Archive for November, 2007
I didn’t sign up for the noblosomething because I hate being pressed to do things I like. It makes me not like them. But I know being consistent is good for any blog, so I privately promised myself to blog everyday. Then I started playing with post-dated publishing and messed it up. So, the count today is 32 posts in 30 days, but with the dates messed up — a little bit good, a little bit foolish. And then this morning I made a horrible typo commenting on someone else’s blog and my reputation may be shot forever. I misspelled duck. You guess.
I congratulate everybody who made it happen, which includes Jeff, Sognatrice and many others. It was luxurious to have so many good choices everyday. I’m going to strive to continue it, and I even have ideas bubbling up, although some of them may be more La Brea tar pit than mountain spring. Chissa. On with December!
November 30th, 2007
It’s one of my descriptive phrases: elaborate vegetable. When you are serving something good that doesn’t look like much, the plate needs a hit of glamor. I’ve a list of these elaborate vegetables, mostly but not all Italian.
As anyone who will listen knows, I’ve recently lost most of my appetite. That’s really alarming for a cook. I try this and that, and yesterday I thought I’d try someone else’s cooking. I went to a little cafe that on two or three days a week makes a lot of contorni, or vegetable dishes. One of them was a torte di cime di rape, or a torte of turnip greens. It was stodgy and dull. I thought I could do better, so I gave it a try.
It was so good that at ten o’clock last night I was wiping up the crumbs. But it was far too late to get decent photos, so I made it again today to get daylight. Unfortunately it went cloudy while I was cooking, but it looks pretty edible anyway, doesn’t it? I had to shoot it sitting on my car to keep the cats off it. Recipe is after the leap into the future.
I varied the recipe by one ingredient on the two trials, and here’s the better recipe. It’s really easy, and you can keep everything but the fresh greens in your pantry or freezer, so you can make it any time you buy greens. Clean up was a snap, too. Hey, it all counts in my kitchen.
The photos show one-half recipe, which is one sheet of puff pastry divided in half. It would make a great picnic or work lunch, at that size. It’s good hot or room temperature, and there’s nothing in it that would spoil before you could eat it. Microwaving would make it soggy, though.
Torta di Bietola
Swiss chard or bietola, cleaned and cut into 1/4″ or 1 cm wide strips. Cooked in only the water from the washing, and only until just done. You will need 2 cups of these steamed greens.
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 smallish cloves of garlic, sliced
2 anchovy fillets (yes, use them, you won’t know they are in there!)
3 small chillies (peperoncini) broken in half
salt to taste (qb)
1 tablespoon of vinegar, whichever you like, but not balsamic
2 sheets of frozen puff pastry
1 egg, fork whipped with a teaspoon of cold water
Make sure to read the package instructions on the puff pastry, and thaw it the amount of time needed and not more or less. It’s only hard to handle if you mistake that.
Preheat the oven to 200°C or 400°F.
This was under my 40 watt hood light in my black pan.
In a large frying pan, put the oil, the garlic, the chillies and the anchovy fillets, and sizzle together for a few minutes over moderate heat, mashing the anchovy so it disappears. Remove the visible pieces of the chillies! Add the vinegar and then the cooked greens, and stir them together. Taste and salt as needed.
Lay one piece of puff pastry on a piece of baking paper or foil that you have put on a flat baking sheet with low or no sides. Spoon the greens onto it, then spread them out to cover all but about 1/2″ at the edges. Using a finger, brush that naked edge with some of the egg glaze.
With a sharp knife, cut some slashes or holes in the remaining piece of puff pastry. then lift it onto the filled piece, and lightly tap the edge down onto the egg glaze. Using a brush, brush the entire top with egg glaze. (you’ll have some leftover for the cats — makes them shiny.)
Put it into the heated oven and cook about 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Eat hot or at ambient temperature.
I like it so well I see myself experimenting with other fillings, other pastries. Yummmm.
All the small photos are clickable to make them bigger.
November 29th, 2007
In an interesting article. the New York Times has proposed that the traditional seeds that once made up the vast variety of food plants grown in Italy has started to disappear.
My neighbors save seeds and use them year after year, if you live in the country, I’ll bet some of yours do, too.
I’d like to propose that we who live in the country talk to our neighbors with ortos and ask about the seeds they use, ask further who else there is they can introduce us to who uses old seeds. Now is the time to do it, because now is when the seeds are in and are also in their minds.
We can contact the study group in Perugia and point them right at the seeds that we find. Some will be winners, some not, but nothing will happen if everyone doesn’t try.
Calabria? Puglia? Emilia-Romana? Le Marche? All of italy … rise up and save those seeds!
November 28th, 2007
The New York Times has named these books as leaders for the year. Before I actually spend tons of money trying to get any of them, does anyone have anything to say, positive or negative, about any of them?
