Lives of others

Last night Lucas and I got to watch our first movie in the new house. We chose 'Lives of Others', a recent German movie by director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
I highly recommend it. The director studied really hard to be able to make an extremely realistic, well made and touching movie about life in the East Germany. You can keep reading the post to know more about the movie - I won't spoil it.

Even though initially the main character seems to be a theater writer, you quickly realize that the most important person in the movie is the officer who's been assigned to monitor him. Following his life through headphones, the officer starts sharing the writer's feelings, and his own life is changed completely.

The clear depiction of the climate of control and fear that was in Eastern Germany was really scary and sad for me to watch. My political views are pretty left wing, and seeing what happened in the countries where socialism/communism was applied makes me very sad. One of the last scenes of the movie is set after the Berlin wall fall: the writer goes and asks for his own files showing how he had been monitored in the past. The librarian goes and looks for his files in a room containing hundreds of huge file-cabinets full of documents. Amazingly, we understood from the commentary that this scene was filmed in the real library, all those files really exist.. the number of people that had been monitored is unimaginable.

In any case, the movie is surely sad, but also very touching, and as I said, extremely well shot. And the music is beautiful and perfect. Again, strongly recommended.

Nano-day

I know I never posted anything work-related on this blog before - well, I guess this will be the first post. In fact, I did something really enjoyable today at work. No worries, I usually don't go to work on Saturdays, but this was a special occasion. We had 300 kids coming from middle and high school here at UC Berkeley with the objective of spending a day learning something about 'Nanoscience and nanotechology'. Nicola and I volunteered to present a one-hour activity, which we showed three times during the day to about 20 kids at a time. Actually I really enjoyed it. The kids were quite excited when they got to play with solutions of gold nanoparticles of cool colors, and we showed them cool machines moving at the microscale.. so for your own enjoyment, here is a picture of solutions of gold nanoparticles of different sizes (most likely from 10 to 200 nanometers - a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). Would you have ever guessed that gold is pink or purple when it's tiny???
I think I'm going to take a picture of my own solutions, they were much nicer.
In my next 'outreach' talk I want to talk about food and nanoscience.. I'm sure it would have some success. :)

Fresh Produce of the Month #4 - Roundup!

I'm a little late, but as an excuse I must say that right after we came back from Italy, Lucas and I moved and so I had to deal with boxes and furniture for the past week (and still have to)... but in any case, finally, here is the longly desired roundup for our 4th 'Fresh Produce of the Month' event.. centered on grapes! This time too we got a really nice set of entries! So let's not waist any more time, and let's see what everyone brought to the table!

The first people who answered were Bee and Jai at Jugalbandi, with their amazing 'Friendship Chelsea Buns'. They explain that 'The Chelsea bun was first created in the eighteenth century at the Bun House in Chelsea, an establishment favoured by Hanoverian royalty and demolished in 1839.', and it is always filled with raisins, which is why they chose it for this event.. Doesn't the picture make you feel like having a piece of those wonderful buns, sipping some tea with a British friend who just came to visit? :)

Ahsa at Aroma! took part to the event again and presented this super creative 'Tapioca-tricolor grapes pudding on pastry'! She mixes tapioca pudding, grapes and grape jam and put them on a crescent pastry.. mm.. I never had tapioca pudding, I'm really curious about how it would taste with grapes!





Namratha at Finger licking food prepared for us three grape-centered dishes: 'Green Goddess, Grape Chaat, and Raisins (Onadrakshi) Gojju! The one that caught my attention the most was the first divine drink: grapes, cardamom, sugar and milk.. a delicious drink for the summer!







A new contributor for this event is A Kitchen Scientist from The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star! She prepared this yummy 'Grapes kebab' - a delicious easy way to serve fruit on a skewer, rolled in condensed milk, then in dessicated coconut and chilled! And she adds some ice cream and custard to increase the scrumptiousness of the dish :)





Next we have Nags at For the Cook in Me, who presents another delicious grape-centered drink: grape tea! It's a cold tea prepared by blending tea and grapes! What's most amazing is that she 'whipped it up' in the 'micro-kitchen' of her office while she was at work!! Congratulations, Nags :)






Aarti at Aarti's Corner prepared for us another summery treat: 'Black Grape Sorbet'. Simple, healthy and delicious. Go check out also all the wonderful pictures she has of the vineyards she visited in Luxembourg and Germany!





