Onion Caper Bread

The continuing saga of baking in the UK continues. This week’s episode includes trying once again to bake French-style loaves upon the pizza stone … with the result that the stone has been retired until such time as we have a better oven. Past experiments with the stone have included preheating the oven for an hour, to see if the stone would get hot enough. That didn’t work. This time I moved the stone up in the oven, and it still wouldn’t get hot enough to brown the bottom of the loaves. The next option would be to move the stone all the way up under the broiler, get it good and hot, and then somehow relocate the stone to a lower shelf.

We’re just going to have to learn to live without bread baked on a stone, because shifting a hot stone about just isn’t in the cards. My knuckles are already burned quite severely, just from trying to squeeze four loaves into such a tiny oven – I’m giving up the idea of moving that stone as a bad idea. (As to how severely, well, they blistered up & scabbed nicely, and I look like I’ve been brawling or something, which is enough to put me off the idea of getting them burned any further).

The loaves, as expected with a cool stone, didn’t have a crusty bottom, nor did they get much lift. So, we sliced them on the bias, and enjoyed them anyway … or, at least, we enjoyed a couple of them – one went to a fellow Bay Area native who’s also over here doing his Master’s degree, and another went to a professor.

As to what’s in them, they’re the standard bread recipe, basically, but with steamed whole oats, oat bran, flax seeds, a chopped onion, a couple tablespoons of capers (soaked to remove the salt), some yellow and brown mustard seeds, some cumin, and some sage. Because of adding the steamed oats you need to bump up the salt a little bit, but other than that it’s just a straightforward matter of “throwing stuff in.”

Once again, no problem at all with UK flour: if I can get bread to raise with an added 1/2 cup of oat bran in each loaf, plus all the other stuff, there’s certainly enough gluten in the flour!

Next up will be to finally get a sourdough starter going. I just read an article on the microbiology of yeast fermentation, talking specifically about getting wild yeasts going, and some of what was in there we’re going to try. The gist of this 17 page article was to the effect that the initial pH of the sourdough starter is not acid enough. They suggest adding 6 oz of pineapple juice to the starter on the first day, with that being enough of a jolt of acid to get the starter producing yeast on the first day. Otherwise you have to wait for some nasty bacteria to get going in there, and then to die, so that after three or four days you’ll have enough of an acid environment for the yeast to get going. The instructions can be found at Breadtopia, and the microbiologist’s name is Debra Wink – Breadtopia will send you the article if you’re interested.

Not having any pH strips handy we’re going to just wing it & see what happens. It may not take place immediately – we have to track down pineapple juice – but we’ll let you know when it does.

The other (less preferable) method would be to include apple juice for the first few days, which we could do … and we actually have the apple juice … but it’s nice, fresh-pressed Braeburn juice, and I like to drink the stuff. Sigh. The things we sacrifice for our art. Maybe. Just … maybe.

Life: Enjoy – This is Not A Dress Rehearsal

There is beauty in sleet.

Really. Mostly it’s beautiful if you’re indoors, not being blown to a dead stop by the harsh pellets of ice rattling against your back, but there is a beauty in the symmetry of white shards shurtling past your window. There is beauty in rain, snow, sleet, dark of night… We’re not going to go so far as to say there’s beauty in floods, but… well, it’s been raining so much that we’re trying to find something nice to say.

Our friend Van (YES, Mr. Blinkey. Van AGAIN. You’d think T. had known him since she was nine or something.) has been warned to wear wool socks and thermals, but only a week ago a city resident scoffingly said it wasn’t yet cold. Now that the wind has been clocked between 36 – 60 mph, and the temp’s been rocketing between thirty-one and thirty-six degrees, inquiring minds want to know: is it cold yet? Seriously: people have a point of pride in bragging that they’ve seen worse. As newbies (or N00bs, as our friend Sarah says) we’re honestly wondering if this is as bad as it gets. (If it’s not… Mom, maybe you’ll want to send a few more thermals?)

It’s cold, wet and raw, it’s still dark and the wind howls and rattles the building at night, and we have tons to do. However, in the spirit of enjoying life (and to send up a flare to let you know that we still are), we’re taking a page from our friend Erin’s book, to give you the Thursday list of This Week’s Things that made us smile:

  • The realization that we don’t have to drive in this weather. That alone is worth a cackle of glee. We might be wind-battered at the bus stop or trying to stay upright on the cycle, but it’s unimaginable to think of driving in this driving snow/sleet/rain. It’s a small comfort when we’re trudging toward the flat with our faces frozen.

