linger on.

Must. Get. On. With. Life. Summer. Over.

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It's just that I have these 4.5 million photos we took in Sardinia. I'm guessing I need to wrap up this portion of the blog, but...there are so many things we haven't discussed yet!!!

Daily espresso overdoses (above).

Remo's car-battery-powered spit (that's a leg of lamb being roasted over charcoal):

Crodino and coffee at the Hotel Belvedere in Lanusei:

Pane guttiau demonstrating how the simple addition of olive oil and sea salt makes it way better than the frankly disappointing regular ol' pane carasau:

Impossibly treacherous uphill driving; hazelnut and pistachio gelato; not seeing the supposedly breathtaking Grotte di su Marmuri in Ulassai.

The hike down from Altopiano del Golgo to Cala Goloritze:

fighting back.

Well, we had a few beautiful sunny days here but now everything is back to normal. To combat the Amsterdam autumn template weather we are posting some more Sardinia pictures.

This was on Sunday after our Gairo Vecchio visit, and before heading home for a meat-grilling adventure. We just headed a bit south towards the water and semi-randomly looked for a beach.

Where we ended up is called Spiaggia di Su Sirboni, in Cardedu. Here's a nice panoramic view (there are lots of other Sardinia panoramas on this page, also worth looking at). It thoroughly reminded me of a successful Disneyland in its perfectly sculpted harmless wilderness. I mean all of that in a good way.

top 7 sardinian edible things.

My personal Sardinian food highlights:

1) ricotta caprina. As we were sitting down to dinner on our first night in Sardinia, Andy was telling us about this amazing cheese they'd had the night before in Lecce called ricotta forte. He described it as fermented ricotta that tasted almost like gorgonzola, powerful stuff. Moments later our waiter appeared with a basket of breads and a shallow dish of what looked like a spreadable goat cheese. Andy tasted some and said that it was the same thing they'd had last night.

Was it? We don't know. Was it great? Yes. None of us could remember what our waiter called it, but I heroically bought this jar of caprita pictured above at the grocery store the next morning, and it turned out to be a very very similar substance. Just great.

2) Sardinian prosciutto. Thicker-cut, by hand, and not too salty. Best prosciutto I've ever had.

3) Really fresh clams and mussels. Cozze. Vongole. Arselle. Cheap and perfectly oceanic.

4) pecorino sardo. More on this soon.

5) Ichnusa. Delicious Sardinian beer. Always served icy icy cold, this was a surprise treat, as if it were brewed specifically for hot summer nights. And days. I drank a lot of it. Afterwards I learned they're owned by Heineken, but I'll try not to hold it against them.

6) The coffee. I drank too much of it, but the ubiquity of a superlative espresso was a little irresistible.

7) pesche marmellata. Two crunchy cookies with jam between them, rolled in sugar. Sounds boring, but looks like a sugarcoated vulva, so, not really that boring. 

lotzorai.

photobombing.

This is photobombing.

As is this.

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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