Lay-out stuff

I will be playing around with the lay-out a bit today, because I'm not 100% happy with it and I want to see if I can get something better out of it. I will be doing this while I'm also working an essay, so it may change several times with long pauses in between. Creativity doesn't come all at once, you know!

Stamps

Now I've said many things about the front pictures of my Postcrossing cards, but I've hardly mentioned the pictures on the other side; the stamps.
When you participate in Postcrossing for a while, you automatically become somewhat of a stamp conoisseur. I can now recognize the "standard" stamps from most busy postcrossing countires; the German church tower, the Russian rabbits, the Taiwanese flowers, and the US landscapes (although these changed a few months ago!). But I've also received many beautiful, special stamps, which I would like to share with you, because I think they deserve more attention. (Here in the Netherlands we only have boring sticker stamps, and although I sometimes buy a batch of old stamps to compensate for this, I still feel a bit guilty about our lack of proper stamps.)
The selection below is entirely random: I just went through my stock of cards and picked any stamps that looked special, mainly the bigger, colourful ones. This hardly does justice to them all. I know I have a cute little Hello Kitty stamp from Japan somewhere, but I couldn't find it quickly, so maybe I'll redo this in the proper order with the proper attention one day. But for now, just sit back and enjoy!

My only South African stamp so far; a dinosaur holograph.

A Czech stamp with a story.

Belgian bird stamps, with a Smurf.

Several colourful Chinese stamps.

Another set of Chinese stamps.

Some US stamps with animals.

Very different Ukranian stamps, I love the dreamy one with the unicorn.

Another set of Ukranian stamps: they must like triangles!

A varied bunch of Czech stamps: I love the cat one!

A huuuuge Russian stamp.

Some other huge Russion stamps.

Two large bugs from Singapore.

Very different stamps from Thailand.

Almost a stamp overload from Taiwan!

Quotes in the margin

Whenever I'm in class, I scribble down funny quotes in the margin. This may be something that a classmate said, but usually it's something that the teacher/lecturer says unthinkingly, which sounds really funny when you don't have the context. I've been writing these down for a while now, and I thought it might be fun to share some with you. As always they'll be without any names, and I won't spoil the fun by giving you all the contexts, although sometimes some extra info might be useful...
Here we go:

"He has veins in his hair."
I have no idea where this comes from, but it sounds bad...

"If actors were clever, they would be authors."
Definitely from my modern theatre course, and definitely a joke.

"I will ask you what it is about in a minute, but I will throw around some quotations in the meantime."

"He offered their daughter for sacrifice and then the mother was obviously, well, pissed off..."
One of my classmates trying to explain some Greek mythology.

"God was a beta student."
My teacher explaining that God liked to do things in weights and numbers, making him a "beta" (= Dutch terminology for science) student.

"'He was speaking while using vowels' isn't that useful to mention."
Same teacher trying to get some useful feedback from the class.

These are just the ones from this semester (February onward), when I get around to it I may share some older ones, from when all of our English wasn't fully up to scratch yet, with hilarious results.

Protein

As you may or may not know, I am a vegetarian. I have been a vegetarian for 26 years (yes, that is how old I am), and I can overall say that I am happy, healthy, and not falling apart, like some people tend to think when you tell them you live without meat (and fish, and chicken...). I will not get into the whole why and "isn't it hard?" stuff here, if you really want to know more about it you can ask me. I would like to say that I am not principally against eating animals; we humans are a omnivorous species, and I would love to if I knew that the animal had had a good life, hadn't been stuffed with antibiotics and growth hormones and other horrible things, and a piece of rain forest hadn't been floored to feed it. As those things are currently not really possible without paying half your salary for it, I'd rather stick to vegetarianism.

