Author Archives: Where's Zoe Now?

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About Where's Zoe Now?

Late-20s Australian working in Italy, blogging about travel+food+daft adventures.

Sometimes humble pie looks a lot like a chocolate layer cake.

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Since the most bloggable thing I’ve done in the past few weeks has been online shopping for Christmas presents while still in bed, here’s a story from a few weeks ago. It’s nerdy! But it involves cake!

I’d been having a slighty frustrating time at work, with a lot of back and forth that went like

Me: What are the results you’re getting for your simulations of [problem]?

Other person sends me a bunch of graphs.

Me: Ok, but are you sure that’s right? Those numbers just aren’t physically possible. (They were the equivalent of “I measured the size of my car and it was 16 km wide”)

Them: well I already I debugged my code.

Me: sure, but the numbers don’t make physical sense [blah blah physics talk]

Them: but there aren’t any bugs in my code, I’ve gone through it 3 times.

Me: I don’t care how many times you debugged, can’t you see the results you’re sending me are just not possible?

And so on. And, I have to admit, a fair number of side comments about “how do people get physics degrees if they can’t even tell when their calculations are giving them nonsense? Harrumph.”

So when I realized that a friend from church had a birthday coming up and I was going to see her the day before it, it seemed like a good idea to bake her a surprise cake. It would be a nice thing to do, and I find baking quite relaxing.

I had a friend staying with me at the time, so I didn’t want to fuss about with making something complicated. So I chose a simple recipe, one where you just melt the ingredients together. It called for a 19 cm square tin. I don’t have any square cake tins, but that was fine, because I did have a 22 cm round tin, which is almost exactly the same area, so the cake should bake the same way. I even calculated the percentage difference between the two, it’s about 5%.

So I greased and lined my big cake tin, and got to work melting butter and sugar together. I had a moment of doubt when it came to adding the flour. It just didn’t seem like a lot of flour for such a large cake tin. But I trusted the recipe and I knew that 22 cm round is very close to the 19 cm square it called for. So maybe it was just a recipe with a higher butter to flour ratio.

I had another doubt when I poured the batter into the tin and it didn’t really look like much. But the picture on the recipe was of quite a light cake, so it was probably going to rise a lot. It did have quite a bit of baking powder in it. And I’d gone to such trouble to make sure I was using a recipe that suited my big cake tin. So in the oven it went.

And 40 minutes later it came out, flat. Maybe 2 cm thick, at most.

Huh??

E., the friend who was staying, and I stared at this comically thin cake on the cooling rack. It must have deflated. So much for a simple recipe! Could we put on a tonne of icing to bulk it up? No, it was just too flat. Roll it up? No, it wasn’t flexible enough and anyway, it was round. Well I can’t use this as D.’s birthday cake. There’s nothing for it, I’ll have to make a second layer. At this point, it was getting late, so I set my alarm for 6 am and went to bed.

Fortunately, making a second layer was straightforward even in my 6am mental state, and I sandwiched them together well with some plum jam:

Not the best food photography ever.

Not the best food photography ever.

Why are the candles unlit in that photo? Because after all the trouble of making the cake, we discovered at the last possible minute before bringing it out to D. that we didn’t have any matches. Fortunately, this tipped the whole thing from “I thought baking would be a stress relief and instead I had to get up at 6 this morning!!!” to hilarious. So all’s well as ends well.

And as I was falling asleep that night, I realized the embarassing truth. Yes, a 22 cm round tin is equivalent to a 19 cm square tin. But my big cake tin isn’t 22 cm. It’s more like 28 cm. And it’s not as if I don’t know roughly what 22 cm looks like, I work with measurements all the time. So I should add another line to my exchange:

Me: Self, I don’t care how many times you’ve calculated that 22 cm round is equivalent to 19 cm square. Can’t you see that your cake tin just isn’t 22 cm?

Balcony view

Living alone: pretty great or pretty great?

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One thing I really love about Torino is that rents here are low enough that I can afford to live by myself, in an apartment with an adorable tiny balcony.

