After a quarter century of desert life, I still can't quite get used to rain. It seems magical, but also a little dangerous and I can't help but feel that we should prepare for it in some way. So while it has rained on and off this past week, I have made enormous quantities of soup -- minestrone, leek and potato, pork and white bean with sage. Tomorrow is chicken. This soothes me with the feeling that I have done all I can in these perilous times.

The regulars at the pub have taken a less labor-intensive approach to the autumn weather and have merely switched from their usual summer prosecco to red wine for the season. Their preferred vintage is called "Sogni e Poesie" -- Dreams and Poetry. It may not be the very best wine in this country, but it has the most honest name.

Yesterday, Jonathan and I went down to town for a special mercatino agronomico in the Piazza del Duomo -- our favorite kind of mercatino. Tucked away in a corner of the piazza, we found a lady selling the cheese with red pepper flakes that we like. She also persuaded us to buy some very spicy salami.

"The red pepper is good for your circulation," she said. "It makes you strong! After  my husband eats this, he walks around on three legs!"

Jonathan and I roared with laughter at this and bought the sausage (which is hot enough to make me gasp) as well as the cheese. She then pressed a couple of free glasses of wine on us from her own private bottle. We tried to refuse, saying that we had to drive back up the mountain to Capriglia, but she dismissed the hair-raising and lovely drive up Via Capriglia with an airy insouciance that would have put Evel Knievel to shame. 

So I drank my wine and Jonathan's wine, he drove us home, and I did nothing productive the rest of the day.

Today, though, I made more corbezzoli jam. As with everything else after our baking hot summer, there aren't as many corbezzoli as there were last year, but I make a little batch every few days when I have managed to round up enough berries to make it worth the trouble. The corbezzoli have lots of crunchy seeds, so it would be very kind to call the resulting jam "textured" and more accurate to call it "gritty." Recipes on the internet suggest forcing the jam through a very fine meshed sieve a couple of time before serving. Seeing as how I actually have some other interests in my life beyond corbezzoli jam, we are having the crunchy version. I like to think of it as rustic.