October 23, 2010
Forests of prickly pears glitter with sunset-colored fruit: burning orange and deepest pink. The fall crop is so abundant in Sicily that most of it plops down onto roadways to rot in the sun—roadkill for nectar-seeking wasps and honeybees.
I gave the prickly pear, called fico d’india—literally, fig of India—the cold shoulder for quite a while after my first experience peeling one. Who knew to put on gloves? The invisible barbs lodged deep into my fingertips. I spend hours armed with tweezers squinting on my sunlit balcony, extracting them one by one.
But now I’ve found a happy solution: I drink my prickly pears.
Either in liqueur form …
… Or in sweet granita—seeds and all. It tastes like watermelon juice imbued with banana-y blood oranges. Of course I worried that a prickly pear plant would sprout in my stomach after this granita, but so far so good.
Have you tried the prickly creatures? Discovered a danger-free way to eat them?
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September 29, 2010
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The carob
 The carob tree
 The carob farmer
The carob harvest
The farmer whacks at the tree with a long cane stick, and the fruit comes raining down. His wife presses a sackful on us. “Take it to America.”
Carobs, loaded with protein, are what kept Sicilians in this area alive during WWII. Locals ate so many that they couldn’t look at them for decades. But carobs are making a big comeback in the form of carob gelato, carob pasta, carob cake. Bite into them raw! Chewy and earthy, aren’t they?
Before we leave, the farmer says, “What’s the name of your president?”
“Obama.”
“Ah, si” he says. “Do you want to exchange him for ours? We will have Obama and you take Berlusconi.”
Thank you for the kind offer, we say, declining, and bid them addio.
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September 13, 2010
September mornings are fresh as white sheets snapping on the line. I take long walks up and down stony, ringing steps.
Branches drip with overripe figs. I lean over derelict garden walls and push my arm through tangled vegetation to get at them, then bite into the crunchy redness like you’d suck a juicy orange wedge.
A confession: I didn’t really know a fig from a kumquat until a few years ago (only those gluey Fig Newton atrocities that turned up with some regularity in my school lunchbox). But I love them now. They’re high in fiber and potassium (which will bring your blood pressure down).
Go get figgy, folks! Tis the season. Pair them with a dollop of lush goat cheese and drizzle a blossomy honey on top. Oh, what a nice sticky mess.
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Here are links to other fresh fig recipes from the New York Times:
Fig tart with caramelized onions
Braised chicken with figs
Grilled figs
What’s your favorite way to eat figs?
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July 19, 2010
Sicilians love their mare in summer. There’s been a mass exodus from the inland baroque towns; everyone’s hit the beach. The odd thing is that when Sicilians “go on vacation,” they travel en bloc, with all their friends and neighbors. So Ragusani move 15 kilometers away to the summer village of Marina di Ragusa for July and August; Modicani move to Marina di Modica; people from Noto go to Marina di Noto—you get the picture.
“Why would you want to go on holiday to a place where you don’t know anybody?” asks a Ragusan friend when I express surprise at this herd behavior.
Those who can’t afford a second home in Marina pitch tents on the beach and mingle with extended families from sunup to sundown, gobbling up gelato and platefuls of pasta alla Norma. Just before the Festival of San Giovanni Battista on August 29, everyone migrates back to Ragusa, as if a mighty shepherd is herding them all back at once.
    
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June 23, 2010
Peaches grown on the lavic slopes of Mount Etna! They’re called pesche tabacchiere, and love poems should be scribbled to them.
I gobble them up, consoling myself after the new bathtub leaks (again) and the painter calls to say he cannot come (again).
They’re flat, with a juicy pale-yellow flesh. The size of mini-donuts, but even sweeter. They remind you of how things must have tasted in Eden. In fact, the fruit vendor says they were the original peach. “How peaches were,” he says, “when they were born.”
I don’t know if he has scientific evidence for this, but I am completely convinced that this is the way peaches—and everything else—tasted in Eden.
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My Tourist Tips for Southeast Sicily
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