So last weekend we were eating at the house of a friend of mine, and he had pulled a vegetarian recipe from the Internet (he does not mind cooking without meat, but he lacks the culinary imagination to come up with something himself). It was a lasagna dish. Now about 90% of all the lasagna I have eaten (it's usually the default "vegetarian" dish in restaurants, the other option being a pepper stuffed with vegetables or couscous) were spinach with either bechamel or cheese sauce. This lasagna was no different. However, then someone decided to throw a whole load of proteins at the dish. Officially, it consisted of pasta, 250 g spinach, 250 g ricotta, 250 g mozzarella, 2 eggs, cheese sauce, and grated cheese. Now firstly, 250 g spinach for 4 people is just scandalous. I would have thrown in about 4 times that amount. But the protein thing is just out of control. Luckily, my friend also realised this and left the ricotta and cheese sauce out of it, but we still ended up with quite a cheesy meal.
I have seen this done before. Non-vegetarians tend to go "oh my! we need protein! what has protein? cheese! add cheese! and eggs! and nuts! and mushrooms!" until there is no sense or logic to the dish and you're just spooning the stuff up. This is very good, and sweet, and considerate, in a way. We need protein, it's hard to get enough in your system when you're a vegetarian, so it's good they think about it. However, the important thing to remember is that we vegetarians are used to eating very little protein. We can cope with it. (I know this is the most difficult thing for meat-eaters who go vegetarian; the sudden loss of protein in their diet. But once your body is used to it, you're fine not eating that much protein. And I am one of the lucky ones who started out low, so my body is fully adapted.) And the meat-eater who goes vegetarian for a day will have no problems, except that they usually feel they haven't eaten enough. So there really is no need throwing all that cheese and nuts and tofu and whatever in our general directions.

 But still, it's better than the other extreme, which is the "meat analogue" or "meat substitue" group. I have never understood why the things vegetarians can pick up to substitute meat have to look like meat. Apart from the generally tragically bad taste (it tastes like dust or soy, which are both unpleasant), it does not work in 2 ways; firstly, the vegetarian does not want to eat meat, nor something that looks like meat, so they generally don't buy it, and secondly, the meat-eater compares it to meat, isn't fooled and goes "this is horrible and disgusting and tastes nothing like meat! I will stick to meat!" so you lose out on both sides. Case in point: yesterday, we ate hamburgers with a salad, because this is easy and quite fresh, and it was unusually warm outside. I bought 2 (organic) hamburgers for my boyfriend, but for myself I didn't go for the "faux meat" hamburger, I bought falafel. Falafel is vegetarian without trying to be meat. And it actually tastes good. Luckily, most supermarkets have by now realised this mistake, and they actually sell some things that do not try to be meat, like cheese schnitzels or fritatta or vegetable things with cheese. Which usually taste good, because they're not something that looks like meat and tries to taste like meat while consisting of tofu or quorn or baked milk or whatever. (However, you can still be fooled. A couple of months ago we ate in an organic/ partly-vegetarian restaurant and I ordered the "brie schnitzel", thinking I was in for a treat, but I turned out they'd just cut open one of those horrible tofu-y shop-bought schnitzels, stuffed a slice of brie inside and baked it. I have rarely been this disappointed, because the restaurant appeared to be generally vegetarian-friendly.)

Now it may sound as if it's horrible being a vegetarian, but generally, it's pretty neat. When I cook at home I just cook whatever I like, and I never go "owh, there's no meat in here, whatever will I do to substitute it?!" but just think logically. No need to panic, no need to count every miligram of protein until you've had your fill. And when you go out to restaurants, the choice is usually limited so that you can easily choose what you want, making life easy. Or you can go out to nice, small, hidden vegetarian restaurants where eating out becomes a whole different experience (and these are literally everywhere). Moreover, whenever you get to another continent, you realise that being a vegetarian is pretty normal. There are many religions which are wholly or partly vegetarian. I've never had difficulties in Africa or the Middle East, whereas in some Dutch restaurants I've been looked at like I had some sort of disease (which is weird, because I never comment on other people eating meat, because I believe in "live and let live", whereas I've had to explain and defend my way of living countless times. In the West, that is. Where we have enough food and wealth and freedom to let everyone choose for themselves). Moreover, it was just a couple of decades ago that only the really really rich in the western world could actually eat meat every day, the poor were happy to get it at Christmas and Easter and harvest festivals.