Zero practical benefit but it's nice to say "I have a balcony".

Zero practical benefit but it’s nice to say “I have a balcony”.

Until I got a place by myself, I was vocal about not wanting to live by myself and turn into a hermit. But now I love my 1-person apartment. What changed my mind?

  1. Things stay where I put them. If I put the dishes away, they stay in the cupboard. If I leave the recycling bag next to the door so I remember to take it with me when I go out, no one helpfully puts it back where it belongs. I HAVE THE POWER OVER THE THINGS. (ahem)
  2. I can live in finely-tuned squalor. No housemates means no-one dirtying up things that I want clean or being horrified at things I leave dirty. Dishes? Get washed straight after meals, nothing gets left in the sink overnight. The bathroom? I would say “I mopped yesterday for the first time in ages and picked up hair that came from a friend who stayed a month ago”, but actually: 1. I didn’t mop so much as vaguely wipe a damp cloth around on the floor, and 2. the shocking thing wasn’t the month-old hair, it was the hair that came from a friend who stayed in the summer.
  3. I used to hate the idea of being sick while living alone, but I’ve gained a wealth of medical knowledge through “oh I bet this is a symptom that I’m about to die and no-one’s going to notice I’m gone for weeks”-googling. Pro tip: the (UK) NHS website is wonderfully non-alarmist. Is my little toe very bruised or did I stub it so hard as to break it? Other sites say, “It could be broken! Or maybe cancer! See a doctor!” The NHS says “well, if you’re really worried you could see a doctor, but what are they going to do, make you a tiny toe plaster cast? Let it rest; you’ll be fine. Have a cup of tea.”
  4. No queues for showers, toilets, washing machines, kitchen appliances, use of the living room. Why yes, I think I will have a shower while a load of washing is running and I’m using the oven. Actually, I won’t. It’s Italy, the wiring is notoriously bad, and I’m pretty sure washing machine+oven=blown fuse.
  5. SO IT TURNS OUT that “you’ll turn into a hermit!” is only true if you let it be. Everything else, about how nice it is to have control over the space around you, I would have guessed before I got my own place. But — this is a surprise to me — living alone made me more sociable. I can’t hide behind “I said ‘hi’ to my housemate, that’s enough human interaction for today, right?” When I go out with people, I’m not carefully rationing a store of energy for making more conversation when I get home. I can invite friends around without having to negotiate with other people who also want use of the living room. Not that I’ve become a social butterfly. I’m sitting here on a Sunday night wearing tracky dacks, eating crisps from the bag and updating my blog. But for an introverted bod like me, that’s exactly what I need to be doing so that I can go back out on a Monday morning and talk to people.
  6. And yeah, the balcony:

    20141022_083155

    Morning views have since been replaced by constant grey drizzle. Bah.

Giardini Reali, Turin, in autumn

Our weird cultural notions, or: Why does Zoe have a cold?

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Autumn is slipping past and winter is rolling in; the cover photo of this post is from only a couple of weeks ago and already the trees have lost almost all those leaves.

Late autumn brings good things, like excuses for hot chocolate, and — for my American friends — Thanksgiving, the one American cultural tradition that doesn’t seem to have been imported by the rest of the world. Seriously — why not?? It’s a holiday where you eat yourself stupid and don’t have to go shopping for presents for everyone! ie: The best idea ever. To be fair, by definition I’ve only ever been to “friendsgiving”, which you do with people you choose, rather than as a rellie-bash, so that is probably giving me a rosy perspective on the whole thing.

Also, I didn’t really intend for this to be a post about Thanksgiving, but I feel I should put this on the record: Green bean casserole. Sounds like it would be gross, is actually delicious.

