Cooking for 1 in a 2-Room Airbnb- A Salad Edition

All hail the salad. 

No really. I am a big fan.

I'm even bigger fan of having salads in the privacy of my own home. They are admittedly messy to eat, but also, I am not wild about restaurants' ideas about salad ingredient proportions. Those menu items are big money-makers, right? Especially when the salad is principally leafy greens with some other items scattered on top. There's very little food cost involved. 

I was raised to be a big fan of salads. In my family, the salad is a complex thing, with a lot of ingredients, and a better level of proportion among those ingredients. 

It is perfectly acceptable to throw in proteins and carbs, but you begin with ingredients from the garden in the back yard. 

This is why I am a tomato snob of the first order. 

The fresher the better. The colder the better. Variety is key. 

So, in hotter weather, I'm like many people in that I don't want to heat up the kitchen if I can help it. I will resort to salads for lots of meals. I don't mind the work of slicing and dicing, so long as I don't have to sweat while I'm doing it. 

Another factor involved in salad making is that you're probably going to have to repeat ingredients because you're only feeding one salad lover at a time. I can accept this. I can embrace the repetition. 

I've already constructed this salad twice in the last week, and the next avocado I've purchased is calling from the countertop for me to make more iterations. 

What's in here? . 

Baby spinach, small tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, celery, red onion, avocado, olives and grated parmigiano cheese, and for dressing, I've diluted some refrigerated pesto with more olive oil. A splash of vinegar (too much interferes with my breathing while eating...something about the fumes) only, and yes.

For accompaniment, I have taken to nuking arancini or suppli. 

This little sphere of love is a cheesy, pancetta-filled delight.

These are a popular Roman street snack that has been enhanced in variety by a number of Roman providers. Carnaroli rice is partially cooked and rolled into a sausage or ball shape with a number of other ingredients (traditionally just a little mozzarella surprise in the middle, but tomato sauce is often mixed with the rice), then liberally dusted with breadcrumbs and fried. It is perfect street food in that it can be carried in a paper sack, eaten at room temperature or briefly heated in an oven or a microwave. 

I am a dedicated maker of humble tuna salads, too. 

At home, I would chop red onion and celery to accompany some tuna (packed in extra virgin olive oil - best for flavor), enhanced by mayonnaise, dill relish and a liberal sprinkling of Old Bay. 

Currently, I am missing dill relish (it's pretty difficult to find dill anything here, and no, I don't know what the source of the Italian aversion to dill is, exactly, but I'm betting that it's because dill is strong) and Old Bay, a uniquely American spice blend. 

But I've found this: 

Tuna packed with Calabrian hot pepper flakes? Why yes, thank you.

In place of the pickle relish, I chop up and toss in capers. Some Italian saltine crackers and chopped tomatoes on the side, and LUNCH. 

A little sprinkling of white pepper was a good finishing touch. 

This next salad became a pandemic lockdown staple, and all I can imagine as an American substitute will include regular tofu and pesto...

But it just won't be the same as this version, born here in Rome. 

My Airbnb is directly across the street from a NaturaSi...what we might call a healthfood store, but it's more like a WholeFoods on a small scale. I'll be referencing this place again when we talk further about pasta, but for this entry, let's talk tofu. NaturaSi carries a few flavored (basil, olive, roasted red pepper, and also smoked) firm tofus which are perfect for this recipe...it was adapted from a Moosewood cookbook.

Ultra healthy. Ultra vegetarian. Really tasty. 

I need cherry tomatoes, a block of the basil-flavored tofu, a block of feta, toasted almonds, chopped basil (already in the bowl) and extra virgin olive oil. 

Ordinarily, I would use a food processor for chopping the almonds first. Then, a secondary mixture would happen with broken-up tofu and feta. Best to chop the tomatoes by hand (tomato skins here are tougher than they are in America, and I want them to have some integrity in this salad instead of being pulverized). 

Of course, everything is chopped by hand in this kitchen. 

Glad this is just for one person. 

Drizzle with olive oil - however much you desire, but this version got about a half cup - and stir. The feta breaks up in the stirring and helps the flavors to comingle.

I don't know if this even looks appetizing to you...the mixture would appear more homogenous if the pieces were better blended together (via short pulses, if you're considering doing this) courtesy of a processor, but the outcome...the flavor...is exactly the same. 

