At Home in Piemonte

All things that are worthwhile take time. I am so convinced of this, that I, tattooless, would consider having these words etched on my fanny (or not).

One cannot paint a fabulous abstract painting without having mastered, or at least having grappled with the technical aspects of the craft, no matter what anyone tells you. The same is true for throwing pots, planting a flower garden, running a bed and breakfast, cooking a meal. All things, done well, require experience, patience, and a learning curve.

Some learning curves are small. Some are bigger than the Arch in Saint Louis.

Take a young girl, born into an Italian American family, whose roots are still very much found in the Italian part of the equation. Throw in the observations of that young girl as her grandmother and mother cook — how ingredients are used, how things are cleaned beforehand, how food is respected. Up until this point, I could be talking about myself here. But I am actually talking about my friend, Gina DePalma, author and pastry chef at Mario Batali’s Babbo Restaurant in New York. This part, the childhood steeped in the Italian cuisine, is something we share in common. But it is here that our paths diverge, mine going to business school and hers to culinary school, where she parlays the fundamental knowledge given to her by her family into becoming one of the most renowned pastry chefs in America. The education in her mother’s kitchen, combined with her education, combined with years of chefing at some of New York’s most renowned addresses, have conspired to create a depth of knowledge in the field of Italian sweets which I believe is second to none.

Gina’s new book, Dolce Italiano, is not just a cookbook of desserts which follows an array of others on the market. Gina deconstructs the baking and sweets- creating process and makes it accessible for everyone. She provides the fundamentals of understanding what “sweet” means in Italy, an how the sweets course compliments the other stages of an Italian meal. She goes to great pains to make the reader aware of the significance of dessert wines and their incorporation in the cheese or dessert course. She provides the reader with the framework of what is needed to set up a baker’s kitchen, without at any time talking down to her audience. Her realness, her authenticity comes through in every chapter, as does her dedication to her craft.

Many, many, many people are in culinary schools today. Many people are there because food has become something we all want access to. It has become a world of its own, food. A thing. Another commodity, like a Porsche. Most come out of these “food mills” believing that they are the next Anthony Bourdain.
If they only knew (well, they could really, if they would read the books and believe them) what Bourdain and Julia Child and James Beard went through to get to where they got to. The fact is that great chefs know one thing very well.

They know it is not about them, it is about the food.

And that is what I perhaps respect the most about my friend Gina. She knows this, too. She has gone through the learning curve.

And so I come back to where I started. Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe I won’t tattoo it on my fanny. Maybe I will simply spell it out with the glaze when I bake my next citrus glazed polenta cake, page 86 .

It’s an old house.  And sometimes, old houses maintain a strong sense of individuality.  Sometimes they’re possessed.  And sometimes, just sometimes, we offer ourselves as human sacrifices on the altar of incompetence.  Let me start at the beginning.  A very good place to start.

In 2004, when we had the house renovated, our star architect at the time (let’s call him Stefano for the sake of protecting the stupid) did the “as-is” drawings of the house but forgot one thing.  In one wall, on the southeast side,  was a built in chimney.  This chimney was painfully obvious since there is a hole in the wall on the inside of the house where you are supposed to insert a tube to hook up a wood burning stove.  I, in my stressed and out-of-my-mind state, did not catch the mistake. 

Upstairs, in the guest room, I gave the architect direction to install a wall sconce and an outlet on said wall. Stefano, in turn, gave the electrician (let’s call him Frankie) the instructions.  Wall sconce and outlet were installed.  Directly on the in-wall chimney.

None of this would have mattered, of course, had the plumber (let’s just call him Stupido), installed a water heater which did not consume a thousand euros worth of propane every month.  Because had he installed even a reasonably efficient hot water heater, we would not have had to have installed a wood burning stove in that hole in the wall, and we would have never known that Stefano and Frankie had screwed up so severely.  Because we never would have had a fire in the room upstairs, an electrical fire, with black smoke and burning plastic, caused by having electrical fixtures located directly on an active chimney, just weeks after we had completed decorating said guest room.

 Va bene.

The wall had to be gutted open, a steel tube installed, the wall replastered and repainted,  and the outlet and the wall sconce had do be moved over.  To make matters worse, we paid for the repairs, because Stefano and Frankie couldn’t understand (must have been our bad Italian) why they should be responsible.

Va bene.

Fast forward to three years later, to last Sunday night. That’s right.  Two days ago.

I accidently used the washing machine and dish washer at the same time.  Everyone in Italy knows, that does not work.  I tripped the circuit, a result of extreme consumption. Stop laughing, you Americans. This is serious.

