Thursday, October 25, 2007

Lessons in Firestarting

Today the wood came for the fire. In a masterpiece of driving Andrea, my neighbour, backed his enormous tractor straight into the garage and me and him and his Dad spent the enext 2 hours unloading the wood and restacking it in the corner of the garage where it lives waiting to be burnt. I had bought the minimum order of 20 quintales - not entirely sure what that measurement relates to in a language that anyone else would understand, but the fact that it took 3 of us working non-stop for 2 hours to unload and stack it should give an idea of the amount of wood I now have.
The 2 hours passed quite quickly though. Used to office work or being on the computer, there is something rather wonderful about working with my hands when I am here inSarnano, whether that is happily muddling around in the garden or stacking wood in the garage. It surely makes a change.
I am onlysorry that I do not understand more dialect - Andrea's Dad had a sparkle in his eye and from what I understood was telling me no end of salatious gossip about people I don't know - but I was missing the crucial words. He laughed a lot though!
Andrea also gave me a lesson in wood. I am burning mainly Acacia and Oak, and another pale wood that I don't know the word for in English. But he warned me of the perils of lighting chestnut, which apparantly spews streams of hot rocks all over the place in little explosions - they told me a metre of spitting embers was very possible and that you should only burn chestnut if you want speckled curtains! (I don't!)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

honey you have to cut the chestnut if you want to cook them on the fire. Just make a small cut on one side and you'll have a good "Bruciata" that's how we call them when cooked on the fire, if you boil them you have Ballotta. ok? bacioni Lucia