Cannelloni

      Once upon a time, there was an Italian red house in Pasadena called “Dino’s.” Their drinks were strong, their portions were large and their house salad was a meal unto it’s self. (That chopped salad has influenced every salad I have made in the last 45 years.) When we went to “Dino’s” my sister always ordered the cannelloni, which is a dish of pasta or crepe, stuffed and rolled with ricotta and either meat or veg. Then it is covered with red sauce and baked. That’s the way they did it in Pasadena.
Now that I know a little bit more about the multi-verse that are Italian cuisines, as informed by the great Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich, my own cannelloni is different. I made it last night. There was no bechamel and the ricotta is replaced by whole cottage cheese. But like so many pasta dishes that came to the United States, this dish has already been, shall we say, amended. What we now enjoy as main dishes, in large portions, were originally small portioned as part of a larger meal, in fact, a festival meal. The cannelloni I made last night would have been served as one roll per guest before the meat, or fish course.
The formal Italian meal is the ur text to the French haute cuisine. (Stay with me now, cause we’re going to do a little history,)  Two Tuscan princesses married into royal families of France. Catherine D’Medici in 1533 into the Valois line and Marie (of the same house) into the Bourbon line in 1610. What is really important is that both of these ladies brought Italian chefs with them. Mayonnaise, marinara, demi glaze, bechamel all came to France from Italy with the Medici princesses. As did the order of a formal meal. (You did wonder when I would get back to that didn’t you.) Ok, here it is.
Primi (pasta, rice or soup)
Secondi (fish or meat)
Le verdure (vegitables)
Le Insalate (salad)
Il Formaggio (cheese course)
I Dolci e La Frutta (sweets and fruit)

Cannelloni , though a first course, has turned into a main dish, as have many other baked pasta dishes. My favorite at “Dino’s” was their lasagna. And at that great red house, the cannelloni was made with crepes rather than pasta. So let’s start with the crepes.

1 cup cold water
1 cup cold milk
4 eggs
1/2 tsp salt
1 & 1/2 cups flour
4 tb melted butter

Put the liquids, including the eggs, in the food processor or blender and, well, blend.
Add the flour, salt & melted butter and blend till smooth.
You can use a crepe pan or cast iron pan to cook these.
I use a stove top griddle because I can make 3 at a time.

Filling:
cottage cheese, Romano cheese, and an egg (or two)

2 16oz containers of whole cottage cheese
1/2 a cup of grated Romano cheese
2 medium eggs or one jumbo
salt & pepper

This is the basic filling. I used fresh baby spinach but any green veg or meat (though chicken may be too delicate) and mushrooms would also do very well.

Lay the pancakes out, fill them and roll them and put them in your favorite long baking pan.
There will be left over veg and cottage cheese. Spread them over the rolls before you lay on the marinara

Now let us talk about marinara. I don’t know what the Italians used before there were tomatoes in Europe, but now there are canned tomatoes.
Sauté one onion (yellow or white) in canola oil
add 2 14.5 oz cans of tomatoes
cook together till saucy
(yes, you may add oregano if you wish)

pour the sauce over the rolled pancakes and bake
in a 350 degree pre-heated oven for about 1/2 an hour.
(bubbly is what your are looking for)

Eat this.
It will make you happy.

