Abruzzo Alien

Found while walking along the beach, apparent image of alien burned into trunk of palm tree by rising sun, red path in background is a bike path.

Country Home; What you do on a weekend

We have friends who have a country home about five miles away from the beach and in the beginnings of the foothills. We spent Saturday there eating and socializing with them, their five year old daughter and some other guests. The house is in the beginning of the foothills so it remains cool even when the beach is getting warm. We grilled out fresh sausage, arrosticini (tiny bits of meat on skewers, grilled to very crispy), pork chops and veal burgers; along with that we had fried breaded zucchini and eggplant, tiny cubes of a fresh soft white cheese with spicy oil, salad, crostini, fresh fruit (featuring great fresh cherries), prosciutto and melon, a unique cream filled yellow cake with lots of icing and fruit on top, water, wine and caffe.

On the property, in addition to the new house, there is an old house and also a number of wild flowers including wild poppies. Posted somewhere on here are some photos of some of those things. (I seem to have little control on where photos appear and am not sufficiently motivated to learn how to control them.) Click for full size, click again for even larger, these images are greatly reduced in quality from the originals due to file size limitations of the blogsite. My favorite is the last, that being the crinkled, dying poppies.

Flowers and an Ant

Above are a couple of local weed flowers. If you look closely on the thistle flower you can see an ant who got in the photo. A detail of the ant is at the top. Weeds, or flowers, are the same here as anywhere. These photos were done as I was looking for some color block images and saw these flowers. If you double click on an image it should go to a larger size. The original images were shot in RAW format with files too large to download online so the images here are somewhat degraded from the originals.

Pizza & Wine

We usually walk to a local caffe about 10 each morning and on our way back yesterday we ran into a friend who invited us to his house for pizza that evening, actually pizza at 7:00 P. M., which is a bit early but he explained that it was because two of his grand children would be there and they like to eat earlier. So yesterday we had pizza at 7 P.M. Not in any way a remarkable event, though the pizza was quite good, except that after having just written about Italians, pizza and beer, I saaw everything I wrote refuted.

We started the meal with fresh local cheese, bread and home made white wine from my friend's brother's vineyard. The rest of the meal consisted of three different types of pizza, semi-freddo (a sort of ice cream and cake combination that is a personal favorite of mine), fresh strawberries, caffe and a home made bay leaf flavored liquor. The interesting thing to me is that white wine continued to be the drink of adults throughout the meal. The children drank cola and orange. Red wine from the same vineyard was available and at the table but no one drank it.

While I believe my prior reporting regarding drinking beer with pizza is substantially and overwhelming correct as to what occurs usually, what this dinner proved is that Italy is as diverse and mixed in individual approaches to what is drunk with what as any other place. I cannot recall drinking white wine with pizza any other time, I can recall red wine and pizza on many occasions, particularly many years ago, but never white. The point of all this: never take too seriously any observation that usually this or usually that is done; on any given occasion anything may happen.