Snippets and Scraplings

[Scrapling is not a word; I made it up. Isn't it a better, cuter way of saying news?]

I always thought it would be a slow process. Instead, one day a light came on and it was official; I am competent in Italian. For weeks I had to devote all my attention to understand even part of a conversation, and then suddenly one day, I realised that I understood the TV. Then I understood bus conversations. I overheard an Italian describing to his friend a particularly delicious type of cheese, and I got it all.

It has been a short but tough road, and it has been a great instructor in the art of humility and humiliation. I hope never to forget my first few steps into the BLQ airport, seeing Luca for the first time and not even being able to muster up a ciao, let alone understand when he asked how my trip had been. Today, I am proud to say that with still a little way to go, I understand other BCSP students' roommates, follow gameshows on TV, read my econ textbook, write down recipes, give directions (!), order at restaurants, converse comfortably with new people, and, this morning, fully comprehended my entire church service.

Ahhh....quasi-fluency. It's the same proud, heady sensation you get when you earn an A on a fifteen-page paper, or work off ten pounds. Marvelous. It makes it even better that it went instantaneously from understanding very little to understanding most--like failing eighth grade then going directly to college and earning straight A's. All learning experiences should be like this!

For anyone who was wondering, my first Italian words in Italy were "Piccole macchine!" (Little cars!), and I am happy to say I have graduated to full conversations, classes, et cetera. In the process, I learnt something valuable: When people say they "you know enough of (insert language) to get around" it's not always true. I may have be able to ask for a pastry, but when the barista then asks you whether you'd like it warmed or as is, and if you'd like to eat before or after you pay, and whether you'd like to stand at the bar or sit at a table because sitting down costs extra, well... I gave a lot of blank stares.

The Italians talk a great deal with their hands, more so than with inflection of their voices, so body language is key. I daresay I'll come back with all sorts of gestures ingrained into my speech, and you'll all laugh at me. I don't care because it's terribly fun and you're all missing out.

The BCSP students have also come up with some fun anglicisms:

Thanks, guys/Grazie, ragazzi = Graz' guys.

Just a bit/Solo un po' = Just a po'

I like that/Mi piace = Piace it times a million.

I want to dance/Ho voglia di ballare = Totally voglia di dance all night.

Non si fa qui, No!-No!-No! = An Italian lady said to Alex when she saw him on the street in running clothes. It means "That's not done here, no no no!" and it's now a running gag).

I can't pull them off with a straight face and just stick to one language or the other. :P I used to have a great deal of trouble switching back and forth; if too much of my day was "spent in English," I would have to concentrate harder and for longer before my Italian switched on and I could understand it at spoken speed. Now that's eroded a bit, and I switch back and forth fairly easily, although a day in all Italian always gets me fine-tuned to the subtleties of what people are saying.

This comes at an opportune time: It's spring. It's warm. Blossoms are bursting out of the tips of twigs, the birds have returned, and yesterday I ate four marshmallow Peeps. Every time I step outside, I pause and lean my head back and have a quiet happy moment at the beautiful temperature (One of the neighbours saw me do it once and gave me a funny look. Don't care). Gone are the frigid 98% humidity days of January and the soupy grey skies of February; we're in the 13-20°C range now and have blue skies nearly every day. In Piazza Maggiore today, I happily passed an hour watching couples dancing beautifully to tango music in the warm evening air. AND, today I came home to find that Adele had cleaned off my balcony and it is now sunny, open, and decorated with cactus plants. :D I suspect balcony days in the future.

Bianca and I took advantage yesterday with a wonderful stroll around the historic centre. We had just finished a dinner of "Fake Risotto alla Meghan" (rice + melted cheese + an Italian meat called speck) at Meghan's house, which lasted four hours because we talked and talked and ate strawberries and cookies. Since the night was so lovely, Bianca and I ended up walking all over, enjoying the sights and talking. We sat in a park at the very southwest corner of Bologna with the ancient brick gate silhouetted against the sunset, talked about places we'd been and would like to go. We discovered a walled-in courtyard. We admired thirty-foot doors. We gave directions twice to lost people, and window-shopped, and looked at the corner-stores selling gelato. We even had kind of a scary adventure--while we were having a happy silly moment touching the bricks of one of the medieval towers, I looked down and saw that the base of the door was littered with used syringes. Meeeeh... D: We got out of that street very quickly.

In other news, Easter break is coming up with all its drama and excitement; my Paris plans fell through and I'm now scrambling to join in with someone else (I am determined that this will be the one year I actually take a trip for spring break, since there are so many gorgeous places to go that are close). I do have Easter weekend booked for the beach (!) near Rimini with the Gallianis, since Adele's family owns a hotel on the shore. Pictures promised.

I really miss you guys.

