Category Archives: Living in Turin

Snow in Giardini Reali, Turin

Getting the hang of winter.

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Way back in October I wrote about autumn here in Torino, so I think a winter post is surely due by now. And I’ve had my laptop open half the afternoon, thinking, come on, you can talk about winter! it’s not that hard! And I’ve made cups of tea, I’ve fetched my doona to wrap around me on the sofa, I’ve kicked the doona off and puttered around the living room, and I haven’t written a word about winter, because I can’t pin down what I think of it.

The light is very pretty but there’s not enough of it, is I think how I would summarize.

Magic light this afternoon.

Magic light this afternoon. The sun was soon behind a building and my living room went dark.

Actually, we’ve had a decent number of clear sunny days in the past few weeks, days that remind me of Perth winters where you can walk on the beach in the sunshine and even push your sleeves up if the wind isn’t strong.

Except that here, even the sunny days are short, and the overcast days are shorter. I love that in late December we get magic afternoon light by 2pm, I just wish we didn’t get nightfall by 5pm.

Because the problem I haven’t solved yet is how to get myself to go out and do things once it does get cold and dark, which means that 7pm has found me with my doona on the sofa more often than I’d like. Do I go straight from work so I can’t stop at the sofa? Make more effort to organize social events I can’t skip? I did get myself out the door and power-walking down Corso Regina the other night after I’d read something that made me too cross to stay sitting down, but I’m not sure the exercise gains are enough to counter the emotional cost of “read poorly-argued things you disagree with” as a strategy.

But then — thinking out loud here — do I want to go out more? Maybe it’s wise to have a season where I’m not active, where I can’t pretend that I’m a Busy Important Person who is busy Doing Important Things, where I recognize that no matter how much I do in my life my achievements aren’t going to last very long. On an overcast day, everything seems grey and same-y, until I start to look closely at what’s in front of me, to see shape and pattern and texture and muted colour differences. Maybe I need to take winter as a reminder to pay attention to the quieter parts of my life.

So I’m not sure yet what I think about winter, but I’m starting to think it has something to teach me.

Oh yeah, and snow. Still don't quite have the hang of living with that.

Oh yeah, and snow. Still don’t quite have the hang of living with that, even when it’s barely there.

Snow in Giardini Reali

More notes from my extremely glamorous life.

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Spent a good chunk of the week moping around with a mild flu — I’m much better now — so  this week’s post won’t exactly be a tale of great adventure. Even my fever dreams are boring: I was convinced at one point that the way I lay in bed had to be somehow “like a bowl of pasta” and I still don’t know what that was supposed to mean. Answers on a postcard.

  • It snowed here on Thursday night:
    Ooh pretty.

    Ooh pretty.

    Actually, it barely snowed at all and Friday turned out to be quite a warm sunny day, but I only realized this a fair while after I’d looked out my window in the morning, said, “woah, snow!” and put on warm clothes. Which were far too warm for my office which gets strong afternoon sun. Oops.

  • Inspired by “Texts from the Dashwoods“, I re-read Sense and Sensibility. I think Sense and Sensibility is actually my favourite Jane Austen novel, partly because it’s the only one in which I really want the main couple to get together. Probably because in the others I get a strong vibe of “oh well I have to marry someone and this guy isn’t actively terrible unlike every other man in my social circle” from the heroines. As noted previously, I’m not very romantic.
  • Further evidence of unromanticism: Even though I wanted Edward and Elinor to get together, I’d also have been satisfied with them each marrying other people due to circumstances but still enjoying a lifelong friendship where “we used to fancy each other” was in the past. Or just, in general, a novel — any era and genre — that features a friendship between a man and a woman without romance being on the agenda. Any suggestions? (Besides Elinor & Colonel Brandon in S&S, obviously. But something along those lines.)
  • I also re-watched The Castle which is a delightful movie. Recap for UnAustralians: it’s a comedy about a family who nearly have their home seized under compulsory acquisition, which sounds like an odd topic for a comedy — ok, it is an odd topic for a comedy — but it works. Mostly because the dialogue is perfect: (images stolen from Buzzfeed)
    anigif_enhanced-25547-1390979979-1anigif_original-grid-image-13476-1390980030-3anigif_enhanced-32068-1390980063-9anigif_original-grid-image-20158-1390980105-9It’s nearly 20 years old, as you might guess from the images above… but I think it holds up.

So now I’m off to see if my bedsheets are dry yet — laundry in winter is no fun. Maybe next week I’ll do something less boring?

12 100% fun, 100% self-improvement-free things to do in 2015

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Good spot for lunch on New Year's Eve.

Good spot for lunch on New Year’s Eve.

I’m no better than anyone else at keeping new years resolutions.

But I’m a compulsive list-maker and I can’t quite handle the thought of entering the new year without making some kind of list of things to do. So I made a list of fun things to do in 2015.

