Piano update

So a while back I posted about my piano revival; after 10 years of not playing, mainly due to lack of an actual piano, I decided to buy a digital piano and start to play again. My idea was to play as often as possible, but at least either a) 3 hours a week or b) 10 minutes after dinner every day. Unsurprisingly, this did not happen.
With our living room stuffed full of books as it is, the piano is hidden away in a room upstairs, a room that generally does not have the heating on. So if I want to play for more than 5 minutes and/or without freezing hands, I have to turn the heating on at least half an hour in advance. This kind of planning is not something my rare impromptu moments of playing are very well adapted to. Added to that, the piano is living up to its cheap nature; some of the keys make this awful 'woink' sound when you release them, so playing without headphones on is no fun, and playing with headphones one is also no fun because you want to hear the sound reverberate in the air. Also, it really does take a lot of energy, and an hour of playing still leaves me quite drained, both physically and mentally. But all that are just excuses for not playing as much as I actually could, or want to.
Because I still really love to play. I've been working through my old books chronologically, and am now in a position that I can actually play some of the more difficult and longer pieces in one go on the first retry. Some of my old favourites are completely back up to scratch and I use those as a reward when I get stuck in one of the more difficult ones. However, because I play so irregularly, my fingers still really really hurt when I try to do the more difficult things that involve lots of fast or repetitious moves. So after an hour, I do have to call it quits, even though I may just be warming up into something difficult. And then it may be more than a week before I find (or rather: make) time to play again.
I measure my progress against my ability to play Comptine d'un Autre Ete, which was the reason I originally started playing again. I would have thought I would be halfway decent on that song by now, given that I try to play it every time. But there is no way I will be playing it in its entirety for the next half year or so; today I finally managed to play the first eight bars correctly, without mistakes, and in the slowest speed ever.
The thing may be that on some of the older songs, my fingers still somehow 'remember'  the moves, especially the difficult ones because I practised them so often. And with this new song, I have to learn all these tricks all over again, its not a question of repeating what I already could do once. So my progress is nowhere near as fast as I'd hoped, and that can be a bit hard, but I'm still hanging in there. Working towards this goal is a good thing, even though it is taking me really long and it is sometimes hard to stay motivated.
But I've promised myself that when I can actually play it, and still like playing, I may reward myself with a better (digital) piano. And maybe even lessons. Which I shouldn't have quit in the first place, but that decision is 10 years in the past, so best to focus on what I can still salvage today!

The Lost Words

Many of you will know the Jurassic Park and Lost World films, but did you know that these movies are actually based on books? Neither did I, until about last October, when I was checking IMDB because of the new Jurassic World film and got stuck in a Wikipedia loop.
Now I wouldn't normally read novels in the 'techno-thriller' genre, not because I think I am above them, but because I have limited reading time and I'd like to spend that time on something really good (or at least worthwhile). Also, Michael Crichton wasn't very high on my 'to read' list. But sometimes, this kind of novel can be really nice to read, for example during a very long flight, or the many train journeys I've been taking for my job lately. Which is how I've read Jurassic Park while in Australia, and am currently reading The Lost World, the sequel.
I came to these novels expecting them to be like the films, at least in plot and characters, if not in setting and atmosphere. But funnily enough, it is exactly the other way around. The novels are very fast-paced and can leave me with my heart in my throat for minutes after I've put them down. The settings are also eerily similar; you know about as much of the surroundings as the characters in the story, and the descriptions are pretty vivid and graphic.
But that's where the similarities end. The plot lines, for example, are completely different. With The Lost World, the only thing that is really similar, is that there is this 'Site B' on Isla Sorna. And that Ian Malcolm visits it, at some point during the novel. All the other things, from the reason why to the people he meets there to the dinosaurs, are all completely different. Same goes for Jurassic Park; Spielberg took the basic premise of the amusement-park-with-dinos and turned that into a whole different thing. Interestingly, in the third Jurassic Park movie, the opening sequence is the same as the opening sequence in the first novel. So sometimes he does adhere to the story, only not in places where you'd expect it.
Does this mean the novels are weak compared to the films? You might think so, because Spielberg made up a lot on the side. The truth is, the novels have a very different angle; very scientific, and pretty philosophical. Ian Malcolm, much more the central character than Alan Grant, proposes his chaos theory and through that predicts most of the things that go wrong in the park. Added to that, the whole premise that genetic research and revitalisation of dinosaurs can only be profitable if they are put into an amusement park, instead of just studied on their own, stands out much more clearly in the novels. It is basically a critique of human intervention on nature, combined with a philosophical exploration of the connection between science and amusement. If that sounds pretty literary to you, that is because it is; apart from the scary thriller bits with the slashing dinosaurs, there is quite a lot of talking and philosophising going on. In some ways it reminded me of Life of Pi, which also explores the connection between wild animals in captivity and humans.
So if you find yourself in need of some dino entertainment while we wait for Jurassic World, why not try the novels? And if you can't be bothered about the whole Jurassic Park craze, maybe the novels are just the thing for you!