  • The Charwomen in our Building: When T. was weetinysmall, she remembers often seeing the credits of a show her mother used to watch… a cartoon woman with a mop and a bucket, looking cranky as the names rolled by. We now know it was the end of The Carol Burnett Show, and honestly, the women who clean this building could be the image from which the cartoon comes. They chatter like a flock of starlings, leaning on their mops and saying, “That’s all right, luv,” if we happen to need the elevator (and their mop bucket is in there). Every week — through the closed doors of the flat — we can hear them coming, gabbing away. They sound like they’ve found a way to make drudgery more fun.

  • Our First Invitation: Five months into our sojourn, we have been invited to the home of a Glaswegian. As we have found, it’s not that Glaswegians or Scots are unfriendly, rather it’s just not the way things are done, to socialize in homes so easily — which is fine with us, since D’s stacks of reading and T’s stacks of revision keeps us both busy. But because of the joke about a “foreigner” having lived in the country for “fifty years, so he doesn’t have friends yet,” we feel quite privileged to have made a good enough impression to get an invitation only five months in!

  • Glaswegian Obscenities: Oh, we know this one isn’t… nice. We were well brought up children, we know it’s not appropriate or necessarily refined to speak this way. But good grief, do Glaswegians somehow make swearing an art form. Two cabbies and our property manager in the last week, and we’ve had to avoid eye contact with each other for fear of shrieking with laughter. When we first moved here we were shocked by the collective vulgarities. Now, it’s just… wrongly, horribly funny. And the worse the weather / traffic /road work delay gets, the more multisyllabic, descriptive, cathartic, euphemistic and, er, colorful the vocabulary becomes. Don’t worry Mom: we’re not picking it up. We, um, swear.

  • Scots speaking Hebrew: Oh, aye, you knew we were in for some good fun when the Choral Society decided to do a piece in Hebrew. T. heard a tenor explain to a fellow singer, “See, in Hebrew there’s a wee dot under the ‘h.’ That sounds just like the Scots ” — ” and proceeded to make some completely unmanageable guttural ch-sound. T. about fell off her chair. Oddly, the Latin we’re learning for the John Rutter piece is mystifying more Scots than the Hebrew seems to be!

  • Teaching a Glaswegian Taboo: Oh, my. There is really nothing like playing a game when you have two wildly different vocabularies. Taboo is a game where you try and have your teammate guess a word by describing it, but there are certain words you cannot use. Much of the time we just sat laughing helplessly as our friend M., born and bred in this fine city, gave guesses that were greeted from his American teammate with “What?!” We learned that the words ‘boardwalk’ and ‘touchdown’ are virtually unknown, while ‘calamine lotion’ is apparently universal.

  • Teaching a Spaniard Taboo: Much the same as teaching a Glaswegian, except when our Spanish friend B. plays, she gets excited and her clues come out — in Spanish. Also, she learned English …in Glasgow, so the variations in vocabulary apply. Our favorite word from last week’s game will always be “a partin.'” The word was “part,” and of course the words to describe it could not include hair, or Moses, or the Red Sea, or any number of other random words. B. got it, but in Glasgow, the phrase isn’t that you have a “part” in your hair. No, one has a “parting” in one’s hair. Add a thick Spanish/Glaswegian accent to the word “partin'” and you’ll understand why this word effectively ended the game.

At the moment it sounds as if someone is flinging handfuls of pebbles at the window. As the hail continues to sleet against the panes, we’re bundling up to venture out to Choral Society and an evening of tongue-twisting Hebrew. It seems like a good night to spring for a cab!

Hang on, friends. Spring is coming. Downtown there is a row of misguided trees in bloom in front of a bank. Hold on… the sun will come out… tomorrow. (and apologies for those of you who will now have that vicious earworm of a song stuck in your head for the rest of the day).

yours in dogged cheerfulness,

– D & T

Daring Bakers: Lemon Meringue Pie

Oh, the decadence. This month’s daring bakers challenge was to make lemon meringue pie. Well, folks, what a pie this is! There were a few mistakes along the way, of course: I misread the amount of sugar to go into the crust, for example, so ended up with 1/2 a cup of sugar instead of 1/4 of a cup. This was taken to be a good thing by the tasters, though, who said, “it tastes like sugar cookies!” Serendipity? Perhaps. The other problem I ran into was the fact that I don’t know where our pie-plates are packed: we packed them with the glass things, and have left quite a few “glass / fragile” boxes packed, simply because we didn’t feel like bringing them out when we’ll likely move to a different flat towards the end of the school year. So, I was stuck with trying to make this work in a springform pan. Never, folks. Never.

