sardinian recipe: shrimp, peas, saffron.

Plus garlic, parsley, scallions, olive oil, tomatoes. It was good. And Mara made chestnut flour fritters. Both recipes from Giuliano Bugialli's book.

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home cooking.

Some of our best eating in Sardinia was at home. This makes a certain bit of sense: four accomplished cooks living on a farm surrounded by the best raw materials imaginable, and you can hardly go wrong can you.

Unfortunately for you all, our home-cooked meals were documented by some of the most stomach-wrenchingly ugly food photography I have ever seen. I seem to remember someone emitting a blood-curdling scream of horror when this picture of Valentina's beautiful and delicious spaghetti alla vongole e cozze flashed on the screen:

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It all boils down to lighting. It was hot there, so the windows were open. There were huge flying insects and rodents outside, so the kitchen lights were off. Most nights we ate dinner at around 10pm, out on the patio with very little light.

The best we could hope for in terms of picture quality seemed to be "moderately appealing but uninformative", as in the top photo above. It doesn't look revolting, but you'd have no idea that you were looking at two roasted chickens with rosemary and myrtle; roasted red and yellow bell peppers in agrodolce; a nectarine and basil salad with basil from Remo's garden, and a cold pasta salad of trofie with oil-packed tuna, salt-preserved capers, and wind-dried tomatoes.

When we tried turning the kitchen light on, things were not any better:

This toxic-looking sludge is actually my extremely good version of mussels in an orange-chile broth. Imagine it with blood oranges and myrtle-smoked pancetta affumicata. Now look at the picture. Not good.

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lido delle rose.

Our first morning in Lotzorai, I woke up at 03:30. The bedroom was hot and full of crowing roosters and baying hounds. Whenever it seemed like they might be getting tired, another group of hounds and roosters would start up from one of the other neighboring fields and the room would fill again.

I got up and went into the kitchen but there was nothing in the refrigerator because we hadn't gone shopping yet. I tried sitting on the couch and reading for a while but there were ants everywhere and it was hard to concentrate.

So by 04:59 I'd decided to go to the beach. There was zero light outside. Immediately I almost got hit in the face with a bat. A real bat, an animal. I saw its outline against the moon.

I didn't know where I was going, I just took a right out of the driveway because I knew the beach was that way. So I walked, in total darkness, my feet crunching through the sandy shoulder of the road. There were crowing roosters and baying sheepdogs all around.

After five eggplant black minutes, a puzzlingly narrow horizontal strip of faint orange came into view, and as I got closer I managed to understand that it was the sunrise coming through a dense row of pines at the edge of the beach.

I realized that everything I could see beyond the pines was either water or sky. I walked forward though the pines and then went out on to the beach. Standing there, I looked first right, then left, and at first I couldn't see any birds or animals or people anywhere, just empty boats bobbing on the waves.

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and then he said when I cut this string
I want you to go into the other room

conceive there a child whose child
will be eggplant black hairless and high off the ground

when the string groaned and he cut it
when he cut it the string groaned and
he groaned when he cut it the string

everything was real

--Terrill Shepard Soules, from "After Watching The Kremlin Letter"

gairo vecchio.

I'm just naming my posts after the places we went because it's totally ludicrous that there is almost NO information on these places written by a native English speaker on the net, which means that I am suddenly and ludicrously in a position of potential authority.

I hope to soon add some informative and well-written native-sounding English to this post. Just as soon as I finish doing that to the last three (but why stop there? ahahahaha).

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Gairo Vecchio is a town in Sardegna that was abandoned in 1951. Because of landslides. When we visited? We were the only people there.

This was good, because the place is crowded with fig trees, and they're ripe. These were the best figs I've ever tasted, I would imagine because we were picking them right from the tree. The blackberries were pretty good too.

Here's a nicely-done bit of background on the situation. We took almost 300 pictures when we were there, so the visual side of this post will begin expanding shortly.

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valle di lanaittu.

We climbed a mountain. It was hard. The mountain is called Monte Tiscali. There's an eponymous nuraghic village in the top of the mountain that dates back to 6 B.C. Valentina made sandwiches there. Mara hugged a tree there. Andy became a caveman there. Somehow there is no Wikipedia entry for this.

Sardinia is not a place for the easily car- or altitude-sick. In the picture below? The road in the upper right quadrant (the one we're on) is about par for the course. You could barely stand to look out the car window sometimes because you seemed to be skating on the edge of a yawning chasm. This sensation did not photograph well.

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ittiturismo cooperativa pescatori tortolì.

If my blues don't match in this post, it's because the pictures came from three different cameras.

