So, we’re blessed with both an engineer and an inveterate food-griller in our party at the Orvieto villa. The engineer rewired the sound systems so we could put one by the pool and one on the back porch, with accompanying cables for the iPods. (At last count, there were 16 iPods among the 12 of us, creating a substantial music library for our idyll. Thank you, Steve Jobs. Although several of us work for handset manufacturers, so there's nary an iPhone in sight.)
And the food-griller scored a tremendous find: a wood-fired oven, built into a chimney on the back of the villa. He carted wood from the storage shed and started heating the oven in the morning. By late afternoon, it was ready to be loaded with food: overripe apples, sliced and drizzled with fresh lemon juice and cinnamon; bulbs of garlic slathered in olive oil and a little pepper; chopped garden vegetables with rosemary. We had a few butterflied chickens from the local coop and we put them in there, too, in a big roasting pan loaded with the transferred vegetables and the roasted garlic.
The oven was hot, hot, hot. You could smell the food roasting, and the feel the smoke, and imagine yourself living this way forever. “What is your job?” someone asks. “Oh,” you say, “I watch the pizza oven at the back of a villa. It’s divine.”
Eventually, it was time to eat, again. We started with more bruschetta, toasted on the griddle in the center of the big stove. We paired the chicken and vegetables with a big pot of lentils spiked with lemon zest. And we drank acqua naturale and vino, naturally – this time bottles of Rosso di Montalcino from the Fattoria dei Barbi, a farmhouse, winery and restaurant in Tuscany, known for its velvety wines and dishes of roast boar. (We graced the Fattoria with our presence a few years ago, where the maitre d’ kept handing the wine list to the guys, not realizing that in this entourage, it’s the chicks who do the wine buying.)
We’re already planning tomorrow’s pizza party, where everyone kneads their own dough and chooses their own toppings. No pineapple and ham combos will be permitted, however. This is, after all, Italy, and such a desecration of the tao of pizza would undoubtedly bring the saints from their reliquaries, denying us our heavenly visions of the perfect tomato pie.
Guess we’re going to have to buy some more vino to keep those visions going.
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