Getting pie crust to work in a springform pan means that you’ve got to kind of drape it over the sides. Doing this with an 8″ diameter pan means that you’ve got a 3″ wide strip of dough which is 25″ long! Physically impossible to get right, let me tell you. So, I decided I’d cut the side dough into segments & try to patch them together when I’d managed to get them draped over. Well, it worked, mostly … but wasn’t anywhere near a perfect job, and left me not at all proud at the shape of things.

We’ve been warned repeatedly about the differences between UK flour and Canadian / American flours, so we were expecting to have more trouble with the texture or composition of the dough for the crust. This was not the case, except in that the amount of water called for by the recipe was by no means necessary, so I’m guessing that some of the problems people run into in making the transition to the UK is simply that UK flour may have a higher moisture content, which would tend to throw things off, for sure.

How did it turn out? Well, we had some friends over, and timed it such that I pulled the pie from the oven just before their arrival. After a lovely dinner, we were in the right mood to try pie. You see, unbeknown to us, our friends do not like eggs, either. So, here we were, with four people who don’t particularly care for eggs, eating meringue pie! We figured that it’d be a good bet that some locals would like this – it is a British pie, after all. Once again, though, we’re reminded that Scots are not British: the crust was great, the filling wonderful, and the meringue was left in clumps on the plates.

After our friends left for the evening, I packed up two slices for our next-door neighbors. Since I’d just heard them come home, I proceeded to offer them their slices … to be told, “I have to be honest with you, I really don’t like lemon-meringue pie. My partner might, though.” Sigh.

Two slices sit in the fridge, awaiting someone to eat them. Is it a good recipe? Certainly! Would we make it again? Not unless an army of egg-lovers were to come by, needing dessert!

Be sure to check out the other daring bakers and their pies – there are over 100 of us doing this now, so that’s quite a few experiences with this same recipe, in case you needed to know that it’s been thoroughly tested! This month’s host is Jen, from Canadian Baker. At some point she’ll post the recipe up for all to see.

Rabbie Burns, 1759-1796

Aye, it’s BURNS DAY!

Today begins celebrations all over Scotland honoring the birth of the 18th century Scottish poet, Robert Burns (or as they call him here, “Rabbie.”). Much of Burns’ poetry is rather long and sentimental, with a militantly enforced rhyme, as was all the verse of his time. Many of his verses refer to specific people and things that few people who aren’t Scottish historians of a certain period understand anymore. He writes a lot of elegiac verses to Nature, Love, various “Lasses” and a lot of prayers and religious verse, though he just as frequently writes scandalous lines on how much he hates church and prefers and honest drink (though he really was rightfully disdainful of the organized religion of the day). He wrote scathingly funny epitaphs, numerous songs, (of which the traditional Auld Lang Syne is only one), the enormously famous verse to to a mouse, the one about “luve” being like a “red, red rose,” which is responsible for so much Valentine’s Day dreck, the wonderful social commentary of To a Louse (On seeing one in a lady’s bonnet at church), and lines to a haggis — that, yes, people declaim tonight – on Burns’ Night. And in honor of his birthday, we present this little glimpse from his collected works, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.


Epitaph On A Lap-Dog Named Echo (1793)

In wood and wild, ye warbling throng,

Your heavy loss deplore;

Now, half extinct your powers of song,

Sweet Echo is no more.

Ye jarring, screeching things around,

Scream your discordant joys;

Now, half your din of tuneless sound

With Echo silent lies.

Epigram On Rough Roads (1786)

I’m now arrived-thanks to the gods!-

Thro’ pathways rough and muddy,

A certain sign that makin roads

Is no this people’s study:

Altho’ Im not wi’ Scripture cram’d,

I’m sure the Bible says

That heedless sinners shall be damn’d,

Unless they mend their ways.

Paraphrase Of The First Psalm (1781)

The man, in life wherever plac’d,

Hath happiness in store,

Who walks not in the wicked’s way,

Nor learns their guilty lore!