Back on the topic of autum — it also brings the dreaded cold and flu season, and I’ve spent a good chunk of the weekend moping around at home with a cough (which seems to be getting better, thankfully!). How did I catch a cold? Well, the culture I grew up in in Australia tells me it’s from being close to other people who had the virus already. But I’m in Italy now, and if I really want to culturally assimilate, I’m going to have to consider some other possibilities. Like — and these are all things I’ve heard, from people from around Europe:

  1. It was cold and/or wet outside.
  2. I went out with wet hair.
  3. I went to bed with wet hair.
  4. I wasn’t wearing a scarf.
  5. I wasn’t wearing a warm enough jacket.
  6. I was cycling and ended up getting too hot, and my sweat gave me a chill.
  7. I didn’t change out of wet clothes quickly enough after being caught in rain.
  8. Only relevant in summer, but possibly I was exposed to too much airconditioning.
  9. Or any airconditioning, really. Can’t be too careful.
  10. Maybe I sat on a cold surface too long.

Yes, I have been known to say to people, “have you heard of the germ theory of disease? It’s been quite fashionable since, oh, the 17th century.”

This is absolutely not to say “haha, those crazy Europeans with their weird cultural notions”. Partly because I have become a total convert to the scarf theory of cold and flu prevention. I am wearing a scarf right now and I swear it will make my cough go away faster, do not ask me how.

And partly because I have odd cultural notions of my own: alternating too much between hot and cold air will make you sick; drinking a slightly nasty concoction of lemon, garlic, honey and hot water will cure your cold; sugar in any form (except, somehow, the aforementioned honey) will make a sore throat worse; sitting on that cold floor will give you piles, for sure.

So I will wrap my scarf a bit tighter and make another cup of lemon-garlic-honey tea. And maybe not wash my hair until I have a chance to dry it properly — you never know…

Cheap alcohol in Lidl

Notes from my extremely glamorous life.

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Having a bit of an urkkkk-cannot-brain-words-what-blaaaah sort of afternoon, which may not be an ideal time to update my blog! But here are some bits and pieces anyway. Next time someone tries to tell me how glamorous it must be, living in Italy, I’ll be pointing them to this post…

  • I was chatting with Mum the other day, and she said, “You know, even if you got the recipe for your Oma’s Christmas pudding, you’d go bankrupt making it, it’s got so much booze in it.”
    I have one word for you Mum: Lidl.

    It's blurry, but that's a 5.79 euro bottle of brandy. Or possibly brandy-scented hand sanitizer, at that price I'm not sure I'd want to find out.

    It’s blurry, but that’s a 5.79 euro bottle of brandy. Or possibly brandy-scented hand sanitizer, at the sub-10-euro price point, I’m a bit dubious.

  • To try and lift the tone from “Zoe’s adventures in low-budget alcohol”, here’s a photo from a few months ago:
    20140831_180449

    Villa La Tesoriera

    One of the nice things about Torino is that when you’re in a bad mood and just need to walk mindlessly until you’re ready to be human again, there are plenty of long, straight avenues to choose from. I found myself walking up Corso Francia one late summer’s afternoon, which is how I discovered Villa La Tesoriera, the grounds of which is now a public park. It’s very pretty, and far enough from my placethat by the time I’d reached it I’d managed to walk off whatever was making me grumpy at the time so I could actually enjoy it.

  • I’m writing this with a hoodie over my cardigan and thick socks on — it’s a bit chilly this afternoon and I haven’t been bothered to put the heating on yet. To be honest, I prefer extra clothes to heating; I’m not sure if it’s that heated air is too dry or if it’s just that I grew up with my parents and their “put a jumper on” ways, and now it’s what I’m used to.(I once walked into the kitchen to see my mum holding her hands above the toaster to warm them up while she was making breakfast — most people would have put a heater on at that point, right? Sometimes I’m never sure what’s normal and what’s my family. At any rate, what’s definitely less “normal” and more “my family” is that I mentioned to Dad the other day that I hadn’t put the heating on yet, and his reply was, So you’re reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas exports, good on you.)

