We had made no plans for today other than a trip to the supermarket. Helen and I could, of course, have done the shopping prior to the arrival of Dave, Sarah and little Ollie, but who are we to deprive a chef of the chance to poke, prod and taste his way around an Italian supermarket?!
After breakfast, therefore, Dave, Sarah, Ollie and I headed down to town leaving Helen and Reggie at home to attempt to do some work before lunch.
The Wattses and I meandered around Esselunga for over an hour and a half, filling our trolley to absolute bursting point with a mouth-watering selection of gastronomic delights - Sarah assures me that this is a normal occurrence when food shopping with a chef, and an expensive one at that! Dave and Sarah very kindly paid for the entire shop in lieu of apartment rental and absolutely refused to take any money from me, a REAL treat indeed!
Amongst the items my stomach will be looking forward to this coming week are: globe artichokes, numerous cheeses, piles of salami and cured hams, Tuscan sausages, tropea onions (a kind of large red spring onion from Calabria that we last had at our wedding meal near Siena two and a half years ago) and some slabs of ossobucco from the local Chianina cow - an Italian breed of white cow that is apparently the oldest and largest breed in the world and which lends part of itself to the famous bistecca Fiorentina, or Florentine steak, which weighs in at a kilo! Besides all that, we have pile of sweet treats including little pastry pillows dusted in icing sugar and filled with something resembling Nutella, and a lemon tart - it's like Christmas all over again, we're even considering making mulled wine this evening.
By the time we got home it was almost noon and Ollie was in need of a nap so Dave took him downstairs and succumbed to the sleep monster himself while waiting for Ollie to drift - so Sarah came up and drank tea with me and munched amaretti biscuits while Helen finished off in the office.
After refreshments, Sarah went down to see how the sleepy boys in her life were doing and I headed down the road to get another prescription from the doctor. After my 45-minute wait at the doctor's surgery, I came back for a little bit of lunch of cheese, salami and fresh bread before we all piled into the car and headed into town to walk the dog, pay some bills and collect a prescription.
We had a slow amble along the river bank and then completed the circuit by heading back into the main piazza where we stopped for coffee and biscotti. Sarah and Ollie opted to share a hot chocolate - which arrived looking more like a thick chocolate soup, rather more like the consistency of a chocolate custard than what we Brits are used to as a hot chocolate drink! This was our first experience of ordering cioccolata calda over here, so it remains to be seen whether the thick, gloopy, custard-style drink is normal around here!
Once we'd drained our cups, been to the tabaccheria to pay the long overdue water bill (the due date of which was 18th December - yet it only arrived two days ago), popped into the pharmacy to pick up my prescription and had a quick visit to the pet shop to buy some more poop scoopers, we headed back to the car and back up the hill towards home in the rapidly fading light.
As I type, Ollie will be down in the apartment working his way through a jacket potato, beans and cheese, Reggie is barking his head off having heard a deer bark in the woods not far away from the house, and I am tending the fire before the house temperature drops too low.
So, after a slow, steady first day of the Watts's holiday, another relaxing evening is planned with a glass or two of the now obligatory Aperol spritz to start proceedings and a dinner of gnocchi and artichokes, hopefully followed by another good night's sleep to fully recharge the batteries of our weary travellers.
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