July 2008 Archives
Watched some movies though:
Hancock - was great. Go and see it. I saw it in the Imax and was surprised that the screen wasn't as big as I expected. So I texted B and asked him if I was really in the Imax theatre and it wasn't just another theatre with a biggish screen. D'oh!
Stardust - loved this! Watching it for the second time tonight. I read Neil Gaiman's blog so I was reading during the filming. Fascinating.
That's it really. Almost August and I can feel autumn coming ...
Did you know that the van Gogh museum has a late night opening on Fridays with music and drinks and all?
Now you do.
Did you know that you can have the best Thai I've ever had (outside of a tiny restaurant in Cape Town which I had discovered entirely by accident) in Amsterdam at The Bird?
Now you do.
The Zeedijk is a beautiful bit of Amsterdam I'd never visited before. The waiting line for The Bird was long, but moved really quickly and we were seated within about 10 minutes. The service is very very quick and professional, but maybe a little perfunctory.
The green curry was amazingly fragrant and the red was full of body.
Recommended ++.
Yesterday I made my favourite soup, based on a Nigel Slater recipe. Rather than give you directions based on just what you should buy, I'll give you the organic bag/use what you have method.
A selection of summer vegetables, eg courgette, carrots, tomatoes, peppers (red and yellow, no green please), onions or shallots, and garlic. I like adding butternut as we move into autumn. Also if you add aubergine and thicken with passata you have a great pasta sauce. Leave out the passata and then this is an ovenbaked ratatouille.
So. Back to the soup.
Chop all your veggies, onions into rings, carrots diagonally, tomatoes into wedges, peppers in slices etc etc. Toss in oil or spray with a mister and roast in a big pan for about an hour at 180C.
They'll fill the room with the smell of garlic and roasted tomatoes. When you take them out the oven be ready to tip them into a big pan, and add about a litre of vegetable stock or a bit more depending how thick you like your soup and then simmer for about 20 minutes.
Last night I added two chicken leg joints to the soup as it simmered and once the chicken was cooked removed them from the soup, stripped the meat from the bone, discarded the skin and added the meat back to the soup.
To serve grate parmesan over the top, buy a loaf of turkish bread, spread thickly with butter, dunk, eat and enjoy.
Soul-food in a bowl.
I have something to say about Nigel Slater's new book, Eating for England, and it's much the same as what I said about Toast. I think his character really shines through with the recipe books, when it's other kinds of writing he comes through a bit tight-lipped spinster auntie.
For a story by someone who's definitely not tight-lipped go and read (and vote) for Jeanne (the Cooksister) at Can You Twist?, an online reality show with six bloggers writing six stories, with one ultimate winner. I love Jeanne's starting line, 'She had never regretted taking him back.'
How can you resist a story that starts with a line like that?
Repeated scam attempts by Nigerians masquerading as real estate agents make her cynical. Huge rents (upward of 1200 euros) and deposits required by conventional rental agencies make her eyes water. The quality of accommodation is dismal.
Buying something is too much of a commitment and takes too long. Requesting an urgency for social housing will take another six months and is not guaranteed.
The prospect of working to pay rent and childcare and not having enough money left over for food, clothing or other bills makes her want to move back to Zimbabwe, where even though there is nothing to eat there is still a house with a pool.
I read Unclutterer. In a quest to declutter my life I clutter my online life reading about how to declutter my life. How's that then? Anyway, quest for a tidy life aside, one of the entries on unclutterer was about wedding dresses.
I have a confession. I still have mine. Not from the second time because I had no dress then, but from the first time when I was 18.
My mom made my dress. It was cream silk with a princess line bodice to disguise what almost passed for a belly. The petticoat underneath was cotton and mom sewed cotton lace onto the edge. The neckline was beaded and sequined and she sewed each one on by hand, painstakingly. I can imagine her sat in the lounge at home, a cigarette burning in the ashtray while she worked on the bodice of the dress that her 18 year old daughter would wear to her shotgun wedding. I never really thought, until now, of how much she must have cared about me to put that much effort into making my dress.
So I still have it. It's in a box in the storage room downstairs with other mementos from my previous life. The evening bag that my gran gave me, diamante and black silk; the costume jewellery, all broken that my aunt passed onto me after gran died. Some other little things that I kept because I'm sentimental (really).
Unclutterer suggests trashing the dress. Taking photographs of it and then getting rid of it. Remaking it into something else. (Not keeping it for your teenage daughter to wear to her own shotgun wedding.)
I love the photos they link to on Trash the Dress.
What do you think? Should I trash my dress?
Last weekend a friend who lives in Haarlem had a birthday party. A birthday party with lots of Polish vodka and many many mojitos. Good thing we decided to stay at Stempels just under the shadow of the church and around the corner from the Grote Markt.
It's a very charming hotel - Hastens beds, really nicely designed rooms, lovely showers and the sound of the church bells to wake you up in the morning. The only downside really was that they are a new hotel and so the attention to detail isn't quite what it could have been. The cutlery at breakfast was dirty and the breakfast room wasn't replenished properly. Breakfast is really important to the whole experience so I was a little disappointed. There really should have been someone there taking coffee and tea orders and making sure everything ran smoothly.
A couple of years ago I stayed in a hotel in London called the Georgian House Hotel which was cheap but not really that cheerful. However it had a wonderful breakfast that almost made up for the rooms being too hot and uncomfortable. They had lots of exchange student types working in the breakfast room, but the full English and hot coffee and tea was a winner. My mom runs a B&B and she says a good breakfast makes up for a lot of faults. I agree!
So we walked around Haarlem a bit hungover after all those mojitos and happened upon the Teyler's Museum. We have museum cards so it was free, and although most of the collection was, well, not personally interesting (I hesitate to say boring), the Michelangelo drawings were fabulous. Then we sat in this cute cafe, called 't Teylertje and had carrot cake. Later we sat in Bagels and Beans and had bagels and a macchiato.
We shopped at America Today and their till broke and the teenagers working on shopping Sunday had no idea what to do. Later we sat down in another cafe called Brahms and Liszt which I learned is rhyming slang for what we were on Saturday night.
Oh, and the afternoon before the party we had icecream at Gelateria Bartoli. Oh my god. M had chocolate and caramel. I had lemon and a raspberry yoghurt sorbet. To die for. Must go back.
So, we ate and drank our way around Haarlem and very nice it was too.
