(via dan-and-his-hormones)
You there, stop. Put the down the damn gelato.
When people come to Italy, they tend to lose themselves to food. Pana cotta, and pasta, and pizza—Italy’s got something of a reputation for having some of the most fantastic food in the world. It’s all quite true; the food is phenomenal. There are Panini shops on top of Panini shops. Swarthy kebab men jockey for your attention with innocuous offerings of shaved shawarma. Walking down the street can also be ridiculously dangerous. If it’s not the smells wafting from the bakery, it’s the jocular waiter who flirts with any and everyone that passes by, imploring them to try his cannoli (his words, not mine.)
As a student studying abroad, you can’t treat every day like it’s a vacation. The restaurants here all know we have a bit of cash to spend. They’re banking upon us fulfilling the gastronomic fantasies that the Olive Garden put into our heads but could never deliver. If left unchecked the money will run out. The money will run out and you’ll get fat.
“But Charles,” You might be say in exasperation. “How will ever will I survive in this strange and wonderful city without delicious sustenance?”
Fear not, dear reader, for this is a recipe post. I present to you my Roasted Romanesque Empire:
Things You’ll Need:
4 Carrots, diced roughly
3 Medium-sized Potatoes, cubed
1 Medium-sized Eggplant, cubed
2 Medium-sized zucchini, cubed
1 Romanesque broccoli, chopped—preserving florets
5 gloves of garlic, left whole in skin
¼ cup olive oil
2 tablespoons dried garlic
Salt & pepper to taste (go heavy here, we’re working with root vegetables)
Roastable root vegetables are the basis of this simple and cheap dish. I used carrots, potatoes, zucchini, and eggplant this time around but you can use literally anything that strikes your fancy. I highly recommend carrots for their natural sweetness and penchant for caramelization. Of course, the recipe wouldn’t be complete without a Romanesque broccoli—so prioritize is (or substitute in regular broccoli/cauliflower and think of another clever name.)
The directions are simple.
1.) Preheat your oven to 475 degrees F (245 degrees C). Get it hot.
2.) Mix your olive oil and assorted seasonings in a large roasting pan. Taste the mixture. You want it to be saltier and more pungent than you’d normally want your food to taste—again remember, we’re working with root vegetables here that can take quite a bit of seasoning.
3.) Dice/cube your vegetables appropriately. In order to ensure that they cook evenly be sure that you cut your vegetables into relatively similar sizes .
4.) Everybody in the pool. Dump everything in the pan, spread evenly and mix. Mix. You want each cubed chunk of eggplant, potato, carrot, and broccoli to be coated in a think, textured layer of olive oil salt, pepper, and garlic.
5.) Slide the pan into the oven and let it do its thing for 40 minutes, stopping to stir them once or twice every 15 minutes. DO NOT over-worry the pan during cooking. Far too often people are curious to see how their food is doing, and they give in to the temptation to open up the oven door and poke around. Don’t be that guy. Take a bath. Go for a short walk. Do anything. But don’t worry the veggies.
6.) Done! I advise you let them cool a bit before consuming, particularly the whole cloves of garlic. You’ll find that they’ve turned to a mellow, earthy garlic paste in their skins which are excellent spread on toast to eaten whole.
Enjoy.
Welcome to the blog-folio of one @Charles Pulliam-Moore. (Twitter)
I’m a fan of abstract minimalism. Too often words get in the way—and as you can see nothing’s titled, tagged, or really differentiated by anything but an icon on the homepage. As much of a fan of serendipitous browsing as I am, I understand that you might not want to click through each icon, I’ve been doing some minor redesigns around the site in order to make it more navigable.
If you’re looking for something in particular—my travel writing for instance—simply click on one of the preset categories provided here:
Journalist | Witticist | Tech Fetishist | Travel Blogger | Photographer | Videographer
The links listed will grow and change over time, so be sure to come back and check it out. Thanks for reading.
In the US, culture is one of our larger exports. Our movies, our people, our music—you can easily find them all virtually anywhere you travel in the world. This summer saw a number of smash musical hits hailing from the U.S. whose popularity went global: Lights, Payphone, and Call Me Maybe to name a few.
Unsurprisingly, the cultural osmosis that diffuses our various flavors of pop music across the globe does not work both ways. I couldn’t understand why the Italian clubs here thought that playing dubstep Bieber megamixes (circa 2010) until I heard Il Pulcino Pio.
There are certain songs, like Baby for instance, that are popular and catchy. Like VD. You don’t want to like them, and in truth you’re rather apathetic. Still though, their constant presence in your life—in YouTube videos, on the radio—it drives you insane. Il Pulcino Pio is Italy’s Baby.
Imagine an updated Old MacDonald mixed with a fair amount of autotune.
