lo spritz

I included spritz in the below right-hand encyclopedia right in the beginning because it's a constitutive part of life in Veneto - it dominates all early-evening drinking activities... well, I mean, usual socialising before dinner.

Spritz is a cocktail that was born in Veneto and is becoming more and more common in the surrounding regions. Inside Veneto, each city has their own version, of which the Venetian one is the most common and Paduan most notorious.

Usually spritz consists of Prosecco (white sparkling wine; in some areas dry white wine is used instead), a dash of sparkling water, ice and Aperol or Campari. Campari is more difficult to drink, so most of the people drink their spritz with Aperol. It makes a bittersweet glass of aperitif, complex to define at once, but easy to drink. It's the default in all bars from 7 o'clock onwards and there isn't a table sitting outside a bar that wouldn't demonstrate a high glass full of vivid orange.

The amounts of wine and Aperol vary greatly from city to city, but usually it would be something like 6cl of Prosecco, 4cl of Aperol and a little water, complete with ice and a slice of orange. A spritz Aperol can cost anywhere from 1.20 to 2.50, but if you're counting cents (or drinking several) most bars will also offer "bianco macchiato Aperol", which is basically spritz without the water and costs less (extra bonus!). In Valdagno this works well, though bar staff is so used to hearing "Aperol" that almost always means "spritz" and will: a) make a normal spritz and charge accordingly; b) make something that's called "spritz bianco" and is just white wine with water - a complete rip-off, considering that the most interesting ingredient is missing.

Paduan spritz, however, is an aperitif to be afraid of: as little as two of these might distract you from having any dinner at all and/or remembering where your home is. As Padua is the city of students, this is often an advantage and warm evenings will find the 4 central piazzas full of buzzing crowds, each person clutching a small plastic cup in their hand, filled with: 1/2 of Prosecco and 1/2 of Aperol and/or Bitter and/or Cynar and/or Campari and/or Gin. The True Paduan Spritz is said to contain each of these (!).

As much as the city authorities (namely those of Padua, but not only) try to impede the masses of spritz-lovers making noise and confusion in the centre, I'm personally not sure that they will have much luck. The appreciation of aperitifs means that all parties start earlier. Mostly, after a few drinks and a good dinner your usual person already feels so content that there isn't much need for more. Drinking full on until the morning (though it happens) is less common here. If the dinner is the centre of the evening, the people will drink aperitifs before, wine during and digestives afterwards, and this can already wrap the evening up quite nicely. Estonians won't believe this, but I've had full parties complete with meeting everyone, hanging around and being silly between 7 o'clock and midnight. Could I be getting old? Anyway, it's the same 5 hours as meeting at 10 pm and keeping on until 3 am.

el rasentin

El rasentin (in Vicenza; in Venice: el resentin) is something so veneto that the whole concept carries with itself an air of mountain huts, of timelessness and of old men hanging out in front of the bars, joking in thick dialect. It's something very provincial and minutely sophisticated at once. Simple, yet genius.

El rasentin cannot be bought in a bar. The drinker has to make it himself, right there on the spot. The old Venetian verb resentar means "to rinse". In fact, making a rasentin is simply getting a shot of grappa after finishing a coffee, using it to rinse the cup and drinking it. It can be any of the various tastes of grappa, but around here plum one is most common. If the cup is still hot and the strong espresso has left some precious foam inside it, the taste of grappa is accented in the best possible way, up to the point of (they say) being truly poetic.

Now this is what I call a lateral approach to coffee...

Altavilla

Each morning I take a regional train at 08:01 from Altavilla station to Verona Porta Nuova. Yesterday, however, I was still sitting on the platform at 09:30, waiting for a train that would take me to school. Each of the four train tracks had a stationary train sitting on it for at least half an hour, and all of them were towards east (Venice).

Maybe it was supposed to be a message?

cheesecake, vol 2

For the ones who still remember my controversial cheesecake story, and for Liina who needs a permanent place where to find it, here is the recipe to:

Lindy's wonderful cheesecake
(as made in Tartu in 2003, one spring night at 4 am)

The base:
- 200g of cocoa cookies, broken into a powder;
- 150g of butter, melted (or less of it, depends how much you need to make the cookie powder stick, but not too much)
- 2 teaspoons of sugar (optional)

Once the cookies have been reduced to powder either in a bowl (or the student version: in a plastic bag hammered with an empty wine bottle), add the melted butter, stir and place at the bottom of the mould, smooth on top (but not pressed).

The dough:
- 500g Philadelphia cream cheese (not mascarpone!)
- 200g or 1 and a 1/4 coffee cup full of sour cream (in Estonia) or panna (in Italy)
- 1 egg
- 1 small cup of sugar (according to taste, can be less)
- 6 tablespoons of flour + a little vanilla sugar

Mix well in the given order until even, then add to the top of the base.

Bake in an over of 150°C for 30 min (or until about to turn golden on top), then turn off the oven and let the cake sit for 10-15 min for with a slightly open door.