So really, I don't see what the problem is. And thankfully, more and more people are beginning to realise the same thing. Again, it's not that I want the whole world to go vegetarian, it's just that it would be nice if people thought things through before they judge, or buy, or put a recipe online. And in the meantime, I'm perfectly able to sort things out for myself, even if it does mean I sometimes get bombarded with a protein overload.

The Go-Between

Now that I've finally finished Stephen Fry's first autobiography (which is much duller and more factual than his second, which I read before this one, which I know is the wrong way around), I've started in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between. This is one of those novels which I suddenly discovered, while I was doing research for my reading guide on Atonement, and simply had to read. So I ordered it and it sat on my shelf for a while, until Stephen Fry made a reference to the famous first line, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", and then I knew it had to be the next book I would ever read.
So I started, read the famous first line (which really is very good), got through the somewhat confusing prologue, and into the story, which is set in 1900. And I read and I read. It's written in the first person, which generally annoys me, but here it seems to work quite well, as the main character is telling us what happened in 1900, speaking from 1953. So there actually is a point to the first person narration. Also, it's in the past, which is so much better than present tense (which is just completely unrealistic).
And I read and read and read. After a while, I saw that I was on page 50. Now it's been a long time since I actually read 50 pages in one go. More importantly, it's been a long time since I read 50 page in one go from an author I have never read before. Wait a minute, I thought, why am I reading this book as if I've known the author, the writing style, the subject, for years?
Now I realise that for many people this may not be very special, but it usually takes me at least a hundred pages, but sometimes several books, before I get to grips with an author's style, sentence structure, word choice, use of metaphor, his or her voice. But here, it felt like someone I'd known for years was telling me this story. Strange, I thought. I knew the subject matter would be familiar, as I mentioned Ian McEwan used similar events in his novel Atonement, and I'd just read Stephen Fry's account of life at a boarding school, so the whole perspective of a school boy in 1900 was not that unfamiliar. But his voice? Surely every author has a unique voice?
Then I realised why it seems so familiar; it is Ian McEwan's voice, mixed with Jane Austen's social criticism.
Now although I said it takes a while to get used to someone's writing voice, that does not mean that I'm any good at actually describing such a voice. However, I do think the above comes close; the long, flowing sentences of McEwan, always filled with some kind of undertone that shifts the perspective, always saying more than the characters themselves realise, combined with Austen's hidden, sarcastic critique of the social world, in this case, the world of boarding schools and the (post)Victorian British upper class. In a sense, it's the best of both worlds, really.
It is a shame that I already know what the outcome will be, given the outcome in McEwan's novel. I'm still happy I read Atonement (and all of his other novels) first though, because his writing style is my favourite, and if L.P. Hartley can talk to me in the same way, that means I will be pulled in by his story, that he will tell me everything in a way that will be pleasant and relaxing and dreamlike, without being distracted. Yes, with the sun shining, most of my work finally behind me and about a week before the next huge pile comes up, I will spend some great days in his fictional world.
So I would recommend everyone to read The Go-Between. But read Atonement first.