What I've Been Reading

I had been planning to show you my trip to Modena and Vignola last weekend, but what with the laptop still down, I had to resort to other plans. 

So in the end, with the excuse that I wanted to practice my Italian, I succumbed. This is the Italian version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in case you couldn't tell. I had already absorbed a lot about the series through osmosis, although I'd only seen scattered clips of the film and hadn't read any of the books. And since I keep a reading journal anyway, I thought I'd share my opinions now that I've finished it.

I still remember my first experience with Harry Potter; it was 1998 and I was nine years old, waiting for my flute lesson in my flute teacher's living room. The mother of another student was there, reading the first book that had just hit bestseller lists, and she handed it to me. I'd never heard of it, but the page I turned to was about a hooded figure slurping blood out of a dead unicorn's wound. And so began almost twelve years of contempt for Ms. Rowling and her wizardly books. When my friend G.C. Waldrep (a poetry professor at Bucknell) heard that I was one of those people who refused to read the series, he nodded understandingly. "Ah," he said sagely, "you're a Harry Potter agnostic."

I have a strange relationship with wildly popular books, quite different from wildly popular movies. I shamelessly plunged into the ultra-fandom of the Lord of the Rings movies, for example (it helped that all my NZ cousins were extras), and all the big movies thereafter were sure to see me in the seats (Troy, Gladiator, The Dark Knight, all of the big-budget action films). With cinema, I never felt a single twinge of guilt for joining the masses. Literature, however, is different. Perhaps huge book franchises are different from big movies, or perhaps it's just because I'm so close to my literature, I'm not sure, but my natural reaction to a monster-book tends toward disdain, and that's often not a fair judgement.

I read Twilight (oh, that loaded word), in fact, while it was still circulating through book clubs, before the teeny-boppers got a hold of it--New Moon hadn't yet come out in paperback--and I remember enjoying it immensely. While my feelings did not extend to include the fourth book (fail), there seems to be this weird sentiment that "If too many people like it, it's not good anymore," in the mainstream. Which is odd, because it's...the mainstream.

At any rate, it was an experience reading Ms. Rowling's work, especially in translation. I read the first chapter in Italian, and then in English on Amazon, and to tell you the truth, I preferred reading the Italian. It makes me slow down and appreciate what's going on, rather than just blasting through at light speed.

Here are some fun translations that will give the average avid fan a hernia:

Albus Dumbledore:              Albus Silente (Silent)

Severus Snape:                     Severus Piton (Python)

Professor Quirrell:                 Professore Raptor

Professor McGonagall:        Professoressa McGranitt

Gryffindor, Hufflepuff,         Griffindoro, Tassorosso (red-badger), Corvonero

Ravenclaw, Slytherin:         (black-crow), Serpeverde (green-serpent)

Quaffle, Bludgers,                Pluffa, Bolidi (meteors), and Boccino d'Oro

and Golden Snitch:            (kind of close...bocciare means to flunk or reject)

While I worked out Piton and Silente, the others were lost on me until I looked them up. They kept most of the names the same, so I was able to pick out who was whom, but Rowling was none too pleased, apparently. According to a quote from Wikipedia:

‘The translator took the word “dumb” in “Dumbledore” to mean “mute,” ’ she said. In reality, Rowling notes that dumbledore is an old form of the word bumblebee. ‘I chose it because I had the idea that this wizard…always in motion. … For me the name Silente is a total contradiction. But the book is very popular even in Italy, which means that this mistake doesn’t at all bother the Italians! ’

This kind of attention to detail, especially in the names of things, is what makes Rowling’s world so sparkling. Plenty of fantasy worlds are original, but most of them fail to charm the reader like this one. The very Englishness of it is what is so appealing (as opposed to the worlds of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, which are really self-contained cultures). She has a natural sense for quiet, matter-of-fact humour and little turns of phrase that build on each other and never once bored me.

However, if Rowling has had the good fortune of developing a style and a memorable voice this early in her career, this book was crowded with classic first-novel faults. Unfortunate but almost inevitable, really. The first half of the novel was very cleanly plotted and flowed well, but the Dursleys would have been so much more interesting if they had been allowed to develop more complex personalities. A family whose coping mechanism is outright denial is a stroke of genius, but Rowling is already heavy on the archetypes: Harry the downtrodden hero, Hermione the bookworm, Dumbledore the wise mentor, Malfoy the nemesis, etc. Ready-made characters are useful, but in large doses they make character interactions overly predictable (how many times could Mr. Dursley shout at Harry and have it be really interesting…?), because two archetypes can’t really do anything except clunk together in the same way every time.

I know, I know, it’s still a children’s series at this point. In reality, Rowling has plenty of room to work with her characters (especially child characters, which are notoriously difficult). Quite a few of the characters felt like they were still settling into their personalities.

