Occupy Florence

Sometimes I just feel left out by living overseas.  Did you know they don’t do fireworks on Independence Day nor do they eat turkey on Thanksgiving here?  I know!  Well, I wasn’t going to be left out of the whole “Occupy” movement so I packed the fam and a girlfriend into our top of the line tricked out Volvo SUV and went to go demonstrate on behalf of the 99%.

Sadly, only the 1% could afford a tent, but came out to support.

We didn’t want to change the underlying theme of the occupy movement in America, so we went forth with no clear leadership nor agenda.  Although we thought about making this guy our Grand Pumba because of his complete awesomeness.

Here, beside the organic market, we found our tribe.  They and their dogs were also obviously angered about somethings the government is doing…or not doing.  I can’t remember. 

Even the pigeons were pissed about the turkeys getting all the glory.  This is how they take on their one percent. Cannibalism.

Signs of this unofficial occupy movement were everywhere.  This urban art, for example, said in English, “Gentrification and tourist speculation are killing our home town”.  That sounds like a problem. 

Then there was the rubbish.  My Gawd!  How can people live like this!

We bedded down for the night, sure that sleeping in a public place for one night would change the government and basic human nature.

Our Sweet digs

The children protested for more toys, trick-or-treating at least five times a year, more Christmases and less apple sauce passed off as snacks.

We woke in the morning to theft

and violence

The cops came for our children!

Roo offered to drive

 

The cop car was powered by gas

Occupy Florence was roughly as successful as all the rest of the occupy movements. I'm so glad I can still celebrate my American heritage, even while living overseas.

Oops I did it again

I know where babies come from. 

I know why bank balances change.

I know how people get drunk.

I know why my blood work came back crappy.

It appears I have once again been hanging out in fantasy land with my pal, the stork.  I am my parent’s child.  People used to always say I looked like my Mom when I was young. I have her light skin and eyes, but when it gets down to it, I am my Dad’s daughter.   The bond between a Daddy and his little girl can be strong.  Mine is genetic.  I got from my Dad massive upper body strength, a solid bone structure, hair on my big toes and an almost inhuman ability to produce cholesterol.  You wouldn’t believe the numbers I can post!  I’ve got so much skill, I should be ranked.

My first cholesterol screen was in my mid twenties.  I was super fit with just 19% body fat and I ate mainly along the lines of the American Heart association.  The follow up doc took one look at me, told me that the numbers could be off by as much as 25% on any given day and I should “watch myself”.  Okay.  Well, it appears I am just as good at denial as I am with math.  I took my numbers, calculated the 25% margin of error.  Applied it in my favor and lo and behold, I was in the acceptable range, or pretty close.  Case closed.  The test sucked.  Clearly it was off by 25%.  Obviously the 25% was in my favor. I am fine.  Nothing to see here.   Pass the cheeseburgers. 

The second test went similarly.  I was pregnant – that can affect the numbers.  I’m fine.  Deny. Deny. Deny. 

The third test brought some big money numbers!  Holy Toledo.  I thought I was just really good at making cholesterol – no, I am a freaking savant!  The nurse called three hours after I left, and when she couldn’t get ahold of me, she called Husband’s work and told them I had “a medical emergency”.  Really?  I had a crappy cholesterol screen.  I wasn’t in intensive care after a disfiguring pole dancing accident.  Who calls a person’s spouse at work and leaves that sort of message?  What?  Was getting this information to me in two less hours going to save me from eating that lethal cannoli?   I can only dream about what had to be going through that nurse’s head when she placed that call, “dear God people, this girl will have a triple bypass by morning unless I can locate her right now by any means possible.  Here is the scent of the blood we drew this morning – send out the hounds!  By the looks of things, you should start at Popeye’s, set up a perimeter at Burger King, and for the love of all things precious, hide your bacon!” 

Okay, maybe I am a bit hard on the lady.  She only wanted to pass on the news.  At the rate I was going, I would likely have a heart attack in a decade or two.  Clearly reason to send Husband’s office into a tizzy trying to track him down, no?  I don’t want to have a heart attack.  That would way cut into my “being lazy” time.  I know they take good care of you in the hospital, but I prefer five star hotels and frankly they’re cheaper.  Not only that, have you seen the scars a bypass leaves?  I would need a turtleneck bikini!

The doc wanted to put me on meds straight away.  I’m no Seventh Day Adventist, but I hate taking meds.  You know all that mumbo jumbo the announcer jams in at the end of a commercial?  That’s a script for how my body will be affected.  Besides collecting side effects like state quarters, I’m sort of forgetful.   What were we talking about?

