We did not win the giant chocolate egg in the Easter raffle down at the pub, which is actually a bit of a relief. It was instead won by Mirio's two grandchildren, further confirming my suspicion that the drawings are rigged -- but in the best possible way. The kids were very happy and excited and shared the chocolate around very sweetly with everyone. It was the best of all possible raffle outcomes.

We are going for our Easter lunch there tomorrow -- planning on having nothing but a nap for our dinner afterwards. Daniele will be gone for a week teaching a cooking class in Amsterdam next week. He says that if we can come up with a group of ten people, he will teach us how to cook traditional Tuscan food. I would love to do this. But where would I get ten people all at once here? I do not think that the old men in the pub who make up most of my social circle these days are interested in learning how to cook traditional Tuscan food. Eating it, of course, is a different matter.

After a spur-of-the-moment but nevertheless overwhelming urge that necessitated an unplanned immediate trip to the fish section of the grocery store, I painted my Egg Tempera Painting Number Two yesterday. The paintings never come out like the images I see in my head, but I am happy in the belief/delusion that someday they will.

 It seems like every town of any size at all in Italy (so not lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea) has a shopping street -- or a whole area of streets -- lined with high-end international luxury goods stores. Firenze does, Siena does, even Pietrasanta does. There are always the same things -- couture ladies fashions, luxury handbags, pricey eyeglasses and even pricier shoes, and jewelry, lots and lots of jewelry.

In Siena, Jonathan and I strolled this street, holding hands and not even pausing to window shop. We are unmoved by luxury goods, it seems. Probably because of our great moral purity.

But we went nuts when we ran across the shop for the Consorzio Agrario di Siena -- basically, the local farmers' co-op. Local cheeses! Local pastries! Local wines and liqueurs and freshly made bread and pasta! Herb-infused olive oils and spice blends and fruit (fresh and dried) and veggies (fresh and dried) and salami and sausage and prosciutto in profusion. 

We went back twice and spent money like very drunken, very hungry sailors. 

We laughed about it. It turns out that (shockingly) we have no moral purity at all, but only very great appetites. "Well," we said to each other, "we guess we know who we are."

But it was good to be back home again, even though we either don't have or haven't yet found such a wondrous store here in Pietrasanta among the handbags and the jewelry. I intensely love the view at night from our windows of the two-and-a-half strings of Christmas lights stretched above the road outside the pub just below us and then, further down on the plain, all the coastal lights twinkling and glowing and then beyond that the velvet darkness of the sea.

"It's funny," I said to Jonathan. "I find the lights so incredibly beautiful, but the only way I can describe them is to say that they look like jewels. But I don't actually care about jewelry at all."

"No," he said. "The only jewels you care about are metaphorical ones." (Things like this are the reason I love Jonathan.)

Mimmo came by and brought us two bottles of the very precious new olive oil made from the local olive trees. I feel like I have been given gold, only better.

As a birthday present, Jonathan gave me a lovely trip to Siena. We stayed in a beautiful hotel near the Campo and had one of the best dinners of my life in a tiny, elegant restaurant tucked away on a side street. The best thing, though, was a surprise to us both -- they are restoring the Lorenzetti frescoes from 1338-9 of the "Allegory of Good and Bad Government" in the Palazzo Publico and we were allowed to go up on the scaffold where they are working and see it up close.

Now, you may think that seeing a 700-year-old fresco about the allegorical effects of good and bad government would be a rather dry, cerebral, academic experience. I certainly would have thought that before I was up there.

Before we were allowed up, the guide -- and, in fact, everyone we talked to -- warned up repeatedly to be careful (which was understandable) because we might step backwards and fall because of the extreme emotion we would feel (which was not).

"Well," I thought to myself, "Italians are probably brought up on 700-year-old government allegory frescoes and will naturally react with an intensity of feeling that will elude an American heathen such as myself."

I cried.

I was so overwhelmed that the only thing that kept me from stepping backwards and falling to, if not my death, then at least a very serious injury indeed, was my overwhelming urge to get even closer to these magical paintings.

