DIY

Di Matteo to go

Fixated on the idea of the perfect tomato, Kim and I planned our trip to the Amalfi Coast to coincide with the harvest. We stopped in Naples for a couple of nights where the mission was simple - good pizza. Was it really all that? (Yes.) Could we eat enough of it to lose interest? (No.) We did a fair amount of '10-best' research then pared down to a walking-distance radius (our hotel Bellini was fantastic - great location, peaceful courtyard, good aperitivo). It was shades of gray in terms of quality, but other factors led to clear favorites. Di Matteo was a damn good first pie but we made the mistake of taking it to go. By the time we got back to our courtyard it was tepid and as we hadn't yet learned that Neapolitan pizza comes uncut, it turned into a bit of a shredded mess. Pizzeria Brandi lost out because the service was downright shitty (it took half an hour, four reminders and a bit of a tantrum to
get the beer never mind the food); additionally, the crowd was infested with cringe-worthy visitors from our very own homeland.  Sorbillo was almost perfect; great atmosphere, great pizza, but nothing else on offer - no beer, no greens (and by then I needed some). The surprise was Pizzeria Vesi. It's got two locations so my inner pompous ass wants to call it a chain, but the pizza was just as good as the others, and they serve enormous fresh salads (in pyrex baking dishes) loaded with olives and artichoke hearts and tomatoes. Plus, the branch on Via dei Tribunali has an outdoor seating area in the evenings. It was so good that we returned for lunch on the day we flew back to London.

View from the coast road

The journey from Naples to our spot on the coast was exciting and terrifying. We drove fast along the coast road and slow on the hillside lanes (dear thrill seekers; driving the Italian coast is fun but do not listen to your GPS device - it'll take you for a ride that can only end in paint damage). Generally, this trip leaned toward adventurous; we rented a boat, motored to Capri and swam in the Grotta Verde. We hiked from Ravello to Amalfi and consequently visited the alarmingly unsanitary emergency room in Sorrento (x-rays for a sprained ankle).  P.S. you've got to be diligent when exchanging cash for goods in this part of Italy. We definitely got ripped off once or twice. 

Grotta Verde

Lately we've gone with apartment rentals on longer holidays; the price is right, there's more room, you often land in interesting situations, and you've got a kitchen. This time we ended up in a family villa in Torca (just down the road from Sant'agata sui de golfi, about 10 miles up the hill from Sorrento) with Alfredo and his brother, their wives, their kids, their kids' kids, and their gardens. I'm old enough to get emotional about a good garden, and instead of being mortified by that I'm just going to own it. Alfredo's garden made me weepy. I'd been so into the idea of a good tomato that I'd forgotten to get anticipatory about all the other stuff harvest brings - grapes, figs, plums, aubergines and olives. Alfredo's hillside was loaded.

Another thing I'm old enough to do is be really particular about what is and is not good food. I'm over the Michelin Guide. When Kim and I moved to Amsterdam four years ago we were all about it, but by now we've burned way out. Foam and sand and €350 lunches, go suck an egg. I'm on to simple preparation, good ingredients, and hearty portions. On this trip we did find a good sandwich shop and a nice spot for afternoon espresso and sfogliatella Santa Rosa, but we were having no luck finding our 'this is it' meal. There was research followed by sometimes good but mostly 'meh' food that was never quite worth the sweaty-palms drive to reach it. In the 'plus' column, the pasta was always perfectly cooked; in the 'minus', the aforementioned swarms of visitors (often bussed in), too much oil and/or sog, and a lot of smarm (generally I prefer Parisian 'tolerance' to Italian 'hospitality').

But we had a furnished kitchen and it was Campania's harvest season. So we drove into Sant'agata, where there's a small produce market, a cheese shop, a butcher, and a couple of stores that do a bit of everything. A lot of the fruit and veg come from close by enough to be delivered each morning by Ape. If you stop in before riposino (siesta), you've got some exciting choices to make.

Somehow the setting makes it easy to shed Whole Foods engendered aesthetic expectations and embrace picking through bins of imperfect (the odd smooshed, black spotted and/or moldy specimen) San Marzano tomatoes (it helped that I'd recently read bits of Tristram Stuart's Waste: Uncovering the Global Food
Scandal). This is real fruit grown in real gardens.

Gulf of Salerno from the Villa

So anyway, we got our San Marzanos, garlic, olive oil (locally grown and pressed), pasta, parmigiana, Fiordilatte (cow's milk mozzarella), basil (grown by the woman behind the counter), some cute little copper onions (Montoro Bronze), a Cuore di Toro tomato (similar to oxheart), a bottle of Lacryma Christi, some dry salami and a jar of green September olives. We took it all back to our Italian villa with the view of the Gulf of Salerno and the make-me-cry gardens. Kim sliced the salami, plated it with some olives and poured the wine. We grazed on that while she cut up the Cuore di Toro tomato and the Fiordilatte and ripped up some of the basil and drizzled all

AM left-overs with eggs and toast

that with olive oil, and I chopped the garlic and onions, sizzled them in olive oil, rough chopped and added the San Marzanos, simmered all that, stirred in salt and pepper and torn basil, spooned it over al dente spaghetti and topped it with shaved  parmigiana.  An aperitivo, caprese, and spaghetti al pomodoro - we had our "this is it" meal. Probably half because of how fun it was to procure the ingredients and cook them in an Italian villa.