gianni cakes or crespelle alla fiorentina

We have made this delicious meal, which is by turns, either like crepes or quesadillas, a few times but did not bother to document it before. It is more labour intensive but very tasty and worth the effort and concentration. This is the only dish of detail I know that conspicuously calls for a hard and a soft cheese.

To make approximately 5 generous-sized crespelle, one will need:

• 300+ grams (11 ounces) of frozen spinach 
• 200+ (7 ounces) grams of Ricotta cheese 
• 6+ tablespoons of freshly grated Parmesan cheese 
• 4 large eggs 
• Salt, pepper, fresh Muscat (grated) 
• 500 ml (2 cups) of milk
• 150 grams (1¼ cup) of flour
• Cooking oil and extra butter to fry the crespelle and line the casserole dish 
• 250 ml (to make about one cup) of vegetable stock or bouillon for the Béchamel sauce

Begin making the spinach and ricotta filling by ensuring the spinach is thawed and malleable. Combine this with the ricotta, 2 eggs, 3 tablespoons of the Parmesan and seasonings to taste. Mix until thoroughly blended and no longer lumpy.

Next, prepare the batter and one’s work space for the crespelle. Melt about 50 grams (2 ounces) of the butter in a pan. Meanwhile, combine the other two eggs, about half of the milk, some cooking oil, a pinch of salt and about 100 grams (2/3 cup) of flour into a large mixing bowl and beat with a whisk. Adding a ladle’s worth of batter to the pan on medium heat, make the crepes, frying them about two minutes on each side, and allow the stack to sit for a few minutes to cool.

In the meantime, one can prepared the Béchamel sauce, first melting the remaining butter in a small pot and adding the rest (about 50 grams, about half a cup) of flour to it. Once melted, pour the mixture of flour and butter into the frying pan used for the crespelle. Slowly introduce the remaining milk and stock to the pan and stir gently on low heat, seasoning with the muscat, salt and pepper to taste.
Watch it to make sure the milk is not scalded. Scoop about four table spoons of the spinach filling onto each crepe and roll loosely and place in a greased casserole dish. Pour the Béchamel sauce over the crespelle and top with the remaining three tablespoons of Parmesan. Bake the casserole in an oven preheated to 175°C (350°F) for approximately 30 minutes. Then serve and enjoy with a light Riesling.

cassandra or opt-in

During a recent training workshop, which turned out to be a lot more encompassing and thought-provoking than I had expected, we were issued a gift bag of resource books—mostly, unfortunately for the nonce and end up on bulked up office bookshelves and was only referenced in the class one time regarding a battery of self-assessments, which included a review of positive psychology. It was a bit peripatetic, all over the place at turns but certainly not Therapy and Things or something too naïve and Pollyanna-ish. After the training, I did more than the required reading. I was a little bit skeptical since I think I tend to glom on to an argument perhaps too readily, given a reasoned set-up—like when Pollyanna, responding to one of the domestic’s laments that she hates Sundays because it’s the busiest day of the week and church services take up a large block of time, etc., etc., rationalizes in her signature way that the maid could take some solace in that when today was Sunday, then she was as far as possible from the next Sunday. A brilliant and irrefutable stance, I have thought since, although that is more designed to make a bad thing tolerable than a good thing better.
The aims of positive psychology as a discipline and a school of thought strive for recovery and personal-improvement by helping others to uncover innate strengths that have been buried by trauma, and the book was not so doctrine and difficult to summarize in a few words, but espoused that all the hardship and terror in the world is measured out by whether one’s world-view is global or local in a good way or a bad way—optimistic or pessimistic. The tricky bit for me, reluctant to give up the idea of realism and objectivity—although I suspect that aversion to arbitrariness and one’s own judgment is something greatly inflated and if put to the test, would pass away unnoticed—is that on balance, optimistic characters tend to view positive events as universal truths whereas pessimists attribute good outcomes to specific and local factors (I am blessed, lucky, charming instead of I got lucky, my challenger was really off his game, that was a fluke) . On the other hand, an optimist sees negative events as challenges for the nonce and not indicative of future success or failure, the opposite of a pessimist. That’s a little hard to reconcile, for me at least, and I do realize that I am an optimistic person, because there’s necessarily not a category that attributes causes (good and bad) to universal influences or to particulars and I have a tough time believing that even the most cock-eyed idealist would be ignorant of the fact that his challengers have a very different assessment of his fortunes. Like I said, however, it’s probably a much higher level concern if our personal outlook is detached from an analytical reality that is far removed from coping and quality of life. I wonder if there’s an analogue in mythology for the optimist and the pessimist, not just in fable, because that’s something I would buy wholesale—like meta-analysis of Prometheus and Epimetheus (Fore- and After-thought), Scylla and Charybdis or Orpheus. I don’t think it is there to be found—though the heroes and gods are jealous, insecure, arbitraty and fearful, there are always self-same and probably would not admit to a causal violation in their personalities. Of course I am over-simplifying matters, but suffice it to say that the attitudes of men hinge on that Weltanschauung and the framework of hope or gloom that it builds, whether for fabulists or myth-makers, and it is important to be cognizant of that mood proffered and all that goes with it. A little bit of reflection, I think, makes the argument and examples that one can stir up quite apparent and convincing.