Nor from the seat of scornful pride

Casts forth his eyes abroad,

But with humility and awe

Still walks before his God.

That man shall flourish like the trees,

Which by the streamlets grow;

The fruitful top is spread on high,

And firm the root below.

But he whose blossom buds in guilt

Shall to the ground be cast,

And, like the rootless stubble, tost

Before the sweeping blast.

For why? that God the good adore,

Hath giv’n them peace and rest,

But hath decreed that wicked men

Shall ne’er be truly blest.

We especially chuckled at the second one — Glaswegians, should take note! The “ways” here are still just horrible and potholed, but it really doesn’t stop raining long enough to get them fixed…

ANYWAY! It’s apparent from just this small sampling that Burns had a wide range. At times flippant and insulting, at times sentimental or religious, these poems and more give us a priceless vision of the everyday life and vociferous opinions of an 18th century Scotsman, and give us something to recite as we celebrate Burns Night this weekend with our friends. And though we’ve found a recipe for vegetarian haggis, we’ll probably definitely have one when Van’s here( — have to give him the full Scots experience, after all!).

Though we will likely never be as wild about Burns as our fellow Scots, we are gaining an appreciation for his wit and his clever-tongued countrymen. Happy Burns Day! Cheers!

– D & T

Burn Engraving courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Mango Soufflé / Custard

This one could be said to be a bit on the exotic side, drawing, as it does, from any number of cultures, but actually the recipe just came out of thinking, “what would go well with this?” We had two mangoes, you see, which had been sitting around, glaring at us … and, well, they “needed eating up.”*

Mango Soufflé / Custard

  • 2 mangoes
  • 1 block silken tofu
  • 3 Tbsp coconut cream
  • 1 Vanilla bean
  • Cardamom
  • Cinnamon
  • Nutmeg
  • 1 Lemon zest
  • 1 Lemon juice
  • 2 Tbsp Rose water
  • 3 Tbsp tapioca starch
  • 1/4 cup sugar (to taste)
  1. Blend everything except sugar and tapioca starch.
  2. Taste it. Add sugar if it needs it; omit if it doesn’t.
  3. Blend tapioca starch into mixture.
  4. Pour into ramekins.
  5. Bake at 350°F / 175°C for 25 minutes or until center is just set.

The entertaining thing about “until center is just set” with this particular dish is that … well, it’s not gonna set, probably until you pull it from the oven and let it sit for a while. What it’s going to do, unless you had the sense to put these in a water bath, is to turn bubbly around the edges & form a skin on top. Now, for us, this isn’t a problem. For you? Well, solve it by starting out with a water bath, or finish it by maybe putting on a sprinkling of sugar & caramelizing it with a torch.

Flavorwise, the reason to hold the sugar & the tapioca starch is to see how sweet it’s going to be. We didn’t want to overwhelm the flavor by making it too sweet, so by holding the sugar & starch, you can taste it & get a good idea of the sweetness of your fruit. If you put the starch in sooner, then you’re going to have a sample with a rather chalky taste … which isn’t terribly bad, but isn’t as easy to determine flavor as it could be.

This is also a very forgiving dish because of one thing: it doesn’t use eggs. You can’t overcoagulate the proteins in this because … well, they’re pre-coagulated in the form of silken tofu. The binder here is the tapioca starch, which holds up to heat very well. So, if you feel like it, cook it as long as you want, or as little as you want – it’ll only gel so far, and that all depends on the amount of starch you added. If you want it to be firmer, then you’ll have to do up another batch. If you experiment with using cornstarch (or corn flour as it’s called here), let us know how it turned out.

* Full quote: “She’d announce at lunch, ‘We must have the pork tonight, it needs eating up.’ Vimes never had an actual problem with this, because he’d been raised to eat what was put in front of him, and do it quickly, too, before someone else snatched it away. He was just puzzled at the suggestion that he was there to do the food a favor.” Terry Pratchett, Thud, p 287

Angry (with) Leeks

So, we’ve been dutifully plowing our way through the never-ending supply of root vegetables brought to us by our local box scheme. We’ve not known what to do with some of the things – such as parsnips & swedes – but other, more familiar things have been just as shocking. Take, for example, the leek. Now, in the US, we think of leeks as rather bland, sort of onion-like vegetables, and there aren’t too many recipes that centrally feature them — they’re good in soups or roasted with other vegetables in gratins and such. The few times we’d buy them, they’d generally be disappointing, as they were just rather crunchy and fairly flavorless. Well, the UK must have some radically different soil! Leeks over here are … well, angry. We now understand that the Welsh may have had something going when they chose their rebellious national symbol.

