CSA Summer Share Closeout

Blogs. They seems like such a good idea. You post some pictures, get in a habit. Then you miss a week and it all goes to hell. I now have five (!) CSA summer shares that I have failed to write about, as well as two winter ones. Yikes. I am going to post the pictures all together, then do some quick writeups of what I remember as being standout uses of them. Since a lot of it is months old though, details will be foggy.

Week 16:
Week 17:
Week 18:
Week 19:
Week 20:

It always seems a bit odd to get lettuce (and mizuna for that matter) so late in the season, but I guess they can get two harvests so there's an early and late one. Arugula on the other hand seems to belong to the late season, because of it's peppery bite. It all got turned into salads, of course.

The last tomato of the season seems so very long ago now. We were very pleased with the quality and quantity of tomatoes that we got this year, and most of them (this one included) just got eaten with a little salt.

We have several leek recipes that we did with the various doses of them we got. We made a risotto, a fritatta (I think), and a soup. Other than that last one (which I liked but Mary did not) they were generally delicious recipes.

I think that the veggie that the CSA has most opened out eyes to is squash. It's something that we never really had before joining the CSA, and now that we've tried many recipes (all of which we love) we actually look forward to its season. We've even gone so far as to purchase it at the store, which is pretty serious praise.

The acorn squash we mostly stuff with a delicious southwestern filing that has sausage, tomatoes, black beans, cumin, and red pepper. It's delicious and offsets the sweetness of the squash.

The butternut squash and delicata squash are pretty much interchangeable to us. We have a half dozen recipes we love, including a risotto, several pastas, and a stew that mixes the squash with dried fruit and beef for a great sweet and savory meal.

I honestly can't remember what we used this celeriac for. I am pretty sure that we used half in a pot pie recipe we have, and that the second half ended up going bad in the fridge. We like it, but do need to go out of our way to find recipes for it.

Through the fall, we got a lot of apples and pears. Most of these we just ate as is, but we also made apple cake with some of those.

We got a wide variety of peppers as well. As I have said before, we mostly consider them to be fungible and tend to wantonly swap (sweet) varieties. We do have a bag of green "chili peppers" in our freezer, waiting for inspiration or a bout of cleaning to strike.

Onions are another common fall crop that we've gotten a lot of. We mostly got yellow onions, but have also seen red onions and sweet onions cross our paths. This is fine though, since we tend to use them a lot without trying.

Green Beans usually just get steamed, though for Thanksgiving we made an amazing recipe with shallots and bacon. It was amazingly good, and disappeared quickly.

I honestly have no idea how we used these turnips. I do know that we are not compelled to use the greens from beets and turnips when we get them though, so those suckers went right into the trash.

A big daikon radish was delicious sliced into salads, and lasted quite a while. That's good, since it was the size of a baby's arm and took a while to get through.

This year's challenge crop was definitely carrots. We don't use them that much, and for much of the season got a big new bag weekly. We frequently cut some for a snack at work (along with celery,) but only if we remembered to do so the night before. We used them in a few dishes, but few of those call for more than a little. Still, we were pretty good about not tossing too many away.

We always manage to use one half of each head of cabbage pretty easily, but the second one causes us issues, for some reason. We made a soup and slaw out of this one, which worked well because the soup could freeze.

Parsnips tend to get used along with other root veggies: in the aforementioned pot pies; in pot roast; caramelized and mashed with potatoes.

This was the first time we got rutabaga and marked the first time we made the pot pie with it. We had been subbing in whatever other ingredient that we had extra of, and I can't say my palate is so refined that I really noticed the change in using this instead.

I historically have not loved sweet potatoes on their own, but we have a bunch of recipes that use them with other ingredients that are delicious. We have a burrito filling that uses it, which is quite good. We also made a sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving that was popular, but way to sweet for me.

We made a mac and cheese bake with some of the broccoli which, while designed to hide veggies to get your kids to eat them, was delicious for us adults as well.

It's a good thing that potatoes last. We like them, but it does take a while to use them up. We have started to find some entree recipes (like Rosti, a Swiss dish that's basically hash browns for dinner) which help to use them up a bit more quickly.

Spinach has a zillion uses. I think we made soup with this batch, but we also like it in a calzone-like spinach and feta pie and in spinach-kale turnovers. Speaking of kale, for whatever reason we didn't manage to use the batch from the last share before it went bad. We do have several recipes we like with it, but none of them managed to get on the schedule before it went bad.

I turned the pumpkin into puree and we used it to make pumpkin bread and for a cinnamon roll recipe that gets a little extra flavor and color from it. This time around we roasted it instead of steaming it, which lead to a much less soupy puree.

Dried mint is the grape leaves of the fall. All the enthusiasm that the newsletter can work up is, "Great for tea". It doesn't even get an exclamation mark. I would say that it's fine for tea, though I won't necessarily pine for it once it's used up.

Last and least, brussels sprouts. How can roasting and the addition of shallots and pancetta not make something amazing? Brussells sprouts easily sunk to meet that challenge, ending up bitter and mushy. We'll give these another try next year with a different recipe, but as of now our dislike of them stands.

CSA Week 15

Though we have used most of the produce from last week, nothing really stands out as a particularly noteworthy usage. We managed to finish the mizuna from two weeks ago and last week's head of radicchio in salads, so that feels like an accomplishment. We're still stockpiling bags of potatoes like there's a famine coming, but hopefully some of that will change.

Oh! Potatoes, potato bread. I used a pound and a half of potatoes (which made a depressingly small dent in our stockpile) for my first shot at potato bread. My usual source for bread recipes (The Bread Baker's Apprentice) wasn't much help as the potato bread recipe in there is for a sourdough, and I didn't want to spend a week getting the starter in place. I found a good sounding recipe online (good in that it used a pound and a half of potatoes) and made that. It was a very soft bread with a texture more like sandwich bread than the rustic loaves I made all last winter. It was good though, and found it's way into grilled cheese and breakfast toast. Plus: Pound and a half of potatoes.

French breakfast radishes

Lettuce

Tomatoes. Still not getting old. The biggest of these was a two pounder!

Leeks went into a rustic mushroom tart, built on a foundation of phylo dough. It was good as a side, but definitely was a bit light for an entree which is how we were using it.

Another head of radicchio was used for a pasta dish that also used our two pound tomato. This was fantastic tasting and also used up most of the head, so that was great.

