Saturday, September 27, 2014

A month in Tuscany Day 20 - 33 years of married bliss

Today was Jacky and Howard's wedding anniversary.  When they were married 33 years ago I had emigrated to Canada and was not able to be at their wedding, so I was happy that they invited me and Candi along to celebrate with them.  Well maybe they did not invite us but they put up with us anyway.  We drove to Castallina in Chianti and found this wonderful deck to have lunch on.


After the chill of yesterday it was warm and sunny again and it was the perfect temperature for lunching in the shade.  We ordered to starters to share the first was the charcuterie platter.


As always this was beautiful with 3 different types of bruschetta and and some artichoke hearts.  The bread basket included some wonderful topped foccacia bread.


We also got a burrata mozzarella sitting on a bed of arugula pesto which was not only beautiful, but very tasty.


For my main course I had lamb with the most amazing parsley mashed potatoes and red cabbage.




Howard had rabbit stuffed with Tuscan sausages, which he said was amazing.


Jacky ordered pasta with orange flavour and a duck sauce, also wonderful.


If this was not enough we ordered 3 desserts to share.  Creme brulee, puff pastry with cream and one that we had no idea what it was but this was what arrived.


This was 5 blobs of gelatto on a stick coated in chocolate.  This was so beautifully presented and who doesn't love a bite of gelatto covered in chocolate.


the puff pastry was also very beautiful and tasty. After lunch ( over 3 hours) we wandered around the town a little and bought some of the Chianti wine including the one that we had for lunch.


We waddled back to the car and drove home to the villa where there was a lot of napping.  Due to the amount of lunch consumed we decided to have a light dinner.  I had made some chicken stock from the chicken caccatori carcass, which I used to make a vegetable soup.


This was very popular and used up all the vegetables sitting in the fridge.  We had left over cold chicken legs from the night before and I made some panzanella Tuscan bread salad.


After the previous nights riotous behaviour we were far more subdued and went for quality rather than quantity in the wine area.

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