GIACOMOTTO

Yesterday we made boeuf bourguignon and we had it today for brunch, I know it’s a little rough but it’s so good we could not resist, everyone who woke up was drawn to the kitchen by the smell!

There is a lot of controversy in France on how the “traditional” one is made, actually it’s a lot about how you like it, some people would argue about the carrots some other would even put potatoes (although I think potatoes is really on the edge of what not to do). Anyway, this recipe is more about some guidelines, maybe general but yet necessary for this dish to be a “boeuf bouguignon” and not just another beef stew.

Ingredients:

- beef, 4lbs (~2kg), rump roast is ok, some other cheap cut is ok too since we are going to cook it almost to death anyway.
- american style bacon (pork belly)
- onions, 2 or 3 big ones (put more if you like onions)
- some butter
- Marc (strong grape moonshine) or brandy
- a bottle of cheap wine, maybe more; so plan a 2nd one just in case
- carrots / mushrooms (both optional but strongly recommended)

Start off by cutting the bacon in little pieces and put them in the your stew pot with a bit of oil to get them started, once they get a bit brown take them out.
remove the pork fat, and do the onions next with some butter until they get a bit softer (not quite fully cooked is best) then take them out.
Cut the meat in 2in/5cm cubes and cook them in the same pot in batches so the meat don’t steam but get brown on all sides (the meat should not be fully cooked on the inside). Add some butter regularly as necessary. put the meat aside.
Once that’s done, put a good amount of marc (~2 shots) and scrape the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon. maybe do that for a minute and add the wine and let all that warm up to temperature (almost boiling). Then add back the meat and let everything cook at slow temperature for at least 3h. Note that if there is not enough liquid then just add a bit more wine until the meat is almost all under liquid. May sure to cover the pot during the 3h. Let rest on the stove over night, very important for the meat to relax.
The next day add the carrots / onions / bacon and cook everything together for an extra hour or 2 until carrots are good. By then the meat should fall apart easy. if the meat is already very soft just steam the carrots on the side and cook everything together for 30min.

Now, if you eat that with fresh pasta and some parmesan cheese on top, you are having a very traditional “giacomotto” meal. Although in my family we tend to use bore or deer instead of beef…

We discovered this great card game recently, My friend Nikola grew up playing this game in Serbia and that’s actually how he learned counting…

Here is the game:
The objective is to gather as much cards as possible from the table into your own stack of cards. there can be 2 or 4 players (4 players is 2 against 2 like bridge).

You start the game by giving 6 cards to each player and put 4 uncovered cards on the table. The suits don’t matter in this game.
The cards have the following values:
2 to 10 = 2 to 10 (same)
Ace = 1 or 11 (as you want)
J, Q, K = 12, 13, 14

The first one to play needs to find a sum of the cards on the table that match one of his own cards in his hands, then put those cards in his stack (the one in his hand and the ones that make the sum as well), then the next player goes. If the particular sum occurs several times on the table you can take all the cards that make this sum. For example if the table has 8, 5, 6, 7 and you hold a Q you can take all 4 cards (8+5=6+7=13). If you can’t match anything you have to put one of your cards on the table. After 6 rounds the players don’t have cards and the next 6 cards are distributed to the players from the deck. Repeat until the deck is empty.

At the end, the last one that grabbed something from the table grab the rest of the cards from the table.

Counting points to see who won:

the following cards are worth 1 point: 10, Ace, J, Q, K
there are 2 special cards: 2 of clubs = 1 point and 10 of diamonds = 2 pts
The one that has more cards in his stack gets 3 extra points.
So, the total amount of points in the game is 25.
Also, every time a player clear the table of all cards he gets an extra point.

The first one to reach 101 points has won.

have fun !

Sarah and I went to Ragland, Alabama to go see her grand parents this last week end. I am still amazed of the social contrast between California and over there. It definitively feels like an older country meaning the mentality and the habits of the people over there are much less flexible, a bit like in europe; you know, the real europe not the flashy large cities.

Anyway, we had a great time, Sarah’s grand-ma is definitively the cuttest ever. On sunday night we were all sitting at the kitchen table with Sarah’s mom, Alan and the grand parents. After her grand-pa showed us his WWII souvenirs and things they started telling us about how they both met so we got to hear the whole romantic story - exactly like in “Harry met Sally” - it was so funny.

