Archive for May, 2007
I was just reading headlines and this one caught me: Free Tool Offers ‘easy’ Coding. Having struggled with some codes lately, I read the article.
For kids? Why should kids have all this fun? Why shouldn’t some code-deprived adults gradually learn something about coding by playing with this program?
My experience post-DOS with code was expressed beautifully in the quote, “”A program doesn’t congratulate you for the 90% that you got right. It fails for the 10% you got wrong.”
I was one of the early small businesses to computerize. It was before PCs and my computer had no hard drive, but instead two 5.25″ floppies. One had the program, the other held the information. If you ever wondered why those little hard 3.5″ floppies that did not flop were called floppies, it’s because the larger predecessor was limp as a cellophane sack. If you happened to hold it near something with an electrical charge it was ruined. Huge areas of information were stripped off the surface by the weak charge of, say an amber necklace or a staticky sweater.
Programs weren’t things you bought at a shop, you wrote them. Databases you created yourself using Dbase or another system. I knew what I was doing back then. The original Windows, which I resisted until my employees rebelled, wasn’t too terrible, but every step since then control of your computing experience has marched away from you and toward experts. And they know code.
What, you must want to know, did that computer with no hard drive at all cost back in the Seventies? $15,000.00 and it included a trainer to teach you how to turn it on and store those floppies.
May 15th, 2007
This blog was destroyed and deleted last Friday. There had been an error in loading the program that no one could have predicted, and therefore avoided. The whole wordpress program was working out of a trash can file. POOF!
That could have been less disastrous if it weren’t that the site hosts did a backup before restoring the deleted file. They back up OVER the previous backup. POOF!
I am rebuilding using cached pages from Yahoo! and Google, for which I am very grateful. Unfortunately, all the comments, which are my favorite part of the blog, are gone forever, because they crawl and preserve the pages and not the things behind them. POOF!
Today I can be a bit lighthearted about this, because a gentleman in Cornwall, UK has been working to get it all installed and working again. He deserves a post of his own, for sure, because without Rich, this whole blog would still be POOF!
Over the next few days links and blogrolls and categories will reappear, and if you feel like rethinking and re-commenting, even that can get closer to normal.
Stick with me, because you are very important to me and without you, I would POOF! off into the ether.
May 15th, 2007
This is me back in the days when the world was a mystery and all I knew of it was a small part of Lewiston, Maine. Even the other side of our block was a marvel to me when my two sisters took me for a walk to see the chestnut trees in bloom, lining and arching the street in flowery splendor.
We lived on Vail Street, in the bottom half of a two-family Victorian house. I remember a lot of that home, and when I was seventeen accidentally saw it again when I was invited to a party. We were father, my mother, two half sisters, me and a baby sister back then. I have a string of memories, like album pages that don’t connect, but that are things that impressed me in some way unforgettable. I remember walking with someone and at the corner of our street we met a neighbor walking Scotties. I remember eating too many chocolate covered cherries at one Christmas and hiding under the dining room table and being sick. I remember using my mother’s beaded felt hat to dip water from the toilet bowl to water the garden plants. I remember going Christmas shopping with my mother and longing for “The Littlest Angel” but I don’t remember having my picture taken that day sitting on Santa’s lap– the picture exists. I got the book for Christmas.
Things were changing everywhere post-war, but not as fast as people think who weren’t alive then. My mother was on a waiting list to get an electric refrigerator, but we didn’t get one until we had moved away from Lewiston. So in Lewiston I remember the big kids chasing the ice man’s truck and getting big shards of ice to suck on and I remember one of my sisters getting one for me. I also remember my uncle coming in from his farm with vegetables and honey in the comb, which everyone liked but me. I still hate it.
I have such memories of those sisters. They were eight and ten years older than I, and fascinating to me. They walked off into the world I didn’t know, had friends I never saw and could go, I believed, anywhere they liked. I am sure that wasn’t true. I don’t remember that they were ever angry with me, or mean to me, or that they ever called me a spoiled brat. From this point in my life that seems impossible, but if it ever happened I don’t remember it. I loved them absolutely and thought they were the two most wonderful people in the world. The eldest is still alive and I still think that of her. I have had plenty of time to think about it but have never changed my mind. The younger died at thirty-nine of a brain aneurysm after a troubled life.
It is her dress that I am wearing in this portrait. Both girls took First Communion after joining us when my parents married and set up a home together. I’m sure this ceremony was a mystery also to my non-Catholic mother and that my father’s sisters must have helped her figure out what to do. I know that she made their dresses and veils. I can’t ask my mother, because she has Alzheimer’s disease and can’t remember those times. Maybe I’ll ask my eldest sister.
