Apologies...

I'm sorry but I won't be able to write the rest of the week or next week as I'm currently in the process of moving out of the current place and somehow I managed to get really sick. Not the best month, I'm telling you! 

Thank you for your time.

~Bella

Crespelle di ceci...

Crespelle di ceci

Chickpea flour crespelle

Ingredients:

Crespelle:

3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1/2 cup chickpea flour

3/4 cup whole milk, plus more if needed

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

1/4 cup heavy cream

Fine sea salt to taste

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Filling and sauce:

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

3 to 4 small zucchini, sliced into thin rounds

3 tablespoons minced fresh herbs, such as thyme, parsley, and marjoram, plus more for garnish

1/4 cup diced mozzarella cheese

1 cup ricotta cheese

Fine sea salt to taste

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 1/2 pounds ripe tomatoes

Yellow bell pepper strips for garnish

A few leaves of butter lettuce for garnish

Directions:

1. To make the crespelle, sift together the all-purpose flour and the chickpea flour into a large bowl. Whisk in the milk until smooth, then whisk in the eggs, cream, salt, and pepper. (The mixture should have a pourable consistency. If not, whisk in a little additional milk until it does.) Cover and set aside to rest for 1 hour, then whisk in the oil. 

2. Heat a 10-inche nonstick pan or cast-iron skillet and coat it very lightly with oil by rubbing a dab of oil over the surface with a paper towel, wiping away any excess. Pour in a sixth of the batter, about 1/2 cup. Roll the pan in all directions to cat the surface, and then place it over medium heat until the batter has cooked into a thin crepe. Use a spatula to remove it from the pan and repeat the process, very lightly oiling the pan with the piece of paper towel each time. Set the crepes aside: do not stack them.

3. For the filling, heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and cook the zucchini until tender, then sprinkle on the minced herbs.

4. Combine the zucchini mixture with the mozzarella and ricotta, and season to taste with salt and pepper.

5. Make a tomato sauce by first peeling the tomatoes (see page 205), then seeding and pureeing them in a blender or through a food mill with the remaining 3 tablespoons oil. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

6. Distribute the cheese filling equally onto the centers of the crespelle, then roll them up jelly roll style and cut them into 1 1/4- inch pinwheel slices. Serve them at room temperature with the tomato sauce and garnish them with additional minced herbs, bell pepper strips, and a few lettuce leaves.

Serve 6   Cooking Time: 1 hour

~Bella


Ps: I won't be posting Friday, or next week as I'm in a moving process. I don't think I'll be able to post anything. 

Enzo's Birthday... Another brother...

Happy Birthday to my younger brother, Enzo, turning 8, today!

My favourite number, and my toughest school year...

I was back in France for 2nd grade or what we call, CE1. The year where I couldn't stand the teacher much, the same year where I started to stop doing my homework, where I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I grow up... The same year where I started to "love" a boy. I wasn't the easiest kid around, even if I kept amazing grades, succeeding each exam, my stubbornness overcame me all the time.
It was the year where the only thing I wanted to do is watch tv shows about crime and lawyers, law and detective work. Being able to defend the victims, bring justice and some peace to people. That's all I wanted, maybe I was relating my private life through what I wanted to do, but all I knew was that I was the only kid who thought about such a complex job. The drawing surprised the teacher... It was the same year, where I would read adult books while kids my age were still trying to figure out how to read correctly.

I was a stubborn little 8 years old girl, hopefully, my brother will be less of a stubborn kid.

"Birthdays are good for your health. Studies have shown that people who have more birthdays live longer."

~Bella

Does Religion Should Matter? (3)

Debates... Agree to disagree once again...

The should it matter is another way to start giving our opinions, and this one isn't easy!

As you may alright know, some subjects are far from easy-going nor pleasant to converse such as politics but as well as religion!

When I think about religion I think about my own, I was born Catholic even though I do not practice or have a difficult time believe in it all, it's still part of who I am. Now, it never came as an issue to anyone nor my ex-boyfriends. None of them asked or been bothered by what I believe in, which is technically not a specific religion.

Being in love with someone who read a different religious book than you, may affect the way you may want to raise your children in, later in life. But, if you both know how to manage both religions, I believe there is a great future for you and the family.
Now, before jumping into the future conclusion of the difficulties of what should your children believe in, let's start at the beginning of the story!

