Estrangement

Yesterday, after living there for only eight months, I left my old house and moved back to the place where I’ve lived most of my life. I’ll blog about the how and why of my moving twice in a year later (as of March 17th actually).

Leaving your rented house -in my country at least- requires you to revert the house in the state in which it was delivered to you. Besides taking all your stuff out, this means taking out any flooring, decoration, curtains, carpets even repainting walls (white) when the colours are too vivid. Only if the next occupant signs he or she will take over some of those items are you allowed to leave them.

In my case, it wasn’t yet known who the next occupant was, so I had to take everything out. Slowly you unravel the house, and it starts looking less and less the house you’re used to live in. Things even start to sound different, especially when you’ve taken the flooring out. Everything sounds hollow. Even the familiar crack of the planks in your floor has gone.

In the end you’re pacing around in a derelict house, on bare concrete, waiting for the representative of the housing agency. The only thing that still works is the toilet. There’s nothing to sit on besides the window sills. It’s not your house any more. But still: so many things happened in places that are physically still there.

In case nobody else does the dismantling for you, you do it yourself. Slowly you grow disaccustomed to the house, if that is indeed an English word. Estrangement creeps in.

It must be difficult for people to take leave of their house in a rush, without having time to go though the grieving process…

Quote of the day (15)

If you don’t deal with your weaknesses, they shall deal with you.

The widow’s mite

The other day an Irish friend of mine commented on my earlier blog about the incarnation, which referred to the idea that even one tear of the baby Jesus would have sufficed to redeem the world. He thought I had missed part of the point and had a good story to make that point: the widow’s mite.

It’s a story from the gospels (Mk 12:38-44 and Lk 20:45-21:4 actually) about a poor widow who donates two mites (the smallest coin around) into the temple treasury. She is contrasted to the rich people who give much more, but they’re giving from their abundance. The widow however gives everything she has.

According to my Irish friend it is essential to the Christian idea of the incarnation that God does not give from his abundance, but that He gives everything He has. I knew that, but I’ve never heard it being explained by the story of the widow’s mite.

God is a poor widow, there’s incarnation for you…

Prawns

The first week of 2010 I spent in Cork where I visited three friends that I had met a few months earlier in Regensburg. On my last night there we went out and had dinner at a Japanese-style restaurant. I ordered prawns. But while going though the menu before I made that choice, I noticed something funny: I skipped the prawns automatically, as if they were simply not an option.

But they were, there’s no reason I couldn’t have prawns except my girlfriend, who wasn’t there. Two and a half years with her have unwittingly taught me a few things. One of them is to avoid prawns. She has a great dislike for them. Even being near someone who eats them, fills her with disgust. She’ll be polite enough to tolerate prawn-eaters, but that is as far as she’ll go.

As a matter of courtesy I never eat prawns when I am with her. Now some people might see this as a sacrifice. I know my girlfriend would, if she knew about my prawn-evading habit. But it’s not. It is simply something you do, without having either thoughts or feelings to go with it, neither positive nor negative. At most it feels like something that you please someone with that you love. But that feeling quickly vanishes. After that it’s nothing, a habit and certainly not a sacrifice.

Quote of the day (14)

Imagine no hangovers, things would be much worse…

Dutch author Gerard Reve

100th post

This is my 100th post.

So far I’ve had:

• 22.890 visitors
• 99 posts
• 118 comments
• 208 tags
• 16 categories
• 570 spam comments
• 11 widgets
• 5 subscribers
• 24 subscriptions
• …in 447 days

You do the calculations…

Spicy Thai Dish

What better to close off the year with than another recipe? It was improvised under the circumstances outlined in the previous post and based on a recipe that I learned from my girlfriend. She used to be a vegetarian once, so she knew some recipes from another walk of life, so to say. She told me this recipe was originally a recipe for a soup that she modified.

After preparation, this dish is ready in a very short time once you start cooking!

Ingredients

• mix of coarsely chopped vegetables (as much as you like)
• tofu cubes, preferably marinated (attention: soya sauce contains wheat!)
• rice noodles (or any noodles if you’re not cooking for someone who’s wheat-intolerant, about a quarter kilo)
• coconut milk (1 can)
• water (1 can)
• red chili pepper, sliced, so people can take the hot bits out (1)
• onion, chopped (1)
• ground ginger (1 teaspoon)
• sugar (0,5 tablespoon)
• lemon juice (1 teaspoon)

The red chili pepper replaces sambal, an Indonesian spice mixture, that is not available ready-made outside of the Netherlands and Indonesia. The red chili pepper, onion, ginger, sugar and lemon juice replace another mixture of spices -containing sambal- that is also hard to get outside of said countries. If you happen to be in the Netherlands, instead of the last five ingredients, simply use the ready made spice mixture for sajoer boontjes (’sayour beans’) and save yourself a lot of chopping. The recipe with this extended list of ingredients tastes exactly like the recipe that I’m used to.

Preparation

Put the red chili peppers, onion, ginger, sugar and lemon juice in a mixture of coconut milk (one part) and water (one part) and bring to a boil. Cook the noodles for about 3 minutes or until done (read the instructions on the package!). Do not drain afterwards.

While the coconut milk is on the fire, fry the vegetables in a saucepan or wok. Depending on what your tofu is marinated in and/or whether you’re cooking for someone who is wheat-intolerant, either add the tofu during the last few minutes or fry (and serve) the tofu separately.

