Food Frolic, Wine & Adventures

2011-10-23T04:24:00.002+02:00

I have lots to say and add but this has been a busy year, spent so much time with my butt on a plane I have not had much time for fun writing. I do make lots of reviews on Trip Advisor as Snow White from Milan so check them out. Lately the disgust for what is happening in our world has depressed me and it seems we are moving farther and farther away from what we need to be as human beings. Our politicians suck, their behavior, quest for power and money, the gross mishandling of our tax dollars in all cities and countries. The other day I read an article in an Italian newspaper, the parlament reps do not even show up for work on Thurs or Fri. In fact, on Wed they all show up at "the office" with their bags packed! These turkeys need to get paid for when they show up and that is it. How can a country be run when everyone is off enjoying their bennies? Just sucks.

On that note, I am adding a photo of one of our great wonders, a place so full of emotion-evoking vistas, smells and sounds. Try the Silver Saddle at the Cowboy Club in upper Sedona, get a personal tour of Hopi land with Sandra Cosentino Crossing Worlds, the Northern Arizona Museum in Flagstaff, stay at the Old Adobe Hacienda in Oak Creek Village and have great beers at the brewery in Tlaquepaque.

The Hopi House for good Native Indian crafts both cheap and expensive and the Silver Bear for silver. Garlands is always a treat and you will not find better rugs. Do not miss the Windrush Art Gallery, The Lanning Art Gallery and across from that one, the Turquoise Turtle, these are the quality galleries of Sedona and you will not be disappointed.

Mojito Time!

2011-06-26T13:03:00.001+02:00

Thanks to people who wander in once in a while, Stephen Andrew Jones introduced me to a creation of his and believe me people, if you like mojitos, are suffering a bit from summer heat you must try his pineapple mojito.

Awesome Pineapple Mojito recipe!!!!!!

Knock your Socks off - Caribbean Chocolate Rum Balls

2011-05-31T15:27:00.001+02:00

Double the batch, these freeze well, lovely with Amaretto or coffee liqueur.

2 oz semi-sweet chocolate, melted
2 cups crushed chocolate cookies (oreos or other)
1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
1 cup sifted, powdered sugar
3 tbsp light corn syrup
1/2 cup dark rum (Cruzan or Pussers)
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup sweetened, shredded coconut

Combine melted chocolate, cookie crumbs, nuts, sugar, corn syrup, rum and vanilla in a large bowl,
kneading until a thick dough forms. Roll into 1 inch thick balls. Roll in coconut. Makes about 24, it is that easy! This recent trip to the Caribbean has got me on the rum thing...rum runners, pain killers, rum and garlic rice, steamed coconut rice...yum.

BVI! Virgin Gorda

2011-04-29T09:26:00.002+02:00

Gathering my photos and getting my thoughts down in words regarding this pristine wonderland. So, stay tuned, you will be glad you did.

Castello Pavone, Ivrea - Piedmonte, Val d'Aosta Italy

2011-02-11T15:51:00.003+01:00


Courtyard of the Castello

A very brief visit to Castello di Pavone in the town of Ivrea on the outskirts between the Val D'Aosta, and Piedmonte, Italy was worth every Euro. Luky to have come in on the tail of two groups who vacated that very day and the weekend before Valentines, we had the place all to ourselves. The historic site has been lovingly restored and is dutifully maintained. You will find yourself immersed in an environment with most of the modern comforts you might desire and a nice dash of hardship to remind you how difficult it is to live in a castle, even today.

The courtyard

The owner is the only one who has a vehicle in the upper portion of the grounds; all us lowlifers must park below the dwelling and climb a nice steep set of flagstone stairs to the outer wall where there is a door built into the rock (remember this when you pack your bags...). :-) You must ring the bell to enter and the door will then slowly open automatically. As it opens the view beyond comes alive and you descend into a short tunnel of brick terraces until you arrive to the front of the castle. They provide help when asked, to bring your bags up to the castle and then to your room and if you are not young and strong, take the offer because the stairs do not end here. :-) Getting to your room could add in quite a few more and every step is worth it in my opinion. The staff is wonderful, helpful and happy.

Stained glass window of the suite

We were welcomed to our Royal Suite Pavone with a glass of Prosecco and promptly reserved our table in the dinning room for dinner. Having dinned there months prior, we knew dinner was a must; the ambience is fabulous.

The suite had one window and three portholes, yes a dark room with the dark wood ceiling but so typical of these old structures it just makes the whole experience more of an adventure. There are no elevators here and wondered how they received deliveries in the winter and during the rainy season because there is the old original river rock stone drive and I suppose their suppliers have a very difficult time during inclement weather (horribly slippery). Be sure to stop in the bar (the armory) and have a glass of wine and some outstanding appetizers.


Sunrise from the one window of the suite.

The dinning room is an experience and it is not just one room but made up of various adjoining rooms; one seems to be a little celestial room, up a few stairs off to the left of the fireplace in the main room and then to the right there is another room but I did not get a chance to see that one. The tables are large and round and stately; just perfect for a romantic and leisurely repast. The wine celler is well stocked so you can accompany their excellent food with an excellent wine. If you stay more than one day, I suggest requesting to have your bottle of outstanding red wine opened before dinner to let it air. Such a shame to not order one of these wines because you do not have time to let it breathe properly. We suggested they try out a Vinturi and see for themselves how this could give them a greater amount of flexibility with client satisfaction (and sell more of those fabulous reds).

We did not have the chance to taste breakfast but I am convinced it was nothing shy of their standard. After a late dinner, there just was not room for breakfast even though they called at 10 to ask if we would like them to bring breakfast to our room. Check out is at 11 so if you would like a slower morning, I would ask them if they do late checkouts; even at a price it is worth it. The spell you fall into while there, is a shame to break so abruptly in the morning with the hassle of getting breakfast, packing and hauling your things back to the car. I was truly amazed watching these young waiters whisk platters of food up staircases to well hidden meeting rooms and small dinning areas for private parties and the like; I think I would have liked to have a job like that when I was young, what a great way to work and get exercise!

Heavenliness - Val d'Aosta, the Alps!

2010-07-11T15:16:00.002+02:00

If you have never been to the Italian side of the Alps, which means taking in the fabulous Val d'Aosta, you have not lived! Culturally Aosta is loaded with ancient history from BC to the beautiful Roman Amphitheater ruins to the Alpine culture and modern day. Everywhere you gaze there are mountains framing your views, the town piazza is crowned with tall glaciers in the background and you can have it all while sipping caffe in the square. I love Val d'Aosta

The gastronomic pleasures of this area begin with the infamous Fontina DOP. This is the queen of the alpine meadows, a cheese made from raw milk, fragrant and alive. To be labeled or considered Fontina DOP, it must be made only from cows of the Valdostana breed that forage on local grasses and meadows. This is the cheese that gave birth, to la fonduta (fondue). It was from this awesome fonduta, that was transformed into the other versions of fondue in Switzerland. If you want to savor the original, this is where you need to be! Do not forget to try Fromadzo DOP too, another very special cheese of the area, mix of goat and cow's milk.

This area is also ultra famous for the Lard d'Arnad DOP and the Vallée d'Aoste Jambon de Bosses DOP. The prosciuto was an ancient gift for bishops and archbishops, produced in the city of Saint Rhemy-en-Bosses since the 14th century. The frigid stream of air that would come down to the valleys bordering with Switzerland and the long winter cold coupled with the manual labor of man, helped transform these raw prosciutti into authentic one-of-a-kind pieces. They are aged 12, 18 and 24 months and if you can find this ham, you must try it.

The lard of Arnad is truly the jewel of the mountain peasant's world. Today it is found in the area for sale where previously, it was very difficult to find because it was the source of substenance during those long harsh and cold winter months. As they say, living in the mountains is about 9 months of frigid cold and 3 months of just cold. So be sure to try ultra thin slices of this served on warm crusty pieces of bread; this is something you will come back for time and again.

A few of the brands assuring you of quality and origin are Saveurs du Val D'Aoste as well as Alpenzu. Alpenzu is another group of the Val d'Aosta guaranteeing the origin of the products sold. While at the hotel, we were lucky to taste chestnuts in honey as part of an appetizer and while shopping we stumbled on le tegole, famous cookies of the area, another must-try!

While traveling make sure you do the castles of the region, they are fantastic!

Romantik Hotels - European Class

2010-06-27T15:36:00.002+02:00

If you have not heard of this group of hotels, then you are in for a real surprise. This franchise has hotels all over Europe specializing in romantic getaways, spas, wonderful food and dinning as well as, stunning surroundings. I suggest ordering their catalog so you can see for yourself the smorgasbord of choices! If it is possible, at least for this creature, I will try to organize my business trips around staying in one of these hotels. You definitely get value for your money and are in lovely historical environments always family owned and operated so there is a nice sense of friendliness, lacking in the large hotels.Romantik

Oh WOW, Val d'Aosta - Paradise Unveiled!

2010-06-24T18:53:00.000+02:00

Just got back from a quick trip to the Val d'Aosta, and man do I have some great information for you! How can anyone not be amazed at those Alps, the Roman history of Aosta itself and the ancient door/arch to the city built 25 BC...
So hold on to your knickers because I have lots to share. :-)

Etruscan pasta - Simple and Honest Cooking!

2010-06-01T14:38:00.003+02:00

This has been the month of chocolate mousse for some reason of course I am super cheating because I have found a 2 minute package from Lindt! These are amazing and come in two if not three flavors...cannot remember (brain fart again). All you add is milk and whip (no, not me even though I have been very remiss lately with my recipes and cooking).:-)

As the hot season approaches, the desire for fresh and cool is right up there with finding a way to pay off all debt in one's life ;-) and last week I tried out an old Etruscan recipe and had to wing it. This is not a cold pasta sauce but it is SUPER simple. All you need is fresh mint, walnuts, garlic, olive oil and the real thing, parmigiano reggiano or grana padana.

For all you seasoned cooks, you just have to guess on the portions. I used quantities I would use for two people making garlic, parsley and oil pasta.

Choose a long pasta, linguini, spaghettini, pici, spaghetti, etc.

For two:
15 - 20 leaves of fresh mint approx.
2-4 cloves garlic depending on tastes
ultra finely chopped walnuts about (4 whole ones)
olive oil extra V, enough to make a sauce to cover the pasta.

Crush the garlic into the oil and begin to saute very slowly. Finely chop the mint and add to oil mixture and saute about one minute on very low heat take off the heat.

Cook the pasta in salted water, (must use some salt in the cooking otherwise pasta is just flavorless with the sauces). When al dente, drain and quickly toss into the pan of garlic, oil and mint that you will have deftly put back on the fire just seconds before draining the pasta. Saute high for 2 minutes or less tossing the walnuts into the sautee mix.

Serve in warm bowls and garnish with the parmigiano. Serve with a fabulous frizzy white summer wine from the Veneto region or even a Prosecco would do well with this. Buon appetito!

Texas Roadhouse!

2010-04-13T14:53:00.001+02:00

I just happened upon this restaurant, Texas Roadhouse while in New England and thought I had discovered the mother lode. What a fun place, where one can eat peanuts and just toss the remnants onto the floor and listen to country kicking music and yell "ye ha" every hour! If you go, you must try the rattlesnake bites, which are out of this world; not even chili poppers, so popular in So. Cal. come close to these! The steaks were cooked to perfection, the fresh hot bread is really something else (while trying to cut down on bread) served with cinnamon butter as well as, the daily assortment of awesome fresh veggies.

So for a fanatic against chains...I have to admit, this one has got me changed along with RiRa (Irish pub and grill -FAbULOuS food and cocktails)! This is one amazing restaurant and bar serving perfect Irish fare (try the Reuben with their homemade corned beef), great hand cut fries and since I was in New England, had to try their clam chowder finding it to be just perfect (as well as their potato leek soup). Most of these pubs have taken over old historic buildings and while maintaining the decor as it was when it was either a bank (or something else), they have transformed these into working bars and restaurants while preserving a part of our past, fantastic!

One last recommendation before I have to run out the door here, is Jumping Jays Fish Cafe! This is located downtown Portsmouth, NH and was the best meal I had in the 3 week vacation. The fish was unbelievable; ultra fresh, prepared with a choice of sauces and each one done to perfection. The martinis were good, the bread superb and the caesar salad was (finally) the way it should be, just olive oil, lemon, garlic, anchovy and parmigiano (nothing saucy or over dressed)! Mind you to eat here on a Friday or Saturday, you MUST make a reservation way in advance otherwise forget it. Even during the week you should make a reservation especially during the tourist season.

Portsmouth offers wonderful coffee houses, fabulous bakery items and oodles of Italian restaurants as well as the classic pub, brewery and chowder houses. The one thing I did not do with my other half was go to a great martini bar (I was told by an insider it has the best). The Red Door Martini Bar and martinis are not all they serve, check out their music line up, damn wish we had found out this little tip earlier, before we had to leave (guess I have a good excuse to go back)! ;-)

Eye Opener of a Vacation

2010-04-09T11:40:00.001+02:00

I am now convinced after spending time in New England, variations on a theme regarding clams, lobster, cod and such are really hard to find. After three weeks of the same type of menus, I never thought I would say this, I almost broke down and went to an Italian restaurant in the US (OMG)! Nonetheless, the freshness of the shrimp, the three sizes available for clams, the lobster and great tasting fresh cod seemed to take away the boredom of the choice. I love New England but to eat some of their traditional food means you really have to exercise; those chowders are not low fat (but wow, are they delicious)!

New England strives to be eco-friendly, green and eco-correct but I found that to be just a "tad" hypocritical when everyone drives SUVs! America has GOT to get a grip on it's over sized engines in these over sized vehicles to drive around in town. Just because it snows does not mean one must have an SUV unless you live in an area where the road to your own home is long and off the main road then yes, most of the trucks have their own snow blade attached to the front. Again, the cost of pushing that heavy blade added into the size of the truck = how much gas consumed? Salting the roads is bad for the rivers and streams and such because it is not just pure salt flowing in when the melts arrive. Snow plows paid for by the cities are for the main roads only so, what is a person to do?

Well I have one suggestion, downsize the cars and engines without sacrificing power (as done in Europe for decades) and still have a four wheel drive vehicle able to pull a trailer, or pack your kayak on top. Check out these photos of the Fiat Panda 4x4 and the ultimate dream of making the Fiat 500 into an SUV ...

For most of us who drive from the house to town for marketing and errands, why not downsize to the revamped Fiat 500? Remember this the old one? Check out the new one and talk about gas savings!

After driving around Vermont and seening how beautiful that state was and how nice to see all the eco-correctness there as well and fierce pride in serving Vermont-made products and using 7th Generation products in hotels, I was severely disappointed to see again, the massive number of SUVs, trucks and, the incredible amount of trash at rest stops, in town (Burlington), cigarette butts all over and the number of people who smoked. Wow, what a dichotomy.
So as we approach another year of crisis proportions for jobs, taxes and less money to buy gas...I think it would be a good time for America to really wake up and not just talk the talk but walk it. We have an amazing country and a great people but we really need to downsize our standard of living for the good of all. Take a few lessons from Europe and its small cars and truck/vans. :-)

Back from Vacation!

2010-04-04T14:30:00.000+02:00

Whew, just got back from a long vacation and much needed at that. Found lots of things to share so stay tuned and not all of it about cooking. ;-)

Still on Eggplant...Favorite Marinated Eggplant!

