So I have been repairing Puglia posts from last year and adding back the photos that got lost in the move. How I would like to be there this gray day!
Puglia the Beautiful
Puglia: Food
Puglia restaurants
3 comments January 14th, 2008
I’m old enough to remember that movie, and perhaps you are not. The phrase describes how I feel right now about retail fashion.
Remember I said that sometimes the search terms used to find me affect what I write about? Well, lately summer style 2008 has headed the list day after day, so I thought, time to post about what there is to wear this year.
I’m looking. And looking. Retail fashion does not care if you look pretty. So far none of the pretty and female (I do not say feminine because it often has overtones I do not intend) clothes that were on the runways has made it to the main street or mall shops. And yet if I look at street fashion sites I see girls and women wearing exactly those things.
The shops are filled with the usual shapeless or badly shaped separates. One famous chain on both sides of the Atlantic looks as if they found a great white sale in the sheet department of Bloomingdales. There is a complement of street hooker once more. There are low slung and too tight pants, adhesive and too short tops sprinkled with copies of 1950s maternity smocks.
I continue to look. I am steaming here. I feel like I want to draw what should be in those shops, tag them with fabric samples and post that. But what good would that do? I can’t make them for you, even if you liked them. On Sunday January 13, 2008, I have not yet found good clothes except those we’ve already seen on the runways of the major world designers. And that makes me mad.
2 comments January 13th, 2008
Chez Pim has published the list of winners.
I am not one of them… so sad.
However, Paul Reiss won the cooking lesson with Discover la cucina italiana! I look forward to meeting you, Paul.
Thank you to each and every one who bought a raffle ticket, and especially, thank you for taking a chance on me.
5 comments January 11th, 2008
Results of the raffle have been delayed until January 11th, which is Friday, due to technical difficulties. I am rearing at the bit, myself.
5 comments January 9th, 2008
http://www.judithgreenwood.com/thinkonit/food-for-summer-redux/
I think this looks odd, so I will explain that this salad was published elsewhere with a link to the whole blog rather than the salad. Everybody is more than welcome, but instead of salad, they were being greeted with rubbish.
Add comment January 8th, 2008
Here in the International Herald Tribune is a review of the newly published book, “In Defense of Food.”
I’ve been reading reviews of the book and its ideas for over a week now. I think I am sort of on the same page with the author, and I do try to get people to think about real food as much as I can without being insulting. Many people, having been convinced that cooking real food takes too much time, do not want to have the boxes pried out of their hands, but you know that semi-homemade is full of bad stuff. Don’t you?
4 comments January 8th, 2008
I’m adding a new article from BBC News that seems to have a handle on how this crisis is developing. I’ve been waiting for seven years for the Italian people to get angry enough to shake their fists in the faces of those who don’t serve them. They are in the piazzas now doing just that.
In addition, there is another blog with an article on this problem with more discussion among people who care about waste.
Bear with me please. I am going to try to bring you the real story of what is happening and has been happening in Naples concerning refuse. Rai Television has films used on the newscasts, in Italian, of course, but the visuals are compelling. I’m hoping that link will take you straight to the first story, but if it doesn’t, you can select TG1 Emergenza Napoli Rifiuti, but first you must watch a brief commercial starring the old man of Italian TV.
And then you can see this, TG1 - Rifiuti, Campania ancora nel caos. I know you won’t understand the words unless you speak Italian, but the images will help you understand what’s going on.
It’s possible that this only takes you to the player and you will have to select the film you want to see.
There’s some print media on the subject, like here at Yahoo! news. I think the reports are seriously underplayed. The crisis is mindblowingly terrible and it has been building for over a decade. When I was in Campania last autumn, my friends and I walked through a beautiful gem of a city, Caserta, and had to encircle piles of trash in the streets, stinking and rotting. There’s too much trash and nowhere to put it.
The reason is partly nimby and partly corruption and partly that like almost everywhere these days, people make too much junk. Somehow, and I will let the Neapolitan politicians explain how that happened, refuse contracts were made with the mob, which in Naples is the Camorra. Even though they and their families live there, they didn’t have the sense to know they had to keep dangerous medical refuse separated from household refuse, that they needed to contract for and build landfills and that they really needed to cart the stuff away and get rid of it. Instead, they took the money and ran, not far, because they would have no power at all outside Campania, and they therefore proved that criminals are stupid, the politicians who play ball with criminals are stupid and people in general will have to come to grips with organized crime because no one else will. Now the criminals, the corrupt and weak politicians and all of the millions who live in Campania live with the resulting mountains of deadly refuse. The people have gone to the streets over this and set fire to the trash mountains, with possibly even more deadly results. I’m not sure which is more sick-making; breathing those fumes or drinking water polluted by the unburned trash.
So, you ask, why should you care? Isn’t it enough to just say we’ll skip Campania on our trip to Italy?
I don’t think so. There is no place on earth that is proof against this problem of too much trash produced over a long period of time. Those mountains of refuse were produced in what is one of the poorer parts of Italy. Imagine what is being produced in more affluent parts of the world. Now multiply that by the length of time it will take for your grandchildren to grow up. What will happen to all this stuff? Will you fill the Grand Canyon? Throw it in the ocean and kill or make poisonous all the fish? Or the latest, which is to throw it into active volcanoes? What if it just gets thrown back up?
This article in the Independent expands the statistics to include other European areas, but we all know that it isn’t just Europe.
The truth is that we all have to take responsibility for ourselves and our production of waste. We have to think hard about every single thing that becomes refuse in our own lives and how it could have been prevented in the first place. Whether that is new packaging ideas, tighter recycling laws and possibilities or just saying no to packaging and disposables and cutting back on the endless purchasing we do, something must change.
The next story could be yours.
20 comments January 5th, 2008
This is Fudge Pie as made by Barb, of Barb and Art Live in Italy. I made this again and took it out of the oven sooner, which gave me a creamier, fudgier center. (Barb, I don’t actually measure either the salt nor the vanilla!)
When I started a blog, I read a lot of opinions about blogging. The first and most important thing said was usually to be original. I decided to be rigorously original. I took that to mean that everything I put on the page had to be my own work, including the recipes. Over time, I started looking around the rest of the blogging world and I realized that most people who blog about food use recipes from cookbooks and report on their experience with that recipe. (I say that left them more time to become good photographers and that’s why many of them are much better than I.)
So then I knew how original ‘original’ needed to be, but by then I had the habit of posting new recipes of my own invention or traditional recipes updated with modern ingredients and a few dishes I’d copied from eating experiences around my world. It’s been a habit I’ve been unable to break, and besides to me cookbooks are more like biographies than instructional manuals.
Sometimes, however, I do cook something I’ve found somewhere else. Sometimes I point you at the source, vis a vis the macaron. Today, I am going to give you a recipe just as I found it, because it is fabulous. It is not someone’s original work, but something from a cookbook, unnamed, that her grandmother used to make.
No competition, this is the best thing I have made in 2008. It’s one of the best things I have eaten this year too. It would be the best thing, if it were nutritionally a little more healthy and a little less addictive.
I ran into the recipe at Group Recipes. Simple, quick, it doesn’t take any exotic ingredients. I cooked it less than 12 hours after reading it the first time. I would point you at it, but you’d have to join to see it.
I made only one real change. I didn’t have 1.5 cups of white sugar, so I used 1 cup of white sugar and .5 cup of brown sugar. I left out the 1 teaspoon of milk, because I couldn’t imagine what 1 teaspoon of milk could possibly do for it that would be worth washing the spoon. Other than the little pan in which I melted the butter and chocolate, and the pie plate in which it was cooked, it took one bowl and one whisk to make and was easy to clean up. In about 10 minutes it was in the oven.
Fudge Pie
Ingredients
* 1/2 cup butter (130 g burro)
* 3 squares unsweetend chocolate (85 g cioccolato amaro)
* 3 large eggs, beaten
* 1 1/2 cups sugar
* 1/4 cup flour
* 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
* 1/2 tsp salt
* 1tsp. milk
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees
2. Melt butter and chocolate and cool slightly
3. Gradually mix chocolate and eggs
4. Add rest of ingredients and stir until just mixed
5. Spread into a buttered 9 inch pie plate
6. Bake 40 minutes
7. The center will be soft, but it will firm as it cools
8. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream
I’ve carried it all over the neighborhood, giving tastes and samples. I didn’t serve it with ice cream because I didn’t have any and besides it seems really rich all by itself. You can’t eat very much before you say enough. The first bite was just otherworldly.
Tomorrow I will give you a picture.
5 comments January 4th, 2008
Questions to you:
How did you get here? If you are one of those I wrestled to the floor and held down until you promised to visit, you don’t really need to share that. How do you find other blogs?
Why do you return to blogs that you read? Why do you subscribe?
Who are you? Not what it says on your passport or license, but what kind of reader are you?
Answers from me:
How do I figure out what to write? Partly by what interests me, partly from what interests you, as demonstrated by search terms used that found me. Example below:
reheatable vegetables dishes 6
hog jowls 3
CORAL,GEM 2
Bernard Willhelm 2
getting old fable 1
Summer 2008 Style 1
pasta sauce with ham 1
Beef Ragu 1
tomatoes on the floor 1
preserving+methods+dried+pasta 1
That was yesterday. Other days, other terms. Some astounding.
Your comments.
Links out, although some are not to be understood. I’m wondering what the seeker after certain key words will think when he arrives here and sees Prosciutto as a topic.
Conversations in real life.
