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Trip To Alans - 06/27/08


Having completed 270 pages of my new novel Too Late For Later, I thought I'd better go down to my brother Alan's in Towson, MD and have him give it a structural overview, as well as doing a reanalysis of Currency of Money.

It also gave me an opportunity to cook meals from three different Italian regions from a couple of the books that Alan had. We decided this time not to do Portugese; just a taste for some Italian.

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I flew Southwest out of Manchester into BWI, down on Friday and back the following Monday. Though not as hot as it was the last time I was down in the summer, it was in 90s.

The last time I got off the plane there in the summer it was 101 and went up from there! This time, it was hot but it was not overpowering. Trips to the store for food were thus much more enjoyable.

We had some terrific thunder boomers each afternoon, though they didn't really cool things off much. The first two storms were so strong that it chased us off off the porch - just when Alan was getting into the finer review points of the fine art of Southern Porch Sitting that he has been instructing me on over the last many years.

Unfortunately, we were again so busy with work that we didn't get down to Baltimore's Inner Harbor area that I love so much. Next time for sure, as that is really such a fun place to visit. Too much work and no play... that drill.

Anyway, though we got right to work Friday afternoon, we had to knock off early to argue about which recipe we were going to cook for the night and whether we needed wine; all that sort of important stuff. We ended up choosing a dish from the Tuscany region, "Pork Chops With Fennel" that came out so good. I don't recall the wine we had, but it was a very nice Italian red that Alan had in stock.


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Alan didn't get into any detailed reading until Saturday morning. I decided to park it in the sun while Alan read through the book. I got caught up on some of the backlogged books on creative writing theory that I had, and was able to finish three during the trip. I've read about 40 books now on creative writing now, and have a pretty good handle on common threads that run through them all. With each one, though I've read the principle a dozen times before, each author has their own slant to it, and I always learn something new or at least take a different view of a concept. Great research and great fun.

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And here come the chefs Saturday afternoon! If you look at the light being thrown up against the outside wall beyond the door, you can see the really foul yellowish hue. That's from the storm that blew us in off the porch. It didn't last long, but it was pretty fierce and for the most part over by the time we headed out to the store to do food shopping for the evening's dinner.

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Alan and Abbie prior to Saturday's great shopping adventure.

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Of course, you can't start cooking until the wine is poured. No problem...

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I put Alan to work on garlic chopping detail when we got back from the store while I put the rest of the ingredients together.

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Great shot of Alan and Abbie getting ready to dig into Saturday night's dinner from the Abruzzo-Molise regino, a Stuffed Veal With White Beans recipe that was unbelievable. I was so aeromatic, that when I went upstaris to bed late that night, I could still smell the spices. It was great! And so was the inexpensive Bardolino that we had; very nice.

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After Saturday night's dinner, Alan and I headed back out onto the porch for more work. We did call it as the sun went down around 8:00pm I think. We were both pretty pooped from the intensity of all the concentration so we plopped an Australian indy film in. It was a series and we stayed up until well after midnight watching the first three of the four episodes on the dvd.

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Alan hunting around, I think, for an implement of destruction for the desert before we headed into the living room to watch the dvd.

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And here I am checking Sunday night's dinner from the Bologna region, Pollo alla Cacciatora, a Chicken Hunter Style from the trattoria La Perla. We all agreed that this meal was the most flavorful of the three I had fixed. It was probably one of the best I had ever cooked as well. We had a really nice Italian Barbaresco that really complemented the meal's flavors.

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