Almeno un vantaggio dell'essere malata

Yes, yes, yes.. I am sick!!! I have been pretty sick yesterday, and today I'm doing a bit better.. but yesterday I had a temperature and I really wasn't in the mood of doing too much. So, when Lucas came back home, he cooked for me!!!!! I asked him if he could make some polpette, since we had some ground beef that I meant to use.. and he did!


That's nice of him, isn't it? :) He made these really tiny and good meatballs with onions, which he told me was American style, and he made some rice too :) (The peas were in our fridge already :) ). So we were both very happy. And he washed the dishes too!

Autunno in North Carolina

North Carolina is famous for the wonderful colors that appear during fall season. Last year we went to the mountains, in this period, and we were amazed. I have some pictures from that trip on my picture website.
This year we didn't have time to go, so I took some pictures of Lake Johnson. It's gorgeous.. I'll post some of them here. If you want to see them larger, just click on them.
This was the beginning of our walk:


Tree tops in the sky:

Leaves (which tree is this?):

Red tree in the woods:

Leave mosaic in the sky:

Later on in the afternoon, with a very warm light:

Fantasmini

I took the recipe for these little ghosts dancing in the night from the Traditional Piemontese cookbook that I already mentioned. Of course, they were not originally ghosts.. they were called 'dolci uova in barca' (sweet eggs on the boat).

To make the ghosts, bring 1 l of milk and 4 tbsp sugar to boil. Beat 6 eggwhites till very firm, add 200 g sugar (this is less than the original dose!!!) and some vanilla powder or flavor. Beat again until a very thick and firm cream is obtained. Spoon this cream in the boiling milk and let cook for a few minutes on each side. The eggwhites will raise and become fluffy.
To be honest, it's really hard to keep the milk boiling and not have it overflow. So I was keeping it a few degrees below the boiling point. When you have cooked the eggwhite-clouds on both sides, take them out and put them on a plate. They will deflate a bit.
Prepare the chocolate sauce. The cookbook proposes a recipe that I tried, but we all liked better the second time I made it according to my old favorite hot chocolate recipe.. so I'll give you mine. In a pan, mix 6 tbsps dark cocoa powder, 3 tbsp sugar (more or less according to your taste), and 2 tbsps flour. Very slowly add the milk that you used to cook the ghosts. Add a little bit, stir until the flour/cocoa sugar has absorbed it, then add more, and so on until it's all liquid. Then put on the stove and bring to boil. Stir from time to time, and then constantly when it boils. Let it boil until it gets to the consistency that you want. If you want to drink the chocolate it must be a bit liquid. If you want to use it to make this dessert, it must be thicker. It will thicken more when it gets cold anyway.
Spread the chocolate sauce on a wide dish and once it's cold put the eggwhites on top of it. When everything is cold decorate with black edible color to make the eyes and the mouths. I noticed it's actually better to keep the eggwhites in a closed container in the fridge if you're going to eat the dessert the day after, and assemble it at the last moment.
The ghosts are like 'spumoni' (not sure how to say it in English. Kind of like marshmellow consistency), and they taste like milk and vanilla, so they're very good. The chocolate is also good, so I'd say, it can be a success :)

NOTE: these doses make a huge amount of fantasmini. I cut it to 4 eggwhites last time I made it and there was still plenty (that whole dish in the picture on top + 5 little ones that we ate the day after :) )

Festa di Halloween -2

Yesterday night, Antonella and Marco invited us to have a real Halloween experience: the 'trick or treat' (dolcetti o scherzetti) tour.
In their neighborhood, a lot of people decorate their houses and children go around asking for candies on Halloween's night. It was the first time I saw anything like this in my life.. there were in fact a lot of children going around, most of them wearing some sort of costumes (not all of them though), and a lot of houses had fancy decorations with spiderwebs, ghosts and Jack O'lanterns. Some of the people who gave out the candies were dressed in pretty spooky costumes - I was told that Halloween is actually more fun for the adults than the children, because they are allowed to be scary :) For me it was an interesting social experience too. As a note, some of parents were driving their children from house to house... Never risk to sprain your ankle for too much walking, as someone else said :) :)
(This is one of the Jack-o-lanterns that we saw on our trip)

