The New Family

Weve met peppe zullo less then a day ago and I can't put into words how friendly he's been.

But before we met the man we had to make the journey, wich wasent easy as it should have been. We got a lift from the school from our dorms to the bus stop, and with the hour we had left before the bus showed up we had a brew and remembered our short history toghther with some other students. When the bus showed up we said out final goodbyes and best wishes to each other and went our seperate ways.

When we reached the train station we encountered our first conflict, the ticket station was closed. So with the help of some extremely friendly and non-english speaking older italian gentlemen, 3 of them to be exact, we were finally able to figure out how to order our tickets through a machine. So for a 9hr train from Asti-Foggia we decided to get a sleeper car so we could make the trip as painless as possible, little did we know they would *almost* cost us each 180E. We re-looked our options and found a 4 car with beds for 70E each wich we were much happier with. We headed to the train platform and nervously awaited or train that would take us on our next adventure to italy.

When the train arrived we decided it would be best if we jumped in the first car and just walked down untill we found our seats, little did we know that those seats would be the LAST car in the train. So after jumping through 12 cars and squeezing by about 30 people we found our room and proceeded to fall asleep in our, smaller than twin sized, beds. (it was better than sitting in a chair for 9 hrs, neither of us disagreed that fact.) When we landed the language barrier really kicked in when we were trying to find our bus to osara, difficult and frustrating were not the words but we were lucky enough to meet a bus driver who spoke minimal english and he told us what bus we needed. He was also kind enough to tell us we needed to buy tickets ahead of time, something we wernt used to. So after almost missing our only bus out here at 6 a.m. we finally set sail on a 1hr and a half trip to our new home.

Peppes Award Winning Wine Cellar. All his wine dateing back to 2001

Once we landed we were dropped of in front of what seemed to be the local bake shoppe, we talked to them and they were kind enough to understand Peppe Zullo and call him to come pick us up. When he showed up the first words out of his mouth to myself and Anthony was, and I quote: "Welcome to the Family." Talk about being welcomed in fast. We then jammed our luggage into his car for a 2 min ride to the top of his complex, listening with careful ears to every word that this man spoke and it was instantly obvious that he was the real deal. He spoke of how he wants the freshest food possible, easy to understand when he has a 2,000 square meter farm...with a working stove top and oven set-up in the center. He was giving us the tour of the complex and showed where his grape wines comes from, all the fresh herbs, his wine cellar, and cheese ageing cellar are.

We were then shown to our dorms and allowed to catch up on some much needed rest. When we woke up we started cooking. We prepared lunch for us and his son, a roasted rabbit with potatoes. Now his philosophy on food is a well understood one, you should never over dress a food so much that it loses its natural flavour. Meaning there is really no need to put a bunch of herbs in the rabbit dish so all we used was olive oil (made in house), salt, and vino. While that was cooking we sauted up the rabbit liver with some fresh squeezed juice (Orange and lemons also in house. [see the pattern here?!?]) and brandy.. Ate that with some crusty bread and spilt the bottle of vino between us. We then were albe to finally taste some of the zullo wine he makes, two bottles of it to be exact, and its a simple wine, no intense flavors or aromas but a simple classic wine wich paired quite well with the rabbit and potatoes.

Me and Peppe

With all that in our system we sat around and talked, not like boss to employees, or co-worker to co-worker, we sat and talked like family. Like we had been sent to america when we were only children and this was the first meal we shared in 15 years. We talked about our past, where we had worked and what previous knowledge we had, we talked about our familes back home and our personal lives, and of course we talked about the food. All in all it was an extremely exciting first day and I can not wait to explore more of the Peppe Zullo world.




Untill next time. Pace&Amore

-R