2010-02-24T16:00:00.000+01:00

Melanzane Marinate

2 long eggplant
2 cloves of garlic
2 bay leaves
White wine vinegar
Salt
Whole black peppercorns
Olive oil for frying

Wash and dry the eggplant, cut off the ends and cut lengthwise throwing away the first lengthwise piece (all skin) and make these about 4mm in thickness. Do not skin the eggplant.
Fry in oil (do not flour the slices) and dry them on oil absorbing paper. Once they are cold, place in a nice terrina and add the garlic cloves cut in half, the bay leaves and the peppercorns, lightly salt and cover it all with the white wine vinegar. Let rest for one night before serving. These are great as an antipasto or to accompany mixed boiled meats. These should be consumed 3-4 days post preparation.

Parma for Eggplant Parmigiana! (No Cheese)

2010-02-24T15:41:00.005+01:00

Thinking about a friend who the other day decided to make eggplant parmigiana, I had to go to my "bible" cookbook Emiliana and Romagnola wanting to set it straight once and for all the difference between these dishes.
First off, the ultra famous eggplant parmigiana served in most restaurants in the US and in cookbooks as well, is actually what is called "Parmigiana di melanzane" vs what is made in Emilia Romagna called, "Melanzane alla parmigiana." The former is from Campania (Naples province) and uses heavy amounts of mozzarella.
Another myth to be exposed is the one when preparing eggplant, was to cover the raw slices with salt. This was supposed to force the vegetable to purge the bitter water contained within. Maybe centuries ago this plant was very bitter but today the varieties we have are far from bitter and the salting actually ruins the delicate flavor of the eggplant and is harmful so, NEVER, ever salt eggplant before use. :-)

My favorite recipe for Melanzane all parmigiana (Emiliana recipe) is the following:
2 medium eggplant
50 gram prosciutto crudo - thick slice about 1/4 inch
1 small onion
300 gr peeled tomatoes
50 gram butter
flour
olive oil
salt pepper
Wash and dry the eggplant, but the ends off and slice into rounds.
The slices should be about 4-5 mm in thickness.
Flour them well and fry in olive oil, dry on oil absorbing paper.
In a casserole dish, melt the butter (may substitute olive oil here is desired) together with the super finely SLICED onion. When the onion is nice and transparent, add the prosciutto cut into little cubes. Sautee for two minutes and add the tomatoes.
Salt and pepper to taste and then add the eggplant slices.
Cook over a slow flame, covered for approximately fifteen minutes.

Bet you didn't know...

2010-02-17T15:26:00.002+01:00

Did you know Italy contains 70% of the world's art? Think about that for a second, a country so small physically is so crammed full of art, monuments, churches, artifacts, tombs and on and on!! It is just amazing to me the whole concept, thinking about the number of people who passed through the country leaving such an imprint and patrimony for the rest of the world to come. No wonder Italy is so short on living space. ;-)

Meucci was the father of the telephone, not Mr. Bell; in fact Bell was well known for pirating his inventions. Marconi was the father of the radio and I bet you did not know the world's first freeway, created conceptually and physically constructed was here is this little land of dreamers and creators. Today the Italian autostrada is one of the best out there that is, if you do not judge it for the curves. With such a lack of space to build freeways, and the fact people will not sell land, the roads have to curve around history and stubbornness, so remember this when you are screaming down the road and have to back off by 50 mph to make a curve and stay alive. They have the best and world's only draining asphalt so when it rains, you can see the road; it is truly amazing (and still drive fast).

Now a quick tip on how to choose Gorgonzola, make sure the mold is not uniformly distributed. You should look for inoculation lines as well as where made. Gorgonzola originated in a small town close to Milan called, obviously, Gorgonzola. Today most of it is produced in the province of Novara and regions of Piedmont and Lombardy. Try a risotto with Gorgonzola!

Marchesi - Pastries of Time Gone By

2009-12-23T03:45:00.012+01:00

Marchesi is one of the oldest pastry shops in Milan where the art of bakers, the flavors, the colors and the smells meet and blend into the classic tradition menghina (of Milan also meaning a dessert or sweet). This shop began in the second half of the 1800's by Angelo Marchesi and is still situated today in one of the wonderful 1700's style palazzi.

Today the style of the early 1900's has been maintained with decorated boxed ceilings, antique furniture, and lamps with the old bar in steel and brass. One can say, today in this shop one may literally breathe an atmosphere of the 1800's, almost a Renoir painting.

They are famous for their panettone, veneziana, praline and krantz as well as, not to miss, a daily appointment for breakfast with warm sweet rolls to tempt and, cocktail hour at the bar. If you want to see the real Milanesi, hang out during these two times and one could fill pages and pages for a book on old Milan. The origins of krantz go back to when the Milanese kicked Austria out of the city, this bread is not just about risen dough, it also contains puff pastry and takes up to 17 to 24 hours to create! Tasting this for the first time in all the years here in Italy, I confess, it is and was (devoured it) the most incredible marriage of butter and candied fruit! I hate to guess how much it cost the Piglet, I gather one needs a bank loan for these breads.

Panettone is a large Italian sweetbread, which is "the" dessert for the traditional Italian Christmas lunch as well as, being the favored dessert during the festivities of the season. There are two types of panettone, the one you find in the supermarkets produced commercially and, the ones you can find at some of the old Milanese pastry shops (taking up 2-3 days to produce). Real panettone is not dry but a soft, humble bread containing sultan raisins and top quality candied fruit. There are various legends as to the origin of this cake; one being that it was created by a kitchen helper of the court of the Sforza’s. This cake had to replace the chef’s cake, which had burnt in the oven. Another story runs along the lines of this, that the falconer of Ludwig the Moor, in love with the daughter of the baker, saved the bakery from bankruptcy by selling the falcons, and buying the ingredients for the panettone. The sweetbread then became a hit with the Milanese.

It is also said to have been a dessert created from the simple, leftover ingredients in the pantry, made by a nun who then drew a cross in the top of the dough to thank God for his providence.

During our travel to this shop, it was snowing with frigid temperatures as the whole world seemed to be in line cramming the store for their Christmas breads; soft lights on the inside with steamy windows; this seemed to be an image from Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match-Seller, only the difference here was, the images were real and these delights are created as little works of art by the Marchesi family.

These specialties (panettone, krantz etc) used to be by reservation only and in person, not by phone, but today one can slip in un-announced and partake in this glorious old Milanese tradition; I wonder how the veneziana is...the traditional cake for New Years...thinking we may have to try to do another illegal park job to get there again.
The shop is open Tues - Saturday from 7:30 to 9pm, and Sunday from 8am to 1pm.

Christmas Milanese style...

2009-12-18T21:32:00.004+01:00

Just got in from a snowy day in Milan...have SO much to tell! Christmas breads from the oldest bakeries in town, restaurants that I thought were closed, shopping the season with the "old milan" elbow to elbow...such an amazing treat! Stay tuned.

Regional Tuscan Cooking at it's best!

2009-12-08T16:03:00.008+01:00

During one of our lightening fast trips to Tuscany for work, we stopped in at a restaurant and locanda we had passed by in the car on numerous occasions but never had the time to stop in. This is a gem, one worth planning your trip around just to immerse yourself in an atmosphere of top notch Tuscan country living.

This is a small locale hosting rooms as well as, the restaurant and being the curious one that I am, we requested to see the rooms; such a nice surprise to find them done tastefullly and with all the amenties one might wish. Granted, it is over the autostrada and very close to the exit so if you plan on staying for a while, it might be noisy but then again, while soggiorning at Hotel Rosati, I never noticed the traffic noise and this hotel is just a few steps away. Great place for an encounter, dinner downstairs and just crawl or race to the room afterwards. Sex, languid, steamy kiss, cozy.

The decor of the dinning room is ultra classic rustic Tuscan tables, with tables out side for the hotter months. This is a wonderful place for a quick meal or for something completely sumptious, slow and satisfying. The waitresses are patient and friendly and the food is cooked to order; (grilled specialties). One of my favorites was the bruschetta done with freshly grilled/roasted tuscan bread (which as you all know is salt free not to detract from the food). If you are dinning with more than two people, order different appetizers and share, the salame, cinta senese products as well as the cinghiale are out of this world and NOT to be missed. Do not expect a wine list, when asked she trotted back with three bottles of red, all Tuscan of course, a Montepulciano Rosso, and two Brunellos and all three super reasonably priced. I just picked one, the Montepulciano red and we were super satisfied with it, a perfect marriage with the meal. Two other "not-to-miss" dishes are the fagioli al fiasco and the ceci both boiled and served piping hot in their own cooking juice and dressed with a splash of fresh pressed olive oil (yes it was November time of the olive harvests). Anything chosen from the grill is fabulous as are the pasta dishes and the deserts are all homemade (did not have room for even a glance at those).

So, next trip to Tuscany or first timers, plan a journey through Chiusi (Etruscan heaven), Sarteano (wonderful tombs to visit), Montepulciano, Perugia, Orvieto and Siena and make base camp here at the Chiusi Chianciano crossroad, (Loc. Querce al Pino) you will save a few pennies as well as find some of the best Tuscan meals to be had. Oh, and do not forget to make a stop off in Pienza at the cheese and salame shops, pick up a finocchiona and salame both made from the Cinta Senese pork...your taste buds will thank you.

La Locanda della Ribollita

Le Strette Barolo Bergeisa 2004 - Divine!

2009-11-08T00:00:00.007+01:00

With the cold weather it is definitely time for some of those warm, meditative, ethereal red wines and last night was the first of the season for us. I decided to open a bottle of Barolo purchased over a year and a half ago while touring the wine country of Le Langhe Roero and Monferrato. The repast was risotto con porcini and that was all we needed. The wine when we tasted it at the enoteca regionale di Barolo was beyond impressive at that time (2004 vintage, considered an excellent year) and we only "stole" two bottles of the garnet liquid; how sad because it is worth stocking the cellar with this beauty. We may just have to get in the buggy next week and head over there and partake in a little white truffle (season in Le Langhe is Oct.- Dec.) and buy up, if there is any left, more of this wonderful wine. So, with candles lit for tonight (did not have the heart to finish the bottle last night) we will finish the evening with wafts of cherries, wood and fennel.

If you would like a warm and fragrant Barolo, you must try Le Strette Barolo Bergeisa 2004 as one of these reviews notes, it is truly a Barolo with all the grace and complexity one would expect from the "historical Bergeisa cru of Novello."
le strette winery
www.new canaan wine merchants

Canederli ai Finferli – Chanterelle Dumplings

2009-10-25T17:09:00.005+01:00

Classic dumplings from the Veneto Alpine regions with rustic yellow chanterelle mushrooms gathered from the woods of these areas. Since we are in the fall season, it is a good time to make these soul-warming dumplings using ingredients gathered locally and produced in the region.

Canederli ai Finferli (Cantharellus cibarius Fr.) otherwise known in the states as, chanterelle mushrooms. Other names in Italy are gallinaccio, galletto, gialletto, finferlo o garitula. This mushroom is used in just about any way imaginable and is great preserved under vinegar or dried.

Prep time 25 min
Cook time 30 min
Difficulty: Medium

300 gr of day old or more, white bread (NOT Wonder Bread!)
80 gr of fresh mu
25 gr onion
15 gr fresh Italian parsley
1 clove garlic
3 eggs
50 gr flour
80 gr butter
80 gr Grana Padana or Parmigiano Reggiano
150 cc vegetable broth
olive oil extra virgin
salt

Finely chop the onion and blond it a tiny bit of butter. Cut the bread into cubes and pour over these the boiling hot milk and let rest for half an hour.

Meanwhile, clean the mushrooms, cut them into medium pieces and sauté in a pan with oil and a small clove of garlic that has been lightly squished for about 10-15 minutes. Remove from heat and salt to taste.

Add the chanterelle mushrooms to the bread, and then add the eggs, the flour, a portion of the grated cheese and the chopped parsley. Mix well and form medium sized balls (large meatballs). Cook them in the vegetable broth for 10-15 minutes, drain and arrange them on a plate and dress with a walnut size of butter and cheese.

Normally canederli are served in broth but with the mushrooms these are better eaten alone. Regular canederli are served in boiling hot broth and dressed with cheese, the preferred dish when shushing the slopes above Trento; Madonna di Campiglio and Cortina (hell all I need is cold weather to get me in the mood for homemade broth and dumplings).

The Real One-and- Only Spaghetti alle Vongole (bianco)

2009-10-20T15:15:00.005+02:00

For those who wish to taste the authentic spaghetti with clams, this is the one folks; a never fail (unless the quality of the clams sucks), people pleaser and impression maker.
You may use spaghetti or spaghettini depending on one’s preference. Canned clams may be used but do not expect to have that fresh seafood flavor.

You will need:

350 gr spaghetti
1 kilo of clams or 200 gr of frozen or canned clams “al natural”
1 or 2 cloves of garlic depending on size
1 bunch of Italian parsley
dash of hot pepper (chili pepper)
Olive oil extra virgin preferably Tuscan
Salt
White wine

Soak the clams in fresh water for about 1 to 2 hours, changing the water at least 3 times during this period. Divide the amount of clams into half, half you will extract the meat out of and throw the shells away, the other half you will leave steamed open with the meat inside. After steaming, strain the clam water and set aside.
Take ¼ of the clam meat extracted and finely chop it as well as half the bunch of parsley and set aside with the other ¼ clam meat un-chopped.

Using 10 tablespoons of olive oil, sauté in a large wide low pan the finely chopped garlic with the dash or more (depending on tastes although this is not a dish meant to be spicy, just a hint) of chili pepper; as soon as the garlic begins to take on a little bit of color, add ¼ to 1/2 cup of good dry white wine (not vermouth) and let evaporate a bit. Add in a cup of the clam water and boil down until it is reduced a little more.

At this point over a lively flame, add the chopped and whole clam meat and parsley and boil quickly for 30 seconds then turn off the heat. Season to taste with salt. You should have at this point a reasonably liquid mixture.

Proceed with the cooking of the pasta, when al dente or just a tad before, drain and add the pasta to the clam mix, which you will have put back on the flame just before draining the pasta. Turn up the heat and sauté the pasta in the clam mix adding at this point, the clams in their shells; toss and mix for about 1 minute or more, the pasta should soak up some of the liquid. Serve in hot bowls with a garnish of chopped parsley and never ever add cheese to this; fish dishes are never garnished with grated cheese (major faux pas). ;-)

For those of you who like red clam sauce, that recipe will follow shortly.

Secrets from Pastry Chefs “What No One Ever Tells You."

2009-10-15T16:14:00.005+02:00

About Chocolate and flour...

Two of the most important things pastry chefs must take into consideration when using chocolate is the amount of coco butter and the percentage. Usually, most chocolates found in supermarkets range from 30 to 40% coco butter and 50 to 75% cocoa mass. The more coco butter in the chocolate the better it is for glazing making it more fluid and more valuable. Clearly the higher the cocoa content (percentage) the bitterer the chocolate will be.

If you look carefully, you will find when the cocoa percentage is high the percentage of coco butter will be high as well because inside the cocoa mass is where a high quantity of coco butter resides. Beware of chocolate not containing coco butter but other ingredients used for the fat content; it is for this reason these other types of “chocolate” do not need mixing when melting.