Mansi at Fun and Food prepared another creative combination: 'Grape and Green Tomato Chutney'! It looks really good, perfect with these summertime fresh ingredients. She also suggest to use it to dip chips, fingerfood, or pakodas... and she also provides a link for the pakodas recipe!






Next we have Dhivya at Culinary Bazaar, who prepared a 'Healthy P.A.C. drink'! Now, you're all wondering what the letters stand for, right? Well, she explains it: 'Since this drink is so rich in P- Potassium , A - Antioxidants, Vitamin A , C - Carotene, i call it Health P.A.C or P.A.A.C'. In fact the drink is a delicious mixture of carrots, grapes and apple! It seems like a great and indeed very healthy idea. :)




At last I'll put my entry - I was hoping to prepare another grape dish to add to what I had already presented to Swapna's event (please go check out her roundup too!), but between travelling and moving I really didn't have time.. So here it is, my 'Strawberry and red grapes preserve', to eat with bread or ricotta/apple pancakes! Hope you all enjoy it :)



I thought this was a really nice collection of grape-centered recipes.. from drinks, to sweets, to chutneys, to jams.. how cool, how many things we can do with this fruit! And now, I'm even more curious to see what the great cook-bloggers will come up with for the next Fresh Produce of the Month event, since I'm going to launch an interesting theme..... Brussels sprouts! At least here, the Berkeley Bowl is flooded with this cute vegetable. You can find it loose or still on the stem.. as in the picture that I used below for the event logo.
I honestly didn't know that's how Brussels sprouts grew, before I saw it here. It's really big and heavy, you can hold it like a sword :)
Now, what wonderful dishes we can make with this great tasting vegetable? Please take part to the Fresh Produce of the Month #5 and share your ideas! The rules are simple:
1) Put a post on your blog with a recipe involving Brussels sprouts. If you live somewhere where you cannot find Brussels sprouts, use any other sprouts that are in season. Add a link to this post on my blog and mention that it's an entry for the 'Fresh produce of the month' event. If you like it, feel free to place the logo of the event on your post.
2) Send me an email with a link to your post, your blog homepage and your name. My email address is chemcookitATgmailDOTcom. Specify 'Fresh produce of the month' as subject.
3) If you don't have a blog just send me an email with your recipe and if you have a picture of the food you made, that's even better. I will add it to the round-up as well.
The deadline for this event will be November 16th.

Important note: if you send me an entry and I don't reply to your email or leave a comment on your blog, it means that I didn't get it.. in that case, just leave a comment anywhere on the blog and I'll definitely see it!! Thanks and sorry about this in advance.

Hope to see the number of participants increasing more and more!

Siamo tornati!!

