Entschuldigung

Hello friends. I am Afflicted with a cold.

Does anyone else find that winter is a time of perpetually sniffling? I want to know it's not just me. It's even worse as I have hayfever, so spring, summer and autumn is also a time of perpetually sniffling, and just when you think the pollen has finally quit, viral coryza hits its step. The quickstep.

Damn viral coryza.

Things that have been cheering me up since my affliction:

1) Vegetables

This week we had: parsnips, butternut squash, leeks, beetroot, pears, apples, peppers, and cheery tomatoes. I baked the beetroot in the oven and the recipe told me I had to keep stabbing it with a knife to make sure it was cooked inside. By the time I had finished there was a pile of beetroot juice on the side and several dirty knives and when Tim came into the kitchen unexpectedly he screamed like a little girl and asked me if I had just killed something.

This is the remnants of our veg box after I went mad with a scrubbing brush on it. I know you are supposed to leave the mud on the veg so it keeps for longer, but I'm the kind of person who likes to tick things off lists and do everything in one go and so when the box comes I just clean all of it at once.

Also it makes the crisper in the fridge less like a lagoon of filth, which is what happened last time I failed to clean all the veg with the correct level of respect.

Unpacking our veg box every week gives me such intense pleasure. It's like having a present to unwrap every week. I never check up beforehand what's going to be in it, because that's part of the enjoyment. Call me sad, but Veg Box = Cheer. Even if it leaves me elbow deep in mud every Friday afternoon.


2) Frozen Planet

(photo obviously borrowed from Frozen Planet.)

Has everyone else been watching this amazing series? Also, I want to know how on earth they filmed that polar bear cub sequence in the den with the mother, in the Winter episode. Can anyone enlighten me? Besides 'magic'? 

3) Berlin

(photo borrowed from ATS.net)

Tim, who is addicted to Groupon, has brought us a holiday to Berlin in 3 months' time for a ridiculously cheap price. Ignoring the fact that the WWF website thinks I am living as if there are 2.5 planets to sustain me and the overwhelming reason for this is my environmentally-profligate travelling addiction, I am mainly simultaneously excited and overwhelmed by how difficult German is to learn.

German was never one of Those Languages I've always wanted to be able to speak. It just always seemed so...well, pointless (sorry Germans.) Firstly, you can only really speak it in Germany. Secondly, almost all Germans I've ever met speak perfect English. Thirdly, even at its best, speaking German sounds like you are mildly displeased about the rattly cough that's been troubling you all winter and just won't quit. Fourthly, I've been busy relearning my French and Italian, and, ambitiously, embarking on Portuguese (a foolish language if there ever was one. IT MAKES NO SENSE. HOW CAN IT BE SPELT THE SAME AS SPANISH AND SOUND LIKE OUTER MONGOLIAN) and there is only enough room in my head at once. Fifthly, I want to go to West Africa and Brazil and Florence and somehow in comparison Munich seemed less exciting.

Sorry Munich.

Anyway, I have been learning German with Tim and it is really hilarious and quite difficult, also whenever I hear the word 'entschuldigung' it makes me laugh because it reminds me of Tingewick. Along with 'claro que si' and 'zehr, zehr gut' they are phrases I can no longer employ in real life.

The Tingewick Curse.

4) Ponyo

I watched this today, after a colleague lent it to me. If you have not watched it, you have to watch it. It's the happiest film ever. The end.

She's a little fishy in the sea!

5) November is nearly over, it's almost the countdown to Christmas!!!

Almost happy-season's-greetings to you all :-)

love
Connie

Cabbage cabbage

Do you know what this baby is called?

When we got this in our veg box we had no idea what it was. There was no list of vegetables that came with the box, so we stood there, looking at this monster for some time, not really sure where to start. 

Tim: "It looks like a weird cauliflower."

Me: "yes, I know, but what is it."

Tim: "Well, let's just google 'weird cauliflower' and see what happens."

I suggest you try it for yourself.

Anyway, we have been eating bucketloads of veg since the veg box came and I am sure my general health is better for it. Even if it is eaten mainly coated in oil.

But olive oil! which is like pure health in a bottle, so I am led to believe. So basically, I am eating health, covered in health, according to such purveyors of wisdom as the Daily Mail. How could this go wrong?

Having a veg box forces you to think primarily vegetarian, just because of the bulk of the veg to get through. IT also forces you to think creatively - you can't go lazy and have protein and two veg, because there is so much veg it really has to play a central role. I've never really made things with kale as a central character before, or parsnip as the main component of a dish. It was fun to experiment, and Tim and I have been planning our meals out on alternate weeks. Tim's been especially creative with his. However. It has occasionally resulted in carnage.