And we were already pretty damn close -- maybe four feet away. Certainly closer than Lorenzetti ever would have imagined that anyone other than himself would ever be again. The things that he painted there were made knowing full well that they would be invisible from the ground so very many feet down below.

But he had -- for no other reason than love -- made this tender, breathing little world up there. A tiny bird the size of my thumb in a birdcage in a window. The frills and laces on the shoes in a shoe shop. A dragon fly pattern woven into a lady's dress. The expressions on the face of two men -- not to mention the one on their horse's -- so vivid, so full of life, painted for no one's pleasure but his own.

Jonathan used to work with a woman at CSU-P who was constantly telling the students to "fake it 'til you make it." It drove Jonathan nuts. What about living authentically, instead of being a fake? What about being who you really are and owning that and taking pride in it? What about doing your best rather than merely pretending to? What about putting real effort into your endeavors, not to make a big show but because the striving itself is valuable to you? Because the striving itself is ... noble? Even if no one ever sees it.

And so Lorenzetti's bird in its birdcage was the very opposite of "fake it 'til you make it" -- made not for show, but in secret, a hidden treasure that only he would ever know about. And, because of that, its power is such that people are overcome to the point of stepping backwards off of scaffolds. Fake art doesn't do that, I don't think.

 

It takes us a bit less than two hours to drive to Firenze, depending on traffic. While Venice seems to be all soft light and water, Firenze is red tile and stone. I prefer it, if only because it is "our" city. We have our regular parking garage with our regular bakery near it. We have "our" museum -- the Uffizi. We know some restaurants we like and where the English-language bookstore is. (Well, Jonathan knows -- I have no sense of direction at all and have been relying on the boys to navigate in the car ever since they were still strapped in child seats in the back. Even now, we sometimes talk about the time, about five years ago, when we were lost and I suddenly knew where I was. It was glorious! But mostly Jonathan knows where to go and I hold his hand.)

But my favorite place in Firenze is Zecchi, the art supply store.

It is small (smaller than this wide-angle picture makes it look) and crowded with pencils and paints and jars holding brushes of all kinds jammed in together in an only vaguely ordered confusion. There is very little room to move around because beautiful things in tubes and boxes and piles fill all the space.

Behind the tumbled chaos on the counter in the back is a whole wall of jars of powdered pigments -- every color, but heavy on all the gradations of burnt red that are the colors of Tuscany. They seem like the ingredients for magical elixirs and I suppose that in a way they are. 

We went there on Wednesday and I bought more pencils for my drawing class and then we went to the Museo degli Innocenti to see the Escher exhibit, "Italy as Inspiration for the work of M.C. Escher."

We've been saying ever since we moved into the rustic farmhouse that it is like living in an Escher drawing. It turns out that we were more correct than we knew. Escher lived in Italy for 13 years -- he got married in Viareggio, which is so close to us that we go there to get our favorite bread.

His early drawings of landscapes around here are absolutely realistic renderings of the places and look like, well, Escher drawings, with nonsensical stairways and strange contorted perspectives because that is how this place actually is -- defying logic and even gravity. There were photographs paired with the scenes he drew and they are exact matches.

So my big reaction to the show was, "Aha! I knew it!" Like I have somehow caught Italy red-handed in the act.

 The view of the sea from Capriglia last night. There may be words for this, but I don't have them.

I am being oppressed by chestnuts.

The birds are singing, the famous Tuscan sun is shining, warming all the famously lovely red clay tiles, the persimmons are getting fat and orange in the trees, the sea dazzles my eyes at sunset so that I almost can't bear to look at it. And the goddamn chestnuts are falling by the bushel all over the place. One hit the roof of the car as I was driving along the other night and I thought a bomb had gone off.