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The Cooperativa is going to take a lot of writing to do it justice, so I'll put some pictures up until I have time to get to the justice-doing.

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In the few days we'd been there we'd not eaten at a single place I'd researched, and frankly the cooking we were doing at home was way tastier than what we'd been having at sit-down dinners.

So Saturday we made it a point to drive over to the Cooperativa (5km?) to buy some shellfish for dinner and see if we could eat at the restaurant. We were lucky to sneak out of the driveway without running into Remo, otherwise we never would've made it to the Cooperativa before siesta.

Remo is the patriarch of the family we were staying with, and the primary manpower behind the farm. He's easily 65 years old, but more likely closer to 75: Sardinians are among the longest-living people on Earth. In fact, 4 of the 10 oldest people alive on Earth right now are Sardinian.

The picture below is from Wednesday night, when we were on our way to the grocery store for the first time, and we mentioned going to the Cooperativa. This launched Remo into a charmingly enthusiastic presentation regarding what he would do with the fish if it were he doing the cooking.

We were dying of hunger and trying to somehow graciously extract ourselves, but he couldn't stop giving us recipes, the highlight coming when he got down and began drawing pictures of clams in the dirt to assist with translation between Sardinian and Italian names for sea creatures.

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On Saturday we managed to get to the Cooperativa just before they closed for siesta (almost every non-bar business closed from 13:00 to 17:00 every day). They were sold out of a lot of things, so who knows what we missed, but we ended up scoring two kilos each of clams and mussels, a kilo of shrimp, a package of bottarga, and four of the shrimp arancini pictured below, all for €30.00. More about the resulting dinner later. We also made a reservation for lunch on Monday, for "some time between 12:45 and 2pm". Ah, Italy.

I think we almost cancelled lunch for some reason or another on Monday, and man what a mistake that would have been. They called us twice to make sure we were still coming, so we should've known this was something not to miss.

We show up and start walking towards the place where we'd bought the fish on Saturday, but the parking attendant yells to us "you're going the wrong way", and points towards a series of bridges leading towards the water.

I think the beauty of it all was heightened by the fact that we had no idea where we were going. There were no signs, no people, no indication of a destination, just a dirt road leading off into the distance. And other than our own footsteps and the rustling of marsh grass in the breeze...no sound.

So we just kind of ambled through their beautiful, silent aquaculture installations and the surrounding dunes, carried along by a warm and toasty sea breeze, until we ended up standing in front of a wooden pavilion.

You go inside to a mostly-full restaurant and sit down for a three-hour lunch. Fried cuttlefish ravioli, octopus salad, polpette di spigola, mackerel in vinaigrette, anguilla alla marinara, bottarga, steamed mussels, charcoal-grilled dorade, scampi, fritto misto with whiting and calamari...they just kept bringing surprises until you explode. Then they bring you a limoncello sorbet.

All this, plus wine, for...€30 euro per person.

Then you walk back to your car, a bit more slowly now, and prepare to nap.

immersion.

Let me just go ahead and state for the record that I don't think I've ever been anywhere as relentlessly beautiful and unspoiled as Ogliastra, where most of our story takes place. The beauty just didn't stop, or stop changing the ways in which it revealed itself.

I could compare it to places like Napa or Mendocino, or stretches of the French or Italian Alps, but...this was older. And wilder. And, no matter how ear-pressurizingly high up in the mountains you got, you were never more than 45 minutes away from dramatic beaches with incredible turquoise water. And, this being the least populated province of Italy's least populated region, there were no people. But there were donkeys roaming the streets. And etc.

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I've never really seriously blogged about a vacation in 100% retrospect, and it's proving difficult. Or maybe just proving completely different.

For me right now the biggest difference seems to be this: by the time you've been somewhere a week, you know all kinds of angles from which you could approach the thing as a whole, whereas if you're writing while it's happening, you don't really know what you're into, you can't see the big picture yet: you're still discovering things constantly and your writing is naturally shaped by this process of discovery.

I can already tell that I'm going to edit the shit out of this post. It might seem like it would be easier to just let it all sit for a while, but I'm afraid of forgetting things. So I'll just start, and I guess we'll see what the shape starts to look like.

If I try to ignore the overwhelming number of possible angles and just embrace what seems to be natural for someone with not a lot of time to blog, I end up at one of two positions: Sardinian history, or our immediate surroundings.

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We stayed in what the guidebooks would call a "private apartment", but that description doesn't really do it justice. It's basically one wing of a family farm, located 5 minutes from the beach. They grow tomatoes, grapes, eggplant, lemons, figs, zucchini, basil, prezzemolo, and, yes, more.