What, no potato?

Many of you have either heard about or met our 85 year old Italian neighbour. I love that so often we are in our kitchen or out on the back deck and you can hear her yammering away in Italian. Plus she makes us snacks which is ace. We had a coffee with her yesterday and she was showing us her homemade pasta, but despite my best "oh, wow, that looks so great, we love home made pasta don't we honey," she didn't offer any to us. So we left only with a bottle of homemade wine and half a home made foccacia.

I was telling her I was going to make pasta e fagioli for dinner. She asked me what I was putting in it (when she got over laughing at my bad Italian pronouncing). I passed the test of using fresh, not dried borlotti beans, but failed dismally with failing to put potato in the soup. "WHAT, no potate? You need one or two, just for your husband," like I'm starving him or something.

Anyway, the soup turned out well, even though it didn't have potato.

To pour our wine with dinner we used our decanter for the first time, and OMG, it's so nice. We got lots of lovely crystal glasses and the decanter for wedding pressies, and it feels very luxurious to crack it all out whenever we feel like it. Like drinking tea in bed this morning out of our china cups. Just because we can.

Here's the decanter in action. We also got to use the fancy pourer Benno got us for an engagement present. Everything tastes better out of crystal!!