Flour is another secret of professional pastry chefs. Flour is rated according to the amount of gluten, which is the measure of elasticity and resistance critical for bread making. Flour in Italy is classified into four types: Tipo 00 (7% gluten, used for pastry kitchens), Tipo 0 (9% gluten, best for bread making), Tipo 1 (10% gluten) and Tipo 2 (10% gluten). However this is not enough to understand flour and gluten, one must verify that the gluten quantity is coupled with it’s good qualities; the qualities given by the mills to the flour.
These three indices represent the characteristics of the various flours, these are: W, G and P. W represents the energy absorbed in the deformation expressed in thousands of erg/g of kneaded flour. G indicates the capacity of the flour to swell thereby trapping air. P indicates the maximum resistance against the deformation and is an index of the tenacity of the dough.

The knowledge of these indices gives the flour its bread quality. For example, good bread flour would be as follows: W from 110 to 150 G from 16 to 18 P from 40 to 50
Pastry flour on the contrary, should be as follows: W from 200 a 250 best for cookies W above 400 is best for long fermentation pastries such as panettoni.

Flour should be stable and in equilibrium, meaning all three indices must fall within the average predicted values for the use of that particular flour. In the United States, when buying flour in the stores these values are not listed (although at times some percentages of protein are listed) and sometimes there is not a choice between flour and pastry flour. Over here in Italy, it certainly is fun when you have a friend in the pastry business willing to share some of the ingredients. ;-)

The Crisis of our Currency, the American Dollar.

2009-10-09T12:22:00.003+02:00

The national debt has grown every single year since 1958. and it will equal the entire GDP some time in 2010. Call it a tipping point, call it decline, call it whatever one wants; it is a crisis of epic proportions.

Unfortunately, our nation's leaders are either oblivious, in which case they are fools, or they are powerless and cannot even save their own land, or they do not care, in which case they are not "leaders" at all. Instead, they are charlatans, pretending to embody the national interest but only driving the nation into a huge abyss.

Neither party has produced a plan to deal with this emergency, although the warning signs have been abundant for over a decade. And without a demonstrable will to boldly act, nations overseas will continue to make their own plans.

We now have global economies, not just the eastern block and the US and it is right to have these economies affecting us but the problem is, we are not evolving with our policies regarding spending and the inflation of the currency; America has just lost everything it has built, the stability and strength of it's monetary position. The dollar is involved with transactions the world over and when the Fed, Treasury, and Congress inflate the currency and expand our debt obligations the way they are, foreign nations know eventually their dollar holdings will be much less valuable. Combined, this includes trillions of dollars of reserves, treasuries, corporate bonds, and securities, and they will obviously want to dump them.

Who could blame them? We make bad decisions and then, in essence, ask foreign powers (who are often hostile) to pay for these decisions. So, what do we do? Do we steer the ship of state out of turbulent waters? No, we have continued to steer it toward the deep beyond, which means the run on the dollar is close at hand, perhaps even inevitable. Fear in our ability to pay back our debts will encourage that run where the capability and willingness by our nation's leaders could prevent it.

Since nothing has yet changed, (especially since the Wall St. & Bank crisis) the best Americans can do is stock up on gold and perhaps, canned goods and hold on tight because it is going to get worse.

Latte Portoghese with Farm Fresh Eggs (a must)!

2009-09-27T13:02:00.005+02:00

Every time I see my favorite "gal," the Bruna Alpina I think of this recipe...

This is a time tested recipe handed down from my Tuscan family ties, a nice and simple variation on custard. I remember this one well because the eggs were always so fresh and the yolks ultra yellow; I can smell it cooking now! Make sure you use an organic orange, wash well.

1 Liter whole milk 5 eggs ultra fresh 10 Tablespoons sugar (baker's sugar or ultra fine sugar) Orange rind Gran Marnier
Boil gently for 20 minutes milk with 5 spoons of sugar and orange peel. Do not let boil over. Cool well.

While cooling, prepare the caramel coating in the molds by placing 4 or 5 tablespoons (depending on the size of the mold) in the bottom with a tablespoon of water. Heat over high heat until the mix melts and bubbles and then continue heating until it begins to color. Take the color (burning if you will) to the point you prefer, which means lighter in flavor or the darker it becomes the heavier the flavor.
Mix 5 tablespoons sugar (or less depending on how sweet you wish this to be) with yolks and Gran Marnier ("season to taste" with this), beat well then add the cooled milk. Lightly beat the whites to mix and add to yolks.
Bake in oven with a pan of water for about 40 – 50 minutes medium oven.

Discovered Fun Italian Travel and Food Blog

2009-09-24T14:39:00.003+02:00

Found a fun and very informative blog for those of you hooked on Italy. She does a lot of hiking and has her posts organized by region, not to mention her recipes as well. This is one of the most thorough sites I have seen, go check it out.
Rubber Slippers in Italy

The Real One and Only Tomato Sauce

2009-09-24T14:06:00.003+02:00

After spending years in this crazy Italian land, having tasted a genuine home made tomato sauce for pasta, I realized someone needs to clue in those folks on the other side of the "pond" to the exquisite flavors of real tomato sauce. I have found it difficult to find a restaurant serving good "pasta al pomodoro" state-side. The main trick to good sauce is in the tomato so when you can find good Perini, use these!

Heat ¾ cup extra virgin olive oil and in it cook 2 medium onions, sliced, until they are soft and transparent. Add 1 small grated carrot, 1 minced clove of garlic, and 1 teaspoon of minced parsley.

Cook together slowly for 3 minutes, then add 2 pounds of fresh tomatoes, coarsely chopped, salt and pepper, a few celery leaves chopped and several leaves of fresh basil, 1/3 teaspoon dried thyme and ½ cup of meat stock. Simmer the sauce, covered for about 1 and ¼ hours; stir it from time to time.

When it is fairly thick, force it through a fine strainer. This sauce may be used with any dish calling for tomato sauce although best when tossed over pasta. Serves 4-6

Duck Ragu & Bigoli alla Vicentina (Bigoli con L’Arna)

2009-09-22T15:05:00.006+02:00

Here is a classic meal and authentic recipe from Vicenza and surrounding towns. I was a die hard Tuscan fanatic until someone helped me see the light and opened up a whole new world of refined Italian fare and over these next months I will try to share the true Veneto region, one so undiscovered (thank God) and pristine; so get your favorite chair ready because this winter will be full of great secrets and recipes and history on this blog.

Time 25 min to prepare
80 min cooking time
Difficulty – medium

400 g of Bigoli (a very thick spaghetti-like pasta) (recipe below)

1 cleaned duck
1 onion
1 clove garlic
White wine (lots, at least half a bottle)
Fresh sage and rosemary
Tomato sauce
Extra virgin olive oil (try to find one from the Garda area)
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion and garlic and saute in a wide pot with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Place the duck on top of this mix, salt and pepper, add a few sage leaves and a branch of rosemary. With the heat high, add the white wine lower heat and cook on a low flame.

When the duck is almost done, remove from the pan and de-bone the little beast, cutting the meat into TINY pieces. Filter the pan juices then put them back into the pan together with the duck meat (do not separate these juices from the fat, this is what gives the pasta all it's flavor and texture). Add a tablespoon or two of tomato sauce that was previously diluted with water and hot broth (from 1/2 liter to a liter of broth) Add salt to taste and finish cooking until the duck is tender.

Meanwhile, cook the bigoli in lots of salted water, drain and place in the hot pan with the duck ragù and quickly sauté together for no more than 2 minutes.
Garnish with Grana Padano or Grana Trentino

Homemade Bigoli
500 g white flour
50 g butter
4 eggs
Milk
Salt
Pour flour on to working surface; make a crater in the center. Add the softened butter to the crater, the eggs and a pinch of salt. Work together adding a little bit of milk as needed to obtain solid dough. You will need a “bigolaro” to cut this pasta making the necessary form. If you cannot find one, use a fat spaghetti cut. Spread the bigoli out on a floured kitchen towel and let dry before cooking.

Cinnamon Sugar Gnocchi

2009-08-30T15:38:00.005+02:00

For a change of pace, try these classic gnocchi from the mountain regions of Veneto. Best wine to accompany these would be a Colle Berici Sauvignon.

This takes a while to make if you plan on making them true to nature from your own potato mix. The gnocchi recipe will be given below following the cinnamon recipe.

For 6
180 g (6 oz) butter
2 tablespoons cinnamon
2 tablespoons sugar (baker’s sugar or caster sugar suggested)
Grana Padano or Parmigiano freshly grated, (not over aged you do not want the cheese to over power the condiments)
Salt

Cook the gnocchi in a large pot of salted water and when they float to the top, let them cook for a few more seconds then drain with a slotted spoon. Mix them piping hot with the softened butter sprinkling them with the premixed cinnamon, sugar and cheese. Serve in hot bowls.

Potato Gnocchi

1 kg of potatoes (boiling potatoes)
3 egg yolks
300 g flour (10.5 oz)
Nutmeg
50 g (2oz) Grana Padano or Parmigiano freshly grated
Salt and pepper

Boil the potatoes with their skins on in salted water. Peel and mash them with a masher by hand (Do not use a Cuisinart) or use a potato squeezer (schiacciapatate in Italy) while potatoes are STILL hot, let cool.

Place the cooled purée on a working surface. With your hands, work in to this the egg yolks, salt, pepper and nutmeg as well as the cheese. Work the dough until it is creamy and smooth, then add the flour all at once and quickly work it into the dough. This must happen quickly in order to prevent the potatoes from releasing more moisture into the dough. To form the gnocchi hand roll pieces of the mixture into fat bread sticks and cut them into half inch or smaller gnocchi. Always cook these in lots of boiling salted water (a large pot).

Palladio Card…Stunning Veneto…again!!!

2009-08-16T15:59:00.007+02:00

Damn, this summer has escaped her and in this heat and humidity, she is just pinning away to get back to Veneto and get her PalladioCard and see the Festa della Ceramica in Nove, near Marostica and Bassano del Grappa. If anyone is planning on being near Venice, Verona or Trieste, you must go get your PalladioCard and visit the villas in this area.

Having passed Palazzo Barbaran www.cisapalladio.org in early April or was that late March…anyway the bug was planted from that day on. Every time she traipses through Veneto, she has eyes only for those fabulous (not just the big villas) Palladian agricultural magnate’s homes…the working “farms” per se. The richness of those homes, landowners, working ranches; just the crumbled site of these places makes her go insane. She craves a fabulous Palladian home…the simplicity of the windows, the elegance on the exterior and balance.

Have you ever really “looked” at a window in the Veneto? The fact the storm doors or shutters are inset from the line of the house meaning, the window opening is at least a foot and a half in depth so the glass portion of the window is nearest the interior followed by the shutters but still within the frame of the window opening of the building (in the photo left, there is an example of inside the window opening and outside, the lower windows). Then on the outside of the opening is the decoration and thus, you have an ultra refined system of closing off the glass portion to keep out the elements out without destroying or detracting from the finesse of Palladian elements on the exterior. God, it is stupendous! She has got to find a house with these hinged (4 panels) shutters allowing one to open them in quarters and to fold them back so elegantly against the window opening without disturbing the “eye candy,” if you will.

Here are a few links just to whet your appetites and while looking and planning, you must find a way to catch a show at the Teatro Olimipico, what a sight!! VILLA_BADOER

Villa Contarini, Villa Emo, Villa Godi, Villa Poiana, www.comune.caldogno.vi.it , Villa di Maser, Villa Pisani, Teatro Olimpico

Milan, Grand Milan – summer in the big city.

2009-08-15T15:44:00.005+02:00

If you have never experienced Milan in August, it is one of the rare treats of this world! Parking is a “non problem” even though many stores are closed as well as, coffee houses nonetheless the thrill of driving smack-dab center city is insane! We parked the car in the square right in front of the stock exchange; imagine that (OK, yes it was Saturday)! Nonetheless, driving roads prohibited to normal traffic unless you have a special permit is always ultra cool in these European cities and Milano defies any other city to attempt this feeling. The latest noise polls have placed Milano over New York City and certainly, during the regular months of the year, this is true but what peace and tranquility there was this day.

From where the car was parked, we walked a short distance to the main intersection and violà; the cathedral in its superlative splendor greeted us at one end of the vista, crowing the opposite end was, the majestic Castello Sforzesco. Ah yes, “Milàn, lè un grand Milàn” is a truism this time of year as it occurs again during the winter vacation (after Christmas)…the two best times of the year to experience and relish the treasures the city hoards.

Off to Fnac one of the most well stocked book stores with music, video, electronics, café, food and wine…what more can anyone wish for? Yes, a stop at La Rinascente would be just one more little dab of whipped cream for the day. ;-)

Roma, Bellissima!

2009-08-03T06:11:00.003+02:00

It has been way too long since going back to Roma, such an amazing city, so full of history and architecture. The Roman women are very unique in their style; American guys looking for a hot woman, you need to check these out, so different from the Milanese lady. Rome is not far from Napoli so it has quite a strong southern influence; the driving is insane but not quite as bad as Napoli (although not far from matching it if not surpassing Napoletan drivers). Taxi drivers are still arguing in the streets at the taxi stand at Roma Termini (the pirates vs the legal taxi drivers), and waiters and owners are still hawking business from the sidewalks in front of their activity or on the plaza square. Prices are horrendous in all the cafes and pizzerias (terrible food in the tourist zones...I mean how can you screw up a pizza???). There is trash alongside the curbs, not just cigarette butts, even though trash cans are frequent and visible; again I realize man is the only creature who shits where it eats and sleeps.

Nonetheless, Rome breathes a different air, the sidewalks are wide and easily walkable compared to Milano, the architectural eye candy is astonishing, the spirit of the Romans transports you to another time. They are packed with pride about their city as well as, packed with fire and personality (watch your pockets however) ready to talk, to argue, to actively engage in just about anything; Rome truly bustles with life. I can see why Alessia (swimmer representing Italy in the World's these last weeks, but from Rome) loves her city and why she is proud; and my love/hate affair with this crazy country continues. How can one not love this world of history and wonders?

The "Noise" of Summer

2009-07-19T14:21:00.002+02:00

Have you ever been to a place in the hot, hot heat of the summer where the song of the cicadas is so loud, it drives you nuts? Tuscany is the place for those wicked hot days, the heat of the afternoon killing you and all you want to do is sleep but the noise is almost deafening and all it does is remind you how hot it really is. You pray for an afternoon thunderstorm to whisk away the heat even if only momentarily and to silence those critters...

Jesus and Mohammad one and the same?

2009-07-05T14:33:00.003+02:00

I have been meaning to post this link to a blog discussing the differences between the Bible and the Koran, (scroll down to the post entitled Jesus and Mohammad, one and the same?) as well as read the post entitled Which Koran from another blog; very interesting facts.

Happy Birthday America!

2009-07-04T12:59:00.010+02:00

Reflections on Independence Day flooded my mind with the sights and feelings evoked while visiting Philadelphia a short time ago. This was the first time for me visiting any of America’s historical past and for a first timer, it was an experience never to be forgotten.

The trip lit a fire within, spurring me on an interior quest of the emotions of those poignant days when a group of men literally sweated out the words of our Declaration of Independence. The heat was unbearable in the Hall, the flies even worse and yet these men were driven by the same vision, the same yearning to create a foundation for freedom, for a true democracy.