Harry and Ron meet for the first time on the Hogwarts Express.

The one slip-up that I could not excuse was Hagrid’s dragon. The whole set-up of the unicorn scene in the forest was a thoroughly dreadful plot device (sending children with no hunting experience into a forbidden forest, at night, to track down a wounded wild animal that has been attacked by an unknown but extremely fast and dangerous creature? I don’t think so, Rowling…), but it was made even worse by the fact that Hagrid had disobeyed the rules to get a dragon and then let Harry and his friends take the punishment for it while they were fixing the problem for him, and then not say a word of apology for their punishment. Completely out of character, especially when you look at his reaction after Harry’s final fight, where he is full of apologies for letting the secret out about his three-headed dog. 

By contrast, I thought Snape and Dumbledore were both seamlessly organized and realized—I can see why Snape is a fan favourite—which was a relief considering the second half of the novel is victim to rushed plotting and clumsy dialogue. Solving the mystery of the Stone isn’t a bad idea in itself, but it condemns Harry and his friends to continually explaining backstory in long monologues, and guessing plot-twists right on the first try. Combined with the series of obstacles in the final scenes…I don’t know, I just didn’t buy it compared with the careful work in the first half. It feels like Rowling invested enormous effort in the first part and midway got carried away with herself. She had me wishing that Slytherin had won, just to make things more interesting. 

She ended up pushing Quidditch aside rather lightly, too, I thought. Perhaps this is just my bias, because I was convinced that the ending scene would have Harry astride a broomstick, chasing the Stone that flew like a Golden Snitch. The Quidditch scenes were among my favourites, with Diagon Alley (ha-ha, diagonally, yes I got it) and the Hogwarts Express also high on the list. Rowling is very good at giving you huge, heart-stoppingly detailed panoramas, full of life and colour that hits you all in the face at once. All of those scenes impressed me very much, because having tried to write them myself, I know how difficult it is to do well. Her world-building is a series of details (like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans) that your mind fills in as it pleases, and the reader ends up with a very personal experience of the world of Hogwarts. 

All in all, a fun read, a good start, and perhaps I might even try the others.

They Are Like Square Clouds :D

You're a terribly quiet bunch, you know. I'm always puzzling over what to write, what percentage of people like what kinds of posts, if a post went well or unread, what lengths are good...or if you all gave up three weeks ago... While the comments ghost in and out, I have three official followers and some additional unknown quantity that I've given up trying to estimate. After seeding links to family, friends, and all over facebook, I tend to get comments in passing: "You didn't really break into that old lady's house..." or "By the way, Barbara said she couldn't see that picture of you in the last post," so I know you're out there.

Mysterious lot, you. That comment button's not going to click itself, you know.

Today was one of those comfortably productive weekend days; I read half a chapter of blisteringly mathematical Macroeconomia, then antidoted with a chapter of Harry Potter e la Pietra Filosofica (I am beginning to suspect how it may end!). In the time that that reading took me, I drank about six cups of tea--funny story, that--I'd been wondering why my tea has been tasting like throw-up (yes, really), and being accustomed to consuming my weight in tea once or twice a day at home, I just couldn't do without it any longer. I thought perhaps it was the type of tea (I had hibiscus, which was new to me), and bought some new flavours (Peach+Passionfruit, and Blackcurrant+Vanilla, oooooh, baby). It was better, but it wasn't until after I exchanged the hard water for store-bought bottled water that it suddenly tasted marvelous. I also bought a brick of espresso (dude, try it in brick form) and have been terribly pleased with myself over it.

"Hrowr? Wassat?" (Dark is momentarily distracted by shinies.)

At the moment, the cat is twining himself around my chair legs and making perturbed little throaty noises, which generally means Booored! D: Puh-lease cuddle!? The lights are on in the windows facing my window, and perhaps the man on the third floor has gone out onto the balcony for another smoke break, one arm draped lazily over the railing. The evening is dark and cold with a clear sky. I am resisting the urge to make another cup of tea because I am running out of nice water. The apartment is quiet, but some delectable foody smell has threaded its way down the hallway into my room. 

Life is good.

At the moment, I'm typing on a borrowed laptop, because mine has packed up and told me it never loved me in the first place, that it's taking back the engagement ring, and not to call it in the morning because it never wants to hear my voice again. Or rather, the laptop itself is fine, but the AC adapter cord, which has been getting more and more chewed up and frazzled as the years went on, has finally lost the will to transmit a current strong enough to turn my laptop on. Really. I plug it in, the battery light flickers on, stays on for a minute, and then the cord has an existential crisis and changes its mind. It is in control of its own destiny, darn it, and that does not include me and my silly old files.

Just wait until I throw you in the rubbish!

