In the Clouds

Is where I’ve been lately.

I can’t possibly describe the bleak and lost spell I’ve been under for the past few weeks following my trip to Rome. I didn’t call anyone, I rarely went out, I couldn’t bring myself to cook much and I just felt spacey and sad.

Travel is an amazing equalizer. It expands your horizons and turns lofty notions of culture and art into very real and tangible things.

Grated pecorino romano heaped upon freshly made pasta, sipping Peroni in the blazing Mediterranean sun, touching history with my own two hands, eating canvases with my eyes.

 

But no one told me that I could lose myself in it, that I would feel more at home there than here, no one described the illogical grief when you discover it’s not your own.

I know I’m lucky to even have the chance to even go, so I shouldn’t be whining about it now.  Yet, I feel a bit disingenuous even saying that because I truly believe that we make our own luck in this world. It’s true that things can have an awful way of coming about but it’s not what we believe in it’s what we do at that juncture that makes us who we are. The first time I traveled to Europe I was barely 20 years old and I worked as a waitress in a French bakery cafe, tips were put in a common pitcher on the counter and divided up at the end of each shift. I didn’t make much but I put every penny in a metal enamel jar on the mantel in my tiny apartment that I shared with 2 other people. I eventually saved enough to cover the cost of a passport and airfare to Amsterdam. I decided I was going, then I saved up all of my money, and then I went. It can be that easy, because it’s a matter of priorities.

And this entire blue spell is a matter of priorities as well. I know that Italy has huge economic problems right now, and that not everyone who lives in Rome is on a romantic holiday. However, let me state it plainly, they have a better standard of living. They don’t live opulently and bathe in gold but they live truly more relaxed lives. A larger emphasis is placed on quality of life, seasonal and fresh cuisine and walking(!) I don’t want a nice car, a big house, or a fancy handbag. I want a huge pile of salumi and a carafe of wine for lunch, a city choked with art and architecture and a tiny flat steps away from a daily greenmarket. That is all.

Damn you David Leibovitz and Frances Mayes and even you Pamela Druckerman.

I’m finally starting to come out of it. I am not ungrateful for my life, I just know that better things are out there and I feel like we’ve got it all wrong somehow with our narrow focus on work, and material wealth. I want a life of wealth not a life of objects.

Is this making any sense?

 

Salve

Is how you say hello in Italian.

But most people say bongiornio or buona sera, meaning good morning and good night respectively dependent on the time of day. Greetings are not optional, and I like that.

Salve, is such a beautiful word though. It made me think of the trip as a heady healing balm, or as salvation from the steel jaws of the grind.

Rome was everything I had hoped and it was so much more.  I’m getting choked up just thinking about it as I type this. Thinking that it’s wasn’t my life but someone else’s that I got to try on for size for a bit and now I miss the way it fit so well.

We stayed in an amazing apartment in the Trastevere neighborhood, our host Federica was overwhelmingly lovely and helpful. This picture is the road right outside of the apartment and it leads directly up to Gianicolo Hill where those trees and beautiful sunlight are coming from.

On top of Gianicolo Hill is the Piazza Garibaldi a memorial to the Italian Unification and the most beautiful view in all of Rome. It’s my absolute favorite spot in the city and now one of my favorite places in the entire world.

We walked all over that city, we ate pasta mostly cacio e pepe and amatriciana, we ate pizza a taglio, we ate chicory and branzino, gelato and cornetto. We drank negronis at sundown, wine all night long sometimes starting at lunch,  Fernet Branca after midnight and acqua frizzante all day.

I fell in love.

I can’t desribe the beauty, the bustle, the rhythm of this place. I love the sound of tires on cobbles, gulls in the air and the fluid quick Roman dialect heard in all directions.  The juxtaposition of ancient and modern is so seamless that it looks easy. The food was really good, we did end up scarfing some tourist slop but we also had some amazing meals.

The city is quiet at night though. Dark streets, a warren of cobbled narrow by-ways, couples gathered in embrace, old and young, unabashed in their emotion.

