Tonight I am trying to watch the Belgian film Bullhead and my attention span is so short. Episodic TV has ruined me.
Month: July 2015
battle for supremacy
StandardA family picnic, sitting at a table under an umbrella near a body of water. He sat so close to her, wrapping his arm tightly around her back, his hand tightly gripping her waist, leaning in repeatedly for a kiss. It perplexed her, each time, because this had never been their relationship – open, public, transparent, affectionate. They were essentially strangers apart from the intermittent physical contact – years apart. And suddenly here he was openly affectionate, clinging almost, meeting her family. Nothing had been quite so uncomfortable as this shift.
Not my responsibility
StandardFor a long time, invisibly perhaps, I have spent my life taking on other people’s boredom and heartache and other forms of emotional manipulation. They might not know they’re doing it, but they are. If you care about someone enough, you will fall into the trap every time.
Yesterday someone who used to mean a lot to me – but who too many times pushed me too far – suggested that maybe he should come to visit me. But no, finally, I said no. A firm no. He countered with, “my fucking heart is dying here – the girlfriend and her blazing stupidity and selfserving. Being on the road to somewhere would be a perfect meditation to forget…”. Is that my responsibility? No.
Overlooking how hilarious and hypocritical the calling someone else out for being “selfserving” is, I can only say that this is all I have ever been for people like this guy – the owner of a relaxing meditation retreat. It’s not about me or my company. It’s just that I am a pushover who has a bit of disposable income and a place to crash far away from everything. This seems to be a recurring theme. A mattress to crash on. A tall patch of grass to fall in. I’ve been compassionate but there’s only so far that extends.
Lunchtable TV Talk: Tut, Zoo and Game of Thrones – Stuff I Never Planned to Watch
StandardSucked into more television shows than I care to admit, I find that I see the same actors’ faces again and again, all at once. This time, it’s Nonso Anozie. I suppose I’d seen him in smaller parts in films before, but suddenly he has appeared in three things I never intended to watch. The binge watching of Game of Thrones, and right now, in the outrageous and rather stupid Zoo (I decided to watch because I love James Wolk and give whatever he’s in a try) as well as this miniseries, Tut. I have nothing really to say about any of this – I got sucked into GoT, but the other shows just pass the time – and Tut, of course, is just a miniseries that disappears almost as soon as it appears.
Also, I just realized that one guy I have seen everywhere of late – including Tut – is Iddo Goldberg. Most recently, but sort of unrecognizably in Salem, and also in Peaky Blinders. Again, all things that I would never necessarily have set out to watch out of real desire. But these things were there, and familiar faces are everywhere.
Cheese, glorious cheese: “A nice amount of cheese”
StandardCheck out this hideous 80s commercial about cheese – glorious cheese. The song came to mind, but the commercial eluded me. Dear heavens… the discussion of “real cheese” (versus what? Cheez Whiz and other non-real cheese alternatives?) makes me laugh. Painful.
Recently I came into a lot of cheese. I found some extra mature cheddar, found some stuff like Swiss Emmental and French Comté, made some homemade paneer… and then my friend came to visit (an Italian woman who lives in Iceland) and brought Italian stuff – Grana Padano, Asiago and some others. My goodness the Asiago was amazing. I do not normally have such an insane abundance of cheese at home.
Never enough, never too much. Always a “nice amount of cheese”.
Recipes – Cooking for guests
StandardI never seem to cook except when guests come to visit. In addition to making a new attempt at black bean-corn-sweet potato-millet burgers, I also made a roasted garlic-Guinness-brown sugar pot roast in my slow cooker, shredded it and made sandwiches from it. I also make big breakfasts – my friend/guest’s favorite is rye toast, cream cheese, smoked salmon and scrambled or basil-poached eggs and roasted asparagus. I made that but also made a very American breakfast of fluffy American pancakes with real maple syrup, scrambled eggs and chicken sausage patties. I am not really big on the idea of sausage, but I had a package of ground chicken that I had planned to do something else with (and didn’t) and wanted to use it. I decided breakfast sausage was worth the experiment and it turned out really, really – surprisingly – well.
Slow cooker Guinness pot roast
2 pound (1 kg) beef pot roast
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 cup brown sugar
30 cl Guinness (or beer you prefer)
1 head roasted garlic
Rolls or buns you prefer, toasted
Sprinkle both sides of pot roast with the spices and place in the slow cooker. Put the brown sugar on top. Pour the beer into the slow cooker. Cook on low for 8 hours. Near the end of cooking time, roast head(s) garlic in the oven, mash up garlic and add to the cooked pot roast, finish cooking.
When finished, remove pot roast from the cooker and shred the meat on a separate plate. Meanwhile you can thicken the liquid in the cooker with a bit of flour (this created a thicker, gravy-like sauce, which is nicer for a sandwich). Return the shredded meat to the cooker and cook for another 20 to 30 minutes on low heat.
