Recipe: Cannelloni with Ricotta and Spinach
A delicious recipe for a hearty dish of cannelloni stuffed with ricotta and spinach.
Read on...conversations with p
When I set off for the Calabrian Women’s Summit 2007, it marked the first time that P and I would be apart overnight. I knew I’d be OK since I’d be in the company of wonderful funny women, but P was left with some alone time–and he used it to be alone, only leaving the house to walk Luna.
So over the weekend, P got some serious thinking in, and here’s the transcript to prove it.
During our first embrace, the following transpired (translated into English–mostly):
P: You know I was thinking…
M: About what?
P: About us.
M: Uh huh. What about us?
P: That we’re like a lamp.
M: Oh? How so?
P: Well, in order for a lamp to work, you need two wires, two forces working together.
M: Continue.
P: A positive (*points to me*) and a negative (*points to himself and smiles*).
M: Right.
P: And when they’re together, they can make something beautiful, like light.
M: *blushes and squeezes him tighter*
P: Or, you know, in our case, like a baby…una famiglia.
M: *double blushes and tears up*
(Just to be clear, no announcements are forthcoming at this point.)
—————
[tags]love, amore[/tags]
calabrian women’s summit 2007
I’m going to go ahead and say it. The Internet is the best invention ever.
I’m speaking from the perspective of an American who has moved to the middle of nowhere, and although beautiful, is not the cradle of expats by any means.
If you’re a regular reader, you probably get the impression that I love living here, and, indeed, I do. But sometimes you need some female, English-speaking companionship–next to impossible to find down here, but this past weekend, it was the order of business as we held the first Calabrian Women’s Summit, which also served as our belated celebration of International Women’s Day.
And all this came together because of this fancy network of invisible wires that make up the World Wide Web. Thanks Al Gore!
Blogger-to-be (no pressure!) Dawn and I traveled to the big city of Catanzaro to meet fellow blogger Cherrye of My Bella Vita who is in the process of opening a Bed and Breakfast with her soon-to-be-marito Peppe.
In fact, Dawn and I were their first guests. We were greeted with adorable welcome baskets complete with my new favorite Kinder snack–and Cherrye only had to make up our little tags twice with Italian help from Peppe.
Bless her heart, Cherrye’s going through what both Dawn and I have experienced already–the early days of learning Italian. I’m not sure that Peppe will be happy with the types of information we shared this weekend, but we thought it all rather essential. Cherrye’s in for some interesting times as she perfects her language skills–more frustrating than fun, to be sure, but she’s doing fabulously.
And speaking of fabulous, the B & B is simply gorgeous–comfortable, homey, and a great location.
Other than hanging out at the B &B, we had a nice if expensive lunch at a pizzeria, which surprised both Dawn and me since nothing is even open for lunch where we live…and pizza? During the day? Unheard of!
But we went, we ate, we got charged 3,50 euro for flat Cokes, and now we have organized a campaign against such unscrupulous business practices. So, yes, if you’re down in these parts, that’d be us wearing signs that say “We got robbed at Ciro’s” on the side of the road.
Unfortunately it rained most of the time, so we were stuck indoors with only our mouths to keep us occupied. Luckily, as it turns out, we do rather enjoy talking.
But it wasn’t all bad weather. Once the rain stopped, we were able to go down to Lido on the seaside for a walk and an aperitivo before lunch.
Now I wouldn’t want all of you who couldn’t make the gathering to feel left out, so I’ve compiled the minutes of the inaugural Calabrian Women’s Summit at which we discussed and reached conclusions on many important topics.
Some highlights:
(1) We will be settling our own village so that we can invent our own language that we’ll call Calatalglish.
(2) In that village, there will be only what we call “delusional mirrors,” i.e., those that instantaneously perform the type of airbrushing that magazines do all the time on stars. It’s only fair.
(3) For fear of offending anyone, some words in Italian should simply never be used: scopare and fico are at the top of the list. Some tips on avoiding them: Say you’re cleaning the floor instead of sweeping it, and always refer to figs in plural even when it’s incorrect. We concluded that they’ll forgive you faster for a mistake in number than for an offensive remark about a vagina.
(4) Leaving someone at the altar can actually be quite a funny story years later, but only if it involves gnocchi.
(5) Not all gay men have good taste in ties.
(6) When you call your own home in America, you shouldn’t call back when the person who answers tells you that he doesn’t know you and to stop calling. It’ll only end in assumptions that a non-native English speaker has broken into your home and is willy nilly answering the phone saying “hel-lo?” And that won’t go anywhere good.