![It’s 2:47 AM when I come to my senses. I’m not waking up really, but rather my reality slides back into focus. On some level, I know that I’ve been walking for hours. I’m standing in the middle of a large road trying to make sense of a monstrous sign pointing in eight different directions. I don’t know where I am, or how I got there, or where I need to get to. The streets are empty save for a muted orange light and a muffled narration of A Clash of Kings by Roy Dotrice emanating from the iPod my pocket.
My headphones are gone, my shirt is torn at the hem, and despite the pervasive humidity that has persisted well into the night, I’m wearing a cable knit, oversized scarf from H&M with the price tags still intact. I didn’t leave the house with this, I think. I have a weary, confused chuckle at myself and look around in earnest for a cab. There are no cabs.
This..this is an emergency, I conclude, fumbling for my pockets. This is an emergency and I should call the police. My clumsy fingers paw at my pockets right and left, front and back, upper, lower, inner. No phone. The phone I’d snapped photos with that morning. The phone my best friend had insisted I take as a going away gift. My phone was gone.
I sat down in the middle of the sliver of a road island, leaned against the monstrous sign, and considered crying.
It’s often difficult to trace back to the source of one’s problems. Usually, the path to finding one’s self drunk in the middle of a mini-Florentine highway late Saturday night is full of Roadtrip style shenanigans and plot twists. This was not the case here. All of my troubles began with a man named Tom.
In a “previous life” Tom had been an investment banker. Or a Wall Street analyst. He might have been a consultant of some sort; I don’t really remember. He’d quit his job in search of his “greater truth.” The only way to do that, he explained, was to throw himself into unfamiliar—if scenic—settings.
“I got into the habit of taking profile pictures of myself doing complicated yoga moves in odd places,” he chuckled, flipping through a few photos on his phone. “It keeps me grounded.”
Tom was in his mid thirties, a little shy of 5’9’’ and baked to a shade of bronze that spoke of his many hours wandering around the many cities of his travels. He smiled a lot, and laughed at my jokes. And honestly?—I thought Tom was hot. More than that though, in my head I’d cast Tom as my swarthy American introduction to a bohemian life of Florentine adventure.
“I’ve been here a few days already,” he told me. “I’m about to leave but dude—there’s so much to see. I’ve got to show you.”
It was like he was reading my mind. There was so much to see. He did have to show me. Tom was mysterious, and transient, and had magically blown into my life quite randomly. He was as knowledgeable as he was curious, and despite my barely knowing him found him to be intensely fascinating.
Transfixed by him as I was, I should have recognized the signs.
Tom had all of the common makings of a manic pixie dream girl (or man in this case.) MPDGs, for the unfamiliar:
Film critic Nathan Rabin, who coined the term after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), describes the MPDG as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”[1]
His beard and fondness for beer made Tom decidedly non-pixie-ish to the naked eye, but his personality was nothing but frenetic energy.
We criss-crossed the Arno, snapping photos from atop the Ponte Vecchio. We dug through off-season summerwear at the H&M. We drank. We drank. We bought watery sangria from a woman in the Plazza de la Signiora and single Euro tallboys from the European answer to the American dollar store.
“Exploring’s the only way you can really find who you are, you know?” If Tom were a pull-string doll with a set of phrases, this would be the kind of thing he’d say. “You’ve got to seize the day with your soul. Otherwise it’ll get away.” Or “We’ve all got a path to follow but so many of us are content to be led astray.”
As the day went on I found myself growing more and more…annoyed with Tom. He was still charming, no doubt, but his outlook on life seemed so…crunchy, so granola, so immature. “Believe in this, follow your heart to that.” He was a modern-day bard wandering the world and I was a jet-lagged cynic from the east coast.
We ended up Kikuya, a phonetically Japanese, aesthetically English pub on the far side of the river after the sun had gone down. Tom was extolling the rejuvenative benefits of deep-breath meditation over our third fourth pints of ale. I was bored. And drunk. I made a pass at Tom. He didn’t take it so well. Words were exchanged, fists were not. And that’s the last thing I have a clear recollection of before coming to wandering down an empty street on the other side of town at three in the morning.
“Yeah man—you had some things to say. And I admit it, I was a bit of a flirt.” Tom would inform me with a nonchalant chuckle a few days later over Skype. He’d since taken a train to Rome in to catch a plane to Budapest. “I called you some things, you called me some things. And then the bartender kicked us out. It was awesome.”
Right. ‘Awesome.’ True to his nature, Tom had retrospectively taken the entire ordeal in stride and saw it as yet another twist around the winding riverbend of his life. “I woke up outside surrounded by gypsies. It was unreal! I still had my wallet and stuff though, so you know—win.”
I wanted to be mad at Tom. He hadn’t really done anything wrong, but I wanted to blame him for letting me lose myself in his romantic attitude towards life. I wanted to blame him for the endless cheap alcohol that one can easily find in the city. More than anything else though, I wanted to blame him for my phone. I loved that fucking phone.