Food from the garden

So yesterday we ate our first home-grown radishes of the year. For me, they were also my first home-grown radishes ever, but my boyfriend's father has a huuuuuge vegetable patch, so for him it's all normal. They were good. Tiny, huuuge (no "normal" size in sight), elongnated, with some weird bulges, spicy, crisp, and refreshing.
As I may have mentioned somewhere, we have a small garden (when I say small, I mean that it's about 3 by 3 m, if you'd chop off all the weird edges and combine it into an actual square) with a birch tree right in the middle of it giving us shade and singing birds and lots of leaves. We have a terrace with very uneven stones, a path to the gate at the back, two small patches of grass, some plants that are there because they look nice (and to attract butterflies and other insects), a wooden bench, a compost heap in which a hedgehog lives, and in the space that's left over, some fruit and veg.
We've been trying to grow several things in it over the years, with varying success. Last year we had potatoes, courgettes (3), tomatoes, a pepper (1), grapes, and loads of strawberries. The strawberries are the only thing that always seem to work. Those and the grapes are the only things that are permanent inhabitants, because we try something different every year.
So this year, we have radishes (grown in our little plastic glasshouses), strawberries (loads and loads of them, given the amount of flowers they're having right now), grapes, broccoli (4 plants), beans, tomatoes, rocket (these two haven't really been showing much action, we bought them as seeds, and we may not be the best at turning seeds into mature plants, although it did work with the radishes and the beans, but we may cheat on these ones and buy some actual plants that have been given a head-start), and one artichoke plant (because it turns out that they can get up to 1.5 m in height). In the beginning we did not want to grow too many things that actually have to come from the ground, because this isn't the best area and we don't know what people have done to the earth in the 92 years before I moved in, but now we've added so many things to it ourselves we feel a bit better about it. No idea what will actually work this time (the broccoli seems to be a favourite for some kind of snail, and as I said the tomatoes and rocket are kind of wilting), but just the idea of growing your own stuff is enough to make me happy about our little garden.
I can't wait (for more than one reason) until we have a bigger house and a bigger garden (which we will probably turn completely upside down) so we can actually have some sort of system that makes sense. At the moment, everything is just standing next to everything, our strawberries surrounding the rose plant, and our broccoli plants hugging the hydrangea (hortensia, for Dutchies). But as I said, it's already great at the moment, so it can only get better!

Glasses

So I've been wearing my glasses more often lately, because I've been spending long stretches of time behind a computer screen and your eyes get kinda dry and itchy after a while, and it's nice to just be able to scratch. Also, hay fever. Also, I got some new glasses in February, so I now have some that I would actually wear in public, as opposed to my small, dirty, old ones (which I've had since I was 12).
So I have been wearing them out in public, and I've noticed that people react differently to me when I do. When I wear them, men tend to treat me as if I need help, as if I can't figure things out, or as if I need them to be sweet and kind to me. I get a lot more smiles when I cycle or walk through the city, and some will actually greet me, even though they don't know me. They will come up to me in shops asking whether I need help, offer me an extra bag, let me go in front instead of cutting me off... it's amazing. It may be because I look about 10 years younger when I wear glasses (which would put me at 16, not too bad), or maybe because I look like a big-eyed helpless girl. The effect is more pronounced when I wear a skirt, by the way, so maybe it does generate some sort of "damsel in distress" signal that men respond to.
Women, on the other hand, give me the cold shoulder. They give me a "look at her, trying to look smarter than she is"-look, and then deliberately cut you off or ignore you. Again, more pronounced when you're wearing a skirt, as if you're trying to impersonate some sort of "feminine power woman". This does not go for women of about 50 and above, who will act the same as men, but most women under that age do suddenly turn up their noses at you. Which is interesting, because I have a classmate who sometimes wears glasses and sometimes doesn't, and when she does bring them I catch myself thinking "tsss, trying to look more intelligent are we?"
Why do women do this? Why do we always push each other down when it comes to looks? It's the men who should be fighting for us, not the other way around (biologically speaking, don't go calling me an anti-feminist now). I've heard from several people that my glasses actually do look good on me, but if I'd go by the response I get from women in the street, I'd throw them in the bottom drawer and then run a car over it.
So anyway, just something I noticed and wanted to share, if you have any thoughts on how and why and so forth please share them, because I'm still undecided whether I should or should not wear my glasses in public.

