2008 Olive Harvest - The End

The unreliable neighbor in our mini-cooperative still has not returned to Izzalini to pick his olives. The rest of us have decided to quietly eliminate him from our group effort. Next year we'll look for another partner. Or maybe our own trees will have such an abundance of fruit we won't need one. Time will tell.


In the meantime, we're looking forward to transferring our oil to one-liter bottles and celebrating the harvest with bruschetta. There's nothing quite as satisfactory as slicing up a loaf of day-old country-style bread, toasting it over wood coals and then annointing it with fresh, home-grown oil. Our local bread, called pane comune, is made without salt and is a perfect foil for the tasting. Thereafter, I do sprinkle a bit of salt on the bread but I don't tell anybody.

If you'd like to see bruschetta-making, click on today's title.

ALL HAIL IS BREAKING LOOSE!

LINDA RICHARDSON'S BLOG FROM TODI

What a gorgeous day it is for us Umbrians: we're having heavy rain and a fabulous thunder-and-light show! After a long, beautiful and absolutely dry summer it's great that the ground and fields and trees and bushes are getting a big, wet kiss from the sky.
Although yesterday's forecast promised it would rain, this morning dawned without a single cloud in sight and only a breeze from the south signaled changed. One never knows and I'm happy to say I went out yesterday afternoon and covered all the firewood with thick plastic.
This year I have a lot of wood ready for the winter. We cleaned a tiny portion of the forest at La Casella in February and the resulting firewood, plus tons of nicely portioned pieces that I bought from our local lumberjack, Fabio, is stacked all over the place: in the covered stone wood-keeper next to the house, in the wire cage behind the laurel bushes and in a huge pile near the cantina.
I have a fire going right now and the coals are perfect for bruschetta. Yum.