You probably cannot conceive of how expensive English language books can be in Italy, unless you are also an Expat in Italy.
November 27th, 2007
The article has just gone up this morning.
This fall we were in Florence and Umbria, catching the drift of what they’re really wearing, and what there is to buy. The photo above is Giusi, from “Atena”, my favorite local shop, wearing her own clothes.
November 27th, 2007
It was wonderful. I enjoyed the food, the company, the place I was. I hope it was equally fine for you. I was having such a good time, I forgot to photograph a single thing.
November 24th, 2007
It can happen. It happened to me the other day. I knew I couldn’t cook a potato in it, start over or think of any clever tip that would work.
So I poached an egg in plain vinegared water, one for each serving and plopped it on top, and it was GOOD. There is nothing so unsalty as an unsalted egg. Bite of each and I was pleased.
November 23rd, 2007
I read somewhere on the internet that cranberry/grappa jelly was the hot new dish for Thanksgiving this year. Who wouldn’t want to make the hot new dish of the year? It’s from Gourmet magazine, too, so there you go.
Three years ago, eg brought me two bags of cranberries in her luggage. They have sat, triple-bagged, in my freezer since then, because like the story of the pig you wouldn’t want to eat all at once, I couldn’t bear for them to just go away. But for the hot new dish of 2007, I figured let’s do it! Those of you who don’t live here will think how silly we are to miss something most people eat once a year and many people deride as not real food. I love cranberries.
The original recipe is fairly straight forward but a little messy with a lot of straining and pressing to get the skins and seeds free of the juices. Note that not only does it star the elusive cranberry, but also granulated gelatin, which doesn’t exist here, as far as I have ever been able to tell.
Italian gelatin is evocatively named “fish glue.” Yum. It comes in transparent sheets or leaves in envelopes. I made a strawberry Bavarian some years back using fish glue and it didn’t jell. I didn’t know how much fish glue to use to replace granulated gelatin nor did anyone I asked.
But I am nothing if not determined when it comes to my cranberries. The package says that the enclosed leaves will jell 500 milliliters of liquid. I started adding up the liquids in the recipe, converting the number to milliliters and voila! It needed more than eleven sheets of gelatin. Whoa, said I, but I soaked twelve sheets in cold water. And you know what? It’s only a few hours later and it’s jelled. Hunh.
So here is the recipe for Cranberries Expatriated. Only the translation is mine.
Get 20 ounces of cranberries, frozen or fresh — or use lingonberries instead if that’s what you can find.
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups cold water
3/4 cup grappa
Remember that 250 milliliters is one cup, or close enough.
In a large pan, put those ingredients and bring them to a boil. Allow them to boil briskly, popping and eventually thickening, then remove that from the flame. Gradually pass all of it through the finest screen of a food mill. This is much cleaner than a China cap and kitchen towels, believe me.
You can soak 10 sheets of fish glue in cold water to cover while that’s cooking.
1/4 cup water
the soaked gelatin
1 cup of the juice you have now milled.
Put those into the same, now empty pan and bring it to a simmer, stirring. As soon as it is all melted and wonderful, remove it from the heat, and stir in 1.5 more cups of the juice and 1/2 cup of grappa. Oil a mold that holds at least 3 cups and pour the mixture into it. As soon as it is room temperature, put it in the fridge to chill until the next day.
To unmold it, run a sharp knife along the edges of the jelly in the mold. Dip the mold into a deep bowl of warm water for a few seconds and then turn it out onto a plate
I had a lot of leftover cranberry juice, so I put it into a jar in the fridge. I feel cranberry other things coming on. I will try to photograph this beauty (we can hope) tomorrow and add the photo when I get back from Massa Martana. And now, happy Thanksgiving to all the celebrators of same.
NB I have changed the number of leaves of fish glue, because it was too jelled.
November 22nd, 2007
Yesterday the agenda was full. I haven’t lived in the USA for a long time, so maybe my finding differences in my experiences is out of date. I was wide eyed as I went through that day, for some reason noticing more than I have lately been noticing.
First job of the day was getting the two new tires put on the car. Giampaolo, the head tire guy, had said, “Eight exactly, because after that the cars start to pour in.” Like I did last week with that wheelbarrow tire sized spare tire thumping along the roads, having called Monday night and made an appointment for Wednesday morning with the owner, who doesn’t work there and who didn’t write anything down about me or my car. Giampaolo didn’t want to do anything for me, so I got aggressive about how could he turn me out into the cold world with that bitty wheel and no spare, and he gave in and put a used tire loaner on the car.