Common Era

During one of my classes last week, we discussed methods of time keeping and counting years, including our Christian-based system, but also the Muslim, Jewish, Chinese, and Buddhist calendars. At some point, one of my classmates declare that she refused to use BC and AD, but chose to use BCE and CE; Before Common Era and Common Era (or Current Era). She refused to use the "Christian system" because she "didn't believe in it" and because she thought it "arrogant" to impose your religion on the world like that. Our lecturer kindly argued that he thought that that was arrogant, as the whole CE system still uses the Christian time reckoning, it just removed the religious element. Before this could turn into a real (and probably painful) discussion we moved off to something else, but it kept me thinking.
Somehow a conversation I had today turned to the subject, and I found out that Jews have been using the Common Era annotation for longer, because they do not like referencing to Christ. Fair enough. But then I was reading a paper (actually, I'm in the middle of reading it, as I stopped to type this), and they mentioned the Greeks doing something in 500 BCE, and that just somehow went the wrong way. I mean, the Greeks have absolutely nothing to do with the Christian faith, but it just feels so contrived to put it like that. So look-at-us-going-out-of-our-way-to-look-secular-and-scientific-and-disinterested.
So I started looking for more information, and the Wikipedia page as usual came in handy. Apparently, I'm very late coming to this, because it's already standard practise in many American textbooks, and the Brits are going that way as well. Soon, nobody will use BC and AD anymore (except for Christians, of course, who are very offended by all this), and we'll all happily use BCE and CE.

So what's next?
Do these people realise that our days of the week are named after a mixture of Germanic and Roman gods? I mean, Thursday is named after Thor! And Wednesday is derived from Wodan, or even Mercurius if you're living in a Romance language country Off with their heads! We don't believe in Thor or Mercury anymore! Come to think of that, most of our planets are named after Roman gods as well! Do we believe in them? No way! Bye bye Mars and Venus, from now on it'll be Manplanet and Womanplanet. But it gets worse; the whole continent of Europe is called after someone from Greek mythology! Quick, change the name, before everybody thinks we still believe in it!
But it doesn't stop there. It's not only names, before you know it, you won't be able to say "the powers that be" or "the writing's on the wall" or proverbs such as "you reap what you sow" and "the blind leading the blind", because all of these are from the Bible, and you don't believe in that, do you? Will we still be able to say "We're not in Kansas anymore" even though we don't believe in The Wizard of Oz? Will in that near future anyone be able to remark "Curiouser and curiouser" without being branded as an "Alice-believer"?

I think I've made my point clear. Everything, or almost everything, we say has some background, some history, some connotation. If you look at the English language, many words are derived from Shakespeare and other literary giants, but many also come from the Bible. If you don't belief in the Christian religion anymore, does that mean you can't use words related to it? I think that's nonsense. Any religious connotation it may once have had has disappeared for most of us, until you put the spotlight on it, like these people do.
Moreover, if you're going to abolish a system, don't replace it with exactly the same thing only with a different name tag. If they'd generated a new calendar, a new way of counting the years, and argued that we're now living in year 4,548,489,932 or something, I'd be happy to change to their system (also, you'd get rid of the whole Before Something and After Something debate). But this way, nahhh. It's too contrived, it's too look-at-us-being-clever-and-secular, and there's no point. You either change it all (and the list I mentioned with all the days and planets etc is veeeeeery extensive) or you keep things as they are. You wouldn't go knocking down the Parthenon just because we don't believe in those Greek gods anymore, would you? Then don't do it to words. They're just words, after all.

Double chocolate cheesecake

For our trip to Paris, we'd bought several small snacks to gobble down in a tight moment of hunger, but inevitably these were never eaten, as there are always so much more attractive possibilities at hand (Starbucks, for example). Now one batch of these, "LU Timeout speculaas", had an unfortunate time in the bottom of one of our backpacks, and now all the biscuits have turned into crumbly bits. What a shame, we could say, or better; what an opportunity!
What do you use crumbly biscuits for? Crumbly biscuit cake bases! And what better cake to make than a cheesecake, and what better cheesecake to make than a chocolate cheesecake! Hurrah!
Now I'd never made a chocolate cheesecake before, so I looked at some recipes (you have baked ones, unbaked ones, ones filled with booze or fruits that aren't in season or whatever), and I ended up with the double chocolate cheesecake recipe of the BBC. However, some of the amounts in there didn't work out for Dutch shoppers (you can only buy mascarpone in batches of 250 g, and I didn't want to be left with 50 g of mascarpone which you can't use in anything) and because I think 50 g of butter isn't enough, and because I used a bigger cake tin (24 cm), I adapted the recipe as follows:

