Beach Walk
Hour and a half. A slow 4 miles. Beach. Hill trail. Neighborhoods. Wind, rain, hail, sunshine. Singing birds and seaweed. I needed that.
A Merchandising Puzzle
While you’re shopping for Chocolate Pudding Mix, don’t forget the garlic! Really? I’m still scratching my head over this one. I asked the guy stocking shelves and he said they hang garlic all over the store. OK…
Milan Thoughts in the Rain
On a rainy day in Seattle – there have been so many lately – the car in front of me was branded “Milan” and my thoughts flew around the world. I’m 25 days away from returning to the land of “ciao” and dear friends that I look forward to sharing aperitivo with.
Figure of Speech
Ten years ago today, the earth shook both Seattle and my life.
“Scared to death” is not just a figure of speech.
Catkins Poppin’
In spite of the snow and hail that keep passing through… and the continued temperatures in the 30s, signs of springtime surround the observant ones here in Seattle. Swelling buds on trees and daffodil stalks. Wild violets blooming. Lenten roses braving the cold. And deciduous catkins popped open, lengthening out and pendulous.
A year ago, after enduring a long, gray, cold, wet winter in Milano, I felt we had all earned our Spring! We’ve earned it here, too, and these little emissaries of warm-days-to-come thrill my spirit.
Milano Coat
While waiting to meet with a client, I stopped in a book store to browse and get a coffee. This man was in line in front of me. I smiled.
Fun to encounter little reminders of Milano and Italia and my friends and time there.
Shadow Tree
The most beautiful thing I saw today.
The scene: a building along the west of a busy mall parkway in south Seattle, with a drive through and plantings along the roadside. The headlights from westbound traffic in the right-hand turn lane across the street, are intercepted by this low, trimmed tree and then play across this wall as the cars turn to go northward.
The combination of elements is enchanting!
Buon Anno! Happy New Year!
Buon Anno. Tanti Auguri.
Happy New Year. Many Good Wishes.
L’anno duemilleundici.
The year two thousand eleven.
Vi auguro buona salute, curiositá e contentezza nel anno nuovo!
Un abbraccio affettuoso a tutti i miei amici.
I wish you good health, curiosity and contentment in the New Year!
A warm hug to all my friends.
– – –
Some would think, “Wow, you found that written on some old paper somewhere in Italy?!” No. It’s a Photoshop collage of close to 100 different pieces. The individual letters and elements were scanned, selected and imported from correspondence, meeting notes and report cards from Italy in the 1940s. While there, I became enamored of the old and very distinctive Italian handwriting and collected penmanship manuals and old journals.
The embossed seal is from a child’s report card. It says “Regno d’Italia“, the “Kingdom of Italy”. Italy was unified in 1861 and on June 2, 1946, it became a republic.
Maiden Octopus
Saturday. Past 10:00 in the evening and the house smells good of octopus cooking since 9:26. A few garlic cloves, a dozen peppercorns, a tablespoon of salt and maybe a gallon of water in a pot with an octopus that stretches out a couple of feet.
How DOES one cook an octopus? Yearning for my favorite dish at the Carlotta Cafe in Milano, the Piovra con Patate (Octopus with Potatoes. Octopus is also called “polpo“.), I set off on my first octopus-cooking experience. I’ve been watching videos on YouTube to get a sense of technique and the general consensus is, like squid, either cook it really short, or cook it really long. In between would be like eating rubber bands.
I trundled into holiday crowds at the Pike Place Market today to my favorite fishmonger, Pure Food Fish. (Ask for Rich and tell him I sent you.) For $3.99 per pound, I went home with a small octopus and excitement to try my hand at the simple, yet delicious, Sicilian dish. (When I got home and unwrapped my catch, I found a tiny little octopus in the bundle.)
While at the Market, I bought Yukon Gold Potatoes and Italian Parsley at a vegetable stall. I had a wonderful conversation with Theresa, the seller, and we exchanged some contact information and wild stories about my bold decision to pick up and move to Italy for a year.
Next, I went to Seattle’s Italian food fixture, DeLaurenti, and bought a few other ingredients. I needed taggiasche olives, which they didn’t have except in a jar, so I bought the celina olives instead. I stepped upstairs and sampled vibrant, green olive oils at their tasting bar and selected the Partanna Sicilian oil for its full flavor. While I was at the store, I couldn’t help but buy two fresh mozzarella balls… (even though they’re from Wisconsin.)
It’s now 10:37 and the octopus has cooked for a little over an hour. I put the timer on for another 15 minutes. Better tender than not. What I’m thinking is that I’ll pull it out of the cook pot and let it cool. Tomorrow, I’ll cook the potatoes, and will cut up the octopus parts and maybe sauté them a bit. (Yes? No?) Then I’ll toss everything together and hope that it looks and tastes something like what I had at Ninni and Agnese’s fabulous little café, named after their daughter, Carlotta.