Falling in love is easy! Falling in love with someone who's religion is the opposite of yours is possible! A happy relationship will happen, religion doesn't make you sadder or happier, it's what you believe in. It could lead to lots of arguments especially if you are not open-minded and accept your partner's religion. It takes a lot to accept someone's flaws so religion wise, it could be difficult especially when you practice your religion to the letter.
Members of one religion could value the same things, so how could partners get along when they have different morals, believes... Arguing, being closed-minded, stubborn enough to not let go of your determination of what people should believe in. It's similar to a couple who are fighting on either they will go out for dinner or stay home to dine. Fixing issues or disagreements is easy when you both talk,  so why should it be otherwise with religion? Why can't we talk and see what's best to do instead of raising our voices? Why should we get into violent arguments over the subject?

Religions have been, in fact, one of the reasons for wars. Wars need reasons to happen, money and religion are usually the cause of it. Today, we see it with Muslims. Because of a few of the religion (so they say they believe in), we have to think they are all bad. Should we start defining who a person is by what they believe in? If that's the case then Christianity has done a lot more, how many did we kill for the Christ? How many people fought for what they believed in? Plenty, but is there any writing saying you should kill for what you believe in? Is there any Bible, Quran or any other religious books that state you should kill another human being? People who use their religion to explain their behaviors, saying or actions are not everybody. These people are in fact not religious or else they wouldn't do what they do. 
Faith isn't murder, it might be a difficult subject to talk about, but that's only human beings aren't open-minded. People are now determined to stick with their own story, not wanting to hear anyone's opinion, and then you complain about wars, well maybe if we listened more, things would differ! 
Relationships are exactly the same. If two people don't communicate, don't listen to one another, how will the relationship grow, how will you be happy? Without communicating no one can understand what the other person think. If you live with each other, discussing religions, carefully, is one way to avoid arguments. Surely, being open-minded to another alternative would make a relationship grown instead of letting if fall apart. 

As Orin, a YouTuber said: 

It doesn't matter what you believe in, it's about the person you are. 

In a relationship, the only way to figure it all out, you both have to talk to find the right way to let the relation grow. Religion isn't politic, isn't a crime, and it's only the faith you put into someone or something, it's what makes you, you. No one should judge you for what you believe in if they do... Maybe you should revise the situation.... No one wants to have an unhappy relationship where both people have to hide who they are, what they believe in. 

"In every religion, there is love, yet love has no religion."

~Bella

Women... What We Think and What We Have to Admit...

Us, women, have issues with the why and how a man just cannot be into us. We make up excuses to defend a person that shows no interest in us, whatever the case may be.

Men know how to use a phone, cell phone, no worries on that. A simple text message, a call doesn't take the entire day. Sure, they can be busy, but come on now, drop the bullshit, the bloody idiotic excuse that you keep on telling yourself. They can find some time for you in their crazy day. Cell phones is a genius invention, saves us lots of precious time, and yet we still manage to keep excusing people for not calling. If we can butt dial a person, we can take two minutes of our day to message. The worst part is when they promise or tell you that they will call later, but doesn't call or message whatsoever. Please give yourself credit, you deserve a lot more than this piece of garbage that doesn't bother talking to you at all. Forgetting to call you excuse... Give me a break, he hasn't because he is not into you. The only way someone could deserve such an excuse is somehow that person had an emergency, someone close died, or car accident and they are in the hospital, or natural disaster suddenly broke out and managed to mess up the internet/connection. Usually, if someone is interested in you, they will contact you a way or another... Forgetting isn't a good excuse, forget that and not the person!

Men know how to be sober around their family members, their bosses, their friends, so they can be sober around you! Indeed, drinking and eating are fun... I mean who doesn't like to party, sometimes, a drink is just for the fun of it, but it's not a necessity. Yes, at times, we need to unwind from a long, hard day of work, but if it's the only moment they reach out to you, compliments you or give you affection, then that's the wrong guy, he doesn't care much. He is just not that into you. Anyone can drink just like anyone can be sober. Don't let your desire to be loved and feel affection cloud your judgment. Alcohol doesn't make a person, just because they act normally after taking five shots of tequila or smoked weed before going to bed, doesn't mean a thing! The substance is still there! A bad boy is a bad boy, they aren't serious and you deserve better!