Last time we got spaghetti squash it did not cook well and ended up tasting raw and crunchy. This time, we managed to get it cooked all the way through and tossed it with herbs and garlic. We still weren't overwhelmed with the recipe, but at least the veggie didn't seem horrid. Another veggie rescued from the swap box by a second try.

Carrots

We're catching up with the garlic and can envision a day when we actually have to buy it from the store again.

Apples and pears

CSA Week 14

Week 14, and we may be in trouble. We managed to go for 10 weeks with no toss aways, but now we've had our second in as many weeks. While we have managed to use most of the mizune from last week, the endive was out of sight/out of mind and managed to get really squicky before we got to it.

As expected, the beets ended up in our old standby salad which was delicious as always. We also made our standard asian slaw with half a head of cabbage, and the warm cabbage salad (I was wrong about calling for potatoes.) The warm cabbage salad was odd, but grew on us over time. It had apples and caraway seeds, which was an interesting blend of flavors.

It's the second season for lettuce apparently. This head will help us use up some of the other random greens that we've been getting.

Mary predicted that our making Best Beef Ever (which calls for two cups of carrots) would spur the CSA to send them. The girl is spooky. I, of course, suggested that we just make it again, but she's afraid it'll lose it's specialness, as if that's possible.

In light of the early demise of the celery two weeks ago, I cut off the root and leaves from this head (bunch?) and stuck it straight in water. It seems to be working, as it's still quite crisp several days later. Yay? Now we need a use for all this celery.

Ah potatoes. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. We have gone from having eight heads of garlic in our pantry (down to two!) to three bags of potatoes. I kind of preferred the garlic situation. I am going to use this as an opportunity to try a potato bread recipe, which takes about a pound and a half (I think, it's a bit vague) which will both scratch my bread making itch and use up some potatoes.

Onions

These pears are super sweet and tender. They're great as is, so we'll probably just eat 'em all raw.

Green Beans

Radicchio is a pretty strongly flavored green. We used half the head for a risotto recipe, which was delicious and pretty easy to make. The other half will end up in salads, a little at a time. Sadly we still have some mizune left from last week, so we'll be having some pretty strongly flavored greens in our next few salads.

More italian frying peppers are destined for a chicken chili.

It's amazingly still tomato season around here. That's fine with us -- we'll never get sick of ripe tomatoes sliced and eaten with a little salt.

CSA Week 13

Nothing too exciting to report from last week. The pizza bianca recipe we made was excellent, and really reminded us of the pizza rustica we had gotten in Rome. Next time, we'll throw on some cherry tomatoes and prosciutto (or maybe some chopped anchovies) and it will really bring us back. We've been working our way through the tomatoes, but having received so many last week we still have some left. The last handful of romas are going in a chicken dish for dinner tonight. We even managed to use some of the potatoes, which is quite the feat for us.

Despite making several sage heavy dishes (a great pasta with garlic chips, sage and sausage as well as sweet potato ravioli in sage brown butter) we're still awash in the stuff. I think we'll try to dry it this week (or we'll put off trying to dry it long enough that we can feel justified in throwing it away.) This? Is why we stopped planting herbs in our window boxes.

Mary has always had a rocky relationship with fancy greens, so this week's curly endive and mizuna are a bit of a challenge. Thankfully, at least the huge bunch of mizuna is milder than the arugula was so it can be mixed into salads in greater quantities. We've yet to dig into the endive, so we'll see how that goes.

We really did briefly consider doing something with our beets other than roasted beet salad with onions and feta, but then we came to our senses. We have a beet risotto recipe that sounds fascinating (and like it would be an awesome color,) but since it's a side we'd need a pretty easy dinner to go with it. I've also been tempted lately to try to make a quick bread or cake with shredded beets (which I'd probably base on some form of carrot cake recipe) but that may be a bit experimental for Mary. If I do give that a go, I'll post pictures of the misadventures.

Two red onions.

Thank goodness, it's more potatoes. We have a few potato recipes on the menu for the coming week, including a dill potato salad and a roasted potato recipe that we've made before, so hopefully we won't fall too far behind. I made hash browns with some of last week's, and they actually came out crispy! The trick is to keep squeezing the shredded potato until you can't get any more moisture out before tossing them in the pan. Who knew?

Half of this head of red cabbage is getting turned into asian slaw, and the other half will likely become a warm cabbage salad. With potatoes, so it's a twofer!

Italian frying peppers

Honeycrisp apples and moonglow pears both sound a bit like they were named by the same guy who names paint colors. We had the apples in a pork dish where you simmer them in apple cider, then reduce the cider into a glaze for the pork. It was delicious, though whole wheat egg noodles are to be avoided in the future. The pears will probably just get eaten as is.

Sungold tomatoes are like candy. We grew them last year, and they are sweet and wonderful.

Green zebra tomatoes and our "heirloom" tomato (no variety name was given) pretty much tasted like tomatoes, but with less acidity.

This red slicing tomato ended up in an omelet with some of the red onion and italian frying pepper. A hat trick!

CSA Week 12

Last week's CSA went well, though we did have our second (or third, depending on if you count our willful disposal of the first grape leaves) bit of CSA produce expire before using. The juvenile celery that we got wilted almost immediately, and my placing it upright in cold water did nothing to revive it. The crab apples were successfully integrated into a summer fruit crisp along with the apples from the share, which was delicious if a bit overly sweet.

Sadly, the grilled pizza was a bit of a letdown. I am not sure if I under-kneaded it, or if it just had too high a content of whole wheat flour, but it never really developed gluten and didn't really rise during grilling. It also got quite soggy once the sauce was added, and partially disintegrated on the grill. I am not saying we won't try it again, but we will use a different recipe next time.

On with the show.

Two pounds of roma tomatoes will get turned into a topping for pizza (based on the Cook's Illustrated pizza bianca recipe) and maybe sauce.

Acorn squash is slated to get stuffed for lunch today, we'll see how that goes. The stuffing has turkey sausage in it, so it can't be all bad.

Would anyone like some sage? Because we have a ton. We plan to make a couple three dishes that call for it (white bean dip, a pasta dish, and chicken saltimboca) but will still likely have a ton leftover. We're going to try drying it, so that'll be an adventure.

Zucchini and a pattypan squash are both going into zucchini bread. Putting the squash in that isn't exactly cannon, but what else are we gonna do with one small one?

More garlic to add to our ever growing collection. We did make a rub for grilled chicken that took 8 cloves, so at least we are only up a half a head this week.

