la Buona Tavola/The Art Of Cooking

Brasato Al Barolo/Braised Beef With Barolo

This dish is a specialty of Piemonte, (Piedmont), which means "at the foot of the mountain". "Il Piemonte’ is a very interesting region, with French influences, delicious food and great wines, to mention but a few. Barbaresco, Barbera, Gaja and off course "the Prince of the Italian red wine" Barolo.







Ingredients:
2lbs. top round beef
2 carrots
2 onions
A few celery stalks
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbs. oil
1 bottle Barolo
Spices
Flour for dusting
Salt pepper

Preparation:
Salt pepper and marinate the beef with the vegetables, aromatic herbs spices and wine for 12 24 hours at a cool temperature, but not in the refrigerator.
Drain the meat. Heat the oil in a large pan. Dust the meat with flour and brown it on all sides over a high flame. Add the marinade. Cover and cook gently in the oven at 375 f. for 3-4 hours. Remove the brasato from its cooking juice, set aside and keep warm. Sieve finely the cooking juices with vegetables.
Adjust seasoning. Reduce a bit, slice the brasato, arrange in a pre-heated platter. You can serve it with potatoes gnocchi, soft polenta, or mashed potatoes.

Buon Appetito.

For more recipes, visit my website, rosariosellshomes.com

Food For Thought Brings Locally Grown Concert Back to Libbey Bowl!

Food For Thought Ojai is sponsoring its second Locally Grown fundraising concert on August 25 at Libbey Bowl. The concert will open with winners of the Battle of the Bands which takes place earlier in the month, then follow with headliners Brett Dennen - currently touring with John Mayer - and Perla Batalla – Grammy nominated vocalist and Ojai resident. The event is a fundraiser for Food For Thought Ojai, a nonprofit organization that brings nutrition education, garden-based learning and environmental and agricultural awareness to students of Ojai’s public schools. The first Locally Grown concert in 2005 featured singer/songwriter Jack Johnson.

“This is a great way for us to get our message out to the community,” said Marty Fujita of Food for Thought Ojai. Funds raised will go toward programs that promote good childhood nutritional practices, farm-field trips, school garden programs and salad bar lunches that feature locally-produced, seasonal fruits and vegetables.

This year’s headliners are two local favorites who have risen to international acclaim. Perla Batalla recently appeared in Leonard Cohen’s critically acclaimed tribute film I’m Your Man. She has assembled a new band that brings a rich depth showcasing Batalla’s powerful voice and soulful, Latin-tinged ballads. Brett Dennen is a young singer-songwriter who has recently been ‘discovered’ and is skyrocketing to fame on tour with John Mayer and Sheryl Crow. His pure and timeless vocals and joyous lyrics promise great things.

Billed as a green event, Locally Grown 2 will promote a variety of consciousness-raising actions to minimize the human ecological footprint. For example, concert-goers will be encouraged to bicycle or walk to and from the event to decrease fossil fuel use, bring their own refillable water bottles, and visit a “Zero Waste” station at the event. As an incentive, raffle tickets for unique prizes will be awarded for individual ‘green’ efforts. Sponsorships to help underwrite the cost of the event are available, ranging from $200 for a program listing to $5000 banner sponsorships.

A presale of tickets for the Locally Grown concert will be held at the Sunday Ojai Farmers Market on July 1 and July 8. Ticket prices range from $20 for rear lawn seats to $100 for front row VIP seats. Tickets will be available online beginning July 9 at https://www.brownpapertickets.com .

More information can be found on the Food For Thought Ojai web site or by calling 805-640-5044.

Food For Thought is a grassroots, community-driven nonprofit organization, working in partnership with the Ojai Unified School District to bring nutrition education, locally grown foods, and agricultural literacy to the children of the Ojai Unified School District.

Note: Links to Brett and Perla take you to their MySpace pages where you can hear their music!

Whistles Like a Bird

Andrew Bird is one of those guys whose talent is so extragavant you'd have to hate him if you didn't love him.

No one in modern music makes better use of one of the most beautiful musical instruments - the human voice, especially when it is used to whistle. Besides the violin - his first instrument - he also plays guitar and glockenspiel. If you haven't heard of him yet, you will. He is poised for a mainstream breakthrough.

Here he is on Letterman with "Plasticities":

Miles and Miles to Go

Miles Davis was not only one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, he was a pioneer of avant garde sounds. Listen to "Bitches Brew" from 1969 and tell me this wouldn't sound right at home at the Ojai Music Festival.

This was the very first jazz fusion album, but what exactly it was fusing is hard to tell - everything from bebop to Stravinsky to Delta Blues. Here's part 1 of 6. I encourage you to link through to all of them.

Battle of the Ojai/Ventura Bands!

Food For Thought Sponsors Battle of the Bands! Winners to Play Libbey Bowl

Food For Thought is sponsoring a local Battle of the Bands for youth in Ojai and Ventura. The three winning bands will open the Locally Grown fundraising concert on August 25 at Libbey Bowl featuring headliners Brett Dennen - currently touring with John Mayer - and Perla Batalla – Grammy nominated vocalist and Ojai resident. The event will be the second Locally Grown fundraiser for Food For Thought Ojai; the first concert in 2005 featured singer/songwriter Jack Johnson.