Oakland

My mother always says, “Write about what you see out your window.” Ok Mommy, here is what I see. The sky is clear with that peculiar light blue that is Marine. Nothing in the world looks like the heavens over the sea. Just ask Eugene Boudin who taught Monet. It is through this singular light that I see Kaitilyn’s vegetable beds in what was our ignored back yard. Through the chain fence that separates our places from the schoolyard, the live oaks shade the platform that the kids at the school built a couple of years ago. They study local flora & fauna there during the school year. Right now their yard is being torn up. I do believe that all that tar and concrete has been torn up to put down sod for a real field. It’s got be done before they come back to school in August. Ain’t life grand?
I am of Oakland. I used to be of Sierra Madre but now, after 22 years, I am of Oakland. When we got here the Maze was only just finished after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Decades ago Los Angeles lost a portion of the Santa Monica Freeway and the traffic was even worse, but it took only six weeks to repair. Please excuse me if I don’t understand why it took nine years to fix the Maze. This is just one of so many things about this beautiful maddening town that confuse me.
When we first moved into sunny and lovely Adams Point, downtown was derelict. From Grand all the way down to Jack London Square, on handsome tree-lined Broadway, it was just one abandoned office building or store after another. Just one more curse of the Loma Prieta. But now, out my window, beyond the roofs of First Congo Oakland (UCC) and Westlake Middle School (OUSD) the first thing I see is a huge (five or six stories high) yellow construction crane. This is the current symbol of Oakland, the construction crane. They are everywhere and especially here in Adams Point. On Broadway, where Auto Row used to try their very best, new buildings are going up. Some, very few, have worked to save the old facades. They did it at the Whole Paycheck (oh, I am so sorry, Whole Foods) at the corner of 27th and Harrison. It had been a Cadillac dealership, with huge windows to display the beautiful wares. When we got here it was empty like so many other beauties here in town. When Pasadena redeveloped Old Town, 30 years ago, they didn’t care what you put in the building as long as the old frontage was saved. Ah the advantage of a functioning planning department.
One of the first things we noticed when we got here were micro-climates. In those days we had dear friends who lived in upper Rockridge. That’s how we discovered the seven-to-ten-degree difference between the uplands and sunny Adams Point. By the blessings of the housing gods, we moved from Altadena to one of the warmest parts of this great city. And then there is the Lake. I didn’t know about Lake Merritt when we got here. Yet there it was, glowing in the sun, decorated with grebes and ducks, the heart of a wonderful city. The best thing about the Lake is how well it is loved. Joggers, walkers, parents with strollers, drummers, barbecuers and folks just hanging out. And let us not forget Children’s Fairyland, a rite of passage for generations of Oakland children. The best night views of Lake Merritt, in her string of pearls, is from the restaurant in the Lake Merritt Hotel.
But the Lake and her neighborhoods are only a small part of this city. One of my first flights back to OAK from BUR my under-seat carryon was a large purse filled with ten pounds of chorizo from the Argentine Market near my dad’s old place in Bungalow Heaven. This was simply because I hadn’t found my own Mexican butcher/grocer up here. And then I discovered Mi Tierra, on San Pablo, a block down from University. Everything I could possibly want, from veg to crema to votives to meat. Oh yes, a full service butcher counter that includes five different kinds of chorizo. For the years I worked at Cody’s on 4th St. that was my go-to place. When I moved on to Books Inc. I discovered International Blvd. and there, at 29th, was Mi Puebla, with its own fabulous meat counter. And the store seems to be owned and operated by Arabic speakers. International is exactly what its name says, a little Chinese, a lot Vietnamese and the majority Mexican, with a sprinkling of Guatemalan. It reminded me of what downtown LA used to be, before the upgrades.
How to address gentrification? I am so torn by the entire process. Living cities change, and that means their neighborhoods, Harlem being only one example. That place has gone through the cycle of development, decline and renewal at least eight times since it was founded by the Dutch. So it is with Oakland. After one more futile search for sour cherries in the halal markets above University, I wended my old way down 6th to Hollis and over 47th to the freeway. What had been a somewhat unkempt but very lively street, with kids on bikes and folks on porches and music coming out of windows, 47th had changed in the ensuing years since Cody’s demise. It had been a street of rentals and was now, obviously, a street of owned homes. The landlords have sold out to owners who can afford new paint and gardeners. Where did the renters go? Did they go up to Pinole or Hercules or Richmond, to endure horrendous commutes to work? This is the price of gentrification and renewal, real people with real lives in a place are displaced. And in this insane market, they certainly can’t afford to move to Adams Point or Temescal let alone Skyline. So we come back to the huge crane outside my window.
It seems to have begun with the restoration of the Fox Theatre. My first sight of the old movie palace broke my heart. There she was, broken and forgotten, with all her little shops, bars and other places, empty. The old queen was a metaphor for downtown Oakland. And then it happened, the Fox and her diamond shaped block were restored and became a magnet. Bars, restaurants and music venues opened, spreading lakeward like so many green shoots in Spring. At the same time the rebuild of Broadway began. All those clouded titles that kept all those properties empty suddenly cleared and the building began. Jerry Brown’s dream of bringing ten thousand people to live downtown was being realized. (It’s an odd thing between me and Jerry, I have voted for him, legally, 16 times.) Condos are busting out all over.
The way to bring down the price of housing is to make more housing and it’s finally happening in Oakland. Just look at what’s being built a block and a half from my front door. Not high end places like the Essex, these are just normal condos and there are lots of them coming. You need to understand that Adams Point has lots of apartment buildings, right next to those million dollar rehabbed Edwardians. We have always had both kinds of housing here. All this building is already changing Oakland and the streets are totally clogged with detours. From the bus route down International to the pothole repair (FINALLY) on Monte Vista, the work of the city is being done.
Outside my window there is Kaitilyn’s yard, Oakland First Congregational Church and Westlake Middle School. And there, between two live oaks, is the new symbol of Oakland, a huge yellow building crane.