Pears and more crab apples will probably go into the same fruit crisp we did last week. Mary had one of the pears and reported that it was very tart, so that should help offset the sweetness of the crisp itself.

Red and cubanelle peppers

This? Is a really effing big boc choi. I should have thrown a small child or yardstick in for scale, because this is a seriously mutantly large vegetable. We'll probably do a stir fry kind of thing with this, since that seems to be the prominent way to cook it.

French breakfast radishes still look just like fingers and taste just like radishes.

Potatoes will be keeping all the garlic company in our pantry. I've looked up a technique for making crispy hashbrowns, and I also want to try making potatoes with onions and bacon (sort of a variation on lyonaise potatoes), so at least we have some plans for this batch.

Arugula will join the little bit we have left over from last time. It's got such a strong taste that only a little can go into salads without blowing us away. Maybe we'll look for a soup or something that can take it. We have a pretty mild spinach soup that might benefit from the sharpness.

CSA Week 11

We seem to have come out the other side of pepper season in one piece, and not having tossed any out. We ended up making a roasted pepper salad with a sun dried tomatoes and caper dressing as a bit of a clearinghouse for them (one green, one red, one cubanelle) and it was very good. The eggplant parm was underwhelming, and we'll probably look for a different recipe next time, or try Sheri's caponata recipe.

We've also officially signed up for our winter share which is one share in each of November, December, and January. We'll be awash is squash and may be hit by the tsunami of potatoes that we apparently only imagined last fall. We're also trying the cheese share (two one pound blocks each share) because how can you participate in a CSA from Wisconsin and not try the cheese share?

This seemed to be the week of variety. We got a summer fruit medley with apples,, tiny little plums, and crabapples. I'm not sure what the heck one does with crabapples when their brother lives hundreds of miles away; I guess I'll have to throw them at someone else.

A single red pepper which made it into our aforementioned roasted pepper salad.

We embraced the end of summer and made a risotto with sausage and arugula. The creaminess helped cut some of the pepperiness of the greens, which worked out well.

Mary had to resist eating these amazing raspberries for a whole day because I was out with work folks on Wednesday, watching the Cubs suck. I'm glad she did, because they were super ripe and delicious.

These tomatoes were almost overripe when we got them. Two were juicy and delicious, but one had suspicious dark grey abcesses when I sliced it so we went the safe route and tossed it. Bet you never thought you'd see the words "delicious" and "abcesses" in the same sentence.

The second chapter in the variety pack of this week was the herb bouquet. This contained sage, chives, and parsley.

Summer squash is going onto grilled pizza and getting steamed as a side.

A smallish watermellon.

A youngish celery that probably has a pretty aggressive taste. Since Mary doesn't care much for celery anyway, I'll probably bring most of it to work for snacks.

More broccoli is going into a mac and cheese casserole that is designed to trick your kids into eating veggies.

Bottle onions are big this time of year. We'd never really heard of this kind of onion before the CSA, but we sure know all about them now.

We have gotten pretty far behind on the garlic. Most of our garlic heavy recipes (Roasted Garlic Soup and Best Beef Ever) are fall/winter things, so we've managed to store up four or five heads from the last few CSAs. Now that we're getting into cooler weather, we'll start making some of those longer cooking things and work through it. Tastiest backlog ever.

CSA Week 10

Crimini mushrooms are going into fake ravioli (fake because they are wrapped in wonton skins) with some smoked cheese.

These odd little dessert pears are much smaller and sweeter than normal varieties, and also ripen earlier in the season.

Wax beans are something that I remember very fondly from my childhood. They were always one of my favorite veggies when I was little, probably because there are so few yellow options there.

Two smallish leeks.

Red slicing tomatoes will never get old.

The broccoli was slow to mature this year. Guaging from how often this fact was mentioned in our newsletters, this was a Big Deal.

Radishes are going into salads.

Another japanese cucumber.

Basil is getting pestoed along with last share's. We'll probably have that over the fake mushroom ravioli.

As with the banana pepper last week, I am unsure what we'll do with a cubanelle pepper. Probably just pretend it's a normal green pepper and use it however we used the other one we got this week. We also got a purple pepper, which we'll cut up for salads.

Another eggplant. As good as the caponata was with the last eggplant, we figured we'd branch out and try something else. We made eggplant parmesean from a recipe in the CSA newsletter with this one, and it was ok but needed more sauce. Live and learn.

Corn is one of the things that we most look forward to from the CSA (along with berries and tomatoes.) This was delicious, if a little on the small side. We used it and the leeks to make Cooking Light's creamed corn with bacon and leeks. It was so amazing that I am linking the recipe. Sweet and savory and smoky; just the perfect way to show off corn. We will definitely do it again.

CSA Week 9

This week brought a tomato bonanza. We got six tomatoes of four varieties (red slicing,w heirloom, green, and gold paste) and had no problems at all finding uses for them. We ate em all with a little salt and some basil. Actually, we still have the green one, and we plan on frying it when we get a chance.

Crimini mushrooms went into a great tuna noodle casserole we got from cooking light.

This honey bear came at the perfect time, as our old one got noticably depleted by Mary's last illness.

Romano beans were delicious boiled for a few minutes and then tossed with butter. But then what isn't?

Beets are totally the comeback kid of the CSA. The first time we made them, I accidentally over-peppered them and they definitely didn't tickle our fancy. The last time we got them and this time, we made a salad with roasted beets, carmelized onions, and feta. We actually look forward to beets thanks to this bad boy.

This enourmous eggplant ended up being the perfect size for our camponata recipe (from Cook's Illustrated.) It was a little involved (we had to prep the eggplant in two stages because you microwave it to help get rid of the extra moisture) but it was so worth it. It was good on the first day and great on subsequent ones.

A salad for two's worth of little gem lettuce.

More green peppers went into pepper steak.

Onions. I have nothing to add to that.

We usually have a tough time finding uses for odd peppers like this bannana pepper, but this one we tossed into our pepper steak as well.

This japanese cucumber was way sweeter than we are used to cucumbers being. We used it in several places where we'd use normal cucumbers (with feta in a salad, or as an ingredient to a green salad) but we probably shouldn't have. They really stood out as odd, given the sweetness.

CSA Week 7, Week 8, Week 7, and Week 8

As alluded to in the title, week 7 and 8 of our CSA got a little strange. Due to all of the wacky weather in Wisconsin, the farmers were struggling to get summer crops planted. They decided that it made more sense to delay the summer crop by two weeks and thus shifted the CSA by the same time. What would have been week 7 and 8 were shareless and two extra weeks were added at the end of the season (for a week 21 and 22, effectively.)