Marco and Antonella's kids collected a large amount of candies. After the trick or treating, we went all to their house to have a Halloween/goodbye party (for the Sanna family, who was going back to Sardegna today).
People prepared a lot of good food. For the Halloween theme, Marco prepared a pumpkin/sausage pasta which was gorgeous:
I made some more fantasmini (ghosts) since I thought there would be children to enjoy them.
And I also made a Jack-o-lantern cake.
It's the same papaya/coconut cake that I already gave the recipe for: I noted that it had a nice orange color, so I could use it to mimic a pumpkin.. and then I decorated it with chocolate.

Festa di Halloween -1

Today it's All Saints Day in the Catholic tradition, and yesterday it was Halloween in the Celtic tradition.. :)
So today I went to Mass, but all the people here celebrate Halloween much more than All Saints Day (it's not a Protestant holiday at all). I was invited to TWO Halloween parties this year. :)
The first one was the famous Filipe's and Vlasta's Costume Halloween Party. It was last Saturday. Costumes were mandatory.. so I actually was forced to invent something... I always think I hate to create and put on costumes, but in the end, to be really honest, it was a lot of fun both to invent the costume and to go to the party and see all the other ones. So.. I was the wizard of the kitchen! And Lucas was the Dissertation Devil :) :) :) Here we are:


As you can see, I was wearing a blue dress which is a Moroccan robe (really pretty) that my mom bought when she was younger, and which seemed to me like the kind of dress that a good wizard could wear. Then, I had an apron, which says 'La Maga della cucina' (the wizard of the kitchen) on it (Lucas gave it to me, it was sawed for us by a woman in Pienza). Attached to the apron, all my magic herbs - and a wooden spoon was my magic wand :) Lucas instead had his whole thesis attached to the black robe he used to graduate, and was the 'Dissertation devil', who whispers in every Ph.D. student's ear: "Go work on your thesis!!!" when they're having fun somewhere :)
People had really wonderful costumes. I'll show here only a few examples, but you can go to my picture website for a complete set:
Laura Craft and Super Mario (i.e. Luisa and Jorge)
Now, isn't this THE real Mario??
Frida Calo and Diego Rivera (i.e. Mariana and Trino)
And this THE real Frida?!?
Desperate Housewives (i.e. Filipe and Vlasta)
And again, Filipe was dancing all night on THOSE shoes :)
Tree and tree hugger (i.e. Crissy and David)
Per chi non lo sapesse: Tree huggers sono definiti gli hippy ambientalisti a volte vestiti a acconciati come David.. che era anche un tree hugger nel senso letterale delle parole, pero'!!
The party was actually a lot of fun. We danced a lot - and what was really nice was that Lucas danced with me for a few dances!!! I really liked that :)
And there was also a lot of food.
At midnight, the wizard of the kitchen and his ghostly helper performed a magic, and little ghosts dancing in the night appeared!!
They were actually quite good ghosts :) I will give the magic formula to perform this magic in a next post :)

Sorpassate le 1000 visite!!!!

Hey!!! 'An Italian in the US' just passed the 1000 visits!!!!!
(image from elsewhere.org)

Della serie: cene italo/spagnole

Our italian/spanish dinner this week was hosted by Crissy, and a new nationality was represented: Peru, thanks to David :)
We're getting better and better and this time we spoke Spanish almost all the time, and Luisa tried to read the Italian cookbook that I brought. We exchanged sayings too .. for example: how do you say 'to be extremely tired' in a colorful way? Lucas, Crissy and I couldn't come out with an American or Italian saying, whereas we found out that in Mexico they say
'cansado como una cucaracha fumigada' (tired as a fumigated cockcroach, stanco come uno scarafaggio spruzzato con l'insetticida) :) :)
And in Peru they say
'cansado como el caballo de los bandidos' (tired as the horse of the bandits, stanco come il cavallo dei banditi) .
So if some readers want to help.. can you find an Italian/American saying for this?!?
The dinner had a 'Halloween' theme, since we are so close to October 31st. So here is our guest Crissy holding the bleeding skull:

More pictures and some recipes below.

