Euro Cup and Cream of Wheat

This month's oomo (see my post on Objects of my Obsession for more on that) pretty much keeps getting better and better. 

My week, as I've stated earlier, has not been one of the best on record and there are those of us who, oh I don't know, cook something up, to make ourselves feel better. 

If you saw the movie Sex and the City, or even if you didn't...there is a scene where our heroine is being spoon-fed some breakfast by one of her friends. She's had a really bad fall and they take such wonderful care of her. I was whining last week to my friends that I would not mind at all if someone spoon-fed me some breakfast right now.

My point - it looks as though she's being spoon-fed some creamy white cereal, and it reminded me of Cream of Wheat, the hot cereal that I ate as a child, and one of my favorite kid meals.

My mom used to make eating it really fun for us. She'd tint it with a little food color - blue one morning, green the next, then pink, etc - and we'd eat it with milk and sugar. And all would be right with the world.

So I've been thinking of how I need to go buy some Cream of Wheat, not even sure if they still sell it...but I could get very used to a habit of creamy white bland cereal right about now, even if it's already getting warm at 8 in the morning. Never mind. I need that comfort right now.

Last night I found it. Expensive! But there. The red box with the little man-chef smiling at me. My only choice was the original 2 1/2 minute recipe. I hugged it all the way home.

Euro Cup sidebar: Italy vs. France at 11:45 today. This was a do-or-die match which had a lot to do with both teams being in Group C - The Group of Death. And France is their nemesis, to put it mildly. Italy had to win today, or pack their sorry bags and go home. If they did win, they'd advance to the quarterfinals which begin later this week.

So, it occurred to me, this morning, why not, oh I don't know, tint my Cream of Wheat blue? 

Because France might wear blue jerseys today. This happens sometimes; their national jersey is blue and so is Italy's.

Oh.

Well then, I'm clever, I can think of something else. 

How about the Italian Flag? Green, white, red.

I made my little pot of cream of wheat, put some cereal in one bowl to tint it red. Some in a second bowl to tint it green. The remainder, white, in the pot.

Now the tricky part was getting the three colors to sit just so in my cereal bowl, but they did, for just a minute. It was beautiful.

I blew a kiss, to my Italian team that I just love, and enjoyed my cereal, all mixed up (so pretty!) with sugar and milk.

France wore blue jerseys today. Italy wore white. With little Italian flag emblems on them.

Italy beat France 2-0.

Color me happy.

Hurt, Pray, Cook

In Elizabeth Gilbert's brilliant book Eat, Pray, Love she takes her reader on a virtual trip through Italy, India, and Indonesia. She spent four months in each country to basically heal her life, and her story is a great read and even better inspiration.

These last few days I've borrowed some of that, not only limited to the title of this post...

I mentioned this on one of my SportsBites radio shows as well. When I am hurting, I do two things. I pray and I cook. More often than not, I do both things together and not only because it makes the food I'm preparing taste even better. It just makes me feel better.

Having been raised Catholic with strict rules and regulations on how to pray (and how to do everything else), quite honestly I have tossed all of that and am pleased to report that for years now I have just made up my own prayers (and my own rules and regulations). So far that has worked out really well for me.

Cooking is one of the most sacred activities I practice. My cookbook is titled Angel Food. It has nothing to do with angel food cake and has everything to do with invoking and welcoming Divine presence when I cook. This is both for my benefit and healing, and usually for the people I am cooking for as well. But since I regularly cook for just me, and lately my heart is hurting, my kitchen has felt like one of the safest places to be. 

There is something about working with dough or pastry or chopping vegetables or folding a perfect omelette that just feels really good. The other day I made chocolate chip cookie dough partially just because I love that it was the first recipe I ever learned with my mom, and partially because I wanted to bring cookies to people I was meeting at an Italian festival on Saturday. 

I made the cookies, packaged them up, and forgot to take them with me. So my lovely friend Tina, whom I shared the evening with because it felt really good to have someone for dinner, happily took them home. 

This was after we learned that our evening's other main event, the encore broadcast of the Euro Cup match between Spain and Sweden was on at 10:30pm EST, not PST, and we'd completely missed it. Oh well. Our Greek tacos for dinner followed by Tina's gift of cherry pie had made for a wonderful meal, so we were happy.