The Battle of the Bands is open to youth ages 13-20 from Ojai and Ventura, and will take place August 4th and 5th at the Matilija Junior High School Auditorium from 10am – 5pm. Bands performing all varieties of music, from straight edge and punk to jazz and acoustic, are encouraged to enter. In addition to opening the Locally Grown 2 concert, the three winning bands will also be able to record their chosen song in a professional sound studio and receive free CD copies of the recording.

Entry forms and a sample recording must be submitted by July 6. Rules and other information can be found on the Food For Thought Ojai website.

Food For Thought is a grassroots, community-driven nonprofit organization, working in partnership with the Ojai Unified School District to bring nutrition education, locally grown foods, and agricultural literacy to the children of the Ojai Unified School District.

Epilectic Triggers

The 2012 Olympic logo supposedly triggers epilectic seizures in certain susceptible people when seen in the short animation promotional trailer. It was hastily pulled at the first sign of trouble.

Despite all the great advances of science, we know next to nothing about the one organ that allows us to know anything about anything, our brain.

How is that flickering images can trigger a short-circuiting reflex in some and not others, for example? Or how is that not every person who watches this Horrors video, "Sheena is a Parasite," does not have a neurological meltdown?



The Horrors have taken the Prodigy based rave and trip hop music and amped it up a few degrees. This video, executing a simple concept very well, shows how videos can make music even more than it would be without the artful presentation of images, even if it floats through your mind at 144 images per second.

Bands on the Run - TV on the Radio

TV on the Radio has been around for about six years and three albums. Each album from this NYC indie hipster outfit is much different than the others. They are constantly refining and reinventing themselves - looking for sounds and songs that amuse themselves, rather than sticking with one style or genre.

That said, they do come out of that lower East Side hipster set that spawned other bands like the Yeah, Yeah Yeahs and Interpol. David Bowie even sings on a few of their tracks, providing that essential validation from a living legend.

What great fun they are having, and providing for those with adventurous ears. Here's one of the coolest videos of the past few years, "Wolf Like Me."

Farmer John Brings the Real Dirt to the Ojai Playhouse

From a press release submitted by Food for Thought Ojai:

No, it’s not about the sausage company.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a movie about Illinois farmer John Petersen and his decades-long struggle to wrest right livelihood from his family’s farm. Winner of over 30 festival awards, this film has it all – life, death, sex, terrorism, art, failure, success. Helped along by the fact that his mom started taking 16 mm movies of the family when John was a child, and by the fact that John is an artist as well as a bred-in-the-bones farmer, this movie reaches far beyond any normal expectations of a documentary about a mid-western farmer.

Presented by Food for Thought Ojai, the Ojai Film Society, and Slow Food Ojai/Ventura. The Real Dirt on Farmer John will show Saturday and Sunday, June 30-July 1, at 4:30 pm at the Ojai Playhouse in downtown Ojai. Tickets are $8 for adults, and $5 for seniors and students at the door.

Farmer John Petersen will be at the Sunday screening for Q & A.

Immediately following the screening, there will be a fixed price dinner reception for Farmer John ($25 per person for three course tasting menu featuring locally grown produce and poultry) at ironpan restaurant located 219 East Matilija Street in Ojai. Please call ironpan for reservations 805-646-3500 by Friday June 29.

View the film’s trailer at http://www.farmerjohnmovie.com/Home.html.

For further information, please call Marty Fujita at 640-5044.

Masters of the Obvious

The annihilation and reconstitution of the music business is one of my favorite subjects. My belief is that it is a good, if not great, time to be a musician. The old gatekeepers are falling by the wayside, and the bigger they are, the harder they fall. People won't pay for recordings, but they will gladly shell out their hard-earned money for concert tickets. The music business, as a whole, has been shrinking for years, but the portion that goes to tickets has been regaining lost ground.

The bottom line remains ever the same: make good music and you will make a good living doing so, provided you can put on a good show.

So it was with great glee that I read the inimitable blogmeister Will Divide's commentary on said meltdown.

"You have to read ten paragraphs into yesterday's Times story about the collapse of CD sales before getting to the heart of the matter, namely the suck-suck-suckiness of Pop music today:

"Even as the industry tries to branch out, though, there is no promise of an answer to a potentially more profound predicament: a creative drought and a corresponding lack of artists who ignite consumers’ interest in buying music. Sales of rap, which had provided the industry with a lifeboat in recent years, fell far more than the overall market last year with a drop of almost 21 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"Not that the writer spent a lot of time examining this aspect of the decline, because, well, it was a business story. Seems download sales aren't so hot either. How big media enterprises evolved to manage free expression and smother creativity, co-opt and trivialize, and how bright, talented people lent themselves to such activities, for a chance for money and fame, is a story as large and shining as the sun in these parts, has been for years.

"That the mobility is finally growing tired of it (and YES, I am using the collapse of CD sales as indicative of wider concerns) says a lot about our times. The country has been soul starved for years. For me, the true tragedy of America is how little real culture, which is a higher order of social self-knowledge, our affluence has bought us over the last sixty-odd years. Our politics is as bad as our pop music (Nashville, I am looking at you), and both reflect a creative bankruptcy that bleeds into the moral realm."