America is the only true democracy although the Greeks and Romans did make an attempt but were defeated by complacency of their peoples. Because of this, I pray people will open their eyes and “see” and “hear” the lies and recognize how our media is masking the truth or not reporting it all, we must “hear” the hidden truths; man has no nobler function than to defend the truth. Americans have a duty to defend the truth, to fight for our freedoms again, to remind our corrupt government what our genetic framework is all about. The tea parties have been a wonderful way to peacefully state our dissent, but will that be enough?

I fear for my country (photo below) and, for anyone who has never been to the heart of our constitution, please take the time to go, to contemplate the Statue of Liberty as well during the days of visiting, to spend a few minutes thinking about what freedom means to you. The freedom to write what we want on a blog and not get thrown in jail, the freedom of the press (well not so free these days when you realize who controls it), the freedom to drive wherever we wish in our cars and to live in any state we choose, to strike up a new business and be an entrepreneur, invent, create…to breathe.

America is strong, her genetics will most likely save her from severe damage caused by corruption and socialistic moves of the current government however before she retaliates, I am convinced Obama is going to wreak a great amount of damage in a very short amount of time. Yes, he did inherit a mess but the mess started many administrations ago so we must not put the blame on just one previous president. While our flag waves, salute it, stand in awe of it and remember the many men who died for us, to give us the liberties we have today. Please do not stand with your hands over your crotch (Obama’s offence to America) during our anthem or pledge of allegiance. Think of Betsy Ross, think about those men in Philadelphia eons ago and light a fire within for your country. While you rush to see fireworks, to light the BBQ, stop, and remember.

Happy Birthday to all Americans.

Intensely Dark-Black (99% cacao) Brownies

2009-06-26T13:58:00.002+02:00

This has been a work in progress, re-orchestrating this recipe to work with the chocolate available in Europe. The final result is a dense, succulent, intensely dark, transcendent brownie. If eaten while still warm, the flavors will be deep and rich, utterly delicious! Published in grams and ounces.

3.0 oz unsalted butter = 85 gm

4 oz dark 99% chocolate = 112 gms I use Lindt's 99% chocolate bars, they are expensive but the chocolate is ultra fresh. Do not use Baker's squares for this recipe, it has been redesigned to fit only 85-99% cacao chocolate bars not containing emulsifiers, or other fats instead of cocoa butter as filler.

2 eggs beaten with

9 oz sugar or 255 gm

Melt in double boiler, butter and chocolate.
Beat eggs and beat with sugar.

Mix melted butter and chocolate with beaten eggs and sugar.

add 1/2 tsp of salt
1 ½ tsp vanilla

½ cup flour or 110gms sifted and remeasured.

Use a square pan 8x8 inches or 20cm x 20cm pan
bake 20 -30 min @350 F or 190 C

The Cradle of Civilization, Italy "La Culla"

2009-06-16T15:55:00.002+02:00

What is it about Italy that keeps us coming back for more?

The attraction of Italy for some of us is at times, something difficult to grasp. Italy is more than just a wealth of history; Italy vibrates on a wave all it’s own. The difficulties of everyday life equate to a constant struggle, which aids in a continual daily evolution be it personal or collective. Italians tend to be slobs, there is no denying but in this sloppiness, lies their unique art for living. Italians have style, they are creative by nature, upholders of tradition and religion and beneath this lies the foundation of who they are; by genetic design Italians boast a wealth of humanity for the “other guy.”

Italy is the world leader in so many venues. Italians have “pizzazz” in fashion, not even the French can take a notch off of Italy’s belt in this area. She is a world leader in beautiful cars (Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini, just to note a few), architecture is unparalleled and gastronomically, no one comes close to the variety and simplicity of her kitchen. In fact, the laws and controls posed on the food industry render Italy’s as one of the safest in the world.

Currently, Italian bubbles are consumed just in Italy to the tune of 153 million bottles and she is the number one wine exporter, exporting 10 times as much wine as Australia. Cheese is abundant in numerous varieties, not just goat cheese done twenty different ways. Unfortunately, Italy crashes when it comes to marketing their products; just look at the junk wines sold in the states such as, Fazi Battaglia (great bottle, crap inside). America associates pizza and the mandolin with Italy and this my friends is truly a crime. Italy is so profoundly rich and varied in so many products and areas of life.

Italians live well despite the insurmountable hurdles the government plops in front of each and every person, entity or free enterprise (well if free enterprise really exists in this country). The government makes life extremely difficult and to the tourist eye (a gaze lasting only 10 days for the average tourist) these difficulties are not conspicuous. Sadly politics are always tacked on to everything and this aids in the inability to market the riches of this country.

Here are some sad but interesting numbers; Italians are taxed approximately 54% of their income compared to 30% in many other countries and yet, they manage to not only survive but to do it with decorum and to actually live as well. Think of it this way; from September through December they work for themselves, the rest of the time it is for “lo stato.” This could be accepted if one saw all public services in tiptop form; this obviously is not the case here. The roads suck, the postal service in the post offices is an abomination, public transportation stinks and is overrun with strikes and the taxes paid by the regions in the north, go to pay for the maintenance and mafia of the south in fact, these regions only get 8% back from what they send to Rome. Most of the funds given to the south are used for private gain of a small portion of southerners leaving the rest of the south still as filthy and behind as ever; a ball and chain on the north.

Another huge problem with the lack of progression in this country lies in the job sector; I bet you did not know one cannot be fired from their job? Once you have your position you can just kick back and get your monthly paycheck and, job performance as a measure does not exist (obviously). Sadly this propagates stagnation, crappy customer service and zero incentive within businesses; why work hard to sell when your job does not depend on it? (Duh!)

On top of this, insanely enough, Italy is a police state. Imagine this; driving around to the supermarket, you see the police or Carabinieri car on the side, waving cars down. Why? To find some reason to give you a ticket, to check your “papers.” Can you imagine that happening in the states? Do Americans realize how lucky and free we truly are? Here you are really guilty until proven innocent. Sure the police can pull you over for speeding and such but it seems they never catch the asses speeding 160mph. Nope, just surprise road blocks to see if they can find a reason to give you high blood pressure.

Here is another one to ponder; bars, cafes or restaurants must pay a tax on the music they play in the locale. A disco must file a plan of the songs to be played and then dump a mound of royalty fees into the hands of the SIAE. As you might imagine, the money never goes to the artists. For example, if they play Michael Jackson they pay for that song and that money actually may get to him as royalties but if you are a nobody, you never see the money for the songs played. In fact, this entity has a huge staff with lots of huge offices (gee go figure). Guess all those taxes pay for those twits to man that office. Blank CD’s have a portion of the sale going to this fund as well…cute eh?

Despite all the negatives of which we are reminded daily thanks to the newspapers and TV programs, Italy and her people manage to live making their motto for life that of screwing the government any chance they can and for us outsiders, this can translate into behavior we dislike or do not understand. To skirt having to pay dump fees for small household electronics, you will find these items vicariously placed at auto stops, or behind supermarkets or along the autostrada and viola now you have a dirty, unkempt Italy. Deep down they do not wish to be this way but what choice have you when 54% of your sweat goes to services poorly provided for and on top of that you get to pay another tax when you use the service? Hello!

There is no tax relief for donations either so if I wanted to give new clothes, I buy them and pay the taxes on them as well as being taxed because it was part of my income. Unfortunately for this reason, so many of the old dilapidated villas of Palladian architecture in Veneto near Vicenza are in a state of crumble. Unless someone purchases the property and submits a restoration plan for approval, historical relics will continue to crumble in this amazing cradle of civilization. There is no feasible way to have historical societies because people have to pay taxes on the donations twice over. How sad, such a screwed up system.

In such a small amount of land, Italy has stashed away millions of art objects for no one to see, she cannot manage them because there is not enough money and monies, which could be donated to help enlarge and or support museums, cannot appear due to asinine laws. So here we are attracted to this vibrant, buzzing yet peaceful world and way of life despite the mess. Italians uphold the family and many traditions where as Americans have lost all of this. This frenetic people race through their days, crowding freeways and holidays believing in their time off with the family, the wife or girlfriend; they still believe in a future and sacrifice for these beliefs and this is what gives this place life.

Imagine, in every square kilometer, which would equate to square half mile roughly, the US has 3 people to Italy's 62 people per square kilometer. No wonder I feel claustrophobic here in these apartments and condos stacked upon each other with zero privacy from one's windows. I can just imagine how our current layer of history might look 500 years from now as people excavate finding metros, masses of concrete, a concentration of life in certain areas, what might be the thoughts of these people regarding this layer of humanity…similar to ours as we uncover layers of walls from the Etruscans to Romans and così via?

But alas, I am here and despite days of complete and utter hair pulling, I cannot abandon this cradle of civilization; 3000 years of it, way before civilization came to Great Britain (with all their airs and such). So when you plan a trip to Italy, try to come and spend some time to really live it and savor the life vibrating within. This is what makes her so interesting; close your eyes to the trash, to the shouting matches, to the dirty streets. She has survived for all these years up to now and she will keep on surviving because Italy truly is the cradle of what it takes to live and endure.

Sun, Sand, Beach Walks...ain't Life just Grand?

2009-06-13T12:01:00.002+02:00

Stay tuned; just finished the California jaunt and doing a bit of catch up. So many things to write, will keep me busy posting here for the next month!

California Miles

2009-05-25T14:07:00.011+02:00

Exploring her own state is something she has not done much of so, she decided to grab her buggy and head off up the coast of California. She pointed her wheels towards the coastline until she arrived to stop in Santa Barbara and sip wine at the Harbor House as the late March fog swirled in around her.

Wandering up and down State Street in the heart of a lovely town, she wished she had a buddy with her to stop and eat at just about every wine bar and eatery there. As the fog really moved in, she decided to head out to Solvang for a little tour of the place one she had not revisited for over 25 years. Upon arrival she was truly surprised to see how much the town had changed over the years all except the Abelskievers. After a really fast tour and a jaunt through the farmer's market for a bag of fresh cherries and bucket of cookies she jumped back in the car and left for San Luis Obispo to spend the night at the Madonna Inn.

Reading some of the print material, she was fascinated to learn how Alex Madonna was such a good friend with William Randolf Hearst and how the two of them, with their dreams, created two masterpieces in their own rights. They both loved craftsmanship and quality and there seemed to be no end to their dreams. After a funky dinner in the pink restaurant, laden with photos of old Hollywood stars with the Madonna family, she headed back to explore the nuances of her funky room.

Clearly, the next day she was destined to visit Hearst's Castle and from one who has lived in Europe for over 10 years, living with, among and around villas, castles and palaces, this was enthralling, overwhelming, and humbling all at once. His vision, which he changed ad infinitum, was a mental work-out particularly when one can practically “feel” his vision, his dream and experience his efforts in every corner, in every piece of furniture, Della Robbia and gads of other antiques. Such fun it must have been for him! She almost envied that kind of power to create without limits.

OK, so onward and "upwards" in the buggy towards Big Sur. Nepenthe http://www .nepenthebigsur.com was her late lunch stop. Anyone ever been there? Spectacular vistas, architecture and a luscious Bordeaux! '99 Pichon Lalande, from Pauillac coupled with artisan cheeses of California. She was in heaven! Contrary to her habit of wanting more wine, she savored this glass over an hour, feeling it wash over her velvety in texture, reveling in the deep purple ruby color and knowing she would never be able to find a bottle of this once home. Ha, thanks to her favorite wine merchants...she found her paradise after returning hom. http://klwine.com

Off again, towards Carmel for a lightening fast "look" and then a late arrival into San Francisco for a night on the wharf. Always her favorite place to be anytime of the year! Those crab cocktails from the street vendors...! Later, in the room, she quietly planned the winery stops for the next day through Napa Valley.

The next day she flew through the wineries buying up a car load of "bottles full of grapes" and then headed out for a stop in Reno so she could spend the last night in another one of her regeneration spots, Mammoth Lakes...a small spot of tranquility this time of the year. The skiers were still there but just barely so the town was quiet and cozy. http://www.mammothlakes.com

Reflections...

2009-05-25T14:00:00.002+02:00

When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally
get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life
here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and
elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our
brief but intrinsic participation with it.

E. Gilbert

Superb Cheese Tarts from the Alps

2009-05-13T15:14:00.006+02:00

250gm or 8oz Flour
100gm or 3.5 oz Butter unsalted
1 Egg

Butter and flour the molds diameter of 3 inches 7cms about 12 of them. Cut butter into the flour with a pinch of salt, when crumbly, add 4 Tablespoons water mix quickly and lightly then add egg and mix quickly until homogeneous. Cover and place in refrigerator for 30 minutes. Roll out on a floured board about 3mm (the thinner the better)

Filling 240ml or 8oz heavy cream

The following cheese combinations are recommended:

Swiss Emmenthal (good swiss cheese) and Brie or, Gruyere and Brie or, Fontina and Brie or, Gorgonzola dolce or piccante and Brie or, Gorgonzola and Fontina (a strong combination) or, Stilton and Brie If you are able to find Sbrinz (from Italy) this is a great one as well to combine with either Brie or Fontina

229gm or 8oz of "type one" cheese grated or finely chopped

115gm or 4oz of Brie or Fontina or type number two cheese cut into tiny squares or pieces

100 ml or 3oz Whole milk
3 Egg yolks
Parsley, salt, nutmeg

Cut cheese into cubes trimming crust off of the Brie. Divide the two cheeses evenly and place in the dough lined tart molds.

Combine milk and cream in a bowl, add the yolks mix and beat well. Add fresh grated nutmeg, a teaspoon of chopped parsley and a pinch of salt. Pour the mix into the tarts covering the cubed cheese.

Bake in a preheated oven 190 degrees Celsius or 375 F for about 20 minutes Cool 10 minutes and unmold and serve

Firenze - Summer and Sangria!

2009-05-05T17:04:00.013+02:00

Maybe it is the heat, causing me to think of Firenze, urges for Sangria or is it my usual spring fever...hum. Three recipes for Sangria are posted here, one in Italian, one for parties, English and the basic recipe in English and all superb! Now, all I have to do is grab that crazy maschio to share it with me somewhere high above the city or on some mountain top; I crave high mountains or is it the altitude and Italy combined, the lifestyle, the people, the culture and architecture, the cradle or culla of civilization? I must have lived there in a previous life.

When I took the early train to Florence last fall, I wanted to walk my old haunts and see if I could find a few old friends. Walking from the Santa Maria Novella station I could feel the city take hold of me. I walked around the Duomo and headed for Via Cavour; it was early and most of the eateries were receiving deliveries (the only time vehicles can be on the street) with shopkeepers out front sweeping and moping and washing windows. After passing one intersection I looked up at the pale rose and yellow facades and literally fell into a trance feeling the past around me, in me and pushing through me; I was home, I could not deny it, I had lived here before.

I felt like an Eagle soaring through and around the streets as I continued my walk.
Upon passing Piazza della Republica I yearned for more time to sit at the pink café seated outside nursing an espresso. Finally I spotted, through a space in two buildings, my favorite vista of Piazza della Signoria and I had to stop and lean against a wall. I felt as if someone had punched me in my gut; and someone had, my beloved city my favorite piazza; so many feelings assault me when I get to this square.

