Eating Local in Italy, So Far No Other Option...


Local Meat and Butcher Shop in Ostuni, ItalyThe wedding was fantastic and now we are on honeymoon in rural Italy. We are touring Puglia (the region most commonly referred to as "the heel of the boot") this week and heading to Abruzzo next week. We flew in to Bari and drove south, stopping in a few little towns along the way and ultimately reached our destination on a small road between San Vito dei Normanni and Carovigno. We were really looking forward to seeking out the best meats, cheeses, wines, etc that Puglia has to offer and so far it's been pretty simple.

All of the grocery stores (even the "name brand" ones) are full of Pugliese food and drink. Granted, there are plenty of worldly and processed food items as well, but the amount of local and fresh food far outweighs everything else. At restaurants the Pugliese wine list is pages and pages long,

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What's in a Name? Scrapple and Sweetbreads, Defined

Phew! A lot of activity going on over here. You may have noticed Sweetbreads has been on a mini-vacation from the blog as she prepares for our wedding this weekend (Sunday!). We've also had a change in plans to absorb, and on top of all that it looks like the economy might take another dive. Yikes. So with all that turmoil going on around us, we thought it might be a good time to give a little clarity on why we're using pseudonyms (for the time being).

Images from Accidental Hedonist, Midlife Magazine, domesticesq, and chomposaurus.wordpress

As great as it would be if our actual names were Scrapple and Sweetbreads, alas it’s not the truth. Someday soon we'll write freely under our own names, but for now we're choosing to write under pseudonyms. No, we’re not running from the law. No, we’re not impostors operating some sort of farm-blog experiment. The simple fact is that we have to take into account our day-to-day lives. We don’t want our work on Little Seed to interfere with our day-jobs until we’ve made a clean break with our past. One thing that’s absolutely essential to both of us is our integrity and our focus on doing what’s right. I have a demanding day-job and feel a deep responsibility to to give my work 100% of my focus while I’m in the office. Yes, like anyone with a dream, I sometimes wander off in my mind and jot down little notes here and there, but I don’t specifically dedicate time to Little Seed while I’m “on the clock”. Sweetbreads similarly needs to separate work from dream. That doesn't mean, however, that we can't dedicate our free time to pursuing our dreams, thus our efforts to start our farm education and get our website up and running.

We both feel the responsibility to our employers and do not want to publicly rub our dreams in their faces. Luckily, I have a great relationship with my boss and have expressed that in a year or two I'd like to start my own business and he's ok with that. It's all about openness and respect and it works both ways. 

So that’s the rationale for using pseudonyms, but why did we choose Scrapple and Sweetbreads?

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Our First Farm Heartbreak

Ok, maybe the heartbreaking cheese graphic is a little overboard, but still!

As we’ve posted about previously, the biggest update in our farming adventure thus far was an apprenticeship for Sweetbreads at Sprout Creek Farm starting this January and ending next June. We were planning to pick up our lives in Brooklyn and head out to Poughkeepsie to lay down some cheesemaking roots. Sweetbreads would say farewell to her office life and spend her days over the vat. I would keep my job in the city so we could pay our bills and continue to save. This was a big step for us and we were fully committed. We spent two full days at Sprout Creek this spring. One day visiting the farm, meeting the team and watching the goings-on from afar, and another day getting our hands dirty, milking the animals and actually making some cheese. We had been hashing out the details since early March and in June we got final confirmation about the apprenticeship. We were very excited and started to make plans for our new lives. We told our families and friends and I even made arrangements with my employer to commute four days per week and work one day per week from the new home. Everything was looking up!

That was until we recently got word that the terms of the apprenticeship were changing. Sweetbreads' involvement was going to be meaningfully less than originally expected. After some discussion it became clear that our expectations and those of the farm were very different, and it was better to move on. It’s unfortunate that we weren't able to work something out, but it’s far better that we came to this conslusion now rather than after we actually moved up there.

Of course it was (and still is) pretty tough for us to stomach. We had such good experiences at Sprout in recent months and we were really looking forward to getting our feet wet. We know that a much more difficult road lies ahead and we'll probably look back on this and realize that it pales in comparison, but for now it's heartbreaking. The good thing about New York is that there's many opportunities. Stay tuned.