What a month at the beach does to you

So what does a month at the beach, taking the sun every day, really do to you?
You get some sun.

To more dramatically illustrate this, I've pulled out some pictures from myself from early, middle, and late this summer. These are cut out from larger pictures, trimmed just to show my face.

I've mounted them into a collage that shows you how my face looked at the end of July, early August, and late August.  The pictures were taken under different lighting conditions, so it isn't easy at first to look at them and obviously see the changes, but if you look carefully you'll see how my face starts out a little red (on July 30 I had already been getting sun for a few days -- sorry I couldn't find a good photo from earlier), then by August 7 it's starting to lose the redness and get darker, and finally at the end of August all of the red is gone and it's just a little darker than maybe you're used to seeing me.

Tortoreto Lido - changes on our street

This past weekend we moved down to the village where we go to the beach, Tortoreto Lido.
Quiet little village in the winter, explodes with beach goers in the summer. Weather has been mixed. On the weekend it was heavy rain, lighting, winds. Monday was good and we went to the beach. Today looks like it's going to be rain.

There are two pictures on this post. The first one is the little street outside our kitchen. This is traditionally what it looks like, small houses, quiet, narrow, little cars parked here and there. The second picture is the new monstrosity that's being built across the street in a formerly empty lot. It's going to completely block our view of the sun.

Oh well, that's progress.

First few days of Summer 2014

I got here in what has to be the earliest time of arrival I can remember ... landed in Napoli just before noon localtime.  No problems with connections, it's all smooth, no lost luggage, but it still tired me out.  No chance for sleep on the plane with such an early flight from the US to Europe, I was in Paris my 6am Paris time/midnight back in Ohio.

First day of course spent doing nothing and recovering.

Second day we take a Sunday drive out to the country to visit my mom's favorite cousin.
Nice 4 hour lunch under the trees in the hills somewhere outside Avellino.
I've gotten so lazy now that I didn't even have my phone with me during lunch, so the only pictures I got were these two of some of the desserts.

The first one is a store bough assortment of mignon desserts.

This one is a home made baba (on the bottom) with some store bought mini-baba's on top to fill in the hole in the center of the home made baba.

Today is actually day three.  Day two was hot, day three started out with heavy rains, winds, and has been much cooler.  Forecast for next couple days calls for more of the same.

The real vacation doesn't start until next week, I'm still technically working remotely this week, so don't expect a lot more until later in the month.

Summer 2014 Here We Come

The older I get, the more I hate winter.

Summer is coming, Tortoreto Lido awaits me.

How to eat Arrosticini

Arrosticini are little skewers of grilled lamb meat. The meat has to

be cut into really tiny pieces to cook the right way, quickly, over coals.

Essentially, it's meat on a stick. Readers may remember my post from July 4 this year when we tried to make arrosticini back in Columbus.  Although a valiant effort, it was flawed because we didn't have the means to cut the meat to the correct and uniform dimensions.

Today we're in the spiritual home land of arrosticini, Abruzzo, and we're enjoying the real thing. As we were doing this, I came to remember the trouble that those poor Columbus-ites had trying to eat the meat on a stick, so I prepared this service as a guide.

Step 1: pick a nice restaurant. Outdoor, at night, is the best choice.

Step 2: Order your appetizers, arrosticini, beer, etc. We'll skip past all the preliminaries.  The arrosticini arrive:

Pick one up by the long end of the stick.

Step 3: bring to face.

Step 4: open mouth, insert meat between teeth and grab the last couple pieces of meat between your teeth. Clench.

Step 5: pull stick away from face, holding meat in teeth.

Step 6: Be amazed by the flavor and goodness. Don't need no stinking sauce, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, etc, they're best straight up!

Here's a better close up view of the arrosticini.

Now some do's and don'ts.

No sword play with your food.

Liquid refreshment, a lot of it, is a good thing.

Finally, save the sticks as you eat so that at the end you can count them and boast about how many arrosticini you ate!

Fare la scarpetta

Today we will explore the curious phrase "fare la scarpetta" or "doing the scarpetta".   What is "the scarpetta"?   Taken literally, it's a little shoe, but as the expression goes "doing the", we're probably not looking for a noun here, we're looking for an action.

But let's back off.   Imagine you sit down at meal time to a nice plate of spaghetti.  Like this one.  Ok, they're vermicelli, but no one will ever know the difference.

These vermicelli are in a sauce that was cooked with tomatoes and fish. You can just see some evidence of this in the lower left corner if you look close.




Let's say you've finished the plate, and let's say it was very good, and the sauce was very satisfying.  And let's pretend you've still got some bread left.

And so you look at the bread, and you look at the leftovers in the bottom of the pan, and you think to yourself "The bread is good, but it's dry.  The sauce is better, but it's inconvenient to eat by itself:  let me put 2 and 2 together and clean the bottom of the pan with the bread!"


With the help of my assistant the 2nd photo shows just such a thing.  He's dipping the bread down into the bottom of the pan to soak up some more sauce.

Before I could get another picture, however, he had eaten all of the sauce and all the leftover vermicelli as well.  He's fast, and insatiable.  It's an inherited trait in his family:  all the males in the family show this same habit.

