammoth cooking session. First, I whizzed up a pea and pesto soup - a foolproof and super-speedy Nigella recipe that I was first introduced to by my friend Lesley. Next, I started chopping up the ingredients for a leek and potato soup. However, I put that on hold after Stuart had finished his tidying spree so that the pair of us could head into town... to buy some more cooking utensils!
We realised that with all of the cooking we wanted to do this weekend, we actually only have one pot that is large enough to cook things in, meaning we could only do one dish at a time. Our enormous Le Creuset casserole was bought at great expense in Abingdon many years ago, but after the initial shock of its price, we can safely say that it has been one of the best purchases we have ever made and has more than paid for itself many times over. Anyway, we were searching for something of similar size - we knew of two kitchen-y shops in Pescia, one at the top of the main square, and one at the bottom.
It was already past 4.30pm by the time we headed out, so we knew it had to be a quick trip so that we could get back in time to put the geese to bed and get the cats inside before darkness fell. We were surprised to find town busy and there was a large inflatable tent at the top end of the square - meaning that we couldn't find a parking space, so we headed for a car park a little way out of town and then walked back in. We tried the shop at the bottom end of the square first, which had a fairly extensive range of cooking utensils, including several pans, but we couldn't see anything that was quite what we were after. We then walked to the top end of the square to the other shop - which proved to be useless for our needs. Rather than selling useful cooking items it seemed to be selling arty ornaments and expensive KitchenAid mixers. With the light starting to fade, we headed back down to the first shop. On entering the shop, the owner asked us if we needed something in particular. We explained that we wanted a large casserole, and she took us to the shelves of kitchen products to show us what she had. Somehow, on our first visit to the shop, we had completely missed a very large saucepan - which was the perfect size for what we wanted!
We bought the pan, and a lid (which we had to pay extra for!), and hot footed it back to the car in the quickly fading light.
We drove home, got the cats in, I got the geese into their house, then we shut the door, drew the curtain and turned our attention back to the cook-a-thon!
This time, both of us donned aprons, with Stuart concentrating on Tuscan ragu while I finished my leek and potato soup and followed that with a vegetable chilli. We'll probably leave it at that for today, with two more soups to make tomorrow. Tomorrow morning's first task, though, will be to turn the apartment around in time for our paying guests who plan to arrive just after lunch tomorrow.
Right, time to head back to the kitchen!
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