The commercial side

I think the gap between this post and the previous one couldn't have been bigger; the despair and starkness of the WWI trenches compared to the story of commercialization that I'm going to tell below. But hey, sometimes my life is just one big potpourri of unconnected things.
Being a project manager at an educational publisher means you have to know a lot about one very particular thing (your subject, in my case biology) and not so much about lots of other things. These include people management, design, finance, marketing, sales, editing, IT, and which business meeting point has the best dinner possibilities combined with the shortest walk back to the train station. We have specialised departments for each of the things mentioned above, with people who have actually studied in their subject, same way as I have studied biology. But they, lucky them, do not really have to know that much about my field to still be able to do their work on my books properly (although our editor now knows more about protein synthesis than she'd ever care to). I, on the other hand, am constantly learning about their specialities.
One of my least developed areas, I and anyone who knows me would say, is commerce. When I call something 'commercial', it's not a positive thing. I never listen to commercial radio stations, for example, or watch the commercial channels on TV. I don't know that I ever owned a piece of clothing that had it's brand displayed for all the world to see. So doing the commercial things that come with the job can sometimes be a bit difficult.
Yesterday was a case in point. We were at a biology convention (the biggest biology convention of the Netherlands) and not only did I have to man our stand (which means talking to the 650+ teachers who attended the convention, answering their questions, handing out free goodies, and on occasion try to get them to buy our stuff), I also had to give a workshop. To be honest, it was only a small part of a bigger workshop, and my part wasn't really that important, and if I hadn't turned up none of the 35 people in the workshop would have noticed. But still, for me it was quite a big thing, because talking in front of a room full of people is not my favourite thing to do.
Thankfully, it all went well. It went better than well, because everybody listened and participated in the short assignment I'd thought up for them, and when we went through the answers they even forgave me for not knowing exactly why something was the right answer at some points (it was about linking words in educational texts, not exactly my area of expertise). I was dead tired and had a pounding headache, but nobody else seems to have noticed that, which was good. My publisher did the other 80% of the workshop and she made the good points and gave the right answers to the questions, to which I added some small bits of info when I thought she was being a bit too brief.
And then we went back to manning the stand and talking to people in friendly manners. I have never had one of those trainings in which you learn to find out whether someone will actually buy your stuff at some point, and how to ditch them as quickly as possible when you know they won't, so some of my conversations may have been pretty useless in a commercial sense, but I had fun and being nice to people is something I like to do. But still, after spending 12 hours anticipating other people's needs, questions and wishes, I'm going to be the most self absorbed person ever for the next 24.
Anyway, it's nice to know I'm slowly mastering yet another part of the jigsaw puzzle that is professional life.