“It’ll show up, dude.” He promised. “Sometimes our possessions just need to take vacations of their own from us. If we’re meant to have them, they always come back.”
Shut up, Tom.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maixyl4dxZ1qa79wmo1_500.png)
It’s 2:47 AM when I come to my senses. I’m not waking up really, but rather my reality slides back into focus. On some level, I know that I’ve been walking for hours. I’m standing in the middle of a large road trying to make sense of a monstrous sign pointing in eight different directions. I don’t know where I am, or how I got there, or where I need to get to. The streets are empty save for a muted orange light and a muffled narration of A Clash of Kings by Roy Dotrice emanating from the iPod my pocket.
My headphones are gone, my shirt is torn at the hem, and despite the pervasive humidity that has persisted well into the night, I’m wearing a cable knit, oversized scarf from H&M with the price tags still intact. I didn’t leave the house with this, I think. I have a weary, confused chuckle at myself and look around in earnest for a cab. There are no cabs.
This..this is an emergency, I conclude, fumbling for my pockets. This is an emergency and I should call the police. My clumsy fingers paw at my pockets right and left, front and back, upper, lower, inner. No phone. The phone I’d snapped photos with that morning. The phone my best friend had insisted I take as a going away gift. My phone was gone.
I sat down in the middle of the sliver of a road island, leaned against the monstrous sign, and considered crying.
It’s often difficult to trace back to the source of one’s problems. Usually, the path to finding one’s self drunk in the middle of a mini-Florentine highway late Saturday night is full of Roadtrip style shenanigans and plot twists. This was not the case here. All of my troubles began with a man named Tom.
In a “previous life” Tom had been an investment banker. Or a Wall Street analyst. He might have been a consultant of some sort; I don’t really remember. He’d quit his job in search of his “greater truth.” The only way to do that, he explained, was to throw himself into unfamiliar—if scenic—settings.
“I got into the habit of taking profile pictures of myself doing complicated yoga moves in odd places,” he chuckled, flipping through a few photos on his phone. “It keeps me grounded.”
Tom was in his mid thirties, a little shy of 5’9’’ and baked to a shade of bronze that spoke of his many hours wandering around the many cities of his travels. He smiled a lot, and laughed at my jokes. And honestly?—I thought Tom was hot. More than that though, in my head I’d cast Tom as my swarthy American introduction to a bohemian life of Florentine adventure.
“I’ve been here a few days already,” he told me. “I’m about to leave but dude—there’s so much to see. I’ve got to show you.”
It was like he was reading my mind. There was so much to see. He did have to show me. Tom was mysterious, and transient, and had magically blown into my life quite randomly. He was as knowledgeable as he was curious, and despite my barely knowing him found him to be intensely fascinating.
Transfixed by him as I was, I should have recognized the signs.
Tom had all of the common makings of a manic pixie dream girl (or man in this case.) MPDGs, for the unfamiliar:
Film critic Nathan Rabin, who coined the term after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), describes the MPDG as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”[1]
His beard and fondness for beer made Tom decidedly non-pixie-ish to the naked eye, but his personality was nothing but frenetic energy.
We criss-crossed the Arno, snapping photos from atop the Ponte Vecchio. We dug through off-season summerwear at the H&M. We drank. We drank. We bought watery sangria from a woman in the Plazza de la Signiora and single Euro tallboys from the European answer to the American dollar store.
“Exploring’s the only way you can really find who you are, you know?” If Tom were a pull-string doll with a set of phrases, this would be the kind of thing he’d say. “You’ve got to seize the day with your soul. Otherwise it’ll get away.” Or “We’ve all got a path to follow but so many of us are content to be led astray.”
As the day went on I found myself growing more and more…annoyed with Tom. He was still charming, no doubt, but his outlook on life seemed so…crunchy, so granola, so immature. “Believe in this, follow your heart to that.” He was a modern-day bard wandering the world and I was a jet-lagged cynic from the east coast.
We ended up Kikuya, a phonetically Japanese, aesthetically English pub on the far side of the river after the sun had gone down. Tom was extolling the rejuvenative benefits of deep-breath meditation over our third fourth pints of ale. I was bored. And drunk. I made a pass at Tom. He didn’t take it so well. Words were exchanged, fists were not. And that’s the last thing I have a clear recollection of before coming to wandering down an empty street on the other side of town at three in the morning.
“Yeah man—you had some things to say. And I admit it, I was a bit of a flirt.” Tom would inform me with a nonchalant chuckle a few days later over Skype. He’d since taken a train to Rome in to catch a plane to Budapest. “I called you some things, you called me some things. And then the bartender kicked us out. It was awesome.”
