Checking In ~ End of Summer 2025

Yesterday I wrote my children asking if they remembered where they were forty years ago on that day…    We all were en route to Galveston, Texas, to celebrate the first wedding in our family—eldest daughter to the treasure she met while both were in the Coast Guard in Seattle…

Today the pair is in Seattle, celebrating forty years. Bill and I sang Happy Anniversary to them this morning…they were out on a whale-watching boat.

In these forty years while establishing contributing lives for themselves, the two have given the world four exemplary sons (all engineers, like their father), and four enchanting grandchildren…

But me, today, I’m taking stock another way.

Last night (I’m in season six of “Bosch”) I finished knitting the blanket for my granddaughter Deborah’s baby due in October. Now I must block it—not fond of that, but it does give the wool its best shape.

Happy that it’s done, and happy that I’ve now returned to knitting on the Fair Isle Christmas blanket—that’s a one-or-two-year project, but so beautiful and fun. More about it anon.

Major major is that I’m back in the novel-writing business…just to report that something quite extraordinary has happened (or so it seems to me). It’s as though my muse kicked me in the pants, boosting me up to a higher level. Actually, she grabbed hold of Bill’s gift for editing, his sense of flow, glommed it onto me…

So I’m anxious to get back to’t.

But first I want to check in…

So you’ll appreciate the daily rounds, tell you the critter in my center raised bed in the back garden is thumbing its nose at me (could a mole do that?). Lots of deep holes, pushed up soil. Small tunnels so I think it’s a mole, but could be a baby gopher. Damn. Sonar pulsing isn’t working.

I’ll try the garlic capsules.

Much more important news is that a granddaughter and her partner are in Venice—one of his films is in the Venice International Film Festival…fantastic. What excites me particularly about their being in Venice is that I HOPE AND HOPE THEY WILL GO OUT TO TORCELLO.

Perchance have you been to the island of Torcello?

After you’ve seen and tasted all the Venetian essentials, taking a vaporetto to Torcello—about an hour—is a beautiful, singular adventure.

Soon after you get off the vaporetto you come to a Harry’s Bar outpost—Locanda Cipriani—it’s apparently no longer connected to the august Venetian family, but notes say it’s still “well worth” the visit.

I had lunch there the summer of 1954…tasted my first real risotto. It was far soupier than any I’d known. I was surprised that I was given a very large soup spoon for my rice dish. I’ve never made a risotto since that I haven’t thought of my Torcello risotto.

It was late August, and when I finished my dessert, I went out into the garden—the restaurant doors opened wide upon it. An old gardener was digging there. As my mother’s sous-gardener from girlhood, I asked him a few questions about the vegetables (had a smattering of Italian after my summer in Rapallo). He smiled, then laughed in a kind of croak, said all the vegetables in the restaurant came from that garden—and, waving an arm around him–everything was so good because the garden was planted on an old cemetery.

Young and tender, I swallowed, laughed, too.

Tottering from the surprise of that and the surprise of my soupy risotto, I walked out the garden and turned right, soon coming to the Chiesa di Santa Fosca…a small round church founded in 639 A.D. and rebuilt in the twelfth century. As I stood quietly inside the small chapel, I was uncommonly moved —moreso than by most any of the churches I’d been in in Italy and France. Somehow the small proportions wrapped comfortingly around me…I wondered how many who had stood where I stood were now coming back as fresh vegetables…

Then out the door and on to a much larger church, the Basilica Santa Maria Assunta. Then back to the vaporetto and a stop in Burano, where every house was painted a different color, and  another vaporetto that stopped in Murano, to see the famous glass blowing. I bought a small hand-blown animal…what happened to it, I wonder?

I hope my granddaughter and friend are doing this now!

About the Venetian risotto. No time for a detailed recipe, my regrets. But my friend H. F. Bruning Jr.* wrote a superb book, Venetian Cooking (200 Authentic Recipes Adapted for American Cooks). You might want to follow your usual risotto recipe letting Buzz’s proportions guide you, adding the rice to the sautéed mushrooms…or make a simple risotto without mushrooms.

Risoto coi Funghetti (Risotto di Funghetti…Rice with Mushrooms)
For 4 servings:
1 pound mushrooms (cut in inch-size pieces, browned in olive oil)
1-1/3 cups risotto** rice
5 cups “weak beef” or “moderate chicken” broth
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

A happy girl here. Hope this finds you happy, too.

Happy Labor Day!

*H.F. Bruning, Jr. and Cav. Umberto Bullo, Venetian Cooking, 1973. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. New York.
** Carnaroli is considered the best… the finest Arborio next…then Vialone or a domestic short-grain rice.