Years ago, when I lived close to the city, I remember walking through that same Piazza with my husband; it was late November, wicked cold and windy and it was night time although, not late. As we made it to the center near the fountain, we stopped and just listened, voraciously soaking up the solitude, the distinct lack of tourists and the cold air. I knew he was oblivious to what was coursing through me because he had slowly drifted away walking towards the Uffizi. I stood there and felt myself going back in time, as if someone was taking me back to this same spot, centuries ago.

I felt the different clothing I was wearing; I heard the horses and carriages over the uneven stones I could even smell the different scents, the fire pots burning in the square. Unexpectedly, it seemed as if I was in the midst of a crowd, spirits brushing against me and all this laughter, chatter and noise whirling around.

My husband yelled at me to get moving and I snapped out of it to find utter silence except for the water falling in Neptune’s fountain (by Bartolomeo Ammannati). The wind was shoving me and, with the suggestive lighting of that square, I knew I had been there a lifetime before. Ah, home sweet home. So yes, when I crave Italy, now I truly understand why. I just wish I could make more frequent visits to this now crazy, loud and dirty city; my city, my past (or maybe it was a past I best forget).

Chiusi, Nonna Rosa's, Kamars and the Real Fagioli Toscani

2009-04-28T08:27:00.007+02:00

Ceramica Kamars Being such a ceramic fanatic, she wondered why in all the years she had spent near Chiusi, she had never ventured into this Etruscan jewel. Founded in 1958 Kamars takes it’s name from the ancient Etruscan name for the town of Chiusi. They export unique place settings all over the world and provide the tableware for a few of the Etruscan restaurants in the old part of Chiusi (such as, La Solita Zuppa). The artist’s reproductions of antique forms, colors and shapes are a refreshing contrast to the infamous Deruta collections. Everything is hand painted of course, and with his small oven capacity, he produces these wonderful pieces in a very unhurried manner. If you ever have the chance to be in the triangle of this area, Chiusi, Chianciano Terme, Sarteano, stop in to see his wares and have dinner next door at Nonna Rosa’s located in the Hotel Rosati; you will be enormously satisfied.

Nonna Rosa is one of those surprises one does not expect in a “hotel” zone let alone, a three star hotel. This family owned and operated affair offers a step back into the past with wonderful vintage and antique pieces from the 1900’s (to note his collection of Lambrettas).

They are warm and welcoming doing all they can to accommodate needs. Within this environment lies a fabulous restaurant run by the family of course, offering not just local fare, but a creative variation on a theme (the classic Tuscan fare with a flair). The restaurant is decorated in every angle lending the feeling as if in ones own home. There is a wonderful fireplace, sconces rendering soft lighting, candlesticks and candelabras here and there on various tables, chandeliers and lovely drapery not just on the windows. Once the ordering is complete, the time between dishes disappears while studying all the vintage pieces, which in turn, spurn many a conversation as memories related to some of the pieces arise.

Do not be shy when ordering, the portions are not huge and they are fabulous about giving half portions for pasta, you will probably pay for a full one but at least you do not have to throw away half of it. You must have an appetizer (one of their best is the tagliere with pecorino, bruschetta in varying flavors, mini onions, homegrown honey, and fabulous cinta senese cold cuts), a pasta course and main dish. The portion size of the main dish is small and really, just the right size allowing a little bit of room for desert; definitely try their chocolate fondue.

Fagioli Toscani – Simply the Best About Tuscan Cannelini or (White Kidney Beans). Beans must always soak overnight no matter what you read. Before cooking, rinse and add fresh cold water for cooking and do not salt the water until the very end.
For 6 500 gm or 18 oz or 1lb of Cannelini beans 10 Large leaves of Sage, or more if small 20 gm or, a tad less than 1 oz Butter salted 2 Soup spoons of hearty flavored olive oil 2 Soup spoons of tomato sauce Bring the beans to a boil on medium heat, as soon as they begin to boil, turn down low. Cook uncovered until done, not mushy, they need to hold their shape. When done, drain reserving a few spoons of cooking liquid and set aside.

Melt butter and oil together in a large saucepan, (large surface area) When the fats begin to bubble, add the beans the sage either as whole leaves or cut with scissors into three, salt and pepper to taste. Sauté and when almost all the liquid has been absorbed, add the tomato sauce. Stir together well and cook for another two minutes (If the mix seems too dense, add a few spoons of the cooking water from the beans). Serve hot as a side dish, garnished with olive oil and accompanied with crusty bread either plain or toasted and rubbed with garlic.

Wine Bars Italian Style

2009-04-25T16:16:00.006+02:00

Wine by the glass posted daily on the chalkboards; a really nice way of tasting without having to buy the bottle. This is one of the places we can wander into and have a glass with a taste of local salami and such as well as, the place we go when the "gang" gets together for a group dinner of Bagna Cauda, or Beef Bourgogne.

So what is next on Snow White's menu? With these days indoors, she is working on some super duper special cheese tartlets from the Alps.

Out and About in the Veneto

2009-04-19T16:59:00.008+02:00

Casa del Parmigiano is a must see while traveling through Marostica, check out their site. Next to this shop is the Casa del Café where you may have a macchiatone that will knock your taste buds for a ride. A macchiatone is an espresso with a bit more steamed milk than just a caffè macchiato (or colored with a dash of milk and a teaspoon of froth); the coffee used here is a genuine treat. Next to these two shops is a good bar/coffee house where one may sit outside on the piazza and soak up the view with Illy coffee and fabulous pastries from the local pastry shop just a few minutes from the bar. Where to eat. There is also a incredibly quaint hotel not far from these three spots, Albergo Due Mori; nestled within the “land of grappa”, this modest hotel is a tiny distillation of emotions.

For those who wish to dine in history, a must-do is the Ristorante al Castello Superiore. High above the town of Marostica is a wonderful taste treat as well as, one for the eyes. Be sure when driving there to take a small car otherwise you cannot make the sharp turn up the castle drive to park above near the water well.

This restaurant makes one of the best Baccalà alla Vicentina I have ever had although the polenta is not true in presentation as it should be, the dish is still an authentic delight. Be prepared for a well stocked cellar with prices to match.

Tecnorati

Peace in Times of Great Unrest

2009-04-12T14:51:00.003+02:00

Wishing a peaceful Easter to all....

Compound Butters for Cheap Meat

2009-04-12T14:47:00.002+02:00

With these economic times, my kitchen is feeling the pinch so it is time to dig out those standby recipes for compound butters to help flavor the cheaper cuts of meat some of us are having to purchase. My favorites are Bercy Butter, Matre d’hôtel in two versions, Marchand de Vin, Garlic Butter and Paprika Butter. When making these compound butters, allow about ½ ounce per serving and make sure these dollops are placed just before serving o top of the piping-hot meat or fish.

Matre d’hôtel Butter

Cream 4 oz or 113 gm of unsalted butter
Add a teaspoon or a little more of chopped parsley the juice of ½ lemon, salt and pepper to taste. A variation of this is to substitute the parsley with chopped chives for great chive butter.

Bercy Butter

Cook 2 teaspoons of finely chopped shallots in ½ cup of dry white wine until reduced to about ¼ of the original quantity: cool. Cream 4 oz of butter with 2 teaspoons of chopped parsley and the wine-shallot mixture, season with salt and pepper.

Marchand du Vin Butter

This is the same as the Bercy Butter except a good red wine is used instead of white.
Garlic Butter
To avoid too strong a taste, or overpowering, the garlic should be cooked first. Peel 6 cloves of garlic and drop into boiling water for 5 minutes. Drain, cool, and cru sh thoroughly, then cream with ½ cup of butter.

Paprika Butter
Melt 2 oz of butter and in it sauté 2 Tbl of minced onion until light brown. Remove from heat and add 2 tsp of paprika, mix well and let cool. Add 2 oz of creamed butter and cream well together. This may be forced through a fine sieve if desired, great on Veal.

Some other ideas for flavorings are: mustard, chutney, tarragon or other herbs, anchovy paste, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce. An assortment of these butters works well with fondue Bourguignon.

Not Just Any Bookstore...Bassano del Grappa

2009-04-10T09:51:00.004+02:00

While roving the streets of Bassano del Grappa, this little day-tripper stumbled on an extraordinary bookstore fashioned as a library in an ancient palazzo. Art and culture have been joined in a meticulously restored edifice called Palazzo Roberti. The building dates back to the 1600’s and thanks to painstaking restoration, the palazzo presents a bookstore of the 21st century cradled in the essence of the past. Just browsing books one has the prospect to admire the high intrinsic value of the architecture, the gardens, the statues and frescoes. Flanking the staircase is a banister, a superb work of art in and of itself; the fat hand wrought wooden rail is supported by forged iron pieces resembling snakes. Today the cultural center, situated on the "piano nobile," allows us to live literature in the past during invitations and meetings with writers and artists of today. This lovely palazzo conquered her as it also did for Napoleon, who chose to reside there twice during his lifetime.

An Embarassing Offer

2009-04-08T17:09:00.002+02:00

OK, I am disgusted with Obama’s embarrassing monetary offer to Italy for the earthquake victims and damage. 50 thousand dollars is an insult and, on the heels of this “lovely” economic crisis caused by America, it makes the offer even more obscene and absurd. Condolences would have been enough, a little kiss-ass political style letting everyone know that the US is concentrating on recovery of it’s own especially since money is just a matter of sending the "invoice" farther down the line to our children and grandchildren. On top of that, his request or demand to have Turkey be a part of NATO is another insane imposition. Why make the European countries pay our tab, for prostituting Turkey with our airplanes? There are way too many immigrants in the European countries and they have no desire to add Muslim-Turkey legally to their worlds and I do not blame them! Good Lord, where else is Obama going to insert his foot? He never ceases to disgust me with his unbelievable lack of experience and ignorance to common sense.

Did you all hear about how Michelle is not going to concede to classic First Lady dress codes as well as, not wanting to give up her prowess in the kitchen? When will she figure out the importance of her position as a representative of our country and take on the role of that representation versus making a strong statement about maintaining her home-style habits? She should have taken the $ 50K offer of her husband to Italy (the price of a car) and put it towards her wardrobe. While in Europe she was out classed in dress by all the other ladies.

The Truth about who Works

2009-04-03T13:10:00.000+02:00

A Russian arrives in New York City as a new immigrant to the United States.

He stops the first person he sees walking down the street and says,

“Thank you Mr. American for letting me into this country, giving me housing, food stamps, free medical care, and a free education!”

The passerby says,

“You are mistaken, I am a Mexican.”

The man goes on and encounters another passerby. “

Thank you for having such a beautiful country here in America.”

The person says,

“I not American, I Vietnamese.”

The new arrival walks farther, and the next person he sees he stops, shakes his hand, and says,

“Thank you for wonderful America!”

That person puts up his hand and says,

“I am from Middle East. I am not American.”

He finally sees a nice lady and asks,

“Are you an American?”

She says,

“No, I am from Africa.”

Puzzled, he asks her,

“Where are all the Americans?”

The African lady checks her watch and says,

“Probably at work.”

Dirt-Poor Soup

2009-04-01T15:27:00.006+02:00

Stealing this recipe from the Piglet, I thought this was appropriate for the times, a dish one could whip up on a budget stretched to the limits. Now with Fiat and Chrysler together, we might be seeing a few more of these in the states besides the Cinquecento clubs and finding replacement parts a tad easier. Gotta love that new 500!

The origin of this peasant soup, from what she garnered via the Piglet, is somewhere on the Spanish continent. Honestly, this is a super easy dish, a great belly warmer and just plain good when using genuine ingredients.

1 liter or quart of chicken, beef or vegetable broth (for one person use half that amount). Old crusty bread (older than a day or two) cubed or just torn into pieces (be sure to use the crumbs as well).

Hearty flavorful extra virgin cold pressed olive oil (Tuscan if you are able).

2-3 cloves garlic cut in half or quartered 1 egg per person Sauté on low bread pieces in plenty of oil with the cut garlic; sauté until the bread is well toasted ad crunchy.

Heath broth to almost boiling turn down when add the eggs).

Lightly beat the eggs in a small bowl as if preparing for an egg drop soup.

Add the eggs to the hot broth while stirring then add the bread, oil and garlic from the sauté.

Serve hot. If desired, may add a dusting of Parmigiano Reggiano (not Kraft!) to make it a bit “richer.”

Just Thinking...

2009-04-01T11:56:00.000+02:00

Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same…

Coming up...

2009-03-30T02:23:00.002+02:00

Snow White has some fun things on the stove, not food, but about Palladio and the Veneto and some wonderful little towns in that area so stay tuned. Found a great bar in Vicenza for cocktails, after dinner stopped in and had a mint stinger...really good!

Ciao, ciao

What is next?

2009-03-28T15:51:00.002+01:00

OK, so is anyone pissed off about this whole crisis? We should be and we should be writing letters to our congresspeople because we are going to be paying for this for the rest of our lives while the weasels who perpetrated this by not only finding the holes but creating more of them, keep getting more money, our money. We need a lynching squad for starters and we need to begin to voice our protest. We are losing control of our country as set out by the constitution and I do not know about you, but I am ready to stand up and make a lot of noise.

The Crisis in America - This is a MUST Read

2009-03-26T17:24:00.003+01:00

There are many versions of why the US financial system is in crisis. This investigative report from Rolling Stone outlines key events and relationships that materially influenced the current meltdown--and is worth reading because it lays out, in layman's language, exactly what happened. It's the first article that I've seen that ties together the details of the backroom deals between Wall Street and government that got us all into this mess. That it appeared in a counterculture publication is interesting--why hasn't the mainstream press done us all the favor of making sense out this devastating set of events?

The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI
Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM
It's over —no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of rotten luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are angry about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not angry enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO
The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money was o.k..

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy man with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, and corporate bonds, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shakiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the riskiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went downhill fast.

II. THE REGULATORS
Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as weaker than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's ridiculous. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH
Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crashed but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his failing schemes. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.
Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their perks," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB
So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN
There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of their financial manipulations are complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, penniless liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go pound sand — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS
Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be ignored by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"
"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.
"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.
"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."
In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."
Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly rotten business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of risks is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT
The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to car thieves on work release and unemployed clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.
[From Issue 1075 — April 2, 2009—with minor edits]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print

Lunch in Asiago

2009-03-26T14:50:00.006+01:00

Had lunch while wandering Asiago the other day and what a major disappointment this little place was. The décor was lovely as you can see from the photos but the personnel and service was offensive.

The prices were high for what was offered and when I ordered some wine, it was either by the glass or by the half bottle. OK, fine but how about a list of what is available????? I ordered by the glass and the waitress trotted off up the stairs to see what was open…. When she returned it was not, would you like white or red, but this is what we have and presented me a bottle. So what do you do, tell her to take a hike? Not likely, she would probably spit in it if I had told her to get me something else. Who knows, the wine was probably someone’s leftover bottle from the night prior.

The head duck was dressed in a suit…for an Osteria?? Yes it had tablecloths and was very nice downstairs but not enough to be that pretentious if you ask me; the quality of the food did not match the dress code. This little place is tied to the Hotel Europa a four star hotel…or I should say stolen stars for a rating and is next to one of the more famous hotels in the town. (This photo is the "nice" hotel)

Asiago is a fantastic altopiano with numerous small towns scattered around the plane. This is not a Cortina d’Ampezzo or a Campiglio however there is that “air” or feeling of being on the verge of having been touched by the hands of “get rich quick” tourism.