I don’t remember ever having to make an appointment for buying new tires when you’d ruined a tire. You could actually do it in lots of places, whereas here it is the gommista or no one. They are all closed on Sunday, so if you have a flat on Saturday, you’re out of luck. And even on Monday, in this case I was out of luck. Although I’d told the owner what my car was and asked if he had the tires for it, and he’d said yes, in truth they didn’t and wanted to turn me away. I was referred there by my friend Tina who is related to Giampaolo. So item one: i had a connection and 2: I was aggressive. I’d never had to play those cards before to spend money on tires.
So, I arrived at the gommista at 8:05 because there was a backhoe in our driveway that wouldn’t let us out onto the road. Customers were lined up and the doors were all locked. Most of the customers were giant trucks and tractors, the kind used on big farms. In the automobile line was a community service truck and me. So much for being on time. At about 8:15 a door opened and I was told to drive my car onto a lift platform. (There may be a real word for this thing, but I am not very clever with car words in either language, although I did hit a high by knowing the word toe last week.) It was with enormous relief that I drove in from the very cold outside. And then, as I left the car and went to the waiting room, lost that sense of relief when I found there was no heat. If it was under 32°F outside, it was also under 32°F inside but no wind.
This is your fashion advice for the day. In Umbria in winter, it is almost never safe to wear tights and a skirt anywhere. It doesn’t matter what you are doing later, hiking boots, woolly socks and wool trousers over leggings is what to wear. Lots of places have no heat.
Time passed and the community service truck was worked on while my car sat untouched. A man in an expensive Alfa Romeo sedan came, dealt with two tires and left with them. My car was still virgin. 8:35, and someone came to tell me to move toward a hole in the wall to warm up. What relief! It was like being in a jet exhaust. Air at about 115°F blew out of the hole with a roar. Apparently, it takes that long to warm it up, but the effect is only within a few feet of the exit blast and does nothing for the overall temperature. I was so frozen the hot air hurt me as it thawed me. Still, I felt saved.
At 8:45 they finally started on my car and by 10 I was paying a bill that was about half what I’d expected. No warranty.
I went to the post office to pick up the forms I needed to apply for my new permesso di soggiorno, or permission to stay. I’d read the instructions on the web, so I had with me the photocopies I thought I needed to do the deed. Year after year, I photocopy exactly the same documents as I have produced in past years. The only thing that ever changes is sometimes more stamps in the passport. I was number 17 for the “amico” desk that doles the forms to us. In just a few moments I was getting them with a warning, “Make sure it is all correct and complete before you come back, because we can’t help you.” Vabbe, OK, I’m not ignorant, I think I can manage this. I dropped by the tobacco store to but the euro 14 and change stamp I needed. I went to the photo shop and had eight photos made, which was why I was dressed decently and almost froze to death for it.
I went to a cafe for breakfast and filling in the forms. I hadn’t even half finished my panino when I realized that, no, I could not fill this out. One demand was the number of my present P di S. There are three numbers on my P di S. Which is THE one?
My friend had said there are people who will fill this out for euro 15, so I went in search of a savior. I went to the office of citizens, because they seem to have answers. This one they did not have and there ensued a confused conversation about patronati and sindicati. I apparently was supposed to have one of those. I don’t. Finally they mentioned CISL, which I’d always thought was a labor union. Given some directions that were fairly sketchy, I wandered and with some more directions found the office. It is in sections, and the labeling is all initials. INAS, CAAF, IRPA, how does anyone know what they mean? I sat down with a group in the part said to be only CISL. I admired the men. I waited. The Chinese man next to me was reading an office supplies catalog, which comprised the only reading material other than some brochures about Catholic church charities and how many people they help. After a very long time, the woman you could hear through the door came out and said good bye to her clients and then asked were we all waiting for her. How would we know? So she asked what we wanted and one by one told us to go here or there. She told me and two Chinese men we needed Abdul, but was that ABDUL, or Abdul? On investigation, there was absolutely no sign saying either. So we waited in the only other area that had any initials showing, none of them ABDUL. More time passed. Finally she passed through this area, and crossly said, “I told you to wait for Abdul!” and she pointed at what looked like a dark elevator corridor or perhaps a mop closet, where the only sign said riservato which means private. But one could hear faint sounds of conversation from behind an unmarked door.
At last the door opened and I waved the Chinese ahead of me, because they’d preceded me into the other original waiting room if not into this hallway. Eventually it was my turn and there was Abdul, a real person named Abdul. I had just lucked into one of the two times in the week that Abdul fills out permesso di soggiorno forms. I asked him, “How is anybody supposed to find you when there are no signs saying “help with permesso di soggiorno” or even Abdul? Why does one have to wait endless time to even find out there is an Abdul? And the biggest question of all, why is this form incomprehensible? I have a Bachelor of Science degree and I can read Dante in antique Italian, but I couldn’t fill this thing out. What is a Polish carer of the aged with no education do? He shrugged. Shrugs are a large part of communication here.