The Children Act

With all our free days taken up by the Australia trip we didn't really have a Christmas holiday to speak of, but we had some days off, and on those days I managed to end one book, and read two more.
I finally finished reading Crime and Punishment, which I started somewhere between Canberra and Melbourne, and wasn't able to get through at any pace until I got to part five. I really don't know what it is with these classics; they take forever to get into, dragging on and on without you getting anywhere, and then two thirds of the way they finally become interesting, you finish them in a flash, and then wish there would have been more to read. I don't know much about Russia or Russian authors, and I read this novel in an English translation, but I think I can see the appeal.
Of the new novels, the first to start and last to finish was My Brief History, a memoir by Stephen Hawking. As this was called a memoir, I was hoping for some personal anecdotes and interesting bits about his free time and normal life, but this wasn't to be. There was one chapter on his pre-school childhood, one chapter on primary and secondary school, and chapter three already dives into his time at Oxford. He keeps saying how he is bad at math and formulas and not really that bright, but then continues chapter after chapter on papers he wrote as a fellow at Cambridge (Oxford, apparently, was glad to be rid of him) and tries to explain very very difficult stuff like imaginary time and why time travel is impossible. It somehow turns in another one of his incomprehensible books on physics and cosmology. Which is sad, because I wanted to find out more about the man behind all that. Also, I didn't understand half of what he was trying to tell me, but I get that a lot with relativity.
The other book, a novel, was The Children Act by Ian McEwan. Now most of you may know by now that Ian McEwan is my favourite author of all time. I love his style, his long flowing sentences, how he can describe a room and the people in it and the atmosphere and the history of the room and the past of people in it with just a few sentences is brilliant. I also think he wrote the best novel I have ever read, which is Atonement. Closely followed by Saturday. With this newest novel, however, he is once again improving upon himself.
After Atonement and Saturday, he wrote two novels I did not really care for, Solar and Sugartooth, which made me feel that maybe he was past his high point. Which is fine, we cannot expect great writers to be great writers with every novel they write, and I will keep re-reading the older ones for quite a while to come, but it is kind of sad to know. But with this novel, The Children Act, he is completely back on his high level.
I won't tell you too much about the plot, because it is quite a short novel, and most of the important points are part of the novel's magic. But I will tell you that the main character, Fiona, is one of the best he's ever written. She is a judge on family matters (after reading the first chapter I had to Wikipedia a lot about the British justice system before I could continue reading) who has no children of her own but daily has to decide on the fate of other people's children. Immediately, you can feel the central conflict developing, especially as the story reveals some trouble between her and her husband. There are some examples of issues she has had to judge on, including cases dealing with religious beliefs preventing people from receiving certain kinds of care, which is the main issue of this novel. Fiona has to rule on a case of a Jehovah's Witness boy refusing a blood transfusion that will safe his life on the grounds of his belief. The way McEwan tiptoes around all the delicate issues of such a troublesome premise is very beautifully done; there is no judgement about such decisions, apart from what Fiona finally rules. He has this remarkable way of writing about very complex and possibly dangerous subjects as if they are no worry at all.
Also, in acting you have the system of 'method acting', in which an actor literally becomes his character. I think Ian McEwan must do the same for his characters, because in every one of his novels the protagonist is someone completely different, with so many tiny details about their lives and occupation that it is almost hard to belief that he himself was never a family judge. While in Saturday, you almost belief he studied to be a surgeon for six years, and in Amsterdam you live through the throes of a classical composer in the midst of a major composition. Here, you almost become Fiona as she ponders he decision and the consequences.
Really, the only reason why I will still prefer Atonement and Saturday to this novel is that it's so short. I finished it in less than a day; each of its chapters is of sizable length, but there being only five I was still done pretty quickly. Not that there is anything missing, the story has several layers and follows a nice arch, but still, more McEwan is always better. This feels more like a novella than a novel, and knowing that we will have to wait another two years for another story to come out really makes one regret that this one wasn't longer. But; read it. Especially if you've never read any Ian McEwan before, it is a wonderful display of his style and craftmanship of creating very deep characters, and you will finish it in a good afternoon. And then you will have all his other novels still before you!
I, on the other hand, have dived back into the classics, and am now in the middle of the First World War with All Quiet on the Western Front. I haven't read much of it yet, but I can already tell you that that war sucked as much for the common German soldier as it did for the British, which was to be expected.

Wokkel

So to keep yourself from going completely mental from jet lag after a 30 hour flight from Sydney to Amsterdam, I recommend getting a kitten. Not the teeny tiny ones that can't function like a proper cat yet and need constant care, but one that is a little bit older, say about 3.5 months. This is what we did, and it worked pretty well for us.
We've had our 2 older cats (Darwin and Vrutsel) for a while now, but felt that Vrutsel was getting pretty lonely during the long days that we are at work. Because Vrutsel herself is still pretty young, we thought getting a kitten might help her because she would have company during the day, and maybe even someone to play with. The parents of a friend of mine had a nest of kittens, and we picked a black-and-white (Frisian cow style) one. It turned out to be a tomcat; we would have preferred a female but once chosen there was no going back. We decided to call him Wokkel, after the Wokkel crisps (by Lay's, it appears that these are only sold in the Netherlands). His (half) brother with very similar pattering is called Tictac and his sister is called Sisi, so we decided to stick with the food theme. My friends older sister would look after our cat and her own while we were in Australia, and we picked him up the day after our return.
Wokkel turned out to have grown quite a lot, and looks more like he is 6 months old rather than 3.5. His ears are gigantic compared to the rest of his head, and his paws are also relatively big, so he will probably keep on growing until he is a kitty force to be reckoned with. It is a very friendly cat, who likes to cuddle and purr and be amongst people (and other cats). He is still very playful, but he is also quite cheeky and inquisitive, which has led him to some tight corners. Vrutsel is very scared of him, as she is of almost everything, and yowls and hisses when he comes near. Wokkel is less than impressed, but they are getting along better and better each day. Darwin on the other hand, has accepted him outright, and they will share a lap if everyone sits quietly. However, Darwin is already pretty old, and can have his grumpy moments (which leads to tail swishing, which leads to Wokkel jumping Darwin's tail, which leads to more grumpiness). But all in all, Wokkel appears to be very happy, the other cats are mostly also content, and we were happy to have the distraction on our jet lag mangled brains.
So now we are five, with Wokkel not quite fulfilling the companionship role we had in mind for him, but still having taken up his place in our household smoothly. If only he could stop pushing all his toys under the couch...

