This is a very economical, yet filling dish that really appeals to me on cold autumn or winter nights. Easy to make it vegetarian too, though vegan might be a bit tougher, as it depends on a cheese that melts well.
Back story is that we were watching a documentary on the rural peoples of the Italian Alps, and someone in a small mountain village went through this in enough detail that I could reconstruct it later. Only problem was that I didn't remember the name, so we call it Zuppa Della Something-or-other.
We got some large & tasty, last-of-the-season cabbages at the farmer's market in a snow-storm for a dollar each, so the per-serving cost was pretty low. Fontina cheese is about $10 for a good sized chunk - so that's the main expense.
Ingredients
Cabbage (red or green) - about 1/3 to 1/2 of the head. Remove the core and slice
About a cup of cubed cheese. Authentic is using Fontina. Gouda works in a pinch.
About 2 cups of chicken broth (substitute veggy broth if so inclined)
Half of a French Bread stick/ baguette. Dried a bit is best. Cubed.
1/4 cup of butter
One onion - chopped
Two cloves of garlic - minced
Olive oil
Favourite Italianesque herbs (e.g. thyme, oregano etc).
Method & Notes
Cover the cabbage with water in a large pan and boil for a while until it's softened (about 15-20min).
Meanwhile, fry up the onion and garlic in olive oil, with the herbs thrown in too. Just cook until they are turning 'transparent'.
Get a large saucepan - I use the same one I boiled the cabbage in. Just drain the cabbage and then build up layers in the pot. Start with a layer of cabbage, use half the cheese and bread cubes, with half the onion/garlic mixture. Add another layer of cabbage. Then the rest of the bread, cheese and onion stuff. Then finish with the rest of the cabbage over top.
NEXT - you pour the chicken stock over the whole mixture.
THIS is a bit of an unusual point. Even though it's a 'soup' the goal isn't really to have a bunch of broth. If you peek down to the bottom of the pan there should be some broth there, but you aren't trying to fill it up. Adjust your broth amount accordingly.
FINALLY - take your butter in a small sauce pan and boil it up until it's frothy and you're getting some brown solids in it. Take that and drizzle it over the whole mixture in the pan.
Now heat it up until the layer of broth boils a bit, then let it simmer for 20minutes or so. Give it a stir or two during the process.
Serve in bowls. It goes well with toast too.
Be prepared - you'll want seconds.
Serves about 4 people pretty well. Sticks to ribs.
Making Sourdough Bread
I enjoy making all of the bread we use in our house. Mostly this is because I enjoy the craft of bread-making, and have for most of my adult years.
But there are ancillary benefits. I like knowing exactly what is in the stuff we are eating and controlling the levels of salt, fat and sugar. As well, reducing preservatives and additives which are great for shelf-life, but perhaps not so great for consumption is a benefit.
It is a very tactile and creative activity. I like to share what I can with those who are learning, trade stories with other experienced devotees, and learn from anyone who has ever made some good (or bad) bread.
When it comes to sharing the task is made more difficult as I haven't used recipes for bread making in a very long time. I know it sounds like I've been memorizing recipes and measurements, but in reality it is a more simple process than that. Once you learn the textures of the various stages, and learn to pay attention to the hydration level (ratio of flour to liquid) there isn't much complexity left. it's more technique and 'feel.'
The result is that you can use as many or as few ingredients as you wish. I've often made bread with simply flour, sourdough starter, and water. Though that's usually just me forgetting to add a bit of salt, which enhances the flavour a lot.
I like to share my sourdough starter around a bit within the community. I try to do so as much as logistics allow. This means I get to share the fun, but also, it gives me a path to replace my old friend if I accidentally kill it sometime through neglect or mishap. Sharing the enjoyment is my key goal, which is a fun thing unto itself.
I have a detailed sourdough primer (PDF) (updated 05/2020) I've been tweaking off and on a few years, so I'm happy to share that with anyone who wants to make their own and avoid some of more prescriptive online sources that dictate rigid schedules and regular divide and discard approaches. It's really not that hard, nor need it be wasteful. Hoping you can give it a try sometime.
Too Many Words™ on Twitter and Its Evolution
Twitter leadership had a challenging job to effectively monetize the popular service.
The emergence and initial success of Twitter was a bit of a lottery win in the first place. Throwing something together at the right moment in history was fortuitous. But the skills to sustain it and preserve its value did not come with the big novelty cheque.
They did a lot of things right: let the service catch on, and gradually build the advertising platform around it. The revenues continue to grow, and the advertising options appear to appeal to many.
Indeed, the level of advertising is beginning to be a bit intrusive at times, but it's generating substantial revenues, which should ensure the service remains around for a while. And there have been exorbitant rewards for the founders which seems appropriate as well, given that they were the ones who won that lottery. They got an application out at the right moment in history when users were ready for it, and sustained the plumbing to the point of critical mass. That's worth some reward.
But as we see Twitter leadership making, or suggesting, fundamentally bad directions forward, one gets the idea that they don't really understand the animal they've been training.
