got some things done

[ritaxis]

I finished transcribing chapter sixteen of The Donor-- it will go up tomorrow.
I finished the story "Seven Little Men." I'll polish it down below 4.5K probably. I need to do an orgy of sending stories out.
I wrote today's, yesterday's, and tomorrow's bits for Bella and Chain. Besides the fact that it's almost midnight, the reason I'm not doing any posting until the morning is that I need to drastically fix bits in Bella and Chain and I want to be fresh for that.

We went to visit the animal shelter, I don't know why, and had an immense lunch at La Bruschetta in Felton. They don't call it La Bruschetta for nothing. They have a separate menu for bruschetta. They make a big deal of being Sicilian but the food was mostly not really unfamiliar. Though the nice fellow's sandwich had "ammogliu" sauce on it. That appears to be a typo for something that ends with an o but I am no wiser for googling other than that. Last week we went to a restaurant with cuisine from Puglia, where they seem to live on eggs and parsley.

Okay, here's a question for Anna or Anna -- in restaurants in Italy, do they try to grate cheese and crack pepper on every single plate anybody orders? With immense graters and grinders?

Or is that a USian Italian restaurant thing?

So I promised Nicky Browne or is it Matthews that I'd keep her month of short stories project company with two a week. Thursday and Monday. I am cheating this coming Monday with a piece that's half finished. Then I need six more ideas and while ideas are easy to come by not many of them are manageable as shorts.

And I ordered the soundtrack of "Everything is Il;luminated" for Gloria, who wanted to see the movie twice (we did), and whose taste in music appears to be as wide ranging as mine: but when I hit on KPIG she asks me to turn it up loud.

Comments

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Ammogliu sounds like the local (dialect) spelling of the word, and ammoglio a half-italianized version. I suspect that the wholly italianized version would be "ammollo", which normally means soaking (of clothes). In a culinary context, I would guess something like marinade. Beyond this I don't know, because it's the first time I hear the word -- I don't know southern dialects much.

You don't get waiters putting pepper or cheese in your food at the table in Italy: I think it would be greeted with some bogglement... You get salt and pepper on the table, and if you're eating pasta you also get a bowl of grated cheese with a spoon in it. The pepper is sometimes in a peppermill, but it's a normal-sized one. The gigantic peppermill wielded by the waiter is not US speciality though: it's universal here in Ireland too (and I'm pretty sure in Britain). I've never seen the giant cheese grater: that may indeed be a US invention :-)

(I think The Other Anna is still somewhat Internet-deprived in London, but this should be solved once she moves into a new flat. At the moment she's relying on Starbucks and their wi-fi...)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

The waiter did the giant pepper mill thing in an Italian restaurant in Swansea recently, so it seems to be current in Wales. On the other hand, I don't remember them doing it in the Italian restaurant in Copenhagen. That one seemed to be staffed by real Italian speaking Italians, so I presume was more authentically Italian.

P.S. I've seen you commenting on other people's LJs, but I have only belatedly realised who you are. Sorry. I have now added you to my friend's. I hope that's OK?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

All the local Italian restaurants are owned or at least cheffed and headwaitered by Italian immigrants, mostly as Anna FDD explained to me a while back, from Northern Italy. But they have entered into a California restaurant scene, and I'm sure they do things which are current here but not at home, besides the cheese thing and the pepper thing. They didn't offer to put cheese on the nice fellow's sandwich, at least: just his salad.

One thing they all do that I know isn't Italian is Cesar salad: that's from Tijuana originally (and Tijuana is almost California).