not the popular view I know

Yes: Bushfires are tragic. Yes: Many have died in horrible ways and this is sad and sickening. Yes: It will take a lot for these communities to rebuild.

HOWEVER.

Carl and Lisa from some morning breakfast news show are on the TV at 9.15pm with hoards of screaming crowds like they're at some fucking Coldplay gig, yelling and screaming and doing the two fingered salutes to the cameras.

$45 million has been raised. That's right, millions of dollars. Many, many millions. For families who have insurance (or should have). And businesses who have insurance (or should have). And services, such as schools, that will have government support. That is why I very happily pay tax.

Thousands starve in Africa. Millions are washed way by floods in the sub-continent or squasedy by oriental earthquakes. Do people give a shit??? Hell no! And I can understand that these people need food and clothing and shelter now, and that this needs to be provided. But 45 million worth?

Look around you people. The Red Cross has enough for this. Give to the homeless guy near your work, or the family in another country who have nothing to lose in the first place. Or give blood or something practical. No amount of money will bring back the dead, which is the real tragedy here.

I have a fold-out couch that any (small-ish) family is welcome to until their house is ready to move back into. I make a mean pasta sauce and the liquor cabinet is fully stocked. Just let me know.

Outrageous I know!

PS: There are many of you who have enquired about my well-being either through this blog, text, phone and email. I thank you all, particularly Marilla, who as I have mentioned previously, rocks! and enquired on this site. So I am glad to be able to tell you that the fires are a good two days drive from my house. May it always be so.

tertius. carthage and cannelloni

greetings all rome weekers! today we see the fall of Carthage and some vegetarian delights. hhmmm... which first? well you've sat through the history first so far, so let's eat!

when my father visited for dinner the other night i made vegetarian cannelloni. very simple, but tasty and doing better on the health stakes than my previous history week posts.

First up get yourself a bunch of spinach and set it in a sink of cool water to get clean. meanwhile finely chop an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic and fry them off in a little oil.

remove the spinach from the water, remove the ends of the stems and then finely slice the spinach. add to the pan with, putting the sliced stalks in first and then the leaves. there should be enough water on the leaves that it will steam the spinach for you.
once the spinach is cooked bring it off the heat and allow to cool before crumbling about 500g of ricotta cheese into it and seasoning.


and mixing it all together well. this is the filling for your cannelloni. simple fill a piping bag, but leave out the tip and pipe this filling into the pasta tubes.

lay the filled pasta tubes in a baking tray and cover with a sauce made by frying some garlic and then adding pureed tinned tomatoes that have been reduced to a thick sauce. then top with a bechamel, just like a lasagna. to make bechamel melt a large knob of butter in a saucepan. add enough plain flour to make a thick paste. cook this until it becomes a deep golden colour (this makes sure that the flour is fully cooked). then add warm milk and thicken to make the quantity/thickness of the sauce you desire. you may need to whisk it a bit to get rid of lumps. then melt in some grated parmesan cheese.

so you have filled pasta shells, covered by tomato sauce, covered by white sauce. cover with tin foil and cook in a 180 degree oven for about 30 minutes or until the pasta is cooked through. remove the foil and return to the oven for about 10 minutes to brown.

i was going to take some pictures of the left overs the next day when the light was better. but we ate it all!!!

has all that talk whetted your appetite for some history? good 'o. let's talk about Carthage.

As you’d expect the history of Carthage is a long and involved one – the histories of cities normally are. Carthage has an almost mystical feel to it. It rose, it fell, it rose, it fell. Its general rode an elephant. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

The North African city was originally founded by the Phoenicians, probably sometime in the ninth century BC. For many centuries Carthage was a successful, oligarchic city. Its religion, as was usual at the time, was a polytheic one, with a mix of Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Egyptian deities.

Slowly Carthage expanded, and at one point or another, its empire included parts of the north African coastline, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and bits of southern Spain. Needless to say this caused a few barnies with the locals, and wannabe rulers. Squabbles with the Greeks and the Sicilians were fairly much common place, but 264 BC marked the first of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. There were three Punic Wars all up, most widely known for the general Hannibal who crossed over the Alps to Italy using elephants during the second Punic War. You’ll all be amazed to know that elephants didn't do so well in the Swiss Alps, and this slowed the Carthaginians down a tad and by the time the army made it to Italy they must have been a bit despondent. However they did put up a good fight and Hannibal’s cunning and bravery are known from this period. Unfortunately Hannibal eventually came off very much second best and was recalled to Carthage. He faced Scipio Africanus is the third, and last Punic War, which saw Carthage raised to the ground.