I could have this with the Italian saltines, a piade (Italian flat bread), focaccia, on top of leafy greens...all options are possible.

This last salad is one I bought, but still worth highlighting as an option for those who are cooking for one:

a poke bowl

Given that plenty of places are working this angle with a huge variety of ingredients, the poke bowl genre, if you will, seems to involve a carb, a protein, some vegetables, and a condiment or two, usually served cold, but sometimes having a variety of warm and cold things in the same vessel.

An interesting place to get burgers here (stay with me - I'm getting to a related point about poke bowls) is called Fonzees. That business has spawned a spin-off called Oriental Fonzee, with Mediterranean dishes, located in the Roman Jewish Ghetto. They offer a poke bowl that I love, with chicken and couscous, among other things. 

So while we all know what a poke bowl is supposed to be, its time in the spotlight has kicked off an array of derivations.

Enter this Italian poke bowl, which actually is more Asian or Hawaiian than Italian, but...whatever.

I got more than a little excited at the prospect of being able to play this assemblage game the same way you might do it at a number of fast food places in America. You pick and choose what you want in your bowl as it is being made in front of you.

What makes this sushi-grade salmon, cucumber, avocado, carrot shavings, sesame seeds, pickled ginger and teriyaki sauce combo Italian, in any way?

The presence of black rice and olives. 

Italian black rice is a challenge to cook, in my experience...it takes a very long time to make it tender. I wanted to experience how tender this vendor makes their rice, so I would know if my previous versions were cooked enough. 

It's a chewy rice, high in fiber, lower in gluten, and nutty in flavor. 

Mixed with some longer grain brown rice as well as all of the other goodies, I could think of nothing healthier in my poke bowl. 

Take the time, make the salad, stay cool in these last days of summer temperatures.

Cooking for 1 in a 2-Room Roman Airbnb

So far, I'm 0 for 2 in the Roman Airbnb scenario. 

In the last (and first) case, I booked a space that was perfectly adequate for my needs and had all the things I'd filtered for in my search: a place to cook, no shared conveniences (like a bathroom), a bed, air conditioning, proximity to where I'm working, and affordable. 

But when I arrived to get the key, I realized that there was no air conditioning. The host acted as if I had imagined it. Airbnb's site said otherwise. The host got an additional fan for me, so I had two. Every day I worked in 90-something degree heat, and came back to a studio apartment that was, admittedly, shielded from the hot sun at all times of day...With two fans after a cold shower, I could more or less handle the heat. Even when I contracted Covid. 

(and you know me: I fought like a tiger with Airbnb on the misrepresentation, secured a partial refund and a discount coupon. But let me say this: if you want progress in the area of customer service, take it up in the Twittersphere. That might work when nothing else seems to)

The kitchenette of that place was actually pretty optimal: a decent size fridge (with a freezer) for a European appliance, a small stove/oven, dishware, etc. 

I was also able to bring a few valuable tools and ingredients with me from our Rome apartment, since we were being packed up and moved. 

So I cooked and ate well, all things considered. 

This present Airbnb situation also has plusses and minuses. 

AC is present (believe me: I asked the host to be very sure). Also, a separate kitchen. Hot water refuses to reach the shower, however. In the September temperatures, this is not completely terrible, but it will become completely terrible if the host does not resolve it very soon. Airbnb has already had to engineer a refund and a discount code for the last disaster. I am sincerely hoping that I will not have to put up the same stupid fight again. (update: host reports that a part is ordered for the water heater...but supply chain disruptions abound, so who knows when it will get here? As a friend recently said to me: 100 years from now, we will still be blaming Covid for everything)

But in the meantime, I'm here in this place...this mostly quiet place, with mostly friendly neighbors, and a small swath of purveyors of the good things: the raw materials for cooking. 

So I am going to take you on this little ride. I will be cooking for one, in a 2 room Airbnb that has no oven, a dorm-sized fridge (the cubic type, so I also have no freezer) and an oddball set of pots and pans that have no properly fitting lids. 

I'm not going to get all fancy about this. This is, after all, still cooking for 1. I won't promise that I won't generate some leftovers sometimes. I'm used to cooking for 2 AND making leftovers of the good dishes. 

First up. A meal made of some gifted ingredients: porcini mushrooms and homemade fettucini.