You can't really tell in those photos, but there is kale literally everywhere. As well as filling up two enormous pans. We ate kale pasta for 3 days afterwards straight.

Luckily, it was delicious! Also, it contained a humungous amount of butter.

Butter = natural = health.
Right?
Right!

Connie 1: basic nutrition :0

Anyway I am sure you are all as fascinated by cabbages as much as I am so hence to the title piece of this blog entry. I've always wanted to stuff cabbages (it's one of those things I had on my grown up list - things I would be able to accomplish, such as drive a car, enjoy salad, and stuff cabbages. Why, I'm not sure. It just seemed to require so much more patience, plus manual dexterity, plus an enjoyment of cabbage, which I was convinced I would never muster.)

Well, at the grand old age of 24...here I am. Stuffing cabbage.

Was it worth it?

Well.

It was delicious.

It was fun.

But it took up 4 fecking hours from start to finish and by the end I did want to kill myself slightly. So it is debatable.

However, I am glad I did it. It was character-building. Also, I enjoyed eating the end result. Always. That's not to say that my cooking is fabulous. That's more a reflection on how much I enjoy eating generally.

The end. 

Look at how beautiful they are! I laid them with the stems all pointing one way, because I am anal like that. You can see how the colour changes as well, from green (outer leaves) to white. You can see also the tomatey inner stuffing.

A thing of symmetry is a thing of beauty. 

I made another tray, because there were just too many. Fitting every leaf in was a challenge...however due to the many and varied sizes of cabbage leaves (predictably getting smaller as we delve further into the cabbage...(for some reason I am imagining saying this in a David Attenborough voice)....)I could always find one to fit in perfectly.

Ta-da!

The intense satisfaction this gave me is inexplicable and perhaps an unflattering reflection on my personality, however I shall gloss over it here to say that I felt INTENSE PLEASURE at completing my little cabbage jigsaw. Also, the minutiae of completing this may explain why my cabbage stuffing took 4 hours in total, and you will probably have no trouble stuffing yours in half that time, supposing you to be less anally-retentive than I am, which is almost certainly true. 

Hurrah!

Deconstructed cabbage.

NB - I went to the Baltic this weekend to see some Modern Art (aka Turner Prize) it was very good and I enjoyed it greatly, and it has inspired me to deconstruct my cabbage in a more modern arty sort of way. Postmodern.

Not really, I just felt like taking a picture of the process, given that I will almost certainly never stuff cabbage again, so I can look back sentimentally on the Day that I Stuffed Cabbage and drop a tiny proud tear, and for that I ideally need a photo as a focal point.

The finished product. I'm so proud.

After baking.

These were really very good, actually, but 4 hours. Man. Perhaps if I were less control freaky about the whole matter. But then if I were less control freaky I probably wouldn't have stuffed cabbage in the first place. It is the kind of thing that only those of a control freaky nature would probably find so intensely enjoyable. Probably.

I got my recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi and it is on the internet and the man is a genius. I would add more herbs though if I were you. Also, I did another version with tomato and olives in. That is even better. Conclusion: I am a genius, and should be given some kind of slot on the Observer food magazine, for dedicating so much of my life not only to stuffing cabbage, but also to writing about it. 

The end.

by Connie

aged 24, and quite a bit.

Ethical living

So, apropos of nothing, I have been having a think about the way I live my life and all that jazz. Last year, my tutor was Bernadette, who herself is very marvellous and is married to the very marvellous Toby Ord, of Giving What We Can fame (if you can call it fame - 166 members is not that much, but they were featured in the BBC, The Guardian, and even the Daily Mail...covering all strata of readers). Out of my 5 housemates, two signed up, one had already been donating 10% of her income on the quiet for years without telling anyone, and it left me feeling that if Tim and I did nothing, we would be ethical traitors of the worst kind - we were soon to have plenty of money to spare and saying no to helping out the people in the world who needed that money most while we wallowed in lashings of cash due to little more than good luck in being born when and where we were wasn't really acceptable.

Well, to my eternal shame, I have not yet signed up to Giving What We Can, and I'll tell you why in a minute. It's not because of anything wrong with the concept, and I still have hopes when I get my finances sorted out a bit more, I will sign up (though no one is more aware than me of the dangers of procrastinating - as soon as we get used to a nice bit of cash, it becomes ever harder to part with it, even as we become ever richer.) Meanwhile I would encourage those of you who don't know about it yet to have a ponder and at least visit the website if you have a spare 5 minutes. 