sister cities

It was a bit disheartening to learn, a few months ago, that some communities of the British Isles were formally severing ties, de-twaining themselves from twin towns and villages in continental Europe.
The relations, I suppose, had gone mostly inactive with cultural exchanges and engagements rarer and rarer and only with the guilt-inducing (or affirming) reminders on the city-limits sign. There was also the instigation that the ties were not only irrelevant but came out of a backlash against EU politicking and monetary policy. One remote Scots village in the Highlands, home to some three hundred residents, called Glenelg is bucking the trend, however, and embracing the notion of adopting a sister location. Those cartographers and explorers mapping out the Martian rover Curiosity’s route named a certain geological feature along the path, one which Curiosity will pass on its venture outward and again on its way back, after this settlement’s namesake in the Northwest Territories in Canada with a palindromical name. Residents are very proud of this distinction and are the first village to pair itself with an extraterrestrial locale.

boatswain

Another recent flea-market find was this bronze statuette, perhaps a trophy (Pokal), but determining anything further on it has proved quite a mystery. The vendor only knew that this very heavy bronze figure on a black marble base was from an artist in Hamburg. The piece is either dated or numbered on the fore of the boat with “19 | 94” and then inscribed with only a sideways, stylized W or E with two dots inside. The base looks like it might have once had a plaque attached to it—which is why I thought it might be some kind of prize. The inside of the boat that the tall man is standing in is etched like a leaf but otherwise cast like a small vessel. The ship’s wheel (Steuerrad) the man is handling is also an unusual detail. Do you have any guesses about this piece?

la serenissima

The UK daily the Telegraph is reporting on a secessionist movement and mass rally along the canals of the city of Venice, which may gain more traction at a quicker pace than other parallel calls for independence in Scotland from Great Britain and Catalonia from Spain.

United Italy already hosts the devolved Papal States as the Vatican, the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta and the Republic of San Marino (plus a few other aspirants) within its borders, and the maritime and mercantile empire of the doges only became annexed due to the barn-storming of Napoleon’s armies, like many other city-states and pocket-republics across the continent—with some notable allowances. The roots of this protest go back decades but economic instability and having to pay tribute to Rome may be the trigger that carries this popular movement. Reasserting lapsed boundaries, once the first province is freed, I think will cascade quite quickly and I don’t know how the map will look afterwards.

exposure latitude

Via the always outstanding Colossal, Flickrer Bastian Kalous shares some amazing and evocative photographs captured with a Polaroid instant camera. These images are imprinted with a certain heirloom palette on a canvas not often seen and the results are mysterious and hauntingly beautiful. His photo pool, which lies somewhere in an unexplored valley—not sinister but something with the compulsion and persistence of a last-known photograph—fortunately has several hundred of these chemical compositions to discover, ranging from his home by Passau in the Bavarian Forest to the Grand Canyon.

pageantry or deconstructing dumbo

Proctoring and participating in something established, like a formal debate, is confounded with expectations, necessarily anticipating that one defend and champion his causes over those of his opponent and the demands of the audience to see that conviction come, that overlay the chest puffing and stepping up to the challenge not only with the notion that a leader be unflinching but also polished, rehearsed and unhesitating.

Rhetoric and delivery are the vehicles of these matches, but they are only that—shiny and serviceable and not the chosen weapons in a duel or necessarily acquainted with civil negotiations outside this particular venue.

Rhetoric and delivery are also indicative of substance and style, and aside from keeping a tighter rein on the direction of talk, which was possibly a miscalculation and under- estimating but more likely a sign of exasperation for having to play to a farce or a baiting tactic that allows one’s adversary to dispatch and exhaust all the questions with prepared answers early on, thoughtfulness and circumspection seem indeed more befitting leadership. There was not an unwillingness to engage, as opposed to the true disdain and disregard revealed on the other side and pandering to an unallied demographic, but rather a weariness similar to being pressed to action by hateful stunts, where there’s also precious little chance for listening. Personally, I find it hard to believe—not having scrutinized the show play-by-play with the benefit of pundits and talking-heads, that anyone was much out of character, and proclaiming victory in these first rounds rings pretty hollow and is just a projection of bias and foregone conclusions. L’esprit d’escalier, staircase wit, thinking of better come-backs as one is walking away, maybe cannot redeem a supposedly bad night but the will to regroup and improve is certainly more withering in the long term. Perhaps, like the manifesto that’s based on math-magic and is malleable to the magical-thinking of the what the audience wants to hear, it was important to see that the challenger can perform, though over-exposure reveals the performance.