Chickens Will Eat Anything

Say you have some bread crusts that are too hard even to sop up olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Perhaps you also have vegetable peels and some day-old pasta. Dandelion leaves, wormy chestnuts, and even rotten eggplant...what to do?

Feed it to the chickens. Yes, it is true: Chickens will eat anything. Even, I suspect, other chickens, as one of the hens in the coop looks so henpecked as to warrant fears of cannibalism. Blake, the other WWOOFer who was here at Ca' del Buco for a week before I arrived, showed me the ropes as far as caring for the animals. Coco the sheep gets an armload of hay about so big, the rabbits get lettuces and vegetable scraps left over from the school kitchens, heaps of hay to the horses, and, of course, whatever for the chickens.

Times zapped by electric fence: seven.

Feeding and watering the animals every morning is one of the many duties I have had here at Ca' del Buco, a dandy little agritourismo set amid the rolling forested hills half an hour south of Bologna. It is a charming farm. The ponies are chubby, the kittens frolic and cavort the way kittens should. It's also a work in progress, overseen by Paola and Roberto, the couple that bought the ramshackle, run-down farmhouse and renovated the buildings over the past couple of years. They, of course, are overseen by their four-year-old son, Gabriele, who has earned the nickname, "Pistola."

It is hard work on the farm. No siesta, no pool to lounge by. We are up at 7ish and off to work by 8:30 a.m. Work stops when it gets dark, and sometimes later, as we put tools away and clean up for dinner around 8. I have dug a trench with a pick axe, built a rock terrace in the rain, wrapped the horse barn in plastic, set planks of wood in the earth, and hauled at least three times my body weight in chestnuts up the mountain. I've gotten slivers, blisters, calluses, hay stuck in surprising places, sheep shit in my eye, chestnut hulls under my fingernails, and at least five kinds of animal hair all over my clothes. Chickens escaped: one. Rabbits escaped and caught: two. Times zapped by electric fence: seven.

Why the hell do I do this, you ask? Have you ever seen a rabbit yawn? Heard a sheep burp? Made dinner with the porcini mushrooms you found in the woods? Yes, I found dinner. This farm work gives such a purpose to my days. The eight hours I spent alone in the chestnut forest, rooting through leaves and spikey chestnut hulls for big brown marroni (a kind of chestnut) were sublime, but important--the family needed the chestnuts to sell at the Festa di Marroni, a big to-do held this past Sunday in Monte Pastore, the nearest hamlet. Paola expected scads of people to stop at the farm for marroni calderosta, or fresh roasted chestnuts, as well as fig jam and fresh tomatoes and honey and various other products they sell.

Let me describe for a moment how wonderful marroni are. The best marroni are bigger than a baby's fist and shiny, colored light brown with darker striations across the hull. They come two or three to a pod, which is forbiddingly thorney and falls from the chestnut trees with considerable velocity. Often they hit the ground and the chestnuts therein pop out, tumbling down the slope and coming to rest in a tangle of roots or a pile of dead leaves. Or, they stay in the pod, requiring a very satisfying stomp of the foot to loosen the nuts.

We gather them by the sackful, and in an afternoon several people can collect almost 75 kilos of them. Later, we spill the chestnuts onto tables at the farm and stand in the midday sunlight, sorting chestnuts into piles of big, medium, and bad. The bad ones we cut with a knife to see if they're wormy, in which case they are tossed. If just a bit rotten, we trim the bad spot and either roast them or set them in the sun to dry and eventually mill into chestnut flour, which can be used to make a medley of delicious things, from chestnut torte to gnocci to fried goodies. Roasted chestnuts take about 15 or 20 minutes over an open fire (I've had that damned Christmas song in my head for two weeks now). The hulls blacken and crack, and the inside turns buttery yellow. When they're done, you peel them while they're still warm, so the inner skin comes off entirely. I can't get enough of these things. I've had them raw, cold, hot, mashed, and even dropped in a glass of limoncello. We will try some in a concoction of honey later on.

If we have time. There is a fence to realize, and the pond to clean. Plenty of tomatoes are still ripening in the garden, the wool has to be finished, and the weather is rapidly changing. Somehow we still have some good laughs. While cleaning the wool last week, I lifted a large piece, gave it a shake, and watched pellets of dried sheep shit skitter into the sink. "é piovre merde," I said to Paola (it's raining shit), and we laughed ourselves to tears for a solid ten minutes. Another day, while talking after dinner, I realized that I've been confusing the Italian word for rowing, "canotaggio," with the word for bra. (No wonder those folks at the rowing club looked at me funny when I asked if I could row there.) Singing in the woods, chatting at dinner, arm wrestling Paola's mother, Mara, at the restaurant the other night (she won), and attending a Judo lesson with a bunch of 10-year-olds (Paola is an instructor)...all fun. I will be sad to leave next week, but have some great memories to take with me. Including the memory of the man I saw on the hill one day, as I dragged brush into the fire I was tending. I thought he was a neighbor coming to visit, but he didn't proceed down the hill. Instead, he seemed to start urinating. Odd, I thought, that he chose the middle of the hill, with no shrub or trees to shield him from onlookers. Also odd that he seemed to urinate so vigorously. Wait a min.....I tromped off to find Paola, who immediately released the dog. But the man was gone. Later, the police stopped by to say they were looking for a man who had been reported to be exposing himself in the area. Suspicions confirmed. I've heard of taking pleasure in the great outdoors, but come on.

Next week I head off to Turin for the Salone del Gusto, a food festival hosted by the Slow Food movement (www.slowfood.com) celebrating all sorts of locally made food products. Being a member of the press, I signed up for a press pass. Five days of lectures, discussions, and good grub for free. Being a freelancer certainly has it's perks...as if three months in Italy weren't enough.