The box scheme has been giving us leeks, and we’ve been eating them – in casseroles, on pizza, and finally as a leek soup, to get rid of all of those which hadn’t made it out of the fridge fast enough. We decided, after a few leek salads, that we needed to cook the things, ’cause they were very persistent, sticking with our digestive system for hours, if not days. Well, in all of this, we’ve also found out that leeks have a darker side: they are quite high in oxalic acid.

For those of you who are prone to forming kidney stones, or who have certain enzymatic deficiencies (like this one), oxalic acid is not your friend. In fact, oxalate has had us going crazy, going to the doctor to try to figure out why T’s anemia has returned, leaving her with no energy, and joint pain. We’ve been looking into all manner of our food choices, trying to track down whether we’re getting different additives, when all the while it’s been …the leeks. Sigh. Angry leeks, indeed.

Swede Fries















This isn’t much in the way of a recipe, but more along the lines of a procedure. This would be “what to do” when you end up with something called a swede, otherwise known as a rutabaga, in your house. For some odd reason, these seem to be popular here in the land of root vegetables. We can’t determine why, as they take forever to prepare, and are an absolute hazard to try to cook.

We’ve been told to mash them – with parsnips and potatoes, of course – but … well, we’ve found that the flavor of parsnips is all-pervasive, as is the flavor of the swede. So, we thought we’d see if we could improve them by turning them into ‘chips’ or ‘French fries.’ Thus begins the saga.

First off, peel the thing. Then, when you’ve gotten it peeled down to where it looks kinda greenish: peel it again. The idea is to remove the whole outer skin, not just the bit which contacted the soil. You’ll know when you’ve gotten through, because you’ll start to see that distinctive orangish hue that says ‘swede.’ Now – here’s the tricky part. Get out your 5-pound rubber kitchen mallet. Wait – what? You don’t have a sledge hammer just for your kitchen? Well, get one. We’ll wait.

Take your largest chef’s knife (or, you know, a cleaver if you have one handy), and place it along the swede. Now – carefully – whack it with the sledge hammer. You’ll have to really pound it – not as much as you would, say, with a Kabocha squash, which is why we bought the sledge in the first place, but fairly hard. Once you’ve cleaved the thing in half, you can revert to normal methods, if you have to – but you could keep using the sledge to drive the knife through the tough flesh.

Slice the thing into something about the width of your little finger, then slice again to give yourself something resembling the shape you’d like to eat as a crisp / fry. Now – boil the things in water for 1 to 2 hours. Yep – boil them. Don’t boil them until they’re limp, but until they don’t have much snap left to them. After that, douse them in cold water to stop the cooking process, and dry them. You’re now ready to portion them out to be frozen and/or seasoned & baked.

We now have about 3/4 of the swede in the freezer, all prepped and ready to spring on anybody who comes to visit. Because, really, the swede just isn’t an easy-prep vegetable!

Choral Society

For those of you into classical choral music – Last semester’s choral excursions were so much fun we thought we’d do it again. One of our choir mates mentioned we would be singing a song this semester in Yiddish, and we were looking forward to the challenge. This semester we’re doing both Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and John Rutter’s Requiem, both of which are relatively short, and will make a good concert, only a little over an hour long. Neither of these is in Yiddish, but the Bernstein is, in fact, in Hebrew. (I guess our friend thought Yiddish was close enough.)

We also have an opportunity to also join a professional group, the Dundin Consort to perform Handel’s Israel in Egypt but we probably won’t have time, as some of the rehearsals – and the performance – are two hours away in Edinburgh. (Boo!)

Still, the university’s rich musical offerings are keeping us busy and happy, and we are having a blast with it.

– D & T

Snow Flies Up


Phew!

Friday night, at the end of another long week.

Daily living is one of those things it’s at times hard to blog about. We get up, work out, we do a little quiet reading after breakfast. We launch into the cold/rain/slush, we gratefully come back in to read and study and eat, and all the while we talk and knit and read and sometimes watch the occasional bit of TV or a movie, and then we read and fall asleep, and do it all over again the next day.

