A world in white gets underway

eat less chocolate
exercise more
get back in touch with lost friends
…

Oh, you are here? I’m finally drafting a New Year’s resolution list,  please do take a seat while I finish with it. Have some tea if you like.

…
clean flat weekly
update blog frequently
…

Wait a minute… Maybe you are surprised that I am back here at all? You are right, it has been quite a while, since… oh  my ears and whiskers, since 25th of October, that’s a loooong time indeed! Please accept my apologies for neglecting the place, and neglecting you. But, as you can see from the resolution list above, this shall happen no more in 2012. Ha ha.

Anyway, let’s go on with a long overdue festive entry: my Christmas and New Year menus, and The Tale of the Elusive Pear Belle Hélène.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day.

The plan was to eat:

Christmas Eve –
mixed mushroom soup
saltimbocca alla romana
cream sherry trifle

Christmas Day –
smoked salmon salad with asian dressing
thruringian bratwurst with bratkartoffeln
lemon sorbet
pear Belle Hélène

But Circumstances decided otherwise. The trifle had to be prepared a day in advance: since I prepared it on Saturday (Christmas Eve), it would be ready for Sunday only. So the Pear Belle Hélène shifted to the Saturday Menu, while its companion sweet the Lemon Sorbet stayed on the Sunday Menu, because it had to spend a long time in the freezer as well, and there was no time left for that unless dinner was to be eaten at three in the morning.

Then Fate decided to thwart Circumstances’ efforts, and as the dinner went late and pear-making energy abandoned me, the trifle became an attractive option again. The practical upshot of which being, the pear went back to its originally scheduled place, on Sunday along with the sorbet.

Circumstances’ parting shot on Sunday came under the the guise of a full belly, which, short story even shorter, moved Pear Nibbling away to the next nearest festive meal, New Year’s Eve Dinner.

In pictures:

(click to enlarge)

Clockwise from top left:

• Teh Mushroom soup. Very, very mushroomy indeed. The recipe comes from Pippa Cuthbert and Lindsay Cameron Wilson’s book Soup!, and if you like mushrooms, this is the way to proceed. It tastes very intensely of mushroom. Mushroom would be its middle name if it has a first and last one. (You can also spot a glass of schwarzriesling, which was too fruity for my taste at that point of the meal.)
• Saltimbocca alla romana. An old favourite of mine, for reasons as unfathomable as my passion for osso bucco. I’ve been following this recipe [de].
• Cream sherry trifle, from a lovely anthology of Hitchockian fare. The dishes in this book are all related somehow to the works and life of Alfred Hitchcock; the sherry trifle is mentioned in Rich and Strange.
• Smoked salmon salad, siamese sauce. Taken from this page — a light starter is always welcome to start those heavy meals.
• Thuringian sausage and panfried potatoes. A hearty meal, maybe unexpected for such an occasion, but who cares. The potatoes had bacon, onion and garlic, aubergine (not the best idea, but it was a leftover and had to be eaten), plus I scrambled two eggs on top at the end. Needless to say, this dish cancelled all the benefits of the starter’s lightness.
• Lemon sorbet. An easy recipe [fr] with no need for an ice-cream maker, possibly too sweet for me, but really really lemony (so watch out if you have sensitive teeth). And no pears Belle Hélène: these will be served on New Year’s eve.

New Year’s Eve.

How to cook up a festive meal when you are bored to rummage in your cookbooks? Easily enough: recycle old recipes, and use mushrooms.

(click to enlarge)

• Smoked salmon and North Sea shrimps salad. A simple variation on the Christmas Day starter, with lamb’s lettuce.
• Yummy steaks with mushroom sauce (button mushrooms, shiitake and French horn mushroom, if you must know). In my universe, a mushroom sauce automatically bestows an air of earnest festivity to any dish. This one didn’t fail to maximise the tastiness-vs-cooking-trouble ratio. (If you don’t like multiple negatives: it means it was very tasty.)
• Dessert? What about the pears Belle Hélène? Well, as you have guessed already, once more the delicate dessert had to be postponed. But on New Year’s Day, really, really this time, there will be pears Belle Hélène — even if I have to starve all day to whet my appetite!

This man knows what happened with the pears.

Epilogue

The new year slowly unfolds; days finally appear to have noticeably lengthened. There is a name for that moment, which I forgot, unfortunately. As I sit on my metaphorical porch pondering life, the universe, everything, memories of 2011 arise — friendships lost and found; life changing slowly but surely like patterns in a cloudy sky; roads I could have followed, doors I should have opened; worldwide significant events, too.

What does 2012 hold in store, I wonder?

And I tear up my draft of a resolution list.

See, I did get to make Pear Belle Hélène on New Year's Day.

(Seriously, apologies for the long silence. Next time: last part of my adventurous adventures in the Far East.)

Pictures credits: me, except The Riddler: pinched from Batman wikia (don’t know who’s the artist).