This the most compact four burner cooktop I've ever seen...and the hood is additionally wee. But it all works. 

The porcinis from Umbria sauteeing in a little salt and olive oil. Salt draws out some of the moisture in the shrooms. Don't waste your EVOO on sauteeing, because that's not what its really for...use regular olive oil or some kind of flavorless vegetable-based oil.

Before they are ready, but they have begun to brown and have given up most of their moisture, I have also tossed in two chopped cloves of garlic. 

Don't hate me because I love garlic. 

Just ignore the garlic if you don't love garlic.

Happy to have found a box grater in the cabinet. Grated some 30 month old parmiggiano. About 1/3 cup.

The handmade fettucini needs only a little time to boil in heavily salted water (it should be so salted that it tastes like seawater). Also floating in there are a few slices of the mushroom stems, because I want the pasta to have some mushroomy flavor too. Note: with handmade pastas, you have to look out for boil-over. Keep an eye on the boil.

That's a lousy shot of a fetuccini noodle on the edge of a wooden spoon, backgrounded by dishes in the sink. I'm checking the noodle to see if it's al dente (with a firm center that is not yet mushy). It actually should be a little more chewy than al dente, because I'm going to put it into the pan with the sauteed mushrooms and it will cook a bit further. 

Sure, I drained the noodles. But before I did that, I ladled some pasta water and those cooked stem pieces into the saute pan with the cooked mushrooms. 

And with that water in there, I add some of the grated cheese. I want a salty/creamy sauce for my pasta, without using cream. This is the essential basis of cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper pasta), which also uses no cream. 

Everything cooks and further comes together, for just a couple of minutes.

ONE pat of butter in the watery sauce, which is starting to cohere. 

Sorry...there must be fat somewhere.

Just a minute or two more before tossing in the pasta, stirring very gently...more like folding...so as to not break up those delicate noodles. 

And once its tossed sufficiently, pour it onto a plate. Sprinkle on the rest of the cheese.

And eat.

You may not find this to be a heavily sauced pasta dish, if you tried it. Americans tend to drown their pastas. But the Italian point of view about this is that mushrooms are pungent enough without much help. Some rather pungent cheese is included, and that's all you really need. 

Stage 1 on a food journey in a small Italian apartment kitchen, which has plenty of limitations. 

Making do.

Or making the most of what can be done.

 

Roman Re-Entry

 

That's right, friends: I'm back. 

For a Fall term of teaching, that is. I'm staying in a different AirBnB (this one has AC, I'm thrilled to report, but no oven and for the first 5 days and counting, no hot water to speak of...no wait, I must be brutally honest. 4 minutes of hot water. Then it runs cold again). 

Re-entry into Rome is muggy and swampy and in glaring sun, almost too bright to take. There is the threat of thunderstorms, but generally, the threat expires with no action. So the barometric headache just lingers. 

Re-entry into Rome is a test of acquired but rusting language skills. So far, I've had to struggle to recall the word for 'bill' (for my sit-down lunch), but otherwise, I have surprised myself. And the bonus: my ear for listening and understanding is still pretty good. 

Simone is missing his unicorn. 

He will return to the store after finding it.

For all the information, call this number.

Re-entry into Rome is far more quiet than I expected, but I am in a different neighborhood, with a higher rate of Italian language-only, working class residents. I might hear English spoken on the street, but there is still a drastic reduction in tourists. Conversely, I cannot find a place to toss my recycling. Regular trash and 'organici' (compost), yes. Recycling, no. 

This is a main square in the neighborhood, highly populated on weekends by children with soccer balls and scooters, senior citizens killing time together, and political speeches. The fountain in the center is a more modern one, by Roman standards, meant to evoke the history of the neighborhood - Testaccio - which was built upon an ancient trash heap of pottery shards, the remains of broken oil and wine vessels. 

A better close-up of that fountain.

Re-entry into Rome means being ready to unload your groceries on the conveyor belt and scurrying to their collection at the end to bag them yourself while simultaneously, mentally translating that spoken Italian euro sum AND getting as much exact change as you can out of your wallet (because the cashier is going to ask you for it anyway, so you might as well get ahead). Now that I've seen what American baggers can do to my fragile groceries, I'm happy to do the bagging myself, but no, I don't like that pressure of doing so much at once, either. 

