I call these days of late summer le giornate balsamiche. They are so calm and the light is different as the angle of the sun rays is changing. You notice there’s more dew (rugiada) on the blossoms, otherwise the flower beds are rather dry here. It looks dry and will remain so until mid-autumn when cooler weather sets in.
The soft sun invites us out to eat breakfast in the garden. Today we invite you to join us for weekend breakfast. Traditional, leisurely and sweet …
Grandmother’s traditional breakfast resembles very much breakfast eaten in the 1950s. First, it’s caffélatte – coffee and warm milk. When my grandmother was a child, in the 1930s her family loved eating roasted sweet polenta for breakfast !! Now she loves croissants and flavors her morning coffee with warm milk, ground cinnamon and star anise.
Sometimes we make croissants the day before and finish them in the oven in the morning to save time. Sometimes we buy an almond cake (torta greca) from a pasticceria, for example from Chiusso’s whose counter you can see below.
It could also be a piece of ricotta cake that you can see in the right bottom of the picture or a slice of Venetian torta al cioccolato. It’s made from a mixture of chocolate and cocoa, its frosting is delicious and soft !!
My weekend selection consists of a cup of herbal tea whose ingredients are freshly picked in the garden. It could be lavender and lemon balm… Then we love sitting in the calm morning sun when there’s absolutely no breeze. We water the plants and listen to the church bells and birds chirping in the sun.
I love a cup of Earl Grey tea in the morning and afterwards a cup of cappuccino during weekends. I might make pancakes which are favorites in Venice too !! In summer, they come with fruit and in winter you can see them offered as “street food” with Nutella. Here is ours, thin and crispy, flavored with home-made caramel sauce and garnished with basil, mint and raspberries from the garden.
We love homemade crostata di frutta – fruit cake in summer. In July we use nectarines and red currants from the garden. We also flavor the pancakes with cocoa and mint or lavender syrup so they take on a dark color. What we don’t eat here as a rule is muesli. We do have a warm variant, though, which is buddino al semolino al succo di uva di fragola – a warm semolina pudding flavored with strawberry grape juice.
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