What have I been doing lately (cosa ho combinato ultimamente)

Sometimes life gets a little boring when I need to stay home almost all of the time. Fortunately I always have little projects. One you can see when you look at this page. I added a feature and did some rearranging. The addition is the ability to translate the entire post for those who don’t read English well (I’m looking at you Laura). As long as I was at it I threw in French, Spanish and German just for kicks. I know one person who reads my blog who’s fluent in German and don’t know about the other languages. The free version of this plug-in uses Google translate and I know that the translations, at least into Italian are, let’s say, imprecise. Still Laura can read the blog now rather than just look at the pictures. If I get any comments in the other languages in the next couple of months I’ll keep them otherwise I will narrow the number of languages to English and Italian. And I will hope that Google keeps improving the translation into Italian. Click on a flag at the top left corner. Hovering over a flag shows the language if you don’t recognize the flag. I also moved some stuff that was on the right side of the page to the left side since all of that stuff disappears when viewed on an iPad. This includes the place where one can subscribe by mail (hint, hint).

One way to relieve boredom for me is to cook. I like to do it and I like to eat the results. This week when I was at the great vegetable market near us named Verdura (vegetable in Italian) I admired a squash that I had never seen before and thought that I could do something with it.

I thought a hearty soup since it is winter after all. It’s a big and heavy sucker. I could use it as a weapon if need be. I also found that it is really tough in the sense that cutting it was a real challenge. I have a good quality 10 inch chef knife that I keep well sharpened and it was a challenge even with that. I tried using a vegetable peeler to peel it and found that was really not going to be a good option so I cut it into slices and roasted it for about 30 minutes in the oven so that I could easily cut off the peel and make it into chunks. Since soups are very forgiving you can add a lot of different stuff (of course there are limits) so I had half a head of left-over cauliflower and a couple of potatoes that were getting pretty old and for something green I had some tuscan kale as it’s called in the U.S. or sometimes called dinosaur kale. Here it’s cavolo nero. I always have broth available and the trinity of aromatic vegetable – celery, onion and carrots so I was all set. Fortunately it is really tasty. I say fortunately because I made a LOT of it.

Next I made some chocolate chip cookies, a very American thing that it turns out seems to have taken root in Italy if not the world. I found a bunch of Italian recipes for these in addition to all of those from american sites. They look a little funny but they are pretty much what I wanted – a little crunchy rather than soft in the center. I can hardly wait to make another batch since I learned a lot from this one.

And of course there is a little silliness. Since I am an early riser after I have breakfast I set everything order so that when Laura finally comes into the kitchen everything is ready for her breakfast. So I have a little fun with it from time to time.

I mentioned in the last post that Laura had order a ton of stuff from the Coop supermarket. That includes our preferred beer.

And of course a Baci quote:

Life is too important to be taken seriously.
La vita e troppo importante per essere presa sul serio.

Oscar Wilde

That’s all folks. I’ll continue to lie low and wait for the vaccine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2021 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.