I’ve been listlessly moping about the house like a jilted lover all week. Lots of heavy sighs, and daydreaming. The lure of an Italian villa was enough for me to buy not 1 but 3 lottery tickets, but I lost anyway.

 

Spring is the perfect time for a trip to Rome, the weather was warm in the day and cool at night. The sites weren’t crowded and easy to navigate. I can’t imagine going in summer though. We’ve decided to make spring break a habit, I hope that on our next trip we can get out to the countryside, perhaps Naples, or Florence and some wine country.

Runaway

A short film by Kanye West

 

 

Beautiful.

 

Don’t know how I missed this for so long, but glad I finally found it.

Get busy living…

I recently posted about the ephemeral nature of time. It’s already March and I have an enormous adventure coming up in mere days, that I haven’t shared with you because I am so overwhelmed and excited about it.

We are going to Rome! We had planned to go last November but work, school and holiday travel ate up any time off I had. Not to mention the house eating up bags of money or (credit rather)….We don’t have kids and know that we won’t always be alone. We are going to Rome for a multitude of reasons, but it was the most romantic and beautiful place we could think, and we are in a way running out of time. I’m never going to be more ready for this, even if I do someday have more time and money. This trip is worth a turkish carpet, 30 nice dinners out, a fancy handbag, or so, so much more. I’m tired of waiting to live my life, so we are just going and bills be damned. If people can charge an item, I can charge an experience that will remain with me the rest of my days and try not to feel guilty about it.

I’ve always wanted to go to Rome but I’m very intimidated by the enormity of the undertaking. I don’t know any Italian aside from commercial pasta sauce names. The entire city is covered by hundreds of years of art and architecture and I don’t know the local cuisine or the customs or what the weather will be like. Italians say that “Marzo e Pazzo’, meaning March is crazy. I guess I will just have to wing it.

We’ve rented a flat in the Trastevere neighborhood and we are adamantly against chock a block itinerary tourism. We’re staying in Rome for a week, living in an apartment in a trendy Roman neighborhood, buying groceries and doing our laundry, I may even hang it outside to dry. I like to experience a city as if I lived there. Many people encouraged us to split our trip between Rome and Venice or Florence or somewhere else, but I wanted to really see Rome not the inside of a train or an airport. I hate the thought of running around an ancient and beautiful city with a checklist in hand, frantically glancing at famous paintings or architecture just to say I saw it, without really seeing it.

The Trastevere is a warren of cobblestones and narrow streets and is supposedly less touristy than the 7 hills neighborhoods and still inhabited by Romans and casual bohemians.

We will be getting up every morning, wandering to a cafe to enjoy a cappuccino and some crusty bread on the piazza, then commence wandering from there. I am doing extensive research on restaurants of good repute so that we will always have a good option close by, since getting ripped off for terrible food can happen anywhere.

I do of course, have some things that I must see like the Villa Borghese, Flavian Ampitheater, Ara Pacis Augustus etc. I just want it to be a lovely and relaxed time. We may even take a train out to Orvieto for a day trip, but we’ll make that call when we get there.

I can’t wait to share this experience with you!

Any advice would be lovely. Now the big question….what to pack??

I recently read a story at Cup of Jo, about packing a unified color scheme when traveling so it all works together. I am awful at packing and always over pack and hate my dowdy outfits when I get there. Worth a try and I just picked up a casual red dress at H&M.

5th Poemonday: Charles Bukowski

This, I admit, is a bit of an early post but don’t look a gift horse in the mouth already.

Raw With Love

by Charles Bukowski

little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won’t flinch and
i won’t blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living does not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
i won’t blame you,
instead
i will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and i won’t use it
yet.

………………………………………………

Charles Bukowski is a hard pill to swallow for some people who enjoy poetry and oddly, he is a cult figure for people who couldn’t possibly choke down one stanza of Robert Frost. Before you google him up, if you don’t know about him, I’m calling both colors to the table to let the words speak for themselves. I really enjoy Bukowski, and can endlessly drink up his words, rough hewn dark images drunkenly weaving in back alleys, seedy underbelly of the country,  and hard, brittle sunlight.  I believe he was a misanthrope, but many people take that as misogyny. Decide for yourself.

