back home again

Before I tell you about our sojourn in Rome, which already feels like a dream, I have to report the ulti­mate com­fort food din­ner.  And it’s EASY.  Allow 2 1/2 hours start to fin­ish, and the beauty of it is, most of the time you don’t have to do anything!

First, get a good large roast­ing chicken, around 4–5 pounds.  Buy four or so good big boil­ing pota­toes, a bunch of broc­coli, two lemons, a head of gar­lic and two large onions (this is for two adults and a child, you can imag­ine why my pro­por­tions are such).  A bunch of rose­mary, some grated parme­san cheese, about six strips of bacon, some rough salt, some not-great white wine, a half pint of half and half and two sticks of but­ter.  Make sure you have some olive oil, and enough alu­minum (or alu­minium, as they say here) foil to cover two oven-proof dishes.  Pre­heat your oven to 425.

Now is the easy part.  You line a dish big enough for your chicken with foil.  Lay down some sprigs of rose­mary.  Put the chicken on top and sprin­kle lib­er­ally with salt.  Drape with the bacon.  Cut the lemons in quar­ters and stuff one whole lemon into the chicken.  Pour some white wine around the chicken and stick it in the oven.  It’s done for 2 solid hours, noth­ing to do with it AT ALL.  While it’s cook­ing, peel your pota­toes and put them in salted water on the stove.  Cut the broc­coli in flo­rets and throw them in a skil­let with olive oil and salt.  Don’t turn it on.  Now, cut the top half off your two onions.  Peel off the skin from the tops and chop the onion bits.  Chop three cloves of gar­lic too and saute the two chopped bits in some olive oil.  Add some chopped rose­mary.  When they’re soft, add maybe a third of a cup of half and half, and a good hand­ful of parme­san cheese and let them melt.  Take it off the stove, and with a spoon scoop out most of the insides of the onions.  Save for some­thing else.  Spoon the cheesy stuff into the onions and put them in a dish lined with foil.  Now you have a good hour and a half or so to watch curl­ing on the Olympics and hope your child’s col­lege edu­ca­tion results in some­thing a bit less… absurd.

Half an hour before the chicken’s done, turn on the pota­toes and put the onions in the oven.  While they cook, saute the broc­coli really slowly.  Melt a good stick of but­ter with hot milk.  Now you need some­body to help you.  While you mash the pota­toes, the helper can take the chicken out of the oven and carve it up.  You can be stir­ring the broc­coli.  As every­thing else is on the table, take the onions out, which will be bub­bly and brown.  IMPOR­TANT: eat at least one bite of EVERY­THING together.  A bite of chicken, a bite of broc­coli, spear­ing some cheesy onion and dip­ping it all in mashed potato as you go.

HEAVEN.

We had this tonight with some really awful red wine, sorry, while Avery’s friend Anna was here spend­ing the night.  We decided to spare them the wine.  Last I saw they were play­ing some elab­o­rate game that involved Avery crawl­ing on all fours with a long scarf around her neck as a leash, bark­ing.  The cats are intrigued to say the least.

Rome.  What to say?  We arrived around dusk, Avery had her first enor­mous gelato, a creme caramel, and was an instant con­vert.  Fueled by sugar, we decided to walk to the Vat­i­can, since we could see it from the river’s edge so close to our lit­tle albergo.  It was quite a walk!  Close to two miles, I’d say, but it set the tone for what Avery feels was our Marathon Trip to Rome, since we walked prob­a­bly six miles a day each day.  The Vat­i­can was only tan­ta­liz­ing in the dark­ness, albeit lit up, so we deter­mined to go back the next day and went back to our cute lit­tle neigh­bor­hood, Campo dei Fiori, to get a per­fectly ade­quate but aver­age pasta din­ner out and be grate­ful for food.  Avery got super tired and I made the colos­sal error of believ­ing that she could find the way home, so we left John to set­tle the bill with what­ever the waiter’s equiv­a­lent oppo­site of “eyes in the back of his head” is, as in, he could see noth­ing of our attempts to get the bill!  She and I ven­tured out and promptly had no idea where we were, so we clung to each other like babes in the for­est, finally ask­ing direc­tions from a nice taxi guy, just as John walked up to us resignedly, know­ing we had got com­pletely lost.  Incred­i­ble but true.