Optional: if preferred, add 75-100g of chocolate melted along with 2 tablespoons of milk on top.

This cake always turns out too small and/or is always finished too fast. It's best when cooled, especially after a night in the fridge. In fact, that one last tiny piece you find in the fridge the next day is the best of all.

The Mission

I'm currently going through a full-blown blast of eco-friendliness-madness triggered by a nice computer game called Global Warning. This attitude is not new - I've been through this before in various forms. I might calm down again and decide we're all going to die anyway, but each such spur leaves some habits into our household (see the post on M'illumino di meno from February).

Have I mentioned that Valdagno is an excellent place to be an environmentalist? It's an industrial area, so it's definitely not perfect, but the fact that this town was one of the first to start a compulsory recycling system and collect organic waste separately from the rest. I'm immensely proud about it. And equally sad because the municipality doesn't abide to their own rules - the cleaning ladies of the public schools obviously haven't been trained on the recycling system. I've seen them throwing empty bottles and paper all together in a non-recyclable tin.

It works thus: we have 4 garbage cans in our kitchen. There's the glass-and-plastic, the paper and the secco - everything that can't be recycled. And the star of it all is the umido, the organic waste. It's a brilliant thing to separate the food left-overs - it will turn into rich soil in a surprisingly short time, so it can be reused without much effort. The only issue is that the green umido-box needs to be taken out on the street on certain evenings so that the compost truck could take everything away during the night. In the winter it's two nights a week, so if we forget, we end up sitting on a stinking compost box for 3 days (lucky there's the balcony!). Umido is an integral part of our household chores and the one who gets to take it out on Monday and Thursday evenings doesn't have to do the dishes.

The international car-free day is 22 September. In Estonia it gets a decent amount of attention thanks to the work of the valiant Prussakov Bicycle Union . But around here the 22th September takes place significantly more often (how often, really? I've no idea...) as the Domenica Ecologica organised in the whole province at once. Using a car is officially banned inside the towns. Everyone else would get a fine for trying to take their car out of the parking lot, but our GPL-run little Peugeot passes just fine. GPL (liquified petroleum gas) costs exactly half the price of regular petroleum and pollutes significantly less. Riccardo and I drive at least 1,5 hours each day to Altavilla, so it does make a difference. But not every car can be adapted to run on GPL. Even worse, it might happen that the engine is not modified accordingly during the process that will cause ignition problems later. Though I have to say - if it works, it's great.

By the way - taking a bus is out of the question around here - one of the main socio-economical characteristics of the Veneto is that instead of a few big cities it has many small towns, no proper cities and no proper countryside either. Taking a bus from Valdagno to Vicenza is like driving through a 40km city - the bus has to stop on every corner. I take a train from the nearest station, 32km from home.

Then, of course, there is the shopping. We can sort our garbage as much as we want, but eventually it all comes down to what we buy. This is difficult. The eggs are all in plastic packaging - where did the carton go? The local milk-products centre has stopped producing milk in tetrapaks and introduced recyclable plastic bottles instead (yay!). We've started to buy big yogurt packages for eating at home, but for using them for a take-away breakfast the normal small ones are still the only solution. There is only one company ("Sì") that makes yogurt in glass packaging, but it's always sticky on the outside and altogether messy...

The supermarket we go to has introduced bio-degradable plastic bags (yay!), but they are hidden near the cash register and I don't think many people have discovered them yet. It would be such a good idea to price the normal plastic bags from 5 cents to 20 so that people would think about using the bags twice. I'm sure the supermarket wouldn't mind making a little more money... In the meantime I've still got to convince myself to reuse the once-used and weighed fruit-bags another time. Like so many things about saving, it seems a little grezzo - crude.

I'll check out an eco-shop in Verona on Monday to see if they have spray taps and any of those wonder soap nuts that can be used instead of washing powder. It's incredible how many of the usual household chemicals are simply bad for the health, not to mention downright dangerous. Even perfume, technically, should be avoided. But what's the alternative? I guess that's the reason why so many people just don't bother with taking care about what's healthy and what's not. It's too difficult to make sure what really is better and if there are any alternatives to the things people have come to be so used to.

OK, so there is the recycling, the domestic chemicals, the fuel, the excess packaging, the plastic bags. But there was one things i never thought about - indoor pollution from the synthetic carpets and particle board furniture. This is one of the things at which point people say - come on... And so do I - the thought that the nice cheap *KEA cupboard might give me allergies really does bother me. And there's nothing I can do with the moquette either - it came with the apartment. Frustration is still lasting, but I'm waiting to see if the new inhabitants of our home do their job well. As of today, we have:
- one red Kalachoe (Kalanchoe blossfeldiana);
- one beautiful rubber tree (Ficus elastica);
- one heartleaf-philodendron (Philodendron oxycondium)
- two ivy plants (Hedera helix)
- two tiny cactus plants.
We'll see if they can make me stop sneezing.

Now, all this might seem quite scary right now, but I can assure to be perfect normal in a few months and pour chlorine bleach down the tube like any other person. We'll see.