We’re bingeing on Joe Strummer and Italian food after a helpful recommendation launched us down Stanley Tucci’s culinary voyage to the Old Country, fighting off snarky pundits and subsequent calorie infusion as the country seeks its moral compass and we seek the perfect Carbonara.
Heckuva past coupla weeks, wouldn’t you agree?
We’re decompressing in our own way, processing the news and looking for glimmers of hope and truth, but the way is hard and filled with pitfalls. For some reason, people seem confident enough to tell us how to run our business. While our instinctive response to those compelled to direct news operations here, ordering that a story or photo be “removed immediately,” might be an offhand “go f… find yourself another site,” we’re trying to keep things polite.
We’re not sure what the Lafayette City Council felt after News Corp turned its Lachlan Murdoch Laser light on them after the council’s Monday night gathering, pretty much dispensing with any pretense of objectivity with the headline: “Woke officials in wealthy Bay Area enclave break down in tears, abruptly end meeting over ICE shootings of Alex Pretti, Renee Good.”
Oh my. First of all, we were startled to learn that New York even knows where Lafayette is, not to mention how much money people have here. Second of all, we’re not sure what the relation of income is to sensitivity to an extrajudicial shooting but apparently that connection was made. Third, news of the latest shooting to rock Minneapolis jarred a lot of people, not just city council members, so we think an injection of humanity at a public meeting – and perhaps a tear or two – is forgivable.
But that’s just us, apparently we’re libtard, incel, commie cucks according to our detractors.
On the Two-Wheeled Front, and we know that wasn’t much of a segue but we’re pressed for time, we’re being inundated by reports and videos of youthful e-bike/e-motos/e-somethings packing up and behaving badly – doing everything from strafing trail users with trash to stripping automotive parts off cars and trucks during nightly e-raids.
The e-wheeled trend has been around for a while but took off in the New Century as environmental concerns and demands for a low-cost method of transport ramped up, but who knew the bikes would give rise to youthful bands of riders channeling their inner Wild Ones and using the bikes to outpace cops and older folks chasing after them with upraised canes.
Steering back onto safer ground (another weak segue but note the subtle vehicular reference) we’ll return to our ongoing kitchen experimentation as we deconstruct la nonna’s recipes in hope of recapturing the best of Italia’s culinary advances. We do this to recapture our past, preserve something of those who went before us, and perhaps cut costs as we look at the prices of staples in the local market.
Descendants of gold miners, farriers, poachers and abalone fishermen we’ve been taught that “grow your own” tastes better and is waaaay less expensive than a trip to Mister Macchione’s Market. Family lore has it that gram fed her twelve children – that’s twelve with a twelve – from her sprawling Victory Garden during the war and that there was always a couple of barrels of vinegar and one with something stronger down in her basement – where she hung her cured meats.
So we reminisce and experiment and try to conjure up the meals that carried us through childhood and remind us of kitchens that smelled like Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pasta al Limone and where meals were eaten at a wooden table long enough to land a plane on. We tell ourselves we’re saving money but we also think its because we’re looking for a sense of normalcy in confusing times.
