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Category: Miscellaneous

New Year’s Day in spring

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Here are some photos I took this afternoon in Donnalucata, after 5 days off I took for Epiphany, taking advantage of the holiday being on thursday Jan 7 and adding two days on Jan 5 and 8:

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The last three days we’ve had full sun and a temperature around 20C° during the morning… while in other places around Italy it was snowing and people were fighting with ice! It’s not anything new anyway, generally weather in this corner of Sicily is almost always mild, and we are used to consider temperature around 8-10C° as “cold“, since during most part of winter it keeps around 12-15C°, especially on the coast.

Previous Christmas’ weekend has not been very cold too. I take the chance to say something about local Christmas’ tradition:

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In Ragusa’s province the Christmas’ Eve dinner mainly consists of scacce. But in Scicli and Donnalucata’s area at Christmas those scacce take a different name and become pastizzi. Pastizzi are a sort of quiches, and they are baked in round baking pans, without the typical focaccia shape. They have no relationship with maltese pastizzi, of which I have recently discovered. There are many kinds of pastizzi with different stuffing, and again the tradition says to bake them all, so that each guest can taste many slices of the various kinds. The most popular ones are those with broccoli, with ricotta spinach and raisins, with meat and topinambur, with dogfish and spaghetti, with eggplant onions and tomato, and so on.

The existence of many variants of pastizzi and the habit to bake them all every time has given origin to many ironic family jokes on leftovers in the past, since they lasted for weeks and weeks and became a sort of family food torture between relatives. Nowadays generally families bake only few kinds of them, only those that are likely to be eaten in a short time without compromising appetite for following days’ meals. Furtherly, in the past they were the only holiday food on eves, while now many other typical dishes have entered sicilian holiday habits, dishes from other regions of Italy that are commonly considered holiday food, like cotechino with lentils, panettone and pandoro, chocolate turron (here the traditional turron is made of almonds or sesame, and it’s called cubaita or giuggiulena).

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .