All the news almost all the time

The recipe contest has been extended! Come on guys, there is not a reason in the world for you not to enter this contest. Not only has the entry time been extended, but the first prize has been doubled to two years of subscription to La Cucina Italiana! That’s US$ 96 of fabulous food and fotos.

It’s freezing cold here, so it’s just the right time to be testing recipes for soup. We are ready. We are waiting. We are even hungry!

I have been very taken up with all kinds of non-blogging activities over the past week and this week looks busy, too. Part of the reason is that I am changing things. Instead of making dishes one by one and either eating them myself or making a dinner party so I can feed them to others, I will have open house almost every Friday evening when my friends will come by and eat the blog foods. Well, other food, too, however it won’t be a dinner party but more in line with a cruise ship buffet cocktail party. Did I really say that? Relax. I’ve never even been on a cruise ship.

I planned to write this and to say if any reader is planning on being in Umbria, get in touch and see if your schedule will allow you to come by on Friday evening. I planned that and then got an email from one of you saying that she is coming and could we meet, so she’ll be the first blog reader from the wide world to come on by. There are already, of course, people who read and even sometimes comment here who are loved friends and eat with me all the time.

One of the new focuses of Think On It is going to be cucina rapida, or quick cookery. Over time I will try to go back through all the posts and add a tag “fast” and “rapida” to any dish that takes less than 30 minutes to get on the table. I’ll also work on some new fast dishes.

Why? Because Alex had the nerve to write that slow food is for old people who have the time for it. In truth, old people are the ones who do not have time to spare. In truth a lot of made from scratch great cookery is not time consuming. What is time consuming is learning enough about food to figure out what is fast and good and what is fast and a dumb choice. No one can do that for you, but anyone who doesn’t learn enough about food and nutrition to get that is on the way to trouble. If you do not know what is going in your mouth you may very easily be poisoning yourself. I read an official government research article the other day that said that European men have extremely lowered sperm counts because of plastics used to package foods and drinks. You know what? That’s pretty serious. We already knew that somehow previously unknown food allergies have become so serious that a person can die when someone in the same room opens a package with the wrong contents.

I can’t fix all that for you, but I can work on coming up with more foods that are healthy, delicious and can be made in a veritable flash. They won’t all be Italian, but they’ll all be possible in Italy.

Alex called me last night after reading my comment on what he wrote. He challenged me to come up with more easy dishes and fewer in which you must first learn to catch or butcher the main ingredient. Okay, I can do that. I told him I would if he would also cook what I come up with. Sure, he’s a busy person with a full life. Who isn’t? He’s a dad as well. He admitted that he once bought and served his child dinosaur-shaped formed ham pieces and that they were awful. It’s one thing to say let’s produce more recipes for fast and easy food, but I challenge Alex, not exactly the family cook, to make them and feed them to the family and therefore prove to all of us that even a weak vessel like Alex can do it. It seems to me that there can be no losers in this deal.