I regret, and yet I regret nothing but the knife came all the same.

On My Nightstand and in My Nook

For Meg at We Be Brave

I mentioned before that I love to read and consume books like some women eat ice cream. When Meg asked me what I’ve been reading lately I decided it could be a post all on it’s own. I have to admit, I find reading new authors challenging because I don’t know what to pick so I hope you will lavish recommendations on me! I’m also notoriously cheap and get most of my books at the thrift store. I rely on the classic and modern classic authors for depth, and  turn to fantasy fiction and contemporary page-turners for casual appraisal.

Don’t get freaked out by the word fantasy. I’m a proud a nerd but have yet to cosplay with my cats dressed as knights and fair maidens.

Here is a list of my most recent rotation and a brief comment on each.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

This slim book is so spare and descriptive and beautiful. A story of numerous characters set in a small town in the American South circa 1939. I hate spoilers so I won’t even describe the myriad of social and emotional issues touched on in this novel.  It left me buzzing with creative energy, struck through with crystal hard shards of self realization. I will enjoy this book and it’s fragile elegance many times to come.

The Millennium Trilogy: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

If you haven’t heard of the Millennium Trilogy, as the three books in this series are called, you might be living under a rock or completely absorbed in cuneiform tablets. I didn’t know much about the series when I started to read it as part of a book club with some good friends. We cheekily called our book club Books That Are Movies and we would all attempt to finish a book before getting together at someone’s house to eat dinner, drink wine and watch the movie based on the book.  Most of us were so enthralled with this story that we were well into the second novel by the time we met up at my place to glug some glogg and watch the original film in Swedish.

The first book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts out so mind-crushingly slow, in my opinion and the general consensus of my friends. Just give it at least 50 pages and the story will coast along at a frantic pace from there. It’s not elegant writing but it’s fun, the characters are far more real and flawed than in the usual thriller schlock and I love Lisbeth Salander, the main character. I feel that Stieg Larsson has a more realistic handle on post-feminist/feminist challenges as they apply to women in modern countries. It’s lovely to see his feminism in a literary style that is usually overladen with chauvinist tendencies. The book does contain significant violence and sexual abuse, yet they don’t detract from the story, they somehow add to it. I just picked up the last novel on my own, and read it in a few days.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

I know this is the image from the most recent film adaption, which I haven’t yet seen, but I like the imagery much better than any of the covers I could find. I love this book, it is my hands down favorite of the Brontë sisters canon. I was given this book as a gift when I was fairly young and I’ve read it over and over again as the years go on. The story is so daring for it’s era and for the position of it’s author. Dealing with huge issues like existentialism, proto-feminsm, child neglect, the morality of love and marriage, madness,  bastards in the manor house, and upward mobility in the cloying confines of English country society.  it always feels relevant to me and so far ahead of it’s time. I recently read it again so I could enjoy the film with a critical eye, but I have yet to watch it. I must confess, I’m really not good at watching television or movies because sitting down for the allocated amount of time makes me feel like I should be doing something else with my time. If you haven’t read this book, please do! I just linked the title to Amazon and it’s free for the Kindle right now!

Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

This series is EPIC! I have to actually pace myself or I will read the entire series and have to wait years for the next one.  This is not a dainty lady story. It is very similar to the Lord of the Rings The Two Towers with lots of battles, intrigues and murder. The author is ruthless in the handling of the story, nothing turns out the way you expect it to. Get yourself some nerd cred and pick these up.

Bringing Up Bebe

This book may very well change my life. I was at a dinner party a few weeks ago where this book was discussed, I hadn’t heard about but soon discovered it was causing quite a stir.  Reading the vitriolic comments on Amazon ensured that I purchased it in a heartbeat.  People who haven’t even read the book hate it! This woman must be saying something radical right?