Thank goodness for Amazon and two-day shipping. Now, if I can just outwit the Italian postage system, it should get from New York to Bologna in under fifteen weeks.... (You laugh, but yesterday Italy decided that everyone should have a strike, you know, just for a lark. My classes were cancelled, the buses stopped running, and Bianca said her ticket to Ireland may or may not be valid if the airport staff strike extends to her flight--in which case she would not be reimbursed, because "it's a situation beyond their control.")

Well then. I cooked something! Want to see!?? It's the only thing I currently have pictures of, other than a few random ones I took before my Compaq died. BCSP held an exchange party where the BCSP students meet the Italian students going to study in America, and we were supposed to bring 'traditional American dishes.'

I made Almondy, Vanilla-ey Marshmallows for S'mores...

While I have seen marshmallows for sale here, they tend to be dry and stiff rather than pillowy soft, and just are not very worth your money next to all the pastries you can buy instead. Although I would have loved to make something hot and full of lamb meat to represent the NZ cuisine, 1) everyone hates lamb for NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and 2) I could not bring anything of the sort for a 20-minute bus ride. Plus, I had made marshmallows before. 

For whatever reason, American souls are profoundly disturbed by the fact that marshmallows can be magicked out of a home kitchen, and you get comments like Yay marshmallows oh wait you MADE them that's like impossible man D: ...I promise, not that hard. Marshmallows are basically just sugar that's had the crap beaten out of it.

My original recipe is Gourmet Magazine's version, but one of the ingredients is powdered gelatin, which I could not find. Instead, I used this UK recipe that calls for gelatin leaves (more on that later...). I find that Gourmet's recipe overall works better, with a smoother texture and a marshmallow that holds its shape very well, although since the UK one uses more egg whites than corn syrup, it has a richer flavour and a melt-away effect in your mouth that is really quite nice. :) If you're planning to toast them, the Gourmet version will most likely hold up better.

Here you can see the texture difference on the inside. With egg whites, you get a bubbly, softer interior, while recipes without eggs are more uniform throughout and have cleaner edges when you cut them, more like a commerical marshmallow.

I was going to post just the compressed version with the final product, but since so many people asked for the recipe, I'll go through it a bit more in-depth. My notes and pictures come first, and the recipe is collected together at the end to make it easier to read.

It is best to make marshmallows on a dry day...

(Well, that didn't work out.) This is the Fountain of Neptune in the middle of the city, covered in four inches snow that continued to fall all day. At least Neptune has that white fur hat to keep him warm OH WAIT NO THAT'S SNOW TOO. 

Hey Neptune, what were you the god of, again? Was it freaking awful weather, or Siberia?

"Neptune, my toes are cold..." 

"Shut up and hold your water spout without complaining." 

"But it's cold!"

"Boy, if I hear one more word out of you, I'm going to kick you into the water."

So for the marshmallows, there are a few ingredients you may not have on hand, like corn syrup:

This is what light corn syrup looks like, and it was a pain to buy. I saw it in a random grocery store and thought "Oh, that's a nice thing for grocery stores to carry...must remember to pick up some for my marshmallows." Well, apparently Scaramigli, the store I was in, is one of the oldest grocery and wine stores in Bologna and carries all sorts of weird things that no one else carries, so I had to track it down again. It's lovely stuff, though. Almost flavourless except for its sweetness, it's veeeery sticky and viscous. See how it holds its shape even in the bottom of the pot?

All marshmallow recipes require corn syrup, either in one large quantity or in a small quantity supported by egg whites, as in this recipe. It helps the marshmallows keep their shape.

The other ingredient of note is gelatine. Again, I haven't tried it with powdered gelatine in this recipe, but the Gourmet.com recipe uses it with great success. Italy is weird about powdered gelatine... For the first batch I bought a packet of Tortagel, which looked like normal gelatine, but when I poured it into the water it turned out to be tapioca powder. Great. Turns out gelatine in Italy is sold as colla di pesce. Fish collagen. Like I could have figured that one out. Really, people.

Left: incorrect. Right: correct. They are double-size gelatine sheets. They also look suspiciously like fish scales.

So the night before the party I was left without the ingredients. And being the tremendously generous and understanding human being that he is, Mauro (Luca's dad) volunteered to drive me out to the Coop supermarket so that I could buy my stupid fish collagen. YOU'RE SUCH KIND PEOPLE. I DON'T DESERVE YOU. D: <3

And after all that, I wrecked my first batch. Now listen up, chickies. You need to watch your sugar carefully, or this will happen:

This is called caramelisation. It is the last stage before the sugar goes ballistic and ignites. It happens between 320 and 350°F. This is slightly higher than the 255°F that I was aiming for. Now, I don't know how I managed to get fifty degrees above what I was watching for, but my thermometer read 230ish and wasn't touching the bottom of the pan. In my second try, I let the thermometer touch the bottom of the pan and got much more accurate results.