Ingredients:
200 g crumbly biscuits (can be digestive, or other crumbly ones)
100 g butter
400g cream cheese
250g mascarpone
300g milk chocolate , melted
100g dark chocolate , melted

Mix the crumbled biscuits with the melted butter. Line the bottom of the spring form tin with baking paper. Press the biscuit mixture into the base of the tin. Set to cool in the oven for about 10 minutes.
Mix the cream cheese with the mascarpone. Fold the milk chocolate into the cream cheese mix and then stir in the dark chocolate so that it looks streaky.
Line the sides of the tin with more baking paper. Spoon the cake mixture into the tin, level the top, and let cool  for at least 2 hours.

"Level the top" they say. It never works.

 Now the whole "stir in the dark chocolate so that it looks streaky" didn't quite work out for me (as it did for most people, looking at the comments on the recipe page), but other than that everything worked fine. The bottom is a bit crumbly, but what do you expect with so many crumbly biscuits?
The taste is great though; chocolaty, rich, with some spices coming through from the speculaas. The harder bits of dark chocolate give it a little bit of a crunch. It is very very heavy though, so while it says 8 portions in the recipe, I've turned it into 12, which just makes the goodness last that bit longer!

Older films

So I was watching A Streetcar named Desire yesterday, the 1953 film version (for a class, sadly enough, the last time I could watch an entire movie just for the sake of watching it must have been months ago. Actually, come to think of it, that must've been The Hunger Games, somewhere in the middle of March. The only things I now actually make time for are Game of Thrones and The Apprentice. Ah, the joy of being busy...), and then it struck me: old(er) films are just much better than the ones we have today.
Now I should immediately put in a disclaimer here, because I don't want to sound like someone who knows her stuff when I don't. I haven't watched that many "old" films. I'm one of those people who keeps saying she wants to watch Casablanca and Gone with the Wind and The Graduate and never really does it. But I do think I've seen enough old(er) and new(er) films to make some kind of judgement.
Now with Streetcar, you can clearly see that the set is not that realistic, that the camera wobbles, that most of the sound effects were added later in a studio, and that the acting is just a little bit over the top. But that doesn't matter. The story, the characters, they draw you in every time, even though you know the plot, even though you know exactly what's going to happen. It keeps you on the edge, it makes you wonder, it does everything a good film or play is supposed to do.
Does this mean that actors were just that much better in those days? I don't think so, because we still have some great ones (although it is of course telling that Marlon Brando also played in what is regarded as the best film for a long time now, The Godfather). I think they did have the advantage of also having acted on stage, which calls for a different kind of acting than film-acting, because the audience is that much farther away and not inside the camera shoved next to your face (although it isn't really, in these older movies, because it couldn't be. So that may also be one of the differences; actors had to act with their whole bodies, their whole selves, not just with that tiny bit showing on the close-up).
No, I think the main difference is that it is real. The people are real, the situations are real, the behaviour is a close enough approximation of real, and the story is told in a clear, not-too-forced manner. What I mean is this; Stanley and Stella and Blanche and the house they live in and their friends and the situations they find themselves in, they're all recognisable. We've all played poker or had an unexpected guest stay too long or known someone who kept up appearances even though inside she was crumbling. They all look real, too, not too much make-up (they even had to make Vivian Leigh look older, because she was too good-looking to play Blanche), and obviously no digital touch-ups. Stella is nice and plump, not the too-skinny kind of actress you have today, and Stanley's friends are big and small and tall and unshaven as real people would be. The filming is kinda wobbly, but that is okay, because in real life you don't have a steady vision of things anyway. The camera is in those places a real person could also be, we don't see the action as if we're "in the wall" or whatever. So, in short, it looks real.
Now compare this to the latest film I've seen that actually came close to gripping me for its entire length; The Hunger Games (yes, I keep coming back to this film, but as I said, it's one of the last I've actually seen and can properly discuss). The situation is unrealistic from the outset, but that's a given in a post-apocalyptic dystopian movie, so we'll let that one go. However, the characters are also unrealistic. Katniss is way to muscular for how little food she has been eating, same goes for Gale. Their faces and clothes are too clean, overall their cloths are just too expensive (Katniss has a pair of leather boots that would cost more that her entire family has in a year). And finally, of course, they look too perfect. Their faces have been made completely smooth by make-up, their hair is always perfect, they are thin but muscular, or broad and muscular in the case of the guys, and they just are unrealistically pretty. Otherwise, the acting is realistic, the responses to situations seem real and are understandable, even though they are situations that we've never found ourselves in. The camerawork is nice and wobbly, "because we wanted to show it was Katniss's point of view", as the director said, even though the camera sometimes occupies a place no normal person could have been (extreme close-ups, extreme overview shots).
On the whole, if you compare these two films, the main difference is the physique and looks of the actors and the camera positions. No matter how good your story is, if your characters look unbelievable or you tell it from a point of view that people couldn't have in real life, people won't follow your story.
Does it matter? Of course it doesn't. Most people don't watch a film to be drawn into the story, to experience highs and lows, to gain new insights into Life, the Universe, and Everything. They watch a movie to relax, to enjoy themselves with friends, to keep the kids quiet. And in response, that's the kind of film we're getting.
However, as Aristotle said (oh my, doesn't that make me sound presumptuous), emotional catharsis in the audience is one of the most important elements of tragic theatre (as you'll see, I'm leaving out comedy for the moment, partly because it's a totally different thing and partly because I don't like 95% of all comic films being made right now, so I don't watch them, so I can't talk about them). For me, it is definitely important. If I'm going to invest my time and attention and energy (and money) into a film, I better get something out of it, or I better be drawn into it in such a way that I forget about everything else for a while. Maybe that's why I haven't been watching that many movies lately; they just aren't good enough. Not for what I want to get out of them.
So perhaps it's time to get some of those oldies, hunker down with some popcorn, and be swept away in black-and-white for a day.