Right. ‘Awesome.’ True to his nature, Tom had retrospectively taken the entire ordeal in stride and saw it as yet another twist around the winding riverbend of his life. “I woke up outside surrounded by gypsies. It was unreal! I still had my wallet and stuff though, so you know—win.”
I wanted to be mad at Tom. He hadn’t really done anything wrong, but I wanted to blame him for letting me lose myself in his romantic attitude towards life. I wanted to blame him for the endless cheap alcohol that one can easily find in the city. More than anything else though, I wanted to blame him for my phone. I loved that fucking phone.
“It’ll show up, dude.” He promised. “Sometimes our possessions just need to take vacations of their own from us. If we’re meant to have them, they always come back.”
Shut up, Tom.
Journalist Lucy Morgan with video camera and phone. 1985.
This woman is kiling it.
(via thisistheverge)
Look what I found at the grocery store. #conad #firenze #studyabroad (Taken with Instagram at Conad Supermercato)
Seat belts prohobited. #Firenze #studyabroad (Taken with Instagram at Via San Zanobi 37)
One of the things I’ve come to love most about living in Florence—more than the pizza, more than the Vespas, more than the weather—is Italian radio’s penchant for highlighting underrated American artists. Particularly artists of color.
Between walking through the grocery stores and working out at the gym I’ve overheard Solange Knowles, Kelly Rowland, and most recently Little Jackie played in a rotation far heavier than I suspect they’d ever get back in the States.
Don’t get me wrong, the airwaves here are just as saturated with your standard American fare from Bieber to Jepsen. Still though, it would sound as if the Italians are far more willing to sample our non-Canadian imported, North American tunes.
The policemen and women of #Firenze are some fashionable mofos. #studyabroad (Taken with Instagram at Piazza del Duomo)
Note to self: getting married in #Firenze is a bit of a cliche. #studyabroad (Taken with Instagram at Piazza della Signoria)
I made it into Florence from Rome around 7PM. I was quite pleased with myself. I’d managed to navigate my way through the Italian countryside and end up smack dab in the middle of Florence, my home for the next four months. Sloughing my two bags from the ever-heady platforms of the train station, I bee-lined for the nearest payphone. I was going to call my Italian contact, get the keys to my new flat, move into said flat and begin living the good life.
“I’m sorry,” Petra’s pleasant recorded message intoned. “The Florence & Abroad office is closed for the week. Our normal business hours are Monday through Friday from 8AM to 5PM. Have a nice day.”
I was floored.
Travelling abroad, I’d unconsciously developed a very self-centered sense of being. I’m catching busses. My train got in a few minutes late. I’m freaking exhausted and need a place to stay.
All of my energy for the past few days had been so oriented towards finding my new home that I hadn’t really stopped to factor in anyone else’s schedule. I’d worked myself into the notion that my arrival to Florence would warrant some type of special treatment.
Why wouldn’t the travel office be open at seven in the evening? Surely someone would be waiting up for me. Surely someone was waiting, worried that I’d be lost and alone and homeless and be accosted by ruffian gypsies wandering the Florentine streets all by my lonesome.
This “me-centricity”, in addition to being annoying to any lookers on, was downright irrational. As the sun set and I fumed myself senseless, it became obvious that I would need to find a place to stay for the night.
“Dove si trova un ostello piu viccino?” I read from my Frommer’s pocket guide to a bored looking cab driver in awful Italian. Where could I find a hostel close by?
The New Ostel, I discovered, was about 15 minutes away on foot, tucked into a dusty corner of Via Jacopo not too far from the train station. The hostel’s aesthetic was an odd fusion of Japanese karaoke lounge and sleepy American bread and breakfast. Squash lounge chairs crowded the outdoor patio leading up to a main entrance that could only be described as Shinto in design.
The proprietors, a young Italian-infused Japanese family, catered to the needs of young weary travellers in a very no-nonsense way. “20 euros for the night gets you a bed, two beers, and access to the wi-fi. We don’t have bug spray.”
They did have a bed though, and sheets, and a pillow, and a place for me to recharge my dead gadgets and my battered body. Despite my initial despair at not having entered Florence in the most together of ways, I found comfort in my shared bedroom at New Ostel. “It’s nice here, Deb.” I sighed to a close friend over Skype after I’d unpacked and wandered around a bit. “ The weather’s gorgeous and the wine’s cheaper than water.”
That last joke elicited a warm chuckle from a sun-worn, bearded blonde man sitting on one of the squashed couches across from me on the hostel’s wifi-enabled patio. “Amen, brother.” He agreed in unmistakably American English.
That’s how I met Tom. It’s also how my first weekend in Florence got a little…hostile.
Asserting my culinary dominance in our kitchen. #sangria #shepardspie #firenze #studyabroad (Taken with Instagram at Il Giardino Di Barbano)
Picturesque. #firenze (Taken with Instagram at Basilica di Santa Maria Novella)