He redid all of my photocopies partly because they all have to go into the CISL system in case the state police lose the documents that go in with the form and partly because I had not realized that they wanted copies of every single page of my passport, even the empty ones and the boilerplate pages. He quickly filled in all the codes. Almost every entry requires a code instead of a word. We talked about Marrakesh, where he was born, he took phone calls and spoke rapid Arabic to someone. All the pages, when done, had CISL printed on them. I hope that helps. When he was done, he proudly stuck the stamp on a square printed just to receive the stamp and packed it all into a CISL envelope and handed me that packed envelope as well as forty pages of paper we had no use for. I’m still looking for a paper recycling bin.
Off to the post office where I am number 143 for the amico desk. A woman came in some minutes after me and took a number, 147. When my number came up, she pushed in front, crumpled her number and threw it on the floor, saying, “I am number 140 and you have skipped me.” Bitch. When I got to the clerk I told him she was a liar and was holding number 147. He shrugged. Then he went through the entire packet, page by page by page, pointing out that the white page numbers on the passport hadn’t printed and that he was trusting me that I hadn’t photocopied the same empty pages over and over. I pointed out that the homemade copies all had the numbers and it was the CISL pages that lacked some of them. Shrug. Finally, he added up the costs, which were just under euro 60. The Polish carer came to mind again. It cost me almost euro 75 to apply for permission to stay here. Had I found one of those filler-inners for euro 15, it would have been that much more. Add in the price of the photos, too. That’s a sizable price, considering that in the old system it cost you the photos and the stamp and a lot of time, but not all that much more time than it takes to find Abdul.
Supermarket, then, and then home, where I collapsed with exhaustion from the effort required to buy two tires and apply for a P di S.
November 21st, 2007
Lat January I wrote a post about Iris Murdoch after reading a biography of her life as philosopher and writer. I immediately ordered every one of her novels thatr I could find at a price I could pay, and in September eg kindly carted them across the Atlantic to me.
Time passed and I didn’t read them. I genuinely thought that I would need a great deal of calm and fortitude to tackle these books by one who has been proclaimed the Dostoevsky of the 20th century. I remember Dostoevsky.
After more than two months I was faced with either beginning Murdoch or reading some violent modern books that are more noir than “Noir.” I picked up the first book of fiction she ever wrote: Under the Net. I started to read it.
It’s funny! It’s charming, the characters are as flawed as they must be and I found myself both thinking about the underlying principles of what must versus what may be lived while laughing my head off. There’s even a great dog in it. The narrator is a wastrel writer who works hardest at finding people to take care of him. It tells of a short-term adventure at a crisis period when all his balls are in the air and he constantly has to choose to do the decent thing or the convenient thing. The details of 1950s London are wonderful.
Thus armed, I picked up the next in my series, The Nice and the Good.
This is the book I needed a steady head for. Its style is more old fashioned, and because she is trying to tell us much more about good and truth and how they fit into life, there are a dozen plot lines going ahead at all times. It was, at times, heavy going. Some of the evil depicted seemed just silly to me from a viewpoint decades later, but the impulse to seek it, tolerate it, brush it off is still shocking. I think it is a book to read more than once. I found myself too taken up with the psychology of the characters and wanting to send them all to a good shrink to really understand how the theme of the nice versus the good was being played out. And it certainly was being played out, with an ending scene that is both terrifying and settling. In a way I feel the book should end there, but each character gets a final recap scene for those of you who insist on knowing what happened afterwards.
The underlying thread in both these books is that many of us value looking like we are good more than we value good. We omit, we elide, we follow rules in order to show ourselves to be good, and it makes us at best nice. It is only when we allow truth and memory and love to hurt us that we can do one good thing. And then, perhaps one more. The struggle, it seems, is daily. Murdoch makes a point that it is possible that justice is more just when offered by one person struggling for good than by adherence to the law.
Interestingly, Murdoch’s men are much more real than her women. The women seem more like expressions of ideals, each one embodying a type more than feeling like flesh and blood. In each of the two books I have read so far, the protagonist is a man, and in the first one, Under the Net, women can barely be said to exist. There are, handily, equal numbers of men and women in >
The Nice and the Good. There are also children, and really remarkable children at that. They were enormously important.
I will read these books again, because they are worth it. I will buy more of the twenty-six novels she wrote, too.
These pictured are all used and reprints. I bought them at amazon.com because the prices were better than amazon.uk, and they had all been translated into American English. That was disconcerting at times. Both vendors have used book dealers, but the postage from the UK is very high, and when ordering from secondary vendors, you can’t beef up the order to spread the postage out over more books. I struggle to get books, perhaps, more than I struggle to be good. Have to work on that.
November 19th, 2007
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