Lasagna the second

Last Sunday I followed up on that plan to do a lasagna (or enchilada torte, as it's the same thing really, just with corn tortillas instead of lasagna noodles) a month with the pumpkin lasagna I was thinking of.

"meat" layer -- dry black beans, soaked and cooked with a little seasoning

veggie layers -- the white part of a bunch of green onions, one large white onion, and a few cloves of garlic, all chopped and sauteed; a red bell pepper, an orange one, and a green one, all chopped and mixed together in a bowl

cheese layer -- a container of fat-free cottage cheese with the green part of the green onions chopped and mixed-in

sauce -- a pumpkin sauce with some freshly chopped sage, a little rosemary, baking spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, mace), rum, pumpkin, fat-free evaporated milk, and a little walnut oil

Only two of the three layers of lasagna had the onion blend, and only two had black beans (because I forgot about them until I'd already done the second layer other than that. I sprinkled some shredded "sharp" cheddar ("sharp" is in quotes, as the yellow shredded stuff is never what I consider sharp, being spoiled by the 4-yr Black Diamond on occasion) over the top, and baked as usual.

It turned out well, especially considering it was an experiment. The cheddar was a good choice, but I think I might add some (or some other sharp or sharp-ish cheese) to the middle layers if/when I do this sort of thing again. The main part of the lasagna was pleasant enough, but was a little soft in its flavors. Anyway, it was liked, and judged a success.

It's been a while since I've posted here. It does make me feel a bit better that similar can be said for the people I know personally whose blogs I follow; I wouldn't follow any of them if it required actually going to their blogs to see if they'd updated, since they do as rarely as I have.

Anyway, I've decided to post here a little more regularly. I probably won't often, especially with Facebook for short updates and so on, but even once a month will be more than I have been.

I decided recently that I want to make a lasagna (or lasagna-style dish, like an enchilada torte, which is a lasagna with corn tortillas instead of lasagna noodles -- down to the same baking directions) at least once a month -- probably every four weeks or so. I wanted to do something like this before, but tried to do so more frequently than that, and it didn't last long. So this time I'm trying to be more realistic.

The inspiration for this is in part that Mark bakes bread pretty much every weekend (and bagels almost every Sunday, and cookies for when either of us has to take cookies to our lab meeting groups, or just because it's been a while since we've had cookies at home). I wanted something that I just throw together that seems all special and fancy, too. I also thought it would be nice to be able to throw together a lasagna on a whim, based on what we have or what sounds good.

Two weeks ago, I started this once a month thing with an enchilada torte with a tomatillo-cilantro sauce. I made the sauce from some fresh tomatillos, a bunch of fresh cilantro, a can of green chiles, and the white part of a bunch of green onions. The green part was mixed into a small container of cottage cheese for the middle layer. I sauteed a bag of frozen pepper and onion blend, and mixed in a box of neufchatel (inspired by a chicken enchilada recipe I've made before, though this torte was vegetarian). I did two layers of the pepper and onion blend, and one of the cottage cheese blend between layers of corn tortillas and the sauce, and sprinkled a Mexican blend of shredded cheese on top. Bake at 350 for somewhere in the neighborhood of half an hour, and yum.

I still have two weeks to figure out what the next one will be. Maybe it'll be a fall harvest lasagna with a pumpkin sauce. It's been a few weeks since we did something like that (not the lasagna, but the pumpkin). I don't know how many cans of pumpkin we've been through in the past few years, and we still have yet to make a pumpkin pie.

Mark and I both participated in the Hypertext 2009 conference that took place in Torino, Italy this year. (You might better know the town by the name Turin. However, after collaborating with people there, the name Torino is more familiar.) Since the cost of such a trip is mainly in getting there, in terms of both money and time, we chose to arrive a bit early and do a bit of personal travel before the conference. We chose to go to Florence for our personal travel there.

Most of the pictures in the slideshow are from Florence, starting our third full day there, due to some travel complications heading out there.

Our flight to Atlanta was delayed due to weather in Atlanta causing them to temporarily halt all flights. However, they were boarding our flight to Charles de Gaulle for an on time departure, meaning that by the time we got to the concourse, they were already announcing final boarding, saying that everyone should already be on board. We were not the only ones just getting there, and they did hold the flight back a bit to allow others with delayed flights a chance to catch the flight, as there aren't many of them in a day. Catching our final connection was a bit easier, but we got there just as they were finishing boarding there, too. We arrived in Florence to find out that our luggage had missed the connection back in Atlanta and had yet to cross the ocean, meaning it would be at least a day, minimum; we got it almost exactly 48 hours after arriving in Florence. And our new camera was in it, along with our clean clothes.