Back from Down Under

After 30 days (4 of which were spent in air planes and on airports), we're back from Australia! And it's amazingly cold and dark and dreary here! Why did we ever leave the relaxed, sunny warmth of Down Under?
But before I get too sad about being home again; the trip was great, I won't describe every move we made in detail, because I've got a travel journal that runs 23 pages and I don't want to spend this day typing that over, but in broad lines we did the following:

Sydney (opera house, Harbour bridge, Taronga zoo, random jetlaggy wandering in an unfamiliar city)
Blue Mountains (National Pass hiking trail)
Abercrombie caves
Canberra (Parliament House and the War memorial on Remembrance day, very impressive ceremony)

Glenrowan (Ned Kelly's last stand)
Melbourne (little penguins at St Kilda's pier!)
Tower Hill reserve
Great Ocean Road (Twelve Apostles and several other geological rarities)
Adelaide (random wandering)
Wilpena Pound (peak climb)
Coober Pedy (slept in an 'underground' hostel)
Kings Canyon (Kings Canyon Rim walk)
Uluru (aka Ayers Rock; sunset viewing, sunrise viewing, base walk)
Kata Tjuka (aka the Olgas; very hot walk)
Alice Springs
Ghan train to Katherine
Katherine Gorge
Kakadu National Park (Nourlangie and Ubirr rock art sites)
Darwin (more random wandering)
Cairns (trip to Cape Tribulation, snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef)

Which was all very nice, except for the Great Ocean Road which was mostly very cold and dreary. Also, I'm not really a city person, so we mostly spend our time there in the botanical gardens, which were very nice and well kept. But we did see the main stuff in each city, of course, because when are you ever going to be there again?
We saw lots and lots of wild animals, including kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, a dingo, little penguins, New Zealand fur seals, a possum, several emu and tons of other birds, all of which I have ticked off in the Australian bird book I bought. I have to add the numbers up, but it's got to be over 100 species, including both species of kookaburra, lots of water birds in Kakadu NP, and several parrots, some of which actually ate out of my hands. No cassowary, sadly. We also saw lots of reptiles, including lizards, dragons, and geckos, the best of which was the 1 meter long perentie that literally crossed our path in Kings Canyon.

Some observations on Australia and Australians:
- most people live in the cities but the countryside is the best place to be
- Australians are very polite and helpful, if you are the same
- Australians are all sports crazy, with people running and cycling up every steep incline in sight, even in 38 degrees C
- Australians are a lot more like the British than they would care to admit
- Aboriginal people have some of the best art and stories in the world
- most distances are put in time ('a 15 minute return walk') rather than distance, except for road signs
- people in Coober Pedy will call it 'humid' when there is 5% humidity
- people in Darwin will call it 'a fine day' when there is 85% humidity
- in the outback you can literally drive 50 km without seeing another car
- while camping the most annoying thing are the biting ants, and the grasshoppers falling into your food
- nothing has tried to sting us, bite us, or kill us, but we used some common sense
- there are clean, spacious public toilets everywhere, even if it's a town with only 600 people
- it is one of the most relaxed, warm and beautiful places I have ever been, and I can't wait to go back

We are sorting through the pictures now, and trying to get everything back into shape while still seriously jetlaggy and mostly very cold. The cats are unbelievably happy that we're back, and our parents probably too, although they didn't show it as much. We've still got 3 days to adapt and land, and then our travels will be truly over, until the next trip.

Blogging time-out

So it's been a very hectic couple of weeks here, with lots of not-so-regular stuff happening, from celebrating my 29th birthday to swimming with dolphins, and in the less positive scale of things the death of my grandmother and a major train disruption that left me stranded at 11 at night. All things I would normally dedicate a blog post to, but as it has been a bit of a weird time, this hasn't really happened. Apart from blogging, I've been missing out on some of my other hobbies (Postcrossing, piano) too, so it's not that I don't want to write, it's a time-thing.
Rather than fixing this in the near future, I will be hopping on a plane to Australia to spend 4 weeks 'down under', so don't expect a quick revival. I will of course put a report of my travels here, but this may take a while. Unless I find a proper wifi spot and decide to write something while there, which would be the ultimate comeback from my time-out. But barring that highly improbable situation, I will be back in December!