The Prancing Pony

“Since you will be coming in while we are out of the house, here it the drill. The key will be under the mat (I’m really not kidding.) Your bathroom is the first door on left in the front hall. Your bedroom is at the end of the back hall, through the kitchen. Your password for the in house wifi is on the desk. Welcome.)
Barliman Butterbur was the master of a hostel, named the Prancing Pony, in Bree. (If you don’t know where Bree is, please apply yourself to a map of Middle Earth. It is a boarder town, just out of the Shire,) Our house here in Adams Point, Oakland is named for that worthy establishment. But none our windows are round.
Now let’s get this straight. I started the Prancing Pony for the money. Taking in paying guests kept our heads above water in some pretty bad times. I didn’t know what I was doing, keeping the room clean and the beds properly dressed. (Y’all know I’ve never been a doting house keeper.) Once I started having guests, there was dust everywhere, there were spider webs in abundance and who is going to wash those windows? Leaving our bedroom door ajar in the heat of Fall can be problematical.( We still need to put cat doors in three access points.) But with time and well placed criticism, we slowly pulled ourselves together and got in the groove of looking after people.
B & B means bed and breakfast. And I really do offer breakfast, it says so on my page. All I need to know is what a guest might want. But nobody tells me, nobody asks. They just wander through the kitchen on their morning way to the loo. On their way back I ask if they want tea or coffee. Our most recent guests were from South of the border, from Bogota and Mexico City. I do not like coffee but I know how to make it. I’ve been concocting the elixir vitae almost 28 years, for the middle son of the Star of Havana. If you can’t see through it, it’s almost strong enough. My guests like their coffee black.
And then there is the question of water. Many of our guests arrive with water bottles, mostly plastic, and I offer them glasses of water. When they see me open the tap, they are taken aback. I’m from the Pasadena area and we call that water “Pasadena crude.” But the water here in the Bay Area is simply wonderful. On the East Bay side, it comes from the Mokelumne River, which is fed by the snow in the Sierras. San Francisco and the Peninsula get their water from Hetch-Hetchy reservoir, which is fed by the snow in the Sierras. So yeah, our water is really tasty. The Germans think it has too much chlorine. They can be hard to please.
One of our earliest guests were a lovely young couple on the last leg of a very long honeymoon, all over South East Asia. She was graceful and tall as a young linden tree. He was taller, 6’4’’, and when he saw that their bed was a king, he just fell on it with a small yelp of joy. The young husband had been folding his long Finnish frame into beds designed for much smaller people. So far, these folks are why we have a pin in Helsinki on the map of Europe. In our front hall, between the guest bath and the kitchen, are the maps. On one side are the National Geographic maps of the United States and The World. On tuther side is the Michelin map of Europe. On the top shelf of the cookbook library is a pretty crystal bowl. The bowl holds pins with round colored tips. When guests come to the Prancing Pony, they are offered a pin from the bowl and asked to place the pin in one of the maps. I ask them to put the pin in either their current place of residence or the place that they come from. Just recently a guest, looking at the sea of pins in the L A area, chose to put her pin in the Philippines, her mom is from there. Two sweet girls were here from Moscow. One of them was from Sakhalin Island. I’m very proud of that pin. And then there is the small but mighty nation of the Netherlands. There are so many pins between Utrecht and Amsterdam that there isn’t any more room. Is there a trail of bread crumbs from these two great cities to the Prancing Pony? The Dutch love to travel.
There are the places with no pins at all. I’ve only got one in the entire continent of Africa. And let’s talk about Tornado Alley. Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas where the hell are you? Come to the Bay Area, come to Oakland and stay at the Prancing Pony, you will have a wonderful time. Oh and speaking of time, we need to talk. My darling guests come from all over the world and many of the dears can’t read a map. They look at a map of my great state and say to themselves “Hey, there is Yosemite, we can get there and back in a day.” Sure you can sweetheart, you will spend 4 & 1/2 hours getting to the Groveland Gate and then 45 minutes to get to the Valley Floor. It just looks close but it ain’t. The lines you see on the maps are not freeways, they are highways. The 120 is two lanes in each direction, sometimes. When you go up the New Priest Road into Groveland, it is really circuitous and takes about 25 minutes. I am not being fair to those who do not know this state. It is a Tardis, much bigger on the inside than on the outside. And the distances are so much longer and higher and slower to travel than they look.
So they come to my house. They come with international sized luggage all the way from SFO to start a full tour of the Southwest. They come with overnight backpacks to enjoy a concert at the Fox or Paramount. They come for music festivals and to work at Kaiser. Sometimes they check themselves in, sometimes they come in late, just as long as they come. Because I love to look after them and am having a wonderful time.

Liturgy

 Imagine if you will, a meeting room, probably in a church. Folding chairs and a table off to one side holding a large coffee urn and paper cups. Once the assembly has been called to order and the request for statements has been made, a tall white haired, white bearded man stands. “My name is Philip and I am a Baptist. I have been clean and sober for 47 years.”