Winter is like that. There is either a monotony or a comforting sameness, depending on one’s mood. Right now, it’s a comforting sameness. The color of the sky rarely varies. Water falls, or tiny snowflakes spiral upward. Wind howls. Clouds scud. Winter: it is what it is.

Looking forward to Van’s visiting us next month has sent us to various websites, looking for things to do in a Scots winter. There’s plenty unsurprisingly, and a lot of things that are a fair bit cheaper than they are in drier weather. As well as getting around to more of the wonderful FREE museums, we’re looking forward to hiking around looking for snowdrops, taking tea at the historic Willow Tea Room, hopping the train to Edinburgh and maybe take in the Isle of Skye, if it’s not altogether too blowy out.

Van has very kindly offered to bring us any and everything from the U.S., but we’ve surprised ourselves by, for the most part, turning down his offer of being our mule service. We don’t really miss anything specific that he can bring. Unless he can lasso the sun, the temperate Bay Area climate, its wonderful people and technology or our entire church and family and our townhouse, really, we don’t need much.

Except, of course PINTO BEANS.

We have guests coming in April, and they already know to leave room in their luggage for that!


Hell, it has been said, is other people. T. would like to now go on record as amending that to “other people in the Gartnavel Hospital Eye Casualty on a Monday.” The hour and a half wait with three clinics running, and the waiting rooms stuffed with very bored people was not the best way to spend a day. The taxi driver told her she’d gotten off easily, two and a half hours later… “Oh, I’ve dropped people off at half-eight, and picked them up again at half-six,” he said quite seriously. “Never let them give you an appointment on Monday or Wednesday.”

People have asked us repeatedly about the medical care in Scotland, and in its staunch defense we will say there are very kind, overworked and haggard doctors and pharmacy techs, who do their best to be professional and helpful. The technology in Scotland is at least fifteen years behind what we have in California (especially in ophthalmology – that was a little frightening), but they believe in taking care of their people, even if they scare them half-to-death to do so. (You should have heard the ad for meningitis prevention and treatment we heard on the radio the other night. Yikes.) We haven’t had an emergency to test out our view of the Scottish medical system, but we can only assume that the hour-and-a-half wait doesn’t exist in a real emergency. Here’s hoping we only have to whine about the wait to see the (FREE! Say it with me now F-R-E-E) ophthalmologist. (And by 2011 they’re phasing out having prescriptions cost anything at all. In April, prescription prices drop a pound eight-five and already they only cost about $60 for three months worth of any drug.) Coming from the world of “hospitals charge what the market will bear,” we find that amazing.

Just the other day we were thinking there hadn’t been any fireworks or parades or late night singing and dancing from the neighbors for two weeks now. Never fear, we were told. Burns Night is coming January 25. We have received our invitations to several Burns suppers and a even to a céilidh after one of them, and we are considering going to Spain instead. No, just kidding, but Burns night ’tis the season for the haggis… and we’ve already been told that “Oh, you’ve just got to try it!” Um, no. But thanks all the same…


The new semester’s schedule is much better than last semester, as D. is home all day on Monday, and most of the day on Wednesday and Friday. Tuesdays and Thursdays are much shorter now that he’s given up on the Philosophy Dept. after-hours class discussions at the pub. When the day both begins and ends in darkness, it’s just outright annoying to have to spend more time away from home than necessary. Despite a couple of the professors last semester making noises about the pub thing being almost compulsory, D. has gotten a bit less pliable this time around, now he’s gotten his feet wet and knows a few pertinent facts about the department. He’s already looking toward next year’s program.

T. hasn’t been exactly idle, as she’s been taking advantage of the urge to go absolutely nowhere, and getting down to work. Her first novel will hit bookshelves this June, but just this week she sold her second one, and is pretty cheerful, if not a bit nervous. Negotiating for things like audio rights and discussing release dates (June 2009! Very quick, in the book-world) and planning summer PR travel have occupied her for a bit. Since she isn’t that fond of air travel, it’s going to be… interesting to figure it all out, but it will be a treat to be back in the United States no matter how we get there or have to get around.

The wind is howling, the potato leek soup is on the “hob.”

Phew. Friday night, at the end of another long week. Thank God, indeed.

– D & T

In the Bleak Midwinter

Yes! We’re still here!