The reason why I haven't yet signed up is, apropos of nothing, I've been thinking about my generally appallingly unethical lifestyle and how generally wrong it is in every respect, and now I have really no excuse for it apart from sheer laziness and a determination to live as easy and pleasant a life as possible. This is all stuff I've known for ages really - things like I should really think about the horrendous conditions farm animals live in so I can have cheap milk for my tea, like maybe I should think about how devastating cheap cotton is to the environment and to farmers and maybe I shouldn't shop in Primark, like maybe just because I buy free range eggs, if I then buy cheap biscuits made with eggs, they are almost certainly battery farmed, yet why don't I feel guilty about that....etc etc etc. 

I think this is all stuff we all know for ages, but because of lots of things - time, stress, not knowing where to start or what sources to trust - we rarely come round to making those decisions that mean we can live more happily with our consciences, rather than having a sneaking feeling of guilt each time we put some cheap jeans into a basket, or some cheap ready meal - a sneaking feeling that something, somewhere, is probably wrong - but everyone is buying these things, and they're on sale, and surely some kind of standards apply somewhere, so it's probably ok, isn't it?

Perhaps the first thing that triggered off all my reading was this book. Now you will either love Jonathan Safran Foer or you'll hate him. Personally I find him over the top but all right, and very astute - have a go at the extract on the website, it will give you a good idea if the book will make you want to scratch out your eyes or amused and interested. I read it with a lot of horror and guilt and a kind of incomprehension at how I'd managed for so many years to ignore all the doubts I had about where my food came from. After all, I'd been vegetarian before, and I knew about factory farming and how bad it is for the environment and how awful the conditions are for the workers....I just couldn't remember what made me stop caring enough to start eating meat again. How did that happen? 

Once I'd started, obviously I couldn't stop. I worked via Compassion in World Farming and The Soil Association and then I got caught up in People Tree, and then I got distracted by swishing....anyway, long story short, I realised I needed to sort out my life and stop living in blissful self-imposed ignorance. 

Ignorance was blissful though. So blissful. Damn it. 

I should add that Tim was a bit surprised by all of this. Poor Tim. Poor, poor Tim. But I'm sure all this enforced ethical change will be excellent for him. He will grow character, and moral fibre, or something. *

If anyone else is interested, though frankly I'm pretty sure you have all been leading far more ethical lives than me (I mean it - I have been hopelessly lax), then the links above are a good way to start. We have already been getting an organic veg box from Riverford, and all our milk and eggs from there, and I think that while I am going to make a concerted effort to go vegetarian (taking poor Tim with me), if we do ever eat meat (once a month, perhaps - I don't really think it's fair for me to impose total vegetarianism on Tim, but as we live and eat together that's how it will work out for him, so the meat thing is still up for debate), we will try and get it from there, where everything appears to be much more above board and traceable. 

I meant to do a blog post about Riverford sometime ago, actually, but never got round to it. I've got a step by step photo orgy of me stuffing a cabbage (sounds filthy......was very satisfying) because it was so fun I couldn't stop taking photos... Anyway. So the 25 before 25 thing about being vegetarian for a week is at last a reality - there have been quite a few weeks where we haven't eaten meat at all, and it looks like staying that way for the foreseeable future. As for going vegan...I'm going to leave it a couple of weeks before suggesting that to Tim. Perhaps after Christmas...

So anyway, that is the probably quite lame reason I haven't yet signed on to Giving What We Can. I've been pondering lots of other things - the way I shop, the way I eat, the way I give to charity - and I think I need to wait and see how much these ethical changes are hitting the purse before I start making commitments. Of course, this is a faffy excuse - even with buying Fair Trade and Organic and so on, I will still be far far far richer than 99.9% people in the world, so it is no excuse at all - but I am still getting used to not being a student and there's only so much change my poor tired brain can handle at a time.

One last thing - I really enjoyed this book also, which has a disconcertingly girly picture on the front and makes the reader think it is all about some 20 year running around Paris and drinking martinis but actually it is a very good book on how difficult living ethically is and how easy it is not to think about life in general. It was very encouraging for me, as I feel mainly despair on how to live an ethical life in the decadent west and all that, and I am sure that in 5 years time I will be using washable nappies and growing my own veg and keeping chickens and all this kind of thing, and you will all be welcome to poke me and demand why on earth I haven't yet joined Giving What We Can (I'm joking, I'm joking....I hope. But seriously, remind me if I'm still not there after Christmas.)

Love!