Why did I think they were getting married? I surely didn’t know what that meant. How did I know what wedding dresses looked like? I don’t recall. But they dressed me in her gown and veil and they took my photograph and the first time I saw it as a more-or-less adult I remembered that it was the first time I considered marriage.
Of course I remember some ugly things from those years too. Autobiography is self-editing. You get to hear what I feel like telling.
The thing is that a lot of what I know about love I learned from those sisters. As I struggled through the ensuing years, my eldest sister was my beacon. I couldn’t grow up to be her, but for a long time I tried to. We don’t look alike, think alike or live like each other, but the love I have for her is so pure and uncomplicated that it serves as a standard for how to love. It’s what I try to offer the younger siblings in my family. It’s what I give my child.
Remember, the children are watching. Someone is learning about love from us– you and me.
Thank you, Freddy.
May 11th, 2007
My heroic friend Jim offered to cook dinner the other night and then forgot to shop or to cook. The adorable Dora took it badly. This post is so that Jim will never get caught out again.
My recipe for when I don’t know what to cook or I don’t have time to think about it is simple. Bacon, onion, tomato, cheese and pasta.
It doesn’t matter what kind of bacon. If it is fatty, then drain most of the fat off. If it is guanciale, pancetta or smoked pancetta, sauté it in oil. If I have used all the solids from some canned tomatoes, I’ll use the leftover juice. If I have fresh tomatoes, of course I’ll use those. Onions can be plain old onions, chopped, or scallions sliced, or shallots chopped. The pasta can be anything I have around, although something with a hole in it works best. Cheese? What have you got? It will be different with different cheeses.
For two people:
- 3.5 ounces or 100 g of bacon, guanciale, or pancetta diced
- 1 onion or 2 scallions 0r 3 shallots chopped up
- 1 tablespoon (cucchiaio) of good olive oil
- tomatoes– about 1/2 tin of canned ones, or two big fresh ones– both of those diced– or a cup of the tomato juices
- a pinch of red pepper (peperoncino) flakes
- from 130 to 200 grams dry of pasta depending on appetites
- 3 ounces or so of cheese grated, coarse or fine depending on how hard it is
Start a lot of water boiling in a big pot for the pasta.
Heat a large frying pan and put in the oil, then the bacon, etc. and the onion, etc. Sauté it until the onion is soft. You will need to drain off part of the fat if you used British or US bacon. Add the tomatoes, chopped or about one cup of the juice. Add the red pepper. Simmer this while you throw first a small handful of salt and then the pasta into the boiling water. Assuming the pasta takes about ten minutes to cook almost al dente, the sauce ought to be ready when the pasta is.
Drain the pasta well, and toss it into the frying pan and let it simmer briefly– about 1 or 2 minutes maximum. Sprinkle the cheese over it, and stir it in. Ladle the finished pasta into shallow soup bowls and drink some red wine.
This really is pasta presto.
Go take a nap.
May 10th, 2007
It’s hard to say who the beginner is in that article. The writer mentions college graduates and others setting up a kitchen for the first time, but don’t they come in all the variety of the population? The list of purchases assumes a sort of meat-and-two-veg kind of menu. There are many who won’t fit that restrictive fare, some beginners aren’t on their first kitchen, but having to set up a new kitchen on a restricted budget. I won’t pick holes in it for that, except to say that someone from an ethnicity other than urban-suburban USA would not be served with that list.
That said, a restaurant supply shop is a wonderful resource for a beginner or an accomplished cook, if they’ll let you in. Just don’t go nuts and buy a lot of stuff because it fascinates you and you didn’t even know it existed.
Let’s look at the items. I am in general agreement with many of them. I agree that stainless steel bowls are a best buy– I said that when I did a post on equipping a kitchen, and I agree that cheap ones are just fine. The important thing is that they aren’t plastic and they won’t break under stress.
The tongs referred to must be the pincer type, which I won’t have in the kitchen because they are not accurate enough. Mine aren’t expensive, but they look more like scissors and have a handle like scissors. They open really wide and don’t rely on “spring” but on you, for pressure. You can pick up jars and lids from boiling water with them, in case you need to sterilize something. That may be rare, but it happens, so why not buy the tongs that allow it? I can also slip one side into a hot chicken and pick it up with my tongs, which I couldn’t with pincers.
