Dinner with Luca, Erica, and Irena

Our rented farmhouse came complete with caretakers who live in a separate house on the property. Luca is "like a park ranger," and Erica works in a day care, and they have a charmingly shy 2-year-old daughter, Irena. Erica speaks pretty fluent English and helped us get settled, told us where to go grocery shopping, and provided the telephone from which we could get insanely slow 4800 bps dial-up Internet access (required for A's playoff progress updates). Luca took us on a field trip, a short walk from the houses to visit his beehives. We watched (from a safe distance) while he opened the hives, inspected the bees, and "fed them" with a big syringe of a protein- and vitamin-laden liquid. He also cooked us dinner.

We walked across our gravel drive in the light of the nearly full moon, arriving at 8pm with a couple of bottles of Brunello purchased in Montalcino, and a bottle of white wine from San Gimingnano. We sat around their large dining table in one of two rooms on their bottom floor -- down a couple steps and through a heavy wooden door was a second room from which special toys were retrieved when Irena needed a distraction. A narrow circular stair led to up to the rest of the house, presumably bedrooms and bath. Luca, the cook in the family, operates out of a tiny galley-like kitchen area that would be familiar to Manhattanites. Instead of counter space, he has a large wood-topped table, and instead of cabinets, dried goods are stored on open shelves and in baskets. The room also contains a chest freezer, a wall-mounted 19" television, a large couch, a child's table and chairs, a dish hutch, and the aforementioned dining room table, which was set with a gold-colored tablecloth and Cortona's noted ceramic tableware. We drank wine from mugs. We started with cheese: two kinds of pecorino (ewe's milk cheese), one fresh and soft, one aged, drizzled with chestnut honey from Luca's bees, and accompanied by a spoonful of onion jam, a local product made from special onions grown near Perugia, studded with plump raisins. There was bread. Erica translated while Luca praised the quality of the wine we brought.

Our second course was "spinach gnudi", "ravioli filling without the pasta," as Erica described it. We each got a shallow bowl filled with four green fist-sized dumplings, sitting in a pool of fresh tomato sauce and dusted with parmagiano. Luca was generous in sharing his cooking instructions (enquiring minds need to know). The gnudi were made of boiled spinach, drained dry and mixed with ricotta, egg, and nutmeg; they're shaped and dusted with flour, then boiled "until they raise". The sauce was made with fresh tomatoes, picked just prior to our visit, and peeled using a food mill, then warmed briefly with garlic, basil and olive oil. Though I kept telling myself that I needed to eat every bite, because they were delicious and I needed to be polite and, well, I was in ITALY, I could only finish two and a half of the four rich dumplings, knowing there was more food to come. Erica smiled when she removed my plate and said, "Lunch for tomorrow''.

Luca set a large cooking pot in the center of the table, and began ladling big portions of wild boar stew. When I asked if he caught the boar himself, he nodded and took down a plaque hanging over the interior door. The hand carved wood plaque was embellished with two pair of curved tusks, the largest about seven inches long. The plaque was engraved "128 kg / 2005". Luca shot the largest boar of the season. David said "I guess that's preferable to a whole head on the wall", and Erica made a facial expression easily translated as "Over my dead body."

The stew was dark brown, generously sauced, and very tender. Luca described his preparations, which included overnight marinating in water and wine with carrots and onions, then long slow cooking with tomatoes and more wine, carrots and onions. Erica served large slices of vegetable tart: sauteed eggplant and peppers, mixed with ricotta, eggs, and "provolone picante" in a puff pastry crust, mouth-meltingly tender and delicious with the boar sauce.

In order to get her to eat bites of stew, Luca tempted Irena with crunchy cheetos-like snacks. While she wasn't overly excited by the wild boar, the rest of us had seconds.

We ended dinner with slices of dense chocolate cake, baked in a very elaborately shaped bundt pan, and Luca poured shots of nocino, liqueur he made with walnuts, from a glass gallon jug into little gold-trimmed glasses.

We left as Irena got close to a late-night meltdown, but not before singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" in both English and Italian. Luca insisted on giving us the pot of leftover stew for lunch the next day. We left overwhelmed and overstuffed, and very very satisfied.

As she showed us out the door, Erica said "You see why I have married him. It's not because he is handsome."