For the dinner we were supposed to bring food typical of our countries. So I took the book that my Dad gave me: 'Cucina di tradizione del Piemonte, Ricettario a Fumetti' by Alberto Calosso and Piero Gallarino (e' bellissimo! Chiunque si interessa di cucina dovrebbe prendere questo libro, e' davveri simpatico, c'e' un pazzo cuoco-cartone che produce ottimi piatti e li illustra :) ). It's a book about cooking from Piemonte, my region. I took a recipe for a soup, because I thought there would be too much other food to make a pasta.
It was really good, so I share the recipe with you (slightly cut down on the butter).
Zuppa di cipolle (Onion soup)
Cut very finely 2 kg onions (~5 medium/big onions). In a pan, put 50g (1/4 stick) of butter and melt it, add the onions and cook very gently for ~20 min. In the meanwhile, melt 30 g (~2 tbs) butter in another pan, add a spoon of flour, and ~ 1 l vegetable broth (I added this much as the recipe said, but I think it's too much, so I had to cook it for a while later to evaporate some liquid) and salt. After the onions are done, blend them to obtain a sort of mousse. Add to the broth. Bring to boil and cook until it's of the thickness you like. Then, add 3 tbsp sour cream (panna da cucina, se ce l'avete a disposizione), mix, and serve hot with crostini (pieces of bread cut and toasted in a pan where some butter (~1/2 tbsp) was melted previously).

Also Lucas cooked! He made cornbread, the style that his grandmother used to make it:
Lucas's grandma's cornbread

Mix 1 lb cornmeal, 1 broccoli bunch cut into pieces, salt, 1 small onion sautee, 1/4 lb melted butter, 12 oz cottage cheese, 4 eggs beaten. Put in a pan, so that it's about 1 1/2 inch thick. Bake at 400 F for 30 min. It was very good!!!

Luisa made a chinese dish, which she explained is commonly cooked in Mexican households of her region, due to the strong influence of Chinese immigrants.
It was very good, but I can't remember the name!

Mariana made the 'Sopa de gato' (soup of the cat), which is neither a soup nor does it contain cat meat :) - but it's a stir fry of tortilla, chorizo and cream. Very yummy :)
(sorry, the picture is blurry).

And Crissy made a wonderful 'Italian roast', which was beef and vegetables slowly cooked in a crockpot with tomatoes and spices for 10 hours. It was delicious.


The dessert was a mixed cheesecake (we didn't make it though) :)
Very good, I couldn't resist trying transparent slices of 3 of the 4 flavors.

I also made another dessert, taken from the Piemontese cookbook, but since I transformed it into a Halloween dessert, I'll describe it in another post.

I just wanted to post a few pictures of the guests of this dinner:

Crissy and David
Luisa and Jorge
Mariana and Trino
Marta and Lucas

Viva Torino!!!!

I just found out that a wonderful website about Torino is one of the most voted travel websites in Pixelawards.com.. It's a collective effort to show really nice pictures of Turin, organized in itineraries. There is also a blog with more wonderful pictures.
I really liked it and if you do too, you can still vote for it!
Per i miei amici italiani e torinesi: leggendo alcuni itinerari ho scoperto cose interessanti che non ho mai visitato, per esempio la magica cartoleria Bonino nel quadrilatero romano.. Torino ha sempre qualcosa di nuovo da mostrare!

Pane di farina integrale stile americano

Lucas's mom gave me a wonderful book titled 'Bread alone', with a huge amount of bread recipes. I am very curious and want to try a lot of them! So I decided to start from the first one, which was called 'Classic country style hearth loaf'. It takes a while but the result is very good.
Some more pictures and the recipe below.

