today's weather is as important as the sausages

To really appreciate my Italian family, you need to be able to fully comprehend this. Food is very important here. Over a meal, or when driving, men talk about food more than anything else, it seems to me. They are experts on the subject, and know every type of mushroom, herb, pepper, which village has the best pizza, the best bread... I am impressed, and feel far too inadequate to enter such conversations. The palette here is so refined that children can explain the taste difference achieved by using a different shaped pasta, even though all pasta is made from the same ingredients.

My friends made pork sausages today. 133 fat pork sausages with all sorts of interesting added flavours. Despite having a mincer for the meat, every scrap of meat for those sausages was cut into the tiniest little pieces by hand. Why? Because it tastes better that way.

The sausages will hang to dry for three weeks now. They will be fantastic.

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Today is the day my neighbours watch the weather closely. If there is bad weather today, then Spring will start tomorrow. If there is some sun today, even only a tiny bit, we are in for another 40 days of mixed weather, a long drawn out winter with spring not really arriving until after the 5th of April.

Candles distributed today at mass can be used to lessen the fury of bad storms.

I single-handedly ensured that it will be spring tomorrow. Despite the cold and the mist this morning, I put all my towels out on the fence to dry. I needn't have run the rinse cycle.

I thought that spring, along with the blossoms and the lambs, was already here.