The cadre of designers and business enthusiasts that ended up with ownership of this popular microblogging site are possibly not the right ones to carry it forward. With a slightly different landscape, would a different team, with better long-term ideas have put together a similar short-message micro-blogging service a few months later to find themselves with the winning ticket? Likely. But regardless of who lays a house's foundation, they don't necessarily bring the skills necessary to make the village thrive.
Capabilities emerge based on the technologies that are available. Intuitively, certain elements get combined to produce applications. Low-cost, easy-access networking, plus an easy-to-use input means results in humans sharing things with each other. That was a natural progression out of Usenet and bulletin board roots. Blogging and short-post sharing became big and popular not because someone 'invented' Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr or even MySpace, Friendster or another on-ramp, but because many of us were already doing similar things the hard way, or on a precursor platform. Gradually developers craft tools to increment the process, and make it easier. Those steps are more often about first-to-market, or occasionally best-to-market. Sadly, often good-enough is a stand-in for "best."
In the climate of fast moving tech, any ten small teams of people "skilled in the art" (as patent lawyers say) of posting text to websites would find it obvious how to make the process easier. You quickly end up with ten different-but-similar approaches. Given the right environment, all of them are basically functional and achieve the goal of users being able to do their thing. The offerings remaining after a few months are determined by factors such as ease-of-use, responsiveness, and depth-of-pockets to cover the hosting/operational costs to keep the service up.
Forming another ten such teams a month later would produce other workable, and not all that different services (beyond cosmetic colours and button placement). Indeed, in most cases there is no secret sauce, no mind-bending invention of clever design, no eureka moment of unique insight required to deliver the effective solution.
With Twitter this was the case. Given the existence, and heavy use of blogging, and thousands of service offerings coming and going, every variant of such a service gets explored. Every approach to inputting content and sharing it.
Input by SMS was the only mobile game in town, and a reasonable, useful and obvious approach. Indeed at that point in time, SMS was a popular, emerging on-ramp for many services. The yet-to-be-ubiquitous broadband service for mobile HTTP-based interfaces didn't exist yet.
The 140 character limit turned out to not only be 'good-enough' the experience of crafting concise messages inspired creativity and allowed certain talents to shine. It's a well known value among creative people, that spaces with difficult boundaries are often inspire more than blank, wide-open ones.
It was most certainly not design-intent in the creation of Twitter, but rather a side-effect of the available technology, with a very positive result. Illustrating that Twitter was not formed from a cauldron of deep, innovative genius has been the on-going handling of the product.
Don't get me wrong - there are clearly smart people doing innovative things in keeping the service up and responsive. Hard things too. Managing the infrastructure, implementing the interfaces to the specs handed to them by the feature design people. These are hard, time-consuming jobs. These are good and valuable skills and talents, and are key to any functioning Internet-based business. And when is the last time you saw the Twitter FailWhale? There is a robust service there.
But services have requirements beyond keeping everything functioning. While on-going spotty service can erode a business, getting the direction of the ship wrong can sink it just as easily.
At the conceptual level, some services can have a tendency to not understand the user. And here there seems to be constant blindness to the nuanced differences between Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps it's the pressures of a now-public company to fall into traps like looking purely at user numbers.
Those of us participating from the early days saw Facebook scurry about trying to force its rigid, closed structure into a more Twitter-like approach. Twitter's public timelines were fundamental to a rapid uptake of and broad integration into traditional media and broadly into the customer support business. Facebook had to work hard to try to enable some part of that attention, and still lags behind in that engagement.
Twitter is continually painting themselves into a "quantity not quality" corner when they get distracted by comparing their user-numbers with other social media platforms.
The fact is, that Twitter with boundaries self-sorts. Not everyone is capable of conveying meaningful information in 140 characters. Those able to say something concise, engaging and/or entertaining within the boundaries garner followers. Those who cannot may not get a broad following, but can still find value within a smaller peer group, and as a consumer - rather than generator - of content. They must focus on engaging the right kind of users, not just broad user numbers.
And some users (Twitter leadership doesn't get this) may not find value, interest or an outlet in the social-media variant that is Twitter. That's okay. Not everyone read the newspaper (when that was a thing). Many people don't watch TV news, nor listen to radio news, nor write letters to their cousin, nor blog. The service need not be all things to all people. And diluting or pandering to every perceived whim of any user does the service no favours.
Now rumours from the leadership brain trust suggest the destruction of the 140 character limit. Throwing open the doors to 10,000 chars, or no limits at all, has savvy Twitter users worried.
Savvy users understand the fundamental "less is more" nature of the service, and worry about its potential demise.
We've seen a long-standing concern regarding erosion of the chronological timeline as well. And still many wait for responsible changes, like dealing with harassment and hate tweets are not effectively implemented. And some well-needed simple elements like a short editing window (two minutes?) to fix typos are in high demand. (Some suggest allowing a small number of characters to be changed would provide the same value.)
Many are the epic tweets ruined by a small typo. Deep is the shame of content creator whose thoughtful and timely tweet - with potential for much sharing - is ruined by an autospell substitution error.
Can we see thoughtful changes that invest in enhancing the quality of Twitter rather than pandering towards a Facebook-like populist, lowest common denominator? That will take some leadership and understanding behind the platform's leadership.
It's not clear that the leaders who fortuitously found themselves with this platform are savvy users who understand what they have.
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