    I guess the limiting factor in how far into winter I can wait to put the heating on is actually sociability: I can’t really invite people to dinner and say “byo blanket”. But until that becomes an issue…

  • Actually, I’m wearing thick socks and about a million bandaids, because I bought a pair of Doc Martens last weekend and so far in my attempts to break them in I have broken:
    1. a lot of skin,
    2. a pair of socks (put a bit hole in one of them),
    3. my spirit.

    The boots remain as hard as ever.

    Also, the one day I tried to wear them out of the house (very prematurely in the breaking-in process!) I had work meetings all day and also had to walk more than I expected, ie, lots of hobbling in front of my colleagues whom I had to keep talking to as if nothing was wrong. Oops.

    AT LEAST MY INNER 14-YEAR-OLD THINKS I'M COOL

    AT LEAST MY INNER 14-YEAR-OLD THINKS I’M COOL

    Maybe I should buy some of the 5.79 euro brandy to drink until I forget how much my feet hurt…?

That time I accidentally moved abroad

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I recently booked some flights back to Australia for Christmas. Inveterate travel cheapskate that I am, I decided to save money by flying Air China, via Beijing. It only adds 10 hours! It’s several hundred euro cheaper! How bad can it possibly be??? That last question is hypothetical, please don’t regale me with stories of how bad it will be.

Anyway, I’ve already done worse. I once flew Perth-New Orleans, via Singapore, London and Chicago. 3 airlines. 40+ hours. Shoving all my stuff into a carry-on so I wouldn’t have to collect bags and possibly miss a transfer. I even got extra security questions at Heathrow due to my weird itinerary.

Also, completely unintentionally, that trip was when I moved overseas.

It started innocently enough. I intended to go to a conference, spend a month in Italy, a few months in Scotland, be home in time for spring. And even that trip was more than I’d really wanted. I’d have been happy to just go to the conference. I’d moved around a bit the previous few years — a couple of 3-month stints overseas, plus changes of housemates and a move within Perth — and I just wanted to stay put for a while. Get some house plants. Give the batch of sourdough starter I’d made a chance to take off.

So when my PhD advisor said he was moving to Scotland and suggested I should also spend a few months there, I was unimpressed. “But I like Perth! I’m writing up, anyway, it’s not like I can’t just work from home if I wanted to. And why does it have to be Scotland, couldn’t you have picked somewhere sunny?”

In the end I’m not as strong-willed as all that, especially not against someone who managed to convince me to start a PhD in the first place because — this is what he said — if I went into industry I might have too much money to know what to do with it, and I’d end up owning investment property. I can’t remember what the arguments were for Scotland, there may not have even been any.

I agreed to some months in Glasgow, a “summer”, if you can call it that in Scotland.

And it was cold, and wet, and for a while there were mushrooms growing in my bathroom, and there was that time the office smelt exactly like a gas leak but it was actually just the drains. And there were the friendliest most sociable colleagues I’ve ever met, and nights spent dying of laughter while drinking whisky in a dark pub, and amazing scenery in the highlands. And I loved it, and with hardly any arm-twisting at all I agreed to stay another 6 months.

So pretty. Except that this it-will-be-dark-in-10-minutes dusk photo was taken at, like, 3pm.

Glasgow can be so pretty. Except that this it-will-be-dark-in-10-minutes dusk photo was taken at, like, 3pm. Winter in Scotland sucks.

When that time was up, the obvious thing to do next — as someone who didn’t want to leave Perth, remember? — would be to move home. So of course I took a job in Torino, Italy.

That was 2 and a half years ago, and I will grant that at some point, the move overseas stopped being accidental. You can’t live in a place for 2 years and not notice that you’re not living in your old hometown any more.

This image maybe over-represents how much sunshine and blue skies Torino really gets.

This image maybe over-represents how much sunshine and blue skies Torino really gets.

I can’t stay here forever, eventually my work contract will run out. What’s next?

