sewing a skirt for Elise

I have a rather unfortunate relationship with my sewing machine.  I love it and respect it and am frequently inspired to use it.  But, until a couple of weeks ago, I never had sewn anything on it.  This is after my mother got me this beautiful refurbished machine as a birthday gift 5 years ago!  (Dearest mother of mine, if you didn't know this before, I'm really sorry.) 

Driven by desperation to make a last-minute-but-priceless birthday gift for a little friend, I got out the machine and opened up the manual.  After a little bit of coaxing and studying, the machine came to life and began to do the same things my mother's wonderful old Bernina did for me all throughout my childhood. 

I made Elise a skirt using this pattern, and it really was almost as easy as that blog's crafty mama claims it will be.  Unless, of course, you have no elastic and nowhere to buy any, so at the last minute you have to convert it into a wrap skirt.  

And the best part of all of it was that Elise loved the skirt!  She wore it that evening at her birthday party.  And then she melted my heart the next day when she walked into church wearing it too.

Lena, what would you like your mama to sew for you?  How about some fabric beach balls?  Comin' right up!

a hike up Mt Etna, our local volcano

This past weekend was Elliott's last time to adventure around Sicily with his sister before she and Sarah leave on Friday.  To make the most of our time together, we went to a beautiful beach in a nature preserve on Saturday and then headed to the slopes of Mt Etna on Sunday.

Do you remember our super eventful, super long hike up Mt Etna last summer?  The volcano erupted right as we reached the highest observation point!  This was also after we'd been showered with huge chunks of volcanic ash right before we our hike.  But today Etna had only lovely vistas for us today... no hot lava or flying ash.  Sorry, Jess and Sarah!

We drove up to the southern station on Mt Etna and then parked just beyond all the restaurants and souvenir shops.  An unassuming trail veered off to the right from the tiny parking lot, and we followed it for about an hour up undulating trails of soft volcanic ash.  After about an hour we reached the edge of a massive lava flow, which is pictured above.  Doesn't it look like Mordor?



Jess and Lena went to explore a nearby atmospheric research station.  Then Sarah helped Jess get rid of a worrisome blemish on her shoulder.   

Jess and Sarah headed up the volcano a little farther to see a plaque Jess had read about in the guidebook.  Along the way they came across a flock of goats grazing on the hillside.  Sarah took a stunning photo of them.

We stayed behind to smell the flowers.

Although this hike was a little less eventful than our hike last August, I think we're more likely to choose this route again.  We'll take you if you come and visit!

life lately

We have been so busy and have been having so much fun around here with Elliott's sister Jess.  She is with us until the end of the week, and we are packing each day full of adventures around Sicily.  Her dear friend Sarah joined us last week to stay for the final week and a half of Jess's trip, and those two girls have been great friends to me as well as such a big help around the house.  I don't want them to leave!

I have some photos to share of our adventures, and you can also check Jess's blog and Sarah's blog for fabulous and funny updates, too.  In the meantime, here are a few recent iPhone photos from around here.

the last of the spring strawberries with ice cream and a generous dollop of Nutella

& summertime means breaking out the espadrilles!

Jess knocked a stick off butter of the counter after it had been unrefrigerated for a couple hours and it went splat... proof that our un-air conditioned house is just too hot these days

& morning snuggle photo for Daddy when he was in Ghana for work last week

Lena was so excited to board the cable car in Taormina and then said, "Wooow!  Woooow!" all the way up the mountain

& Jess and her dear old friend Sarah at the medieval festival in our town (more about that soon!)

 favorite stop in Taormina: Bam Bar for delicious granite, the Italian version of sorbet,

where Lena and I their enjoyed raspberry and lemon flavors

Lena wakes up at 7am and I am just too tired to do much before 7:30, 

so we lie in bed to read books or snuggle.  It's a precious time.

making jam in my bread maker

I have many fond memories of the delicious homemade bread my mom made in our bread maker during my childhood.  For our first anniversary, our four parents got together and bought us a very wonderful gift: a Cuisinart bread maker.  Of course during the time of our first anniversary, Elliott and I were living in a studio apartment on Capitol Hill.  So, sadly, our bread maker sat in the downstairs storage room the entire time we lived there.

Soon after our boxes were unpacked here in Sicily, I pulled my beautiful bread maker into the daylight.  Shortly thereafter I stopped buying sandwich bread and have been making almost all our bread since early this spring.*  I even convinced a friend of mine to buy the same bread maker.  

(*I do recommend keeping an emergency loaf of sandwich bread in the freezer for that time that you run out of flour or milk or--gasp--just forget... and your husband has no sandwich the next morning for his lunch!)