Men know how to touch you, quite easy if you ask me! They are great at using certain parts of their bodies while that brain of theirs, not so much! If a man likes you, he will kiss you! Then he will most likely imagine what you look like in your undies. That's how men work... No logic into that but that's how it is and there's nothing to do about it! You had sex, plenty times but he had stopped. You have been seeing each other for about two months now and he stopped... It doesn't happen unless it's not working out for him. Too many excuses are given to people who fear intimacy, commitment. There are many people reading about the specific subject, others got to therapy to understand themselves. Fear happen, but if yu truly like someone, the fears should disappear, eventually... Then there are the men who don't have sex with you at all, preferring to eat ice cream, popcorn and watch movies all night long, each time you see each other. I mean sure once in a while, but if it's all the bloody time, he is either homosexual or just not into you. Being happy without doing anything is alright as long as it is not each time. Even as a long-term relationship, things do slow down, but it never stops! It's considered a gift, a joy, and everyone should enjoy it, have the right to have a fantastic sex life.

Women have a hard time seeing what's obvious, they hope for the best when clearly, the man doesn't care as much as the woman wanted him to. No interest in them whatsoever. He is just not into you! It doesn't matter if the person might seem interested, if he is, everything will be about you, messages would come along more often than expected, and they would ask you out for dinners, cinemas...They will bring you closer towards them instead of letting you go off in your own ways. Women keep hoping for things that will never come around; when a man isn't interested it's obvious, but we are blinded by the faith that he might, just slightly, might like us, be interested in us...

There's a movie which came out a few years back about how men were not into women and vice versa. Chick flick for sure, no doubt about that, but it was a good slap because even though I might see the obvious thing, know how men may act most of the time, it's still complicated to know when it's concerning me. I still keep a little place in my heart for some hope which may never come.
Women are quite different from men, Mars vs. Venus! We've always been interested in knowing how we both think, but both genders have their faults and truths. Are we suppose to change who we are? No! It's who we are, how our hormones work, and sadly, all we can do is understand one another in order to make it work!

" Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember."- Albert Einstein

~Bella

The Book Of Symbols 10...

Darkness

Out from the darkness back into the darkness- affairs of the cat. Issa

Throughout our lives- in the daily circadian rhythms of sleep of sleep and waking, the creative process of play and invention, the thought waiting for emergence out of the depths of the unconscious; during periods of introversion when the allure of the outer world is stilled and the transpersonal encountered at the horizon of consciousness- we, like the cat, repeatedly come out of the darkness and go back into darkness. Darkness is our first reality, the looming riddle of our becoming. Like the macrocosmic galaxy hypothetically plunged in a globe of "dark matter" and permeated with mysterious "dark energy," so our own microcosmic being, quickening in the womb, is enveloped by the dark matter and dark energy of our ancestral inheritance.

Darkness is defined most simply as the absence of light, and out experience of the one may initially take shape as the observe of our experience of the other. We think of light, for instance, as clarifying and delineating. The world comes into being at daybreak. Darkness, on the other hand, as Rilke reminds us, absorbs and merges the many into one: 

But the darkness pulls in everything: 

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

 how easily it gathers them!-

While light is quick, propulsive, transparent, darkness is still and waiting and opaque. Light beams, transmits, radiates; darkness extinguishes, eclipses, swallows. Darkness is tunnel, abyss, maw, the city in the blackout, the locked closet, the roach scurrying over the countertop before the kitchen light goes on. It is the veiled face and cloaked body. It is the massive iceberg concealed beneath the pitchy surface of the sea, the miasmic land of the dead, the "nighttime nothingness" of the shadowed edge of the moon. 

Inscrutably, darkness presides over the brooding latency

and ghostly luminescence of sea and sky. North

Pacific Ocean, Stinson Beach, by Hiroshi Sugimoto,

gelatin silver print, 1994.

As absence, darkness attracts human projections of moral or mental deficiency, often translated in terms of sin or evil: the Koran's chapter Light, dor example, describes the deeds of the disbeliever as "darkness on a vast abysmal sea... layer upon layer of darkness." A "heart of darkness" in Joseph Conrad's imagination is one governed by abhorrent passions and base instincts that tempt the "unlawful soul" beyond the defining boundaries of humanity. For Sylvia Plath, darkness is intimate and impending: 

I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, 

its malignity.

Darkness often evokes the teeming formlessness of the beginning: "Darkness there was" the Rig Veda declares, "at first concealed in darkness this A; was discriminated chaos." Or it may suggest an impoverishment of spirit or substance. Hinduism's Kali Yuga or "dark age," for instance, lacking the ordering force of dharma, the holy law, is rife with hubris, greed, and war. Alchemy associates the imagery of darkness with nigredo- the stage in which the ego is confronted not only with the weight of its earthliness and unlived possibilities but also with its capacity for evil. 

Yet what appears to be only absence, emptiness and obscurity may actually point to a luminosity, presence, and fullness of being peculiar to darkness' domain. Is it not, after all, alive and stirring? 

