Penne all’Arrabiata Five tomatoes and a long hot red pepper sitting in my fridge for a week meant that it was time for this dish. This is about as simple as it gets, so the real challenge here was properly skinning and seeding the tomatoes. I basically followed this recipe by Giallo Zafferano’s Sonia Peronaci …
Author Archives: hnbjr
M&M Enterprise Cooking, Vol. III
As my Italian-American college roommate taught me long ago, there’s something about letting any tomato-based dish cool overnight that does magic things to it the next day. Not a whole lot to say about today’s dish — all the basic ingredients and their sourcing were described in the previous post. Today’s task was simply to …
M&M Enterprise Cooking, Vol. II
August 22. Una specie di parmigiana di melanzane. I bought long local eggplants at the bazaar last week, sautéed them in Spanish EVOO with garlic, layered with them cafeteria provided mozzarella slices, threw in some gifted modest tomato sauce (Hunt’s in a can, Prego in a jar), baked for a half hour at 180C, secured …
M&M Enterprise Cooking, Vol. I
In the model of a less-evil Milo Minderbinder, I thought I’d show people what kind of food one can whip up with limited resources in a war zone. Having a full range and stove helps, but the crucial ingredient is, of course, an Italian PX. August 7 Starting simple — bieta (or bietola in Veneto) …
O King
On the occasion of the 96th birthday of Martin Luther King this coming Monday, the second movement of Berio’s Sinfonia.
A Quote from Primo Levi’s “The Truce”
From the Afterword, “The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions,” If This is a Man/The Truce, Abacus 1979, trans. Ruth Feldman. It is, therefore, necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. …
An excerpt from Octavio Paz’s “Mexico and the United States”
‘Today, the United States faces very powerful enemies, but the mortal danger comes from within: not from Moscow but from that mixture of arrogance and opportunism, blindness and short-term Machiavellianism, volubility and stubbornness which has characterized its foreign policies during recent years and which remind us in an odd way of the Athenian state in …
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Le elezioni
One of the many small pleasures in Italian daily life is picking up a thick edition of one of the dailies and reading through it over a strong morning coffee (or two, if one still has jet lag). Yes, such paper monsters still exist, and the thick, clotted Latinate prose and strong opinions make, as …
Evergreen – On Another Dimension in Indiana
Several years ago, I wrote about an Evergreen show at the 1995 St. Francis Battle of the Bands at the Grand Theater in New Albany in which drummer Britt Walford (Slint, many others) was lifted off the throne, practically still playing. I was thrilled to see that Vice’s Party Legends features an episode with Dave Pajo …
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Happy (belated) birthday, Hunter Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, who was from Louisville, would have turned 79 this week. With the Republican National Convention in full swing and on the cusp of a truly ludicrous election, we need him now more than ever. The Paris Review’s lengthy interview from 2000 is worth re-reading, and quotes the following from 1988’s Generation of Swine: …
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