We have ceded entire parts of the yard to them -- or rather, to their prickly-burr husks that make walking in sandals a dangerous proposition. Mimmo came yesterday afternoon and blew tons of them away with his leaf blower, but by evening, the ground was covered again. Even going out to gather them is a little dicey because they rain down sometimes with such ferocity that getting conked hard on the head is almost inevitable. Death by chestnut would be the most gruesomely Tuscan way to die. I'm surprised the Medici didn't resort to it more often.

We are eating them out of self-defense, if nothing else.

Unlike other nuts, chestnuts don't last long in their raw state (you can't eat them raw, either) because they contain a lot of moisture and will begin to rot within a week. Even frozen (and our freezer is too miniscule to hold many of them) they only last two or three months. It's now or never with the chestnuts.

So we have caramelized them in sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon and we have glacéed them with honey, ginger, cumin, and a dash of cayenne. And now, like the old Southern ladies of my youth at the end of summer who had canned enough tomatoes to last through this winter and the next and the one after that, but still have a garden lush with tomatoes coming on, we have gone drastic. The ladies made homemade catsup. We are making chestnut butter.

We have tried a variety of methods and flavors -- becoming more wildly inventive as our desperation grows. The best so far (and there have been many attempts) is this:

• Cook the chestnuts (either roast or boil).
• Peel the shells off and sauté briefly (the nuts, not the shells) in melted butter.
• When cool, pulverize in your teeny-tiny little food processor that you drove all the way to Viareggio to get and gasped with delight and surprise to find in only the second store you tried.
• This turns into a crumbly "flour" to which you add vanilla paste, honey, cinnamon, and slightly more rum than you had originally intended.
• Say "oops!" after you glug in the rum as if it was a mistake.
• Blend, tasting and adding more of the various flavorings (especially rum) until it is the consistency of chunky peanut butter.
• (Chocolate and coffee together is another good combo -- improved by the addition of rum.)
• Eat a ton of this spread on bread you bought fresh at the panificio down in town earlier.
• Feel much friendlier towards the chestnuts.

It's a rainy day here -- the first of what is forecast to be a whole week of them. The sea is the same gray color as the sky and the chestnut leaves are hanging down dripping.

We have still not figured out how to turn on the heat in the house, although we did manage -- after two long examinations of the Senora's detailed, hand-written-in-cursive directions -- to find the thermostat. We are bewildered by it. Naturally.

Partly, this is because we live in a constant state of bewilderment these days. Partly this is because it is a fancier thermostat than either of us has ever seen before in our lives. There are buttons. There are screens. There are dials and sliding levers. I suspect that it is programmable. It has that look about it.

Programmable things baffle me even in English and I usually give them a wide berth (having seen enough sci-fi in my life to know where this is heading.) I would not, though, have thought that the heating system in a rustic farmhouse on a remote hillside in Tuscany -- a farmhouse where I have to light the stove with a match in order to make myself a cup of tea -- would be technologically so complex.

And so we have left the thermostat to its own devices for the time being and built our first fire in the fireplace.

It is a lovely day.

We are in our house now, perched all topsy-turvy on the vertiginous side of the mountain with the ground dropping away hundreds of feet below us into the blue Ligurian Sea where Percy Shelley met his death.

The chestnuts and green persimmons clustered in the trees all around us are simultaneously very close and very far away. I could almost reach out and touch them from where I sit on the porch, but could never climb so high up into the tree. There are old stone steps everywhere with geraniums in pots and lizards sunning themselves and outbuildings scattered haphazardly at different levels and rosemary in profusion and olive trees and grapes called "strawberry grapes" and the sound of church bells in the distance throughout the day. The stairways seem to have been designed by M.C. Escher to maximize the feeling of being in a dream.

On Monday we arrived here with all of our luggage to be greeted by the Signora and her daughter and the rental agent, all of whom showed us everything around the place and explained how everything works and with whom we signed many forms. They spoke very quickly and very simultaneously and although Jonathan says that he got almost all of it, I only really understood that if we leave the gas on and blow up the house, we will be in trouble. Which seems fair.

