reflection: spare crop / fleet mind
This is the web cast from Cerro-Laveno…if you want to know what my sky looks like you can click the reload button on your browser or (go somewhere else like HERE and then come back) and the sky will change…it’s in real time. Now, I have an, albeit lo res, view of lago maggiore. I’m enchanted….
The anarchist seed swap was cool. A town up in the hills a ways past Luino had a get together at the recreation center where people came and exchanged seeds. Just showed up and put a chair next to a long table with piles of seeds and scraps of paper. Some, like me, showed up with seeds wrapped in a paper towel and stuffed in their jacket pockets. Then, in order to trade we had to…well, talk to people, people we didn’t know. That was the cool part, talking to people about what worked for them. There were lots of folks younger and some older and kids and dogs. While I was chatting with some ladies in their 60’s with a table full of bulbs, beans and zinnia seeds I overheard someone asking, “so how can I pay you for them?” and the laughing response, “you don’t, we’re doing it for love.” I went by that table tended by 3 young men, dreadlocks and tie-dye but with tidy beards and polite. The table next to them was full of leaflets and brochures…I recognized some from a pretty militant environmental group, Earth First!, that I hadn’t heard of since the 80’s. There were refreshments: tea, coffee, homemade baked things and dried fruit.
Robin had been taken in hand by an 8 year old boy who (while I watched from the window) took her over to see the deer and baby goats behind a fence at the edge of the park adjacent to the rec. center.
Then the group of people who were gathered on one side with musical instruments pulled themselves together in a group and everyone kicked back to listen to the music. They sang beautifully, the songs were…songs about anarchists in Lombardy or Switzerland who’d been imprisoned or killed and something like the anarchist anthem that they sang at the beginning and again at the end.
It was all in Italian, some of it in dialect…Matthew whispered in my ear, “Have you noticed that they’re anarchists? Not exactly what anyone in Texas would expect when you say ‘Anarchist'” It is true that a very tall fellow with a lovely baritone voice was wearing a black shirt with a hand-grenade on the front, and I’m sure that a lot of people, like us, were just there to swap seeds…
But, if you’re wondering, anarchists in Lombardia are nothing like this:
Meanwhile, I finally got some seeds for Cavolo Nero (fabulous tuscan ‘black cabbage’ that makes a wonderful sub for collard greens) and a few of the oregano seeds seem to be peeking up down in the garden. We also left with a pamphlet that one of the tidy young fellows gave to Matthew. The first article inside was entitled: “You may already be an Anarchist” I think Jeff Foxworthy may have a new tag line…
Saute the veggies in 1-2 tbs. of olive oil (you can use half olive oil and half butter if you want). After about 10 min over med-low heat they’ll start to caramelize a bit (if you’re lucky).
While this is cooking mince garlic (2 cloves or less) and crush some clove or get the powdered clove from the cupboard. If you’re one who’s tempted to have a heavy hand with spices, now is the time to back off by half. One of the fine qualities of good Italian food is clear, simple flavours. You can, if you like that kind of thing, crush a single juniper berry and add it to the 1/8 tsp (or less) of clove. Don’t add these yet, just have them ready. You may also chose not add any of these spices/garlic, esp. if you’re using a gourmet sausage like the kind one can find at Whole Foods.
Now comes the part where you add the wine (red or white or even a desert wine or a marsala). I’ve also used cognac. Just be aware that what you use to de-glaze the pot will effect the flavour, sweet wine, dry wine, red or white shades the tone of the finished Ragu.
This is going to cook a long time. The flavours will concentrate. If you don’t do the alcohol kind of thing, you can de-glaze with water and it’ll be okay. For the quantity I mentioned above I use 2-3 tablespoons…enough to get the good stuff off the bottom without making soup.
Now, let the wine cook down and the veggies dry out a bit in the pan. If you have sausage with a casing on it, use this time to remove the sausage ‘skin’. when the veggies have absorbed the wine and are about to start caramelizing again turn down the fire to low. Then, add garlic and spices along with the meat. Take a wooden spoon and start breaking up the sausage right away, don’t let it brown on cook up into clumps. You want it to be the consistency of…well, dog food. You can also add 1 or 2 (but not more) twists of black pepper from a pepper grinder. Do not, under any circumstances, add salt.
Once the meat is no longer pink but not brown. Turn off the fire under the pot (or move to a cold burner if you have an electric stove). Let the flavours sink into the meat while you decide about the tomatoes.
Tomatoes depend on the season. If the tomatoes you’re finding at the store have a blast of acid tang but otherwise no discernible ‘tomato’ flavour, skip them and use a good brand of canned tomato. If, on the other hand, they are big and beautiful or small and sweet, chop up about 1-1/2 cups of them being careful to conserve all of the juice. Right now it’s winter, good tom’s are hard to find so I’ve opted for pre-diced, canned tomatoes. You can also use canned if you’re just not feeling like doing all that chopping.
