Ribollita…..autentica

It’s a wet Saturday in Florence today and that is ok with me. Last night our landlady invited me to go with her to the supermarket to do some grocery shopping. I took full advantage of shopping with a car and bought up big! It is fun going grocery shopping with her because I get talked at in Italian and grocery items get explained to me in Italian, so even though I don’t understand half of what I am told, I end up understanding what something is or where it is from and more importantly what is the best- eg she made a bee line for the pecorino romano and told me this was a must….I didn’t disagree!

With the grocery shopping done and dusted the night before it meant a glorious sleep-in for Nic and I. Actually, I won’t say sleep in, more of a lay in listening to the rain.  I was over excited saying the boys were fully recovered from tummy complaints and woken at 6am by Alex letting me know he might have eaten too much dinner last night as he ran to the bathroom…..oh dear.

It has been a lovely quiet morning reading to the kids, Alex has some how managed to talk me into reading him the second Hunger Games book to him (I haven’t read the first one) and I am totally absorbed in the story. We seem to sit for hours at a time drifting into the Hunger Games world. Around 12.30pm Nic asks about lunch and I respond with- I have no clue! I was just about to look in the fridge when I hear the familiar cry of,

“Cammmillaaa, Cammmillaa CIAO! I ‘ave ribollita for YOU!”

My lovely landlady is standing at the gate with a ceramic dish of homemade ribollita!

She then goes into detail about how I should reheat it (I needed Nic to catch everything as I only understood about half). With lots of grazie e tante from us she wondered back home  no doubt to feed her husband his lunch. We couldn’t believe our good fortune and even better the boys weren’t eating, so more for us!

Instructions were to chop an onion

Sautee in olive oil until golden

add in ribollita and salt, heat and serve

The soup was incredable, such rich, deep flavours you didn’t want it to end. I served it with a few slices of proschutto crudo and marinated olives and it was a lovely side to such a rich, comforting soup. I will ask her the next time she makes it to invite me over so I can learn the correct Tuscan way, because once you have experienced something so rich and morish you want to revisit it often and winter hasn’t even kicked in yet!