This bread starts with a 'poolish', i.e. a small amount of flour, yeast and water that start the fermentation of the whole bread-to-be. To make it, mix 1/2 cup water at RT with 1/2 tsp yeast, let stand for 1 min, stir until yeast is dissolved, and add 3/4 cup whole weat flour. Cover with moist towel and let rest for 2 hours at RT or overnight in the fridge (that's what I did).
Then, add 2 1/2 cups of water to the poolish, mix, add 1/2 tsp yeast, mix, and start adding flour (I added a mixture of whole weat and regular flour). Add 1 tbsp salt before you finish adding the flour. You should add flour and stir until it becomes solid enough to be workable with your hands. Once it's solid enough start working on it with your hands and add flour until it's not too sticky. They say you should add a total of 5-6 cups of flour but I think I added more than that. Knead for at least 15 minutes (this is a hard thing to do!! you can use a machine, if you want). At the end of the kneading the dough must be elastic, such that if you pull or poak on it it should go back to the original shape. If it doesn't, keep kneading. I did it for 20 minutes..
Then, make the dough into a ball, lightly grease the exterior part with oil or butter (I used oil) and cover with a moist towel. Let rest 2-3 hours (supposedly at 78 F. I think my room temperature was much lower, and I let it rest for a bit longer).
This picture shows how much it raised after that time..I was impressed!
After that time, deflate the dough by punching it in the center, form again into a ball and rest for another 30 minutes.
Deflate the dough again and knead it briefly. Cut into 2 pieces, flatten them and eliminate any air bubbles by squishing them with the palms of your hands. Reshape into balls, and set in bowls covered with towels that you will have floured. Cover and let rest for 1.5-2 hours (proofing). This is how one of them looked like after the proofing.
Preheat the oven and a baking stone in it to 450F (according to the book the preheating should last 45 min. I did it for 20 min only).
Transfer the bread loaves on a floured board, cut them with quick shallow cuts on their surface, and slide them into the oven. Spray the inner walls and the bottom of the oven with water, and immediately close the oven not to lose the water vapors. According to the book, you should then repeat this operation after 3 minutes. Since it seemed like a dangerous operation to me, I didn't repeat it. Cook for 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 400F and cook for another 15-20 minutes. Cool the loaves on racks.
The bread was very good, and I think it really came out how it was supposed to, as you can see from this picture that shows the inside of it:
It was a bit different from how I was imagining it would have been, since a 'country bread' in my mind has a much thicker crust and a denser inside, with bubbles of air that are larger, but the dough is denser. So I think this bread is more American counry style bread, whereas the recipe that I used before and posted here was more Italian-style. Both are very good, anyway, although I'm biased towards the Italian version :)

Btw: this is my 100th post!!

Cena di addio per Gisela

Gisela will leave Raleigh next week to go to Columbia, and then Cesar will join her and they'll have their honeymoon in Brasil, before moving to New Castle, UK, where Cesar was hired as a professor.. congratulations! This is really nice, and makes me hope that Lucas and I will sometime be able to find something in Europe.
Anyway, so we decided to have them for dinner one last time, to say goodbye. It was a really nice evening. We stayed up talking until 1.30 am, and we had a lot of extremely interesting discussions, ranging from the history of guerrilla movements in Columbia to the minorities in the US, to movies..
People liked the food, and the wines that our guests brought were awesome.
Here are Cesar, Vlasta, Filipe and Gisela before leaving. I'll put below pictures of food and recipes, if someone is interested in them.

I prepared two appetizers:

Insalata autunnale (Fall salad)
This is one of the infinite variations of my typical salads: the basis is cabbage, finely cut, then I added slices of apple, almonds in pieces, and olives. I seasoned it with a sauce made by mixing approximatively 6 tbsp yogurt and 1 tbsp olive oil, plus I added a bit of oregano and celery salt.

