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…

Walking the dog

This week, I was back to dog-walking duty since the school year began. The kids showed me the mushrooms they found on walks with Christian…

Catching those amber beads took a minute or two… time enough for a brief nap…

They found a monarch butterfly chrysalis too.

By myself, I try to capture the seasonal change…

Happy Sunday!

You really should go to Thermea in the rain. You might think it’s a dreary day, your body might shudder with the thought of exposing skin, but I urge you, don’t listen to it. Instead, take your bathing suit, and rent a cotton robe, pay the fee and observe the hush, go in with your beloved and undress at your locker. It doesn’t matter if you’ve shaved or not, if your flabs feel flabby, or your belly distended from pizza, you’re not there to impress anyone. Put your flip flops on, take your towel, pass the bathrobe belt through the loops and meet your friend on the other side.

Find the steam room with the orange scent… it’s become a habit now, the place where you start, and sit on the slippery stone slab and notice the heat work its way in. It’s an osmosis operating on your skin. Notice how your head begins to sweat while you quickly forget your reluctance to come at all. The steam might hiss, and random drops fall, so now you can think of your breath and find a meditation in its steadiness.

Take the salt scrub afterwards, pretend you’re good at self-massage, notice how your feet appreciate it. Then wash it all away like a layer of sluff. Then, after all that, you might not be brave enough for the pool with the coldest water, maybe you’ll be fine with temperate instead. And if you followed the instructions like I said, it’s raining outside and it doesn’t matter, because your body is in a pool and your head is already wet. You’ll get to notice the greenery everywhere, the way the rain makes it a saturated colour, and the stones will shine with tones of pink and yellow, and maybe you’ll notice that grey speaker stone where the soft music floating in the air comes from.

You must also take in the Aufguss announced with the gong. They have their own mini soundtrack there in the sauna, and towel-wielding people dance while scent-infused snowballs sizzle and fill your nose and heat is manipulated to rush over your skin. Breathe it all in.

And now because you’re full of heat, you can tackle that coldest of pools, grit your teeth and wade all the way in. Your body is strong, you are so lucky. Revel in the shock of extremes.

You really should go when it rains because then when you sit awhile to relax, you can choose those vacant hammock chairs just under the eaves, and sway to the rhythm of that moment and gaze at the variety of green shapes. You can feel the air and see the wind, you can smell that fresh smell or else get the wafting of smoke from the fireplace. Hopefully, you’re fine enough just to be.

There’s another cycle left before you leave… You get to pick the variation on the theme. You get to duck in for another glass of Sacred Blend, one third chilled or else too hot. You can notice when you get impatient with the heat, or when you’d like to leave the cold for heat again and practice being fine with the present moment.

I’ve written all this, now and maybe you’ll want to go, but it’s better when you sign in without any expectation. You’ll probably feel softer skin afterward, you’ll probably notice your body more relaxed. But if I say it now, I don’t want you to look for it. I don’t want you to go waiting for the effect like a promise. And maybe it’s not possible to arrange to go when it’s raining without thunder, or when the drops are falling at a perfect amount in a nice downward slant. Maybe it’s winter, or fall, maybe there’s no green at all. But that shouldn’t deter you. In the winter, your body craves the warmth, and gradually expands to encompass it all, and you notice you’re not so afraid of the chill anymore… So go in winter too. Repeat the experience in every season with every variable, and you’ll soon see the comfort in routine, the way one aspect stands out and then how wonderful it is to have the body you have, the toes, the knees, the shape and the drape of your skin, and all of it there, wonderfully supporting a little you inside.