Well, when life hands you lemons (or the incorrect sugar temperature), make lemonade. Or crazy sugar scultpures.

I'm still eating these. :3 How awesome do they look!? This little guy is my favourite:

I served my marshmallows as part of s'mores, the quintessential American campground food. Instead of graham crackers, I put out thin biscuits, and replaced the dread Hersheys bar with a jar of Nutella, which works wonderfully to stick the s'more together. The Italians polished off a pound and a half of them, and I was so proud. Among the comments I got:

"It tastes like home...not like plastic."

"Whoa!...(munches a bit more)...whoooaa..."

"This is what clouds are made of."

"They're acceptably edible."

(Luca's comment. This was actually my favourite, because Luca doesn't give compliments ever. :P)

If you've never had homemade marshmallows, you've never had real marshmallows at all. And everyone loves you for it. Including Adele--I don't think she'd ever seen them before. She asked me how I made them and seemed baffled by what I told her. "And what are they called again?" she asked me. "Maffi?" I said it several times for her.Later, I heard her walking down the hallway, muttering the word to herself.

"Mash...mash-millyoos."

I think I need to enunciate better. ^^

Almond-Vanilla Marshmallows

Ingredients:

Sugar                                  - 450g or 2 1/3 cups

Light corn syrup                  - 1 heaping tablespoon

(also called liquid glucose)

Water                                 - 200mL + 140mL

Gelatine                              - 9 sheets**

Eggs                                   - 2 large, yolks discarded

Powdered sugar and cornstarch sifted together, enough to coat sticky edges.

As for flavourings: however much of whatever you like, really. I used vanilla and almond extract, but you can also substitute liqueur for some of the water, if you like. I'm desperate to try Baileys. ;D You can also add food colouring at your discretion, although the pillowy white look really has nothing to be improved upon.

**Gelatine is not sold in powder form in Italy, only in sheets. If you can't find sheets in the U.S., Google says to use 3tsp or a 10g packet of powdered gelatine instead.

You will also need:

Baking pan

Stand mixer with whisk attachment (preferable) or handheld mixer

Heavy-based pot

Candy thermometer - BCSP students, you can borrow mine. ^^

...And, depending on the mess, you'll need between one and fifty cans of Pam. ;D

Method:

1. Put the gelatine sheets or gelatine powder in 140mL cold water and let them soak.

2. Add 200mL water, corn syrup, and sugar to the pan (it'll be pearly and grainy looking). Mix on low heat until dissolved. Then crank up the heat to high so that the mixture reaches the boil, stick in the thermometer, and let 'er rip all the way to 255°F or 125° C (it will take at least 10 minutes). It will bubble and look scary, but resist the urge to stir it.

3. While the sugar is boiling, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks in the bowl of the mixer (I was using a handheld mixer and just used a large bowl).

4. When the mixture reaches 125°C, the sugar will be at the "firm ball stage" (you can roll it into a ball when you drop a spoonful into water). Remove it from the heat and add the gelatine together with the water it soaked in, and stir until melted (sheets) or dissolved (powder). It will bubble and thicken slightly.

The firm-ball stage. I checked just to make sure.

A word of caution: the hotter sugar is, the more unfriendly it becomes, and that includes cleaning as well as skin contact. Do not splatter, and immediately run any burns under cold water before trying to wipe the sugar off.

5. Add the hot syrup/gelatine mixture to the egg whites in a very thin stream with the mixer on medium speed. You may have an easier time doing this if you transfer the syrup to a bowl or jug with a spout.

6. When all the syrup is added, the mixture will get shiny and thick. Add any extract flavourings or food colourings at this point and continue to beat for 10 minutes. Here is what your mixture will do:

Thick...

Thicker...

We have lift-off! 8D

At the end of 10 minutes, it will hold a ribbon-shape on top of itself:

7. Generously grease a baking pan large enough to hold the mixture, and pour it in, smoothing the top with a greased spatula. Leave at room temperature to set, at least four hours and preferable overnight.

8. Turn out the finished slab onto a cutting board covered generously with sifted powdered sugar and cornstarch, and cut into squares with a sharp, well greased knife. Coat with powdered sugar and cornstarch on all sides.

This stuff is awesome to work with.

9. Toast, if you like, and enjoy!

Cold Days, Hot Drinks, and How I Accidentally Broke into an Old Lady's House

Happy International Women's Day! 

Yeah, I didn't know it existed either. But as soon as I set foot outside my room this morning, Adele had a little present for me--a lovely little yellow flower, in a grappa glass. :3 I had no idea why she was saying Auguri! (congratulations) until she explained it to me. She had mentioned it a week or so ago, but I had all but forgotten.