Sometimes I’ve considered just not stopping, keeping on moving every 6-12 months. There’s an entire corner of the Internet full of people who’ve decided to perpetually travel. I can see why. Waking up in a city you’ve never been to before is genuinely exciting. And the possibility to re-invent yourself constantly, always being around new people who don’t need to know about your old hangups or unwanted personality traits or past mistakes — if you squint and hold your head at a funny angle, it looks like redemption.

But inertia has kept me in Torino for a while, and I’m glad it has. Waking up in new places is nice, but so is sleeping in your own bed. And what’s even better than having people not know you were a mess a year ago, is having people know perfectly well what a mess you are right now, and they love you anyway. Which, yes, Captain Obvious, but I’m a slow learner.

So I’d like to settle down somewhere eventually. Where? When? Who knows… I’m not sure I’m ready to move back to Australia just yet, but I suppose I shouldn’t rule out the possibility of doing it by mistake.

My third Christmas cake in 12 months.

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I’ve made a couple of Christmas cakes since I’ve been in Torino. The first was last Christmas. I wanted a hands-on project to take my mind off a busy period at work — Christmas was approaching and it seemed a good idea to make something “from home” to share with my friends here, so I emailed my mum who very kindly sent me her recipe. (In contrast, the week of Christmas, I was in Australia and tried to oh-so-casually ask my Oma about her famous Christmas pudding recipe, but no dice. Every thing else she’s ever cooked, she’ll happily write out for me in her immaculate European handwriting, but that Christmas pudding is going to the grave with her.)

Last Christmas’ cake worked out pretty well, especially considering I couldn’t find all the right dried fruits. So when summer rolled along and some friends and I decided to have a Christmas-in-July party, I decided a second cake was in order. The idea of the party was to have an Australian-style Christmas while the weather here suited it, for the benefit of the poor lost Europeans who have such bewildering ideas like “Christmas is a winter festival”. So I made a more Australian-style cake, swapping in glace ginger for some of the dried fruit, another trick I’d learned from my mum. I wasn’t as happy with that cake as the first one — I should have tweaked the alcohol choice to match the ginger — but it was still a good summer picnic cake to take hiking and even to carry across to Slovenia with me on my vacation.

So it’s inevitable: now it’s chilly in the mornings and they’ve put the Christmas lights on, it’s time for another cake.

Pretty lights: a message from Comune di Torino to make a Christmas cake already.

Pretty lights: a message from Comune di Torino to make a Christmas cake already.

No ginger this time, but I’m using home-made mixed peel and sort-of raisins, and I’m planning on a 1-2 week soak for the fruit, inspired by the most touching story I’ll ever read about cake.

Go, read it, see if you don’t also end up with something in your eye, and a hankering for a nice, rich, Christmas cake.

Below is the recipe I use, as my mum very kindly typed up and emailed to me (I’ve included her comments).

Continue reading →

Salone del Gusto, 2014

Salone del Gusto: so much food, so little time

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Salone del Gusto is a huge food exhibition/market/trade fair/convention held every 2 years in Torino. I went this weekend with a friend, somehow we managed nearly 5 hours of walking around, trying free samples and discovering new foods. It was good fun, but very tiring, so in lieu of some actual prose, here is a bullet-point summary.

  • Things it reminded me of: the Perth Royal Show, if you only went to the dairy tent aka the best part of the show; a giant indoor market; the vendor exhibitions at physics conferences, except people are selling food rather than vacuum systems and atomic force microscopes.
  • Flavour combinations I encountered that I never would have thought of myself: Tomato & vanilla; olive & orange; grappa-flavoured soft cheese.
  • Things I wish I’d taken a photo of: the intricate, delicate bread sculptures from Sardinia, the marzipan fruits from Sicily, some of the traditional costumes people were wearing, especially in the International pavillion.
  • Though I did get a photo in  the Puglia section:
    20141025_161116
  • Best stall: it’s a tough call, but there was a French cheese stall, with amazing goat cheeses, and the owners pretty much only gave samples to people who asked in French. Delicious cheese plus confirmation of stereotypes, oh yeah.

    "Je voudrais, um... uh..." *waves wildly at cheese* "oh, merci!"