Our week 7 (original week 9) share we picked up on Wednesday, knowing that we were leaving for a week to visit our family. Because of this, we had to do some creative planning, including freezing our corn and two of our green peppers (the other pepper ended up in a grilled veggie dish we made.)

The eggplant also got grilled and stacked with the grilled green peppers, some grilled squash, and some goat cheese and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. Despite being a vegetarian dish, it was pretty tasty.

The cucumber got chopped up and tossed with feta for a quick salad.

Carrots are an item that we get a lot of in the CSA, and our week off isn't going to help. These we just stashed in the fridge on wednesday and revisited when we returned, since anything that could last the week was so very far off our radar for wednesday and thursday.

Cauliflower is really delicious roasted. If the CSA has tought us one thing, it's that everything is made better with roasting.

This muskmellon was almost too ripe. It was super juicy, but tasted a bit washed out and bland.

Mary says that grape leaves are our CSA nemesis, but I think it's potatoes. Once they start, they just keep on a'comin'.

Garlic is always welcome.

We use the bottle onions as we would red onions. We tend to treat all forms of onion as fungible, within reason.

A two and a half pound kohlrabi bulb is a lot of kohlrabi. Luckily our one recipe for it calls for two pounds, so it works out. We made this dish on the Monday after we returned from our trip (it also uses some carrots, thankfully) and the veggies survived like champs.

We knew that kale wouldn't last the week, but had filled our two pre-trip dinners using up other veggies, so we made spinach and kale turnovers (with red onion and feta) on Thursday night and froze them. We've been pretty good until now about not freezing too much, so hopefully that doesn't cause us to fall too far behind.

While we were visiting family, one of Mary's co-workers picked up our share (week 8 original week 10.) In that was: green peppers, cabbage, carrots, bottle onions, garlic, sweet corn, melon, cauliflower, heirloom tomatoes, new potatoes, red tomatoes, chard, lemon basil.

We were pretty bummed to miss out on the corn and tomatoes in particular, but we'll certainly have more opportunities for both in upcoming shares.

CSA Week 6

Two really lanky bulbs of fennel are planned for a fennel and citrus salad. Until recently I'd never had fennel, but I've become quite a fan. It has a very fresh and crisp taste, and is much milder than one would expect from the strong flavor of fennel seeds (which can make anything taste like sausage.)

Oh good, I was worried there wouldn't be any zucchini. These two are slated for a summer vegetable gratin (from Cook's Illustrated) for lunch today. If you can belive it, we actually had to buy zucchini because we had used all the previous shares and only had half as much as we needed for this dish.

Cabbage got slawed, as always. We had planned on making a new slaw with thinly sliced sugar snap peas, but discovered that our sugar snap peas were, in fact, just peas. Instead we made the asian slaw that we usually make, which turned out well.

A tiny little head of lettuce. This was about one salad (for two) worth. The lettuces were much easier to keep up with this year, but that may have been due to the biblical levels of flooding Wisconsin had in the spring.

We have started slicing cucumbers and bringing them to work as snacks. With the garlic scape bean dip, they were delicious and refreshing. If there is any remaining, I may sneak it into the fennel salad, since it has a similar texture and flavor.

Last year, we had no kitchen during the height of potato season. We ended up grilling a lot of potatoes, and feeling a lot of pressure to get through them. These darlings may prove to be our biggest challenge in going to the weekly shares. How many potatoes does one man need?

Chard got made into soup with the potatoes and a lot of rosemary. We had to add in some store bought spinach to reach our needed amount, but it turned out well.

Green onions got sliced into the slaw as well as a few other dishes. We had forgotten we were getting them and bought some from the store, so we're certainly at risk of them going bad.

Black Raspberries

Peas are a vegetable that Mary prefers frozen to fresh. We have no plans for these ones in particular, which could be a problem. With a little luck, we'll be able to find a use for these before the new share arrives.

CSA Week 5

The last of the strawberries. Sad to see you go, little guys. You were excellent.

What we initially thought was lettuce ended up being a huge head of escarole. My memory is a little fuzzy (a problem with waiting so long to blog the share,) but I think we made our roasted garlic and escarole soup with this. If we didn't, we should have -- it's an awesome soup.

Hey look, it's more zucchini. We made a dish with this share that was a sort of cobbler, almost. It took sliced zucchini, onion, and a batter made with Bisquick. It turned out pretty well, and seems like it'd be a good CSA clearing house for odds and ends of future shares.

Turnips are funny looking fellows; They kind of look like oranic baseballs. As we often do with root vegetables, we turned to our old friend, Mashed Potatoes with Root Vegetables (from Cook's Illustrated.) We made a variation with bacon and thyme, and very much enjoyed it.

Radish sprouts have a mild radish flavor and are great in salads.

Sugar Snap Peas were also to prove to be the last of the season.

We are never quite sure what to do with mini onions. We put them in salads, but always worry that they are too mild to sub for real onions but too strong to sub for scallions. We've used them in a few different ways, but desipte them being a rather small amout of onion, still have some kicking around the crisper.

Rhubarb got cryogenically frozen until science develops a cure for absent-mindedness so I can find the really good recipe for crisp.

We roasted these beets and made an amazing salad with carmelized onions and feta cheese. It was delicious, and totally got Mary on board the beet train.

Cucumbers are often a challenge for us, since one can only have so many cucumber and feta salads. We found a salmon recipe that was served over a bed of shaved cukes though, plus it took the last of the dill from week 4. Any dish that takes more than one CSA ingredient gives us an absurd thrill.

Bok Choy was our first casualty this season. We fully intended to grill it tossed with asian seasonings, but by the time we pulled it out of the fridge it had clearly passed the point of no return. I think we should get credit for making it this late into the season before having something rot on us though.

CSA Week 4

As you can tell, I've managed to get quite behind on blogging the CSA. I would like to claim that I was doing a lot of cooking or some other inspirational hobby, but the reality is that I was playing GTA 4 the whole time. And then I bought Oblivion, which seems like it will prove to be a similarly engrossing game. At least I wasn't so busy as to not manage to use the produce from the CSA, so that's something.

Sugar Snap Peas are so very sweet and fresh when we first get them, that we've taken to just eating them raw as a snack before (or with) dinner. These have turned out to be a real treat, and I'll be sad when we stop getting them.