Antipasto caldo autunnale (Fall warm appetizer)
I took the idea for this recipe from cooker.net (Italian wonderful cooking website), but added my touch to it (the gorgonzola sauce). So here is my version of it. Slice 5 red potatoes and grill the slices on an anti-sticking pan (no oil was necessary), until tender and slightly colored on both sides. Add salt to them. Then slice a packet of fresh mushrooms and sautee them in olive oil with some garlic and salt. Cut into small pieces three red onions. Cook them in a pot with 1 tbsp vinegar and 4 tbsp water (you can increase the vinegar/water ratio, but I didn't want to in this case), and 2 tbsp sugar. Taste it after a while and keep checking on them. You need to cook them until they're almost completely mushy.
Prepare a salsa di gorgonzola (gorgonzola sauce) by mixing in a pot ~ 2 tbsps flour and ~1 1/2 cup milk and ~ 1/2 cup gorgonzola cheese into pieces. In particular, first put the flour in the pot and add the milk a little at a time so that it incorporates the flour without making clumps. Start the heat once the flour is mixed with part of the milk. After you heat up for a few minutes you can add the cheese. Add salt to taste. Mix occasionally to break clumps that may form. You will have to start mixing all the time once it starts boiling, or it will stick to the pan. Stop heating once it's thickened enough (not too much or you won't be able to spread it). You can use this sauce for a variety of purposes, including good pasta dishes.
For the antipasto: layer the grilled potato slices, the onions, the mushrooms and the cheese sauce, and keep layering until you run out of ingredients or space in the pan. Before serving it, warm in the oven for ~10 minutes at 350F.
I forgot to take a picture of the layered serving dish, unfortunately, so you see only what was in my plate :) . I was very happy of this appetizer and it's good also a few days after. You can serve more of it and have it as part of an entree if you want.

Then I made a pasta:
Linguine con pesto di peperoni e pesce (Linguine with pepper pesto and fish)
I forgot to take a picture of the main dish, so again you see only what was in my plate :) )
I took the idea for this pasta reading a few recipes from cooker.net, again. I wanted a sauce a bit different from the usual, again using fall ingredients, and which did not contain tomatoes. So I chose to use peppers and fish. I roasted 5 sweet banana peppers (red and green) in the oven at 350F for ~1/2 hour, turning them occasionally.
Then I removed the seeds and peeled them (only what was easy to peel got removed :) ). Then I cut them and blended them with 2 garlic cloves, a handful of walnuts and 3 chunks of parmesan cheese, as if I wanted to make pesto, but using peppers instead of basil. I also added some salt.
In a pan slightly greased with olive oil I cooked a Mackarel fillet (~5 min per side). I removed the skin after cooking it and cut it into pieces. When we were almost ready to eat the pasta, I cooked the linguine al dente (for my American readers who may not know: please remember to add at least 1.5 tbsp of coarse salt in the pan where you cook the pasta, and have a large pan with a large amount of water in it, which must be boiling before you throw the pasta in!!!!). Then I drained them and stir them in the pan where I had the fish, and added the pepper pesto sauce. I mixed everything up and the fish was tender enough to get divided into tiny pieces during this operation. Serve hot.

The dessert was a cake that had been suggested to me by my aunt Carla.
Torta Milano (Milano cake)
Ingredients for the dough:
300 g flour (2.5 cups)
50 g sugar (1/4 cup)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract in 1 tbsp of water
1 pinch of salt
grated zest of 1 lime or lemon
110 g butter, melted (1 stick)
1 egg
Mix the flour, the sugar, the salt and the lemon. Add the butter and the egg, beaten. Mix with your hands quickly and shape into a ball. Cover and let rest in the refrigerator for 1.2 hour. This is very similar to the dough we make for 'crostata' cakes, that I described in earlier posts.
Ingredients for the filling:
200 g ground almonds (~ 1.5 cups)
50 g sugar (1/4 cup)
50 g corn starch or potato starch (1/3 cup)
strawberry or raspberry or orange jam
4 eggs
1 pinch of salt
50 g sliced almonds (1/3 cup)
Mix the almonds, sugar and starch and salt. Beat the yolks in a bowl and add the almond mixture to it. Beat the eggwhites until firm. Add them to the other ingredients (this actually obliged me to kind of destroy the firmness of the eggwhites, because the egg/nut mixture was sturdy).
To assemble: spread the dough on a buttered and floured pan, covering the bottom and the borders of the pan. Spread a good amount of jam on it, until completely covered. Add the filling on top. Bake at 400F for ~20 min then take out, add the sliced almonds and finish cooking (~10 min). Check on it, because in my oven it was quicker than in the original recipe.
It's a very nice cake, very good to eat with a glass of Port wine or a cup of coffee. :)

During the whole meal, we enjoyed a new type of bread that I prepared. I was happy of it and I will make a separate post to describe this recipe.

