webcowgirl | Entries tagged with sicily

So I gave a try at making Pasta Alla Carrettierra tonight. I had bought breadcrumbs in Palermo and picked up some ewe's milk cheese to mock what I thought the proper flavor profile was. (Note: I used manchego as I'd, er, inadvertently left the Asiago at home.)

I wound up kind of following this recipe but then adding in an idea from another recipe and adding in cubes of cheese (to pump up the protein). My recipe (limited somewhat by not remembering to buy any fresh herbs at the grocery store) was like this:

6 T olive oil
add 5 fat cubes of minced garlic. As they go golden ....
add in breadcrumbs and fry till golden. I can't tell you how much to use as I put in way too many. Probably a few T would do - I think I added almost a cup!

At this point I stirred in 1-2 T dried parsley (as I had no fresh and had forgotten to buy basil either), then added ....
2 cans of chopped tomatoes in sauce ...
and let it all cook for a while, all the while going OMG I put in too many breadcrumbs. Probably one can would be okay if you hadn't biffed the breadcrumbs like I did. Also note that while many of the recipes I linked to recommended raw tomatoes, or cooking raw tomatoes, that actually wasn't the flavor profile of what I had in Catania - no surprise as it's not exactly tomato season!

The bucatini finished cooking, I drained it, then dressed it with really good olive oil, then smooshed in some of the sauce, then added chunks of young pecorino and served it with grated manchego on the side to put on top.

Conclusion: delicious. Key ingredient: garlic and breadcrumbs! The cheese was not the crack-like component of the original recipe, which is good to know as for whatever reason Asiago seems much harder to find in London than it was in the US.

Next recipe: pasta with a RAW GARLIC sauce. I am looking forward to this! Also, having

trishpiglet and

babysimon for dinner was a great time and I'm happy I was able to distract them from my lack of dessert options by giving them Marsala. Now I can go and read a trashy Charlaine Harris mystery and consider my evening well spent!

This may or may not be your thing, but I've got all of my puppet show videos up on YouTube now. Be warned they are performed in Sicilian. This one features puppets being decapitated, dismembered, and cut in half. It's great!

(Yes, you can hear me laughing in the background.)

Wow, I think I spent nearly two hours writing up my trip to the various puppet theaters in Sicily. Now I'm all tired! Anyway, go read it and tomorrow I'll put up links to show what the actual shows looked like.

It's only a few seconds long ... but for some reason I'm having a really hard time getting YouTube to upload stuff!

I think it's funny that I came back home wearing my pyjama top. In truth, it was pretty much the only clean shirt I had, though that's not why I wore it.

I'm going to put in some laundry, put away the cheese, wine, pasta, cookbooks, and ceramic head vases that I bought, then see about catching up with all the gossip and maybe doing a really long post. I've got lots of videos of trumpet playing devils and puppet shows, so expect some new stuff on my YouTube channel in the next day or two.

I am reminded today of why we are here for such an extended period of time, and, in fact, of why we are renting a car next weekend. Today has been a day of utter transportation failure, compounded by not having an internet connection. The bus schedules are posted 1) online and 2) at the station. Now, we are near a bus station, but it turns out it is only a bus station for the city buses and one of the intercity lines. The one that does leave from there only had three departures for Taormina today, one at 9, one at 2, and one at 4. The other bus station might have had other departures, but it left from the train station. And could we figure out how to get to the train station, or even read the sign explaining which of the various conditions applied to the departures (ie not on holiday s- though we werent sure if today was a holiday or not - not on weekends - only on school days - only on weekdays - only on weekday holidays ... etc.)? No, I did not understand enough Italian to figure out where the bus stop was that went to the train station. We did finally get there, only to find that while they did have a different schedule, but that by the time we had actually found out where the other bus company had its buses, we had missed the bus (it was around a corner, down the street, and behind a construction site).

The whole reason this was happening was, well, not because we had been planning to go to Taormina, but because the CircumAetna train doesnt run on Sundays. This was not mentioned in any of the four guide books I bought. Fortunately I figured that out before we went to its train station, which is in a totally obscure part of town.

We did wind up having a completely great lunch, once, three hours after we had left the hotel, and after I spent 10 woozy minutes on the bench (WTF with the sense of balance going all sideways), we finally completely and utterly gave up on doing anything today. And all of the stuff in town was closed down, too. Shut tight. Not a museum to see. If only I had known we could have done yesterday completely differently ...