Thurs­day we had a lovely break­fast at the hotel, and then we did every­thing!  It was alter­nately rain­ing a lot, and rain­ing a lit­tle, but since we’re from Lon­don this seemed per­fectly nor­mal, so we per­se­vered.  We were absolutely deter­mined, after the evening before, to go to the Vat­i­can and see what all the fuss was about, so off we went.  A sur­pris­ingly quick very long queue, and then to the Basil­ica, about which I knew embar­rass­ingly lit­tle con­sid­er­ing that only 15 years ago I was deep in a PhD in art his­tory, a good part of which was to be on the Ital­ian Renais­sance.  I excuse myself on the grounds that every­thing I knew about Michelan­gelo has been replaced by an ency­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of children’s pic­ture books and cook­ery prin­ci­ples.  We took the lift (so funny, the ticket spec­i­fied “round trip”!!) and then walked the sup­ple­men­tary 320 steps after that.  I think the warn­ing that peo­ple with heart con­di­tions should “con­sider” whether they want to make the trip is com­pletely inad­e­quate!  Any­one not really, really fit and THIN would be chal­lenged by the teeny tiny wind­ing stair­case that leaned pre­cip­i­tously toward what I real­ized, with huge fright, was the inside of the DOME itself.  Eeek!  We made it to the top and Avery’s claus­tro­pho­bia and my fear of heights were con­quered by the lus­cious view of Rome.  Stun­ning.  Avery was amused to see the backs of the sculp­tures we had seen from the ground, com­plete with a pigeon on every head.  Lovely.

We were gut­ted, as the Eng­lish would say, to find that the Sis­tine Chapel was “chiuso” on Thurs­days, but the upshot of my excel­lent Ital­ian accent was that the rest of the guard’s expla­na­tion was com­pletely a mys­tery.  Pos­si­bly it will open again some­day in the future, but his com­ments were far too exten­sive to be of any help.  I should have been flat­tered that he thought I could under­stand.  Whew.  From there, we headed close to home for more gelato for Avery and a nap for John.  I real­ized I was peck­ish myself, and ven­tured for a snack I had seen from the win­dow of a cute wine bar: tiny lit­tle tartlets filled with every­thing under the sun, each for a euro!  I chose a crab­meat with lemon and may­on­naise, and a lan­gous­tine with aioli and pars­ley.  Heav­enly, could have eaten twenty of them, with caviar (OK, maybe not that), egg­plant, roasted red pep­pers, sun­dried toma­toes, prawns in lemon mous­se­line.  MMM­mmm!  We went back and woke up John and headed out to try to find two major sights, both from “Roman Hol­i­day” and on the must-see list from my mother and sis­ter.  We found the Trevi Foun­tain with­out too much trou­ble, and it was worth the trip.  A grey, heavy, leaden sky, with the mar­ble horses rear­ing and the mist from the foun­tain soak­ing the tourists, of whom there were a sur­pris­ing num­ber given the sea­son and the rain.  Lovely.  Then to the Span­ish Steps, YAWN!  So much smaller than I expected!  But we got a pic­ture of Avery to rival any­thing Audrey Hep­burn had to offer, and decided to call it a day.  How­ever, on the way home we stum­bled on the Pan­theon, which set off all sorts of exam­i­na­tion alarms in my post-graduate head, and the glo­ri­ous Piazza Navonna, such gor­geous foun­tains.  The find of the day: a leather good store where for about 25 dol­lars, John got his birth­day present, a black wal­let of but­tery soft­ness with his ini­tials stamped on it, and I got a black belt with a sil­ver buckle, and Avery got a tiny lit­tle back­pack to clip onto her back­pack from school, as all the girls do.  I com­mit­ted my usual error of fig­ur­ing out how to ask a really com­plex ques­tion, and then not hav­ing the lan­guage skills to under­stand the answer!  “Should we wait for the engrav­ing, or come back for it?” I asked, all full of myself and my lin­guisitic aplomb.  “Blah blah blah blah!” was the response, only in Ital­ian, and I was lost!

