No, Thursday's Out....

Local ice creamery Salt & Straw has set up shop in New York City, and the food critic of the New York Post is not a fan . He takes particular issue with their Pastrami on Rye flavor, which has a butterscotch base, and too much mustard. I don’t blame him! Salt & Straw flavors are almost universally Not For Me. I’ve liked two, ever. I only go into S&S when some visiting friend insists. Also, the aroma of baking cones blankets an entire block of Division, which is intrusive. I do love the tiny gelateria just up the street, run by two Italian brothers passionate about their nocciolo – so passionate* that in their first year, they shut down and went home to Italy during the hazelnut harvest.   Hazelnuts may be the Oregon State Nut , but Oregon hazelnuts are not noccioli. Having just received my voters’ pamphlet, I have several other nominees for Oregon State Nut, but that’s another story. Anyway, speaking of things that are intrusive and not to my taste, I had a...

The Uffizzi is full of breathtaking art, but this hit me just as hard. We left off with me at the Ukrainian church in Florence. I took a news vacation during the trip, but the Ukrainian church reminded me that things are brutal in Ukraine right now. And in the Middle East. And in Sudan. And .... Avoiding the news couldn’t protect me from reminders of conflict and oppression and violence, past or ever-present. Most people don't get news breaks.  In Trieste I was haunted by the stumbling stones placed at the "last voluntary address" of Jews deported to the concentration camps in World War II.   (I shudder that we are discussing “mass deportation” from the US, these days.)  And I was unsettled by the gorgeous Miramare  Castle, where Maximillian and Charlotte/Carlotta lived before they decided to go rule over Mexico, a bit of colonial arrogance that ended badly, as such things do.   (Here's Rudyard Kipling, from my visit to the National Portrait Gallery in Londo...

My 22-day itinerary in the UK and Italy went like this: Belfast and nearby; Bristol; Pisa; Florence; La Chiara di Prumiano (tiny settlement up in the Tuscan hills); Trieste; London. But I’m relating my news in no particular order. Food: In a seaside restaurant called The Shack on the Northern Irish coast, my daughter asked what was in their “Shack Salad.” Our waiter, stumped, made some elegant hand gestures and said, “It’s a … collection of … leaves?” We grinned. Did she think we didn’t know the word “salad?” But three weeks later, in a posh London restaurant (where the exquisite bartender recited bits of Romeo and Juliet to me, and yes, I was not the first, but still) I looked at the menu. And the house salad was described as “a collection of leaves.”   (Cantucci, with lemons for scale) In news of Italian cookies, biscotti and cantucci are much the same, but cantucci are smaller and generally have tooth-cracking almonds. When I asked for biscotti in cantucci territory, and e...