Lettuce

The fresh fruits are one of the highlights of the CSA for us (we almost jumped ship to a different CSA just to get a fruit share) and these Strawberries are a perfect example why. So fresh, so ripe, so delicious. Berries never last past the first day for us.

Garlic Scapes ended up getting subbed for garlic, as usual, and also ended up in a white bean dip that was tasty.

A big, honking cucumber.

We actually have a startling number of recipes that call for dill, and we managed to use it all up, a rare occurance for herbs.

Which brings us to grape leaves. You remember grape leaves? Our pointless nemesis? Well we couldn't bring ourselves to landfill 'em two weeks in a row, so we gave stuffing them a go. We followed a recipe in that came in the CSA newsletter, and while they were entirely inoffensive, they were also pretty underwhelming for the work involved. If we get them in future shares, we may just share box them.

Collards we wilted and cooked with some onion and garlic (scape) and folded into phyllo dough with goat cheese for a spanikopita-like turnover. It was pretty good, though we should have seasoned a little more aggressively.

Last year, we managed to let our kohlrabi go bad before getting to it, desipte having a pretty good sounding recipe that used it (kohlrabi in brown butter and honey.) This year, we made the recipe and despite all of Sheri's loathing of this vegetable, we enjoyed it quite a bit. I passed it on to her; maybe it'll convert her (or at least prevent her share-boxing of it next time around.)

Radishes

Arugula

And here continues the zuchinni onslaught. From here in the future, I can tell you that we have been seeing a fair amount of this lovely vegetable. This share's dose ended up in zuchinni bread. We seem to have a dozen recipes for it, and the one we did this time (from Cooking Light) was pretty good.

CSA Week 3

For a second week in a row, we've managed to keep up with the CSA and use our full share. A lot of stuff (radishes, lettuces, sprouts) ended up in salads. We roasted the asparagus with balsamic brown butter (yum.) The spinach got souped. The mint was used to make mojitos and encrust lamb chops, both of which were awesome. Overall, it was a good share.

On to this week, which contains our first real CSA roadblock of the year.

Cabbage is destined for slaw and soup.

We accidentally ended up with an absurd mushroom bounty. We forgot that we had picked some up from the store, so we bought a second package. Then, we got some in this share. That's a lotta mushrooms. Hopefully between omelettes and other uses, we can get them used up.

Little Gem Lettuce is adorable, and makes one large or two small salads.

Sugar Snap Peas are tasty, but this is too many to put on salads. Maybe we'll go for a mushroom and pea stir fry?

Parsley.

Lettuce.

Collards are getting subbed for kale in a soup with the cabbage.

Now this is what a strawberry share should look like. These were so sweet and delicious, we ate the bulk when we got them home and only had a few leftover to bring as lunch the next day.

Garlic Scapes we usually just sub for garlic.

The first zucchini of the season is slated for zucchini bread.

Meet our nemesis: Grape Leaves. The only thing we can find to do with these is stuff 'em, and neither of us are very gung ho about any of the recipes for those we have seen. Also, eight leaves seems like too few to make a full recipe of anything, but we certainly aren't going to go buy more. This will be the first item of the CSA that we don't use, though I think we deserve credit for willfully composting them rather than letting them rot in the fridge for two weeks and then tossing them shamefully in the night.

CSA Week 2

We're off to a good start. By the end of last weekend, we'd managed to use up all of our CSA share. Considering that last year we always had one or two things we threw away even with less frequent pick-ups, that's a great start. We used everyting in the predicted way last week, and it was all delicious.

Since storms continue to flood a lot of the farms, we didn't have very high hopes for this week's share. Luckily, they pulled it out and we got a pretty good variety again.

More spinach this week. We don't have specific plans for this (usually a red flag) and may just end up steaming it as a side dish.

Escarole will end up in one of our favorite soups. How can you not love anything that has an entire roasted head of garlic in it?

Lettuce and radishes are salad bound.

Green garlic is slated to get grilled and then used to flavor a white bean dip. Hopefully that works out for us as I'll be winging it with the recipe.

Asparagus was already roasted, with a balsamic and brown butter sauce. So good. We could have roasted asparagus every day for a week and not get sick of it or run out of recipes to try.

The strawberry harvest must have been hard hit by the weather, because we got a sad little container with thirteen small berries in it. They were delicious, but we were still pretty sad to see so few. Berries are a real highlight of the summer for us.

Some kind of sprouts have already been consumed on salads.

Mint is bound for drinks (we've already used it to determine that we don't like juleps) and grilled lamb chops.

Rhubarb is getting frozen so that we can make crisp after the season. I found the good recipe after making the just ok one, so we clearly need to make it again soon.

Naansense

It's summer, which in Chicago means heat and humindity -- hardly bread baking weather. Still I do love bread and since we had soup for dinner tonight, I decided to look up a recipe for grilled bread. I found a promising looking one for naan and decided to give it a go.

The dough is fairly straightforward. There's no real fancy work or a pre-ferment so I was able to do it the day I decided to take it on, which is nice. It is a very soft (wet) dough though, so it might be a bit of a test of patience when kneading and shaping. I found that for the shaping into portions, I was much happier if I kept my fingertips oiled and kept the dough moving a lot.

After the first rise, you punch the dough down and knead in garlic until it's distributed. I used green garlic from the CSA, which had a pretty mild flavor. Next time I'll be more careful to get it evenly distributed: As it was, I ended up with some pieces having very little garlic and some having a lot.

The dough is then divided into golf ball sized pieces, shaped into balls, and risen again.
Once the grill is hot, you stretch the dough balls and place them right on the grill. The recipe doesn't specify how thin the dough should end up, and I started with some pretty thick pieces. With practice I found that the thinner you can stretch it, the better. If you can see the gluten, toss those suckers on the grill. The dough does not stick as it would to the side of an oven (where the bread is usually baked) so it does contract a bit in the cooking.
Once the first side is done (which only takes a few minutes, depending on the heat of the grill) you brush the naan with melted butter (ghee would probably be more traditional, but plain ole melted, unclarified butter worked great too) and flip them over. They puffed up a lot during the cooking on the first side, even when they had been stretched extremely thinly during the shaping. At this point, you brush the just cooked side with butter as well. Mmmmm...so much butter.
The recipe made quite a bit, but it was so good that volume was not a problem. The 'loaves' were not huge, and were amazingly delicious. Of the twelve pieces that came off the grill, seven were eaten within a few hours.
The resulting crumb for the bread was very nice. The puffed up parts had nice large holes, and the bread was pleasantly chewy throughout. The early loaves that I had not stretched as thinly were very slightly undercooked, but even those were excellent and not at all doughy. In reality, the dough seemed very forgiving of cooking time and temperature, and loaves ranging from very lightly colored to deeply browned were all wonderfully textured and endowed with great flavor. I had been concerned that the melted butter brushed on the done side of the bread might make it greasey, but it didn't.

