Easter Eggs

Hope you all had a good Easter, there wasn’t too much happening here as the whole of Italy was back in full ‘red’ lockdown for the weekend.

On Good Friday we learnt from our Latvian friend of their tradition for making Easter eggs, these are colourfully died hard boiled eggs, so we decided to give it a try.

First we went out foraging for wild flowers and leaves, then armed with our pickings and a pack of white eggs we went onboard their boat for a demonstration.

We wrapped the eggs in onion skins and stuffed them full of flowers and leaves, these were then tied tightly into a stocking.

Once they were all done you had to boil them preferably in coloured water, I added turmeric. They were then left in the died water to cool overnight.

The following day the stocking was removed to reveal the eggs. These are considered as treats to be eaten on Easter Day.

Lamb is not often found in the butchers here but it is the Italian tradition for Easter lunch so they were well stocked and it was in high demand. I queued (after studying Google translate) with what I thought a good description of what I wanted in fluent Italian. This was not the case and I ended up with a large leg of lamb weighing 1.5 kilos.

Much more than I wanted as I don’t eat meat and being in lockdown we could not invite anyone to share it, so it was all down to Paul. It took him until Wednesday to get through it but I can assure you that nothing went to waste!

On Tuesday restrictions were relaxed slightly and Sicily is now back to ‘orange’ so we can travel within the local area. We joined the weekly hiking group and walked through the valley at Ragusa. This is another very picturesque walk, up steep hills, over fields full of spring flowers and along narrow hillside paths.

From the top of the hill we could see some random iron figures (nobody was sure what they represented), and Ragusa Superior on the other side of the valley.

We came across several small stone buildings with metal doors, we took a look inside and found that they housed the irrigation system pumping water through the hills to the local farms.

This very nice house is apparently a refuge for walkers, unfortunately it was closed presumably due to Covid restrictions

A small pond was full of tadpoles, we tried to feed them with apple but the didn’t seem too interested.

There is soon going to be hundreds of frogs here unless this little guy gets to them first!

After approximately 7 miles and 600 meters of ascent, we returned to Ragusa.

Italy has been confirmed as remaining at least in the ‘orange’ zone until the end of April so it’s going to be a while before we are able to post tales of further sailing adventures or even plans for the summer season!