Holy $moke by Derek Robinson

Hungry for a book that snaps your eyes open and dares you to put it down?  Here’s a tip!  Holy $moke, by my favorite living writer, Derek Robinson.  Holy $moke is a smorgasbord of spies, intrigue, laugh out loud fun, and indelible and unlikely characters, all driven by a swiftly moving plot.

About time a book came along that is so startlingly original that I forgot about my afternoon nap and my before dinner cocktail.  All done without the clichés of murder, seduction and gunnery.  Wait a sec…no sex, blood, violence and still spellbinding???  Let me give you the whole picture.  My favorite writer doesn’t depend on weepy and psychologically damaged characters either.

Let’s set the stage.  As World War II ebbs toward its ragged conclusion. Allied forces are advancing by fits and starts through Italy. Southern Italy is liberated, but no one is quite sure what’s filling the vacuum. In the north, German forces are putting up a hell of a fight.  In Rome, the fascist government is deposed, leaving a political and commercial void in its wake.  Ordinary Romans try desperately to put food in the mouths of their families and gather together the shards of their war shattered lives. 

Meanwhile, General “Wild Bill” Donovan, the brainy, bellicose founder and leader of the Office of Strategic Services has his OSS agents scouring the city for leftover scraps of intelligence.  He’s not messing around and neither are his underlings, who haven’t produced viable information in ages.  The pressure is on.  The message is clear:  find new veins of intelligence gold, or find yourself banished to some backwater, where you’ll wait out the war filling out forms and filling filing cabinets, while your brain atrophies and your raw fingertips bleed.

Enter Virgilio del Pronto, an out of work writer, recently released from prison and looking to restart his so-so career.  With Rome’s newspapers and magazines in ruins, finding a writing job is damn near impossible. Plus, more than just an empty belly is pressuring him.  There’s Virgilio’s caustic wife, an unpleasant person in the best of times, who never lets him forget he’s unemployed.  “How lucky I was to marry a writer…Instead of a ditch digger who brought home a wage.”  Yes, I often identify with that.

But some things Virgilio has in abundance are acquaintances, all of whom are very aware of his fluid imagination and gift for the written word.  We’d call his approach ‘networking.’  He calls it survival.

Then, out of the blue, with persistence and a truckload of luck, Virgilio strikes gold.  A vein of it.  And it’s just what the American OSS agents need.

Robinson mines history and inserts vivid strands of humor into another of his seamlessly free flowing tales of the improbable. Reminiscent of his Eldorado series (The Eldorado Network, Operation Bamboozle, Artillery of Lies, and Red Rag Blues), Holy $moke leads you through a neatly constructed and mesmerizing sequence of events, all founded on equally improbable truth.  Along the way, he paints a clear picture of life under Allied occupation, while weaving a magnetic tale of Vatican intrigues, including oddities such as the German Ambassador playing tennis with the Japanese Ambassador.  Yes, even after Rome’s liberation, Axis Ambassadors to the papal enclave still played on.

All of this is preposterous, yet in large measure it happened.  You’ll be turning pages and chuckling as Derek Robinson leads you through this romp of a novel!  Pick up your copy early in the day; otherwise you’re going to lose sleep! 

I always read Derek Robinson’s books twice.  Once for enjoyment and again for even more enjoyment!

Check out his web site:  http://www.derekrobinson.info/ or order directly from the author at;   delrobster@gmail.com

Although Holy $moke is self-published, don’t forget to look for his other supremely entertaining books on Amazon.com or Amazon.uk.  There must be twenty, both novels and non-fiction. His series of flying novels, from both World War I and II are the best I’ve ever read.  But, I warn you, all his books are as addictive as potato chips at a cocktail party and while you’re laughing and eagerly flipping pages, you’re also getting sneaky glimpses into real, unvarnished history!