I spent the part of Fathers Day that I wasn't a zombie-slug, making homemade Bolognese sauce for spaghetti, with some little homemade rolls, which leftover I will love enjoying tonight. My dad loved pasta with meat sauce. At home in our family we always loved spaghetti left over, the next day. Personally I love it anytime. It was the perfect meal to think of him by.

Yeah. Just some notes on feeling better through cooking and food I guess. Not what pop culture would necessarily subscribe to but surely we all know how much I care about that.

By the way, in case you haven't read it yet, I can't begin to tell you how happy the ending is in the book Eat Pray Love. And it's a true story. Everything that unfolded for her, she absolutely deserved and had coming to her. I love that book.

I trust that the good news in all of this, is that we all deserve an ending at least that happy. 

I very much look forward to mine. 

Euro Cup + (Other) Objects of My Obsession (oomo)

I am really not big on signature acronyms, cutesy alliterations or, anything cutesy for that matter. But, I use the reference 'object of my obsession' so often that I've decided to give it the label oomo from now on.

Starting today, Euro Cup - headline/top-story/main event of SportsBites radio this last Thursday and one of this month's oomo - deserves a lot of my time and attention, so much so that Antoine (quite easily) talked me into going to English pub The Underground to watch the Portugal-Turkey match. I hesitated (English pubs are not usually my favorites) for about 5 minutes at his direct orders ("let's go!"). But, they do have many big screens airing soccer for this duration and, upon finding free parking (miraculously) only about a mile away, we walked in and there on all those screens was the beautiful Cristiano Ronaldo and his Portuguese teammates all lined up for their anthem. 

I didn't need any more coaxing to just sit my little butt down and settle in for the afternoon.

A yummy BLT, really good fat fries, and about 3 cokes later, I was happy and Portugal had won, 2-0. I started taking mental notes in there for future reference: Mon-Fri, 2 for 1 burgers 11-3, and that Manchester United burger on the menu with blue cheese and bacon did sound pretty good...Italy plays on Monday at 11:45...matches go on most of the month, often on weekdays...happy hours after about 3pm....chocolate volcano cake was today's special dessert...the service was good and soft drink refills are free....hmmm....

Plus, there is really something to be said for watching Euro football players on the big screen which I learned 2 years ago when I fell in love during the World Cup. And herein lies another oomo. Steve Amoia was my very welcomed guest on SportsBites the other day, and we got to talking about the new short, incredibly hilarious film that is probably aired all over Europe at the moment (they are so lucky), starring Franck Ribery (from France and, not the most handsome man) and Italian Luca Toni who, gives whole new meaning to um, dreamy. 

The two amazingly talented footballers are teammates for Bayern-Munich in Germany's Bundesliga and are quite the duo, both on and off the pitch. It is tremendous fun to watch them play together and their goal-scoring is just, spectacular. Their short film begins with Luca taunting Franck with the World Cup 2006 Champions shirt he wears, reminding his French friend of "second". They speak only Italian and French, respectively, but clearly they understand each other very well. The whole little episode cannot be enjoyed without laughing out loud even if you can't understand a word of French or Italian. Luca Toni is known for his gestures and facial expressions anyway and Ribery is famous for his practical jokes and being a clown.

My point is, their website and film, The Grand Final, is the new oomo. I am addicted to it.

Oh and by the way I saw Sex and The City - the movie - for the second time today. It's not an oomo but I did like it, I thought it was just really fun with great one-liners, hair, clothes, shoes. It made me laugh, and cry. A couple of my favorite parts were the reference about almost never looking back,  and, the guacamole.

Yeah. I will leave you with that. Stay tuned for more oomo, I'm sure I'll be addressing those from time to time....

Buona notte!

How I fell in love with Italian football

Buona sera!

I was going to go into a soliloquy about why I haven't posted anything lately but let's just drop that boring note and get into the good news, shall we? Euro Cup 2008 is finally here this Saturday, the moment I've been waiting for pretty much since Italy won the World Cup, on 9 July 2006. 