Ok, so I don’t have kids but it’s an idea on the horizon. I read this book start to finish in three days flat, so engrossing! It was a revelation:

-French parents are not total slaves to their children.

-French parents still enjoy some privacy and a career without feeling guilty.

-French children go to bed and stay there, and even more amazingly French babies sleep through the night at 4 months old (!)

-French children eat a variety of foods at a very young age including vegetables, fish, and cheeses, and eat calmly in restaurants and don’t throw food.

This book helped me feel like I could be a good mother. I’ve never wanted to be a stay at home parent, but always felt guilty about it, which has probably influenced my delay tactics on motherhood. The only bad thing about this book is that it makes you feel so awful that you don’t live in France and have access to the amazing childcare options and baguettes. All the more reason to move…

So there is a brief roundup of the books I’ve read in past 2 months. What are you reading? I really would love to know whose writing you enjoy and what I should try!

Cast Iron Skillet Pizza

I must admit that I’ve detested pizza for much of my life. I blame commercial delivery franchises, I’m looking at you Pizza Hut, Dominoes and Papa John’s. It’s just not good food. I happened to marry a red-blooded American man with a penchant for corner shop pizza. I didn’t even know this existed coming from the over-planned suburbs of California. Apparently in the Chicago area mid-west corner pizza joints are amazing and they deliver delicious pizza on a cardboard circle in a waxed paper bag. How rudimentary. So we get pizza on occasion from the local corner shops in Baltimore, aside for gourmet places like Joe Squared and Iggies we get sad thick crusted pies with lackluster toppings, but it is cheap and the fried chicken wings are uuurrmazing! But what to do about the pie? We just started making them at home using Trader Joe’s pre-made dough on a baking sheet.   It was a bit of a Friday night thing, but to be honest the crust was never that good, even though the toppings were awesome.

I heard good things about pizza stones so I did some research, and lo and behold people were raving about ditching the stone and making pizza in a cast iron skillet. One of which I just received for my birthday. So tonight I decided to experiment with it and make a pizza. I used Trader Joe’s dough but in the future we are pretty pumped at trying our own. I followed the cooking directions at Macheesmo, which tell you to cook the pie on the stove for 3 minutes on high heat and then pop into a pre-heated 450F oven for 20 minutes. Note there are also directions here for your own dough and sauce! I was a bit freaked out that the dough would stick or the pie would burn to a crisp but it came out beatifully with a crust that was perfectly crisp and chewy.

 

Give it a try.

I dare you to not pick up the phone to order out again.

 

 

 

 

Limitless

In another lifetime I was a docent (read unpaid volunteer) at the newly opened Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. I thought it would look good on my college resume to have volunteer time and I am an unabashed nerd for all things relating to marine biology. I had to learn, in an 8 week crash course, the intimate lives of all the marine species starting with invertebrates and progressing to mammals, to include ovoviviparous birth and such things. I loved it all. Sadly, largely due to my own poor actions, my high-school GPA was grossly under 3.0 and dreams of university vanished. I still enjoyed my time at the aquarium and it started a life time love affair with jelly fish.

 

So they aren’t the most cuddly of ocean species. Nothing like great sea turtles, gamboling sea otters, or beautiful flowering anemone, grabbing your digits and hopelessly using their tiny neuro-toxins as they clutch my finger like an adorable infant, but maybe that’s because I know they can’t penetrate my skin. Yet, jellies always grasped my attention and my love. They oscillate so beautifully, their lacy tendrils flowing behind them like forgotten ball gowns, in blatant disregard of decorum, half dressed in the drapes Scarlett O’Hara style. I can’t discern their eyes, brains or bones. They are free, limitless in their fluidity and movement with nothing physical holding them back.