I’m literate.  Using this highly underrated super skill, I went to the book store and bought a “how to fix yourself” manual.  It had lots of super good info about nutrition in it.  Who knew!  Even with all the good info, it didn’t connect the dots.  So, armed with a ten spot and my reading super power, off I went again.  The next book had one little paragraph hidden in it that said roughly, “a genetic propensity to high cholesterol may be nothing more than a genetic propensity to not process animal protein properly” or some such thing.  This was my moment of zen.  My Dad and his Dad had wicked high “genetic” cholesterol with the bypass scars thrown in for good measure.  Shazzam! (Total super hero word) If I know what the problem is, maybe I can fix it on my own!  Another ten spot.  Another book.  A plan started forming.  Corny, but I felt empowered.  Like I had way more control over my well being than I ever imagined. 

I had watched my Dad go through every cholesterol med on the market.  Heard the results of liver function tests following each change.  I was honestly as afraid of the drugs as I was of the knife.

My doc went right for his pharmaceutical arsenal with me.  He reviewed my food journal and didn’t even offer the option of food therapy.  It looked to him like I was following the rules.  He listened patiently as I blathered on about “genetics” and “meat” and “petrifying fear of daily medications” and he gave me three months.  He set the guidelines.  “We draw again in three months.  I need to see a 10% drop or we will need to medicate you.”  I work well with deadlines and fear may cause some to clam up, but fear is my homey.  We get on well.  Without fear walking beside me holding my hand, I’m way more likely to keep on keeping on than make a change.

Change I did.  My reading told me cholesterol comes from high cholesterol foods, but also from saturated fat.  Okay high cholesterol foods – you’re out.  Saturated fat, the tribe has spoken.  And for good measure, animal products – all you over there - you’re fired!  Just like that I was a vegan - a curse word where I come from.  The best part of this medicating with munchies was the side effects.  My pants fell off after just one month.  By the end of month two I had dropped to a size zero.  My skin was glowing and I felt strong.  Scared, but strong.  At the end of three months, I knew my body had done some serious changing.  Absolute terror still kept me from calling the doc and ordering the follow up test.  At three and a half months my doc cornered me in our grocery store and told me it was time.  I delayed an additional two weeks because that’s what grown-ups do.  What?  No?  Whatever.  After the blood was drawn I waited and waited for the results to come back.  It had taken over-anxious-nurse three hours to call after the last test.  One day passed.  Then another.   When I could take it no longer, I called in for my results.  The nurse was baffled as to why they ran my blood again.  “Everything’s normal here”.  Clearly she has never met me.  The doc got on the line and was completely blown away.  Of course, this day I let the knowledge of the 25% variance in test results slide.  I had dropped my Cholesterol 110 points in three, no four months!  I had gone from a “medical emergency” phone call to an “everything’s normal” phone call.  The doc and I met again and I told him about the book I was following, Dr. Joel Furman’s Eat to Live.  He asked if it would be okay to share my story with others.  I was flying.  I wrote a thank you note to Doc Furman.  He responded asking to use my story as a testimonial to his plan.  How cool. 

The fear had passed. 

Then one day I found myself standing at the refrigerator door looking at a left over hotdog from the grill.  I ate it like a caveman!  I hadn’t even swallowed the last bite before the guilt set in.  I couldn’t even own up to my heinous misstep.  I carried the hot dog guilt for two week before I admitted to Husband this grievous error.  He laughed in my face.  “You messed up.  So what?  Today’s a new day and stressing yourself out over a hotdog isn’t going to make you healthy”.  You’re right.  It isn’t. 

More than four years have passed since I got serious about eating myself healthy.  I have made concessions along the way and I try to eat most of my meals vegetarian, but it just doesn’t work so well here in Italy.  The bread is packed with lard.  The pasta stuffed with cheese.  It is sooooooo good, and so bad for me.  When I am in country, I hang on to an extra eight pounds (the Italy Eight as I affectionately call those cute little bastards) and the cholesterol that goes with it.  A week in America and the weight vanishes…and the cholesterol that goes with it. 

Here I sit with last week’s blood work in hand.  I am up again.  A little too much Italy, a few too many concessions I guess.  The good news is, I know how to fix it.  The bad news, we have to attend family dietary counseling because in addition to the light skin and eyes I passed to my children via my Mom, I also passed them my Dad’s hairy big toes and cholesterol issues.   I’m not cuddled up with the stork any more.  I’m not doing fancy Enron accounting to make the numbers pretty any longer.  I deny denial.  It’s a setback, but so what?  Stressing about it won’t make us any healthier.  Six months till a redraw.  Go!

So what’s on my i-pod today?  The Hives - Try it Again.  Because you get up, you get down and you try again.  