Since Asiago is a short drive from Vicenza, this is a place for locals to get some skiing in with just a short drive from home in the morning, on the slopes by 9 and then home by evening. Nonetheless, there is that air of catering to a higher tourist Euro and that brings nothing but disenchantment to those looking for a casual, relaxing little day trip away from it all. The area is well known for its cheese and limpid honey and is well equipped for skiing although here in March the lifts were closed even though there was still a lot of snow.

Granted it was Monday and shops are either closed on Monday or at the very least, during the morning so, the town was dead and many cafes or restaurants were closed. This only helped fuel the idea she had formed in her head of this town; that the season had just ended and no one really cared to be nice because they did not have to now, almost as if they were burnt-out and fed-up.

Despite this gloomy feeling, she will still venture a return trip during early summer, the hills must be breathtaking and there are other towns on the high plane besides Asiago, which looked very inviting and comfortable and ready for exploration.

Weird photo...

2009-03-25T18:21:00.003+01:00

Baccalà alla Vicentina...well with some dedication and hard work, this is what these ugly dried corpses become. I have a lot of things to post after spending a few weekends wandering, grappa-ing and wine tasting.

Genova, Old Port District

2009-02-24T17:08:00.007+01:00

While making their way towards Portofino, they made a command detour to Genova and its famous aquarium. Never having set foot in this crowded and busy city with a suspended highway winding through, she was invariably curious to have a glimpse and get a feel for this famous city.

Although pushed for time, they headed to the old port district finding parking in some un-godly spot hidden on the wharf and from there, had a nice walk (800 meters or so) to the “fish tanks.” The old port provides a smorgasbord for the senses; full of all those typical odors from a maritime environment making a port, a port and inundating the senses at once.

The smell of saltwater permeated the air; the sing-song clinking and clanging of sailboat rigging tickled their ears, and the heady odor of rotting fish and fish entrails mixed with diesel, rust and boat paint warmly greeted them; ah yes, the “bouquet” of a port.

The boardwalk was wide and welcoming, splattered with Africans selling knockoffs, benches semi occupied by locals soaking up some “rays” and people watching, generally just enjoying the sun and fresh February air. Approaching the old galleon replica, fishermen littered their path with old yet precious nets stretched along the boardwalk as they darned away, repairing, chattering and selling the morning’s catch. Their boats dock just below the boardwalk and from there they hoist up the boxes and crates of fish to their trolley carts with suspended balances ready in the blink of an eye to open up shop and sell their wares in this open-air make-shift market bursting with spontaneity and life.

The galleon provoked images of Columbus, what it must have been like oh so many years ago; too bad Italy did not finance him, they certainly missed out on the chance of a lifetime! All around the harbor were floating palaces, sleek (longilinea) boats just begging to go out in the open water.

Once she entered the aquarium, she was astounded with the presentations, the tanks and exhibits. Being a tad jaded as if no one can do a better aquarium than the one she visited in San Diego, this was a real experience of interaction, not just a display of fish. There was a marvelous grouping of huge tanks as well as, a nice representation of miniature tanks with massive amounts of attention dedicated to detail. Most impressive were the exquisite displays of jellyfish; almost unreal in their jewel-like, filmy delicate “skirts.” The dolphins are a sit-down-and-stare-at time eater, always a fascinating and fun world in which to lose one’s self; entertainment arrives by the boatloads from the sea lions, a cleverly interactive tank as well as the penguins.

Loaded up with smiles and “oohs and ahs” they headed to the car for the wicked little tunnel tour south towards Rapallo. Yikes what a terrible road from Genova south, loaded with trucks hauling containers, two lanes only and all tunnels; makes that beer all the more meaningful upon reaching destination.

Little Pearl, Portofino

2009-02-12T06:18:00.013+01:00

Taking a little time out from the daily grind and after all the rain and snow, they decided to dash over to Portofino for a stroll, photos and a cocktail. Portofino is a tiny pearl tucked away on the Ligurian coast not far from Genoa, next to Santa Margarita Ligure and Rapallo; a little fishing town, now a haven for VIP. Little did she know this was a place for “whoop-dee-doos;” once she spotted Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Hermés, Ferragamo, etc., she realized this was way out of their league pocket-wise (although, not out of her realm of taste). Of course for these two poor “street bastards,” visiting a town such as this in the off-season is their habitual MO, nevertheless off-season does not lower the prices of absolutely anything in this fabulous town (as it does in other places where normal folk forage).

They arrived late in the afternoon, just in time to catch the last of the setting sun reflecting against the pinks and yellows of the walls along the harbor. The wind was picking up, the tide coming in and only two bars out of a ga-bunch of them were open as well as just two restaurants; it was Monday so it is possible more were closed because it was Monday, but then again, these folks make so much money during those four months of the season, who the hell needs to stay open in the winter? They are probably sunning it in the Bahamas or Caribbean!

Few windows bore signs of life from behind the green shutters along the port shores (except for a few on the top floors); it was closed up tighter than a button but still, one could imagine the beauty of Spring with bars, gelaterias and store fronts open, bubbling with signs of life and color. The few boats moored in the waters were just those of the local fishermen and one lone sleek sailboat (a mere 40 footer). The wind was cold and whipping around the bend of the cove but that did not deter these two nuts.
They settled into benches and chairs made for midgets with their knees at their cheeks, outside suffering the cold so they could soak up the sounds, the smell of the ocean and the changing light on the castle above as well as, the church perched above the harbor. She had no idea how much of a haven for two-legged creatures with buckets of money this place was until she saw the prices on the drink menu; € 13,00 per concoction! When you walk away leaving 26 Euros for two drinks, one realizes the prices here will singe the hair off of one’s two rear cheeks.

Parking prices should have tuned her in at € 5,00/hour as well as, the fact the road is so narrow and small, cars must line up on the road coming into town in the summer before a lighted sign displaying parking availability as cars leave the structure. Yes, this is a small town, where you can walk from one end to the other in ten minutes (if not window-shopping) so, I suppose the prices work for parking. Clearly, city hall makes a nice penny on tourists she deduced while walking towards the harbor. They crossed over solid brass water grates and manhole covers; huge, thick pieces of brass and, polished! Ah yes, she forgot, this is one of the fabulous jewels of Italy where Silvio Berlusconi has another one of his homes, perched high above the harbor (poor guy eh)? (He has one on Lago Maggiore, one in Portofino, Costa Smeralda and an Island in the Bahamas, all the best-protected jewels of Italy and beyond).

After strolling by the ultra clean and pretty public showers, it slammed into her big time just how much money rolls through the place and, with all the water and electrical hook ups for boats (hot and cold water) she knew this was a great people watching trove. Her companion told her it seemed only boats of 10 meters and up moored there; she did not believe him until she looked at a few postcards. Wow, so this is how it is when you have buckets and buckets of the stuff to keep a floating palace in fuel.

Portofino is stupendous; truly a pearl tucked away along the coast with only one way in and out. It’s history dates back to 986 known as Portus Delphini and today is part of the club of I Gioielli d’Europa. Francesco Petrarca spent many a day (1300’s) in this glorious place along with his sailboat and where he asked to be buried.

Near here appears Portofino enclosed by luminous greenery; with a mountain barrier that repels the violence of the winds a silent respite in ecstatic quietness. Africa VI 845-847

The houses are long and narrow, the colors faded with many dilapidated facades lending more charm than ever to the scenery. Everything is small, streets, doors, and houses all squished in to the coastal hills and mountainsides, such a lovely contrast from the California coast. She tried to think of a place in California to help describe this town and all she could come up with was a mix of Big Sur, Carmel and Sausalito and still this does not do Portofino justice.

Having retrieved their wheels they headed for Santa Margarita for dinner since the town on passing by while headed to Portofino seemed more inhabited with many more places open for business. Exploring this lovely resort was a few steps down price-wise from the tiny pearl but still not a place for “commoners.” Prices in the restaurants are not for the faint of heart. We ended up stopping at La Palma since the other place could not take credit cards due to “technical” difficulties. Suffice it to say, this is not a place to go for those looking for a great meal. Service was 15% plus cover so between that, the water and a ½ carafe of wine, € 30,00 went to waste, well actually into someone’s pocket.

Thinking about how difficult it is to find a bad meal in Italy she realized how easy it is to find those few bad meals in places frequented by money. What is it; do they just want to be in the surroundings so they never look at the money spent? Is food quality not on the docket because they are there to be seen and willing to pay the price of the chair location ( or boat location)? Seriously, the money spent for two cocktails and for the service and beverages at dinner equal at least 3-4 meals out of a basket from the supermarket. Maybe she is just envious, wishing she could wander these ports of call without a second thought to the price of a caffè or a glass of water ;-)

With heavy hearts, they headed for the car after dinner; wishing there was a way to remain and savor the change of air and soak up the idyllic lights along the coast. As they left the lights behind them and entered the endless cord of tunnels they decided they would be back at the end of March, beginning of April for a drink and more eye candy; a chance to see the place in it’s glory before the long lines of cars and people clog the tiny piazza along the harbor.

Knock-Your-Socks-Off Bread Pudding Soufflé & Whiskey Sauce

2009-02-06T20:38:00.005+01:00

This recipe is a three-step process. The pudding base can be made a day in advance as well as the bourbon sauce.
Phase One: Bread Pudding ¾ cup Caster sugar or baker’s sugar 1 tsp ground cinnamon Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg 3 medium organic eggs 1 Cup heavy cream 1 tsp vanilla 5 cups New Orleans French Bread, in 1 inch cubes 1/3 cup top quality raisins. Currants may be used as well for a smaller raisin if desired.
The bread must be light and tender such as some of the French breads made at the super markets. If it is dense bread, it will soak up all the custard and the pudding portion of the recipe will not work. Baker’s sugar is not in many supermarkets but can be found at Ralph’s, not at Vons and Caster sugar at finer supermarkets such as Whole Foods.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-inch square-baking pan. Combine sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Beat the eggs until smooth and then work in the heavy cream. Add the vanilla, then the bread cubes. Allow bread to soak up the custard. Place the raisins in the bottom of the greased pan. Top with the bread/egg mixture. Bake for approximately 25-30 minutes or until the pudding has a golden brown color and is firm to the touch. If a toothpick inserted comes out clean, it is done. The mixture of pudding should be nice and moist, not runny or dry. Cool slightly. Turn out on to a cutting board and gently chop. Leave oven on to 350 degrees.
Phase two: Meringue
9 Medium egg whites
¾ cup baker’s sugar
¼ tsp cream of tartar

Butter six 6oz ramekins or use a large soufflé dish and dust with extra sugar. Beat on low the egg whites and cream of tartar until frothy. Turn up to high and whip until soft peaks form. Slowly add the sugar and beat until stiff and glossy. The egg whites should be completely free of yolk and they will whip better if the chill is off of them. To test them, use a clean spoon; if the whites stand up stiff similar to shaving cream, when you pull the spoon out the meringue is ready. Do not over whip, or the whites will break down and the soufflé will not work.

In another large bowl, take half of the bread pudding and fold into it ¼ of the meringue. Add a portion of this base to each of the ramekins.

Place the remaining bread pudding in the bowl and carefully fold in the rest of the meringue. Spoon to dishes and top off or mound the soufflés to about 1 and ½ inches above rims. Smooth and shape tops with spoon into a dome over the ramekin rim. Bake immediately for approximately 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from oven and using a spoon, poke a hole in the top of each soufflé and pour the room temperature bourbon sauce inside the soufflés. Serve immediately.

Use about half of the sauce for this and serve the remaining on the side or dress the plates before un-molding.

Phase 3: Bourbon Sauce
1 Cup heavy cream
½ Tbsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp water
3 Tbsp caster or baker’s sugar
1/4 cup excellent bourbon

Place the cream in a small saucepan over medium heat and bring to a boil. Whisk cornstarch and water together in a small dish and add to the cream while whisking. Bring to a boil while whisking and let simmer for a few seconds, taking care not to burn the mixture on the bottom. Remove from heat. Stir in the sugar and bourbon. Taste to make sure the sauce is sufficiently sweet to taste and with a good bourbon flavor and has a nice thick consistency. Cool to room temperature.

Enjoy!

Trillion Dollar Spending = Dog Tails to me.

2009-02-05T15:01:00.005+01:00

The spending bill being presented to the Senate is not just 800 billion; by the time interest is calculated over the next decade, it will be more along the lines of $ 1.2 trillion representing an unsustainable growth of government!

This expansion will include the bail out of state governments from their own budget deficits, expand Medicaid, boost education spending, food stamps and unemployment benefits, build more federal buildings, provide more for public housing, construct climate change supercomputers (thanks Gore, just what we need), erect trade barriers overseas, create refundable tax credits and make special interest payouts. This will not stimulate sustainable economic growth; the current package is a mass of spending with a sliver of targeted tax cuts.

An alternative plan should call upon a plan for change, to once-and-for-all put the nation's fiscal house in order, provide permanent tax relief for businesses and individuals, free Americans from the boom-bust economic cycle and to put the national debt to bed forever.

Did you know our current national debt is $10.7 trillion; this includes $4.3 trillion owed for SS, Medicare and other commitments, $6.4 trillion held privately, $3 trillion of which is held overseas and, (a big and), 40% of that privately held debt is due this year? The only way for government to pay that current debt, is to borrow more money. So, the U.S. is risking defaulting on it's financial obligations especially since the nation's creditors during this current economic downturn, may not be able to sustain the uncontrolled growth of spending, leaving the U.S. in financial ruin.

So now what? More dog butts for me.

French Green Beans with Stupendous Shallot Dressing

2009-01-29T21:12:00.001+01:00

1 lb of French ultra fresh green beans. You must use small tender thin beans for this. 3 Tbs of extra virgin olive oil 2 tsp of Dijon mustard 2 tsp white wine vinegar 1 bulb of minced shallots Steam the beans until just barely tender. While steaming, whish together the dressing ingredients adding salt and pepper to taste. When the beans are done, cool slightly under running water Toss immediately with the dressing and serve. A tiny garnish of Pinole over these adds a nice touch.

Winds of Change

2009-01-28T22:43:00.003+01:00

We have entered a new era as a country as well as, a people with the election of our new Commander in Chief; this is time for all of Americans to change and embrace a rebuilding of all sectors of their country and their lives. I do not believe government can do it alone and thus no matter how high journalism has elevated President Obama, he cannot do it alone either.

We have a long road ahead of us and I hope and pray people will wake up and take this new wave towards recovery, reconstruction and resurrection of values lost to our nation. Renewal and change is hard work and requires conscious de-construction of the old to build new; so let us all get our heads wrapped around the concept and get to work; a positive attitude and yes we can! As one door closes, another opens...we just have to see the open door. ;-)

Pears Nobile like Monet's Haystacks

2009-01-26T18:04:00.004+01:00

Poached pears make a pretty dessert plate and are very versatile through the seasons. In winter, their flavor is heightened when accompanied by a good Gorgonzola, toasted bread and walnuts roasted with butter and salt. During the summer, serve with sweetened mascarpone and lemon peel curls.