Ligurian Cuisine: Tarta di Limone

Mother’s Day is upon us.  Although my mother has passed on, she’s with me everyday, and especially every time I step in the kitchen.  Even as a small child, often I was right there by her side, stirring this or pouring that.  I knew cup and teaspoon and tablespoon measures before I could read. My mother also showed me how to measure spoonfuls by the open palm, that-looks-about-right method.  One of her specialties was Lemon cake.  Gracious, I can still taste that lemony flavor that permeated my childhood dreams.  I was a championship bowl licker.

So, when I got to Cinque Terre and found out we would be making Tarta di Lemone with our hostess, Daniella, I found myself convulsed with inner turmoil.  You know the feeling: this can’t be as good as my mother’s, but I have to be nice to my hostess.  No need to fret, and one check of Daniella’s recipe will tell you why.  My mother’s was made with real lemons and no shortcuts.  No cake mix. No lemon curd from a can, or squirts of lemon juice from a plastic bottle.  Ditto in Daniella’s kitchen!  With just the heavenly aroma, you can instantly tell a cake made with fresh ingredients. Oh, my goodness!

So let’s get back to Cinque Terre and the task at hand.  Tarta di Lemone.  A quick check of the recipe and ingredients tells the story.

This cake goes together like a dream…a dream of my mother’s kitchen!

Preheat oven to 325

baking time 50 minutes

In a small bowl mix together:

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

half tsp salt

In a small bowl mix together:

¼ cup yogurt (or milk)

1 tsp vanilla

In a medium bowl cream together: (I used a handheld, electric mixer)

1 stick butter (softened)

¾ cup sugar plus 2 T

zest of 2 lemons

Add 2 eggs one at a time and mix well after each.

Alternating, add the flour and yogurt mixtures to the butter/sugar mixture, then add 2 T fresh lemon juice.  (About one lemon’s worth)  Mix well.  You’ll have a light, fluffy batter.

Put the batter in a buttered/floured loaf pan and bake until a knife comes out clean.  Note: in my oven, the cake needed about seven minutes longer to bake. Let the cake cool 10 minutes then invert onto a rack. 

Slice the cake and pair it with berries and whipped cream.  And, don’t you dare use a can of pre-whipped cream…or sin of sins, Cool Fluff!

In this recipe, the cake’s deep lemon flavor isn’t overpowered by sugar and I like to keep it that way.  No icing.  Let the whipped cream and berries do their work of enhancing and adding depth to the flavor. Your only other job is to have a glass of milk close at hand…make that a quart!

Come on now!  Mother’s Day is only a day or two away!  Let’s be kind to our childhood memories!  Daniella sure helped me refresh mine!

Cinque Terre, Part III

I’ve given you an overview of fabulous Cinque Terre. http://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2017/04/on-to-cinque-terre-part-i.html

AND told you about the delights of Ligurian cuisine. http://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2017/04/lunch-with-daniela-cinque-terre-part-ii.html

NOW, it’s time to spread our map, hop on a ferryboat and checkout the five villages and another one that doesn’t make up the Cinque Terre, but nevertheless is a jewel of a stop.

Getting around.  Lots of choices.  TAXI (expensive from town to town).  TRAIN (convenient and inexpensive BUT make sure you buy the right ticket or you’ll be fined up to $55 per person). WALKING (least expensive, but it’s a long walk!)  BOAT (my fave!  $25 for an all day, hop-on-hop-off trip in a spotlessly clean, first class ferryboat)

Lots of reasons taking the BOAT is my fave.  In addition to the excitement of glimpsing all of Cinque Terre from the water, is the supreme convenience of being able to look around, shop, eat, and climb back on board to do the same at the next village.  Boats run on a frequent schedule, so you seldom have to wait until you’re bored and stamping your feet in frustration.  Lastly, I like the ferryboat because it’s so inexpensive.  Convenient, beautiful. cheap!  The trifecta!

Lets talk briefly about the five, no wait, six towns!  Check out the map.  We’ll start from the largest and most northern town, Monterosso which is where we stayed.  Lots of shopping and lots of restaurants, but let’s not forget it’s also a vibrant, functioning town with small food stands, grocery stores, tiny shops, outdoor cafés, and a market square that really is a market place with fresh produce, cheeses, meats, flowers and so much more.  You’ll have to check with locals to find out the times and dates.

