Armenian beef and lamb sausage

First of all , I want to say THANKS to all you lovely people who commented on one of my blogs.

I haven't been too constant, and can only blame it on being Giuliana's Nonna Nina--so far she calls me a combination: Nonni, and I am totally snookered!

Next, I want to congratulate the youngest member of the Screw Iowa Writers:

Melissa Westemeier on the publication of her debut chick lit book: Whipped, Not Beaten,available through Cornerstone Books. I ordered ten copies to give as Valentine's gifts to friends. And I advise you all that for only a $12 investment, you'll have wonderful reading entertainment! Melissa writes a fun, informative and interesting blog as the:

Green Girl of Wisconsin.

My son Nico made this recipe of Armenian black sausage (below)--either click on this or copy and paste into your browser

http://lpoli.50webs.com/index_files/Soujouk-black.pdf

He experimented and did 4 times the recipe--much harder to work with, and he advises to do only a kilo or 2.2 lbs at a time like the recipe calls for.

And if you go here you'll find a picture of it (I hope)--didn't know how to transfer it.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s166/sh/7e2a3546-05df-4612-b7f7-c532de491c41/80fc4a862b49d65c2de87ad163af299c

Keep reading our great monthly column: "FROM the MASTERS" on www.bridlepathpress.com (and an occasional poem or two.)

I wish everyone a happy, healthy, prosperous and creative New Year!

Pumpkin Bits

Ah 'tis the season of leaves changing on the trees, pumpkins in the patch, and butternut squash hefty in the veggie garden. So let's go sweet with this pumpkin one. Butternut squash soup to follow...if not today, then tomorrow.

PUMPKIN BITS

(These may be made ahead and kept in fridge or frozen.)

1 1/3 cups flour

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

3/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) cold butter

1 cup oats uncooked (may be quick cook or not)

1/2 cup chopped pecans

1 pkg. cream cheese softened (8 oz.)

3 eggs

1 can pumpkin (15 oz)

1 Tablespoon pumpkin pie spice (and if you're like me and don't have any handy, use: 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of nutmeg, a dash of cloves)

Preheat oven to 350

Line a 13 x 9 pan/dish with heavy foil enouogh to leave some edge to form a "rolled handle" on each end, and then grease with butter

Mix flour, brown sugar and 1/4 cup of granulated sugar in a bowl

Cut in butter with pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture looks like coarse crumbs.

Stir in oats and pecans (may use a combination of pother nuts too--like walnuts, etc.). Reserve one cup of mixture for the crumbs on top.

Press remaining mixture onto bottom of pan. Bake for 15 minutes

Beat cream cheese, remaining 1/2 cup sugar, eggs, pumpkin and spice with an electric mixer until well blended.

Pour over crust. Sprinkle with leftover reserved crumbs.

Bake 25 minutes. Lift from pan using foil "handles."

Cool completely before cutting into square bits.

Recipe for fior di zucca and a note on Harold Pinter

Fior di zucca

Make a batter of flour, eggs, water, salt, pepper, garlic powder and baking powder and aside to rest while you wash and dry and prepare the flowers.

Don't bother to ask, because I can't tell you how much of each ingredient goes into the batter. Experiment and you'll live a happy life of daring...go by eye. like I do, for how many flowers you have. It's the way I was taught. Some friends think I hold out on them--this isn't true. REALLY. I never measured anything in my kitchen, bit have tried writing these blog recipes...and it's a total pain. And I'm not even sure they are correct measurements. I usually guess.

Clean the flowers. Cut the stems, take out the pistol and remove any sepals. Into each flower place a piece of anchovy and a piece of mozzarella. Roll the twisted flower into a bowl of flour and then dip into the batter and fry in hot corn oil in a deep fry pan.

Server hot.

The following has nothing to do with food, and is merely a not on Harold Pinter and play-writing.

I love theater and plays. Always have. I read somewhere that Harold Pinter wrote 29 plays. these include: The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1964), Betrayal (1978), A Kind of Alaska (1982), and Celebration (2000). He died in 2008, at the age of 78. A great talent, who basically said that he wrote the way he did because that's the way he writes. Isn't that terrific?

He may be quoted as saying, "How can you write a happy play? Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life."

I've written two short plays for theater and one movie screenplay adapted from one of my short stories. And I began another but only got to 30 pages before I quit because I was merely auditing the class and had to leave because my husband was whisking me off to Asia. That idea of mine was made into a movie about the killing of Aldo Moro--well, at least I had the right instinct.

All writers should try to write plays or screenplays. You are forced to write only action and dialogue--no character's thoughts, thank you very much. And it'll also teach you plot and plot points and the spinning around of the action to go in another direction. Oh, just read the book by Syd Fields, he's the expert.