Yesterday, however, was completely rocking. We caught a bus to Siracusa about 10 minutes after we got to the bus station, I managed to NOT get sick on the bus (I am going to have to generally avoid the intercity buses here, something about the curving roads, the dips, and the constant breaking just puts my stomach in my throat), and ... then we had transportation fail to some extent, which meant to get anywhere we walked half an hour. I just could not figure out the city buses in any way, where they picked up or where they went, and we couldnàt find bus information - the listed stops didnàt actually mean anything to us. So it was walk walk walk to Ortygia, then walk walk walk back to the bus stop slash train station (the only place where I could find a toliet in town besides the restaurant we ate at), then walk walk walk to the Greek & Roman ruins at Neapolis, while getting rained on, then walk walk walk back to the train station, discover that the bus we thought we were going to catch was actually a "weekday only" bus (I thought it said "Except holidays," WTF do I know about reading Italian) so we now had a hour and a half wait, then decide to fuck this when we found out that the OTHER bus company had an 830 bus which meant we could go to a puppet show, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was, in fact, the highlight of the weekend, although we did really have some good food.

We got back to Catania at 930, got a glass of wine and a Pirroni, then slept the sleep of the long dead. In fact, our exhaustion is probably a great deal of why we screwed up getting any transport today. And when we finally headed out hoping, if nothing else, to spend some time in the Bellini Gardens, the skies fucking opened on our heads, so we just gave up on seeing ANYTHING today and found a nice dry place to hide. Looks like tonight is going to be a game of Citadels and more reading. Fortunately the Number One Ladies Detective Agency is great, so I expect to be very entertained.

Tomorrow: Palermo! Etna will just have to wait until next year, I guess.

All things considered, there were so many things to recommend about this day that I think it was, on the whole, "nearly perfect."

Good things:
half day at work, actually did some useful stuff while I was there
realized I could squeeze in a lecture before my evening show and bought tickets to same :-)
got to Paradiso on time

shadowdaddy was totally up for taking a nap and skipping paying 20 quid to see art
nap was irresistibly delicious and walk home was gorgeous and sunny
got some new food at Chatkhara (an Afghani kind of biryani) and sweets at Royal Sweets
Alain de Botton was fantastic - made funny points about life (i.e. "There are all of these regulations regarding not having sexual relations with your coworkers at many companies - God forbid you should enjoy sex more than you do trying to get rich")
the biryani stuff was yummy
we found the gorgeous back entry to the Barbican (from Moorgate), which makes it look like a futurist fantasy - I thought "Hanging Gardens of Babylon," J thought "Cloud City"
we were on time for Inferno
we made it home at a decent hour
we're nearly packed

Things that could have made it bad:
Inferno and Paradiso were, um ... not nearly as good as de Botton.
I am having to figure out how to use my two free round trip tickets to Nice in a way that's likely to disappoint someone.
It's after midnight and I haven't finished my review of the shows we saw earlier.

Still, really, that's just not much to complain about! And tomorrow it's Sicily until I've had all of the red wine and marzipan a girl can fit in her. I can't wait!

So I decided to try another recipe from one of the Sicilian cookbooks - pasta with sausage and pistachios. My test subjects

shadowdaddy and

wechsler pronounced it "gorgeous," or at least that might have been what they said around the general gobbling (I'll assume the fact

shadowdaddy biked into work and back didn't influence that much, though I think it is why he scraped out what was left from the bowl). J said it really seemed to want to be eaten at an outdoor cafe with a view of the Mediterranean, but, well ... at least it's warm enough outside that I could open the windows this afternoon.

Anyway, for those interested (it's really easy!):

Pasta with sausage and pistachios recipe

400 g pasta (enough for 3 or 4 - I used medium shells)
400 g sausage (I used about six Italian sausages for three people )
1 onion, finely chopped
60 g of pistachios (I'm afraid I didn't measure this either, I just added a bunch - probably a quarter cup)
a "packet" of cooking cream (I'm not sure how one puts cream in a packet, but I think what I used was about half a cup)

Cook the onion with a little water, then add the sausage (chopped) and brown them up. When they're done, add the pistachio (crushed). Boil the pasta until cooked, drain it, then add it into a tureen (I used the bowl I bought with

spikeylady in Madrid - good memories!) with the cream and sausage/nut mix. Serve hot. (Note: I think you don't want this too wet, so add about the right amount of cream to kind of lubricate the noodles but not leave puddles in the bowl. I also suggest putting some nuts on top to make it look pretty.)

This is right next to a recipe for a pasta with courgette "sauce" that's right tasty, and is followed by four pages of rabbit recipes. I've got to say, bringing back home cookbooks was really the best idea ever.

