No Free Lunch

This past Sunday Izzalini hosted an all-day program in honor of a saint I'd never heard of -- undoubtedly a local luminary, although not from our locality. It turned out to be a Vatican touring show, complete with learned speakers and a dazzling red-and-white plastic tent for late-afternoon refreshments.
I can't say I noticed many extra cars parked in front of the church or an overflow crowd in the piazza after Mass. In fact, the folding plastic chairs outnumbered the audience members 4-1. And I noticed that the folks who attended the post-Mass lecture did not return for the post-lunchtime session. Others drifted in, mainly from our own parish, and the last to arrive were my Izzalini neighbors. That's because the food was last on the program.
What a feast they found in the red-and-white tent: stingy, dried-out roast pork sandwiches and plastic cups of wine, soda or bottled water. Well, most likely people found out about the event by word of mouth and nobody bothered to read the fine print in the announcement -- the line that read:
At 17.00 a snack will be served.
However, free food is free food, even if there was a donation box on the table. The cool part about the Euro is that coins go up to the equivalent of $3.00 and nobody can tell what you're dropping in.

On the Wing

Antonietta dropped by this afternoon for a brief chat. Obeying the courtesy demanded by our elders, "Never return an empty dish" (or "Never return a dish empty"), she brought back a little bowl of mine with three fresh eggs inside. I'd given her some pesto I'd made (with walnuts, not pine nuts) and more than three eggs would not have fit. When "Bird Flu" threatened to spread through Western Europe a couple of years ago, she and her husband, Amedeo, slaughtered (and ate) their roosters and retained only the laying hens. Bless their hearts, the hens don't seem to miss the lack of stimulation and keep right on producing, although less frequently.
One fact I learned when the disease was rampant in Asia and showed up briefly in Eastern Europe was that only male chickens are raised for sale in supermarkets and individual meat markets. Apparently the sex of a baby chick can be determined in fewer than five days after hatching and poultry farms sell off most the females as fast as they can. Once in a while we all buy a full-grown female, called a gallina, to make a broth or soup, but the meat is pretty stringy by itself. Boiling the bird for a number of hours is the only way to render it useful.
Italians prize roosters for Sunday dinner and if they don't have access to the free-range variety they ask the butcher for a giant male chicken with a lot of bruises. Males fight each other like mad (guess why) and the theory is that bruises tenderize the meat.
I have never cooked a rooster, but I sure like baked chicken prepared with shoots of fresh rosemary, a couple slivers of garlic and kosher salt stuffed between the skin and the meat. Naturally, we baste the bird with olive oil to make it nice and crispy. What a feast.