    “Je voudrais, um… uh…” *waves wildly at cheese* “oh, merci!”

  • Worst stall: The Australian one. (They were from Tasmania — another confirmation of stereotypes? Sorry…) They were just really disorganized. Maybe they were really, really, jetlagged?
  • Purchases I’m glad I made: Stilton cheese from a very friendly stallholder from somewhere in the west of England who very much enabled my “oh but when will I next have the chance to buy stilton”; some kind of Lebanese cheese I forgot to ask the name of; a jar of fennel sauce/pesto/whatever-you’d-call-it.
  • Purchases I regret: Juice from local juice bar — it was watery, like actual juice, I don’t think they had the “juice bar” concept quite down; a disappointing almond granita. Lesson learned: stick to things you can sample before buying!
  • Purchases I regret not making: More cheese. Why did I not buy more cheese?! And canoli. I didn’t buy canoli because I find them really hit-or-miss, but in retrospect, I should have taken a risk.
    20141025_131652
  • Three pieces of advice: 1. Dress smart — comfortable shoes for lots of walking, no tight waistbands. 2. If you’re thinking of buying from a stall but don’t want to lug around the cheese/wine/pickles/bag of onions/whatever, take a photo of the stall number, because you’ll never remember where it was later. 3. If at all possible, go during the week. It was packed on Saturday afternoon. Great for people-watching Torinesi from all walks of life get excited about food, bad for stress levels as you’re constantly in crowds.
Home made candied peel

On language skills and dried fruit.

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When I first moved to Italy, it used to really bother me that I couldn’t understand the conversations I was overhearing around me. What are all these people talking about? I’m missing out on so much!

And then I went back to Australia for Christmas, where I understood everything going on around me, and I realized the truth. Most of what you overhear, you don’t want to overhear. Those 2 weeks in Perth, I swear about 90% of conversations I overheard were either people making loud phone calls on the bus to reschedule their colonoscopies to work around their urologist’s appointment, or bros telling their gym buddies about the new Paleo-kins diet they were on where you’re only allowed to eat spinach, bacon and protein powder and maaate you just have to try the spinach-bacon protein shakes I make, I’ve been slamming them down, every meal, they’re amazing.

These days, my Italian language skills have improved and while I’m far from fluent, I’m starting to think the level I’m at is somehow optimal. I can usually understand what I hear if I actively listen, but I can still tune out conversations on the bus just by not paying attention — even if someone says something outrageous, I’m not going to pick it up unless I’m listening for it. And my spoken Italian is rubbish, but I’m starting to think that’s for the best… 3 stories to illustrate:

  1. The other night, I’m on the tram, it must have been around 11pm so it’s quiet but not empty. Everyone is minding their own business; two guys get on. One is very obviously drunk, the other is his loyal friend who is really hoping to get him home as quickly as possible, hopefully without too much drama. I make the mistake of listening in. The drunk guy is discussing his girlfriend, who’s dumped him earlier today. How could she?! But whatever, she was no good anyway, he was about to dump her. But how could she?! It’s all her fault anyway. But how could she duuuump meeee? At which point, I’m very glad that a) it was his stop and his friend made him get off, and b) I couldn’t think how to say “Maybe she dumped you because you’re a tedious drunk,” because that would have been mean and probably gotten me into a fistfight.
  2. A few weeks ago, I was cycling to work and pulled up behind another cyclist at a red light. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something moving. It’s a spider. On seat of his trousers. I did consider trying to say “hey, there’s a spider on your butt!” but I decided against it because it didn’t look like a dangerous spider, and I could just imagine the follow up, “No, really, it’s a very dark coloured spider and you’re wearing light beige trousers and it’s moving around so it was visible in my peripheral vision, I really truly wasn’t checking out your butt while waiting at a red light, really…” So awkward! Not to mention, the only Italian I could think of was less like “butt” and more like “arse” and he’d probably just think I was yelling obscenities at him.
  3. Yesterday, I was at the supermarket buying grapes. This one’s a longer story, because on the face of it, there’s no good reason for me not to have asked one of the other customers, “do you reckon any of these are seedless?” But I was worried they might ask why I was after seedless grapes, and then we’d be in the realm of things that are hard to explain even in your mother tongue.