I don't really remember what all we saw in exactly what order in those first two days. The pictures give me clues to remind me after that, but for the first days, I can't guarantee the order, so instead I'll just mention what places I remember we did see.



Palazzo Vecchio -- In front of this "old palace" of the Medicis is a copy of Michaelangelo's David. The Salone dei Cinquecento is indeed "imposing". We also amused ourselves by trying to identify all of the countries portrayed on the walls in the maps room, seeing how well we could do, given how far some of them were from what we would consider "correct" -- for example, Japan was shown as a single island, probably due to the fact that Europeans were only allowed on the one anyway.

We also visited Casa di Dante (House of Dante), a museum in one of the houses that belonged to Dante's family, and might have been one he lived in. We also visited the "church of Dante" (link is to a Google translation of an Italian Wikipedia page), the church where he met Beatrice, who is buried there, and where he married his wife Gemma. It's a small, old-looking church with a vending machine for light.

While browsing at the Uffizi, another property of the Medicis, I quickly became bored of marble busts -- ancient Roman ones up through Renaissance ones. It's surprising how quickly they blend together for me. We saw a lot of amazing paintings, mostly from the Florence area, with some inspired by the Florentine Renaissance work. This included some Botticelli (including his Birth of Venus), Raphael, Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Reubens, Titian, and Rembrandt, among others. Some of the paintings have been in the collection at the Uffizi since before it opened to the public for open viewing in 1765.

We also went inside Il Duomo, including visiting the excavation described in the Wikipedia page. The current church was built on top of an older cathedral, founded in the 5th century. The excavation also found Roman artifacts from centuries before that.

Now we can progress to the days we have pictures for. We saw Ponte Vecchio every day we were there, but we only crossed it the once. After reading a brief summary of its history, I wanted to see it, but other bridges made more sense on our final full day there, as it appeared rather crowded on a Saturday. Basically, I read that it used to have a bunch of workshops for the likes of butchers and tanners and blacksmiths, until they were kicked out for the smell and noise. Then the jewelry smiths moved in, and now it hosts a bunch of shops specializing in various types of jewelry. It was also the only bridge in Florence to survive WWII.

Palazzo Pitti, the palace on the other side of the river that the Medicis moved to from Palazzo Vecchio, has multiple galleries and exhibits, that, along with the gardens behind it, are divided in two sets for tickets. The first time we went, we saw the Palatine Gallery, the Royal Apartments, and the Gallery of Modern Art, all on ticket 1. We came back later for the Costume Gallery and the Boboli Gardens, skipping the Silver and Porcelain Galleries.

We'd been planning on going to the gardens the same day as the galleries at Pitti, but during lunch it started raining heavily. So, instead of heading back toward the Pitti and doing an outdoor thing, we headed back toward the hotel to figure out something else. (After all, worst case was that we'd have to visit the gardens under the same conditions the next day.)

On the way, we passed by the Palazzo Strozzi, and discovered that it housed the Galileo exhibit we wanted to see -- lucky thing, since Mark thought the exhibit was somewhere else. So we did that on Friday afternoon instead of the gardens. We saw lots of cool things there, such as working replicas of really old machines to tell where the known planets would be in the sky, one of the telescopes used by Galileo, some of his notes, one of his fingers, and some of those machines showing the known solar system, including some of the other planets' moons. Yes, I did say we saw one of his fingers -- someone apparently thought it would be a good idea to dig him up and cut it off. You can see a picture on the site I linked to if you look at the links for the last rooms of the exhibit.

On our final full day in Florence, we went to the Galleria dell'Academia, which houses Michaelangelo's David. I must admit that I never quite understood the fuss about this particular David. In the pictures of it that I saw, I understood that it seemed to be a well-done marble statue, but I've seen a few marble statues in my day. And while I've really liked some of them, this one didn't really seem worth the level of additional fuss. However, I did not quite get how really big it is, nor how detailed. The pictures I saw did not quite do justice to the veins on the back of his hands, and the sinews at his feet. That is one artifact that is definitely more impressive in person than in a photo.