So, the vermicelli and all the sauce are gone, but we get the idea:  we use the bread to clean the plate, then the cooking vessel.  It's an ageless tradition in Italy, and although it derives from the basest of roots, it's gotten enough of a reputation as a "good thing to do" that if you search Google for "scarpetta" the first few pages of hits will show you links to fine Italian restaurants all over North America instead of explaining to you what "scarpetta" really is.  If you search on Bing, you find links to people who were named "scarpetta";  Bing may be completely correct but they just don't get it.

If you search for "fare la scarpetta" on either one finally you get somewhere.  You'll find links that explain that a piece of bread, when deformed between your fingers, becomes long and flat, and in some way resembles a long thin shoe, something that could reasonably be called a "scarpetta"  (a little shoe.)

So, now we know that it gets the name from the shape of the bread, but how do you do it?  It's easy enough in the plate, but say the plate is already clean?  And the 5qt pan that had the vermicelli has been cleaned out too.  What can we do?

Say we have one of these things on the right.  It's the pan where the fish was cooked in the tomatoes. All the fish is gone, all the tomatoes are gone.  What, then, is left?   Flavour!

We can do something with this. It's perfect for demonstrating the technique because the sides are low and we can get a good picture.

Start with a small piece of bread between your thumb and forefinger.  You will have to experiment with the size to see what works for you.  Try to find good bread.  Here's a hint: if you crush the bread and it turns to sawdust and disappears, it's no good.  It must take the abuse and bounce back to it's original size.

Now dip the end of the bread into the pan, starting away from you.  Slowly, moving it left and right as needed, bring it towards you, soaking up flavor as you go.

Slowly!  Give it time to soak up the sauce.  If you've got good bread to work with it will take the abuse and remain solid.

If you see the bread is staying too dry move around in search of wetter spots.  If you see the bread is getting too wet, pull out before you lose chunks of bread.

When you get to the end of the run, tilt the bread, quickly up into the air, to catch what ever loose sauce is trapped on the end.

Now carry the bread back over to your plate.
Admire the work you did, and shove the whole thing right into your mouth!

So that's how you do "the scarpetta" at home, when you've got the cooking vessels to work with.  In a restaurant, it's not so easy:  the chef doesn't just let you walk into the kitchen.  So you make do with just cleaning the sauce on your plate.  Once in a while, with luck, you will be rewarded for your efforts, and the chef's mother will bring you out more sauce!  (Hey, it really did happen to me!)

How to eat fish

Dear readers, this is what a fish looks like when it arrives on your plate, cooked.
I show two pictures,

Fish, cooked, on plate, Italy

On the left, fish in Italy.

Note that the fish more or less looks like a fish and it has a head on it.

Fish, cooked, on plate, USA

On the right, fish in the USA.
Note that it has been reorganized into a box shape and breaded and fried.








To those of you who grew up eating only the fish on the right (fish sticks, aka fish fingers) I can only say that I am very sorry for you.

To help you out, in case you ever come across a real fish, I have provided this handy guide to how to eat a fish.  You can do this with a fork and knife without getting your hands dirty.  Having a second smaller dish to hold the discarded parts is handy but not essential.  The example fish I used here was cooked in a tomato sauce, but the same steps apply no matter how it's cooked.  You will also need some good bread.

First step, cut off the head.

Make an incision more or less behind the gills, find the spine, and cut through it.  Put the head aside, we'll come back to it.

 Now take the body of the fish and split it into two parts.  To do so, make an incision down the top of the fish all the way from front to tail, down clear until you feel you're hitting the spine.

Make a similar cut from the bottom up.

When you've made those cuts, using the fork and knive you gingerly lift one half of the fish up and over so it now lays open faced.

Now slide the knife under the spine on which ever half of the fish was left with a spine, and cut away the spine from the tail.  If the fish was cooked properly, you will just life the whole spine out without having to struggle.

Put the spine on the scrap plate with the head.

Now you need to work the two open halves of the fish and remove any small bones that are left.  There could be a few. There will be big ones nearer to the gills and small ones anywhere.

The close up on the right shows the procedure to use to pull the bigger bones from the area close to the gills:  slide the knife under them and then lift the bones away, helping with the fork.

These are the two halves after the cleaning.  Now we can start to eat.

Close up of one side.

There could still be some small bones left.
They're most likely to be hiding between folds in the fish or in the sauce.

Be on the lookout.

Once you've eaten the fish, you need the bread to clean the plate.   The sauce that's surrounding the fish is so good that you don't want it to go to waste.

Now we go back to look at our plate of scraps.  This is what we had left over.

We've got the head, the spine, random bones, some skin, etc.

Let's take a close look at the head.

What's that in the head?  More meat and sauce.

Take your knife and dig out the meat, and scrape and pull out the sauce. If no one is watching you can put the whole head to your mouth and such the sauce out.

I'm by no means an expert in working fish heads, but I did what I could and cleaned mine, here's an after picture.  See how all the sauce has been cleaned away?   You can also see between the before and after pictures that large pieces of white meat were pulled out.

If you skip this step, you'll be missing out on some of the best parts of the fish.

Bon Appetit!