September, slowly

Roasted peppers, juniper chicken, and that familiar September feeling of starting over.

August was a month of hard work for us, excessive heat, plaster dust and that sticky kind of grime that seems to cling to everything, punctuated by a few glorious day trips to the sea whenever we needed to catch our breath.

Once I was in the water, I would slowly let myself fall backwards, sinking in until the sea wrapped around my head and there was nothing above me but the sky. I would listen to my breathing, and calm down. Or I would walk slowly away from the shore, the water up to my waist, looking towards the pine trees at the far end of the bay.

In those moments, I sketched out plans for September and made peace with everything I had not managed to do. At the beginning of summer, it always feels as though time might stretch on forever, but of course that is an illusion.

My early morning walks in August were just as precious: five kilometres along an empty road, with only the occasional car with foreign number plates passing by, tourists looking at me with curious smiles. As I walked up and down the hills, with patches of woodland and fields on either side of the road, I thought about the recipes I wanted to make in September, the next books for our Italian book club, and how I might hold on to this habit I had managed to build despite the heat.

During the day, we tried to figure out why our blog had disappeared from Google, without getting anywhere. It is a situation that still leaves me completely baffled and I simply cannot make sense of it (and neither can the friends—SEO experts and programmers—who helped us with incredible generosity through those August days when almost everyone in Italy seemed to be on holiday). We made every change that was suggested to us, but nothing worked. So, plan B: Tommaso started building a brand-new website for our cooking classes, hoping it might at least slap a bandaid on the emergency for now.

Then, while I carried on with the Italian translation of Vegetables the Italian Way, Tommaso would step away from the computer and wear the hat of mover/painter/handyman to work on Casa Marcella.

All this to say that we arrived in September a bit tired.

With September came cooler nights and mornings, too, somehow balancing out the days that are still far too hot. September has always felt like my secular New Year, but this year there is one more reason for it to feel even more like a fresh page waiting to be written: our six-year-old will be starting primary school in about ten days. The smell of new notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils is contagious.

In September, in the kitchen, one season begins to make way for the next.

At the market, I bought the first cauliflower, still wrapped in its pale green leaves, to roast with breadcrumbs for Livia, and the first squash for a recipe that will come later this month. On the kitchen counter, there are plums waiting to become jam and four kilos of Roma tomatoes ready to be turned into passata for winter.

To ease ourselves back into our usual rhythm, as promised, today I am sharing two recipes I made again and again throughout August: a distillation of late summer in both flavour and colour. Because yes, there may be a definite back-to-school feeling in the air, but my table is still very much a summer one.

Further down, paid subscribers will find both recipes in full, along with printable PDFs to save and keep in the kitchen. So, what are we cooking?

• Roasted peppers with anchovies, breadcrumbs and capers. They work beautifully as a meal in itself with a slice of toasted bread, as a side for roast chicken (or chicken salad), or alongside a plate of mozzarella dressed the way my grandmother used to do, with extra-virgin olive oil, a pinch of salt and dried oregano, and a few drops of lemon juice.

• Pan-fried chicken with juniper, carrots and pine nuts. It takes just a few minutes to prepare, then marinates for half an hour before being quickly cooked in a pan. It is also excellent reheated the next day. It pairs perfectly with the roasted peppers, breadcrumbs, anchovies and capers, but also with a simple tomato and cucumber salad.

Morning encounters

Before I go, here are a few things to read and cook, from the newsletter archive and beyond.

• What a wonderful August of reading it has been. The New York Times published its list of the best thrillers of the 21st century (I love lists like this, and I love thrillers when I need to clear my head), and one name kept coming up: Tana French. I looked for her books at the library and read the first two in the Dublin Murder Squad series. Alongside Tana French, I also devoured another thriller that came out in Italian just a few months ago, All the Colours of the Dark.

• I’m also making my way through Cucina Ambientale by Chiara Pavan, the next book for our Italian book club. If you want to join it (we read books in Italian and discuss them in Italian) here you find more info on how to join.

• A Year in a Tuscan Cooking School: September. You’ll find three seasonal menus and 10 recipes for the in between season.

• Over on Susan Spungen’s newsletter, you’ll find a short Q&A with me and the recipe for roasted tomato orzotto. You can read it here.

• This ratatouille recipe by Melissa Clark is so good.

Casa Marcella Updates

Tommaso has finished removing all the old backsplash tiles from the kitchen and repainting the walls. This week we went to a couple of shops to look for new tiles, and I would really like to understand why we always seem to fall for the most expensive options.

Thank you for all the feedback you have shared about the things that should never be missing from a holiday home if you want it to truly feel like home. It is incredibly valuable, and we will definitely keep it in mind, starting with the need for enough hooks, hangers and shelves in the bathroom.

But that is another story for the next update.