Knives also don’t have to be expensive, but they do need to fit your hand. If a knife doesn’t fit your hand, you will have accidents. If it doesn’t take a decent edge you will have accidents. I speak as one who although experienced has in the past three years had a couple of knife accidents, one of which took me to the emergency room. OK, buy the cheap knife, but then take it immediately to someone for sharpening so that you can keep it up yourself. That first edge is never successful at home to a beginner. Yes to paring knife or knives and at least one serrated edge one to use for tomatoes and bread. That can be a good-sized steak knife. I would also add kitchen scissors– good sturdy ones that cut some bones as well as packaging materials.
I guess a sheet pan is a decent choice, although I don’t have one because a broiler pan that comes with most stoves is pretty much the same thing. I do have, instead, a flat cookie sheet that I use as a peel to put things in and take things out of the oven. I couldn’t do that with a sheet pan.
He sneaked a cutting board into the sheet pan paragraph, and I really disagree with his recommendation. People seem really confused about cutting boards ever since the US government reported on bacteria growth on them, first incorrectly and then correctly. Plastic cutting boards are the ones that grow bacteria. They develop cuts in the surface in which bacteria grow. Wooden boards kill those bacteria. I have one nylon cutting board and I am careful to use it only for fruits and veg. He is wrong, because he should not only prefer a wooden board, but insist on it if it is to be the only board.
Including a mandoline is ludicrous. I have two. I love them. They are not for beginners. They are certainly not for people who don’t have money. $25 is one eighth of this budget for something that, with practice, allows you to make pretty cuts in large quantities. That’s nuts.
I don’t like his style of vegetable peeler, but I can use one if that’s what there is. A plastic colander with big holes is what I drain pasta in, but a metal one, as he has chosen, would allow one to use it also for steaming things over a pan of hot water. Thing is, I am not a beginner, so I have the other equipment to do that, but I would come down firmly for a metal colander in the beginner kitchen.
I’m in general agreement with cast aluminum as a beginner pot, but I would recommend skipping the mandoline and spending part of the money on a couple of flat, professional kitchen aluminum lids. I have one medium one and it does a lot of work, since it will cover anything smaller than itself. I’ll try to show one soon. The handle on the lid is a flat U shape and allows it to be opened with the tines of a cooking fork– a good thing when you get busy. I also think everybody needs one sort of big pot for soup, pasta, the occasional chili binge for your friends, the rare lobster feast, cooking corn on the cob. Something he bought may fulfill that need, but it wasn’t clear to me. From the picture, I don’t think he bought anything the right size. After all, you can cook something small in something big, if pressed, but you can’t cook something big in a small pot. Pasta must have lots of water, but I see nothing that would accommodate pasta for even three people.
A cheap non-stick frying pan is a curse on mankind. Get a good heavy frying pan without the coating and learn to watch what you are frying, or get a cast iron frying pan and season it. I have a large frying pan with a non-stick surface that cost €65 new, and that, my friends, is over $80. It started to lose its coating after two years, even though I religiously approached it with nothing harder than wood or silicone. That stuff is not stable enough and all those pans are going to end up in landfills. And where does all that coating go? At least part of it is vaporizing into your food.
You know, if you read my earlier article on kitchen stuff, that I love the heat resistant silicone spatulas. Wooden spoons are basic. You need both. You need a spatula with which you can lift things out, too, such as pancakes or hamburgers. A skimmer is nice, but a big slotted spoon will also do. (n.b. do beginners make gnocchi?) A whisk is essential, if only because you look so cheffy when you have it in your hand.
Food processors are very nice to have, but practice using knives is both cheaper and more basic. The size he suggests would be fairly useless for me, and the things I use it for are not beginner things, but advanced things that I did by hand before I was injured. Nice as it might be, if your budget is $200 I’d skip it. A salad spinner of any size isn’t a basic, but a nicety. A clean dish towel does the same thing. I agree with the Microplane grater for hard things. It is new technology that wipes out the old. You still need a plain old grater for softer things– and many of those also have a slicer included.
A coffee and spice grinder? Take part of the mandoline and food processor money and buy a Turkish coffee grinder which does a great job and looks good. One of the things beginner kitchens often lack is electric outlets, and this operation doesn’t need to be electrified.
I don’t see a blender with a vase as belonging in this list at all, unless the beginner is a devotee of frozen Margaritas. I would say that buying one of the stick-blenders-on-steroids is more to the point. With a motor at 350 watts and up, it comes with a stick blender attachment, a mixer attachment, dough hooks and a mini-chopper. It takes one electrical outlet and does 100 things. Especially for a beginner, it is an investment that outweighs the other electrical appliances mentioned in the NY Times list.