Carrot cupcakes

So after all that Frenchiness, I decided to make something really British, namely carrot cupcakes (which are basically carrot cakes, only smaller). Somehow we'd managed to avoid every salon du the in Paris (not actively, I had even looked some of them up, but there's just too much to do in Paris), and I was craving for some good old cupcakes.
Now I checked on line for several recipes but none really suited my purpose, so I created my own by combining several other recipes. It is mostly based on the BBC Good Food recipe for carrot & cream cheese cupcakes, but as I have no clue what "brown muscovado sugar" might be, and  bicarbonate of soda still isn't something you just find in shops around here, you will see I've made some changes.

Ingredients:
175 g brown sugar
100 g plain flour
100 g self-raising flour
3 tablespoons of mixed spices (this is called "koek- en speculaaskruiden" in Dutch, it contains cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and cardamom)
1 tablespoon of lemon zest
2 eggs
150 ml sunflower oil
150 g grated carrots (you want to grate these in your kitchen machine. Believe me, I tried grating them by hand, and it's no fun. Also, it makes everything in your kitchen bright orange)

Told you it didn't look pretty!

Add the sugar, flours, spices, and lemon zest to your grated carrots.
Combine the eggs and oil in a separate bowl.
While letting the machine run, pour in the oil-mixture bit by bit until you have a soft dough. (At this point, it will not look pretty. Believe me). Spoon the mixture into your cupcake cases (you'll need 12, or fewer if you want bigger cakes) and bake for about 20 minutes at 180 degrees C, until they are firm but still springy to the touch. Let cool on a wire rack (or you'll get soggy bottoms, and if The Great British Bake-off taught me anything, it is that you don't want soggy bottoms).

Now, you can eat them just as they are, or you can add some icing (what Americans call "frosting", which always reminds me of How to lose a guy in 10 days ("Frooooooost yourself!!!") but never mind). Make sure your cupcakes are completely cooled before putting on the icing or your icing will melt, or worse, split.

