Unfucking of the apartment in progress. Two weeks of being sick is not a housekeeping performance enhancer, and frankly I think we just "pretend cleaned" it before the fambly got here. So who knows when we last saw the floorboards of the off-limits upstairs area...I'm drawing a blank myself (how unusual!).
If you're us, every time you clean (clean for real), you find stuff you haven't seen in a while. Unsent postcards (we must have 100), cryptic scribblings (is that a password? no, it's that Croatian guy we met at that thing), flyers for gigs we never went to (they are legion), plus the usual scads of completely irrelevant crap.
Of course you also find stuff that stops you dead with immobilizing nostalgia, which is one of the reasons it takes you three days to clean the apartment. The above didn't quite immobilize me, because 1) the author isn't my grandmother, she's the Mara's grandmother Alverta (originally Elvira, don't have the full lowdown on the name change), who (though I think she's awesome), plus 2) she's still turning out legendary amounts of gnocchi and cookies and all kinds of greatness at the crispy ol' age of 88.
She's not mine, but I still feel nostalgia's clammy fingers grasping for me. I'll be back eventually to explain what this is a recipe for, hopefully: Mara's Italian relatives come from Abruzzo, and in the Abruzzese dialect these are called fiadune. Or at least that's the way we always thought it was spelled. But there must be a more generalized Italian name for them, right? "Fiadune" gives me 2 Google hits, but then again Abruzzo seems to occupy a bit of a blind spot in regional Italian cuisine.
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