Chicken sausage patties
2 pounds (1 kg) ground chicken
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon dried sage
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Mix spices together, then mix into ground chicken. Form into patties and fry about 7 to 10 minutes on each side.
Destination Thanksgiving in Iceland – November
StandardThanksgiving is a pretty American tradition (other than the Canadian Thanksgiving tradition, of course) but it is one of the few I retained when I moved to Iceland. Over the years I hosted many dinners, some big, some small, for stray Americans and many other nationalities. To a very small extent, I have continued to do Thanksgiving in Sweden but it is more difficult for friends to get to where I live, a much bigger production. I have had some nice ones, but it is much easier if I take the production on the road rather than try to do it here.
This November, I will have a mini Thanksgiving in Iceland. Largely this is because all my other successful Thanksgivings were in Iceland but also because most of my friends who can and want to attend still live in Iceland. Planning is underway.
Shedding layers part seven: Books
StandardCookbooks! Yes, why do I have so many cookbooks?
Long, long ago, in an era long before the internet existed and everyone had five devices to search for internet content, including recipes, people exchanged recipes on little designated notecards made just for recipes. Or they collected recipes and published them in books. Some were generalist in nature, some were very specific (for example, vegan desserts, which, contrary to what some might say, are not only sorbet related, or vegetarian Indian cooking).
I must have gone through many phases of wanting a collection of recipe books because… well, over the years I accumulated a whole lot of them. Everyone around me – grandmother, mother, parents’ friends, etc. – also had recipe books aplenty. It never struck me that is was not necessary. Back when I started my own collection, it was kind of necessary because, as I said, there was no internet then.
Moving from country to country, lugging hundreds of (and it used to be over 1000) books along with me, though, it all seemed like too much. Especially as each year saw the internet grow and its cornucopia of content overflow, it made no sense to carry around books I had cracked open maybe once – and never once used to cook with.
That said, I still have a stack of these books and these will be the next things with which I part as I go on shedding extraneous layers of my life.
Striking midnight: Just your ghost passing through
StandardI have been forcing myself to get into bed by midnight every night. I might not fall asleep immediately, but I am there, mostly tucked in and ready for the cuddle that isn’t coming. Haha.
Tonight I am listening – for the first time in ages – Tori Amos‘s Boys for Pele. I had a bunch of Shiseido stuff sitting on my kitchen table for some reason, and I can’t hear or see the word “Shiseido” without thinking of the lyrics from “Muhammad My Friend“:
“And on that fateful day, when she was crucified, she wore Shiseido red, and we drank tea by her side…“
This is, incidentally, the only reason I am listening to this album, even if there are other bits of it that resonate with me still. Tori Amos is a very 1999-2000 thing for me. A transitional cache of music that carried me through the end of a relationship (that seemed unequivocally adult at the time, but reflecting, I see I was little more than a child in many ways – as he’d said, “You are two years old – maximum!”) and saw my decisionmaking take twists and turns that seemed illogical at the time but have slowly led me to where I am now.
I was never one of the rabid fans, didn’t jump on board right away during the heyday that followed Tori’s first two albums. It was later, looking for CDs (you know, when CDs were a thing) in a Borders (you know, when Borders was a thing) bookstore (erm, yeah, uh, you know when bookstores were a thing!) in Kahului, Hawaii, to serve as the soundtrack of our driving around Maui for a week. I found only Tori CDs and decided, despite having lukewarm feelings about her music, these would have to do. They struck a nerve for me, forever tied to that summer of intertwined endings and beginnings. The Maui sun, the tying up loose ends on the master’s thesis, the summer-long departure for a dreadful European bus trip (it was even worse than that sounds, despite all the things I saw and experiences I had). The culmination of it all in Iceland – the first time in my life that I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be. Driving from Akureyri back to Reykjavik with Anna in the middle of the night at the end of Verslunarmannahelgi weekend through the thickest fog I have ever seen – trying not to hit an errant sheep and stay awake while blasting Tori’s Under the Pink.
Tori Amos was the soundtrack of these transitions – but by 2005 I did not care any longer, and The Beekeeper is the last album I am conscious of seeking out. By then, it was all just treading old ground, and if you know me, you know I don’t like doing that.
Condition critical
StandardHe never set out to be the best-dressed drunk in town. Concerned with perception and looking just the right way when presenting himself in public, he took care to debut coveted, new wardrobe items in just the right way and time (even using the word “debut” when unveiling a new pair of shoes or a new coat). At least the sartorially concerned was one side of his personality.
The other, alcohol-soaked side, might throw these moderately expensive threads on, and run down to replenish the stock. Not at all caring what public perception might be.