With some practice it’s possible to have all two or three pans ready at about the same time. When everything is ready, put the entire pot full of coconut milk and noodles into the vegetables (plus tofu), mix and serve.

Happy New Year!

Green Risotto

I am temporarily part of a family at the moment. I’ve fled my home to endure the festive season elsewhere. One of my chores for the past two days was to do the cooking. This turned out to be quite a job as the daughter of the house is both wheat and (bovine) dairy intolerant and the eldest son cannot eat fish.

Usually for special circumstances like this, I have a fail safe recipe: green risotto. It’s vegetarian, kosher and halal and -last but not least- it’s about the only thing my girlfriend wanted me to cook when it was my turn.

Unfortunately it contains pesto, which contains cheese (usually Parmigiano, Pardano or Pecorino), so it’s not suited for vegans or people who are intolerant to anything made from cow’s milk.

To make things worse it’s winter and the local stores are out of fresh basil. I had to improvise. Luckily I knew the recipe for pesto, and I knew a trick for making pesto when out of fresh basil. So here we go.

Ingredients

• olive oil (1 or 2 tablespoons)
• risotto rice (1,5 cups)
• white wine (1 cup)
• water (4 cups)
• salt
• red pepper (1, diced)
• green peas (1 bag)
• pesto (1 cup)
• grated cheese (goats cheese in this case)
• scallions (sliced)

Preparation

Fry 1,5 cups of risotto rice in olive oil until golden brown or at most for 3 minutes, whatever happens first. Add white wine and water (in that order, you don’t want to miss the smell of the boiling wine) don’t forget to add salt (this dish can deal with quite some salt, it’s hard to overdo it), half-cover the pan with a lid and leave to cook over a slow fire for about 20 minutes or until all the water has gone. Stir once or twice while simmering. Add diced pepper and peas, mix until pepper and peas are hot. Add pesto. Serve with generous amounts of ground pepper (freshly ground tastes best and again: this dish can deal with a lot of pepper), grated cheese and sliced scallions (in that order).

Normally I use ready-made pesto, but this time I had to improvise on account of the cheese and the shortage of fresh basil.

Ingredients

• some dried basil and/or fresh basil leaves
• loads of fresh parsley (but preferably fresh basil if available);
• olive oil (enough to keep things smooth)
• grated cheese (normally Parmigiano, Pardano or Pecorino, but this time ordinary Dutch goat’s cheese)
• pine nuts

Preparation

Use a hand blender to shred the parsley and basil to bits. This works best when some olive oil is added to turn it into a smooth mixture. It’s important not to put too much olive oil in as this will lead to ever-increasing amounts of pesto. Better start with a little and add extra olive oil when necessary. After mixing the parsley/basil and olive oil, stepwise grate some cheese into it and blend on. The general idea is to add olive oil when the mixture becomes too thick and grated cheese or pine nuts when it becomes too thin. When added in small quantities, the hand blender can deal with whole pine nuts.

I used a trial-and-error method, which worked fine, but didn’t give me exact quantities. I estimate that I used 8 to 10 cups of parsley, a handful of fresh basil, two teaspoons of dried basil, half a cup of both olive oil and pine nuts and roughly the amount of a whole cup of cheese, ungrated that is.

Keep adding the required ingredients until the stuff you are making looks and tastes roughly like pesto…

Quote of the day (13)

A quick and dirty estimate is better than a long description.

Wolfgang Schlager

Gravestone

Due to circumstances I’ve been rewriting my will (nothing serious, just a trip abroad). That activity prompted a strain of thoughts about what I would like as a text on my gravestone. Incidentally: I don’t want one, but suppose I did, what would I like to have written on it?

Most people only have their names and dates of birth and death. My dad’s gravestone also mentions his profession, but he was an organist. That’s something worth mentioning. Things like ‘accountant’, ‘chief executive officer’ or ‘ICT specialist’ hardly are. So I’m lucky to be an archaeologist.

Yet, I would not want my CV on my gravestone. As someone once said: ‘When you’re dying, you’re not going to worry about whether you’ve spent enough time at the office.’ So I asked myself what I would want mentioned and I came up with a surprisingly odd list of things that I am proud of and would like to be remembered by:

• I taught my god-daughter to read her first two-syllable word (‘castle’);
• I donated blood 95 times;
• A friend of mine and me regularly visited (both at home and in the hospital) a former university teacher of ours in the course of the year in which he was seriously ill;
• I spoke well at his funeral (so well in fact that one of the other speakers jokingly promised me I could speak at his);
• I never ever fell out with friends (apart from loosing track of them and -sometimes- picking up the thread years later);
• I designed a Roman bridge for an archaeological theme park that still stands today;
• When, only months after being married, the wife of my colleague ran off and he got to talk about it at work at the wrong moment, I kept some prospective clients waiting for their appointment for half an hour to give him time to talk;
• With friends we managed to find a place where an Iranian refugee could sleep for a night;
• I wrote one good poem (about the thrill of sleeping next to a woman and hearing her breathe);
• Every night in winter I made a hot water bottle for my girlfriend, who needed her feet warm in order to sleep;
• When a friend of mine decided to stop drinking alcohol, I abstained from alcohol during Lent to provide moral support (incidentally: it runs totally counter to the idea of Lent to say this);

And that’s it. No professional achievements, no relationships, no knowledge or scholarly activity. I surprised myself big time: this isn’t me at all, it’s just the things I consider my real achievements, the ones that I think are worth remembering. They’re surprisingly minor details. How little you can do that really matters. Maybe the French are right: Il faut cultiver son jardin.