Pieve di Cerreto

Or at least that’s what the dictionary says. Muffins are pretty American, about as unlikely a find in Europe as brownies. But fresh blueberries were on sale (99 euro cents for 125 grams!) and I even found Italian-made bran cereal.

The recipe is based on one from epicurious:

Mix together:
1 egg
1/4 c sunflower oil (instead of butter)
1/4 c milk

Others suggest using applesauce instead of all the oil, seems like a good idea. I also considered honey and reducing the sugar.

Mix together separately:
3/4 whole wheat flour
1/4 c sugar (i used less than half the amount called before because the bran cereal was sweetened)
1 t. baking powder (vanillized, as this is how it comes in Italy)
1/4 c bran cereal (i tried to crush it, but that was too tedious; as it was, it gave more crunchiness this way, as if I had put in sunflower seeds, which sounded good too, but i didn’t have any)

Combine the wet stuff into the dry stuff, fold in blueberries. Bake at ~218 C for ~20 min. I think my oven here is a bit too hot because I took them out just before the 20 min were up.

We’d found muffin cups at the euro store. But no muffin tins anywhere… How does one make muffins without the tins? Bella brilliantly suggested doubling the papers, so we did and squeezed as many as we could into a small pan, but they still came out with some funky shapes.

As a bonus, we had found a pastry tube at the 1 euro store too, and we wanted to try that out. I had left out some butter to eat with the muffins and when it softened I fluffed it up and it looked like frosting. And, wouldn’t you know, I had gotten some vanillized powdered sugar yesterday too, so we made icing and decorated them.

Now for a walk up the hill!

We arrived in Pieve di Cerreto Thursday evening — too late to go grocery shopping, so we had our usual first dinner at I Macelli. Excellent as always, we sat near a German couple from Erfurt who were camping all over Italy. They came to see the famous bridge and read about the excellent restaurant. They were having some trouble communicating with the waiters and asked what I was drinking — they called it Vino Tinto — I thought I’d heard that somewhere before, but couldn’t place it (Mexico, it turns out). I ordered them a mezzolitre di vino rosso and they were happy to start chatting with me. I’d been to Erfurt myself when I lived in Weimar for a month, so we talked about east germany, and driving around the US. Last year they camped all over southern california, utah and the grand canyon. We spoke german, which i then had to translate into English for Bella, while speaking italian to the waiters. Isabella was impressed by Andrew’s kids’ bilingualism and decided that she wanted to speak more Russian, so I had render everything in Russian as well. Hard enough as it is, but good thing I had my mezzolitre di vino rossi to help out!

For Friday’s dinner, we made it to the grocery store. One of the nice things about Italy is that food is cheap! Like it was in the central valley when I was a kid. As much as I love the Bay Area and Boston, the food prices there are always shocking to me. Tonight I made 100% semolina pasta. It turned out amazingly light and delicious. The best I’ve made so far! I also managed to roll it out quite thin, but because I didn’t have a machine, it didn’t get over rolled at all, and I think that helped.

For sauce, I toasted several cloves of chopped garlic in olive oil, added some chopped red onion, four chopped roma tomatoes, dried rosemary (from the garden), sage, oregano and basil, and black pepper, with a few splashes of balsamic vinegar. Let that cook down for a while, until everything is soft and gooey. I also marinated some stracchino in olive oil and balsamic, and threw that on top of the pasta, along with the requisite parmesan cheese. And some prosciutto toscana e melone to munch along with it.