Ninni and Agnese had offered to let me come into their kitchen to learn how to cook this, my favorite meal. Friday, the day before I left Milano to return to the U.S., I hired a taxi to take me to the café. (It’s not very walkable.) When I arrived on Friday at lunchtime, they were closed! I was so disappointed, and rode the same taxi home. I never got my chance for a lesson from them but will always remember their incredible meal.
11:06 p.m. The octopus is out of the pot after about an hour and 15 minutes. It cooked down to not much, really. I think I could select a bigger octopus next time, or one-per-person. It’s tender and perhaps needs only one hour. The outer skin is loose and slippery, so I’ve fingered most of it away.
Guess what’s for dinner tomorrow? I’ll cook my potatoes, lightly warm my octopus in a sauté pan, drizzle my oil and some fresh-squeezed lemon, and add my olives and parsley. A little sea salt and some pepper. Done! Maybe it’ll approximate Ninni and Agnese’s dish, and if I close my eyes I’ll think I’m at their cafe alongside the canal, sipping a Sicilian wine and whiling away the time.
Wednesday morning. Post-Octopus…twice! I prepped the octopus as I described, for my dinner late on Sunday. A girlfriend stopped by just in time and we both relished it.
My hunch-of-a-method approximated that of the Carlotta Café enough so that I decided to cook it for two friends on Monday night, too. I went back to the Pike Place Market, got two octopus from Rich and started all over again. This time I threw more veggies into the cooking broth and cooked the octopus whole. It ended as a deep aubergine color, but the skin was more troublesome this time. I may need to do more research, but my friends devoured it, nonetheless. Piovra con Patate may be my new “potluck dish”.
Mark Bittman, “The Minimalist” chef for the New York Times, wrote a concise, yet thorough, ditty on buying and cooking octopus, “Octopus Demystified”.
And here are guide on Cooking Small Octopi and Cooking Large Octopi including cooking charts with times and results.
Here’s a recipe, in Italian: Insalata Tiepida di Polpo e Patate
or, roughly translated into English: Warm Salad of Octopus and Potatoes
A little side note:
One friend was puzzled by the long, pale gray, glistening octopus that I bought (seen above) and the deeply-colored, ruddy-purple, curled, firm octopus seen below. It’s “before and after”! Before cooking, the octopus is limp and pale. One web site recommended holding it by the head and dipping the tentacles a few times into the boiling water so that they curl uniformly, then dropping the whole animal into the pot to cook. Almost immediately, the skin color darkens, and by the end of cooking, (in this case about an hour), the octopus has taken on this dark coloration. Some enjoy eating the skin, some do not. Depending on the length of time in the boiling pot, the dark skin can be brushed or scrubbed off, ideally leaving white cylinders of meat. Personally, I like to have the suction cups remain because they are the clue to the meat on the plate! But the skin at the top of the tentacles and around the body/head is thick and viscous and I haven’t developed that preference yet.
Buy More Stuff
“Black Friday”. THE day upon which retailers place their hopes and base their projections for their year’s sales and their holiday “retail success”. The day after Thanksgiving, when much of the country is turkey-drugged, stuffed with carbs, off-from-work and feeling the pressure of the looming Christmas gift list. The thing to do? Join the frenzy. Get in line at 4:00 a.m. and shop!
Some friends and I met in downtown Seattle this evening at Westlake Center, the closest place this city has to a central cathedral’s main plaza. (I guess it IS a cathedral of sorts…) The streets were barricaded and filled with people awaiting the lighting of the tall Christmas Tree out in front of Macy’s department store.
What caught my attention most, were the simple, stark, white-on-black signs carried by smartly-dressed, friendly men and women. “Buy More Stuff”, the signs said. And “Hurry!”.
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Some people were sure that these folks had been hired by the retailers to ramp up sales. Others understood the facetiousness of the message. It turns out that there’s a group named “BuyMoreStuff.Org” who states its foundation as: “We’re here to encourage people to buy more stuff. If you don’t hurry, they’ll run out of stuff or you’ll run out of time.”
“It’s interesting: Americans in particular are hyper-attuned to advertising and marketing, which all comes down to Buy More Stuff, and when you reduce it down to its primary thing it becomes very weird. When the message is pared down to its essence is when it confuses people the most.” said Michael Holden, who founded Buy More Stuff with fellow performance artist Cody Strauss.
Yes. There’s been plenty written about our having been hoodwinked into feeling compelled to buy, buy, buy. But one thing I mused over, having recently returned from Italy, was “WOULD this be allowed in Italy, and if so, would anyone actually DO this there?” These simple signs are a clean, inoffensive, provoke-thought-and-get-under-the-skin manifestation of “Freedom of Speech”. Bravo!
I like that they can walk around town with bold signs. I like that they did (and do). I like their message. (And I like their graphics.)
Here’s a Huffington Post blurb from last year’s “performance”.
To twist your head around, read a bit of the Buy More Stuff mailbag here. “Hurry!”