There’s 12 of them so I have around 1 per month which is about how often I say I’m bored, everything is boring, there’s nothing to doooooo. I’ve listed them here for future reference, but this is absolutely not a checklist, they’re in no particular order, and I don’t intend any self-improvement.

  1. See a musical. (This one is cheating because I have tickets to see Les Miserables with friends next week.) (done!)
  2. Bake bread.
  3. Walk some more of the Via Francigena.
  4. Go to Barcelona for a weekend.
  5. Go swimming. (done!)
  6. Get some photos printed and make an actual physical off-my-harddrive display of them.
  7. Host a dinner party.
  8. Go to the mountains (for winter sports or hiking or drinking hot chocolate; I’ll leave that open). (does Como count, even if it’s in hills rather than mountains?)
  9. Knit a hat.
  10. Make and listen to a playlist of all the ridiculous 90s pop music I haven’t heard for years.
  11. Go to the cinema. (This is non-trivial in a city with only one cinema that regularly shows original sound movies.)
  12. Visit the Museo Pietro Micca, which is apparently very cool and somehow I still haven’t been there. (done!)

Happy New Year everyone!

Dinner flash mob in Turin

3 things I’ve learned in Italy

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Before I moved to Italy, I imagined that after a couple of years, I’d be fluent in the language (ha!), I’d have learned to cook lots of amazing dishes (I had takeaway pizza for tea tonight), I’d understand Italian politics (ehhhh… maybe it’s beyond understanding?) and I’d be riding around on a Vespa (obviously I’d never seen traffic here).

But I’m not completely wasting my time, and here are three things I’ve learned:

1. How to appreciate traditional food.

Not always, I admit. My pizza this evening was from the place downstairs from me that is run by a Chinese family and sells pizza and Chinese food. (An obvious combination, right?) Definitely not generations of a family from Naples, each son learning from his father how to prove the dough and mix the tomato paste.

But I think it’s fair to say that in Italy, “This is just how my grandmother made it!” is high praise for food. I’m only exaggerating a bit when I say that food from the next town over is crazy foreign food that you might eat once a year at a food festival. There are special foods for not just Christmas and Easter but a whole bunch of saints days, as well as the seasons, and the idea of eating something at the wrong time of year is inconceivable.

Traditional doesn't mean "no fun" - this was a dinner-eating flash mob back in summer.

Traditional doesn’t mean “no fun” – this was a dinner-eating flash mob where everyone wore white, that I happend across back in summer.

All of which is quite novel for me. I’ve never quite worked out how to answer, “What dishes are typical to where you grew up?” which in Italy is a perfectly good get-to-know-you question, but in Australia makes no sense. And when I go back to Australia, I love that there are Mexican and Indonesian and Vietnamese and Thai restaurants all within walking distance of my parent’s place. But I’ve become quite taken by the idea of having a well-defined cuisine, that you’ve cooked and eaten so long that you understand it perfectly.

(Note that I’ve learned to like this idea, sadly I’m a long way off from being able to cook…)

2. How to interact with small children.

Confession time: I’m not naturally a children person.

If you’re a friend of mine and you have kids: your children are wonderful and I legitimately like them.

But I have a hard time thinking of anything to say to people about their babies other than, “yup, that sure is a baby.” Toddlers mostly remind me of tiny drunk people. Supposedly if you’re a woman, your hormones are meant to make you want babies. All my hormones have ever made me want is carbohydrates.

Before I moved to Italy, I mostly just ignored children, which is easy enough to do; they’re generally pretty low to the ground. But I got here, and everyone is nuts about kids. People strike up conversations with toddlers in the supermarket. Teenage boys (!) coo at babies on the bus. No-one has a problem with kids being around, even in museums and restaurants.

So I suddenly found myself in this environment where interacting with peoples’ kids is just a thing you do, like greeting shopkeepers or using your umbrella if it’s even a tiny bit rainy. And it turns out it’s a skill you can develop. (Unlike the umbrella usage, which I’ve never got the hang of. Holding an umbrella up takes effort, why bother when it’s just drizzly?)

Also, toddlers really are like tiny drunk people: you can keep them entertained with the stupidest things and you’ll get bored long before they do.

3. How to wait.

I got a good lesson in this one earlier this week. I’d received a bill for garbage collection services, and Tuesday, the day before it was due I went to the post office to pay it. I would have gone earlier, but the week before, I didn’t get around to it, and the Monday was a public holiday.

Turns out, everyone in Torino got the bill at the same time. And it’s payable only at the post office.

So I get to the post office, and I’ve got ticket number 190. They’re currently serving number 103. At a rate of about 1 per minute.

Yes, I really did spend 90 minutes waiting to spend 1 minute paying a bill.

I won’t say I enjoyed the experience, but it certainly taught me patience.

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).

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