(7) The movie “The Da Vinci Code” would have been greatly enhanced had the nun simply shrugged and responded “Boh” when when Silas asked where the key was.
(8) The southern Italian response of tsking while jerking the head upward should be outlawed. It’s confusing for foreigners when the mouth says no but the head says yes.
(9) Attending southern Italian weddings can make you poor.
(10) Fancy soap dispensers, even if they cost only $8 in Wal-Mart, should be screwed into the sinks if possible, because they are fair game for visitors.
I know, now you’re all wishing you had been there to bat around ideas on these pressing issues, but don’t worry. There will most definitely be another summit soon, and I’ll keep you posted.
The admission price is simply a book or magazine written in English that will likely end up spread across a kitchen table and discussed in great length.
—————
[tags]calabria, girlfriends, friendship, first meetings, life in calabria, learning italian, learning a language, bed & breakfasts in italy, bed & breakfasts in calabria[/tags]
A Blog By Any Other Name…
I’ve gotten quite a few questions about the origin of the name of my blog lately. Maybe others are also wondering where it came from and are just too shy to ask. Or, most likely, you haven’t given it any thought at all and couldn’t care less about my creative process.
No matter. You’re all getting an answer right now. And we’re going back to when I first moved to Italy in 2003.
I’m a journal-keeper by nature, and so it was only logical that I’d be recording my experience of making a new life in my family’s old village. Remember this was around the time of Under the Tuscan Sun, and I was thinking about at some point organizing my experiences and observations into something larger, which for the sake of argument, we’ll call a book.
So I brainstormed some names for chapters and came up with “Mozzarella Dreams,” (this because I had recently had nightmares on two separate occasions after eating mozzarella in the evening; the chapter would be about food habits); “Questi Uomini” (“these men”; chapter to discuss the culture of machismo); “The Young Girl and the Sea” (talking about my aversion to the beach despite living so close to it); and (I bet you saw this coming) “Bleeding Espresso” (about the coffee-drinking habits around here, including the no cappuccino other than first thing in the morning “rule”).
But that still doesn’t really explain where I got the phrase from, so stay with me here.
“Bleeding Espresso” first came to mind because when I was in college, there was a rather flamboyant football player who was always good for an entertaining quote. One day he let loose with: “I believe if you’d cut me, I’d bleed Duke blue.”
It immediately became a catch phrase among my friends and me because it was so over the top and hilarious. I mean, I like my alma mater and all, but that’s a little excessive. Surprisingly, it’s not as out there as I thought because when I just did a quick Google search for the phrase “bleed Duke blue,” I got 5 pages of results. And none of them were said by this particular athlete.
In any event, that phrase has always been somewhere near the surface of my consciousness, so when it came time to chapter name, I wanted something along the lines of espresso, cappuccino, and the like. I thought about just how much coffee people drink here, and that probably even I at this point would bleed espresso if I were cut.
So I scribbled “Bleeding Espresso” on the inside of a manila folder where I kept random tidbits that I wrote, brochures from travels, etc., and there it sat for a few years.
And then one fateful December night, I got the inspiration to blog, but I drew a complete blank on a name. I thought and thought for a couple days until it occurred to me to go back to the beginning of my Italian travels quite literally.
I went to the folder, and Bleeding Espresso was born. The tag line below it came a few moments later, and my name “sognatrice” (“dreamer”) came from the “Mozzarella Dreams” phrase.
So now you know.
Buon International Women’s Day!
To all my fellow females, Happy International Women’s Day!
Far be it from me to speculate as to why this worldwide holiday isn’t celebrated the United States, but I assure you, here in Italy, it’s a big deal.
It’s called la Festa della Donna, and it’s the day when women of all ages are honored with dinners, girls’ nights out, auguri, and, of course, flowers–in particular, the exploding-with-joy yellow mimosa, the international symbol of the day.
We have a few mimosa trees in the piazza here and normally they’re in bloom just in time for March 8, but this year’s mild winter had them full of yellow in January, and so now, sadly there are no more mimosa.
But I thought ahead so I could give all of my favorite women (you’re one if you’re reading this!) a little love for this International Women’s Day, so I snapped this photo on January 20:
Now for you fellas that are reading: you have some appreciating to do!
W le donne!
Michelle Kaminsky is an American attorney-turned-freelance writer who lived in her family's ancestral village in Calabria, Italy for 15 years. This blog is now archived.
Calabria Guidebook
Recipes