She has been wonderful to me lately. Yesterday, she brought me hot tea to keep me warm while I was studying. But it was three days ago that she really spoilt me. I had finished reading some of Hemingway’s memoir and had just sat down to write this, when suddenly she bustled urgently into the room and set a tray down in front of me.

“Drink this,” she commanded.

When an Italian mother gives you an order (especially if it involves the words “eat” or “drink”), you darn well do as you’re told. 

What she handed me was this:

A piping-hot glass of spiced rum with a lemon peel curled at the bottom of the glass. I took a cautious sniff, which alone was enough to make my eyes tear up.

“It’s strong,” she said. “Look at me!” she said to her husband, standing in the doorway, “I’m going to send her back to America as an alcoholic! Hee hee hee!”

She winked at me. “This is why it took me so long to drive home from work today—but it’s good for a cold day, you know. You’re going to sleep well tonight!” 

She left the tray for me on the table, heaped with about ten thousand cantucci (almond biscotti), and promptly bustled out of the room to some unknown region of the house.

<3 <3 <3 

Hot Rum + Snowy Evening + Writing = Bliss. I felt very cool and writerly.

The eating continues to be fantastic.

Lemony, buttery tagliatelle noodles. Oh baby.

This one, called a Piemonte, was prettier than it tasted, but not by much. It was vanilla-flavoured.

Café Impero, where I bought it, has an awesome mosaic on the inside.

Shop window full of marvelous cakes.

(Ha ha ha!). No, I didn't try this one. But it would go nicely with the cannabis incense I saw in the open-air market...

Another shop window. These were sculptures made out of pasta. Makes you ashamed that you ever made those macaroni paintings in kindergarten.

So, about the Accidental Forced Entry.

On Sunday I went to a church on the other side of Bologna, quite a distance outside the central wall, so I wasn't entirely sure where I was going, though I had the address. After a half hour bus ride, I walked through a light rain looking for the place, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the sign for Chiesa Nuova Vita through an open gate, with cars lined up in the parking lot.

But once I was through the gate, I discovered I couldn't find the door--at least not one that didn't look like a locked maintenance door. I was very early, so I walked around the whole building looking for the main entrance, and finally stumbled upon a big wooden double door that was ajar, invitingly revealing a set of inner doors.

Perfect! I boldly tried the door, which was unlocked, and went in.

There was a little foyer, where I waited for a few seconds to dry off from the rain. I heard someone coming out to meet me, but instead of an usher or a church member, a little old lady came out from the kitchen (uh oh--kitchen?) and regarded me with a solemn and puzzled expression. There was a moment of deep silence.

Then she asked, «...Chi è?» (...Who are you?)

Oh dear. "This isn't the Nuova Vita Church?"

Before she could answer, "Of course not, you fool," her tiny white terrier burst out from behind her and stood up on his hind legs to snarl at me, and she threw herself between us and started shouting at the dog in Italian, darting this way and that to block his angry advances with phrases like "I'll protect you!" and "Watch out for him!"

What can you really do in that sort of situation? I'm just glad my Italian is now advanced to the point that I can profusely apologise. She sent me in the right direction and waited to make sure I got in okay. In my defense, her house was directly connected to the church building.

All I can say is, she reacted a lot better than I would have. I get upset when my brothers' close friends walk into the house without knocking, let alone a stranger. The graciousness of the Italians never ceases to impress me.

The Obligatory Pasta Post

In the Galliani household, pasta is served twice a day, 6 to 7 days a week, with occasional exceptions. That's roughly 100% of all meals, because breakfast doesn't count as a meal in Italy.

Sometimes stereotypes pale in comparison to the truth. The glorious, mouth-watering truth.

I hope you don’t think I’m terrible, but it’s actually been nearly a month since BCSP took us on a field trip to an agriturismo farmhouse so that we could learn to make pasta. The photos have been sitting in my hard drive, getting more and more out of date, but there has been so much other stuff going on! (As for post frequency, you’re all getting rather spoilt, I think—three posts in three days!)

The bus ride was a crazy ride up into the mountains near Bologna, up slippery dark roads coated with heavy snow. We were grateful to get inside the farmhouse, which was warm and homey, exactly what you think of when you think rustic Italy. There was not a single wall or ceiling in the entire place that was not made with brick, which was a very cool aesthetic. Unfortunately, the place had double-booked the class, so there were close to seventy of us packed around the table, looking doubtfully at the six workspaces on the table.
Clearly not everyone would have a go.

The decor was cool, though.

