Pigs, Cheese, Babies, and Adulthood: A (Very Late) Mishmash

[This is for the weekend of March 5th. I'm aware it's late, but I'm on Spring Break and was celebrating my birthday last week, so cut me some slack]

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You guys are going to be so jealous when you hear what I did this weekend! Or maybe just grossed out. 

Saturday we went ham and cheese tasting! First we went to a pig farm to see the pigs before we ate them. The kind of pigs are unique to this area and are called Cinta Senese. 'Cinta' comes from the word 'sash', and refers to the white band behind their forelegs - the rest of their bodies are black. They have to have this stripe, or else they can't really be called Cinta Senese... They're really super frickin' old - Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted one in his 14th century painting Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico here in Siena. Other characteristics - they have longer faces than most other pigs, with big long noses for snuffling around in the underbrush for bugs and nuts and so forth. Along with that, their ears actually sort of hang over their eyes to protect them from leaves and sticks while they look for food.  

Here piggy piggy piggy... 

So, some more pertinent information regarding these pigs: they almost went extinct because in their natural forest foraging habitat, they were meant to get really fat really quickly so that they could survive the winter months. But with the advent of industrial farming, they got too fat and the meat was no good. It was only in the last half-century that there was an attempt to make them viable again. They took two male pigs and somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-nine female pigs and (with the help of some other types of pig for genetic diversity) made them a viable breed again. There's a 'club' of Cinta Senese farmers who have really strict rules about how you can or cannot raise the pigs. For example, you have to have at least one acre for every two pigs. You have to feed them a very specific diet, which you can supplement with some special stuff that's good for them, but most of it has to be nuts and bugs and stuff they would have eaten in the wild.

The man who owned this farm used to be an industrial pig farmer, I believe, but he switched to Cinta Senese because they're way more interesting. They take longer to mature than what he called 'white' pigs, but that seems like a good thing to me - their lives are longer that way! Their meat is actually really good for you. It's got omega fatty acids (the good fat) and anti-oxidants and good cholesterol. But the meat is really expensive (understandably) because of all this - it takes longer to raise the meet, the rules are strict, and they require a certain amount of space. Although, they did live in mud, and I'm sure that mud had all kinds of gross byproducts of pigs in it... But that didn't stop me from putting on their strange plastic boots and wandering around in it to get closer to the pigs. 

However, the meat was flipping fantastic! The fattiest one was poesie - poetry, the farmer told us, and it was pretty awesome. We had five-ish pieces of meat, ranging from super fatty to not so fatty and the last two were actually salami. The last one had fennel in it. Yum! 

Afterwards, we went to a pecorino (sheep) cheese farm - certified organic by the EU! The whole place is run by a woman and her two (three?) brothers and like one other person. They have their own herd of sheep and feed them appropriate, natural foods that they grow themselves, so they can guarantee the quality of the milk they get. And they have their own naturopathic sheep doctor - only in extreme cases do they use antibiotics. Oh, and if you were wondering - really good ricotta, you have to eat within a week. If you can keep it longer, it isn't good ricotta. 

The younger, softer cheeses were my favourite, but it was all super good. We got to have ricotta, soft as cream and without salt, with honey and pine-nuts last of all - it was heavenly! So so good. Speaking of which, if you haven't had sharp cheese with honey, do it now. It's sort of like cheese and jam. So much happy taste-buds on Saturday. 

My favourite, although probably mildy racist...

Sunday we went to Carnivale in a small town that does these big floats. Apparently, Siena claims they're the only ones with contrade, but they're lying - this town has four neighbourhoods, and they compete every year to build these huge floats that have moving parts and make music and blow smoke. They're flippin' huge.

And the way Carnivale works is that lots of people get dressed up in costume and have a huge party in the streets throwing confetti at each other and eating and drinking before Lent starts and they have to behave themselves. Little kids are particularly prevalent and particularly adorable. I took a lot of sneaky pictures of cute kids in costume, and got a number of weird looks from parents because a 20-year-old was photographing their kids. But so goes life. 

We returned home covered in confetti, and most of us were still finding it in our clothes days later. I had a huge amount of fun, and was all prepared for my birthday Tuesday, which I'll mention only briefly.

I sort of celebrated my birthday for two days - starting on March 8th in Italy, and continuing until the end of March 8th in North America. I woke up super early on my birthday for early-morning birthday Skype, so that started the day off on the right foot. March 8th is Festa delle Donne in Italy, a special day for the ladies, and these gross little yellow flowers called mimose are given out, so my host mom gave me some of those. Apparently I can take them home with me, because they will never loose their colour...

Simon also took me out for dinner! Which was lovely - it was nice to spend some time with him, since we don't take Italian together (he's much more talented than I am at it...) and don't ride the bus together. The pizza was the most delicious I've had here, I think. Simon says there is better pizza and I think I would die if I had something tastier!

Then, of course, there were birthday drinks, and a nice early(ish) night since I was fighting a cold (which I've since succumbed to). Wednesday I got cake for breakfast, so it was, all-in-all, a really great day.

I apologize this is so extraordinarily late, but I'm on spring break now, and was preparing for it all last week. I'm posting this so hopefully I can post a first-half-of-spring-break post in then not too distant futre. I know you all miss me terribly and can't stand to be left so long without updates, but peace. There will be beautiful pictures of Capri in the next post, so that should ease your pain.

Love and misses!

<3