I’ll post a couple of pictures.

For most people, pastas are the tasteless carbs that goes with the sauce and most of the time this is right because factory made pastas are just that way. And it has to be, I mean for the price we are buying them, the package is likely to be the expensive part for the pasta company. They must be using the cheapest flour mix with the nastiest dry egg extract. This is sad because real pasta made with good bread flour and fresh eggs are just so good with a drop of extra virgin olive oil and a bit of freshly grated parmesan. Now you’ll say making pasta is messy, takes a lot of space, is time consuming, etc… Well with the right tools, right recipe and a little habit it just becomes like a reflex.

Now, you don’t need fancy tools, not even anything electric, but you have to have those three, otherwise forget it, it’ll take you forever to make your pastas:
- A pasta roller-cutter machine: manual, cheap (max 40$), made in italy, works a life time.
- A pasta rack: you can buy one or make one. (I made mine for <10$)
- At least one person to help you

Ingredients:
- 2 cups bread flour
- 3 eggs
- pinch of salt
- tablespoon of olive oil

Mix it all up together, start with a fork and finish with your hands. If there is no more flour in your bowl and the dough is still sticky add some flour (maybe you got big eggs). If you don’t succeed to make one chunk of dough roughly holding together, add a bit of water (maybe you got small eggs). Once you got that dough, take it out and work it on a table, meaning you fold and spread several times to make the dough uniform. Make sure you got some flour available to sprinkle every once in a while if needed. You’re basically done now. You just need to use the machine and the rack. If you got a helper, you can make very long pasta which cuts time in half (one is turning the rollers and the other one hold the dough with 2 hands). And, while you start flattening the dough pieces the other one can spread the pasta on the rack which cuts time in half again. So you go 4x faster with one helper.

When we look at all my paintings, there is a common style thread to them. However, through each of them I try to bring out something very different every time. This process is difficult, but not for the reason you may think of. The monochromic paper drawings are for me something very naturally relaxing and I have a bunch of them ready to be painted. The real difficulty comes in with the colors. I practiced a lot drawing forms that make sense together, I have some in many page corner of my school notes since high school, but colors that makes sense together is something fairly new to me. You probably noticed my first painting genesis is B&W, well this is the reason. Basically, all these paintings I have done so far represent my color coordination learning process. Genesis is for me perfect in term of forms and my objective is to achieve the same level with color. Jupiter is expected to be a major step towards this achievement because it combines the genesis idea with colors. At first I tried to lay down the shapes and then add the colors but I have been stuck on the shapes for months and I realized today they cannot be independent. This is the basic idea explained in the genesis text, it has to be built empirically and the same thing goes for colors. So today, the Jupiter canvas I started is covered with white gesso for a fresh restart. For the same reason, some sections of the freeway from above canvas have been covered as well.

Sometimes it’s better to erase it all so that our imagination is not cluttered with old mess.

I made these great cookies the other day, they are called “Palets de Dames” and that’s my mom’s recipe. On the up side it’s quite easy and fast to make, on the down side they are super addictive and of course super rich. Now that was a bit expected coming from the giacomotto family all time favorite recipes, huh? Assuming you’ll limit yourself to 2 or 3 of these delicacies per day, here is the recipe, if you dare…

Ingredients:
- Butter: 125g (1 cup)
- Sugar: 125g (1 cup)
- Eggs: 2
- Flour: 150g (a bit more than a cup)
- Raisins: 125g (1 cup, more if you want)
- Dark rum

First soak the raisins with rum, the longer they soak, the best it’ll be (I leave them a couple days in a sealed can). Pre-heat the oven to 150C (300F). Then start by whipping up the butter with the sugar until it’s all really creamy. Then add the eggs and the flour all together and let it mix for a while, till uniform. At the end add the raisins and mix gently with a spoon (otherwise you’ll destroy the soaked raisins). Make little stacks on a buttered cookie sheet, the shape is not important since they’ll be all flat when they cook. They cook fast, about 10 minutes maybe, but most important, they are done when they get brown around while staying white in the middle. Have fun!

This is such a great game, we have been playing it at my house for the last month with my Chinese roommate Ru and my Indian roommate Mandeep (we need to be 4) and we love it. We did play a lot with Ru’s friend Fong but she went back to north china… she was too good for us low level players anyway! I used to play this game with my family back in France and I figured, you know, we must have been playing the “French rules”. Well, we were actually pretty accurate although we had no clue of what some of the symbol really meant.