Connie

*I should point out that Tim has no lack of moral fibre. He has signed up to his own version of Giving What We Can, based on the principle we should look after those closest to us if they are in need first, and he is giving 10% of his earnings to his little brother, without which his little brother would be unable to pursue a course of studies to fulfil his potential to become the gifted musician we all know he can become. The cynical amongst you may say this is just helping out family and that doesn't count and Tim's brother is amongst the very richest in the world anyway, and he has plenty to eat and somewhere to live. This is all quite true, but it is true he would not be able to go on that course without that money, and I think we do have a duty to look after those dependent on us before looking further abroad. I have no one dependent on me, and so I will be signing up for the schistosomiasis aid and whatnot, but I feel it makes me no more worthy. But that is just my opinion. 

y por fin....Granada

The Alhambra is rather lovely

And lovely Granada is set out beneath it, all meditarreanean courtyards and open streets

From the Albaycin, looking down

Arabic decoration on the walls of the Al-hambra

And a flowing surplus of water.
Tim said, "what better way to display your luxury and wealth - in a dry land, water everywhere in your gardens."
I am inclined to agree!
Those Nasrid Kings knew how to live up the party.
Water.

An eye-wateringly complex ceiling.

Frankly I am not sure I could live here. Too baroque.

I mean, obviously it's not baroque. Though it kind of is.

And because obviously I had the option of deciding whether I wanted to live here or not. But out of the goodness of my heart I decided to leave it open to the turistas. 

Obviously.

The Watch Tower.

"Paradise is a walled garden."

After such cultural heavyweights we were frankly exhausted and crawled away to our hotel for a sneaky siesta for 20 minutes....which turned rapidly into 5 hours. We were clearly more tired than we realised from all that medicine! It was perfect timing actually because the heavens opened, and we rode out the storm snug as bugs in our small bed, which was too short for Tim by quite a few inches, fast asleep. Occasionally one of us would wake up, check the watch, and then promptly fall asleep again.

5 hours!

So naturally when we woke up, we felt quite hungry, and as Tim had never experienced the true pleasures of chrros y chocolate in Spain, I had to take him there. Somewhere. Where? The shopkeeper we asked had absolutely no hesitation - "you have to go to this cafe called the Alhambra. It serves the best churros and chocolate in Granada. If it is still open, of course. But I think it is still open."

Me: "I thought churros was a breakfast dish."

Her: "Oh, you know. Breakfast, until, sort of, now. The whole time, basically. It's something we like to eat. All the time."

(Obviously this whole exchange was in my very best Castilian Spanish*)

(*with a number of Latin Americanisms. Probably.)

And I will let the pictures tell you all.

(PS below was one portion. Just one portion that we shared. It was almost too much.)

Careful dunking.

Approaching the critical point.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm/

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

yup, back for more.

But we had to save room for the best thing of all, a tapeo with Tori and Juan which led us past many a tapas bar (including a reggae bar....) and many, many beers......

A beautiful holiday :-)

Ronda

After the coast, we left for Ronda, the most famous of the White Towns of Andalucia. Our coach climbed bravely through bendy bendy mountain roads, reversed precariously around blind corners and generally awed us with Driving Skillz. 

Ronda itself is a stereotype of Andalucia. Sun-baked fields, scorched earth, that perfect blue sky, weathered rock, dark green cypresses against bleached white and gold countryside.

And the city is a maze of cobbled streets and ancient gates.

From the Puente Viejo, a view of the Arab baths, next to our hotel.

 

And from the Puente Nuevo, the most famous of all Ronda's sights:

I have 100000 of photos of this, but I will keep them to myself. Wisely. 

At night, could my shitty camera be what inspired Van Gogh's starry masterpiece?

We went out in search of tapas but couldn't resist one last bridge shot. Or several. 

Our hotel was an amazing oasis of peace. We spent forever over breakfast in their sunny dining room....

And frankly left carnage behind.

My father would not be pleased at the positioning of these houses. He would say, "Connie, those houses are liable to fall prey to the inevitable forces of natural erosion."

I know this is true because I later showed him this picture and that is exactly what he did say. 

But that's what gives Ronda its special charm. Ronda 3: natural erosion - 0.

Winter sun (part 2)

Spain!

Beautiful Cadiz.
I liked the pattern of waves....leading you surely to a tapas bar.

Cadiz is sea-locked on three sides - only a thin causeway connects it to the mainland, and the result is beautiful:

We stayed in Cadiz only one night, enjoying the beach, and the next day went to Puerto de Santa Maria, part of the sherry triangle of Spain. There we visited Osborne sherry bodega - pronounced 'Osborn-nay' and 'properly a Spanish family business', though the original founders were British and German....

Their symbol is a black bull, very Spanish.

The visit was atmospheric in all the best ways, by which I mean, deeply steeped in the scent of sherry.

 All round the sherry cellar, the streets are named after their most famous products

 And though going on a sherry bodega visit in the morning before we had a chance to have breakfast may have been a mistake in some ways, we were able to sleep it off on the beach afterwards....a very pleasant way to start a holiday :)