 

I finally checked out the National Aquarium in Baltimore with M for his birthday outing. To be brutally honest, don’t waste your money. Go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Aquarium of the Pacific or according to M the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, but apparently we are spoiled. We dredged through the tiny, cramped exhibits and I dragged M through to the jellies, finally finding my peace, except they were playing ridiculously loud guitar cock rock through the speakers. Those poor jellies could use some Erik Satie that’s for sure. I walked enthralled in the semi-darkness as the jellies blossomed, opening and closing like so many e.e. cummings small hands.

Next time you need some slow, enthralling peace go to the aquarium and sit in the semi-darkness and watch the ballet of delicate movement behind the glass. If you are in the Baltimore area just be sure to bring headphones.

One More Hour

How many times do you lose minutes or hours or days? Always harried and tired trying to fit too many things into a limited space of time. Lying awake in bed, sometimes I think, if I just didn’t need sleep I would be okay, I might get everything done. This past week I took a class for an IT certification, it’s a mind dump of information and study. I came home exhausted every night, cooked dinner and then relaxed for a second before bed. On Wednesday we had a lot of errands to do, as I was cleaning the house I spied that the time was 9:30 p.m. Shortly after I sat down to read with a glass of wine for  a minute before going to bed. Rinse, wash, repeat. I sat for what seemed like a delicious break as the story rose to a frantic pace, and then my glass was empty. I resolved to go brush my teeth and get ready for bed. I glanced at the clock and the time was 8:45. I was stupefied, then I realized that the first time I checked the time was on the thermostat which we hadn’t changed for daylight savings. Holy mother of God! A grin broke out over my face and I let out a whoop, hugging myself with happiness!

I found a lost hour and I was so happy I felt like I won the lottery. What, you ask, did I do with this holy grail of time? I poured another glass of wine and curled up and read until my eyes crossed, and enjoyed every single minute of it.

I’m a reader and I get lost in fiction. I love it, it’s my escape, my hobby and a lifelong passion. I was myopic to the point of blindness pre-Lasik and I continue to subject my eyes to hour long sessions of type. After a staunch defense, I finally capitulated and requested a Nook for my birthday. It’s good, almost too good, and most books are at your fingertips. I still love the smell of the printed page and buy books worth owning, but now I can easily satisfy my cravings at the drop of a password. If I thought I had a problem with iTunes purchases I’m in for a bruising now. If you must know, I was reading The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson. It’s a great trilogy, read it if you are looking for something engaging with a sly proto-feminist vibe (more on that later perhaps).

Anyway, I just wanted to share with you how much time really does matter and how one single hour changed my whole week. I felt better, happier and more satisfied. Carve out five minutes or an hour for yourself. Listen to an entire record, read a book, stop on your way home and get a cup of coffee, sit and be alone. Do what you want and feel indulgent, because, really, time is all that we have.

 

 

I couldn’t think of a more perfect song for this.

 

xoxo

 

 

 

Breaking Things, and Breaking Things In

First, I made this beautiful salad, and that’s what I really wanted to tell you about, except I broke my oven right after that.

Womp-waa. Sad trombone my friends. Luckily, my oven/stove is the cheap piece of junk that came with the house. It’s a Hotpoint brand. Never heard of it?? Really? Yeah me either.

We had purchased a beautiful bison roast at the farmer’s market from local purveyor, Gunpowder Bison, and I was saving it for Sunday supper, a new tradition we wanted to instill in our weekly schedule.  I carefully let the meat rest on the counter for a few hours to gain room temperature and gave it a light bath in olive oil, fresh garlic, salt and pepper. Bison has a really low fat content so I thought it would need the extra oil to keep moist.

Anyhow, I was busy. I was cutting up things for this beautiful cauliflower salad, that is kosher, vegan, gluten-free, seasonal and local. If you are into that sort of thing, excepting the kalamata olives aren’t local of course. The recipe calls for roast red peppers, which I don’t keep on hand so I used red pepper flakes and it calls for shallots which I have used in this recipe before but substituted red onion this time, and I added fresh minced parsley ~ 1/2 cup, because it came in my CSA box this week.

