Pepper harvest ahead (cross fingers)
Friday, 10 June 2011
Yes, I admit it’s an out-of-focus crappy picture, but it delivers the pertinent info: the pepper’s almost in bloom.
Musings
Adventures in the flour aisle
Thursday, 9 June 2011
I moved outside of my comfort zone today. I made pasta.
I checked the three cookbooks I have with pasta recipes and figured I could use AP or cake flour, but the best would be semolina.
And the Bob’s Red Mill selection at the nearby WF did include the semolina, so that’s what I used. I dumped it on the counter and immediately got worried. The flour was not fine; it was grainy.
I added the liquids using the well method, and started working the dough. Still grainy. Then, all of a sudden it wasn’t! I was thrilled.
I just want to say, however, that if the quantity is right for Italians with three cups of flour for four people in a side dish of pasta, we need maybe one or one-and-a-half. There was w-a-y too much.
But tasty!
Harvest 2011 begins
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
We initiated the 2011 basil harvest today. I made pesto and combo’d it with Japanese noodles, however incongruous that is, because that’s what I had in the pantry. Yum!
Emerging
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
I’m emerging from the post time-change body-clock shift that might be termed the “weak or no signal” stage of trans-Atlantic travel recovery.
Specifically, I awakened early (after falling asleep waaay too early), took a 1/2 hour nap about 10:30 am, and hummed through the rest of the day.
I especially enjoyed the humming part.
For your doccia
Monday, 6 June 2011
I suppose that if I spent more time cruising shelves in the groc store, I’d know about products like Happy Time. A few post-Google clicks, and I discover that the stuff is made “with caring Bamboo Extract and delicious Orange Blossom.”
We found Happy Time (in our shower, duh!) at the agriturismo where we stayed downslope from Francavilla Marittima, in the boot arch zone just above the Gulf of Taranto. The Ancient Greeks established themselves early here, and it was part of Magna Graecia—that is, the Greek lands beyond the Greek homeland.
Still adjusting to the time change
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Yes, there’s some pesto in our immediate future; gotta clip this exuberance back. And do some weeding.
We iPad-ported the selected pictures I mentioned yesterday with us over to the relatives’ (thanks again for watching the house, J!), and I realized we also have to distill the narration we pair with them….
Urban weekend: Summerfest
Saturday, 4 June 2011
Despite the heat, we found the main aisle of Summerfest 2011 jammed even before noon. The music was barely going (just DJ), so we concentrated on the artist booths. We made two modest purchases, then retired to the new sushi place, although we’re sad that it displaced Everybody’s Pizza, a long-time neighborhood favorite (the scuttlebutt we heard was that the landlord raised the rent to squeeze EP out). We found the sushi etc. tasty and rather more expensive than a typical sushi place around here.
Among other accomplishments today: 1) I’ve yet to take a nap; and, 2) I went through the 16K-plus pictures from the Italy trip & selected just over 250 for a quick slideshow. That’s a distillation of something like 1.6%. Amazing.
I come home to learn this
Friday, 3 June 2011
Bee balm with lavender flowers, a Monarda species.
I’m disoriented by the time change—to say the least. Up at 3am, nap from 1 to 3pm, and again from 6 to 10pm. Yawn.
Now you know for sure that we’re home—I’m presenting a flower picture…(from right outside the front door). Reading about the bee balm, I discover there are two plants tagged bergamot. One is a Monarda species. More commonly, however, the term is used for a citrus that looks like a yellow-green orange, and is commonly grown in Calabria, and used especially to flavor Earl Grey tea.
And now I realize that some of the citrus trees I saw in Calabria and Sicily must have been Citrus bergamia—my ignorance of the diversity of the Citrus genera.
Great trip
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Today we had coffee in Napoli. (And Napoli has long been known for its coffee.)
Then we buzzed La Tour Eiffel. (If you stretch the definition of the word “buzzed”.)
And we will sleep tonight in Atlanta….
What reality is the one you seek?
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
The original—well, the original tiles reconstructed in the museum. With positively lousy lighting.
Today was Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli day. We dodged persistent raindrops getting there from a nearby train station, and discovered the museum was more of a ramble through the art objects from several Naples-area archaeological sites—especially Pompeii and Herculaneum—than a comprehensive survey.
In particular, the museum highlighted that while we have visited those sites and seen roads, sidewalks, walls, and floors, many of the decorations we’ve seen have been copies, while the originals were removed to this institution for safe-keeping—beginning in the 1700s. Well, plus some of the architecture has been reconstructed (rather than merely stablized), too.
The colorful copy we saw at Herculaneum. In somewhat better light.
Both of us were very glad that we saw P and H, the sites, first, and then the out-of-context artwork plopped together sometimes in a mix-and-match fashion that we found extremely disconcerting. One room, for example, had this mosaic from Herculaneum paired with tile-inlaid columns from Pompeii. Many of the displays, however, were from single rooms/residential complexes, but usually were not displayed in the order they were originally. Like I said, mix and match.