Somewhere in Altadena, Felix is still shaking his head at a memory. We were at Liz & Tim’s and Philip had just expressed his love of the Mass. “But Philip, you’re an atheist, how can you love the Mass??” And that, my dears, is the whole point. How can one love the form and not believe the words? How can a cradle-Baptist atheist embrace the Anglican Liturgy?

lit·ur·gy (lĭt′ər-jē) n. pl. lit·ur·gies 1. A prescribed form or set of forms for public religious worship.

Ok that’s clear enough and, even better, broad enough to cover all religions. And all religions have liturgies, great services and daily prayers, marking the year and marking the changes in life. Humans not only commune with their gods through liturgy, they celebrate birth, coming to maturity, marriage and death. The Bris is a circumcision ceremony usually done at home (the baby boy is only eight days old) and has its own gentle cycle of prayers. These are usually sung and they make a liturgy. There are many in the Baptist confession who would bristle at their services being called liturgy, but they are. There is an order to their worship and that’s all it takes. It is in this rock-ribbed and foursquare tradition that Philip came up. And which, at the age of 16, renounced.
This West Virginian hard head did not hear the Mass until he sang for the Episcopal Cathedral of the Diocese of San Joaquin, Fresno. By the time I heard him sing the “Libera me” in the Faure Requiem at Pasadena First Christian, he was already a church singer. And slowly the spell of the Roman Liturgy was cast over a non-believer. The spell was made of history and form (you do know that all good musicians are part mathematicians, don’t you) but especially music.
All liturgies have music, all. By accident of history and geography, the Church Temporal (Christianity in history) has the greatest canon of liturgical music because it is so broad. Starting with the Greek services of the early Church, Christianity moved across the face of Europe, west north and east, absorbing music everywhere it went. (Think of the horn nosed monster in “Yellow Submarine.) Forms of service sprang up like dandelions and so did the music to support them. Since at least the 6th century C.E, monks sang the offices of the day.
Matins: 2 am
                                                Lauds: sunrise
                                                Prime: 6 am
                                                Terce: 9 am
                                                Sext: noon
                                                None: 3 pm
                                               Vespers: sunset
                                               Compline: bedtime
Those are a whole lot of prayers to set to music. And that music was different wherever it was made. In what would become Russia, France, Norway and England, music bloomed in the garden of Christian liturgical practice. And England brings us closer to the original point (you did wonder, didn’t you?) There were multiple rites on that island; York was one and so was Sarum. Before the present, beautiful and now really weird Salisbury Cathedral was built, there was the monastery and church of Sarum and they had their own, highly influential liturgical rite. But when you go to that wonderful place and ask about the Sarum Rite, the docents will blink, smile sweetly and say, “Well, there is the historical reproduction, in the close.” That is all they know. Just try to get a copy of the Sarum Rite, just try.
It was this musical and historic spell that fully hooked the lapsed Baptist. The Canon opened itself to the musician and he dove right in. Now it is possible that William Byrd and Thomas Tallis had something to do with the dive, but I couldn’t possibly say.

“If you throw the lucky man into the Nile, he will come up with a fish in his mouth.”

When the Baptist came (professionally and after a stint at St. Dominic’s SF) to St. Paul’s Oakland, he came up with a fish in his mouth.
Someone, it might have been Dr. Mark Bruce, figured out that if you have a small choir (8, maybe 10 on a good day) and don’t have enough money for both a choir director and organist, you throw yourselves on the tender mercies of Tudor choral music. This tradition not only serves the immediate needs of the choir, but it trains the singers and makes them ready to sing Josquin, Monteverdi, Palestrina and the all-father Victoria. No church choir needs a sound system and a band to sing to the Lord. They can simply stand together, listen to each other and follow their director. A Protestant church that is not afraid to hear sung Latin doesn’t hurt. It was in such a choir that the Baptist found his fish.
(Now it is time for a small rant about some of the results of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965.) Just because they said that the Mass should be said in the vernacular didn’t mean that 1700 years of liturgical had to be rejected. But it was. There is nothing wrong with guitars or the vernacular in sacred music. Ramirez’s Misa Criolla and Peña’s Misa Flamenca are only two examples of magnificent, soul-changing music written since the Council. But I don’t have a dog in that fight. Hell folks I’m not even an Episcopalian. I’m just an old Congregationalist who worships and sings at St. Paul’s. Now back to the fish.)
After the retirement of the beloved and sadly late Dr. David Farr, we kind of flailed around looking for a new choir director. During this interregnum the Baptist did a lot of conducting. He also started to write liturgy. That’s right folks, Mr. Clean and Sober for 47 years loves the Anglican Liturgy so much that he is writing it, two full masses, seven motets and several Psalm settings so far. Now that we have Prof. Kula running our choir life, he asked Philip to be his wingman and everybody is really happy.
So the moral of this story is simple. There is no single door to the life of music and all of them are open. If a cradle-Baptist atheist can find fulfillment and inspiration in the Anglican Liturgy, then anything is possible. Now I just wish they would stop baptizing babies.