Here's a blast from the past, from the rightly famed gospel queens, the Davis Sisters:

Dad Rock That's Still Cool

As a dad myself, I have few pretensions left to hipness in any form. While I haven't (yet) devolved into a state of Dockers and socks-with-sandals, I also no longer bother to follow bands my 13-year-old daughter listens to like cute is what we aim for, Cobra Starship or Taking Back Sunday.

There's nothing wrong with Dad Rock in and of itself. Frankly, in the Darwinian world of musical tastes, the fact that bands like the Rolling Stones and The Who stand up so well to the test of time speaks to eternal associations with youthful expression and rebellion. They endure because they are good. And no one on this earth embodies coolness like Keith Richards.

That said, only one band in my listening experience bridges the gap between dinosaurish dad rock and coolness, and that is Wilco. Small wonder that they also bridge gaps between country and rock, between folk and soul, between . Mark my words, 50 years from now, we will still be debating Jeff Tweedy's legacy. He is cool because he tries so hard not to be.

This is the man, after all, who bought up all the rights to Woody Guthrie's unpublished songs, right out from underneath Bod Dylan's nose, and came out with one of the emblematic albums of the 1990s, "Mermaid Avenue" with British belter Billy Bragg.

Here's a Pitchfork interview with Wilco's founder about their newest and sixth album, "Blue Sky Blue":

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/42415-interview-wilco

Here's Jeff Tweedy with his son, proving once and for all that being a dad doesn't exclude us from the clubhouse of cool kids:

Music + Film = Art

Having been among the lucky 200,000 households in MTV's test market rollout in June 1981, I have nursed more than 25 years of jonesing for great music videos. It is a sublime addiction, feeding all my senses, especially when I would grab my gal and dance to Kim Wilde's "We're the Kids in America."

Everybody lives for the music go-round, indeed. Good times.

The music business has changed dramatically in recent years, however. And among the first casualties of these epochal changes has been the elaborate, expensive, over-the-top videos. Recording artists and record companies are now looking for cool on the cheap. The Hold Steady treadmill video being a perfect example - shot with digital for virtually nothing, it has become a viral phenomenon, lasting nearly a year.

Here's another excellent example - this sleek Swedish import from the Concretes, "The Chosen One." Money can't buy you love, or great art either.

40 Years Ago Today - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Well, sort of. The epochal song-cycle rock opera concept album, from those towering geniuses and cheeky lads from Liverpool, debuted on Friday.

It is hard to overstate the significance of their achievement in moving the artistic goalposts. The New Yorker's current issue has a great profile of Paul (my second-favorite Beatle), in which he talks about the pain of having to sue his bandmates about their poor choice of management (history proved him right to do so), and how he and John patched up their relationship, and went back to the easy tomfoolery and rapport they enjoyed during the late 1950s as teenagers with the Quarrymen and their shared love of American blues and rockabilly.

It is hard to also overstate the cultural wasteland that awaited the Beatles when they arrived in the U.S. in 1964 for their watershed moment on the Ed Sullivan show. To describe that moment, I will defer to one of my favorite bloggers, Digby's Hullabaloo:

"First of all, to you kiddies out there who want to know what all the brouhaha about The Beatles was all about, I strongly suggest you - hell, everyone should have it - grab the four Complete Ed Sullivan Shows with The Beatles . Now here's the thing: you have to watch one a night, all the way through, including Miitzi Gaynor sing what she calls "real music," and Frank Gorshin doing Kirk Douglas impressions. You will learn two things. First of all, that life in mainstream white America in 1964 was bereft of any positive cultural merit whatsoever. And secondly, this is the ideal society your average Republican politician has in mind for America, sans Beatles of course. It truly is hard to believe. You must see these shows in their entirety to understand how much this country has changed."

Here's a rare, archival video of the title song:

la Buona Tavola/The Art Of Cooking

This is strawberries season, and there is no better time than now to make this delicious dessert.

Strawberries Baskets with aceto balsamico/ Cestino di fragole con aceto balsamico

Ingredients for the baskets:
5 oz. of butter
5 oz. of flour
3 eggs whites
1 tbsp. vanilla extract

For the filling:
10 oz. vanilla ice cream
1/2 lb. Strawberries
16 drops aceto balsamico

Preparation:
In a bowl, wisk the butter with the sugar and the vanilla extract until frothy. Slowly, add the egg whites and then the sifted flour. Put this cream in a pastry bag with a smooth nozzle and form four disks on a buttered cookie sheet.
Bake for 10 minutes on a 425 f oven. Remove and while still hot. Place each disk over an upside down glass. The overlapping edges will turn downwards, thus creating a basket.
Let cool and then remove from the glasses.
Clean and dry the strawberries and place them in the baskets.
On each dessert plate, place a spoon of vanilla ice cream and let it melt for a couple minutes until soft. Place a basket next the vanilla ice cream.
Drizzle about four drops of balsamic vinegar over each basket, garnish with strawberry leaves.