Overall, this was an excellent recipe and one that we will certainly add to our normal rotation. Being able to cook the bread on the grill rather then baking it in the oven makes it a great summer option, and the quality of the resultant bread means you really aren't missing anything by going that route.

Update: Yesterday I read some of the comments on allrecipes for the original recipe, and it seemed like some folks had complained about the toughness of the bread. I realized that while I had measured out the full amount of flour, I used way less than it called for. This lead to a much softer dough, which probably explains the difference. It makes it a little harder to knead and shape, but I would certainly repeat this decision, based on the quality of the final bread.

CSA Week 1

It's CSA time again! After enjoying last year's biweekly shares despite not having a kitchen for a chunk of time there in the middle, we decided to take a chance on a full share this year. That means weekly veggie shares and a whole lot of not ordering in for us.

It also means I have to update here at least once a week, or I'll fall hopelessly behind. On to the veggies!

For a first delivery, we actually got quite a bit of variety this week.

Button Mushrooms are destined for salads and omelettes.

Two heads of lettuce (one red sails, one romaine) will keep us in salads for the week.

Spinach is going into our favorite spinach and kale pie.

Pear Butter may just get spread directly on our tongues. We've already had most of it on bread or toast, and it is so very delicious. Nice pear and apple flavors, with some caramel background. Super tasty.

Asparagus was born to be roasted.

Green Garlic is new to us, but we plan on using it as we would normal garlic. It'll probably make it's way into the mushroom omelettes.

Rhubarb is destined for an odd lentil soup recipe (yes, rhubarb and lentil soup) as well as the ever delicious crisp.

A small bundle of chives will likely get snipped onto anything we can think of.

Mint will be used to flavor ice tea, probably in the form of a syrup (which is also convenient because the sugar is pre-disolved.)

Radishes will be snacked on and eaten in salads.

The newsletter and emails this week have all commented on how hard hit the supplying farms are by the recent storms, so we're curious to see what the share looks like next week. Hopefully there aren't too many ruined crops, since that would stink all around.

More Bread

Despite the complete lack of update here, I've been pressng forward with my bread making over the weekends. We are both loving all the fresh baked bread, and I am definitely getting better at using my instincts on hydration and whatnot.

As a follow up to the french bread, I baked another batch of Ciabatta. I was more aggressive with the hydration this time. I still didn't quite get the crumb I was looking for, but at least it didn't look like a chicken. We managed to eat it all before I got a picture, so you'll just have to trust me on that.

I followed that up (last weekend) with Pain a[funny accent here] l'Ancienne, which Reinhart spends much of the 100 page intro to the book rhapsodising.

This bread uses deferred fermentation, which means that you retard rising overnight by using ice water in the dough and putting the bread in the fridge. This allows the secondary reactions that usually occur concurrently with rising to get a head start, leading to a very different flavor. While most of the breads using a pre-ferment have a sharper, more savory flavor, this one has a smoother, sweeter one.

My loaves came out a bit rustic (which is the polite way to say 'ugly') but they had a great, open crumb and wonderful flavor. I wanted to make baguettes, but because of the size of my baking stone had to keep them pretty short. I made six, fifteen inch long loaves and by the end of the first day half of them were gone. The taste and texture of this bread was just great, and we really enjoyed it. It did seem to lose freshness a little quicker than some of the other breads I've done from this book, but a quick visit to the toaster fixed that just fine.

This was a truely amazing bread, and was one of the easiest to make. No pre-ferment is needed, and because of the hydration level all the keading is done by machine. This guy took very little effort, and made a wonderful loaf.

So far in this bread frenzy, I have been using only all purpose and bread flour. Since over the past few years Mary and I have managed to accumulate quite a collection of flours, I was interested in making a recipe that would use something else as well.

This weekend, I found that in Pain de Champagne, which uses a small amount of wheat flour. This bread is back to the more standard method (pre-ferment mande the prior day and kept in the fridge overnight after rising) and according to Reinhart is the one most often used around France for creative shaping.

I chose to knead this one by hand rather than with the Kitchen Aid in order to get a better feel for the dough. I was very pleased with the hydration level and feel of the dough, so I'll probably continue this habit in the future. The hand kneading doesn't take that much longer, and once you get the hang of it and don't constantly have dough sticking to your hands is quite fun.

Mary had suggested that I make rolls so that we could have meatloaf sandwhiches, so most of the dough got shaped into small batards for that purpose. I did, however, save out a chunk in order to attempt the most absurd of bread shapes -- the Epi or sheaf of wheat. To shape bread in this way, you first shape a baguette and then perform a series of cuts and pulls to make the lobes of the wheat berries.

I was very pleased with my shaping this time around, and only had one real ugly duckling in the rolls. The baguette for the Epi came out so wonderfully that I considered just baking it in that form. Because I was going to bake it in a sheet pan rather than on the stone, it was long and slender and I had managed to shape it to a very even thickness. Still, the Epi was so silly that I just had to press forward. While you won't mistake mine for the picture in the book, I do think I did a good job of at least approximating the proper shape. Next time, I'll cut a little deeper and at a sharper angle, in order to allow the 'wheat berries' to be pulled a little further out from the loaf. After baking, I realized why this was such a great shaepe: The ratio of crust to crumb was way higher than with a regular baguette, so we ended up with a loaf full of end pieces. Could there be anything better?

Chickenbread

Since we have somewhat limited kitchen space and are not packrats by nature, I am always a little cautious about buying new cookbooks. I've been giving a library copy of The Bread Baker's Apprentice a test run to determine if I wanted to pick it up, and after making two breads from it I have pulled the trigger.

The book is all about artisanal breads, which tend to be more rustic and have more character. They are also a bit more involved than the breads I have made out of the Better Homes and Gardens book, but the flavor and texture (even when I mess that second bit up) are beyond compare. Most of the breads use a pre-ferment, where you make a sponge (basically a less-risen, unkneaded dough) the previous day and let it take a long, slow ferment in the fridge. You then incorporate that into the final dough and put it through the twelve (!!) stages of bread baking and end up with a delicious, salty, sharp-flavored loaf of wonderfulness that may or may not look like a chicken.