Why do I blog? Because I need someone to listen to me! OK, maybe that’s lame, but mostly because I need to write and to blog you must write.
Who do I read? The people on the right in the blogroll and links, as well as a bunch of things I have on Blog Lines that aren’t necessarily pertinent to this blog but add to my general fund of knowledge (and sometimes misinformation, too.)
6 comments January 4th, 2008
It just means ham in Italy now, so if you happen to be ordering it at a delicatessen counter say prosciutto crudo to get the ham sold in other countries under that umbrella term. If, instead, you want the familiar boiled or baked ham you may have eaten all your life, ask for Prosciutto cotto.
Prosciutto crudo is pretty special stuff, no matter where you get it. Try to find out from your vendor where theirs comes from. It has to be labeled, so they can tell you. I won’t tell you that if all they have is something that isn’t Italian you shouldn’t try it or use it in a recipe, because it doesn’t have to be Italian to be good, but your chances are higher if it is Italian.
Not all Prosciutto crudo italiano is the same. Through most of Italy there is a local type which will be called nostrano, meaning ours. Our local Umbrian is rather salty for me, so I order Prosciutto di Parma, or Parma ham, or Prosciutto San Daniele from Friuli Venezia-Giulia. Both of them are less salty, tenderer and moister than others I’ve tried. Read here about San Daniele. Trust me, it’s delicious. If you click onto the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma above, you’ll get a visual treat that will be as good as a meal and give you some ideas about what you can do with that glorious pig.
There are some don’ts about buying prosciutto crudo. Don’t buy too much at a time. A real purist would say to buy what you can consume that very day, but I think it’s fine to buy it a day ahead. Just leave it in the carefully wrapped package it came in and remove it from the refrigerator 30 to 60 minutes before you want to serve it. Here in Italy you can buy the number of slices you want or you can buy it by the etto, which is 100 grams and close to four ounces. Unless you are feeding a huge crowd, you’ll never need a pound, let alone a kilo of it.
If you see it at a counter already “shaved” and piled up like a mess, don’t touch it with a ten foot pole. No one would treat real prosciutto crudo that way, so it’s bound to be nasty, plus it’s meant to be cut one thin slice at a time and arranged carefully so that it is beautiful when it’s served. It’s never meant to be piled up on a chunk of bread like cheap bologna, which is pretty much what those piles of shavings can do.
Don’t put mustard or pickle with it as you might with ordinary ham. You’ll miss the true delight of this special thing if you kill it with strong flavors like those.
Don’t fry it. Really, just don’t.
So you’ve found it, you’ve bought 100 grams; what to do with it now? Most of mine gets picked up, slice by slice, and nibbled straight from the package. Maybe you’re a more disciplined type. I like prosciutto crudo with fruits, not just melon or figs, but any fruit. That’s a perfect antipasto course in almost anyone’s terms. Very occasionally I order prosciutto and eggs at a cafe. It’s served as a crunchy slab of toasted bread topped with fried eggs, and prosciutto is laid over all, so that the heat of the eggs starts to melt it a bit, draping it gracefully over the plate. It’s a lot better than it reads, or so I found after gagging at the thought for a couple of years, then finally giving it a shot. Nice.
Crudo is often use minced and added to things for its wonderful flavor; things like ravioli or tortellini stuffings, or minced fillings for involtini or meat roll-ups. I usually look for the end pieces too small to slice and sold at a bargain pèrice for those purposes. It makes a very unsatisfactory broth, in my opinion. Since it isn’t smoked, it turns back into pork and makes pork broth. There are easier ways to get pork broth.
If you are interested to know more about prosciutto, Wikipedia has a page on it. I can’t guarantee every word as I am more of an eater than a researcher when it comes to hams, but I did not see Prosciutto di Praga there, which I hear good things about. I also note a lack of detail in the handling of San Daniele, but it isn’t our only resource. If you know something that author didn’t know, fill in the blanks and I’ll go read it.
Speaking of smoked, there is smoked prosciutto in Italy. It’s called Speck and comes from the Austro-Germanic parts of Italy in the Dolomites.
You can read what Kyle Philips has to say about Speck and what to do with it at about.com. It’s approximate to Virginia country ham, and I use it as I would the US product, but I also eat it as it comes, which I never did with country ham.
A word on cotto? It’s just like what you are used to. It can be arrosto, or baked, or just cotto, boiled. There are grades and if possible get “alta qualità” which doesn’t have additives. 
If you come to Italy, just go to a grocery store and order un etto of each kind that interests you, get a loaf of good bread. some fruit and a bottle of Prosecco. It may be a supper you’ll want only once in your life, but it will give you an education and an attitude on prosciutto. Or seek out a good source wherever you are, buy what you can find, following the few rules and when you come to Italy, you’ll already approach the deli counter with attitude, just like we do.
4 comments January 2nd, 2008