When this happens, I go to the box and flip the interrutore (the circuit breaker in English? Something like that), shut off an appliance and life goes on.  Only this time, I cannot do it.  The breaker will not go on.  No power.  Upstairs.  In the guest rooms.

Did we have guests?  Of course we did.  When I got done with a full round of break dancing and twitch like symptoms, I got nervous.  Nothing quite like this had ever happened before.  Our guests– lovely, lovely people.  Australians.  Bed and Breakfast owners (see my blog role for their website, that is the LEAST I can do for them).  Ian immediate put on his caretaker hat, and asked me for a screwdriver.  I don’t remember much about the next several hours, except that the following events did take place:  I called an electrician, brother in law of Roberto and Roberto (see my former posts about these two), and he came and spent three hours on a Sunday night trying to solve the problem.  I cooked dinner, eggs, potatoes and a salad, for my guests who were very gracious about the fact that their stay had been thrown back into the 19th century.  I had one massive breakdown involving tears and whining.  Emanuele could not find the problem.  He would have stayed all night, it annoyed him so much.  Sometimes you get blessings during catastrophy.  And for me, guest inconvenience is akin to getting punched in the stomach - you see it coming, you can’t do anything to stop it, and you gotta roll with it, but it does not mean you like it.

I’m thinking, Emanuele could not find the problem, and he’s a good electrician.  I am going to need to rebook my guests for the rest of the season.  My guest rooms will be permanently without power, because this is Italy and corrente is different here and oh, dear God, I am going to have to come up with a whole new marketing concept involving a lot of candles.  I started going mad, quite frankly, which is disturbing because it only took some defective wiring to start the process. Shows a certain vunerablity.  Too many years worrying about wiring and plumbing.

Fast forward.  Monday morning.  Our Australian colleagues and guests check out.  They refuse to allow me to make an inconvenience discount on their bill.  What can I say?  Blessings during a catastrophy.  New guests are due to check in.  We call our other contact.  Ugo.  Ugo is a great electrician, Friend of Franco (not to be confused with Frankie the electrician from hell, Franco is our neighbor, friend, and farming guru), and an all around nice guy. The only problem with Ugo is that you have to call him ten times to get him to show up once.  But this time, he came, pronto, with his whole team. He heard the fear in my voice.  Two hours of diagnostics. Team of three electricians.

Diagnosis?

Fire in the outlet which is still located too close to the chimney.  A Frankie and Stefano Special.  Take Two. 

So, here, three years later, the outlet and wall sconce wires had fused from the heat, and had finally reached their quite literal boilng point. 

In the recesses of my dirty little mind, I was thinking up methods to torture the team which had brought us to this point.  I am not a violent person.  But when I stuck my nose in that outlet and smelled the melted wires, for the second time in three years, I was so wired (no pun intended) that I could have created a nice little electrical arch, with Stefano and Frankie and Stupido holding hands in the middle. 

Problem is solved for now.  Va bene. 

But I have survived my second B&B right of passage.   The first happened in 2006 when we had no water for two days, courtesy of the city of Acqui Terme.  And now this. But we survived.  What does not kill you makes you stronger.  I said to Ugo, DISASTRO.  Ugo said, no, Diana, disastro is only when you don’t have your health any more.  This is just a little problem.  That’s all. He’s right of course, if I would allow myself to be philosophical for a moment.

Right of passage.  A small one.

It’s really hard for me to believe I actually live the life I do.  It’s so strange.  You pick up some self actualization book at Barnes and Noble and you read about fulfilling your dreams, making more time for your creative pursuits, enjoying more, stressing less, eating whole foods, stepping back fromthe edge and corporate anonymity into a self determined life.  Like you can actually buy a book and do it.  I’m not hitting on the writers of that kind of material, Lord only knows I was a major consumer of those types of publications. 

I am sitting here, on the other side of a major life transition.  Take a life, change it, make it opposite of the way it was, and go and live that new life.  That’s what happened to me, or rather, that is the change that we made happen. 

Most people don’t make these kinds of changes.  There are a wide variety of reasons for this.  They have to do with being happy the way things are, or not knowing how to start changing things. They have to do with not having enough money or the right partner or any partner at all.  They have to do with fear of the unknown, of jumping off a cliff without a parachute, with being too tired and not wanting to work all that hard because, well, most of us have worked very hard most of our lives.

These are all very legitimate reasons not to go buy an abandoned farm in some foreign country and open a bed and breakfast.  Why, then, was this my destiny? 

