A Tuscany adventure - #1, Holiday!

One of the distinct feelings I remember from university is the feeling of finishing an exam. For weeks you work and study frenetically as the upcoming exam races towards you. The world does not contain anything else than the exam and you and you plunge towards it head first - and emerge on the other side to find yourself floating in an empty void. Where, for just a few moments ago, life had a clear goal that everything spiralled towards, there is now only emptiness and silence. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the change is so abrupt that it stuns you slightly.

From time to time this same feeling pops up again later in life as well, as it has indeed done for me now. For the past couple of months I have been leading this project at work. I have been working too long hours for weeks on end (which, by the way, is the reason why this blog has been silent recently). Yesterday my holidays broke out, and I find myself in a void again.

Currently, my void is situated in the kitchen of a thousand year old house in a medieval village in Tuscany called Montemagno. And as voids go, this is a good one. For one and a half weeks I will be soaking in myself in Italian everyday life and experiencing Tuscan culture, food and wine. Those of you who plunged into this blogpost hoping to find stuff about foams, fluid gels and other modernist concoctions may be disappointed. What, you may exclaim, is the point of calling a blog "modernist" if one writes about Italian cuisine that is anything but modern? Italian food is probably as far from modernist you can come!

Two reasons:

1. Before trying to modernise or perfect or otherwise change traditional food (which, I think, is one of the tasks of modernist cuisine), one should know and love the traditional.

2. I did not manage to set up two pages so I could feed these posts into a separate blog.

Lunch today was at La Vecchia Pieve in the nearby town of Calci and consisted of pasta with mushrooms and a plate of mixed grilled meat. And the inevitable finger in front of the lens. Simple, but good.  The food, not the finger.



So the coming posts will be a mixture of travel and food, all based on Tuscan traditions. I hope you will come along on the journey with me.