Last weekend, I was inspired by our Italy trip and took a stab at ciabatta. Ciabatta is a rustic italian bread with a soft crust and (in theory) a very open crumb (that means lots of big holes.)

The starter is very moist (think pancake batter) and the final dough should be quite hydrated as well. Now after reading the hundred page introduction telling me that the baker should trust his instincts and bake by feel and texture, did I listen? Or did I just slavishly follow the recipe and hope that the pretty clearly underhydrated dough got moister later? You guess. It wasn't until after trying to shape the first loaf using the instructions in the book (which lead to the lovely loaf on the left) that I realized I was being dumb and just used pushing and prodding to get the second loaf into shape.

Ultimately though the final bread lacked the open crumb that it should have had and looked like we were about to shove stale bread in it's cavity, it still tasted great. There are several recipes for ciabatta in the book with various savory ingredients added, so I think I'll try one of those soon and aim for redemption.

This weekend, I decided to attempt french bread. The starter and dough are much firmer, and this time I was more sensitive to the feel of the dough early on. I started out with a little extra water after the troubles the prior weekend, only to end up keeping it under the dough hook for an extra ten minutes trying to get enough flour in to reduce the hydration. Still, the dough ended up closer to the firmness it should have had, so it was worth it.

Since one is supposed to handle the dough minimally to prevent degassing, I decided to try a batard (wider, shorter loaf) rather than full baggettes. In reality, I think I fell somewhere inbetween, since the batard should have been a little shorter and fatter. Still, no chickens this time, so...that's a win.

The bread tasted great and had a fairly good texture, though I still felt that it should have had a looser crumb. It had a great crunchy crust, with a slightly chewy and tangy interior.

Overall, I'd say that both breads were winners. I can't wait to try these again, as well as some of the other recipes in the book. Of particular interest is the foccacia, where you bake the bread covered in a half cup of herb infused olive oil. That's a lot of oil, but wow it sounds good.

Italy Roundup

We've been back from Italy for a week now, and have finally winnowed down the 550 or so pictures to a mere 480. I picked out about 40 that I felt represented the trip fairly well, and here they are.


Our first night in Rome, we started by taking a nightwalk from the Rick Steve's tourbook. The first stop was here at Campo d'Fiori. It's a square that has a market during the day, and hosts drunk twenty-somethings at night. These flower stalls where still set up that night, and I thought they made a pretty neat picture.


We were rather startled when we landed to see palm trees. It's our first time in a mediteranian country, and while we didn't have a lot of preconceived notions going in, we certainly didn't expect it to seem so tropical. There were also orange trees at several locations, and this never stopped seeming novel to us.

Rome was blue skies and sixty degree weather the three full days we were there, which was a nice break from the Chicago weather. The day we took the train to Venice it rained a bit, but we didn't let that dampen our spirits. I am so getting hate mail for that one.


Mary in front of the Triton Fountain. This fountain is the one that the Tallises have a copy of in Atonement, so we had to get a shot of the real thing. It has some neat details, including some bees which were a motif that we would see several more times while in Italy.


Piazza Navona was another large square, with a (unfortunately under construction) huge fountain in the center. It attracts vendors both during the day and the night, including several folks selling a range of quality of art. We picked up a picture for ourselves and one as a gift. We love us some street art.


Several of the ancient sites had cats running wild at them. This particular site (which you can barely see in the picture) was discovered when they were digging for a new road, and has become a historic site and cat refuge. This little fellow reminded me of Pip, so I had to grab a shot.


Rome has lots of statues. Besides a ton of busts and greek inspired ones, there were quite a few with odder subjects. I resisted the desire to post every dog, anteater, and peacock statue here, but trust me -- there are a lot.

This particular pair was at an outside area at one of the Roma Museo Nationale sites. It's actually what we refer to as 'the wrong museum', since we had been looking for a different site of the Roma Museo Nationale, but had not realized that there were multiple sites. While we didn't like this site as much as the 'right' museum, it was still pretty neat and these pairs of statues (there were four pairs in total) were a highlight.


As we could tell when looking at our pictures, I love mosaics. This one was from the 'right museum', where they have a lot of mosaics, frescoes, and of course busts. In my defence, the mosaics were really amazing. Many of them had tiles the size of a pinhead. A pinhead!

There were also quite a few neat statues, and having gone to the wrong museum first, we appreciated the anatomical detail (veins standing out on flexed muscles, hair detail) that these more modern (relatively speaking) statues had.




One of the highlights of Rome was definitely the Colleseum. It is beautiful and humbling -- an enourmous feat of engineering still mostly standing over a thousand years later. A nice thing about the finish layers being gone (at one point it would have been skinned with marble) was that it exposed a lot of the supports and arches that hid underneath. We're both the right kind of nerd, because we found this fascinating to see.

This was one of the few sites that really seemed busy while we were there. There was a long line to get in, and pretty big groups of folks on the inside. We had luckily read about a way to get past the long lines (thanks, Rick Steve!) so it didn't have too much effect on us.


As you may tell from the weather in this shot, it's placed a bit out of order with respect to when it was taken. I'm placing it here because we did all of ancient Rome (or as much as we did, anyway) on the same day. This is the forum, which was a plaza with the senate house and many temples during ancient times. From this view (taken from the Capitoline Museum on the morning of the day we went to Venice) you can get a sense of the original layout and how amazing it must have looked. Seeing how much had been reduced to fancy rubble made us appreciate the relative intact-ness of the colleseum even more.


Most statues have subtext, which is often beyond me given a lack of cultural background. On the other hand, sometimes it's not so subtle.


As much as I love mosaics, my wife loves plunder. A lot of the statues and obelisks in Rome are in fact plundered from elsewhere, which for some reason Mary loved. We joked that this small statue's base, with it's patchwork of styles, had been plundered from all over.


Trevi fountain is a really big thing in a really small setting. This was the only other place in Rome that we found to be consistently crowded. It seemed to be between our hotel and just about everything, so we hit it at all hours of the day and night and there was never a time it was not full of people. It's quite an impressive sight, even with the crowds.


Another quite striking site was St. Peter's Basillica in the Vatican. The church itself has amazing statues and carvings, all ornate and elaborate and in various colors of marble. The ceilings are all mosaics, and the entire thing is quite breathtaking. We agreed that it was the most extravagant building we'd ever be in.