The mini-lesson was taught by a group of women describable only as Pasta Grandmothers. The magic ratio, they explained to us, is one etto (100g) of flour per egg. Then they rolled up their sleeves, broke their eggs into the flour, and went to work, explaining in bits and pieces as they went. Julie was called on and put to work making a batch of dough, followed by other BCSP students, all diligently kneading away. Bianca and I had to content ourselves as spectators, this time.

One of the Grandmothers.

To make fresh pasta dough, you pile your flour (00-type, ideally) onto the biggest board you have and make a well in the center to break the eggs into. Then you mix them in with a fork, very, very gradually. Then you knead.

Notice that the egg yolks in Italy are more red than yellow. That's what happens when your chickens aren't fed on sawdust and dirty tissues.

Pasta dough is about as simple as you can get at just two ingredients, but any quick-n-easy allure it might have had is negated by the fact that it takes a quarter hour of kneading for a 250g batch. And you can’t really use a dough-hook to do the work for you…it takes genuine manpower to stretch and turn the dough to properly develop the gluten. The Grandmothers laughed at complaints of sore wrists and told the kneaders to stand with one foot behind the other and slightly bent over the board, so that you could “put your back into it.” Small wonder—they all had forearms that could snap chair legs.

After Julia had exhausted herself on the kneading, one of the Grandmothers handed her a rolling pin at least a yard long.

This, she said, is for two things: rolling pasta dough, and beating your husband.

(I believe it. D:) Lauren brandishing, Tiffany scheming.

So after the kneading, there is about another quarter hour of rolling, and rolling, and rolling. Pasta rollers did not make an appearance in this kitchen. The whole process from flour to finished dough takes at least half an hour.

Halfway between thumbs-up and OW HAND OW. In the background, a Grandmother watches on attentively.

…I can’t WAIT to do this myself. I couldn’t stop watching the head Grandmother, who in the dim kitchen could tell exactly where the weaknesses were in her 500g batch of dough, and rolled out every blemish in her sheet of dough, which must have been four square feet. More photos here.

With the finished pasta sheets, we learnt how to make the classic pasta shapes—tagliatelle are made by rolling up the sheet and slicing it to form noodles, farfalle (“butterflies,” known in the US as bow-ties) with a simple pinch of a square-cut piece of dough, ravioli like a pasta sandwich, and tortellini with a clever wrap around the thumb.

Tasty! says Mariella.

After two hours of pasta-making, we sat down to a three-hour dinner of the pasta we’d just made,  complete with wine that had been grown and bottled right on the farm (delicious). 

All thoroughly enjoyable, and we were all very warm and sleepy for the ride back, which was just as well, because the bus didn’t run that late (1 a.m.) when we got back, so I had to walk home with another girl, Christina, who also lives on San Donato.

It was an hour’s tough walk through the snow, but not a single drop of water got through my Uggs, and my feet stayed toasty all the way home. And hey, I worked off all those calories!

Everyone loves a formal apology

(especially Tiger Woods >8D)

As I was getting into bed last night, I realised what I'd done. Here I am posting about ice cream while you all just got hit with (am I getting this right?) a full-out snowicane. You know it's bad when they invent new words. While the weather has been pleasantly unextraordinary over in Bologna (roughly the same latitude as New York), these pictures keep cropping up all over Facebook:

Wait, what's that? Let's take a closer look...

That's right--A METRE OF SNOW. D: You poor frozen babies!

Another blogger who lives up in the mountains, Catskill Kiwi, reported a whopping six feet of powder!
 

She says, "see those faint posts sticking out near the tree line… that’s my garden fence, they are 5 foot posts."

@__@ Was not trying to rub it in. If anything, I'm a bit sad I missed it...extreme weather is always exciting, especially obscene snowfalls. You never see this sort of thing south of Buffalo. I can't really say I hope it will happen next winter, can I?

To console you, here's an anecdote to make up for it (and you can even learn some Italian in the process)! Out at an aperitivo (think cocktail party food, but served at a bar), we were all talking about fast food. What I said was: 

Beh, ma i hamburger di McDonalds sono sempre pieni di preservativi. 

What I had intended to say was, "Well, but McDonalds' hamburgers are always full of preservatives." But the Italians all went quiet and looked at me a bit funny (that's how you know you're about to learn a word the hard way). QUICK ITALIAN LESSON.

                           i preservativi    ≠   preservatives

                           i conservativi   =   preservatives

                           i preservativi    =  ...condoms

DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING. Darn ambiguous Latin derivatives. They hastily corrected me, and of course no one minded (Federico was laughing so hard that he spilt his entire whiskey in my lap...) Of all the mistakes you can possibly make, my favourite ones are the really hilarious ones because they make good stories. :P

Gelato, Cannoli, and an Impromptu Defense of American Food

I don't know how fellow bloggers do it. My blog feed sits empty for days, then suddenly has a hernia as eight new ones come in end-on-end. I suppose I'll join the fun with one of those obligatory posts about the Food.