I love the back streets, where small, non-tourist shops offer local goods, such as dried herbs, wines, flavored salts, olives, cheeses, and cooking utensils the locals use.  Don’t you love to have friends over for dinner, or just wine and cheese and as they swoon over your lavishly laden serving bowls and platters, you hear:  Wow, those dishes are charming!  Where did you get them?

Then the snob in you comes bouncing out like a jolly joker:  Got those on our last trip to Cinque Terre.  It’s where I buy all my serving dishes…and you see these olive wood serving spoons?  Franco Bianchi made them for me in his small atelier in Monterosso.  He’s such a caro amico.

But, now it’s time to hop on the boat for a splendid cruise on the briny and a visit to the rest of Cinque Terre.  I’m not going to go into detail about each village, since they are all similar to what I’ve just described.  History, endless shopping, seaside dining on the freshest of local seafood, washed down by local wines.  Best of all are the friendliest people you’ll ever meet, not only the merchants, but the people on the street or sitting next to you in outdoor cafés, many of whom speak English and who are happy to engage in conversations and tell you about their town.

Only one town cannot be reached by ferry boat.  Corniglia is high on a bluff and sad to say, we did not visit.  Best to walk or go by train, or so I’m told.

Cinque Terre is not just for daylight adventures. If you’re up to it and plan ahead, there are also evening dinner cruises, but they fill up fast.  We wanted to take such a tour with Angelo, but when I called, he was solidly booked four days in advance.  We were there in April and I suspect in the high tourist season it’s even worse.

One town I promised to mention that is not included when the guidebooks talk about Cinque Terre, is Porto Venere.  It is also a World Heritage Site.  Yes, the ferryboat does stop here, or if you’re just passing through, you can also get there by car.  Coming in by ferryboat, the first thing you notice is the ancient church of St Peter (1198 AD) on the cliff approaching the harbor.  But the town dates back to the first century B.C.  And in fact, the ancient church was built on the site of an earlier Christian church, which was itself built over a Roman temple dedicated to the goddess Venus.  So many conquers, so many layers of history.  Roman, Byzantine, Genoese, French. Italian.  The harbor has seen more passing of empires and city-states than I can even begin to explain.

Ok, so what did I do besides wonder and wander in Porto Venere?  The next street, which parallels the promenade along the harbor front, is a tiny cobblestone alley, so narrow you can literally jump from a store or restaurant on one side to another shop on the opposite side!  My quest was to find an Italian linen shirt.  Sure I had found them in other shops in the other towns, but at ridiculous expense.  I was willing to pay more than I normally would, but not enough to keep me awake at night, mumbling “Oh, my god, what did I do?” 

In this tiny alley, I found what I was looking for, a boutique for men, and the shop clerk was the perfect, dark haired Italian beauty.  As soon as I walked through the doorway, I knew I was going to buy a shirt.  Men are such simple fools. As it turned out, she was as charming as she was beautiful.  I tried on a shirt.   She put me in front of a large mirror and we both looked it over.  “It looks ok,” she said, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.  I dearly wanted her heart to be in it.

Then she searched and found a smaller size.  I stood in front of the mirror again.  Now she smiled. “Molto bene!”  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  I walked away with the perfect shirt at the perfect price, purchased from the perfect shop clerk.  Win-Win-And Dazzled.  That night I mumbled, “Oh, my god, where did my youth go?”

Lunch was on the harbor front.  Calamari.  Salad.  Delicious bread. Fried fish.  Winnnnnnne!  Should we order another bottle?  Was that a serious question? asks one of my lunch companions.

So we tarried at table, in the sunshine of a brilliant day, soaking in the atmosphere of an ancient port, while our Italian waiter brought us platters of sumptuous fare and kept our cups running over.

With great effort, we made our way back to the ferryboat, for a ride back to Monterosso and the promise of an adventurous evening.

Yes, I could live in Cinque Terre.  The question was, can I bear to leave?  Matter of fact, I think I could use another linen shirt…