I agree with a stone for sharpening knives. I bought a new one last week for €1.80. You do need to practice, but you won’t be as ruinous to your knives with a stone as an electric sharpener often is in the hands of the ignorant. More decent knives have been ruined with those than cutting on those horrible glass cutting boards.
They also sell long-wearing kitchen towels in supply stores. They have a loop that allows you to attach them to your apron or jeans. They are a very good buy.
The things he dismisses, that I do not, fit in this list.
A wok. I am perhaps spoiled because I have a giant pasta burner that heats my wok, but it is the shape of the wok that I find important even for things that aren’t stir fried. The round shape allows you do use a small amount of oil in the bottom and pull things up onto the wall of the wok when they are done, allowing them to drain of the oil. A wok is ideal for curries, too, in which pastes are fried in oil. Is it a beginner’s necessity? No, but then a salad spinner isn’t, either.
A boning knife is your best friend when trying to cook refined cuts of meat and fish on a budget. You can learn to do the butchering work that costs real money every time you want to make something a bit deluxe, without paying the deluxe price, and this goes on for years and adds up. It can be used for other knife jobs, too, but won’t replace a chef’s knife. Am I a butcher? No, but I can play one on my blog. I can bone cheap cuts and end up with a fancy meal as well as a delicious soup from the bones. (Or spare ribs.)
Copper pots and pans– well, sure, a beginner probably isn’t doing the kind of cooking copper is so great at. On the other hand, once you have some money and some experience, copper is one of the best investments you can make. Maintenance is a snip with a squeezed-out lemon and some salt, copper is better at surround-heat than anything else, and it is beautiful. In the end isn’t beauty in your kitchen worth something? The one above is just representative, and is not as beautiful as a used copper pot, either. Just pick steel interiors rather than tin. How much cooking would I feel like doing if I had to work forever with beat-up junk, which many of the beginner’s items surely will be after some years? To me it is a mistake to discount it as the writer has done, and I would instead have said copper is what you will deserve when you’ve developed some kitchen skills that outlive your junk.
I still have some of the things I started out with decades ago. Some look really beat up, yes, but they’ve served in the war against hunger and have been my valued allies. I can look at these things, tools that have lived in the city, at a farm, have traveled around the USA and expatriated to Italy, and I know what works and lasts. Believe me, anything that wasn’t worth kitchen space got tossed years back in one of my 36 moves. I hope that every new graduate who reads that article will have a couple of items that will last the race alongside him and more than anything, I hope that the new cooks will keep on cooking and controlling what goes into their bodies and not start eating out when they get some dough.
Mr. Bittman, who wrote the New York Times article, eats out and around for a living. What and how he cooks should be of interest. I salute him for this effort, but I don’t totally agree.
The images above are from Amazon.com and are strictly for reference.
May 10th, 2007
Revealed: the recipe for the hottest dessert in restaurant America. I have heard this dessert referred to countless times. The recipe is at this New York Times page. It does sound fabulously and incredibly delicious. And why not? Look at the ingredients. You’d pretty much be willing to lick any one of them off a cleanish floor.
Am I going to make it? Let’s put it this way: if my doctor ever tells me I have one month to live I will make it, eat it all myself and then post “I ate the Butterscotch Budino.” And that will be the horse’s last mouthful.
I dare any of you to make it and report back– but reserve that for people under thirty who have the time to recover from the fat flux.
May 10th, 2007
In this NY Times article, the minimal approach to kitchen equipment is approached. I agree with quite a lot of it, in principle, but disagree with some of the attitudes. Why? I will tell you another day, point by point.
Today I’ve blogged quite enough.
May 9th, 2007
Never let it be said that I do not practice what I preach. Sunday lunch included all of my hot buttons.
- I semi-boned my own leg of lamb
- when things went bad I just altered the program
- I didn’t waste anything
- I worked to accentuate the integral flavors of the ingredients
- I used up small amounts of stuff that was around the kitchen
- I cooked to the tastes of my guests and not mine
- I made do when I couldn’t find something I counted on
- I called up, woke my child in the US and bragged that I had done a “Julia”
The original plan was to have an extensive antipasto course, loosely based on the Puglian experience. I planned on canellini with lemon juice and oil, tarallini I’d brought back with me, hummous because one diner couldn’t eat the meat, Arabic bread I had in the freezer, olives, and those tiny baked potatoes because I had finally found the real ones.