After the all-night party our upstairs neighbors had for Hogmanay, we had a sudden urge to sit quietly as much as possible and gave in to the last minute deep-resting that beckoned before semester began again. It seems odd to be tired when we haven’t been doing much, but it was a busy semester with few breaks and the sharp, cold, abruptly shortened days just invite sleep. D, at least, needed the respite of plenty of naps.

The last night before school began, we accompanied our friends M&B to what they promised was a … Mexican restaurant.

Now, okay: Mexican restaurants vary even within Mexico, probably, and certainly along the West Coast of the United States. There’s a vast difference between, say, El Torrito’s and La Cantina on 4th in Santa Rosa, or between a Chevy’s in the South Bay and
Pancho Villa Taqueria
in the Mission District in the city. Thus, we were prepared Sunday night to be flexible. The restaurant was staffed and run by people from Spain. It would be different, we knew, but everyone in the U.S. has a different interpretation of Mexican food, and it would be no different in the UK, right?

Well. Yes and no. Everyone has a different interpretation of Mexican food. And then, there’s the European interpretation of a Mexican cuisine “with a modern twist”… When we walked in, it looked right. There was plenty of exposed wood, stuccoed walls in warm terra cotta colors, and rustic, brightly colored artwork. It smelled right, as periodically someone would order fajitas, and hot cast iron and onions have a very reassuring smell in this context. The only thing that wasn’t working for us was the “modern twist.” The quesadillas were tasty – goat cheese, mango and red onion with salsa — but not terribly Mexican. B’s enchilada was filled with lentils and mushrooms, D’s with spinach, and T’s black bean burrito — which she figured would be fairly basic — was filled not only with black beans and chunks of garlic, but with portobello mushrooms, goat cheese and spinach… I don’t know what it says to you, but the discovery of a potato in one’s enchilada should alert one to the fact that it is not the traditional cuisine of Mexico one is eating.

Just before Christmas, we found a small bag of dried pinto beans. We have plans for those beans!


We’re so grateful to everyone who has sent us a package — even tiny ones allow us to drop everything and open them up! As the backup of Christmas mail has finally unplugged, we’re receiving daily cards and packages now. The one from home was filled with notes from the Littles, baby pictures and three months worth of catalogs (Coldwater Creek is just so much fun to page through, even though my clothes never coordinate that well!), magazines, and two down jackets.

We’re excited to say that both down jackets are far too large! No, really — we’re excited. At the rate the cookies were disappearing around here for the last month, we expected to have to buy two seats the next time we flew home. Now that we’ve seriously reined ourselves in we’re feeling better about the state of the world, and can safely pass along the largest of the two ginormous coats to the Salvation Army around the block.

It’s weird to realize when one opts out of car culture how much else one chooses to set aside. T. – though not a fan of high heels anyway – is taking a serious rummage through her shoes and deciding what she’s really never going to wear. Nothing that can’t be comfy during a fifteen minute, mile-long walk to the West End is going to survive the cut. That means a lot of shoes — thin-soled, velvet or shoes without enough arch support, as well as the lone pair of heels – are going to go away with the coats. (It would be a bit of a mournful process except that T. has plans for that closet space. Bwa-hahahah!) According to T’s totally nonscientific observation, women’s coats here in Glasgow have much more varied styles than coats elsewhere… probably because one has to wear one for more than half the year, and one has to make it interesting! Thus, after weeding out a few more unsuitable garments for the closet, there should be a lot more room for other things…

We’re remembering there’s life beyond winter, and not a moment too soon. Our first houseguest is arriving at the end of February. T. and Van have been friends since he was eleven and she was nine, and so a mere five thousand miles distance doesn’t deter him from dropping by for a visit. Despite the fact that the weather won’t quite have it pulled together by the time he arrives, we are now pretty motivated to actually find some touristy things to do, and we’ll be in good mental and physical shape to drag him all over the country. Details to follow, of course.

Another of our expected houseguests have had to bow out, as they’re expecting an addition to their extended family. It’s catching — three more of our friends are also expecting. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: STOP THAT. Don’t you people realize you’re supposed to stay exactly the same while we’re away? No aging, no multiplying, no nothing. *Sigh.* Fine. You’d all just better send pictures.


Snow is visiting the city, making the hills around the smog-stained old buildings glow with a serene purity belied by its noisy, busy streets. In our little valley we’re still too low for it to stick, but it’s only a matter, now, of time. Hope that your forays into the bleak midwinter are reminding you that snowdrops and crocuses are just around the corner.

– D & T