6 firm pears with stems Juice of 1 lemon 1 Cup (240 mls) excellent red wine ¼ cup (60 mls) sugar ¼ cup (60 mls) currants 1 vanilla bean split 3 or 4 whole cloves Using a vegetable peeler, peel the pears leaving the stems. With a paring knife, cut a small slice off the bottom of the pears and stand them upright in a saucepan. Squeeze lemon juice over them, then pour on the wine and sprinkle with sugar. Add the currants, vanilla bean and cloves to the wine.

Cover and simmer for 20 minutes (or longer depending on the size and ripeness of the pears); do not allow them to become soft. Midway, turn the pears on their sides and baste several times with the wine. Transfer to serving dishes. Pour some wine syrup over each one and garnish.

A small variation on this theme is to leave them whole, unpeeled and set them upright in a baking dish like Monet’s haystacks. Drench them in wine and sugar and slow bake until they are soft and all the wine is absorbed (may take up to 4 or 5 hours, I used to use my wood oven after making bread or a roast and leave them in the oven all night) Serve warm or cold.

Martinotti Method, not Charmat!

2009-01-21T21:32:00.007+01:00

It is interesting to learn, an Italian, Martinotti invented the Charmat method, which was then copied, “stolen” and made famous under the name of that Frenchman, Charmat.

We have done a true disservice to Federico Martinotti, director of the Enological Experimentation Institute of Asti in the ‘20’s. He was the inventor of what we call today Methode Charmat. He was THE inventor of the controlled fermentation method in autoclaves to create Spumanti. His method promised Spumanti with fruity notes, often sweet, by means of pressurized metal containers. This method became extremely popular given the speed with which a Spumanti could be produced as well as the economics of the method versus that of Champenoise also known as the classic method.

It was actually Martinotti who patented the autoclave in 1895 and then Eugène Charmat after the 1900’s who spread the method by implementing large containers for autoclaving. The correct name is and should be, metodo Martinotti-Charmat however if we give to Friar Dom Perignon the experimentation and success of fermentation in bottles for that wonderful sensation of classic spumante (alias Champagne), then truly, recognition should go to the Italian, Martinotti for his non-bottle method of fermentation.

The same grapes used for the classic method can be used for the Martinotti – Charmat method however this method renders softer colors, along the lines of straw with a tiny hint of green, fresher flavors and less structured at the same time as well as, less intense bouquets thus, the favored grapes for Spumanti are, Moscato, Prosecco, Malvasia and Brachetto.

The whole process is done in a large autoclave with the addition of selected yeasts and syrups but in a shorter amount of time re-fermentation is achieved and this is where the infamous Prosecco del Trevigiano arise. In fact, Asti is achieved from one fermentation, interrupting it in the middle of the fermentation. The first phase is stopped when 6-8 % alcohol have been achieved then, in a second autoclave the second fermentation occurs until it reaches 7,5 – 9% alcohol. The wine is then cooled to minus 4 degrees centigrade and transferred to a third autoclave for bottling. For the drier Spumanti, the Charmat lungo method is used, which requires a longer time on the “fecce.”

I conclude this with a nod to an old typical dance from the field workers of Polesine:

"…Xe quasi trent'anni che fo' l'campanaro E come un somaro me toca tirar Quando fo' don, don ,don Mando zo' le mie passion Quanto fo' din, din , din Me consolo col buon vin!…"

Go with Everything Dressing

2009-01-19T08:14:00.000+01:00

1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil (for a stronger flavor) or use other type of oil depending on tastes.
¼ cup of red wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon of Dijon mustard
1 clove of garlic pressed
Salt and pepper to taste
½ tsp of sweet basil or Italian herbs or for a different twist Provence mix of herbs.

Combine ingredients in a covered jar and shake to blend. This can be mixed with a hand blender or a whisk noting that using good olive oil will make a nice thick and creamy dressing. For those who like Dijon, add more than one Tbs.

Tagliolini with Herbs

2009-01-17T18:09:00.001+01:00

Tagliolini alle erbe

9 oz fresh cream
4 oz whole milk
1.5 oz salted butter
1 oz gentle Parmesan cheese (not over aged Parmigiano Reggiano)
Concentrated tomato paste
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, Thyme, Marjoram

Chop the herbs:
1 small bunch of parsley
2 or 3 leaves rosemary
1 sprig of thyme
10 leaves of Sage
1 sprig of Marjoram

Melt the butter, add ¾ of the chopped herbs, add the cream milk and cheese and 2 tsps of tomato concentrate from a tube and salt. Take off the heat.
When the pasta is done add to the mix and cook high until the sauce reduces a little bit. Serve with fresh black pepper and the remaining chopped herbs, parmesan on the side if desired.

Dog Butts

2009-01-16T18:28:00.003+01:00

As we organize the new kitchen, perusing Ikea this animal lover stumbled on a few fun items and instead of using them to hang leashes in the garage...this crazy creature wanted to put these in the kitchen for dish towels; loving them and planning to put more on the walls. ;-)

Paté with Grappa and Black Truffles

2009-01-16T18:04:00.002+01:00

I have wanted to publish this recipe for a long time but could not find the recipe; it was packed away in a box I had packed eons ago thinking I would eventually be able to get back to the place I left it and voilà, I have and so, here it is.

This is one of the best paté’s I have ever tasted and if you want a little variation on a theme, add a tiny bit of black truffle. ;-)

300 grams (10.7oz) chicken livers
300 gram white onions
60 grams (generous 2 oz) salted butter
2 tablespoons grappa (please use excellent grappa, none of those flavored fruit things but, grappa from wine such as, Pinot Nero, Muller Thurgau, Moscato ecc.)
One half of a chicken broth cube (without MSG)
1 bay leaf (alloro)
Worcester sauce
Salt

Carefully clean every trace of bile from the livers if not already done for you (check to make sure). Also, clean as much of the connective tissue as well, which will give a creamier mixture. For this recipe to be it’s best, the livers must be ultra fresh.
Wash and dry them then proceed to cutting them into 2 or 3 pieces.

Thinly slice the onions. Melt the butter then add the onions and sauté over moderate heat making sure they do not brown in any way, cook until nice and glossy. Add the livers and the bay leaf, raise the heat and cook stirring frequently.
Add to this cooked mixture the grappa and let evaporate adding the crumbled broth cube at the end of evaporation (try to use broth cubes or concentrated meat extract pastes without MSG). Taste and if necessary, add salt and complete the seasoning with a dash of Worcester sauce. If desired, this is the time to add the black truffle.

Turn off the heat and remove the bay leaf. Transfer the mixture to a Cuisinart or blender or any type of electric grinder/chopper. Mix until everything is soft and creamy.

Grease a pretty mold and pour the mixture in pressing it lightly in to all the angles. Cover and refrigerate.

Before un-molding, place a dishtowel that has been soaked in very hot water and rung dry tightly around the mold. Place on serving platter and flip and un-mold tapping the bottom where needed. Serve with warm thinly sliced toasted crusty bread. Serves 8

Ultimate Chocolate Dessert

2009-01-15T17:55:00.005+01:00

This dessert originates from Le Antiche Sere at Sogna in Italy; an old medieval borgo. I have made this dessert many times and every time the rave reviews were worth the every effort made.

13 ozs (365 grams) semisweet chocolate (use the best you can buy)
11 ozs (310 grams) unsalted butter
8 eggs, separated
10 ozs (285 grams) almonds, toasted and ground to a powder
¾ cup (180 milliliters) sifted powdered sugar (try to find powdered sugar without cornstarch if you can)
6 ozs (170 grams) white chocolate
2 tablespoons (30 milliliters) cognac

Variation of sauce: Bourbon Sauce
1 Cup Heavy Cream
½ tablespoon corn starch
1 Tablespoon water
3 Tablespoons Sugar (caster or baker’s sugar)
¼ cup Bourbon

Procedure for the chocolate soufflés:
Melt the semisweet chocolate and butter together in a double boiler (check out the awesome porcelain and copper double boilers at sur la table

Cool for 5 minutes

Beat the yolks and add them to the chocolate and butter mixture, stirring on very low heat. Then add the ground almonds and powdered sugar. Remove from the heat and allow cooling.

Whip the egg whites until stiff and gently fold into the mixture. Divide the mixture among 10 buttered ramekins or other similar forms and bake for 25 to 30 minutes at 350F or 175C.

Unmold and serve on a pool of warm white chocolate melted with a dash of cognac.
I find a nice Bourbon sauce changes this dessert from ultra refined to decadently wicked. This is the same sauce I use for my “knock-your-socks-off” bread pudding.
Whiskey Sauce: (again, please use good Bourbon!)

Place the cream in a small saucepan over medium heat and bring to a boil. Whisk the cornstarch and water together then whisk into the cream and bring to a boil while constantly whisking away and let simmer for a few seconds, taking care not to burn the mixture on the bottom. Remove from heat.

Stir in the sugar and the bourbon. Taste to make sure the sauce is sufficiently sweet to taste with a good bourbon flavor and should have a nice thick consistency. Cool to room temperature.

I find this sauce served warm, just finished that is, over the unmolded chocolate tart to be "killer."

Twenty days...

2009-01-10T17:40:00.002+01:00

Ughh!!! 20 days of the flu, not a para flu but the real bastard thing! I lost sight of Golden Piglet, probably was afraid he could get it via the blog. ;-)

Anyway, I am now catching up on things I have wanted to write about and will begin organizing the new kitchen soon so the recipes will be-a-coming.

Happy Propserous New Year to all (hoping we can all hang through the economic mess)!

Going off Track...

2008-12-31T21:01:00.002+01:00

OK, who the hell is paying for Tom Cruise's need for the FBI? He owns, HOW many planes? He makes, HOW much money? So the poor tax payers have to pay to have him protected for going out in the open using his notariety and Hollywood face to push Scientology, and WHAM, look what we get to pay for!!!!!

High Quality Food Culture

2008-12-19T17:06:00.003+01:00

I have so many things to write but these last two months have been busy trying to organize living quarters and now we are under the push of the holidays adding more to the plate. The other day talking to Golden Piglet we began to discuss the culture in Italy of high quality food, the fact there are so many strict rules regarding food production and the food industry. Recently there was a problem with pork from Ireland and all and any shipments to Italy were stopped, the issue is this, rarely do any of these problems originate in Italy. You never hear of bad beef or pork or lamb originating from Italy. Yes this country does have its problems with pollution getting into the water veins and affecting grazing land for buffalo milk but it is something that never leaves the country for later recall.

The United States does not have a strong FDA for the protection of human consumption regarding food production and thus every two or three months there is a ground meat recall, a spinach recall, etc.

Gang, the fact is this, one eats well and healthy here in bureaucracy-land Italy and the fact remains, simple cooking, simple food for honest, healthy meals. There are no coulis of this or that, or vellutato of this or that unless you are trying hard to make some fancy thing. Some say Italian cooking is boring or predictable, others try to jazz it up with fancy sauces and interpretations on a theme but in the end, the culture for the best using the least still wins the prize and when people pull their heads out of that dark place and see the light, they will realize all the most sophisticated kitchen equipment or kitchen for that matter does not make a better meal.

I have heard some say how boring eating in Italy is, every region having their specialties and traditions and the fact that it is hard to find things a little out of the ordinary. I ask those creatures, how is it then that Italians tend to be more appreciative of what they have than what they do not? They are happy to cook a good capon, or to make another fabulous broth from scratch...simple cooking, simple food, honest flavors. With that, I leave you all to your Christmas meal planning, searching for the ultimate meal for the holidays, looking for something new and missing the whole point of the kitchen.

Cheers and happy bubbles over the holidays to all.

Gotta Love the Left Over Queen!

2008-12-13T20:26:00.002+01:00

I just thought you all should head over to the left over corner, where the queen of left overs has truly presented one of the best blogs I have seen in a while and not only her blog but her ideas for left overs! She mentioned our blog in finest-foodies-friday and when I read more about her I was happy to find a fellow Italian lover as well as, one who purports simplicity in the kitchen (she is also the one responsible for Foodies Blogroll.

Golden Piglet is a bit of a pain in the butt regarding left overs that is, they need to be consumed quickly for the mass of bacteria and molds that set up shop so quickly (he takes the fun out of my left overs being a microbiologist maniac). I have never been able to use left overs very well and now, Jenn has answered my prayers and even though the Piglet loves to eat so our left overs never make it far anyway, now I have a good reason to have left overs! :-) So, as you ponder what to do with what is in your pantry against what is in that Tupperware, go see what The Leftover Queen has to say. Thank you for Jenn for the nice review, we certainly appreciated it.

Coming Soon...

2008-12-12T20:49:00.002+01:00

Snow White is working on a few posts, one about the cradle of history, one about Franciacorta (eat your hearts out French Champagne), the differences between ragù, King Porsenna and Chiusi with La Solita Zuppa, Pietra fetida, La Murrina seconds store in Milano, mini wine bricks just for starters.

The weather is nuts over here right now, snow at low levels, Zermatt getting wads of the stuff, Rome's Tiber ready to overflow it's banks, Tuscany practically a whole new lake and this all adds up to...yep you guessed it, eating because it is cold and making trips to the hottest pastry shops around.

Green Gold – Extra Virgin Gold

2008-11-30T18:34:00.003+01:00

The last of the olive harvest is over and the crop was a good one well I take that back, it was fantastic. The hard work always brings a smile after the olives have gone to milling and the finished product is dripping from a thick piece of bread toasted quickly at screaming high heat, rubbed with a clove of garlic and sprinkled with salt…true heaven for those who love just-pressed extra virgin olive oil. There is even more satisfaction as it rolls over the tongue, spicy and fragrant, a bright emerald green; the thought that you picked it yourself and, you worked your blooming arse off to get it...add to the flavor appreciation.

Nowadays, in Italy the laws have become so encumbering, picking olives has become another dying act. Granted in the past, people took advantage of those they hired to help pick; today if you hire, you need to pay insurance on them, pay them an hourly wage, a minimum of 9 Euros/hour (hell, way beyond minimum wage in the States) and some go as far as asking for product as well the hourly wage. So tell me, how can anyone afford to even pick the fruit off the trees when the product sells at market price of 9 Euros per liter????

If you do not have a large family, which is now the case in so many Italian homes as the families are not only getting smaller but moving to the easier jobs and cleaner jobs as well meaning, they leave the parents on the farm, alone to do what used to be done in numbers. So what is a person to do who is alone with a butt load of trees to pick? How are they supposed to bring to market a lost treasure, stupendous in flavor (and organic)? An oil tasting of fresh green olives packed full of beneficial properties and history? It used to be “an event” in the countryside at “olive time” where the families came together, took days off from their jobs to get to the fields and pick. Lunch would be had in the fields either over a makeshift campfire grilling fresh sausage, bread, pancetta and such all watered down with homemade wine.

The time spent picking was a time of recounting gossip of the month and catching up on who is doing what, there would be laughter and voices of others in fields nearby floating upon the air who were doing the exact same thing. Everyone happy, working quickly if the weather was cold since harvest time was usually the beginning of December, and if not cold everyone would be relaxed, happy and working for that liquid gold, for that first Bruschetta of the year.

Life was simpler, harder but full of satisfaction. Today, it is a rush to get to mill, the weather is not the same so harvest time starts at the end of October and if you have too much to pick, you might wind up leaving the fruit on the trees unable to pick it all. You legally are not allowed to have anyone help except direct family, mother, father, son or daughter. Cousins mean insurance, actually anyone means insurance however tell me…are those bastard twits in uniform or undercover from the Finanza really going around looking for people picking olives?