Re-entry into Rome means sore feet, stair climbing and wistfully looking at elevators you are not allowed to use...and accepting that the explanation you were given for the prohibition against elevator usage is nonsensical, and thus, more or less Italian. 

There it is. One of two elevators that you need a key to use, and the AirBnb host says she didn't obtain one because she was 'not around' when the elevators were installed. 

That's the best explanation I got. 

I asked if I could use one of them to just get my bags up to the second floor. 

She said she asked on my behalf. And the answer was 'no.' It is at once infuriating and Italian, this kind of thing. 

Re-entry into Rome means still wearing a face mask on public transit. Well, for about 60% of the riders. The rest are fine with risking Covid transmission and/or a fine. At present, the case rate is relatively low, but we shall see what the season brings. Italy is just now rolling out the second booster for people over the age of 60. 

Re-entry into Rome means food adventures. Within reason, I am here for it.

Is this not a sunny, bright kind of lunch? Risotto made with purple cabbage, a dollop of soft cheese and a sprinkling of pistachios, sliced oranges and fennel, and a sweet slice of cantaloupe draped in prosciutto. You need to go off the beaten path for lunches like this (translation: go outside the city center), which don't offer the standard tourist-driven array of pastas and sandwiches. But what a reward when you do it. And with the exchange rate being so favorable right now, I can easily tell you the cost: $12.

Once I found a small bottle of chili oil as well as ground chili flakes, I ordered a takeaway quattro formaggi (four cheeses) pizza...and it was fabulous. 

I also ordered puntarelle...the sliced, curling stalks of chicory, quickly sauteed in olive oil, anchovy and lemon. The point was to absolve some guilt over that pizza. 

But it's really, really good. 

Re-entry into Rome means a new group of students, who are also here for it. It is nice to see the energy and enthusiasm again. May it continue through the term. 

Here we are - all 18 of us - at the Villa Giulia, Etruscan Museum of Art.

Sweating, naturally. 

Re-entry into Rome also means renewing friendships. Here is my friends' view of the sunset from their terrace.  

And here is the harvest moon from their terrace.

And here is what they just 'whipped up' for dinner:

(and if you two are reading this, don't worry: the pasta comes in another entry)

Re-entry in September is tough because the calendar says autumn, but the temperatures do not. Even Italians are, I think, based on my casual observation in the last couple of years, overlooking their usual annual puffy coat day, which was September 15. 

It will be 84F on this September 15. 

We'll see what this one brings. After all, re-entry into Rome has already included seeing jackets and scarves on early mornings. 

Re-entry is a rhythm I'm still seeking out...I think I have time to find it. 

 

Re-Entry

Science fiction stories featuring that transition from inky, mute space and back onto sunny, tumultuous planet Earth usually make the passage through the atmosphere seem fiery and dangerous. It’s the tricky part. You need to somehow shield your craft - or at least, yourself - from being singed, scorched or worse. 

Re-entry into American life is nowhere near this abrupt. It’s full of a lot of queuing, form-filling, patience-draining and name-signing. It’s toggling between all of your usernames and passwords, which you misremember and have to change and hope you remember to document before having to use them all over again. It’s memorizing strings of numbers, repeating them, and explaining that you don’t yet have all the information that people behind counters and desks and in front of monitors require. It’s butting your head against the bureaucratic wall, over and over again, and wondering how, even though you voted by mail in every election and carried an American passport and driver’s license and received packages and mail at a (technically) American address, you also more or less disappeared for six years. 

And yet, to a tiny audience, you are mostly who they know, wherever they happen to be.

You learn that there are still a lot of entities who want a personal check instead of a card with sixteen numbers and a microchip. They don’t respond to emails. They make and take phone calls only. You thought the cash-only local economy of your European dream was pretty analog, and it turns out that you were kidding yourself. Now, you can’t find your checkbook because no one has wanted your checks in six years. Oh, and movers packed up all of your belongings 6 weeks ago, and you don't know when you'll see them. With the shipping nightmare that is the lingering pandemic-laced world, it's a toss-up.

So many things about this photo say 'Italian' to me, but in fact, it was shot in Atlanta, GA. 

You vaguely wonder how people who don’t have a physical address - by choice or by misfortune - manage to have bank accounts and credit cards, because those entities don’t want to cooperate with you until you do. Two-factor authentication for some reason rigidly insists on texts sent to phones (how do people who don’t have them literally FUNCTION IN THIS WORLD?), often gives no option for another means of conveying the damned code, and keeps a death grip on your old phone number. 