Okay, now that you’ve happily resolved the tomato issue, move the pot to the smallest burner on your stove, with it’s very lowest fire (or setting). Splorp in the tomatoes!
Okay, here comes the easy part :). Making sure that the meat is broken up as small as possible, stir in the tomatoes and slid a lid half way onto the pot and sit down to drink a glass of wine. Ragu is slow food, it needs to cook over this low fire for at least 3 hours for edible and preferably 4 for irresistable. If you started in the morning thinking you’d have it for lunch and suddenly find that it’s not going to happen, relax, you can have it for dinner. Never start a ragu later than 2 or 3 in the afternoon…unless you want it for breakfast. Remember this is 2-3 meals you’re going to put 2/3 of it in the freezer and have a care-free, ready in 20 min. meal twice next week.
Now, just to be sure, when I say a low fire on a small burner, this is what I mean. You’ll need to stir it about every half hour (unless you smell it burning). If it seems to be getting to dry, add in a dash of wine and cover it completely with a tight lid.
Brief warning, don’t cook it even 10 min. more than 4 hours, the meat will turn to saw-dust, trust me, I tried it once.
Okay, boil the pasta in well salted water (1 scant Tbs. of sea salt for every 2 quarts of water) 100 grams of pasta per person for adults. Use something that has ridges or crevices to grip the sauce or spagetti (any fresh egg-pasta is also good including filled ones such as cheese ravioli or tortolini).
Now, and only now, taste the sauce to see if it needs salt. When the pasta is almost done take the lid off the ragu and add about 1-2 tablespoons of the starchy pasta water to the sauce, turn up the heat. Drain the pasta put it in the serving bowl, add butter (yes butter, not olive oil) 1 tbs. to the pasta and one to the sauce. Turn off the fire. If you want to eat Italian-style pasta con ragu, ladle out about 1/3 cup of sauce for each 100 grams of pasta…. Italians do not drown the pasta in sauce, if the pasta is good, it is nice to be able to taste both. In Italian they call this kind of dish pastasciutta, pasta is the main ingredient to which the sauce is added as an accent.
If you want american-style spaghetti then put the whole pot of sauce over a pound of cooked spaghetti.
Stir the sauce through the pasta and then dish it up! Tastes great with a dusting of freshly grated parmesan.
Divide the leftover sauce into two containers (about 1 cup of sauce per container) and let cool before putting in the freezer. You can also use this sauce for the meat-sauce part of Lasagna but that’s a whole day project!
Hope that you enjoy making it as much as eating it.
Okay, I don’t like to dwell on the past; but, I have WWI on my mind of late. I have a whole backlog of charming ‘life in Italy’ posts that I’ve been meaning to write as soon as poetry month is under control. The one about how my daughter is afraid of the recorded voice of “the train lady” that emanates from the train station below our house or her first experience with the Feliniesque small circus. Then there’s the possible post that has a photo recipe of how to make real Ragu like an Italian.
But, instead, I’m still thinking about WWI. I started writing a poem about Georges Méliès, one of the first film-makers, the father of special effects and author of the first political film: L’affair Dreyfus (1899). I knew nothing about Méliès until, in the course of my work as a translator and language coach I was working with Dr. Barbara Grespi. Now, Barbara is one of those insanely intelligent (she’s written books on cinema history), sophisticated, and stunningly beautiful Italian women who makes someone like me feel like, well, a putz.
Anyway, I must not be too much of a putz, because she was asking me to work with her on an English language presentation about tarot iconography in the films of Georges Méliès. We were SKYPE’ing and I said George who? She said, “He’s famous for the film of the Moon with the rocket in it’s eye.” Sure enough, I wiki-ed and then Youtube-ed and came up with familiar images.
In the process I also got a bit of information stuck in my head like a piece of spinach between a canine and a bicuspid. Méliès made tons of films but then went bankrupt and sold his film business. Then he started making and selling toys at Gare du Montparnasse (a big train station in Paris). Five hundred of his films were confiscated by the French army in WWI in order to recycle the celluloid into heels for soldier’s boots.
Finally, last week I started writing the poem that had been poking and shifting in the back of my head for over a year. I wrote 10 lines of blank verse and then I sat still and started again. It all came in rhyming couplets (which I rarely use and then never one after the other) and it turned into the first eight lines of this sonnet that looked at me and then spat at my feet, asking: “why are you writing about a toy maker and a special effects man when the ground is full of the blood and bones of the people who died wearing those boots?”