I will start with the cannolo (that’s the super-trendy, super-Italian singular form of cannoli). Don't moan—it'll be painless and fun. Twelve of the 18 blogs that I read are centred on cooking, and having learned well from them, I promise:

1. I will not intentionally try to make you jealous of what I've eaten. That's just boring and mean. Share the love.

2. I will not rehash the old cliché of “American food = suck; Italian food = omg.” Apart from being very yuppie-snob (see “Stuff White People Like”), it is just no longer interesting to listen to. And it’s not even true, since the organic/local food movement rose to power. As the post-1950s Packaged/Processed Everything fad dies down, America has discovered that it is still awesome at plenty of things—like barbecue, or slow-cooking. And it's always been the gold standard for all sorts of tasty food, from apples to hot sauce to Virginia ham.

So—my cannolo. (Goodness—food always gets me on tangents like these. I won’t apologise because it will inevitably happen again. :D) (Please also excuse my overkill of parentheses (they’re just so useful (and helpful(?)))).

Cannoli.

Every so often you get a brain-shattering experience you weren’t even expecting. I mean, your first taste of Italian pasta—it has to rock, that's just a given. And stepping inside your first real cathedral—that sort of experience you can mentally prepare yourself for.

Other times, you get a mind-job for free. I was coming home one day from class and passed through Piazza VII Agosto, a wide-open, cobbled piazza near the BCSP office, and saw a little string of tents set up. On Fridays and weekends the piazza is crammed full of these sorts of tents for an open-air market that sells mostly shoes and tacky clothes, so I was ready to pass it by without a glance, but instead, I smelled food. And since I had a few euro and a few minutes… I spied a tray of that ever-familiar traditional Italian dessert, cannoli. 

I was biased—I admit. Despite my promises to myself not to bash American food, I couldn't quite squash my visions of horrendous Oreo-chunk atrocities, swimming in whipped cream (or worse, an entire 2-lb. brick of cream cheese). Or jammed into cupcakes and stuffed with frosting and maraschino cherries. Why, America, why!?

Sigh... Publish a gluten-free version in Cooking Light Magazine and pass the diet soda, please.

After some judicious hesitation, I handed over a two-euro coin. “Well,” I said to myself as the girl wrapped it in a napkin, “this’ll probably be pretty okay, I suppose.” I wasn't terribly convinced. They seem too hard to get right. And cannoli are from way-south Sicily, so they surely couldn’t be that good in fairly-north Bologna. But Luca had said that he’d had good ones here…

Then: crunchEPIPHANY.

Crackly, flaky, meticulously crafted pastry shell… dark chocolate gently laced throughout… airy and sweet ricotta filling freshly piped inside… little nuggets of pistachios dotted round the edges… confectioners sugar lavishly powdered on top…

/ / / Wooow... / / /

It stopped me dead in my tracks (in the middle of a busy road, I might add…it was that good), and left me suspended for several long, transcendental seconds in one of those genuinely speechless moments. I think my brain managed to say to itself, «What did I do to deserve this…?»

Fantastico. I waited for the bus with this ridiculously silly grin on my face (I had just won the culinary lottery, after all), nibbling blissfully on this enormous and surprisingly filling confection.

D: ~ <3

And then! (as Emeril would say) and then, BAM!—Pistachio gelato! (Does pistachio have some magical property, or what?)

It was my first gelato ever, not counting the tired, grey soup that someone managed to sell to me as “chocolate gelato.” My pistachio gelato came in a teensy cestino cone (not sure how to translate—perhaps “little basket,” or “little cup”—something terribly cute) and for 2 euro I had almost more than I could eat.

I had expected it to be very light and airy, but instead it was heavy and sweet and treacherously dense, and probably double the calories of our sort. If American ice cream is a dollar-a-box confetti cake, Italian gelato is a sly, murderous torta barozzi. Americans go the way of “cheap and cheerful” (as we say in NZ), while Italian culinary tradition that unless it is so lust-inspiring that you would assassinate your mother for it, it is not worth eating. They are not the same thing AT ALL. Lots of commercial American ice creams are still made with preservatives and artificial ingredients besides the traditional cream, milk, sweetener, and eggs, whereas true Italian gelato is made solely from creamy, thickly-whipped evil.

The shop-girl lavishly dolloped this splendid foodstuff onto a cone (at this point, I was really not caring about the cone) and went about her business with the other customers, hardly realising that she had completely blown my mind with a few careless flicks of her ice cream scoop. The texture! The flavour! Who cares that it was barely 5 degrees Celsius!? It was so sweet and cold that I could hardly taste the pistachio, as if that made a difference.

Woo! Bring on the intolerably hot weather.