So the story with the grapes is this. Saturday, I was feeling especially crafty, so I decided to make my own mixed peel (candied peel, if you’re American). Turns out, it’s really easy, I used this recipe and it worked splendidly:

This might end up in a Christmas cake, if I don't eat it all first.

This might end up in a Christmas cake, if I don’t eat it all first.

In this case, success is followed by hubris. What else could I preserve? Glace cherries sprung to mind, but of course I’ve missed the cherry season by several months (next year!). Why not… raisins? So there I was, buying grapes, and refusing to ask for help finding seedless ones because I didn’t want to have to explain, “well I made my own mixed peel even though you can buy it, so now I’m thinking I’ll make my own raisins even though you can buy them and I swear I’m not that sort of person normally.” (It didn’t help that a lot of the how-to-dry-raisins instructions I found on the internet were on Mormon lifestyle blogs. I made sure to buy beer and coffee along with the grapes, to preserve my own self-image.)

Turns out the kilogram of grapes I bought were not seedless. But hubris is followed by madness, so I sat down with my kilo of grapes, and a knife, and I cut every single grape in half and pulled out the seeds. Every. Single. Grape. About halfway through, I checked in with myself:

Self, what will you do if this all fails and you don’t end up with anything resembling raisins and you’ve wasted all this effort?

Well, what else would I be doing on a Sunday night?

So now I have 2 trays of grape halves in a very low oven, maybe they will form something resembling raisins, or at least something close enough that I can soak them in booze and put them in a Christmas cake.

Ugly, but quite tasty.

Come on ugly grape ducklings, you can turn into beautiful raisin swans!

Maybe I should spend my Sunday nights on Italian language learning, instead.

Peanut butter cookies

How to make peanut butter cookies (with bonus story!)

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Stop and think about what you’re doing right now. Would it be better with a peanut butter cookie? Yes, yes it probably would. These are my current go-to bickies, and they’ve got at least 3 things going for them:

  1. They’re very easy to make.
  2. They’re gluten free without being kinda gross, in fact they’re amazing, all chewy and peanut-y and sweet and a bit salty.
  3. They’re completely unheard of in Italy, so you can bring a tin of them to a get-together and not worry about competing with anyone’s grandmother’s traditional recipe.

Step by step (the recipe is closely based on this one, but with added cinnamon and without the salt):