Icing ingredients (this makes for a loooot of icing (see photo), take half of these amounts for a more modest amount):
100 g butter (soft)
200 g cream cheese
100-200 g icing sugar (how much icing sugar you use will depend on how sweet you want the icing to be. I like it when there is a bit of a sour bite to it, so I used 100 g (also because the carrots make the cakes really sweet), but if you have a sweet-tooth, use more than that)

Mix the butter until it is soft and smooth. Beat in the cream cheese, and finally beat in the icing sugar. Use a knife to put it on top of the cupcakes, because the mixture is too thick to go through a piping bag.

Now, with added deliciousness!

You can decorate them in any way you want, I didn't have any cute sprinkly things laying around, so we just ate them like this. And they were delicious! Sweet, spicy, a bit soury, moist but firm, hmmmm!

I think I may try these again with some chopped walnuts added to the batter, I wouldn't mind a bit more of a crunch. But other than that, they're great!

On your own

So we're back from Paris, we survived the endless queues, drunk Russians, and guys trying to sell us all kinds of stuff we don't need, and had an amazing time in between!

One thing I did notice, and it intrigued me. We had dinner in several small (very small, like 15 seats-small) restaurants, but also in some bigger, more touristy places. In all of these restaurants there were people sitting on their own, eating. Mostly these were women, but in the first small, vegetarian restaurant we visited, Le Potager du Marais, one Asian guy was also eating on his own (he spooned up the rich, dark chocolate mousse that took me 10 minutes in about 5 bites, which was another thing that amazed me, but that's neither here nor there).
Now in the Netherlands, it is highly unusual to sit in a restaurant on your own. It is also unusual to go to the theatre or cinema on your own, but more people do seem to be doing that. Eating alone, however, is not really done outside your own home, and when you see people doing it, they are generally businessmen, working on their laptop or making calls. Also, you would see most of them in the restaurants attached to the big department stores or more bar-restaurants, not in genuine "restaurants", and especially not in very small places where it is very noticeable that you're on your own.
What was interesting, I thought, was that most of the women were just quietly eating, some were reading a book, but most were just very relaxed, eating and talking to the staff (in the second small vegetarian restaurant, Le Puits de Legumes, one women actually kept bothering the about 20-year-old girl who ran the place on her own, so maybe some of them do need company). But on the whole, they seemed pretty happy about being there on their own. I think most of these women were French, but definitely some of them were tourists, including the aforementioned Asian guy, and in one Italian restaurant there was quite an old Italian guy who put away 4 courses in the time we finished one pizza.
But then there was an American girl who was waiting for her friend to join her, and she had to sit alone for about 10 minutes, and she was very uncomfortable about this. She kept looking as if she was afraid she would be thrown out of the restaurant any minute, even though there were more people sitting on their own. And there was an American couple (not in a relationship, just friends, the guy was gayer than gay), one half of which really didn't want to be in the small, weird vegetarian place she found herself in, and the other half profoundly thanked her several times for coming with him. He clearly wouldn't have gone there on his own, he needed her with him to go there.
So there you have it; some people do comfortably sit alone in a restaurant, eat their meal, and go on their way, while others cringe at the thought and would rather stay home. I think I'm of the latter category, I would have the idea that others would constantly be watching me and wondering why I'm not with someone; do I not have any friends? But maybe it's also a cultural thing; eating in the Netherlands is still more of a thing to get through before you can move on to things you really want to do, and if you go out to eat in a restaurant it is a "thing to do", a thing to do with other people, not something you just do. I wish it were, because eating in these small, out-of-the-way, eccentric places makes me very happy, and it should be acceptable to be on your own more, especially now that more and more people are staying single for longer times.
I would highly recommend both restaurants I mentioned in this post, even if you're not a veggie-hippie, because they serve great organic food, have nice staff whose English is far better than they give themselves credit for, and their general atmosphere is so much better than in the big chains where you're just a number. So go there. Even (or especially) if you are on your own.