So, change the number, a reader might offer. 

That is a lot harder than you think. Oh, you can adopt a new number, but who will readily adopt it as yours? That’s the troublesome piece. 

American customer service has devolved into chirpy bots (designed to stall your progress while providing the illusion of caring about what you need or feel, more than anything else) and FAQs and ‘forgot-your-password-username-etc.?’ meandering loops with no success.  Go ahead, try to find means for communicating with a real person on that website. Hint: you’ll find it when you resort to using a plain old search engine, because other people have had enough with the fruitless search, and they’re freely sharing those toll-free numbers you can almost never locate on the company website. And when you do reach a human being in written form, it becomes quickly apparent that that person is a) also pre-programmed, potentially so well that they cannot effectively read the words you have written, and b) immensely obtuse. It is as if they have taken instruction on how to NOT answer your questions.  

Frustrated? Don’t tell anyone, most especially the person who faces the public, the one who is supposed to handle questions or problems or people who have needs. 

Why? Their new tactics for handling questions or problems or needs involve categorizing everything that the customer expresses in the way of dissatisfaction or frustration or even the repetition of a question (because they’ve thus far successfully dodged answering it) - however calmly, however seriously or honestly - as yelling or being rude or somehow inappropriate. Alongside those classes on how to not answer questions, there has been additional training in hyper-defensive posturing. 

Meowmy, that is your stern voice.

Re-entry into America reminds you that you spent six years NOT behind the steering wheel, and that even your thigh muscles enable you to repeatedly press the gas and brake pedals, through endless stoplights. 

When preparing to move this from my childhood home, my friend P struggled with starting it (as had everyone except its dearly departed owner), and she called upward: Dale, help me start this truck! 

Of course, it started. 

This '93 edition Ford has now gone into the capable hands of the across-the-street neighbor (with a newly licensed teenage daughter) who installs car batteries for a living. I guess that Dad can still keep an eye on his house now.

Re-entry into America comes with free refills, a lot of salt and sugar, and the frighteningly false end of a pandemic. 

Re-entry into America’s soundtrack includes incessant pharmaceutical commercials, extreme political partisanship at the expense of legitimate representative governing, and more Spanish, which I need to get busy learning. 

Re-entry into America looks and feels so very, very strange, as the family photograph now only features you. It is so reassuring to have a life estate holder lock you out of your family home less than 6 months after your last living parent died. She routinely asserted that she would never prevent his daughter’s access, until she changed her mind. When confronted by the idea that the true owner of the house didn’t cotton too highly to finding her family’s remaining possessions shuttled to the basement within mere weeks of the death, she changed the locks and played little passive aggressive games, refusing to communicate directly, but making sure her umbrage was communicated via others. 

But she’s in mourning, it could be explained.

I guess that she left his ashes on the basement floor because she misses him so much. 

Re-entry into America comes with the loss of two parents, two cats, a profession that has undergone an alarming amount of change, and affordable costs of living. 

Re-entry into America came with a couple of crazy moving days, when our household goods finally arrived after being adrift for 3 months. We locked the cats in the bathroom and dutifully, even cheerfully, tried to work with the movers who declared: we will bring furniture first, and then, the boxes. 

‘Cause y’all got a lotta boxes. 

OK, we brightly said. We knew we were going to have to compress the contents of the Rome apartment (far larger than we had a right to) into a smaller space and deaccession a number of things. At least *I* was braced for this reality. 

Anyone without an interior design degree do this? While waiting to move into our loft, I drew a not-to-scale floorplan from memory and then cut out little miniatures of our furniture to move around. I didn't feel like mastering software. I felt like manipulating things by hand. This will *not* be the outcome of our living space, however. Something The Spouse said about not placing wine racks without a wall behind them...

And then in came the stream of movers with…boxes. 

Boxes and boxes of….books, clothing, kitchen goods. Everything, it seemed, that could fit into a box was boxed...even the things that didn't necessarily require boxing.

Oh, plus the occasional piece of a bed frame, or a bookcase shelf, or some other item that had been wrapped like a Christo and rendered anonymous. 

