jnjosh learns italian

Zucchini Carbonara

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As part of learning italian and the culture of Italy, I’ve also been really diving into cooking italian food. Carbonara is traditionally made with guanciale but we often look for meatless recipes or at least meatless options. So using a few different resources, I’ve put together this Zucchini Carbonara recipe that we really enjoy.

First, check out the video.

Okay, I’ll not bore you any more, let’s just get to the recipe.

Zucchini Carbonara: The Recipe

This is for about 2 servings

Ingredients

1 zucchini
3-4 egg yolks (3 large or 4 medium)
3/4 cup of freshly grated Pecorino Romano
2 servings of Spaghettoni (or Spaghetti) ~120 grams
2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
Water, Salt and Pepper

Instructions

Start boiling water. Use a bit less water than you normally would, this allow the starches in the pasta to build up. Add salt. When the water is boiling, add pasta.
Dice the Zucchini into small cubes.
Add 1 Tbsp EVOO to a skillet and saute the zucchini with pepper for about 5 minutes on a medium high heat. Toss it a few times until the zucchini is a little browned.
Turn off the heat and remove the zucchini. Set aside. Pour the leftover oil into a separate container with the second Tbsp EVOO. Set aside.
Grate the Pecorino Romano cheese using a fine grater. You’ll need about 3/4 cup, but save 1/4 cup for topping.
In a large metal bowl, mix the egg yolks and 1/2 cup of cheese until it is combined.
When the pasta is al dente, scoop some pasta water into the egg-cheese mix and immediately begin mixing it with a whisk. Allow the pasta to continue boiling. Mix the egg-cheese mix in the metal bowl over the boiling pot of pasta until it thickens slightly (like a double-boiler). Take care not to scramble eggs, but if it gets too think you can add a little more pasta water.
Add the saved oil we set aside earlier and continue mixing over heat.
After a minute or so it should be slightly thicker and the pasta should be ready.
Add the pasta to the egg-cheese mix and toss aggressively.
Add the zucchini and continue tossing and stirring aggressively.
Serve and eat immediately using remaining Pecorino Romano as a topping.

Buon Appetito!

So… I may be an Italian citizen

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have Italian ancestry but never really experienced an Italian-American childhood. Growing up in a smaller town in Ohio, I didn’t really learn about the culture or history. While I knew my Mom’s family was Italian—my interest in Italy oddly came from other parts of my family. For example, my love for pasta came from a restaurant in Columbus that my non-Italian family frequented. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I really started thinking about Italy or it’s history.

Cut to early 2023 when I learned: I may be an Italian citizen. What? Let me introduce you to the wild world of Italian citizenship laws and ‘jure sanguinis’.

What is jure sanguinis?

At a high level, this is simply citizenship by descent. Italy’s laws allow for recognition of the descendents of Italian citizens—given some rules. Those rules can get really complicated—and I don’t want to try to cover every possible path someone could take. In some cases the years your ancestor lived in can affect this, in other cases their gender, unfortunately, affects it. There are many resources to figure out your path that I’ll talk about later.

Roughly speaking, there are two important things to know to get started.

When your Italian-citizen ancestor naturalized in the US?
When was the next in line born?

For example, let’s use a pretty simple example. Let’s say your Grandfather was born in Italy in 1900, moved to the US in 1920, and naturalized in 1925.

If his child—your parent—was born in 1924 (one year before naturalization) you may have a valid line.

But if this child was born after that naturalization event, the line is broken.

This is of course very oversimplified, there are dates that matter and like I said above—gender of your ancestor can matter. For example, before 1948 women could not pass on their citizenship. That was changed in 1948 but if your ancester was born before then, you’d have to actually go through a court-based approach effectively suing to be recognized based on the 1948 ruling.