I can only speculate.  Deep seeds of unrest were part of my being for a very long time.  We did well - we had a good life, always lived in nice places, traveled, did interesting things.  Most of what we did and where we lived were determined by the companies we worked for.  And, after a while, that became an obvious problem and a source of resentment for me.  It was a slow evolution.  It certainly, I see in retrospect, did not happen overnight.  I pour over my day journals from years gone by to find where the discontent began, and to be honest, I find that it was always there, from the beginning.  It was as if I need to buy this place and do the backbreaking work of bringing the property back and make something of beauty to share with others in order to feed my own monsters. Doing this has freed me. It has taken everything I have as a person to do this work.  I see that now, after almost four years here.  I have been challenged, and continue to be challenged, on every front in every way. 

I think that creating something absolutely individual where nothing existed before is a complicated thicket of overgrowth which one only accomplishes with a great deal of introspection and realization concerning one’s own abilities.  One cuts away at the brutal inertia, one confronts reality, continuously and mercilessly, until some dream becomes evident, takes form, and grows.  I never imagined anything would be so difficult, or so satisfying.

All of that, all of those thoughts and that history, has moulded me into a different person than I was before thinking about doing a project like this.  I have much more faith in who I am and my abilities now than I did before.  I don’t care, don’t care at all, about accumulating worldly possessions.  I love nice things and a beautiful ambient, but could easily live in one room which was comfortable, as long as my husband and my dog were with me.  I have reduced my needs to almost nothing.  I understand the difference between wanting something and needing something.  These realizations are all huge gifts which I have received because I have the privilege of living the life which I do.  Without having made this catastophically huge change, this earthquake of a change, I would still be hiding from my own demons, scared and somehow, deeply unhappy.  Instead, I now try to live every day in a self determined, forward thinking way.  I am very happy about this.  I still have my dark moments, but when I do, I work to find out how to resolve things quickly.

Now, I see that this was my destiny because I had to do this to become the person I was meant to become.  The things I have learned along the way will accompany me through this life and beyond.  The bed and breakfast?  It’s my greatest creative work so far.  And it ain’t over yet.

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Originally uploaded by baurdi28

Our guests, Martina and Stephan enjoying themselves at the Massolino wine tasting.

In my mind, there are few things as beautiful as pottery which has just been thrown and is waiting to dry.

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The beautiful Rionda vines of the Massolino vineyards, shortly before the vendemmia at the end of August, 2007.

Last week, in an effort to restock our dwindling wine supply, we decided to go to Barolo, to one of our favorite producers, Franco Massolino.  It is one of those wineries with a history — three generations of fine winemakers, some of the best slopes in the Barolo region and a sense of integrity all conspire to produce great, truly great wines.  Dolcetto, Barbera, Barbera Superiore (the higher classification of Barbera which requires a minimum alcohol content and barrique ageing), Chardonnay, Nebbiolo and of course, Barolo. 

Massolino’s Nebbiolo is grown on DOCG Barolo vines — vines which have not yet reached the age and concentration to qualify for the Barolo classification.  A wonderful, lighter, easy wine.  In a few years, the vines will reach their optimum maturity, and the wine will no longer be called by the varietal name.  The Barolo vines, some over fifty years old, produce the wine for which the the vineyard is most famous.  On this day, we tried the 2001 and the newly released 2003.

We brought our guests, Martina and Stephan from Munich, to the wine tasting with us.  After touring the cellars, which are extremely active right now in anticipation of the upcoming vendemmia, and after trying the wines, Martina and I walked down from the winery toward the vineyards– and stood there in hushed silence at the beauty of it all.

I love that Massolino is right in the center of the town of Serralunga.  You drive into the town, and the winery is right there, the back yard dropping down into acres and acres of vineyards.  I love that despite the fact that their wines can be found on the wine lists of some of the best restaurants in the United States, you can sit with the owner and wax philosophically about grapes and the meaning of life.  That there are cats and kids and the mom milling about.  That it is all so precious and real.  And that the wine is like drinking pure gold.

How lucky are we.  Really.  

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Originally uploaded by baurdi28

The Massolino Winery, in Serralunga, sits on one of the “Grande Vigne” hills in the Barolo territory. The Grande Vigne are similar to the “cru” vineyards in France — they are the slopes where the best of the best Nebbiolo grapes are grown. Massolino is located on Rionda, the name of this particular Grande Vigna.

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Originally uploaded by baurdi28

I loved having Nora in my studio with me.