However the city, always a survivor, managed to re-group and enjoyed prosperity, and invasion, on and off over the years, including the Vandals and the Arabs. Today the city, which has been well excavated, is almost part of the suburbs of Tunis, in Tunisia. I would very much like to go there one day! Hannibal was eventually sent into exile, and fought against the Romans with the Phoenicians and other Levantine nations. The Romans hunted him down, eager to do away with their nemesis. Rather than suffer the ignominy of capture, Hannibal took his own life by swallowing poison.

come back tomorrow, when it's roman baths and saltimbocca (it'll be tastier than poison)

rome week continues. the brother gracchi and the best pasta you'll ever eat

it's quite ironic that this is rome week, but i'll get to that later. today are two lessons, one on making the most divine spaghetti with roast chicken sauce, and the other on republican agrarian law reform. no, it's more interesting that that i promise.

in the second century BC the romans were in a spot of bother. roman society and politics was governed by a rather complicated set of titles an positions. i have horrible trouble trying to remember if a quaestor outranks aedile, so don't worry if you don't get your head around on the first read. but as is the case with most civilisations, the power of rome relied heavily on the strength of its army. and to be in the army you had to own land. now during this period there were a lot of greedy sods around who were buying up land at a rate of knots, and putting small land holders out on their arses. ahhhhh.... capitalism. gotta love it.

so along comes Tiberius Gracchus, and the Populares party. now old Tiberius came from good stock - his grandfather was Scipio Africanus, the sacker of Carthage (sounds familiar? it was the first scene in the Colosseum in the movie Gladiator). Tiberius, as a tribune, sought to reform land tax and land law to increase the number of land owning citizens and also therefore the number of citizens who could be conscripted.

without going into too much detail this was very very unpopular with many of the land owning patrician families, and in the process of trying to get himself re-elected, Tiberius was killed.

so everything trundles along for about a decade, when Tiberius' up-start of a brother, Gaius, comes along. He's got these crazy ideas in his head about redistributing land to the poor, and allowing citizenship to more of the empire's inhabitants, decreasing the duration of conscription, and curtailing taxes that make the rich richer and the poor poorer. sounds like socialism to me. terrible thing. and the romans certainly thought so and Gaius and his political allies were hunted down or chased out of rome.

and of course all these centuries later there is obviously debate as to whether the Gracchi had the needs of the poor of Rome at heart (which as we have noted in the current political climate is wrong), or whether they were just out to make a name for themselves and increase their power in the senate (good thing, apparently).

at any rate a few years, and battles, later along come the Caesars and voila - Empire. and it's all milk and honey for a few centuries, and then it goes to hell in a handbasket. mercy - i've just put the rise and fall of the Roman Empire into a sentence. if you need pictures with this, just watch the Star Wars films. it's basically the same thing (but Harrison Ford is cuter than the Gracchi).

lordy, all of this political debate has made me hungry. mmmmmmmm..... italian roast chicken pasta. this recipe was given to me by my friend gabriella, who got it from her aunt. her family came to australia, via france, after their part of italy ceased to exist after the war. fascism, certainly a bad thing, i think we can all agree.

to start off with you'll need a whole chicken. please make it a free range, grain feed, hormone/antibiotic free bird. aside from being much, much nicer for the animal before it gives its life for you to eat, it makes the meat taste much better.

start by making slits in the meat and stuffing these with cloves of garlic. then salt the skin of the bird. well. a lotta salt. really. then place large cubes of butter on the bird, in the bird and in the pan. finally scatter around a good quantity of rosemary sprigs, and a couple in the cavity too.

(you can't see the salt in this picuture, but it's there. trust me)

put the bird in a pre-heated oven. how long it takes to cook will depend on the size of the chicken, but allow an hour and a quarter for this part of the process. no one likes their chicken done rare.

as the bird is getting close to done, pour a cup and a half of chicken stock and a cup of white wine over the bird, and return to the oven until it's done.

While the bird is resting cook some pasta. a nice thick spaghetti, or even fettuccine, as it sauce will be very thin and will need something that holds it well.

while that is happening mix a little cornflour with some water and then add this to the liquid in the pan. place on the hob to thicken.

to serve mix the cooked pasta in the pan with the juices and a couple of good hand fulls of grated parmesan. you can either serve the meat separately with some salad as a second course, or do as i do and stir some of the meat through the pasta, and then slice the breasts to place on top.

serve with more cheese.


this really is a heart attack on a stick, but it is so incredibly good, i can't tell you. it's one of my signature dishes, and one that people request when i invite them around. and it's quite easy to do. impress your friends and families today by serving them this, you won't regret it!

but you'll remember at the beginning of this post i mentioned irony. Well Euro 2008 is on a the moment, and last night Italy got their arses kicked by the Netherlands. 3-0!!!! I will have vengeance for what those romans did to my beloved blues in the finals in 2006.

Vive la France!!!!