It suddenly felt as if those dead stood up and cried in me, all at once. And the poem doesn’t do them justice, there was Siegfried Sassoon for that. I know that it’s not worth crying over anymore, those who died in the confused slaughterhouse of WWI would be dead now even if there hadn’t been a war; it’s too late. Still, I can’t quite shake the sensation of hopeless frustration at being unable to either stem or adequately memorialize such loss.
I’m in love with this dictionary…really, it’s a two volume set that my sweetheart bought me for christmas. He picked it up at the second-hand store because he liked the font. I have a very fancy Italian-English dictionary, brand new 3″thick…”Oxford / Paravia” complete with online reference resource included.
The dictionary in the picture was published in 1951 as the revised edition of a revision that had started in the 1940’s and then stopped because of the war. The editing house, F. Casanova & C, explain this in the introduction and then go on to talk about how they’ve not only finished the revision but added hundreds of new entries that:
“…bring to you the very latest words and modes of speaking, the result of the rapid changes that both languages have undergone in the course of the conflict.”
On the other side of the frontispiece is the name of the publishing house beneath which is an emblem, stamped by hand in red ink, a lion rampant standing on a globe.
So, you might think, well Nuovissima in 1951 has to be out of date by now, but it’s really not that way. Today I was looking up the verb “dole” as in “to dole out”. In the fancy new dictionary they offered the following: dare, distribuire in piccole quantità (to give, to distribute in small quantities). Pretty straight forward but I was translating a poem. I was looking for something more subtle. I went to find Volume One of Dizionario Lysle e Gualtieri. They told me that this word was not used much in English anymore, that today people said “distribute” but they gave me a new verb: scompartire (to divide into parts). I glanced up at the noun form, gold! parte, porzione, elemosina, pietanza, spazio lasciato senza aratura, piccolo pezzo di pane (part, portion, alms, pittance, a space left unploughed, a small piece of bread) Now, the next to last one I’ve never heard…but I found the word that fit into the poem, “elemosina”. I made the noun form work by finessing the line a bit.
Although I have to give credit to Oxford/Paravia in that they went on to give an entry for “on the dole” (a phrase current in England since 1920 and yet not to be found in Lysle even in 1951); for the noun form of “dole” they only offered two synonymous Italian words for “pain”.
All this to say that old dictionaries are a treasure trove for both the translator and the word hound and that the latest up-to date version doesn’t always tell the whole story…
How cool is this! My sweetheart has his paintings in the front window of the newly opened De Freo Gallery in Berlin. He’s going there at the end of the week to take some more paintings and do a little publicity. I’ve been so wound up with International Poetry Month (which turns into a full time job for at least the first two weeks of February) that I haven’t stopped to talk about what’s going on with him. Now you know!
Below are some pictures of the latest paintings and a sculpture; check it out!
I was just checking up on all of the blogs that I follow when I looked at my dashboard and saw that I had a new follower! Wow, how cool was that…who could it be? I clicked; it was me! Somehow, I’ve ended up following myself. I felt like Pooh tracking the hefalump prints in the snow. Maybe at least now I’ll be able to find out what I’m up to.
I still have the flu, or something like it that gives me a sinus-headache-of-death every day. My daughter is well! She even went to school today without a fuss. My sweetheart went off to work in Varese so I was finally able to finish my second essay about poetry and catch up on reading my favorite blogs. I love writing about poetry, I just wish that I were faster.
The sun has come out since my last post and that’s a relief. I have sworn off sponges and cleanser this year and replaced them with hand knit dish cloths and scrub-cleaner made with dish-soap, baking soda, and a few drops of lavender oil (all stuff I have in the house anyway). Now it’s time to go and pick up my girl from school…nice to take a walk in the sunshine.
This is my town, Gemonio, at 4:30 pm today. It’s been like this for the last several days. Not so cold, above freezing every night and up in the 40’s during the day, but grey. I hate to be a whiner but these grey days get to me…it feels like working in a fluorescent lit office building from which there’s no escape.
After a few days I begin to feel disconnected from everything as if my lovely apartment that is so full of windows has become an aquarium and I’m some exotic tropical fish floating around inside doing the laundry. Although there’s no change in the intensity of the light, the colour shifts: this morning the light was grey-green, now it’s changed to grey-blue verging towards grey-black.
As I was thinking about this day I read Bobbie’s Blog and thought…well, at least it’s not snowing. But now I don’t know, snow has a nice hard splang! to it; real cold that crunches under your feet and blows in the front door. I console myself with the brilliant red of pomegranates and the idea that it can’t last forever….can it?
p.s. I’m loving the beautiful scarf that my Mother sent me….take a LOOK at her blog full of beautiful stuff!
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 