Picking Truffles in Calabria: Another Homeless Smurf

18 CommentsMonday • April 2, 2007 • by michelle

On Saturday afternoon, P and his friends went hunting tartufi (truffles) in the mountains that surround us. Other than a ton of rainbows, the sprouting of delicious mushrooms is another great side effect to all the rain we’ve been getting. While normal funghi hunting, e.g., for porcini, occurs in the fall and winter, our black truffles are just getting good around this time.

Ah, yes, I should point out that we only have black truffles down here as the white, expensive, sacred ones are further north in more famous white truffle country.

So how did we do? Well, no luck on the tartufi this time, but P did find a rather unique ‘shroom that he brought home for me. Have I mentioned he’s always bringing me something?

This is actually a porcino, well out of season, and just cute as a button (about that small as well). So if you want to start up a collection or something, it would seem that we’ve just created another homeless Smurf*.

And you thought Gargamel was nasty.

*In Italian, the Smurfs are called “I Puffi.”

From Wikipedia: Italian: puffi (singular: puffo), the name has been reinvented from scratch because in Italian language the “schtroumpf” or (in Italian spelling strumpf) reminds speakers of the Italian word “stronzo,” literally meaning ‘piece of excrement.’ Note that the dialect word ‘strunz‘ is even closer to ‘strumpf.’ The fantasy name “puffi” is derived from the word “buffi” (singular: buffo, as in opera buffo) a word meaning at same time “funny” and “strange.”