The week, in summary

There was a storm last Sunday and I like the picture I took of us, cozy inside, peering out as so much rain made a stream on our front lawn, a waterfall off the bark of our linden tree, and a mini geyser over the manhole cover in the street.

We visited Princess Auto’s new location on Monday for fun. It was a grey day. It’s an unfamiliar store. We took note of their inventory and brought home a catalogue, tested their coffee and bought a few things…

Tuesday I ran school-related errands with the kids and did not take a single picture of anything. Instead there’s an account of our mall visit in receipts: eight stores in two hours. On Wednesday there were meetings with teachers, as is customary before the school year starts. It’s a common topic of conversation… the fact that there are parent-teacher meetings and that they occur before the start of school. My husband has repeated it often: meeting with students before classes is a good thing! It makes the first day of school less nerve-wracking! I saw this dead golden moth on the freshly-waxed hallway floor and thought it was pretty.

Thursday was a first day for high school students, and Enzo missed our daughter. I’d try to catch him moping, but he’d feign alertness….

I sat beside him long enough, pretending to scroll, till he finally rested, just a bit.

Then it was Friday and everyone went to school.

I walked the dog and came home to discover a power outage. So I left home and went to the library downtown to look at books. I spent time in the cookbook section (some covers are so pretty!)…

… before finding a window seat a getting some reading done. My view included preparations for the Winnipeg Biz’s Food Truck Wars (here). Then home!

Enjoying

Listening to the “How to Be a Better Human” podcast, I liked what guest Hrikishesh Hirway said about creative pursuits:
“I talked myself out of doing the thing that I loved for many, many years, and I guess at a certain point, I just felt like that was one kind of unhappiness - not making stuff - and I preferred the unhappiness of making stuff. It was a matter of recognizing how much of myself was missing at a certain point. I felt like to be complete, I needed to be engaged with the part of myself that wrote songs, that made music, that was personal, and that I could really pour all of myself into.” (Here)
An informative website about the war in Ukraine is not enjoyment, but I found it very enlightening. Up until now the idea of drone warfare has been very abstract. (Here, via)
This video by Elle Cordova was a delight to watch (and re-watch)!

Cooking

Saturday morning, I plan the week’s menu. Yesterday, the dog wanted to bark at cars stopping for an open house. And there was a cookbook I brought home from Friday… so part of menu planning looked like this:

The cookbook is Milk Street Backroads Italy: Finding Italy’s Forgotten Recipes (published in 2025, see here). Flipping through the pages, I read this section titled “The pope’s pasta carbonara”:

We’re talking about pasta alla papalina, which roughly translates as pasta for the pope. Now almost 100 years old, it has become a classic - if little known - Roman pasta. As the story goes, during the early 1930s then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli asked Ceseretto Simmi, a restaurateur with several eateries near the Vatican, if he could prepare a lighter, more sophisticated version of the traditional Roman carbonara.
Carbonara - rich with guanciale and sharp pecorino Romano cheese - was considered a brash dish. “So my grandfather went to my grandmother and said, ‘Make carbonara, but use prosciutto instead of guanciale and Parmesan instead of pecorino,” said Simmi’s granddaughter, Elizabetta Simmi, who now has her own restaurant near the Vatican. And yes, pasta alla papalina is on the menu. “The cardinal suggested it and my grandfather created it, a softer carbonara.”
It worked because both the cheese and meat were lighter, more nuanced options, which toned down the intensity of the carbonara. (P 162-3)

This little story provides a neat, almost folkloric, distinction between the kinds of carbonara we’ve eaten… the gentler, parmesan-bacon kind I tend to make (with Kenji Lopez-Alt’s blessing, here on Youtube) versus the authentic, almost fiery, guanciale-pecorino we got to try.

If there is a meal that universally unites the family, it is definitely pasta-based. Last Sunday I made Joshua McFadden’s “Lamb Ragu with Carrots and Green Garlic” (but with regular garlic… recipe here) and Christian, not finding ground lamb at the usual places he shops, stopped in at Alsham Food Market (Instagram) where the butcher ground it on demand. The quality of this one ingredient made this an outstanding ragù…