The Signora's daughter asked Jonathan about our house in Colorado and he told her it was built in 1895. "Yes," she said. "I had heard that all the buildings there are very new." (This is not the usual response that we get. Perspectives shift.) She had seen a documentary about tornados in the US and wondered if that might explain why there is nothing really old in the States. Could be.

Then we went down to the town to open up a local bank account. Again, it was a long process involving much rapid speech with technical banking terms of which I understood only that I should not use my birthday as my PIN and that at some point I would be asked three security questions. I have not been asked them yet, although that was now three days ago. Or if I have, it happened in such rapid Italian that I did not notice. As the afternoons wear on, I have a tendency to simply start saying "si, si, si" to everything and smiling a lot. So far, so good.

Then we went to do a big shopping at the HyperMarket out on the road to the beach while we still had the rental car to carry things home. It turns out that the organizational grouping of groceries is highly culturally specific so that whereas, say, flour and salt and sugar all all grouped together in American grocery stores, they are not in Italian ones. Also, it turns out to be harder to tell the difference between dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent, shower gel, dish soap, toilet cleaner, and shampoo just by reading the labels than you would think. There are possibilities here for making mistakes that you really do not want to make. We were so confused that we ended up with pre-packaged octopus salad and screw-top 3-Euro wine and called it a day. We will live on love. And, I guess, octopus.

Tuesday, we drove to the airport at Pisa to return the rental car and took the train back to Pietrasanta. Then we took a taxi 95 percent of the way back up the mountain and walked the rest because the taxi driver was worried that if she took us all the way to our house, she would never be able to get back. So we are marooned here in paradise now as if we have fallen off the edge of the world.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "what indeed is Earth but a Nest from whose rim we are all falling?"

The important thing is not to panic.

We have arrived, at long last, in Pietrasanta. Our last days at "home" are a blur -- the final packing, the final garbage run (goodbye, futon!) , the final cleaning -- all made more challenging by the roofers showing up unexpectedly on Monday morning to begin removing all the layers of old roof that had piled up over the decades -- layers which delighted the local fauna, no doubt, but displeased the house inspector. So our last days of leave-taking had a soundtrack of splintering wood and crowbars. Metaphorically appropriate, but hard on the nerves.

Our last night was spent sleeping on the floor. Never before in all my years at the house has the floor ever seemed so unyieldingly solid. No structural problems there!

I sobbed as we left, of course -- partly for the place itself, which I loved, but mostly for the time in my life that it represented, a time when I was a mother with my beloved little boys at home and a professor who spent long hours talking about Ideas with generations of students who cared about them. When I was turning in the rental car at the Colorado Springs airport, the booth attendant asked me, "Heading home?" -- which seems like a simple "yes/no" question. I told him some lie because the real answer would have been too emotionally difficult to explain: "I don't know."

And so it began -- lines, cramped seats, cramped legs, execrable airplane food, the peculiar stink of airplane bathrooms, and our second mostly sleepless night in a row while the tiny icon of an airplane on the seatback screens inched its way across a map of the ocean.

And then, in the early afternoon, we finally touched down in Milan.

I had worried a bit about Customs (so much luggage!) and about Immigration Control (no extended-stay visa!), which just shows how long it's been since I was in Italy. Not a word was said to either of us -- just another middle-aged tourist couple off a plane-ful of them. We were blithely released into the afternoon sun, where our rental car waited.

We only got lost twice on the drive to Pietrasanta, which is pretty good -- especially since it was Thursday and we hadn't really slept since Monday night. Jonathan drove and I promised things to God. This is our customary division of labor.

Pietrasanta has changed, of course, in the last forty years. It is still lovely, but now it is filled with art galleries and restaurants in the places where the marble workshops and bronze foundries and stores selling chisels and power grinders used to be. We went to the place that used to be my regular bar, the Bar Igea -- always filled in those days with artists, sometimes still wearing their blue overalls sprinkled with marble dust or gesso or blood -- but it is now an upscale "Cocktail Lounge" open only at night. The important thing, in moments like this, is not to panic.