A neat option here is that you can take an elevator up to the base of the rotunda. This allowsa neat view down into the church, a close up view of the mosaics, and access to an even more fascinating site: the cupola.


The cupola is the small round tower on the very top of the dome. To get there, you go up a set of 300 or so steps which lead up between the inside and outside skins of the dome itself. Since this follows the curve of the dome, the stairs get quite interesting on the walk up. I'm standing as straight up as the staircase will allow; the odd angle is the way the walls run.



The views of Rome from the cupola of St. Peter's are pretty amazing. In the first you can see the piazza in front of the basilica and in the second a skyline of Rome proper.


Clown or cop? You decide. The swiss guard have very interesting outfits, though Dan Brown insists that they are badass, so who are we to judge?


The Vatican Museum is full of subtle, understated art. Consider this ceiling of the Map Room, which runs for a quarter mile.

The Sistine Chapel is part of this museum as well, but it was another of those rare crowded places and they did not allow photographs. After having seen so many frescoed ceilings and walls in the museum proper, by the time we hit the Sistine we were tired and sick of crowds which left us pretty underwhelmed. We still looked at the ceiling and picked out interesting bits (and played 'name that saint',) but it probably would have had a bigger impact had we seen it first (or empty.)


We also visited Castel San Angelo, which has been a bunch of different things over the ages, including a place for the Pope to escape to. It afforded some more intimate views of the city.


When in the Capitoline museum, we saw several busts where they had used different colors and patterns of marble to add texture and the look of fabric. After so many white marble ones, these were quite striking and from the next room looked very much like actual fabric.

Overall, we had a great time in Rome and have already begun talking about a return. We saw a lot of neat sights, ate a lot of great food, and had gorgeous weather. I think it's likely that when we return to Italy to visit Tuscany (someday) that we will spend a day or two in Rome again. We've just got to revisit the good Gelato place. And the fixed priced five course menu place. And the place with the really good mashed potatoes and soups.


As you'll note from the heavier clothing here, Venice was not in the 60s. The weather there was much colder, mostly in the 30s and low 40s. Still, it was an amazing visit.

The city itself is simply indescribable. A carless maze of alleys and squares, criss-crossed randomly with canals in all sizes. The entire city appears to have been carved from pure madness. That said it's a quite striking madness and we were very glad to have gone.

Behind me is the Grand Canal, which bisects the city and is crossed by only three bridges. Did I mention the madness?


Because of the lack of cars and the fact that it's built on canals, there are a lot of things that are just very Venice. Consider this raised walkway, put in place to deal with the routine flooding.


The main sights in Venice are mostly placed around St. Mark's square, the only official piazza there (the others are all campos; Venice really likes it's own vocab.)

Seen here is the Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale) where the ruler of the Venetian empire lived. We took a 'secrets tour' of the place and then wandered through the public areas, which made it a very enjoyable trip. We first saw one of the largest and oldest suspended ceilings from above, then got to see it from below where the paintings were visible. We also crossed the Bridge of Sighs and checked out the prisons.



Also on St. Mark's square was St. Mark's Basilica. The differences between St. Peter's in the Vatican and St. Mark's were quite striking. Where St. Peter's had been austere and gleaming, St. Mark's was more populist. There were still mosaics all around (here depicting old testament scenes) but the whole thing felt somehow...scrappier. The floors were covered in tiles layed in wild byzantine patterns, and the outter walls were adorned with a wide variety of different friezes, mosaics, and reliefs.


Where Rome had really been about seeing specific sites, Venice was much more about getting lost and discovering this odd city. Through ever alley you'd find odd squares and random little side canals.


We didn't take a gondola trip, in part due to the weather and in part due to the cost. Should we find ourselves back in Venice in more temperate times, I think we'll splurge for the ride. Sadly, it was cold enough that the gondoleers had coats on, so we couldn't see their trademark striped shirts. At least some wore stripped scarves to make up for it.


Another fascinating site was the Naval Museum. It's a lesser museum (they charged 1.55 entrance fee, since apparently they didn't think they were quite worth 1.60) but we had to go once we read that they had a display on World War Two era manned torpedoes. Yes, manned torpedoes. Two sub mariners would ride one of these suckers to the enemy ship, plant charges, and then ride this back to safety.

They also had a lot of neat models of ships from Venice's (and the world's) naval history, as well as an interesting display on the gondola. Turns out that they are far more complex than they look, with a center of boyancy and gravity adjusted for where the gondoleer stands and the fact that he rows only on one side.


Since there are no cars, pretty much anything will pass for a road. Here is an example of one of the many, many streets that allow one to touch both sides at the same time, as well as me looking like a big dork.


In the part of the city our hotel was in, there were some wider streets and an open square where most of the produce and fish was sold in open markets. In other parts of the city, where there were smaller roads, one had to get creative. This was the only shop we saw that was in a storefront and on a boat parked across the sidewalk.


Until our last day, the weather was consistantly grey and cold, but dry. If you do visit Venice, bring good walking shoes. Here is a shot of Mary taken during a four hour walk that brought us through five of the six neighborhoods in Venice.


Here is a picture of our hotel, taken from across the grand canal. It was a converted palazzo, and had some silly but neat touches (murano glass chandelier, mosaic floors.) It was a good location; close enough to landmarks that if we got truely lost we could head for those and make our way home.

Though neither of us is clamoring to go back, we both enjoyed Venice. It really is a unique place that simply must be visited to have any chance of understanding. It's a world so very foreign from Chicago, and I'm really glad we got to visit it.


And now we enter the section that causes Mary's eyes to roll, in which I show all the pictures I took of things that made me laugh or smile. To start off, seeing a dog in a collar in a piazza in Rome really amused me. Given the large number of dogs it was all but inevitable we would, and yet it seemed like such an oddly mundane sight to see surounded by some much history and beauty.


On our way to see the church that housed the chains that St. Peter was martyred in, I had to stop to snap a shot of this poster for the italian version of the Ice Capades. America so does not have the camp market cornered.


Even in America, I like a good warning sign. Somehow the ones in Italy were even more entertaining to me, including this one warning people not to disco in the stairwell.


So you built a city without any roads and on top of a series of rivers and canals and you need to dig with a crane, where do you put it? Why, on a barge, of course.


On that four hour walk I alluded to earlier, we passed a newstand with the mirror version of the book we had started using to learn Italian. This gave us some heart that somewhere in Chicago, there was an Italian couple walking quietly, and pointing out to each other excitedly every time they recognized a word from the seven chapters they made it through.