Catch up

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I am sitting around philosophising a lot lately, because I am on a diet. This post is photos that were taken and then never written about. And philosophy. The above is a baking dish full of uncured pork shins on a bed of minced vegetables. They were very good. I got the recipe from an Italian individual’s website, and I must look him up to give credit before I can actually write about it.

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That is the bed of vegetables and seasonings.

Pay attention to every day, because if you don’t you may lose opportunities to know something, be good to someone, understand someone. Once you leave today, although you may or may not remember it, you can never come back. I have days or periods that I would so like to return to so that I could do things better. It’s a bitter pill to know I can’t.

That’s just simply a boned turkey breast which I wrapped in thinly sliced pancetta and roasted until the internal temperature reached 165°F or 74°C. I photographed to illustrate how to wrap it easily, the problem being that pancetta or bacon is not as long as the roastìs diameter, and so you have to trick it. What I do is lay the strings ( 3 or 4 of them) for tying it down on a board and then the slices, slightly overlapped. Put the roast on top, then turn a bit, using the strings to help hold the pancetta, and keep rolling until it is wrapped and you’ve got the strings sort of completely around. Start tying the strings, adding lengthwise strings to stabilize those that are around the turkey roll. Tuck in any stray slices of pancetta as you find them, and find them you will. It doesn’t need any salt, nor garlic if you use pancetta. I just tuck some sprigs of an herb under the strings and roast it. When you cut off the strings, the pancetta will stay in place as you can see. I ground black pepper over it after cooking. Any salt needed is in the center and should be added at table.

Look for opportunities to give people positive feedback. It’s good for your character, can’t hurt them if you are being honest and not a flatterer, and helps fight the wave of snark that sometimes threatens to drown us. I have recently given up all the snarky blogs I used to follow. It took me months of trying to break the habit, but I just removed them finally from my Bloglines list, all showing that max 200 posts that meant I hadn’t been looking at them. It does feel fun to dive into a bit of mean-girlishness like that, but then you read one that just seems unfair because you know more about the item than they did and you feel anger, frustration and then guilt. Once you get to thinking that all the meanness might be wrong and you just don’t know about it, you can realize that what you are doing is enjoying other people’s pain. It’s like slowing down to see an accident and actually hoping someone is really badly off. I don’t want to be that person.

This is actually going to get its own article, because it is part of something so wonderful in Italy that it still takes my breath away, but I rarely mention it. I gasp with pleasure just about every day at something here, and then I forget to share it.

That wasn’t that long ago. Now it is 32°C/90°F. I like this much better.

Don’t kill whales. No one has to eat whale. Just don’t kill whales. If there is a meat you require me to give up instead then tell me what it is and I will abstain if you just stop killing whales.

I am going off for a foodie get together in Rome tomorrow and I will carry my came