Next, we walked through Santa Maria Novella. As Mark has commented in conversations about it since, we did both have a two-part reaction to a lot of it of amazement and fascination on one side, and disapproval on the other, due to having grown up Lutheran, and therefore not quite comfortable with a church that ornate. There were many amazing things in there, many of which were there before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, but I was particularly impressed by the (very faded) frescoes that were painted before the Black Death (around 1350).

Finally, we headed to the Boboli Gardens behind Palazzo Pitti. Of course, it started raining. We still bought the tickets, and decided to visit the Costume Gallery (which was on the same ticket) first, to give the rain a chance to stop. The exhibit had examples of fashions from the past few centuries -- the stuff up until about the 1920s-1930s was fascinating to me, but the newer stuff mostly less so. One interesting part of the exhibit was the part where they had the clothes three of the Medicis were buried in -- or at least whatever remained of the clothes at the time the bodies were dug up. I'm still not quite sure what I think of that.

After we looked at the Costume Gallery, the rain was pretty much done. However, even though it was a Saturday, there didn't seem to be all that many people at the gardens while we were there -- probably because of the rain earlier. We have a few pictures from the parts of the garden we actually saw.

On Sunday, we took the train to Torino/Turin and stayed in a hotel near the station, since we had been unable to reserve a room at the conference venue for that night. Monday morning, we packed up, checked out, and headed to the conference venue, which was a bit of an adventure in itself. Luckily, though they hadn't sent confirmation of it, our reservation had been successful, and we were able to check in, I was able to set up the posters I had with me (one for my demo, one for the one my adviser was doing on behalf of some other students in our lab group, and one for a collaborator who just recently graduated and lives in California).

The conference itself was good, though tiring for me, since there were three different times total on two different days scheduled for demos and posters, and a bit of that time during all three times involved people interested in my demo. I was glad to hole up in our room at the end of each day and be hermit-y after talking to so many people for so much of the day. Good people -- just tiring to do demos is all. Mark just had a 20-min. talk about his paper and then he was done except for the listening to other talks and talking with people outside of the scheduled sessions, both of which I was also doing.

We took a few pictures on our way out of town, as we walked back toward the train station to head back to Florence. After some shopping around town, we took the shuttle to the airport, witnessing quite the Italian fight between a couple other passengers and the shuttle driver when the shuttle showed up later than the couple in question thought it should. Florence has a rather small airport -- the gates only have numbers, since they don't even have to use two digits, and they don't actually have any walkways; the gates are doors leading to a row of shuttles that seem necessary only to make sure you know which plane is yours and to prevent you from walking where the next one will soon be.

Internet-less for the weekend

A little over a week ago we had a bit of a spring/early-summer storm during the day. I was home for this. It had seemed to be quieting down a bit, as far as I could tell, and then there was one bolt of lighning.

The front window flashed bright white through the curtains. (Remember, this is the middle of the day. It was grey and cloudy, but the sun was obviously on the other side of the clouds. So that was very bright to flash the window that bright.) The thunderclap was practically instantaneous. And it was definitely loud. The combination even freaked out our youngest cat, who seems to have absolutely no sense of fear at any other standard times.

I unplugged my laptop, just in case, and tried to check on the weather. I'd been online when this happened, so I knew everything had been working, but it wasn't anymore. We occasionally lose internet briefly when there's a storm, so we didn't worry about it right away.

However, it was different this time. It hadn't come back later, and we figured out that both the cable modem and wireless router (the thing that lets us hook up multiple computers, including the laptops and the Wii, to the one modem) were fried. Mark ordered replacements before heading out of town for the weekend, but for about a week we had no internet access at home. (And even then, we only got fully back online when we did because we just happened to have a couple network cards to replace the ones in the computers that were connected physically to the router, including the desktop machine I use for our online banking, bill-paying, etc. after they turned out to also be a little toasted.)

This used to be the way of things, but I've gotten so used to having that access. I'm used to checking the news, or my email, or the weather while sitting on the couch in the living room. We streamed debates and speeches over the wireless onto a laptop feeding into the TV (it's not hooked up to cable) during last year's campaigns. I'm writing this while stretched out on the couch.

Not having that for most of a week drove me nuts. It's one thing to leave it intentionally, for a break from things. But to have it taken away by surprise like that? I don't like that.