in search of a dream to call home
On Saturday I was making dinner while Dominique (my three-year-old) sat at the table, eating his snack. He looked over and saw that I was preparing brussels sprouts. His remark? I kid you not: “Brussels Sprouts. Hooray!” He must have continued to think about it for longer than the typical three-year-old attention span, because a few minutes later he added, “Those brussels sprouts are going to be so yummy!”
We have a branch potluck tonight at Church. I’m making pizza. I don’t normally make pizza for Italians, but less than half the branch is actually Italian, so I’ve convinced myself I can get away with it just this once. But I never make pasta for Italians. Never. I made this resolution years ago, and it was strengthened the other day when Tony came home from work. He had been discussing food with a coworker (yes, this is one of the most common topics of conversation in Italy), and mentioned that he ate pasta for lunch every day. His coworker asked who made the pasta, and upon being told it was I, asked if I made good pasta.… Read more
Well, we’ve been here over a month now, and I’m sure you’re all dying to know what we’re eating in Florence. So I thought I’d give you the links to some of my favorite Tuscan recipes. On the menu for tonight is Tuscan White Bean Minestrone. I made this in a vegetarian version before we came to Italy, omitting the bacon (well, so not strictly vegetarian. I used my homemade chicken stock), but here in Italy they have 100 gram packages of cubed pancetta, so I use that, and it is delicious. Worth a trip to Trader Joe’s, where I believe they may also carry small packages of cubed pancetta.… Read more
We are supposed to be in Italy. The week before we were to return home, between two weddings, Christmas, and New Year’s, we realized that we had substantially overestimated the number of things we could accomplish in three months, even at a frenetic, positively Southern Californian pace. So we called our Italian airline, AirOne, which as you remember, considers carseats unsafe for children. It appears that AirOne employs one lone Indian customer service agent. It took us a few days to catch him on duty.
When we finally did, he said there was no way he could look up our reservation without a code from Expedia, where we’d purchased the ticket.… Read more
Blogging time’s been hard to come by lately. I don’t blog about our business, or I would have plenty to blog about. We’ve all been sick this week. However, we did go out to lunch yesterday with a lovely lady we met while campaigning for Proposition 8. Actually, we met her the day of the election. When we went to vote, we noticed that outside the polling location there were only people passing out flyers for No on Prop 8. Tony got in trouble at the polling place, because he wore his Yes on 8 T-shirt, and no biased material (including clothing) is allowed inside a polling place.… Read more
Today was Giorgio’s birthday. Being American Mormons, we decided to make him cookies. We made thumbprint cookies, but instead of filling them with jam, we filled them with, yes, you guessed it. Nutella! On Carla’s birthday last month, we inadvertently crashed her party when we stopped by with cookies on our way down for our nightly walk. So today we took Giorgio’s cookies at lunchtime.
It appears that we successfully pulled off a social encounter in Italy! Carla told me that Giorgio was very touched, and that he had asked her to invite us to his party in the evening! She is making what she describes as a “very unhealthy” chocolate cake for him.… Read more
Advisory note: non-Foodies may find this entry tedious. Just come back tomorrow for something more exciting or philosophical.
Have you ever spent an entire afternoon just eating? No? Well, neither had I until we were precipitously invited to an Italian wedding yesterday.
For the past few weeks since we ran out of bee pollen, we’ve been searching for it all over. Friday evening the people who sold us our dandelion honey dropped by and told us where we could find pollen. So yesterday morning we hopped on our bikes and rode up to Vigna, some three kilometers up the road toward Certosa di Pesio.… Read more
Productivity for us here in Italy seems to be more a product of serendipity than careful planning. It’s not that we don’t plan exhaustively. But sometimes things turn out better when we just go with the flow. Our internet has been grinding to a halt fairly often lately. We can get reliable dial-up, which us O.K. for email and other more basic tasks. But we cannot send large attachments, and forget about Skype calls (we don’t have a home phone, and we’ve been trying to set up quite a lot of things for our trip to the U.S.)., or web-conferencing.
We had a web-conference scheduled for Thursday evening, which we were forced to cancel.… Read more
How we choose to nourish ourselves is deeply significant. Food provides our bodies with the means to think and act, to heal themselves, and to reproduce; in short, to fill the measure of their creation. Proper caloric intake is only the beginning of our need for nourishment. The quality and variety of our food, and our skill and intent in preparing it are vital to our well-being on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels. Food was intended by God to “please the eye, . . . gladden the heart, . . . strengthen the body, and . . . enliven the soul” (Doctrine and Covenants 59:18-19)
One’s relationship with food (which of necessity must be renewed daily) can be a source of joy and fulfillment, or of frustration and destruction.… Read more