After a wel­come cock­tail and hot water bot­tle break at the hotel, we dashed out to meet my friend Michele Bam­bling and her fam­ily at their apart­ment near the Colos­seum.  Her hus­band Bill is the Wall Street Jour­nal bureau chief for Europe and Africa and was full of alarm­ing and enter­tain­ing sto­ries about his work.  Their two chil­dren, Jack­son and Adele, are just younger than Avery and she was happy to relax in a Roman apart­ment and play doll­house while we adults had a drink and caught up.  Michele and I used to talk “nihonga,” a Japan­ese paint­ing tech­nique that she was study­ing for her PhD and which was the lynch­pin of my won­der­ful gallery painter Makoto Fujimura’s style.  We repaired to a pizze­ria that sim­ply defies descrip­tion in any Amer­i­can con­text.  Filled to capac­ity with Roman natives, it was warm and spicy on a rainy night.  We set­tled for a selec­tion of four piz­zas and pounced on them all, as the chil­dren had basic margher­i­tas (tomato and moz­zarella).  Our choices were all piled on the thinnest and crispi­est of crusts.  We had funghi and porcini with pro­volone, car­ciofini (the tiny Roman baby arti­chokes), beef carpac­cio (although I think it was aged rather than sim­ply raw) with argula and parme­san, and my per­sonal favorite, a very unusual com­bi­na­tion of radic­chio, anchovy cream and shaved grana padano (a supe­rior parme­san).  Quite eas­ily the most stim­u­lat­ing and enjoy­able com­bi­na­tion of tastes I have ever had.  Glo­ri­ous!  Lots of fun to catch up with the fam­ily and imag­ine what’s hap­pen­ing in Tribeca, which feels a mil­lion miles away.  Dropoff and pickup at PS 234 together is like a dream that hap­pened to some­one else.  Their apart­ment is a glory of sim­plic­ity: old, old tiles on the floor, carved plas­ter mould­ings on the ceil­ing, floor to ceil­ing win­dows.  It’s tempt­ing to chuck it all here and join them.  Home exhausted!

Fri­day we decided to tackle the Colos­seum, but we had asked Bill the night before to point out on a map how to find my sister’s other must-do, the “Mouth of Truth.”  It took some doing to find under scaf­fold­ing, but we found it.  John was dis­be­liev­ing that we were going to brave the enor­mous tourist line to put out hands in a dumb stone mouth, but we were adamant.  My sin­gle favorite pho­to­graph of my mother is of her about to do just that, at age 20 or so, so sweet.  So we waited, and in the end, the sight of Avery fak­ing her bitten-off hand inside her sweater cuff is the best photo of the trip.  Hilar­i­ous!  From there to the Colos­seum, which just amazed us all with its scale, of course.  Avery was quite able to regale us with the com­plete story of Romu­lus and Remus, and lots of other Roman trivia.  And thank good­ness, there were KIT­TIES.  Jill told us there would be!

We were all wilt­ing, so we repaired after some wrong turns to the restau­rant Michele had wanted to take us to but was full: the Trat­to­ria La Domenica, a tucked-away glory no one would find with­out know­ing, where the menu was entirely in Ital­ian as was the staff, so Avery went for safety and ordered fet­tucine alla ragu, I con­vinced John to go for some­thing alla cala­maretti, which I was pretty sure was baby cala­mari, and I myself ordered some­thing bear­ing the word “vitello”, and since noth­ing with veal can be bad, I felt pretty secure.  Luck­ily, I like liver, because it was that of a calf!  Lovely, though, grilled with lemon.  Such fun to find a lit­tle unknown neigh­bor­hood place.  Across the street was the glo­ri­ous Basil­ica San Clemente, where you can descend, if you’re brave enough, deep, DEEP into the ground to see early Roman fres­coes and columns and fresh water springs.   A bit of a diver­sion, in its cold damp­ness, to the hot sun­shine outside.

From there, we headed across the river to the lit­tle neigh­bor­hood of Trasta­vere, where I had thought our hotel was to be, to find a dar­ling book­store Avery des­per­ately needed, the Almost Cor­ner Book­shop, for sup­plies to get her though the trip home.  This place is an ivy-covered oasis in the twist­ing, mossy, slightly men­ac­ing but tempt­ing streets of this artsy area, owned by a man of inde­ter­mi­nate accent (maybe South African?  maybe New Zealand?) who told us who he had come upon the shop six years ago and fallen in love with it.  Shortly after his visit, back home in Saudi Ara­bia (?) he received a phone call that the owner wanted to sell.  Can you imag­ine sim­ply lift­ing up your life and mov­ing to Rome to run a book­store?  I have to remind myself that this is a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion.  Avery came away with a huge pile of books, and then we vis­ited the gor­geous church, Santa Maria in Traste­vere, and sat in the piazza lis­ten­ing to a gui­tarist and tam­bourine player, and then real­ized we needed to head to the airport.

What a whirl­wind.  We walked, talked (I so enjoyed air­ing my bad Ital­ian!), ate our heads off, enjoyed each other’s com­pany enor­mously, and real­ized that we’ve got to do this a lot while we’re here.  Within a two-hour radius by plane we can hear 10 lan­guages at least being spo­ken, and I for one would like to join them, how­ever badly.