Choux try-out

The Great British Bake Off has finished again, leaving us with a huge gap to fill on Wednesday evening. But also, many baking ideas.
One thing I've been wanting to make for a very long time is choux pastry. In the earlier Bake Off seasons, this was presented as one of the most difficult things to make, apart from filo pastry. Now, in the later seasons, all the contestants can just whip up a choux no questions asked, although they do explain that it is a tricky thing to get right.
I've investigated the stuff, and discovered that it is in fact twice cooked dough; first you cook it when you combine butter and flour with boiling water, and then you cook it again in the oven. What I'd like to know is who ever thought of this first, and why anyone in their right mind would want to tip flour into boiling water and then beat in eggs without having them scramble. Because the resulting dough isn't really all that special, it's actually pretty tasteless, and has to be filled with some kind of cream to be appetising.

Anyway, the ingredients list is very short:

125 ml water
50 g butter
65 g flour
2 eggs (beaten)

Preheat the oven to 200 C.
Put the water and butter in a pan and heat on a gentle heat until the butter has melted. Then bring the water to a boil, take off the heat, and quickly dump in all the flour at once. Start stirring frantically until the mixture forms a ball-like dough and comes away from the sides.
(I never thought this was actually going to happen on the first try, and that I was going to waste a lot of water, butter and flour in the process, but lo and behold, it worked!)

Ball-like choux pastry sans eggs.

Now add the egg mixture a little at a time, beating thoroughly between until all the egg is absorbed. At this point, I realised I might have used a bigger pan, because the mixture kept sloshing over the side due to my vigorous beating.
When all the egg is absorbed you have nice shiny mixture, which you can pipe in whatever shape you want onto a baking parchment. I made some eclair shapes and some choux bun shapes.
Then it goes in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 C, and after that you turn the heat down to 170 and bake for another 30 minutes or until they are golden brown all around. I've found wildly varying baking times for these, so this is what I did, but I've also read recipes where they tell you to turn the heat up instead of down after the first 10 minutes.

As soon as they are done, take them out of the oven and pierce them to let the steam out. I was too late doing this with some of them, which means the steam will turn back into water and soak your choux buns, making them sloppy and inedible.

Leave to cool completely, split open, and fill with your favourite cream (I used whipped cream). You can drizzle chocolate over the top if you haven't forgotten to buy dark chocolate (which I did, and I felt too lazy to go back to the store).

Eclairs filled with whipped cream (no chocolate).

Choux pastry in itself is pretty tasteless, as I already mentioned, but these were quite okay when filled with whipped cream. I am going to make them again pretty soon, letting them cook a bit longer and letting out the steam earlier, so they don't turn sloppy and we can actually eat all of them. But for a first attempt, it went a lot better than I'd ever expected!

KitchenAid love

Wow, I actually haven't written anything in the whole of September. How did that go by so fast?
Anyway, now that it's October, and autumn is about to start and my birthday is creeping up (which is less and less of a good thing as years go by) I am hoping there will be more time to actually write stuff here. Because it's not that stuff hasn't been happening. A lot of stuff has been happening, it just that I was simply experiencing the stuff, and not able to write about it. And I will now stop using the word 'stuff'.

One of the things that happened which I can write about because I can be relatively brief is that I bought a KitchenAid. An Artisan KitchenAid, to be exact, in a deep red colour. And if you don't know what a KitchenAid is, go look up pictures now.
I've been wanting to have a KitchenAid for as long as I knew they existed, but first there was the sharing-a-kitchen-with-loads-of-other-(thieving)-people issue, then there was the no-money problem, and then there was the our-kitchen-is-smaller-than-most-people's-walk-in-closet thing. The last hasn't technically been resolved, but when brand-new KitchenAids were being sold for 2/3rds of the normal price, I couldn't resist. So I bought one (with some mental support from my boyfriend) and then waited patiently for 3 weeks for it to arrive.
But oh, how pretty it is! How shiny and strong and robust. Also, how heavy (due to the smallness of the kitchen, I have to move the thing in place whenever I want to use it, and KitchenAids clearly don't expect to be put away in dusty cupboards). But it works like a charm. It came with a big (4.6 l) steel bowl and 3 types of mixers, and I'm already planning to buy loads of accessories once my bank account has recovered. I used it to make brownies for last weekend's family day, and all agreed that they were very tasty brownies indeed.
So apart from the storage issue, I am very happy that my KitchenAid dream finally came true. Now we'll just have to buy another kitchen to fit it in.