I'm getting the spirit in the dark

I'm getting the spirit in the dark

People movin, aw, ain't we groovin?

Just getting the spirit in the dark.

Aretha Franklin, Spirit in the Dark

According to the fourth-century Christian writer Gregory of Nyssa, it is only after one has quenched the brilliant light of the reasoning mind that one may enter most immediately into the presence and knowledge of god: "Moses' vision of God began with light, afterward God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw god in the darkness." 

The "Black Sun" of the alchemical stage of the

nigredo signifies an eclipse of the ego's standpoint due

to an incursion of the unconscious. Though depicted

as an encounter with death, the presence of the angels

testifies to the necessity of this provisional darkening in

order to achieve the opus. Viridarium chymicum, 

1624, Germany. 

Preeminently, darkness is the precinct of initiation. In the enchanted forest, the shamanic cave, the black pool or the well, the darkness theater, the alcheringa time, the Asclepian temple one comes face to face with the agony and the muted rapture fo death and (re) birth. The experience of initiatory darkness, as evoked by T.S. Eliot, is, to be sure, one of paradox and ambiguity:

O dark dark dark...

I said to my soul, be still,

and let the dark come upon you...

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;

wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing;...

Wait without thought,

for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light,

and the stillness the dancing. 

But if one consciously enters into the darkness and endures its enshroudment; if catlike, one learns to see and to hear acutely in its recesses, te darkness will gradually reveal the treasures concealed there. In the process, darkness will become the mysterious and familiar source of transformation and inspiration, growth and healing to which, repeatedly, we gratefully return:

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world...

Rainer Maria Rilke, You, Darkness 

of Nyssa, St.Gregory, Jean Daniélou and Herbert 

Musurillo. From Glory to Glory: Texts from 

Gregory of Nyssa's Mystical Writings.

Crestwood, NY, 1979. 

~Bella

Does Age Should Matter? (2)

Age... An issue or nothing more than a simple number?
When you build a friendship, you don't automatically ask the person for their age? Not that you care much if they are 8 years older than you or not. Does age matter when you are building a friendship? No, not really, you don't personally go and ask people's age, but when it comes to a relationship, stable, serious relationship with a partner that you love and respect, somehow, you make a much bigger deal about ages. Don't take it personally, some people don't look at the age but how mature someone is.
From my own experience and seeing other's, I can tell you that age shouldn't matter at all, you could be 30 and act like a 60-year-old person, or be 45 years of age and act like a teenager. Maturity should matter though!

Now, I know how difficult it can be when you are in your early 20's and looking for stability in your life. I'm in that situation, and it's not fun at all. People your own age view things differently than you so you get along with older people... Normal and quite frankly alright. Age doesn't matter if you can get along with someone older than you.Yet, the situation gets slightly complex when feelings rush in...

In a relationship, not everyone will agree with me, some will judge the person. Imagine you are 22 and they are only 19. The age could be quite problematic if you are interested in going out in bars to get a drink or two with friends, you won't be able to take your partner with you, the underage could be a slight issue for some people! Then there is always the friends telling you, "You could do better."

Next, there are the other issues such as the "label". The term "Cougar" given to older women who are with younger men. Not fun to be described as such, our society has grown so much over years, centuries, we would think people are less judgmental, but sadly, we haven't changed. Another issue would be the siblings, younger ones, commenting to make sure you get the drift of what they are trying to tell you. Sarcasm is great but also quite sneaky! There's some truth in every sarcastic comment! 
Then, there is the patience... 
You can't expect to be on the same page all the time, especially when there is a big age gap between the both of you. Patience is a skill that must be conquered fast in order to keep the relationship stable. Your patience will be put to test as soon as the relationship grows. You both won't have the same schedule, leaving you both less time to see one another. Life gets in the way, but so is work! You will have to manage your patience, not every day will be the same and routine does set upon a relationship, unless you make it excited! 

It's an agree to disagree situation! 
To me, love isn't a number, it's a feeling that should be felt! You could be 5 to 10 years older and I would be alright with it. Now I have limits, I wouldn't be able to be with a person who is my parent's age! I wouldn't have much in common and I'm personally ain't attracted. I know many people who would prefer way older people for stability and maturity! Again it's an agree to disagree situation which only can be determined by your own opinion. 

Age shouldn't define your feelings towards another human being, your feelings should be determined on how you feel towards the other person! 

"I believe that two people are connected at the heart, and it doesn't matter what you do, or who you are, or where you live; there are no boundaries or barriers if two people are destined to be together." - Julia Roberts 

~Bella