The Cup that changed my life. It's high time I told you that story.

On 17 June 2006, from Germany, the World Cup's schedule featured Italy and the USA in the first elimination round, and there was a party at a friend's sports bar/restaurant.

I was at the party early. Lots of my favorite Italo-American friends would be there and I did not want to miss a beat. I made sure I was seated front and center - great big screen, great furniture, great food, even better company and, suddenly, before my very eyes, Gli Azzurri - Team Italy.

Oooh. Mmm, I thought as  I watched the players in blue. Mmm. Having never watched a pro soccer match before in my life, the first thing that got my attention was that there was no padding, no helmets, no protection except goalkeepers' gloves (and Italy's goalkeeper...whole separate thing to notice...) so, wow, you could see these men really well. And they really were worth a look. Oooh. Mmmmmmmmm.

Then it happened. Italy scored the first goal. The beautiful Alberto Gilardino slid to his knees and mimicked playing a violin. (If you watch the video in the link above, you'll see this scene).

I was in awe, mesmerized. I had never seen anything like that in my life. I looked seriously at my friend Linda, sitting next to me, and said,

"I'm in love. I'm done. Toast. I love this game. I love these players. It's over. I'm...done." I probably said all this along with hand gestures of sorts. Then I was about speechless. Very unusual for me.

The match ended in a draw, 1-1. Team USA was invisible as far as I was concerned. I remember absolutely nothing about them or their squad. I only had eyes for Team Italy, especially when I discovered Alessandro Nesta. (Later on I laughed to my good friend Jim Riggio that I had mistaken Gila for Nesta: "I thought it was Nesta that did the mock violin thing! I fell in love with the wrong guy. Not all that unusual for me!") Never mind. I was madly in love with 23 men, all at the same time. Deep, deep love.

Every match Italy played after that, I was able to watch even if it meant getting up between 5 and 6am (Evening matches were 9 hours ahead of California time). My schedule was always clear to indulge my new passion. How magical. How fabulous. I love falling in love in July.

Italy triumphed over Germany in the semifinal on 4th of July. I was late to my family's party that day. I could not wait for 9 July, when the Final would be with France. Huge party plans began to unfold.

By that hot - scorchy, actually - Sunday morning, at least 500 Italo-Americans, sports fans or not, had gathered at a site in San Pedro for the 11am match. I was asked why I had left the house on a Sunday so early (refer to my post on Sacred Sundays) - by now, for those who knew me well, that was such a foolish question. Duh!

Spectacular! Italy won and we all went positively insane, as if these players were made of our own flesh and blood. I had never seen a trophy ceremony like that. I had never, ever been so thrilled at the victory of a sports match.

I could hardly sleep that night. I felt like my life had been changed forever. It had.

I went to Italy a few months later and the country was still tingling from all that. Pictures of my new heroes were everywhere. They were on TV commercials. I was enraptured, always thinking, "they are so lucky in Italy!" I went to Rome for the first time and was told more than once that my favorite site, the fabulous ,Via Del Corso, was where the team's bus arrived in Rome for their coming home celebration two days after they'd won the World Cup. 

By then I had begun studying and following the players' individual club teams and a new friend in Torino even took me to a live Juventus match one freezing afternoon, which was one of the highlights of my life. I got to have conversation after conversation with beautiful men in Italy (such a great way to practice my second language) - because I was this bizarro anomaly - an Italo-American woman who loved Italian football. How much fun was that - for maybe everyone, least of all, me. I learned more Italian vocabulary than I might have otherwise, for reading the sports journals and watching the sports news every day. There were always such great interviews and photographs of my favorite players. (They are so lucky in Italy.)

The next two times I went to Italy after that? More of the same. I say I travel there not only because I intend to literally make the motherland my second home (it already is the home of my heart and soul; my body just needs to catch up), I go to collect people and their stories, revel in the cuisine, and immerse myself as much as possible in the national religion that is Italian football. (And for the record, I'm kinda homesick, by the way.)

This passion has brought more joy into my life than I thought it could. Since EURO CUP starts on Saturday, and it's said, for Europeans to be almost as important as the World Cup, it would definitely be fair to say...

I am so lucky.