Our new best friend Lorenzo, an old punk who runs the hotel where we are staying until our house is ready for us on Monday, tells us that there are still many working artists here, just that they have been pushed out of the very center of town. And, indeed, I saw two men at lunch on Friday with the telltale pencils and ruined shoes of people who have spent the morning working in the studio.

Later, we drove up the mountainside for a peek at our village, even though we couldn't go to our house. And by "mountainside," I mean "sheer cliff with dozens of narrow switchbacks pretending to be a road." I had not remembered it as being quite so death-defying, which only confirms that I was 20-years-old and therefore clearly thought I was immortal when I lived here before. Jonathan drove our little standard-transmission car all the way up in first gear and did not tell me (while I was saying "Ooo! Look at the sea! Jonathan, look at the sea!") how close we came to stalling out a couple of times on practically vertical switchback turns. This would have been disastrous as the car has no real emergency brake, thus raising the possibility of us spending that always tense moment between "stopped" and "first gear" rolling precipitously backwards down a very steep roadway before plunging to our deaths over the side of the cliff. Of all the times not to panic, this is probably the most important.

But the village seemed magical, as things do when one has risked death to see them, and the sea was very blue (with what may or may not have been Corsica just visible in the distance) and the fig trees were heavy with green figs. It was so quiet that we found ourselves whispering.

Our first night, we had pizza and wine at a table in the street. Jonathan is speaking Italian like a pro. I am speaking Italian like someone who speaks only Spanish -- and only a little of that and only badly. We are, so far, very dazed and very happy.

My new best friends the painting crew are here. I am in the only room of the house that is not being painted while they go through a thousand rolls of blue masking tape in all the other rooms.

This is the 10th stage of the process of revolutionizing our lives out of 12 stages total. I made a list.

One: The Wild Romantic Imagination Stage. I think it was cold. I think it was even snowing. Or maybe it was just another bleak winter day when Jonathan and I hatched our plan. I don't remember exactly how it came about other than that it started as an inchoate longing to go somewhere new together.

Two: The Doing Things Online Stage. This is an easy and fun stage. It is easy and fun to surf the net looking at rental properties on hillsides in Tuscany, for example. Or to search for the menus of restaurants that would be near you and decide what you would eat if you were actually there at the moment. Or to drive around on Google Street View ogling the produce outside the "Frutte e Verdure" or the bread in the window of the "Galleria del Pane". It is so easy and fun that, in an excited dither, suddenly (over the course of one full month) we had rented a rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener on an actual hillside in Tuscany.

Three: The Sorting Through Decades of Our Stuff With a Hard and Critical Eye Stage. Visit 1 out of 99 to the ARC donation station.

Four: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part One (also Crying Stage -- Part One). The tiny baby shoes! The homemade birthday cards! The little bag of extracted wisdom teeth! (Well, maybe not the teeth...)

Five: The Making Friends With Skilled Craftspeople Stage. Oh, the parade of people who actually know what they are doing (aka, not us)! Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, contractors, floor refinishers -- we have come to know and love you, been through challenges together (trucks that wouldn't start, damp, spiders, kidney stones, attack dogs) and learned each others' secrets. Our time together has been ... special.

Six: The Standing Together in the Epoxy Aisle of Home Depot Trying Very Hard to Concentrate On How Much We Actually Love Each Other Stage. Nuff said.

Seven: The Finally Packing It All Up Into Storage Stage. Followed very quickly (and inevitably) by the Oops! I Need That Again One More Time substage.

Eight: The Farewell Tour Stage. Coffee and crying with dear friends. Mostly crying. My friends are understanding and tolerant. And also -- fortunately -- waterproof.

Nine: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part Two. Is it possible to pack up and carry away with me enough objects so that I can hold on forever to those years when the boys were growing up here and I had them with me every day? No. (More crying.)

Ten: The Everything Gets Painted Beige Stage. And our life here is erased.

So that is where we are now. There are still two stages and 21 days left to go.