Apple cake

Our apples have been steadily growing bigger and redder, and after another few attempts we have conclusively decided that they are not fit for normal 'eat an apple' consumption, as they are far too sour and tough and somehow just plain yuck. But that doesn't mean we can't put them in other stuff! I've made two apple crumbles already, and yesterday I made an apple cake. This is a recipe my grandmother used to make when my mom was little, but it's not one of those teary-eyed family heirlooms because frankly, it's too simple to put into words.

Ingredients
200 g flour
200 g sugar
200 g butter (softened)
2 eggs
(baking powder)
apples
sultanas/raisins (soaked if you're using dried ones)
cinnamon

Pre-heat your oven to 180 C.
Simply mix together the flour, sugar and butter and add the eggs when the mixture becomes too tough to handle. I added some baking powder because my flour was pretty old, but you can leave that out. Mix thoroughly for about 3-5 minutes and then put into a rectangular baking tin (which you've lined with baking parchment etc).
Cut the apples into little slices and put these on top of the cake mixture, slightly overlapping (in Dutch we call this 'roof tile style'). I used three small apples and my baking tin was filled, but you really just have to try how many will fit. If you have some left over you can always sneak them in between some others.
Dry off your raisins and sprinkle these over. Also sprinkle over some extra sugar and cinnamon.
Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until it's dry in the middle.

There is cake mixture underneath, hard to see at this point.

Now the idea is that the cake will spread around and over the apples, partly covering them, and leaving nice 'apple trails' on top. This usually works, but this time, probably because I used baking powder, the cake went a little crazy and gobbled up most of the apples:

Hello cake!

So usually it looks like the bit on the top left, but hey, who cares what it looks like anyway?
It tasted great, moist in the middle and nice and crunchy on the sides. I wanted to add some lemon zest in the mixture but it's a good thing I forgot as these apples are really too sour to be adding some more. But if you're using quite sweet apples, lemon zest may be a nice addition.

There are still lots of apples left on the tree, so I may be trying out some new apple recipes soon, maybe even a tarte tartin if I'm feeling very adventurous!

Piano revival

I've been meaning to start playing the piano again (I've had lessons for four years and played a while after that, but it stopped as soon as I went to university) for more than a year now, ever since we moved into this big(ger) house. Somehow, I never really got round to it, until a couple of months ago I heard someone play the Amelie song Comptine d'un Autre Ete in public, and I decided I really wanted to play that song. Which meant getting a piano, and learning to play again.
I went for a digital piano*, as you can plug in headphones and play all hours of the day without disturbing other people with your awful hammering. Also, it never goes out of tune, which is nice. After a short online investigation into the really beautiful but very expensive big brands, I eventually bought a Casio CDP-100, because apparently it's the cheapest piano that still has a reasonably okay sound and touch sensitivity. I bought one second-hand via the Internet, and it has been sitting in one of our upstairs rooms for a week now, because I didn't have my sheet music and after 10 years cannot play any song from scratch apart from 'Twinkle twinkle little star'  and that gets boring after a while.
But last Wednesday my parents came to visit and brought with them a towering stack of piano books; who knew I had so many? Easy songs and classical songs and jazzy songs and very recent pop music songs all combined into my history of piano lessons. I used to love all the country tunes and melodic musical wanderings before I turned to more recent and less classical stuff. Looking back, I think this was the sign that I wasn't really interested in the whole piano thing anymore, but right now I can't wait to get back into all those classic classical pieces.
So today was the first time I tried some of the old songs again. And it went surprisingly well! I could play each and every song of my first 'real' music book without problem, and even in the proper time. Now these are songs where you don't really have to move your hands about, and all the notes have the correct finger position above them, but still, it surprised me. Then I tried some more difficult things, a menuet by Mozart that I'd played at a recital, and that one went quite okay too, a bit slower and hesitant, but still pretty nice. With some of the moves, it was like my fingers still remembered the things they used to do, and just went along in a stream of memory movements.
After a while, my arms and especially my fingers became pretty tired (strangely enough the thumbs seem to go first, probably because you don't really move them when you're typing, which is the only similar movement they've been getting for 10 years), so I decided to call it a day. But still, a whole hour of reviving old songs and playing pretty decently, I'm positively surprised at how well I am actually still playing. And as they say, practise makes perfect, and I have a whole weekend of practising ahead of me!

