Agriturismo Coppi Rossi

Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’

Seeking ideas to spend Christmas Eve other than bright sun, warm temperature and good food? What about the characteristic Nativity Scenes here in Riviera?

You have to know that Nativity Scene is an important and still alive tradition.

Let’s start from the Dome of Porto Maurizio square, where in the Nativity Museum you’ll find the artistic Scene of the 18th century made by Maragliano, recently restored to its original splendor.

In every church, parishioners compete for setting up the most impressive Scene: in Oneglia, visit the animated Nativity Scene of Padri Minimi or the artistic one in the church of Borgo Peri, where, in its picturesque frame, every year Jesus’ birth is associated to different aspects of our culture.

We’re used to devote an afternoon of our Christmas holidays to tour Nativities in the villages of the valley: starting from the closest in Sant’Agata continuing to Torria in the Impero Valley or to Valloria and Tavole in the Prino Valley.

One specific characteristic of all these Nativities is they’re set inside our territory, in a hilly landscape with dry stone walls, olive trees and persimmon with orange fruits still hanging on, and the characters employed in traditional activities, often mechanically animated.

There is poetry in wandering the hills in the cold but clear days of the end of the year, along the narrow alleys (“caruggi”) of the villages saturated by the smell of olive wood burning in stoves, entering the ancient parish who live in these days of the wonder in children’s eyes at the beauty of light and color. We too return children for a moment: the magic of the Nativity.

Since a long time ( I don’t remember well, but it’s more than 20 year old), the Christmas evening (I mean the 25th) we meet our friends to have the so called “dinner of leftovers”.

We consider it a tradition and has 2 goals: to limit our food wastes while eating something we didn’t plan to cook. You know, when you eat something at lunch it tastes fantastic, the same food again at dinner looks “boring”, overall when you have to feed some kids. We all love to cook, so it’s guaranteed we’ll find something wonderful in our dishes.

With our “Christmas cat” taking us company, we ate up our broad beans (it’s an early variety which sprouts in this period) and salame (apparently salame and broad beans is commonly eaten only here in Liguria), chards au gratin, salmon puffs, cima (a typical ligurian recipe, in this case the Imperia-like version: basically it’s a veal meat pocket filled with whole eggs, chards, pine nuts, carrots, prosciutto cotto and parmigiano), crepes filled with fish in a porcini béchamel sauce, coniglio alla ligure, lamb, home made panettone, 2 chocolate mousses (we were doubtful about what recipe to cook, so we prepared 2 variants and did a survey: it won, hands down, the “italian meringue” variant).

Yes, you guessed, we’re a “bit” overweight.