Um, what happened to ‘we’ll bring all the furniture first’? We had no time to ask this in the 4 hour onslaught because we were supposed to be checking numbered boxes off on a list amidst one question after another, from one huffing mover after another: ‘where do you want this to go?’ 

And while we spent six years in Italy and knew some Italian, that did not prepare us for interpreting it from hastily scribbled labels on these packages. 

We had deflated the air mattress we were sleeping on - too eagerly, obviously - because we were told that the rule of thumb in moves like this involved bringing the bed in first. It was one of the last things to go from Rome, so it seemed…reasonable....to expect to see it first. Alas. No.  

As we re-inflated the mattress, the cats emerged from the bathroom with wide eyes. And The Spouse looked like he’d been terrorized for the last several hours. 

Day 1, before the onslaught began.

Day 1's near end...

We worked like fiends after the movers left on Day 1, unpacking and consolidating and making several donations...so this was the beginning of Day 2.

Also...why would the movers insist on placing a rug that everyone and their brother would walk over, thereby necessitating that it be vacuumed before arranging the furniture to go over and around it? 

And this was the end of Day 2.

We couldn’t assemble anything that had been expertly broken down into separate parts because nothing was completely present. That wouldn’t happen until Day 2. We would guess at the meaning of the Italian label for a box and repeatedly discover we were wrong. 

The Spouse called it Bad Christmas. 

In fact, by the end of Day 2 we had to ask the movers to accompany us to a storage space we’d secured because we reached over-capacity in our living space. It was only then that the guys produced a translated list of box labels, and they didn’t let us keep it. 

Our storage space, initially. Lest you think we bought all of Italy and shipped it to ourselves, I'll post another entry on Italian packing and packaging. But first, I need to sleep for a few days. 

Oh wait...I can't.

By the time I had to board a plane for Rome to teach for the Fall term, we had unloaded over 100 books, a dining table and 6 chairs, a side table and a mid-century cookie jar (hey, it was a big cookie jar!). We donated piles of clothing, shoes, small appliances and anything for which we had a duplicate. We moved the contents of my entire Roman studio (including a small printing press, easels, an old, metal, mid-century teacher’s desk, an equally old teacher’s wheeled audio/visual cart, a fireproof cabinet, etc, etc.) into a rented studio space. We’re still looking for a home for a coffee table and a partial barrister bookcase. I’ve left The Spouse to search in the storage unit for a stool, book shelves, an ottoman, a ceramic bread cloche (the box we’d saved for this undertaking came home, but the packers didn’t use it to pack the item for which it was intended...maybe, I think in retrospect, because it is French? We all know how the Italians feel about the French) and various and sundry other items. 

Coffee table, anyone? 

Just one of the many stacks of books to leave our library...

But the the most important piece of furniture is assembled and the cat TV is UH-mazing, so really, what is the problem? 

These guys are GLUED to the outside scene. Dogs and squirrels and little geckos. Just, WOW.

SUCH an improvement over the Roman pigeons and occasional seagull.

I'm including this because I mention (below) having to get another storage space, and on a day when I could sell a piece of my father's gardening equipment from said storage space, I got to meet the buyer's best buddy, Festus. In a previous life, Festus took a bullet during a domestic violence episode. His nightmares are dissipating, thanks to love and peace in a second life, riding around in an air conditioned truck with his new dad. 

Festus (and his dad) are my heroes.

Upon vaguely tallying (because a literal list would be horrifying) the costs of lodging in an extended stay hotel for almost three months (in part because the house we originally thought we were going to rent was quickly discovered to be unlivable), a rental car for several weeks (because our car was floating on a boat across the Atlantic), Camp Kitty lodging for the four-footed Italian immigrants, my flight and drives home to deal with my father’s estate matters (which entailed hiring a lawyer, an appraiser, movers and renting a storage unit too!), buying a car so we could hand in the rental, paying ‘cleaners’ to only pretend to clean our loft once the tenant moved out, buying a new air mattress when the borrowed one gave out after a faltering 5 day run, obtaining a storage unit and a studio rental, and slowly putting our lives into some semblance of order in our new/old place…here’s what I ultimately think about re-entry into America:

It’s expensive. I don't care what all my traveling American friends have to say about this, when they claim that traveling to Europe is expensive.

'Home' is damned expensive. Re-entry has indeed left our wallets in smoking ruins.