* I've been getting some questions as to why I call it a 'digital piano' and not a 'keyboard':  because the two are completely different things. A digital piano is basically a piano that produces sound digitally, meaning you can stick in some headphones and not bother anyone with your music. But it does have 88 keys, which are pressure sensitive and weighed, so it takes the same effort and effect as playing a real piano. Keyboards have fewer keys, which usually aren't pressure sensitive and take very little effort to press down. It's a bit like the difference between a type writer and a computer key board. And as I plan to buy a real piano sometime in the future, I felt it was better to buy a proper (and more expensive) digital piano than they keyboard substitute.

Red velvet cake (a leaner approach)

I've been fascinated by red velvet cake ever since I had a slice at an American exchange student's party a couple of years ago. Both the strange redness and the extreme sweetness make it an interesting, and also a very American, cake. Only an American would make a cake that screams 'look at me! I',m red!' as loudly as this one, and only an American could suffer the intense sweetness of all that sugar without wincing. However, I had completely forgotten about red velvet cakes until the Great British Bake-off started again, and someone made a red velvet Swiss role.
So I looked up several recipes, most of which on American websites, and I was completely bowled over by the amount of calories you are supposed to put in. There was one recipe that required about a kilo of butter, a kilo of icing sugar, and 8 eggs. These are really not normal amounts for cake making (in my book, at least).
So I went for a more British approach, and picked Lorraine's three tiered recipe, selecting the middle tier (23 cm) as the cake to make. The ingredients were still vastly beyond any limit, so I halved them. For the buttercream I did something completely different, because I refuse to put 600 g of icing sugar in with 300 g of butter, that makes the whole thing just too sweet, especially with fondant icing added on top. So I changed the ratios there a bit. Also, I used a recipe that requires food colouring instead of boiled beets, as I've had enough trouble with beet stains in my life.

Ingredients:
175 g butter
175 g sugar
3 eggs
150 g flour
25 g cocoa powder
baking powder
25 ml food colouring (red, obviously)
500 g rollable fondant icing (white)

buttercream:
100 g butter (softened)
60 g icing sugar
100 g cream cheese

Preheat your oven to 180 C.
Grease the tin and line the bottom with baking paper.
Beat the sugar and butter together until fluffy. Beat in the eggs one by one, then add the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and a pinch of salt. Add the food colouring (I did this little by little, because the whole thing turns an outraging shade of red which then dies down as you mix the thing). Put in the cake tin and bake for about 40-50 minutes (I forgot to change the baking time to the lesser amount of ingredients, so I ended up with a slightly burned and very dry cake).
When it's done take out of the oven and leave to cool completely.

Red batter

For the buttercream, mix together the butter and icing sugar until fluffy. Add the cream cheese and mix again.

When your cake is completely cool, cut in halve and sandwich the halves together again using the butter cream. Cover the entire outside with the remaining butter cream (this will go better if your cake is not dry, with little red crumbs sticking everywhere). If you have any indentations, use the butter cream to fill them for a more even end result.

Buttercream-covered crumbs

Spread some icing sugar over your work surface and roll out the fondant icing until it is very thin and large enough to cover the whole cake. Transfer onto the cake (this is surprisingly easy) and press down gently so that the icing sticks to the butter cream. You can decorate the cake using anything you want, but I thought this was enough of an exercise for one day.

Slightly burned brown-redness

So, the end result was pretty dry and a bit over cooked, but still quite edible. You can taste the cocoa coming through, and the butter cream was not too sweet. The fondant icing makes for a nice look, but it doesn't really add anything to the taste. All in all, halving the ingredients still made for a pretty decent cake, I can't imagine how rich it would have been with the full amount of ingredients. Still, a very nice cake to have made, and I foresee some red velvet cupcakes in my future, as I still have quite a lot of food colouring left over. And this is one of those 'I'll never be able to do that myself!' cakes that I can now cross of my list.

10,000 pageviews (and counting!)

When I posted my Literary Splendour post, the page view count was at 9,990. When I looked this morning, it was at 10,030! A blogging milestone!
Youtube or Facebook probably get about 10,000 page views a second, so it's nothing big in Internet terms, but it feels like a (unconscious, to be honest) personal goal has been reached.
To give you some interesting details: most views are from the Netherlands, but there are quite a lot from the US and the UK, and lots of single views from countries around the world. Most traffic comes in via google (google.co.uk, google.co.nz and google.ie being the highest contributors, funnily enough), but some comes in via Postcrossing and some people have taken the trouble to memorise the URL and type that in directly.
The most popular post by far is still Painting with clingfilm, to which I've never actually given a follow-up post because I haven't actually been painting with clingfilm for about two years.
So there we are. 10,032 page views and counting. Onwards and upwards to the next 10,000.