Tonight (what's left of it): pack for Barcelona, and drink cider. :-)

Rigatoni alla Norma

Alla Norma is tomatoes and aubergine/eggplant and cheese. The recommended cheese is ricotta, but it's a crumbly ricotta ("ricotta salata," salted ricotta) and one of the places I went to had a smoked cheese on top, so I did that for this version but also put wet ricotta on the bottom, underneath the tomato/garlic/onion/basil mixture. (After eating this three times in a week, I was really impressed by what a wide variety of recipes went by the same name.) The kicker seems to be soaking the sliced eggplant in salted water - I couldn't believe the way this changed the flavor! I also "dressed" the cooked tomato mixture with some really nice olive oil as recommended by my cookbook. So even though I'd never made this before and don't even like eggplant (normally), this dish was very tasty and a huge success. Not bad for a lazy night at home!

I am back. What did I miss?

I didn't miss the cold and I didn't miss bad food. I didn't miss rushing around.

I did miss having access to a public transportation infrastructure that doesn't totally collapse on a holiday, which was, oh, Friday, Sunday, and Monday. Not getting a car was a huge mistake - I was trapped in a gilded cage, and while I ate quite well, I was NOT able to make it to Syracuse because I didn't realize Saturday was the only day I could get there on public transportation. No car, no leave Taormina. We did take a lovely hike to the beach down the hill (and had a bracing walk back up) on Easter Sunday, but we could do nothing but shiver in the rain on Monday as it was too cold to even do hikes around town that day and I hadn't brought the right clothes for the weather.

Summary: I ate well but otherwise didn't do much. Taormina had too many rich people in it for me (very much like Key West - I just don't shop for Prada when I'm on vacation, what can I say) and it was more expensive than any Italian city I'd ever experienced in. I brought home a ceramic head.

I'd like to go to Sicily again for Easter next year but I _will_ rent a car.

Well, I've got the room booked for

wechsler and my/me/mine trip to Sicily. (Help me, grammarians!) We'll be at the Villa Fiorita in Taormina for the whole trip. This wasn't my initial plan - I wanted to stay in Palermo - but RyanAir pissed me off so much that I decided to go somewhere else altogether (Catania). While I really wanted to see some of the cool Easter celebrations, they appear to be concentrated on the northwest coast, which is a three and a half hour train ride away - plus time to get to whichever hill town we were aiming for. (This is because there's a VOLCANO in the way. Stupid Mt. Etna. Who does it think it is?)

Anyway, on the side of the island we're on, the descriptions of the various towns were uniformly grim (industrial and polluted) - except for Taormina, which Frommer's practially peed its pants about. "Such writers as Goethe and D. H. Lawrence, besotted with the glories of Taormina's panoramic views of the bays beyond and Mount Etna looming in the background, spread word of the area's charm." Well, okay, fine, if it was good enough for Goethe, it's good enough for me - and we can do day trips to Syracuse and the Aeolian Islands using Taormina as our base. I guess Palermo can wait for another year. Right now I'm thinking I'll go for a full 10 days there for Easter next year. April 2-13th 2009, who's in? I'll find us a nice villa near Palermo and we can play in the ocean and look at Greek ruins and watch people in devil masks whip each other in the streets on Easter Sunday. It'll be a blast.

Last night was QUITE the drinking riot. My plans to meet with a large posse (

dimitra,

babysimon,

interior_lulu,

shadowdaddy,

wechsler,

spikeylady, is that everyone?) at the Boot and Flogger were unexpectedly changed when I arrived to find the streets closed due to a police action nearby ("suspect car" or summat). Fortunately Posse 1 (

spikeylady,

lilithmagna, and

seph_hazard) had just shown up at Red Cross street, so we hiked together to an alternate pub - which was too packed for us - and then another pub (the George) which was open but where we were forced to sit outside. Er, let's see, so it was a bottle of white for four here, then over to the B&F (when the streets opened) with the newly aquired

trishpiglet and

babysimon and

wechsler and drinks for seven, and then eight (port and then olorosso sherry and two bottles of Rioja - "Tonight the house drinks good red" indeed) and then eleven, then to the George again when the B&F closed for, oh, I don't know, at least two bottles of white and two pints of the George's home brew for Mr. J and ... then I was on the train and, I'm pretty sure, asleep until just before Putney, and at home and in bed and out like a light at about midnight. I will mention that I had about a gallon of water over the course of the night and some really awesome dreams about having some kind of color-related superpowers (it was like the Power Rangers gone to the dark side) ... and got up at around 10 and here we are, a rainy Saturay afternoon. J and I are catching up on "stuff that needs doing" - paying bills, getting stuff together for taxes, making plans for our anniversary in May (15!), organizing some things for his trip to New York - and kind of taking it easy. I expect this will be a fairly chilled out weekend, and I'm looking forward to not doing much.