The first course was to be crema di pomodoro because one guest asked for it. That seemed light enough to follow a big antipasto.
The second course was to be roast leg of lamb served with a contorno of purea di fave secche or puree of dried fava beans.
The dessert would be something made out of last year’s fruit in the freezer, so I went to look, took out peach pie filling I froze last October and on the spot decided to use sour plum sauce as well, as a sauce f or the meat. I realize many of you don’t have a freezer full of these things, but you have very close relatives to them in your supermarkets, which I do not. Anyway, I staggered out of the garage with my arms piled with lamb, breads, peaches, plums and tomatoes– all of which I had frozen at some time. My neighbor, Amelia, had to pick up the things that fell off my arms while I opened the door. Shopping at home isn’t any easier than shopping at the Coop.
I forgot to drain the broth off the fave before pureeing them. They became soup. With the addition of a splash of Tabasco and some Fleur de Sel Gris they became good soup. So the first course became two soups instead of one.
I decided that since we would not have the fave with the lamb, the canellini needed to become a contorno, and the potatoes as well. So I popped the canellini into the oven with sage leaves and garlic thus making them fagioli aglii uccelletti. The potatoes needed no different treatment to be a contorno.
With the two soups sitting made up at the back of the stove, I slashed into the leg of lamb and removed the thigh bone. That’s really easy. Removing the hip would be hard and messy, so I didn’t remove it. I also removed the tail I found attached, because I had a killing vision or it popping up in the roasting and pointing at us like an accusatory finger at the table. Uh, no.
In the space left after removing the bone, I rubbed a seasoning paste of lemon peel, lemon juice and Moroccan spices. I bought this, but when I don’t have it, I make my own with lemon and cumin and paprika. It’s the paprika that makes the following photo look so bloody. It isn’t the meat. That rubbed in, I stuffed the space with peeled shallots that were in the vegetable bin for months. Then I remembered that there were about 2 tablespoons of raisins sitting in Marsala wine in the cupboard, so I threw those in, too. This is what it looked like at that point. The bone on the right is what I removed.
Then I went looking for my trussing needles. Whoops! I must not have moved them here. Hmmm… well, there are some bamboo skewers among the chopsticks… maybe? I faked trussing needles by pushing the skewer through, then cutting it off at the not pointed end, allowing me to make three needles from each skewer. Then I laced kitchen string around them like a ski boot lacing. Like this:
The string just zigzags. I rubbed more of the paste over the meat before I took this photo, as you can see.
Then I put the lamb into a slow oven, 325°F or 160°C, and cooked it until it was well done, versus the rare I prefer. I thought that the shallot could have been parboiled before using them. They were still a bit crunchy when done.
Saturday I finally found the real teensy potatoes! They were at the organic vegetable store and the fellow carefully picked out the smallest ones for me. These are just the size of a man’s thumb and are terrific. I made quite a lot more of them this time, a whole kilo in a larger soufflé dish and using half a box of coarse sea salt. Can you see how much smaller they are? And that they are the long, baking potato type?
They went into the oven with the meat, but in the end I needed to briefly raise the oven temperature to 400°F or 200°C to finish them, once the meat was out and resting.
I buttered a large, flat baking dish and poured the thawed peach mixture into it. I had also thawed a package of phyllo dough to top it, but I left putting that on it until later. I prepared the antipasto ingredients, which were all pre-made, in the antipasto server my club gave me for my birthday one year. I cut the various breads up and wrapped them in a napkin with the tarallini and put them on the table.
I began to think we’d actually have a meal to eat by that time. For the sauce I dumped half of the thawed sour plum sauce into a sauce pan and added a peeled clove of garlic. When I tasted the plums they seemed clovey, so I dropped in three whole cloves as well. I put it onto a burner set at simmer and ignored it until it came to a boil, then killed the flame. The lamb was done, so after it had rested I used a very sharp knife to carve the boned area. The boning makes carving a much more attractive and simple thing. I tented it with aluminum foil to keep it warm. I carefully scraped all of the pan juices and crusty bits into the plum sauce and re-lit the fire under it.
My guests arrived– and no, they are not all ladies and wouldn’t like to be called that, but it sounded better in the title– and the antipasto was already on the table with the wine and water. I didn’t photograph any of that, because I find it impossible to serve alone and photograph, too. I could ruin the food and my reputation!