Mostra di Monet

Maia and I wanted to go for a trip today, but unfortunately it rained almost all day. So we decided to go see an exposition that just opened at the NC Arts Museum, in Raleigh. The title of the exposition is 'Monet in Normandy'.

This specific painting is not at the exposition, but there are many as famous and as wonderful as this one.

I really really enjoyed seeing this exposition, even though there were way too many people (rainy Sunday, and the exposition started very recently). I love Monet and I can lose myself watching his paintings. Moreover, it brought up so many memories from the past: my trips with my parents and my aunt and uncle to France and to the towns of Monet, my love for art and paintings, the many expositions that I saw when I was in Turin and in Italy.. this was an almost unique event here in Raleigh. So, I was really happy and I'll go back with Lucas once he's done with his thesis.
Moreover, Maia and I took the occasion to visit also some of the Museum permanent collections. I already visited it, but it's a really wonderful museum, showing ancient art from Egypt, Rome, Greece, South and Central America, Africa, paintings from Europe and America of the XVII, XVIII, XIX, and XX century and modern and contemporary art. I'd recommend visiting this museum to everyone who happens to be in Raleigh.
Visit their wonderful website to have a more detailed idea.

Festa di matrimonio di Cesar e Gisela

Gisela and Cesar are two dear friends from Brasil and Columbia, respectively, who just fot married and had their wedding party two weeks ago - I still didn't write anything of this nice event..
So here are the newlyweds:

Look at what Gisela has in her hand.. this can let you understand the quantity of alcohol that was flowing at the party :)

Other than alcoholic beverages, the party was a lot of music and dancing and food, as every respectable party :)
This is just a memory of the 'Italian mafia' - as we were called :)

Maia (on the left) had just arrived from Palermo and Ross (on the right) recently came back from Pavia, as I mentioned somewhere else.

Pic-nic italiano

Last saturday Antonella and Danila organized the first Italian Pic-nic of the Triangle! It was a very nice idea. We met at Lake Crabtree, which is a wonderful place very close to Raleigh. Funny, I had never been there in these two years. The lake is beautiful and there are lots of trails.

There were a lot of people and food...

There were a lot of savory cakes (torte rustiche) and rice salads (insalate di riso), which are the typical Italian pic-nic food. But barbecues are everywhere in the US, so we obviously took advantage of it, and tons and tons of meat were cooked :)
Lucas and I went for a short walk around the lake and I took a few pictures. I'll put here this sort of goodbye picture, hoping to go back to this wonderful place soon.

La meglio gioventu'

Lucas and I watched this long movie (or miniseries) about one week ago and I've been wanting to write about that since then.
It's an Italian production by Marco Tullio Giordana (english title: The best of youth).


It's the story of the lives of two brothers who are young in Rome in the Sixties/Seventies, and grow and live in different parts of Italy. Their personal stories are intertwined with the historical events taking place in Italy from the Sixties to 2004. So it starts with the story of the Sixty-eight movement, the fights between 'i sessantottini' e 'i celerini' (the young people occupying universities and the police), and it's actually very nice because it shows a bit of both sides, as the two brothers are on different positions. Then the movies goes on, and the history of Italian society too.. so there is the Brigate Rosse (a sort of terroristic movement that started at the end of the Seventies).. and other social issues are discussed, together with life romances and sufferings. It's a wonderful movie, I'd recommend it to everyone.. even just if you want to see some of Italy and of Turin in particular: a lot of the movie is set in Turin. It made me quite homesick, in fact, especially now that I don't know what will happen of my life in general..