  1. Obtain peanut butter. If you’re in Italy, this is the hardest step. The big supermarkets are often a decent bet, though I’ve been surprised by both Crai and Carrefour Express supermarkets sometimes. Try near the Nutella (don’t get distracted and buy Nutella instead of peanut butter…) or possibly the ‘foreign food’ shelf. If you’re in Torino, the Pam supermarket in Lingotto sells a jar that’s big enough for 2 batches of these cookies. The brand is called “Save” and it’s pretty nasty peanut butter for eating (as you would imagine from the name — does “save” ever bode well for food?) but it’s fine for baking with.
  2. Everything is measured by volume not weight. If you don’t have measuring cups, 1 cup is 250 ml, so a drinking glass is probably about the right size. Depending on your peanut butter jar, that might well be about 1 cup.
  3. Cream together 1 cup peanut butter with 1 cup sugar. You want to mix them so that all the peanut butter has sugar in it, and all the sugar has peanut butter on it.
  4. Add 1 beaten egg, 1 teaspon vanilla, a decent shake of ground cinnamon. I’ve never measured how much cinnamon I use, sorry to be vague! You want enough so the cookies taste vaguely American, without overpowering the peanut butter.
  5. At this point, the dough will probably be quite sticky. I suggest you pop it in the fridge for a while, it will noticeably improve the texture of the final product and make it easier to form the cookies without getting sticky goop all over your hands.
  6. The time the dough needs in the fridge is about how long it takes to heat the oven to 180C, so turn it on now.
  7. To form the cookies, make 1.5-2cm diameter balls, and flatten them. Do some fancy criss-cross pattern with a fork, if you like, but I just squoosh them down with my fingers.
  8. Bake for 10-12 minutes.
  9. DON’T TRY TO TAKE THE BISCUITS OFF THE TRAY UNTIL THEY’VE COOLED. They will fall apart! Wait until they’re cool enough to touch. I have made this mistake multiple times. It does result in a lot of broken cookies which I have to eat myself because I couldn’t possibly serve them to other people. Ahem.
  10. There is no Step 10, so let me tell you a story about going to the supermarket to buy eggs the last time I made these biscuits:I’m waiting in line at the checkout, when suddenly the old lady in front of me spins around, exclaiming and waving her hands as if she’d seen a rat or something. Turns out, she’d spotted the woman behind me, wearing sandals. In October. Wouldn’t she be cold?! How could she not be wearing socks and shoes?At this point, she’s on a roll with being dramatically appalled about things. Look at the batteries! 8.40 euro! That’s [I don’t remember how many] lire! For batteries! I murmur something polite about ‘yes that does seem expensive’.So we get talking, which is mostly her talking and me trying to keep up: Where am I from, it’s obviously not Italy? Australia?  Really? Her father spent 2 years in New Zealand! What on earth am I doing in Italy? A scientist? Oh madonna! She clutches my arm in mock horror. What do I think of Torino? I like it? Good. But it’s not like it used to be, back in the days of Fiat, it was such a more elegant city. She’s 91, she says.And she thinks my name is ‘uhzoe’, because I subconciously hesitated when she asked me. Oh deary me.
Archway in Giardini Reali, Turin

Signs of autumn

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I grew up with hot summers and mild winters; autumn in Perth mostly just means the evenings get longer and it becomes bearable to be outside in the middle of the day. For me, chilly mornings and hazy light and falling leaves still feel like something out of a story book, something I never quite believed existed.

Will I ever get over the 'let's make everything pretty' architecture? Probably not.

Also, will I ever get over the ‘let’s make everything pretty’ architecture? Probably not.

So I’ve been doing autumn things, like getting in as much gelato as I can before it’s too cold, and making plum jam. Buying fruit for that, I had the opposite problem at the market to usual — normally I’ll ask for half a kilo of something and the stall-holder will try to sell me at least a full kilo, if not two. Buying 4kg of plums, on the other hand, I had to hold up fingers and very clearly enunciate quattro chili, to the great amusement of the seller who probably couldn’t imagine why the strange foreign girl wanted so much fruit (I counted 48 plums went into the saucepan, plus those that I ate fresh).

Actually, most of autumn seems to be about food: plums and fichi d’india and mushrooms. One of my lasting mental images of Torino is from the first autumn I was here, walking into the fruit and vegetable market at Porta Palazzo in the middle of the afternoon, with golden sunlight that you could almost touch and stalls upon stalls of produce, with so much of it completely different to what was available a few weeks prior. It was one of those moments where I marvelled about where I am now, having done nothing to deserve any of it.

I had another moment like that the other night, it was a drizzly evening and I took the bus home, looking out the window at the lights from the shop windows reflecting off the paving stones of the street. I was listening to my “you listened to this as a teenager”  playlist on my phone, and I realized that actually, going home to my cozy apartment in a beautiful city was more or less exactly what I daydreamed of as a teenager. Which  was a good thing to realize, I think: it’s my birthday in a few weeks and I find it very easy to ask my self so, what do you have to show for yourself after this many years?? And this year I have an answer. I am literally living the dream! And it has nothing to do with achievements or goals met, which is a relief.

What was supposed to be a post mostly about jam-making has turned rather introspective… But then, autumn does seem to be the season for spending time thinking, doesn’t it?