Hello everybody, we're back! We've had three really wonderful weeks full of events and visits, from North Carolina, to Virginia, London, Turin, Milan, Vicenza, Padova, Fubine, Bra.. so, quite a lot of places! I uploaded all the nicest pictures on picasaweb, so you'll be able to see them at this address.
I'll summarize here some of the nicest moments and images of the trip. You can read this post if you want to know something about all these nice things we visited!
Everything started with my dear friend Crissy's wedding!
Crissy and David got married in Raleigh on Sept. 22nd. It was a beautiful day, and they are a wonderful couple. Here you can see them at the ceremony, celebrated with a Methodist ritual. The ceremony was very short, compared to Italian Catholic rituals. It was celebrated outside, as you can see in the picture.
After this, the party started! Being an American-Peruvian party, you can imagine how most of it was focused on dancing :) The party lasted till almost midnight, and I really enjoyed it. All the people were happy, and there was a nice mixture of the young and the 'old' generation crazily jumping around on the dancing floor! This was very interesting for me, because no one ever dances in Italian weddings. Too bad, it's actually a nice way to move around instead of being stuck at the dinner table all the evening.
Going to Raleigh was great also because we got to see some friends that we hadn't seen in a while. So many nice memories.. I particularly enjoyed staying at Luisa and Jorge's. It was a lot of fun for me and Luisa to get ready together for the wedding. See how cute they were?
Before leaving for Europe, we visited Lucas's parents for just a few days. It was a nicely relaxing interval in the busy trip we were having. Unfortunately I don't have almost any pictures of this part of the trip :(
Then, our next step was London! This has been a really great part of the trip. We met here my friend Eleanor, whom I hadn't seen in about 4 years, and we also met her boyfriend Steve and another old friend of mine, Simone. Eleanor and Steve hosted us - I liked every moment of the stay, and it was so nice to see that even though I hadn't seen Eleanor in years, our relationship was as fresh as always. I also found out that I really like London. It has so many different faces - I didn't realize this last time I was there.
Here you can see the Thames and the big wheel they recently built to see London from a special viewpoint. I could live in this city if it weren't so rainy, cloudy and expensive. :)
After London, we finally landed in Torino. Still, we didn't stay long there. Almost the day after we arrived, I had to go to Milano to renew my visa to be able to enter the US. I have to do this almost every time I go back to Italy, and it becomes more and more painful every time. There are a number of annoying things in this process, including calling a number that costs $2 per minute just to schedule an appointment with the consulate to be interviewed for the visa, going to Milan, wasting a morning in line, and recently having to pay another private company to have the passport delivered at home. This is a new introduction - earlier on, one could have it home the day after the interview, delivered with regular Italian mail. I was quite annoyed at this innovation: not only for the much increased cost, but also because I didn't want to have to wait at home one whole day for the FedEx-like people to come and have me sign the receipt for the passport. So I decided to just stay in Milan and withdraw the passport at the end of the day, and take the occasion to visit the city. Lucas joined me, so it actually turned out to be a nice day. This is just a shot of one of the most impressive things in Milano: the Cathedral.
The inside is as impressive, especially because of the contrast with the exterior part - one bright and full of statues, and the other dark, almost empty if it weren't for the gorgeous stain glasses that are there. I love it. This short visit made me aware of a number of other really nice things of Milan, which I never really considered. I'd recommend visiting around the Castello Sforzesco - there are some small roads with not much traffic, and lots of nice trattorie.
Another nice trip Lucas and I did was to Vicenza and Padova, to visit my sister. We met her in Vicenza, and we stayed there for about one afternoon (it takes ~4.5 hours by train to get there from Torino). Visiting Elena was really nice. I hadn't seen her in such a long time, and it was a pleasure to see her in that nice small town. Vicenza has some really pretty views, such as la Piazza dei Signori:
We didn't have time to visit all of it, but from what we saw it seemed like a pretty little town. The day after, we met Elena in Padova. Padova is an amazing place. Downtown is almost completely pedestrian, and there are some gorgeous squares, which are used as open-air markets during the day and for restaurants and cafes to put outside their tables at night. It's a pleasure to walk there, and all the details are taken care of:
One of the nicest things was visiting the 'Cappella degli Scrovegni'. It's a jewel, painted by Giotto. I studied it at school, and seeing it in real life was awesome. The 15 minutes that they give you to look at it are definitely not enough. Another artistic wonder we visited was the Battistero, painted by Giusto de' Menabuoi. We didn't have enough time to visit the great Church of Saint Antonio, who's a greatly loved Saint from Padova. Well, this means we have to go back. :)
We went back to Torino with Elena to participate to the baptism of my cousin's daughter, Giulia. You can see her here:
She's four month old! The ceremony was about one hour long, as usual in Italy, and at the end of it there was a first open reception, and then my aunt invited us for lunch at her place. The food was delicious, both at the reception (big chunks of parmigiano to eat with grissini, salame from Calabria, cheese from Sardinia, and lots of other things that are unknown here in the US), and at the lunch. I'll show here the wonderful display of sauces that my aunt prepared to eat with the meat that she cooked:
The meat is from cow - you boil different parts of it, until it becomes really soft, and then you eat it with olive oil and salt or (more traditionally) with these special sauces made with parseley and garlic, tomoatoes, or even fruits, as you can see in the picture. She also made some more delicious food, which we were all quite amazed of.
We had some more wonderful food at my grandparents' place, in Fubine, and at Alberto and Franca's place, in Bra. In both cases we had homemade pasta (lasagne and tagliarin), such a treat! And then roasts, and great desserts.. Too bad I didn't take pictures :(
Finally we stayed in Torino for a while. Here is when I started taking less pictures, unfortunately, since I know the place so well. We visited a lot of dear friends. Most of my friends recently had babies, so seeing all of them was a great joy. I also noticed some nice changes in Turin. For example, around the Duomo, they finished the recovery of some Roman ruines, and now it's wonderful to see them and go through them. Lucas and I went to visit the Antique Museum, which is there, and we were impressed by the beautiful collection that they have. They recently added some Roman mosaics, that they found close to the Duomo, such as these:
I also noticed that the city has become more international. Lots of foreigners everywhere - it was a pleasure to see that! I will end this post with a picture of my hometown taken from the park where Cinzia and I always go to:
Isn't it pretty?