Seriously! I need to figure this one out…or do they show up if someone rats on you, like jealous neighbors? Damn, always have to be nice to neighbors because you never know when they might stick it to you and here in Italy, the laws are made for snitches and tattletales.

So what is for dinner tonight? La Bruschetta!!!!!!!!!!

Mingao - Dessert for Buongustai

2008-11-19T20:43:00.004+01:00

Ingredients

3 tablespoons of sugar per egg yolk
Use 4 egg yolks
1 -2 tablespoons flour or one generous one.
1/2 liter of whole milk
scorzza di limone/lemon zest. Use half a lemon for those who like the lemon flavor and use a good zester tool, use a whole lemon.

Beat the egg yolks with the sugar (from 10-12 tablespoons) and the flour energetically for five minutes until nice and soft. At the beginning it will be dense and difficult to stir but will soften up as beaten.

Add the whole milk at room temp with the lemon zest.
Place on low flame and stir slowly with wooden spoon, bring to boil. After it begins to boil stir one more minute and then turn off. Pour immediately into cups and cool.

Note, this is a great dessert when placed in pots du creme or nice little liqueur glasses. Serve using chocolate spoons made by Lindt (unfortunately Lindt is not one of our sponsors, of course we would not mind if they contacted us...;-) If you cannot find chocolate spoons, regular ones will work just fine but garnish with a a dash of grated dark chocolate.

Ashera - Luxury Cats

2008-11-10T14:38:00.004+01:00

OK, has anyone out there heard of this breed...or even seen one? I have been discussing this with a vet friend of mine and we get into some heated discussions about genetic stuff and creations...here is the link A-4ft-leopard
It seems Lifestyle Pets created this and a few other unique examples and as much as I might be aginast breeding, these cats fascinate me (check out the prices while you are at it)! http://www.lifestylepets.com/

http://ilprofessorechos.blogosfere.it

The Computer Affaiar

2008-11-07T06:13:00.000+01:00

Have you ever had a relationship, in the beginning where all communication was based on letters, phone calls or now, the internet? Thinking about that the other day, I realized how much fun those can be, how exciting and frustrating as well. So, Snow White presents one of her best efforts with technology and love. ;-))

She gets up out of bed, the two legged “thing” in the bedroom is snoring, so she takes the chance and scurries down the hallway, in the dark; well not too bad since the "on" light from the computer casts a glow on the walls. Nonetheless, she hurries down the hallway, trying to throw her arms into her robe as she moves and trips on a cat. Scream, howl and screech, from the cat. Oh damn!!! She grabs the walls and regains her balance, for two seconds and she is off again muttering under her breath, “ Damn cat!” What the hell were you doing in the middle of the hallway anyway, in the dark on the rug?”

Unfortunately the cat woke the dogs up and so they decided it was time to investigate what was going on. Here comes the big one and pushes her from behind at her knees, she buckles and goes down on all fours as number two dog jumps over her. Damn it again!! She pauses; listening...he is still snoring, yes? She waits; yes...he is sawing down a forest. OK, great! She stands up and continues her journey to the "office" and enters only to find another cat in her way and one under her foot, and another one on the desk trying to brush up against her and as she tries to maneuver around them, the dogs screw everything up by insisting on coming in and joining the party!!!! There is no more room so she makes a lunge for the chair on wheels and slams herself into the corner of the desk.

Oh my God she screams in silence! Tears roll down her cheeks…as the pain hits her full force. &%§£, that hurt; she is jumping around, swearing quietly, crying and glaring at the zoo before her. The dogs are cowering, the cats could not give a damn. She twirls the seat of the chair around and crashes into it still holding her shin, swearing, pissed...but on a mission nonetheless. She turns to the computer while still holding her shin, moves the mouse around to wake up the monitor, while waiting, she nurses her bruised bone. All four cats are on the desk wanting to be fed. “Damn it guys, go out and catch some rats or something, leave me alone, I have super important things to do here!!!!!!!!”

The monitor slowly comes to life and she tries to type in her password, but she cannot see because she has not turned on the light for fear of waking the great “white logger” in the back...so she practically has her face on the keyboard to see the keys but to no avail. She mistypes, and again, and again; Oh to Hell with this! She turns the light on low and quickly types the word but now she has her glasses on...found them in the light. Shit, will miracles never cease?

OK, here we go she thinks to herself, but the mouse does not move well over the new mouse pad....in fact, it really sucks! She is desperately trying to click on her browser.....misses, clicks and viola!! Finally!!!!!! She looks at her mail tab; no new messages; oh crap, that is not possible! She is nervous now. It must be this stupid browser. She closes all tabs and launches her browser again. All five tabs come up....oh lord how long does this thing take??????????? I could pull five files out of a file cabinet faster than this!!!!!!

OK, here it is, the mail tab......she looks, and then looks again; nothing is there. Crap, now what??????? Desperate for a fix she goes in to her file of emails from him....ah....finally some old mail to read. She peruses a few of those until she knows them by heart, OK, now what? I’ve got it; my sent file! Let's go over what I wrote him, maybe I'll be inspired to write him some more gibberish (she is now panting...nothing is working she is needing a fix so badly she is ready to do just about anything...god how my shin hurts she thinks....all that pain....)! Bloody hell again!

OK, get a grip on yourself; this computer is not at fault, do not yell at Bill Gates because he did not cause this mail failure. OK, fine! I'll get over this....I will. She turns to her two trusty friends and pets them, which helps calm her down and at the same time, makes her realize how addicted she is to her torrid love affair with this electronic box!

The dogs understand, they nuzzle her and then leave and go back to bed, the excitement being over for the night. The big fat 15 pound cat comes over and just plops himself down on top of the desk next to the monitor and looks at her..."you stupid nut, she is thinking he is thinking...." I guess I'll have to make myself a chamomile and just try to go to bed she says to herself.

A voice in her head tells her: In the morning my child, morning....you must wait until morning, for the computer monster does not relinquish emails until then...calming down...wishing she was in another part of the world that very second...OH MY GOD, how am I going to last???? One word, just one...even gibberish would work....I'd sell myself for one word she thinks to herself....to see his email address in my inbox....yes that would do it....that is one word, isn't it, that address??? Yes, I would be happy (liar)!!!!!!!!

OK, computer...I'm leaving now so do NOT crash on me between now and the morning...do not look for viruses or I'll kill you myself...and for god's sake, do not let any spy ware get through the "protection" or you are going to be under the next delivery truck that passes by!!!!!!

OK,...going back to bed...she is totally blinded in the dark after the brightness of the computer screen...walking down the hallway with both hands on the walls...teeny tiny steps ...shuffling her feet in case there is a cat...no cat...OK, so far so good...listening....crap! He is STILL snoring...that is good and bad...still asleep is good but that means he will keep her awake...oh GOD NO!!!! No more sleepless minutes, please (meaning more time to think about emails)! Ughhhhhhhhhh, how will I survive??????????????????????????

She slides into bed as her mind turns on instead of off; drowning in thoughts of another place in time, sleep never coming.

Musing over...

2008-11-03T06:33:00.000+01:00

She looks down to the floor at the gray furry friend she has staring at her with his big orange eyes, she knows the only reason he is looking at her is not for affection; she has supermarket written across her body and hands! Yes, that is all he wants, any and all food either from her hands or plate!

She is sitting at her computer with the view facing the lake watching the weather change from sunny to a mix of overcast, windy hot gunk and eating a piece of Parmigiano cheese making sure she sliced a few smaller pieces for the beast at her feet (why she bothers to cut them into small pieces she wonders, he throws any size down when it comes to cheese)! Thank god he does not like wine and at his age, she would give him anything he wants as long as it does not contain gluten. Hum, he seems to be eating more of her cheese than she, a bite for her and two for his little skinny body.

Hell, he is good company even though he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about her, at least he is a snoring, breathing living body who shares her meals and wakes her up a few times in the night with his toys. She knows he listens to her when she talks to him because his tail whips back and forth so fast slapping the floor or the furniture he is near. We still have not graduated to purring and after having a great home for 14 years then torn from what he knew as home, she cannot blame him at all for not being ready to take on a new boss. The nice thing about him is that after a ½ inch of cheese he’s ready for a nap and so he high-tails it to his blanket on her bed or to his basket in front of the toilet (yeah I know, great place but he was used to that before so I cannot break his habits). Nothing like having company when you go need to visit the porcelain god!

The bells from the church on the island are so close she feels as if they are right in her back yard particularly if the wind is right. She hears the sounds of the trains as they pass below her nest, gliding over the tracks reminding her there is a world in constant movement even though here looking at this idyllic view one would think otherwise. The sounds of the occasional Ferrari or super sports car as they wind around the roads float to her open window as well as those idiotic motorcycles screaming over the road by the shore.

The azaleas are in full bloom leaving massive bright color blotches all around the area and in the towns. She decides to finish a few postcards and get those ready to post the next day and look over some tourist ideas for the next day as well, trying to decide on museums or a drive; reality seeming so far away just like the villas on the other side of the shore.

Actually, she thinks this is the perfect kind of weather to go to town, sit at a table outside with her marrochino and begin planning the course of her book, the cast of characters, the overall flavor and tone and begin a rough outline. Of course, it would not be all work because she loves nothing better than to people watch and soak up the sounds and flavors of the towns while sitting in the piazzas or along the shores or ridges or whatever it is in that particular spot.

She gathered her belongings, packed her little tote bag and went to fire up the big beast and point it towards town, time for a dose of life, coffee or maybe a glass of wine. As she closes the door she hears her furry friend snoring up a storm; that’s good she thinks, at least he is satisfied and happy on his full cheese belly. A dopo!

Men, Food and a Deserted Island

2008-11-01T06:04:00.004+01:00

Here is a quick test to see what kind of man you have in your life. I thought of this after reading one of my favorite blogs. OK, so I decided after living with three male monsters who were selfish and self centered, I would come up with a type of “what would you do…” type of screening question for future men in my life.

I realize the home is truly the responsibility of the woman and she really does know almost every thing there is in each cupboard in the kitchen and refrigerator. Now, you bring a man in there, he opens the door and cannot find his beer or the cheese because it is not FLAT OUT in front of his BLIND face. There may actually be a carton of milk in front of it, (God forbid) or worse yet, her tub of yogurt!

So here is the test: You ask him what he would do if you were deserted on an island (the kitchen) together with a fixed amount of food supplies, limited to a small wooden crate (the refrigerator). You tell him what types of food are in this box and tell him you will divvy out the portions equally each day/meal. Then you tell him that you only have one Twinkie or cookie and you assume this will be split equally or, you as a female, being givers of life, will probably let him have your half…right? Well, maybe. Two days go by and you are both starving, looking at that last Twinkie; you both go to bed and pray for a miracle the next day. The next day you get up and it is gone! What is his response? You want to hear the ones I received? These are real my friends and I mean it.

One of my “lovely” suitors told me in all sincerity that he would and should always get more than I because he was bigger and needed more energy to function and, he would have been sneaking into the box every night eating everything. With a deadpan face, he told me if there was one left, he would take it and fight for it.

Male number two: This is not even a discussion because he takes the last of everything and leaves the empty box, bucket or wrapper! So being deserted together would be sheer hell and so it was. The refrigerator was always full of empty wrappers and I would come home thinking I could make a sandwich with the turkey….what turkey? There isn’t any bread either….!!!! Getting my drift???????

Male number three: No that is OK, you take this, really. I want you to have this and eat it…as his fork comes over to take a bite…then another bigger and bigger and as he eats, he truly believes he is being the bigger “man.”

So, how do you think this bad girl solved some of these issues? Well, when the fork came over to have a “taste,” her fork tines went into his hand! When number two thought it so funny to leave empty containers, this innocent creature emptied the kitchen and refrigerator of all food filled boxes, dry or otherwise and filled them all up with empty boxes. The refrigerator was full of empty wrappers, Tupperware with nothing in them, empty sandwich meat bags and for the bread, she filled it with sawdust mixed with mashed potatoes, made it into a form looking like bread and left that as well. For the first male, he was an easy fix; Ex-lax brownies did a number on him. ;-))))) So, the moral of the story is; don’t mess with the kitchen help!!!!!! Now, try this out on your men and see just how magnanimous they really are. ;-)

The Ecstasy of Italy Part II

2008-10-22T04:30:00.001+02:00

After leaving way too much money in Germany, the two food hounds headed to the Dolomites in Trentino, Alto Adige or Sud Tirol. Even though it was still August and full-on Italian vacation time, it was nice to be back in Italy where the food is always good even when it is bad, and the wine, oh God the wine; finally back to real heavenly wine! Menus were in three languages although we did not need it, it was nice to see that Italy was catering to travelers and making life a little easier by offering other languages on the menu without having to fight to find out what you were ordering from people who did not care to even try to speak English or another language for that matter (and I am talking about two towns where the tourism is heavily Italian, Madonna di Campiglio and Pinzolo).

Once again food and wine was a joy and the days were filled with stupendous hikes at 2500 meters, mushroom photography, grappa tasting and of course, the can’t-live-without, spritz-campiglio-style!

One of the greatest tragedies of Campiglio, especially for one who has grown up with the place over 40 years is to see how the ultra rich manage to destroy the simplicity and true nature or personality of a place; just look at Cortina and what is has become! Campiglio should be left as a place for skiing and summer trekking, hiking and nature, a place for casual dress, simple genuine food to fill the huge appetites fueled from the vigorous outdoor activity the area has to offer.

Unfortunately, the “locals” who are not willing to pay massive prices for a slice of carrot cake, are outnumbered by the twits who could care less about how much they spend, all they want to do is be seen never really looking at the price, paying and leaving the locales with the idea that it is OK to charge high prices. Kid you not, two glasses of Prosecco and ONE slice of carrot cake was 18 Euros!!! This translates into 4 Euros for the cake and 7 Euros a glass for the bubbles, insane and offensive to those who work hard for their money. With this come the changes from rustic mountain, simple and real, to false refined BS, shops selling Rolex, furs and lots of useless things for people with nothing better to do with their money than buy more “stuff” and fuel a false atmosphere.

The outdoor sporting goods stores abound with prices to match. With a bit of preplanning regarding clothing (buying it for much, much less in Milan), Campiglio can be sojourned without spending a fortune although, the “ovini” (gondolas) to the mountain locations are not cheap but hey, that is one fee we are happy to pay to have the opportunity to see vistas worth millions and to listen to the sounds of silence. Pinzolo is a good option for lodging for those who wish to save some money with Campiglio only 15 minutes away and not to ignore and brush aside is Pinzolo’s Dos del Sabbion.

Some exceptional meals, superb lodgings with breathtaking views from one’s hotel room may be had at the Hermitage chalet hermitage in Campiglio. Their (stube-hermitage) Stube Restaurant is expensive but memorable and half pensione affords one a glimpse of the talented chefs and pastry chef (beware, bottled water is 7 Euros a liter).

Ah Italy, alive, sexy, passionate, and expressive how else should one end a vacation except in ecstasy?

WEATHER CAMPIGLIO

Family Recipe

2008-10-20T17:39:00.003+02:00

Golden Piglet is going to share with all of us his secret family dessert recipe shortly. I will do my best to translate it and convert the measurements...most of them not precise but a spoonfull of this and one of that. ;-)
Cheers