Specialty of the house

Remember how I went for a two-week long trip to Shanghai at the start of September? Well, a favourite topic of conversation with those who come back from China is food. At least, that’s one subject I like to ask about a lot, but it might well be a personal obsession: no matter what the country, my interest in the subject never seems to fail. But I digress — China is indeed renowned for its food, and this is what this long overdue blog post is about.

The blue lotus

Ici, on dirait que le ciel est plus grand.

This observation was made by a friend during a schooltrip to Russia a long, long time ago. I couldn’t help thinking of this again when I went to China earlier this September; the sky looks bigger over there as well. Along with quite a few other things, but that is to be expected when visiting Shanghai, the world’s “largest city proper” according to Geohive. Large city, disorienting Orient, patchwork of colourful impressions, mind-blowing experience — this is what I shall fail to capture in the next few Entries.

First a disclaimer. The following haphazard account is merely an attempt to describe my first impressions of China gathered during a very short visit in a very specific location. For this reason, it is quite subjective and more likely to reflect my own flawed perception of things rather than providing a deep insight into Chinese civilisation. But honestly, would you be reading this if you were looking for boring objectivity? So there.

Very unusual: a regular-sized sky.

If I were a blog post, I would be this one

if I were a river, I would be… the Rhine.
if I were a colour, I would be… magenta.
if I were a work of art, I would be… The Book of Secrets.
if I were one of the five sense, I would be… smell.

if I were an animal, I would be… a human.
if I were a word, I would be… “sirocco”.
if I were a fictional character, I would be… Arthur Dent.
if I were a deadly sin I would be… sloth.

The Book of Secrets.

And now, most exquisite Reader, why won’t you describe yourself in a similar fashion?

Picture credit: Marta Bevacqua.

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Edited for grammar on 19. September.

L’heure avant l’aube du jour suivant

A portrait in 5 snapshots

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J is a waitress, and a student as well. She works in the pub a couple of blocks away. I am a regular there ever since the football World Cup in 2010. I am not sure she likes football. It doesn’t matter: the games are opportunities to have a good time in a lively atmosphere, and lots of beer. And long evenings chilling out with pub regulars who stay even when the game is over.

We play name-boozing: each participant gets allocated a football player. Whenever the player is mentioned on TV during the game, the participant must drink from their pint, empty it if the player scores a goal. If memory serves, the game is Germany vs. England. J gets Schweinsteiger, and complains that she will be too drunk to work by the end of the game. I get Mertesacker, who must have eaten a tiger if one is to judge by the number of times he is mentioned that night.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream.

Je me souviens

When I was a wee lad, at that age when most memories are those you gather from family members telling you do you remember that time when… years afterwards, my dad drove us to some place, god knows which. The road ended up in a dead end (did we need to park? were we lost?); which incidentally is my earliest memory of a fancy road sign. At the end of the road there was a sort of sand-filled basin. I remember the surroundings being a pine forest, and the day was sunny, possibly Summer. I can’t remember how long we stayed or what else we did that day.

What I do remember though, is that for aaaages afterwards, I was convinced that dead ends always ended up with a sand-filled basin. Better still, I had been so impressed that dead ends with sand-filled basins were a recurrent feature in my drawings at that period, and for quite a while afterwards. Sometimes I wonder what the teachers (or whoever the victim recipient of the picture was) were making of it. Nor, truth be told, if they understood what the deuce this strange coloured blot at the end of the road was (I hope at least the dead end sign was recognisable). I’m not even sure I used the proper colour for the sand.

Picture credit: Kentin31

Hush little baby, don’t you cry

There are times I get a bit confused as to what day it is. Maybe you know the feeling, from holidays for example, when all days look the same and you don’t have the same markers as during working weeks. When there is nothing you must do, no one you have to meet, it can be pretty hard telling days apart; one morning you may wake up wondering, is it Monday or Tuesday?

Well, I get that sort of feeling every now and then, and quite intensely at times. This week for example: on Tuesday night, I thought it was Wednesday; on Wednesday morning, I remember switching off my alarm clock thinking it’s way too early to get up for a Saturday; and on Thursday, it felt like week-end. Today as well (it’s Friday), but with Easter it is a long week-end anyway.

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I cycled all the way to the blood donation centre yesterday, through avenues beset by trees and bushes, and along a park. The smell of vegetation coming alive, daffodils, grass, a touch of barbecue smoke, the evanescent dryness of asphalt; sounds of birds chirping, people chatting and lazying on the grass; the delicate heat of a clear sun.

Welcome, Spring!

the strangest circus

I can feel unrest amongst the legions of readers of this blog. By Harry, you are right: time has come to post something lest it be said that I neglect you. Since I am quite busy these days, you will please forgive me for taking the lazy route and repost an interview I did last year for The h2g2 Post.

the hidden world of nature II

A song about a long gone Irish girl

Despair not, O fair Reader, lest the thrilling tale of my stay in Edinburgh may never be finished. Here it comes at last: part 4 — packed with culture, booze and comedy! In technicolor!

You may want to refresh your memory: Find out why I went to Edinburgh this time, read all about the memories which kept me company during the stay, see how well the first few days went.

And now, let the show begin.