What if your ancestor never naturalized? Easy, as long as you can prove it. Oddly disproving something is a bit harder than proving it. For example, to prove that example ancestor above, you’d need their certificate of naturalization or oath of allegiance—which can be obtained from the government. Disproving requires letters from the government, the national archives, and local county courts all stating they have no record of naturalization—and more. It gets complicated.

Given all that, you collect the proof for your recognition and take it to your region’s Italian consulate.

So… how do I prove all this?

That’s the right question. Get ready because this is where the fun begins.

You prove this by obtaining all the vital records, marriage & divorce, and naturalization records for your entire line. From your Italian-citizen ancestor through to you. Then you have to have any non-naturalization document both “apostilled” by the state it came from and translated to Italian. This is of course hard to reason about without an example, so let me talk through the documents I need for my case.

This can vary greatly between consulates. Since I’m in NC I base this on the Philadelphia consulate’s checklist. Also, I’ll be using mildly fake information in this example and won’t be sharing my ancestor’s names, of course, for privacy!

Andiamo!

First, I need documents for my last Italian-citizen ancestor, my great grandfather. He was born in Sicily in 1890, moved to the US in 1920, married in 1925, and never finished naturalization—starting the process multiple times. He died in 1960.

Documents I need to collect for him

Vital Records
- His Birth Certificate from Italy
- Marriage Certificate from Ohio—Apostilled & Translated
- His wife’s Birth Certificate from Ohio—Apostilled & Translated
- His wife’s Death Certificate from Ohio—Apostilled & Translated
- His Death Certificate from Ohio—Apostilled & Translated
Proving he never naturalized
- Certified Census Records from before and after his next in line, my grandfather’s birth that show him as either “AL” (Alien) or “PA” (First Papers).
- Certificate of Non-Existence letter from the USCIS (immigration service)
- Negative Search Letter from the National Archives
- Negative Search Letter from the county in Ohio he lived.
- Since he lived in the US during the 1940s as an Italian citizen, he also had an Alien Case File. So that too.

Now repeat those vital records for each person in my family line: my Grandfather, my Mother, and myself. And guess what, there were some divorces in there so I need certified, apostilled, and translated versions of those too as well as written confirmations from the courts that there are no open appeals to the divorce.

It’s a lot and I occasionally learn of new problems—like my mother changed her name at one point. Now I have to prove that she is the same person.

Currently my google sheet checklist has around 30 individual documents I need, most of which need apostilled and translated. Maybe some time in the future I’ll share my google sheet.

Finally after you go through the process of collecting, apostilling, and translating all these documents—you have to get an appointment at the consulate for your region. This is a task many compare to winning the lottery.

OMG Josh, why?

You are probably seeing the amount of documentation here and wondering—why would you do this to yourself? Don’t you have a video game or something you could play instead?

Well, yeah it’s a lot. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really wanted to go for it—and even then maybe rely on one of the many services that can help you. I’ve done this DIY because I enjoy genealogy and learning about my family. Finding these stories that I never learned as a kit have been such a great experience.

And where does this go? What does Italian citizenship get me? It’s a connection to my family that I never knew. It allows me to travel in the EU more permenantly, and when the time is right it’ll allow me to move to Italy more permanently. I’ve always had a dream of living in Europe and well this is a great way to make it happen.

Ok, I’d like to do it but how do I learn more?

Well there are a lot of resources out there. Both for DIY people like me and services that can help you. You can find lots of information and ask questions. If you are going through this and want to talk to someone about it because everyone you know is bored of hearing about it—yeah, same here—I’d be glad to talk more about this! Feel free to reach out on Threads or Mastodon.

In the mean time, here are some resources to learn more about this:

Why am I so interested in Italy?

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Starting a new blog in 2024? About Italy? What are you doing here Josh?

Listen, I know it’s weird but I’ve spent the last year learning more about the Italian side of my family, learning Italian, and learning how to better cook Italian food. Italy takes up a large portion of my day to day thinking, so I thought I’d start writing about it in some form.