I have read numerous recipes for the perfect roast beef or bison, that states “Roast meat at (specified high temperature 480 in this instance) 10 minutes for each pound of meat and then turn off the oven completely and keep the door closed for 45 minutes to 1 hour.”  Couldn’t be simpler! A few of the comments in the recipe posts said that older ovens with crappy insulation may not work for this recipe.  My oven is an off-brand cheap model so I assumed it’s insulation and heat retention would be sub-par.

While pre-heating the oven for the specified time (20 minutes) I used this heat opportunity to cure my new(old) Griswold cast-iron skillet. Griswold’s are apparently THE holy grail when it comes to cast iron skillets. I asked M for a skillet for my birthday, and boy did he deliver! He went above and beyond and bought me a piece of history.

Apparently, cast iron skillet culture is a bit of a cult, but I didn’t know that. Leave it to my fact finding partner to plumb the depths of cast-irony. He bid and won for me a #10 Griswold cast iron skillet on Ebay. Griswold was a company that provided cast-iron items to Manifest Destiny settlers up until the 1940′s when it went bust. So that means my cute little skillet is at least 70 years old. Whoa! So I was a bit intimidated on how to proceed with curing it.

I read up (a lot !) on how to cure this baby and many sources said to put it in a high temp oven for long period of time and then to scour off the flaky bits and any visible rust with steel wool, then treat with lard, Crisco (gross!) or cooking oil. I’ve waited to do this for some time but this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I don’t normally keep lard, I am against Crisco, and all I had on hand with a high smoking point was canola oil.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

So while I was pre-heating the oven for the bison roast, I popped my (dry) Griswold in there and let it heat up. I was thinking of work tomorrow, my workout that I was going to do at home in the time that the meat would rest in the ambient temps of the oven and all sorts of ephemera.  After 45 minutes, I switched out the cast iron and put in the  seasoned roast in an open enamel pan. Then I had the bright idea to use the (NEVER BEFORE USED) oven lock. I thought hey? this might keep the seal on the oven door better than regular, and would wash away any doubts about my sub-par oven. Just an innocent little metal handle that slightly protruded from the oven door. I thought it was similar to a dishwasher lock. Maybe it was put there for inquisitive toddlers, right?

WRONG!

It locked the oven completely and nothing I could do would unlock it, roasting merrily away at a blistering 480 degrees F.  I had seconds long nightmares of my entire house going up in-flames after a charcoal briquette of a bison roast flew out my front window, skidding into the street and evoking riots of my justified row-home neighbors, as all our homes crumbled to the ground. I was, to put it succinctly, freaking out. I quickly called M to triage the oven, he could not force the little metal bar to open. We frantically raced to our computers to Google how to unlock a (shit) Hotpoint oven. All results said, Wait until the cleaning cycle is over and the temperature has cooled, approximately 2-3 hours.

!!! I didn’t even set it to clean, and in 2 hours the measly bison roast would be aflame and filling our entire house with noxious smoke or worse, alighting the entire oven on fire.

Holy hell!

So, like any sane man, my M, used his manly wiles removed the oven from it’s electronic wall socket, which thankfully turned off the oven but we found it wouldn’t open. So he forced the lock, breaking it and then pried the oven open with a screw driver. I got the barely cooked roast out, amid domestic chattering and all was returned to normal and safe. The evil oven was thwarted of it’s flesh prize, but alas the door doesn’t work anymore.

I cooked slices of roast in a hot skillet, and served it with sauteed kale and the above Sukkot cauliflower salad.

It was a good dinner, but the chore and cost of finding a new oven now weigh heavily on my shoulders.

There goes the mid-week (save your life) recipes of meatloaf and roast chicken I had planned on, and I start school full tilt this week.

It’s going to be a doozy.

Any advice about new gas ranges/ovens in the lower price range would be appreciated. We weren’t prepared for this financial setback but knew that eventually we would upgrade, so we are just going to roll with it.

Also, just to let you know, my Griswold came out of this unharmed and is now soaking up ounces of canola oil, and I got in my workout anyway.