Tunstills Umbria
This site has been lying fallow for the last year whilst we concentrated on refurbishing our new home here in Italy. It was a small monastery, set beside a river, with its own oratory and grainstore and surrounded by open countryside, soft rolling hills and woodlands where roam the wild boar and the porcini mushrooms, the funghi doesnt actually roam but because of the fullness of their shapes these growths are called little pigs, porcini. Both of these delicacies will be gracing our table during the next few weeks at La Preghiera where we live. www.lapreghiera.com.
The nights arrive earlier now and the mornings are starting to be frosty, we are after all some eight hundred feet above sea level, woodsmoke is giving an additional facet to the autumnal scents of the valleys and the new hams are being taken down and eaten, thinly sliced, with home made unleavened bread. Rabbits and guinea fowls are being roasted and all is being washed down with the red or white country wines, home made and unlabeled, the meal finished with sheeps milk cheeses, pecorino, fruit and vin santo, the health, or holy, wine made from grapes that have been dried in the smoky atmosphere of the kitchen, a type of smoky port and often accompanied by Madeira cake which is dunked into this nectar, after it has matured for a few years.