So here we go, a blog. Maybe someday I’ll do videos on YouTube too—especially for any cooking or other topics that could work well as video. I really want to just start something talking regularly about Italy.

Why am I so interested in Italy 🇮🇹?

Well first, I’m 20ish% Italian (according to DNA tests and family history) and while I knew it growing up, I didn’t really experience the Italian-American style childhood. In fact, I mostly learned to cook and love pasta through the non-Italian side of my family.

Early in 2023 I came across articles about having your dual citizenship recognized by Italy and started digging in—more on that later. As I researched family records and learned about different areas of Italy I’d want to live in, I realized a few things. I’m really interested in the culture of Italy—from the food to history to cars and design. I even want to dress better when I learn about things in Italy.

It’s so much that I just want to talk about it all the time. But here’s the thing, I’m becoming that guy that would just talk about his favorite thing all the time. So here we are. A blog in 2024 so I can have a place to tell stories about things I learn and/or do. If you are into that sort of thing, I hope you enjoy it!

So what should you expect here?

Dual Citizenship

As I mentioned above I’ve started the process of being recognized as an Italian citizen. There are many ways to go through this jure sanguinis process and my path is pretty straight-forward—but I’m constantly amazed and challenged by the process and I want to write down what it’s like for future me and hopefully for anyone else going through this process. I also have learned a lot about my family through this, including seeing photos of my great-grandparents for the first time.

It’s a very complicated project to take on that involves collecting documents for your entire family line, getting them officially notarized (or apostilled—a word I didn’t know until I started this) and translated. Then finally going to an Italian consulate with all that paperwork to be recognized.

The process to me is really interesting and while I’ve found a lot of resources online, I still find myself having to track down things on my own. I want to write about that more and share what it’s like. A lot of times I’ll watch videos that kind of just oversimplify it and guide you to paying a service. However, I think the DIY version approach is doable and I want to share how I’m approaching it. Spoilers: I have fun with Google Spreadsheets.

Language Learning

The dual citizenship regcognition is kind of retroactive since birth, so I have no requirement to learn Italian as part of this. However, I do actually want to live in the country some day and learning the language is important to me. Also I’m a bit of a language learning nerd. I’ve learned a little bit of everything from Spanish 🇪🇸 to Ukrainian 🇺🇦 to Japanese 🇯🇵.

I like talking about language learning too, so I imagine I’d share some interesting stories and strategies I’ve found learning Italian. Maybe I’ll talk about how I think Duolingo is like fast-food learning—it helps but may not be the best, kind of like how McDonald’s is food but may not be the best for you 🤣. I also really like reading books now in Italian and have a whole backlog of books to read. I really want to read similar materials that people growing up in Italy would have read so I can better understand cultural idioms and jokes better.

Eventually I also want to write this blog in Italian. Not ready to do that yet but at some point I’ll provide both Italian and English versions of posts.

Cooking

I’ve alwalys loved cooking Italian food, but now I’m learning I really only knew how to cook Italian-American food. It’s great, but learing the original versions of some these dishes has been a great experience. I’ve learned how to really cook things like carbonara or Pasta alla Norma, but also as we are a mostly vegetarian household I’m always looking for ways to make these meals work for us. I also occasionally get lazy and want to find ways to make really good dishes really easily. So maybe I’ll share why I never buy premade marinara sauce now.

Also I’ve started making bread (with and without my sourdough starter) and recently made my first focaccia!

Other Italian Stuff

I also love learning about history, different regions of Italy (have to figure out where I’d want to live in the future!), and maybe even Italian watches—the photo on this post is of my Italian Unimatic U2 Classic.

Anyway, I have not yet been to Italy unfortunately, so this is currently a fully remote experience of Italian culture, but if you find anything interesting, incorrect, or you just want to nerd out about this stuff, you can find me as ‘jnjosh’ on most of the social platforms or you can find me at jnjosh.social.

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