To-do lists and channeling my inner Quaker

Everyone seems to have their own way of tracking what they need to get done.  I keep mine in my head…and buried in closets.  Or I did until I moved to Europe and found that there aren’t many closets to hide unfinished projects in.  Bummer.  So I am forced to keep my dirty little unfinished craft project out in the open.  Rubbermaid boxes stacked in corners like Martha Stewart’s Blair witch project pollute what was once an elegant library.  Amazingly a lot of these abandoned attempts at creativity and domestic-goddess-ness have followed me around for over a decade.  In several houses I have spent more time cleverly storing these skeletons in closets than actually trying to put meat on their bones.  A fine line exists between my skeletons and to-do list. 

Most of my Rubbermaids are stuffed full of very well organized quilt projects.  Mum taught me to sew when I was five.  Like many children raised in rural areas across the US, I did 4H.  I loved it!  I grew up in a home where Mum made most of the clothes.  She made my kindergarten wardrobe with matching outfits for my Barbie.  She even made my Dad’s suits.  Mum was a teacher, and I always thought she would have been most happy teaching Home Ec, but she taught special math and second grade.  She helped me through simple beginner sewing projects and by the time I was in third grade I was making some of my own school clothes.  Rutabaga is in third grade now and that sort of blows my mind. 

My maternal grandma was one of the world’s most special people.  When she passed, a long forgotten piece of her patchwork came into my possession.  It had been put together with fabrics made long before my parents had even met.  Little hexagons that she had stitched together by hand now rested in my hands.  The fabric was tattered around the edges and slightly discolored, but I was sure it was the most beautiful piece of hand work I had ever seen.  I wanted to finish it, to have something my grandmother and I had made together.  I did my research, a more difficult task without Google.  The name of the pattern she had been working was, “Grandma’s Flower Garden”.  That sealed the deal if there was ever a doubt.  I spent time looking through piles of scraps and cutting hexagon sets, making my own flowers for my Grandma’s garden.  Mum had been telling me all along that the fabric was too fragile to add on to, but I was intoxicated by the idea of this “Grandma and me” project so on I sewed.  Flowers were crafted from a night gown Mum had made me when I was in elementary school.  One or two were created with scraps from the Easter coat my Mum had stitched for a three year old version of me.  Scraps of every kind went from taking up space to being beautiful blossoms.  And then…nothing.  It is all in a Rubbermaid in the library along with a half dozen other unfinished great ideas.   

Hard to believe, but the number has actually been shrinking.  About six years ago I finished five in one major push.  I burned myself out with that go.  I couldn’t even look at patchwork for a couple years following.  Each project has been banished for different reasons.  One I had no idea how to finish.  The next, wasn’t looking how I thought it would when I started it.  A couple needed help over a technique hurdle.  Some were victims of hasty cleaning for guests.  Adding insult to injury, Friends would give me their unfinished projects and fabrics when they had had enough.  They are all lined up in little plastic quilt coffins waiting for resurrection day.

It may not sound like it, but I love quilting.  It’s a creative outlet, just one that takes months upon months to come to fruition.  I wouldn’t say I have adult ADD (some might, but I wouldn’t), but staying on track, focused, and interested for that long is difficult.  I love working with my hands and there is almost a primal reward in creating something where there was nothing.  They just take so blasted long! 

About five years ago, while me and quilting were on a mutually agreed upon period of separation, I found cakes!   The thing about cakes is, they have a time frame.  Even if I don’t love the direction a cake is going or it doesn’t look just like I planned, I cannot very well put it in a Tupperware and pick it back up in a couple years.  I have, at most, three-ish days.  It turns out I work well with deadlines.  Even though I sink massive amounts of time into each cake I make, it is mere moments compared with my last hobby.  I take a photo.  People eat.  And it’s done. 

It was the lack of closets that made the Rubbermaids weigh on me.  Seeing them was stressing me out.  So much time and effort had been put into each one of the items in the land of misfit blankets.  Like my to-do list, my intentions for each project remained mainly in my brain.  Then one day I got a wake-up call.  Something unexpected and bad happened to a beloved man and it shook me to the core.  Suddenly the thought of all the things I hadn’t finished, or done that I want to do, pressed on my heart.  They outweighed the accomplishments and the armoire full of finished blankets.  I had learned to quilt because of an unfinished project of my Grandma’s.  True, but I was doubting I would ever have enough grandchildren to find beauty in my project purgatory.   Tragedy turned into a call to action for me.

One by one the boxes have come upstairs.  One by one I am finishing…  I have two very close to completion.  There is no bed waiting for cover in my home.  In all honesty, they will likely go from finished, to folded in the armoire.  Being innately lazy, I have picked the easiest ones to work on.  The remainder of the boxes are pretty intimidating.  All along I have imagined having a beautiful guest room to rotate the quilts through.  To have one more beautiful than the next for each holiday, each season.  Maybe our next home will be our forever house.  Maybe it will have a guest room.  Maybe it won’t.  What it will have is a bunch more quilts.