Eleven: The Having Strangers Sit In Judgement Of The Place That Has Been Our Eden Stage. We will try to be out of the house whenever it is being shown by the real estate agent. Obviously.

Twelve: The Walking Away Stage. Actually, driving away in a rental car that we will return at the airport while, almost certainly, crying. And then it will be a whole new world -- the dreams of a bleak winter day made real.

Well, this is unexpected. Our Tuscan adventure has now made it into the mainstream national media.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/third-places-meet-new-people-pandemic/629468/

I have to say, it seems breezier in The Atlantic than it does here in Colorado in the midst of the packing boxes.

Wednesday's snow is almost gone. More is expected on Monday. These are the days we envisioned in the heat of last August, telling ourselves that it would all be eventually worth it and hoping that we would not be hit by a bus in the meantime.

August is when the local tomatoes here are at their best. And August is when we make sun-dried tomatoes -- so that we can eat them in February and remember the sun. We sweat a lot in August so that in February we can miss the feeling of sweat, I guess. In Colorado Springs, you have to make your own fun.

We call our sundried tomatoes "Tuscan Sun-Dried Tomatoes" because of the Detroit Rule ("Food sounds better with the name of a place in front of it -- with one exception.") although they are not sun-dried and are not particularly Tuscan in any way. When the Food Police come, there will, undoubtedly, be hell to pay.

This is how we make them:

Start by making Basil-Infused Olive Oil (unless you are using your own tomatoes, in which case, "Start by growing tomatoes.") To make BIOO, roughly chop up a big pile of fresh basil. Mix this with an equal amount in volume of olive oil. How you determine equal amounts of something that comes in a big pile of foliage and and something that comes in a thick liquid is anyone's guess. You may, if you like, drink a lovely glass of red wine to help you figure that out -- you still won't know what "equal amounts" means, but you won't care so much. Heat the mixture gently in a pan on the stove. (Jonathan says, "If there are equal amounts of basil and oil, why is it basil-infused oil and not oil-infused basil?" I would explain it to him, but the early morning glass of wine has made that seem rather difficult, so we call ours Basil-Confused Olive Oil instead. This is what happens when you live with a mathematician. Where were we?)

Heat the oil/basil confusion gently on the stove while kind of pounding it every now and then with the tip of a wooden spoon to bruise the basil and release the oil. Heat until just barely simmering and then turn off the heat and let it cool. When it is completely cool, strain it into a bottle or jar. This can be done way ahead of time and can be done with any fresh herb. Rosemary is particularly nice.

The next step is to wait until the tomatoes are at their very best and then buy a lot of them. Like two or three dozen if they are big. Maybe more. Get perfectly ripe and beautiful ones. Smell them to make sure that they are very tomato-y. The aroma should make your eyes kind of roll back in your head and other people also buying tomatoes will see you fondling the produce and swooning and they will move away from you, giving you room to get all the best tomatoes (everyone, that is, except for one old lady who knows exactly what you are doing and doesn't give an inch. That old lady is your friend and you will give each other knowing smiles over by the zucchini later.) When you get home, wash the tomatoes, but don't peel them.

Cut them into quarters and cut off the hard green stem part inside. Use you thumb to gently scrape out the seeds. You don't have to be fascist about it. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Line as many baking sheets, cake pans, etc., with parchment paper as you can fit into your oven. Arrange your oven racks to accommodate everything. Put the cut tomatoes on the parchment paper, skin side down, in one layer. I lay them out very carefully to use every bit of space while making sure that none of them are underneath others. I wish I had a picture of this because it is a thing of completely anal beauty, but it did not occur to me last August to photograph any of this. (This failure to photograph myself, more than anything else, gives away my extreme elderliness, I guess.) Lightly sprinkle the tomato wedges with a bit of dried basil leaves and then with kosher salt -- no iodine! (Iodine turns preserved things brown -- or at least, that is my understanding. I have never actually seen this because I was raised by a bunch of southern ladies and have been part of the pickling/canning/preserving process since before I can remember. I have always known about the iodine in the same way that kids growing up in Colorado know about carrying water bottles with them everywhere and kids growing up in New York City know, presumably, about avoiding rats and Woody Allen.) 