This is how a real nice old Chinese set of tiles looks like:
my parents’game (137k)

I just scanned some drawings, a couple of them are already on the easel. So, expect some colors in a couple of months !

Alright, I had this idea for while now, but it has never been fully complete until this summer where I finalized the drawing as well as the idea. It was inspired from the shape of a freeway exchange while I was flying above France. I find the general shape really smooth, probably because the curvature of the central lines are limited to a certain range. But, what actually took time to develop was the rest of the drawing. I gave the space around the central lines a wave-like pattern a bit inspired from the St. Paul painting of Oleg Korolev with the additional scattered dots to give it a bit of a california 60’s art feeling. I am currently working on a 40″x30″ painting based on this idea. The color selection is giving me a hard time but it’s getting there.

I had this dream one night a long time ago; it was so breath-taking that I wrote it down on paper right then. I kept this on loose paper since then and until now, here is the translation:

“From this dream I kept two images and a lot of sensations. The scenario is of a distant future (likely in several centuries).

I am in a small shuttle, at about 300ft above the earth ground. The shuttle is really very small (small one person cockpit) but without the feeling of being hunched up. I can move freely and I have the impression of being inside a air-conditioned and quilted suit. Ultra light, I can barely feel it on me. It just feels good.

Outside it is dark, it’s probably night but I can still see hills around me with bright white lights scattered here and there irregularly all over the hills. They are probably street lights. Right under me I can see an empty freeway made out of the same bright white light uniformly all along. I cannot see what’s on each side of the freeway since it’s all black. This is basically what I’m seeing, the destination of the freeway is fuzzy as the other lights, a bit like a light surface night fog would do on street lights.

So, I do an emergency landing on this freeway, obviously my little machine/shuttle has issues. Without any stress, I land easily and I repair it easily (don’t know how). All that with an extreme effortlessness, it feels very normal and anybody could do the same. We could almost compare this little shuttle with today’s moped. And by the way I do not see lots of commands in the cockpit, everything looks very simple. In the dream I can see myself only inside the machine and I have no idea of it’s shape, I just know it’s small and light.

Then without any transition I go directly to the second picture. I find myself floating in space just above the earth atmosphere. I know that the small shuttle brought me there but I have no memory of the take-off, the travel and getting out of the machine. It is strange.

Let’s describe what I’m seeing. Remember that I’m still wearing this space suit as described in the beginning with a bubble around my head (yes, it is a “realistic” dream). The thing that really made me thought I was in some distant future was my state of mind when I was floating there just above the atmosphere. In fact it’s a bit like taking your moped to go to the beach and have a walk there.

But I’m not alone, there are people around floating likewise at about 500ft from me. The strange thing is that there is nothing else at all, no shuttle, no satellites, just a few people scattered far from each other. What are we doing here, floating in emptiness?

I do remember that I’m stunned by the amazing view of the sun rays fading out behind this stellar horizon of the earth, maybe this is the reason of me being there? But this people floating around are just moving in random directions, and also, the view may be amazing for us today but must be ordinary for people living in such era. The whole social aspect is strange, I have no interaction with people but yet I know they are there, not too far, moreover the behavior is totally unexplained… but I do not seem to care too much.

The keywords of these dreams are simply ‘effortlessness’, ‘comfort’, ’soft’ and finally ‘physical freedom’. It seems there was no limit of where my body would go as long as my mind could think of it, similar to Jonathan Livingston seagull’s spiritual experience.

In this amazing dream, both out of this world and realistic, the feelings from a sensory point of view were so strong, everything was so soft and quilted. Even the view was soft and calming, the weak lights coming from behind the earth atmosphere were so uniform and non-violent. Nothing is complicated, colors were dark and soft, everything was pastel. And most amazingly, there was no sound at all, the silence was absolute. I could not hear anything, not even myself, a bit like being fully deaf. My brain is calm, I think of nothing, no stress. I’m floating there calm and on pause, in complete plenitude, like in a very high state of meditation.

Most dreams are about emotions. This dream was a unique experience because I was feeling it physically. I was someone different when I woke up. We could call it a spiritual enlightenment.”