I served the crema di pomodoro first. 
Then I served the velluto di fave, which is what my fava beans had become. No photo exists, but it resembled the purea from last month except no peppers.
The lamb was served with a bowl of the warm plum sauce, and I loved it. Here are the finished potatoes. Just look how tiny they are. They were a big hit– and yes, that is another of the antique-looking dishes by our local artist.
When the meat course went onto the table, I quickly cut and painted melted butter onto 8 layers of Phyllo dough, put it on top of the peaches, wrinkling it slightly to fit it, and threw it into the oven set at 375°F or 165°C. The smell was very nice accompaniment to lunch.
This is how one serving looked.
I was satisfied. Fifteen minutes before the guests arrived I woke eg up in the USA and bragged, “I did a Julia! I managed every disaster and made a meal anyway.” She answered, “Show me the money.” She’s a bit cranky at 6:45 AM.
May 9th, 2007
This is a meme requested by Sognatrice of Bleeding Espresso. She is positive that I am sinful and I’m sure she’s right, although I tend to think the things that sane people do and like aren’t sins. Convenient, eh? Cruelty and abuse of kids and animals automatically place you among the insane for me. So, anyway, I have her blog open next to this page so I can see what the sins are supposed to be, because I have a teensy list of sinful things and they are all done by other people, not me. Like arriving an hour late to dinner. Like pulling out of stop signed streets without looking or stopping. Like ignoring me as if I don’t exist. Big stuff, you know?
Here’s the official list:
1. Lust. My excuse for this one is this is the way God made me and he must have expected that I would have these thoughts and impulses. How can it be a sin if it comes unbidden? Why did He create them if not to make me want them? It’s not all that broad a panorama of targets, after all, it’s just a slim list of certain kinds of men and they do not include Brad Pitt. (Raoul Bova is quite another matter.)
2. Gluttony. Potato chips, but really the overdone, really brown ones, and those are often the ones that are the bargain brands and are always in big bags. I used to have brakes that had to do with being allergic to a preservative used in cooking fats, but they don’t use it anymore, so I have to rely on vanity and staying completely away from that part of the store.
3. Greed. Hmmm. It’s been so long since I wanted anything except more books and Degree antiperspirant, and I am expecting a box with both of those. Is that greed? I share my books with others. Wouldn’t a greedy person stick them somewhere private and say no, I don’t have any even if asked? Antiperspirant is just being thoughtful about others, no?
4. Sloth. Got me there. I admit it. I am lazy as can be.
5. Wrath. There are certain public figures and certain issues that make me shout at the TV or a magazine or newspaper. I despise racists and abusers of the weak, the young and the helpless. I don’t want to overcome this sin. I’m convinced that avoiding passionate response to provoking issues is part of what’s wrong with the world today. So, there, I admit wrath and refuse to stop being wrathful.
6. Envy. Sometimes I envy people who still have their thirties, forties, fifties ahead of them. Then I remember that if I had them to relive I’d be as naive again as I was then and I would have to go through the relearning, so I think I have this sin under control.
7. Pride. I find myself more dazed by the fact that things I think are just the normal way of life are seen as posing or prideful to others. I don’t think other than shaving my legs that I do anything for pride, but isn’t that more vanity? I thought Jane Austen had that worked out that pride is good and vanity is bad? I love wearing pretty clothes and interesting hats– I have always worn them– but the reality is that it is far more likely to make my friends laugh at me than to stroke my pride or vanity. My world, once just the normal world, seems to have upped and disappeared, leaving me alone thinking about swishy voile stitched down pleated skirts and high-heeled sandals worn with broad straw hats. Most of my pleasures have become jokes. Now I am indulging in self-pity, which is definitely a sin.
Tag seven people? That’s really tough… some might be insulted! Get over it, I am under pressure here.
Barb
Gia-Gina
jessica
sara
Joanna
Julianna
Jeff
The rest of my blogsphere is pretty much one subject and you can’t ask someone who is doing a blog professionally to break into sinful confessions before their public! Or I recently asked them to do the thinking blog post, and I’m afraid they’ll hate me if I ask again. (One of those said she reads only 2 blogs, and could not pass on to however many it was.)
May 7th, 2007
and there are a lot of beans in Italy. Lentils too. Here is my favorite one.
When they are fresh and not dried, they are unbelievable. Faintly green, tender and quick cooking, easy to pod and freeze, too. For two years now there has been a bean blight which meant that there were no fresh canellini to spare. Tragic, no?
May 5th, 2007
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