Oh, and just so you don’t go all getting the wrong idea about me, I still live for heavy metal and poker.  My friend coined the term “Metaliquilt” for my propensity to rock out while domesticating it up.  My other friend refers to me as “Betty Rocker”.  Yes, I am baby pink and black Neapolitan ice cream, and really, changing that is nowhere on my to-do list.

Little Straw Hats

Cappellacci di Zucca

It's Italy.  It is amazing that I have written 42 blog posts and not done one about pasta.  Let's remedy that right now!  Northern Italy loves to stuff pasta.  I was first exposed to the beauty of stuffed pasta many years ago by one of America's most famous Italian chefs, Chef Boyardee.  My, his ravioli were such a culinary complexity following spagetti-os. Who knew it could get even better?

There are loads of stuffed pastas in this region.  Some of the more readily found contain spinach and ricotto, prosciutto (parma ham) and cheese, but by far the most popular here in Ferrara is the Cappellacci di Zucca.  Cappellacci refers to the shape of the pasta.  It means "little hats".  Di Zucca refers to the filling "of pumpkin".  I know I have only written one other food blog and it was also about pumpkin...I am loyal if not terribly diverse. 

This pasta is part of the ancient and popular culinary tradition of our town of Ferrara.  Amazingly, there is record of this recipe dating back to 1584!  It didn't have the clever "hat" name back then (that took a couple extra centuries). 

If you are going to stuff pasta, you need some pasta to stuff.  So, let's get on it!

The recipe is not terribly complex.

One egg for every 100 grams of flour.  That's it!

For this demonstration, we used 400g of flour and 4 eggs.

On a solid surface, make a bowl with your flour and crack in your eggs.

Start working the eggs into the flour

until you are able to knead it.  If it is too sticky, you can add a bit more flour.

After your dough has been kneaded into a fabulous ball, cover it with a tea towel and let it rest for a while.  For reference, this is a lunch or salad sized plate, not a dinner dish.

While the pasta is resting, let's work on the filling!  The base is pumpkin.  Maestra's Mom cooked this pumpkin down for us.  She split the pumpkin and baked it in the oven.  To get the pumpkin to this point, you can also peel and dice the pumpkin and cook it over a low flame on the stove top.

Here's where the special happens:

Add three-ish teaspoons of sugar, one teaspoon of salt, and one grated nutmeg nut

Grate and add 300 grams of parmasean...or more

There seems to be some heated culinary debate over the addition of amaretto cookies.  It seems that one is either way for them or way against.  Maestra is a fan, but her sister who stopped by, is not.  We ended up adding three of these quarter sized cookies crushed to powder. 

 

The completed filling.

So the pasta has had a chance to rest and is ready to be rolled

Divide the pasta into workable sized sections.

We made a 4 egg batch and Maestra has chosen to divide the dough into four sections.

The pasta is getting worked!  Start with the setting rather thick and run the dough through several times.  If it is sticky, dust it with a bit more flour.  It will get worked in with the passes through the pasta roller.  Reduce the setting on the roller until your pasta is thin enough for cappellacci.

It is now past 11.  It's PROSECCO TIME!

 

Prosecco, there's happy in every bottle!

So how do you know when your pasta is thin enough?

The pasta on the left is still a bit thick.  The strip on the right is ready and has had the rough edges trimmed.

The rolled pasta needs to be cut into roughly two inch squares

Here is the life-cycle of rolling a cappalaci.

Put a slight teaspoon of filling in the center

Fold, then seal the pasta around the outside edges by pressing firmly with your fingertips

Pinch the ends

like so

Twist and pinch!

Voila!

Lather, rinse, repeat a few gagillion more times...

These have been placed on a screened board to dry a bit before cooking

To cook:

Bring a big old pot of water to a boil.

Toss in a reasonable amount of pasta (don't want to totally cowd those hats)

And a handful of sale grosso (big salt)

Return to a boil for at least three minutes

What sort of sauce you serve your cappellacci di zucca in is totally up to your taste.  Traditionally, they are served with butter and fresh sage.  They are also very often served with ragu.  One of my favorite restuarants serves them with a butter and orange sauce.  Another family favorite restuarant serves them in a brandy cream sauce with walnuts.  Each one, amazingly, is delish!

The butter and sage

Straight from the pot into the sauce

And onto the plate

Top with a bit more grated parmasean...

Ivy is having hers with ragu while Girl Crush remarked these are the best cappellacci she had ever tasted.

Maestra enjoys the fruits of her labor while I polish off the prosecco!

Delizioso!

Special great big thanks to Maestra for the fantastic cooking lesson as well as her Mum and Sister for helping us along.  And of course, to amazing friends that make everything a joy.