November 1st, All Saints, Rolled Eggplant

Rolled, stuffed grilled eggplant

Mix together ricotta, chopped mozzarella and grated parmigiano--don't ask me how much--do it by eye for 12 large pieces of grilled eggplant. Stuff and roll. Place in an oven-proof Pyrex dish. Cover with tomato sauce and basil, and some more mozzarella and parmigiano. Bake in a hot oven for 20 minutes. YUM!

After I prepared this I read this quote by Eugene O'Neill. "Keep on writing, no matter what! That's the most important thing. As long as you have a job on hand that absorbs all your mental energy, you haven't much worry to spare over other things. It serves as a suit of armor."

O'Neill wrote 50 plays, including The Hairy Ape (1921), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Iceman Cometh (1939), and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941).

Today is the 1st of November--the feast day of All Saints, and the beginning of NANOWRIMO--so start writing your novel and keep at it for a month. I'm adding to the one I wrote a few years ago in the shortest month...February. The important thing is to write something on it every day.

Good luck to all of you who try it.

Pappardelle con funghi e piselli B-day luncheon MH

Pappardelle con funghi e piselli

Wide, fat noodles with mushrooms and peas in cream sauce

This is the dish I'm going to make this coming Saturday for a luncheon of 6 women friends.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons of sweet butter

1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil

1 small to medium sweet onion, sliced long

1 minced or squished garlic clove

1/4 cup (at least) of cut up bacon

1 lb of thin sliced Baby Bella mushrooms

3/4 lb of petite peas...if fresh, hallelujah! (if not, use fresh frozen)

1/2 cup of white wine (I'll use Pinot Grigio)

1 to 1 & 1/2 cups fresh heavy cream

3/4 cup of fresh grated parmigiano cheese

3 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

season with salt and fresh coarse ground black pepper to taste

1 lb of papparedlle (This pasta is fairly expensive over $5 for 1/2 lb...you'd better love your guests as I do.)

Optional: 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce

May add other mushrooms if desired

In a large heave fry pan, sauté the garlic, onions and bacon. Remove from the pan, add the mushrooms and fry up in remaining butter/oil. bacon drippings. Add wine and let the alcohol burn off. Add cream and let cook to thicken. Add, the removed mix plus the peas. Also you want to may add one to two tablespoons of tomato sauce for color, if desired.

Add cooked pasta to sauce and stir, adding cheese

Top with fresh minced parsley and serve.

For a second dish, I'm making rolled, stuffed fillet of sole, poached in wine and tomatoes. With this, I will serve a salad of rughetta (arrugala) and Gorgonzola.

Desert: Tiramisu--recipe is in the archives.

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino has written many novels that blend fantasy and reality. Among these are, The Baron in the Trees (1957), Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).

He wrote realism with little success, and then decided to write the novel that he'd like to read. He said, "What stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

And, "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

And, "I feel suspicious about writers who claim to tell the whole truth about themselves, about life, or about the world. I prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the most bold-faced liars."

He's an inspiration, folks! Basically what he's saying is write the poems you want, the stories, and the novels, but what he's not mentioning is the fact that what you're trying to write you may also want to publish someday...and herein lies the difficulty: do you listen to what brilliant men have to say about writing, or go with your gut?

Ropa Vieja (Old Clothes) A Spanish recipe

I might have posted this before--ages ago--but it's been so long since I blogged anything, I figured I'd toss it out here for the world at large just in case I skipped putting it on.

For tonight's dinner I made ropa vieja, which will sit and rest in fridge and then I'll skim off the fat--easy as it gels and floats to the top. Basically this translates to "old clothes- or rags" you make a soup of the meat first. Use skirt steak or flank.

If you have a bone, plop it into the water too--espeically if it's a cut with marrow. Add salt, black pepper, pieces of red or green pepper. a small onion and several pieces of garlic. And then you cook the shredded meat in a fairly spicy sauce with minced onions, garlic and peppers and hot pepper and a hit of vinegar and a hit of vino, and some of the soupy water. Cook this for about 45 minutes or so, or until the water cooks out and you have a nice dense saucy meat to serve over white rice.

Save the rest of the broth to make vegetable soup a few days later--two meals from the same meat.

Epiphany Quote form James Joyce

It's a day of reflection for me. The sun is shining brightly on the newly fallen snow of this past weekend and I've come across a quote

from The Writer's Almanac of January 6th. It's for every writer who never ever really quite got what James Joyce and a zillion other writers today mean by the expression; "epiphany."

"Around the time Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word "epiphany." In his early 20s, he drew up little sketches, sort of like "prose poems," in which he illustrated epiphanies. He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of "inadvertent revelations," and said they were "little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal." He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden 'revelation of the whatness of a thing,' the moment when 'the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant.' "

Oh and here's another quote, this one from Anais Nin:

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection."

Quote about poetry

I'm writing this quote from Derek Walcott because I want to remember it and because it rings true.

He said this following in his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

"For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History."