Then into the oven the tomatoes go. (This is the part where they are not exactly [or at all] sun-dried. I will not discuss the reasons for this, but only mention squirrels, birds, and bugs in the backyard -- it's like a Hitchcock film out there.) They (the tomatoes, not [hopefully] the squirrels, etc.) stay in the oven at 200 degrees for anywhere from seven to 14 hours, so prepare yourself. I try to put them in the oven the very last thing at night and then wake up early and start checking on them. It is August, after all, and having the oven on -- even at 200 degrees -- all day long is really too gruesome to contemplate. Better, apparently, to risk your house burning down in the middle of the night from an unattended oven.

After seven hours, start checking on them. They are ready when they are the consistency of fruit leather and are quite dry, but not brown or crunchy. They should still be bendable -- like, you know, a sun-dried tomato. They might not be all ready at the same time, like children on the way to school in the morning, so take out the ones that are dry and leave the others longer.

(Heavens, this post is getting long! Here is a close-up of one of the flying pigs from yesterday to cheer you up.)

It is morning when you are doing this and you will need coffee because there is hot oil coming up and hot oil and drowsiness do not mix. Carefully calibrate the coffee, though, because jitteriness and hot oil also do not mix. If you fear that you might overdo the caffeine, you can handle it the Italian way by making yourself a Caffé Corretto, which is a shot of espresso with a shot of grappa in it. Grappa is the distilled product of the seeds, skins, and stems leftover after pressing the grapes for wine. It smells like flowers and goes down like gasoline. It is sort of like Italian moonshine. I think it is funny that this is what Italians call "correct coffee." There is no doubt in my mind that Caffé Corretto played an enormous role in creating the Renaissance -- or at least the Caravaggio part of it.

In any case, when all the tomatoes are dry, roast some cloves of garlic: take some peeled whole garlic cloves and put them on a square of aluminum foil with some olive oil. Twist the aluminum up to look like a big Hershey's Kiss with the garlic and olive oil inside. Bake at 330 degrees for about 30 minutes or so, depending on the size of your cloves. They should be the color of old ivory when they are done -- not the color of sepia. 

While they are roasting, mix together four cups of water with half a cup of apple cider vinegar in a non-reactive sauce pan on the stove and bring it to a gentle boil. In another sauce pan, start gently heating your basil-confused olive oil from so long ago.

When the vinegar mixture is boiling, put the dried tomatoes in it several at a time and let them boil for two minutes before taking them out with a slotted spoon and putting them to drain a bit on paper towels. By the time this is done, the garlic should be ready.

You should now have very very very very clean jars ready to go. It is probably a good idea to have been boiling them in a big pot of water starting when you got up, but I forgot to tell you that earlier. I blame the whole Caffé Corretto thing. How Michelangelo got the entire Sistine ceiling done is a mystery to me.

Start packing the clean jars with layers of dried tomatoes that have been vinegared, throw a clove of roasted garlic in every now and then. Occasionally sprinkle in some chopped fresh herbs -- I put in chopped basil and thyme. Throwing in a sprig of fresh rosemary is always nice. As you are packing the jar quite tightly with layers of tomatoes, pause every now and then and pour in some of the hot basil-confused olive oil that you have been warming on the stove. Be careful -- it is hot and it might splatter a bit. This is where you want to be sure that you have your caffeine/alcohol intake correctly calibrated -- it is not a time to fuck around. The tomatoes might float a little bit in the hot oil. If they do, carefully push them down with a spoon.

Stop putting in the tomatoes when they are about half an inch from the top of the jar. Fill the oil until it is a quarter of an inch from the top. Put a lid on the jar and store it in a dark, cool place. It should keep for many months. Then sit back, look forward to February, and wonder why you didn't just buy the fuckers from the store.