Literary splendour

So I've read three incredible books lately (with some less incredible books in between, which are the ones you tend to forget about pretty quickly), and today it hit me that all these books were written by women (Eleanor Catton, Kate Atkinson, and Elizabeth Gilbert, to be exact). Three completely different women, from different parts of the world, but three women nonetheless. Which is pretty amazing, because a) there are still fewer women then men writing 'serious' novels and b) those novels don't seem to make it to the Netherlands all that often. To which I could add c) most of my favourite authors thus far have always been men.
So what is different here? Firstly, they're all pretty big books, 500+ pages, meaning that we really get into the story. The other book written by a woman I've read in the past weeks, The Love Affairs of Nathanial P, was about 200 pages, and that feels like typical chick lit size. When you get above 500 pages, we get into proper psychological depth and character building. Also, all novels had an elaborate setting, either in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, that needed a lot of exposition and explanation. Also, all of them have something that is 'different' about them in structure or outward appearance. The Luminaries has its astrological connection and decreasing chapter length. Life after Life similarly has some very short chapters, and combined with the repetition found through the reincarnation theme the structure is pretty extraordinary. The Signature of All Things has the most conventional structure - chronological and with chapters of about equal length - but contains botanical images and a distinct font that still set it apart.
But what really makes these novels so great are the characters. The Luminaries has more protagonists than you can count on two hands, but all of them have a proper history and depth. Also, most of the characters are male, but they are not caricatures of men as you find in so many novels written by women (Nathanial P being a case in point). In Life after Life the protagonist is a girl / young women whom the reader gets more acquainted with as her life progresses through its various cycles. Apart from gaining a deeper understanding of the early twentieth century and general European history, you get to know her and those around here better and better with every reincarnation. In The Signature of All Things the protagonist is also a woman, who leads a pretty tranquil and confined life, but still manages to fill page after page with her experiences and revelations. In short: all these characters take their lives in their own hands, make proper decisions, and then live with them. They are all strong, observant, and still full of conflict, making them very real people.
I don't know if any of this has anything to do with the fact that these novels were written by women. I've read the same type of character in novels by Yates or Ian McEwan, so I don't really think so. Also, these women are from three very distinct corners of the globe (Canada/New Zealand, the eastern US and the UK), writing in three very different literary traditions. So maybe it's a pure coincidence that these three wonderful novels came to me so close together. Or maybe it's a sign of the times, of many more psychologically developed character rich historical novels to come. Either way, I've had a very rewarding literary summer.

Garden update (3)

I could simply add photos to the previous post (when my computer was refusing to cooperate) but so much has been happening in the garden that I think it deserves a new post.

To begin with, have a look at these marvellous strawberries. A second crop is growing on the plants as we speak, but I'm afraid they won't nearly be as big and tasty as these ones were...

June strawberries

We removed some of the apples from the apple tree to lighten its load, and then I turned these apples (tiny, very very sour, but ripe enough (the seeds were brown, which is the main point, I was told)) into an apple crumble.

Miniature apples

Also, another pepper has been developing, and now we have two:

Peppers!

And one thing I forgot to mention last time are the beans (green beans, to be exact) which have staid very low but still produced some very nice beans. But those have already been eaten, I'm afraid. As have most of the leeks, before they sprouted flowers
We've also eaten the first of our potatoes, which has produced really a lot of offspring, some of which almost too big to fit my hand. We can eat 2-3 times from this first one, and we put 5 in the ground, so I'm thinking that leaving your potatoes to sprout roots and then put them in the ground because you don't know what else to do with them is working out pretty fine. Their 'alpha' potatoes, which normally grow on Malta, but with the warm and dry weather we've been having also seem to thrive here.

Our courgettes and pumpkins haven't started flowering yet, but they're producing lots of leafs that haven't been eaten by the slugs, so I'm hopeful they will do something yet.

And finally, this weekend, our trial aubergine also went to work, and produced this:

Baby aubergine

Yes, that is a baby aubergine. It's about the size of my thumb as we speak, but we're hoping to make it into a proper sized purple egg.
I never would have guessed that a garden this small, with so little attention given to it, would produce this much food! Just imagine what we will do when we get a proper plot on our hands. One can only dream...