Anyway, to get to the point, my nifty bread maker also has a jam setting.  I started using it with strawberries this spring and have been jamming every fruit in season ever since (so far, cherries, peaches, and apricots).  The entire process takes about 20 minutes to set up, then the bread maker works for 1.5 hours, and then you slide your jam into a jar and... you're done!  No sweating over the stove, no fiddling to get your canning jars to work, no huge messes or sticky pots.  Here is what I do:

First of all, assemble your ingredients.  It's a short list: a few apricots, a box of pectin, one lemon, and some sugar.  Cut up 2 cups of apricots into chunks and slide them into the bread maker pan.

Squeeze a tablespoon of lemon over the apricots.

 Dust half of a box of pectin over the fruit.  Let it sit for 10 minutes.

In the meantime, enjoy your beautiful daughter.  She has assumed her usual position for whenever I am cooking or baking anything: right in the middle of my kitchen counter.

The recipe calls for 1.25 cups of sugar "or to taste."  I prefer my jam on the tart side, so I put in only 3/4 of a cup of sugar. 

Then snap the pan into the bread maker and program it for the jam cycle.  The bread maker uses the paddle in the middle of the pan to mix the jam and uses extra high heat to bring the fruit up to the proper temperature.  After 1.5 hours, you have fresh jam!  I put mine in recycled jars since I will just keep it in the fridge or freezer until we eat it; I would need brand new canning jars if I wanted to keep it for any length of time at room temperature.  It will keep in the fridge for up to 6 weeks or in the freezer for... well, I assume a really long time.

Come on over and I'll put some homemade jam on some homemade toasted bread for your breakfast!

popsicle baby

Someone is super excited about the fabulous new Tovolo popsicle molds that Uncle David sent us from Hill's Kitchen!  I made these first ones with limeade, which is a wonderful way to enjoy my favorite summer drink, if you ask me.  Jess has since made them with Nutella, coffee, sherbert, and peaches.  Not all at once.

Jess gave Lena this popsicle while I was out running errands and then took these lovely photos of her.  I love the more pensive ones on the kitchen table, followed by the colorful ones out on the porch.  My little 16-month-old looks so big!

Agriturismo San Fantino

the Italian form of "Magdalena"

We had run out of cereal and milk, so for our last morning in Amalfi we decided to have an Italian breakfast.  This might have also been because I had been craving a cappuccino all week.  You just can't walk by all these darling cafes and not want to sit down for awhile!  And a Nutella-filled croissant doesn't hurt either...

As I mentioned before, the town of Amalfi is known for its old paper mills, and many local artisans still make beautiful paper by hand.  We visited several of these shops, and at one of them I purchased some thick, creamy paper with the letter "B" embossed in the top corner.  I'll need an especially good pen for that paper.

Later we hiked above the town into the hills to see some of the old paper mills.  If we did see them, they were really old.  Like... just a few stone walls in the valley.  But the hike itself was totally worth it, particularly because it passed through so many magnificent lemon groves.

Finally it was time to move on and leave the Amalfi Coast behind.  We drove down the winding highway along the coastline, soaking up last glimpses and final memories.  After several hours on the highway (including, of course, a stop along the way at another beach) we reached Agriturismo San Fantino, a rustic Italian villa with an attached ranch.  Since the 1980s, a huge tourism movement in Italy has been to convert old farms into hotels where families can come stay, meet the animals, and then enjoy a [usually organic] meal made almost entirely from food grown or raised on the property.  I've mentioned visiting another agriturismo here, and we have also visited a couple more in Sicily that I haven't photographed for this the blog.  Visiting an agriturismo is definitely one of our favorite ways to enjoy the Italian countryside: good food and farm animals all in one place.

Before dinner, we explored the ranch, ate wild blackberries, and showed Lena animals in real life (instead of in The Big Red Barn).

Around 8pm we put Lena to bed and then enjoyed a quiet dinner on the patio.  The chef--a cheerful man named Pierluigi--served a dozen appetizers, all of which he had made from produce and meat from the ranch (sheep's cheese, pork sausage, proscuitto, pickled artichokes, fresh green salad, eggplant bruschetta, etc.).  Elliott and Jess sipped wine from a nearby vineyard.  Later Pierluigi served us steaks from a cow that had been... umm... well, alive just a few days earlier.  Fresh and tasty.  Sorry if you're vegetarian, but it was delicious!  Pierluigi popped the top off a Heineken and sat down with us to talk as the meal wound down.

And then home again, home again (jiggity jog) the next morning.  We were so ready to settle into regular life again, as always.  I think we all agree, though, that this whole trip has been one of our favorites in Italy thus far, haphazard and last-minute though it was!