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livTerm has ended, and I was able to wrangle things so I could take my marking to Cambridge and live at home for a week, leading up to the beginning of Passover this Monday.
There's still some amount to be done of settling into the routine of me spending normal weekdays in the flat we are starting to think of as our place rather thanjack's place. Still, it was mostly very good, having plenty of time to talk without it feeling rushed, and also we were quite good at getting on with things and relaxing in the evenings, rather than making it a special occasion just because we were in the same place. It was also really nice to be able to do a bit of Cambridge social stuff, which is the other reason why I am rearranging my life to live mostly in Cambridge even though my job is the other side of the country.
So there was pubmeet on Thursday, which ended up moving from the Carlton to the Haymakers as the Carlton kitchen was off. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fivemack for making sure we knew the group had moved across town! In many ways the Haymakers is a nicer pub than the Carlton, certainly the food is vastly better. (I particularly enjoyed a giant calzone while I still had the chance to eat chametz [leaven]). But the big advantage of the Carlton is the very fact that it's kind of run-down and tired, as a venue, because as a result it's always really quiet. The Haymakers is loud and crowded, even when they don't have live music as they did on Thursday. Happily it was warm enough to sit in the beergarden, but I can see why we mostly stick with the Carlton.
And Fridayceb came to dinner, yay. Taking advantage of where we're living at the moment, I raided the Nasreen Dar for tasty ingredients. I was cooking from memory as I didn't have my recipes with me, but here's an approximate recreation, since ceb asked:
Main dish was a mild lentil curry I originally got fromj4. Started with finely chopped onions which I fried with chopped fresh ginger, garlic and black mustard seeds. Since it was a special occasion I did the onions properly, taking a good long time, occasionally adding a splash of water, to get them brown and sweetish like you're supposed to for (anglo)-Indian cooking. I tend to be lazy and just sauté until they soften, which works fine but isn't quite as tasty. Then I added some diced carrots and, oh, roughly 300g of lentils, I didn't measure very carefully, and coated them in the spiced oil. I put in two tins of chopped tomatoes and a tin of coconut milk, plus enough water to make sure everything was covered. Here the Naz let me down a bit because they didn't have any decent coconut milk, just cheap watery stuff which is mostly carrageenan gum. But this is better if you use as close as possible to pure coconut milk! Then I cooked the lentils in the sauce until they were properly soft and mushy, didn't time this very carefully but basically while I was dealing with the other parts of the meal. I topped up the liquid if it looked like the mixture was going to stick. Just before I was ready to serve the meal I added the juice of a lime and a bunch of salt and black pepper (it's important, I'm told, to salt lentils at the end of cooking not the beginning, otherwise they don't soften properly). I also let the mix cool a little bit because the flavour is better if it's not absolutely piping hot. Ideally this wants coriander leaves, but I didn't have any of those.
I accompanied that with a variation on my mother's sort of pilau-ish rice. I fried cloves, a stick of cinnamon, some cardamom seeds, a pinch of cumin and a teaspoon of turmeric in low flavoured oil (sunflower was what was to hand, but any cooking oil will do.) Then I added basmati rice, about half a cup per person but again didn't measure it very carefully and I think this was a bit too much, and coated it with the oil and spices. I put in about three volumes of water, a bayleaf and a veggie stock cube, and let it simmer on the lowest possible heat until the rice was soft and fluffy and bright yellow from the turmeric.
And some leeks which I cooked in approximately the style I learned fromnou, though I couldn't remember the exact details. Also if I remember correctly this is a Caribbean dish not an Indian one, but whatever, I think the colour and the flavour matched fairly well with the lentil curry. Basically you chop the leeks fairly small and put them in a wok, I didn't add any fat or water, I just didn't drain them very thoroughly after rinsing them. Once the leeks were starting to wilt I added a bunch of balsamic vinegar (not enough to actually cover the leeks, just as flavouring), and a handful of leftover maple syrup candies which rysmiel brought us from Canada. When nou made this she used jaggery, which I think is palm sugar and I don't really know where to acquire it in Cambridge. I wanted something that was sweet but a bit more interesting in flavour than white sugar; the maple candies worked really well, but I think demerara sugar or even honey would be fine. I also couldn't remember which vinegar nou had used when she served this dish, I think it was something a bit exotic which I anyway didn't have, so I picked balsamic as being the most interestingly flavoured vinegar in the kitchen. Then I just carried on cooking the leeks slowly and adjusting the balance of sweet and sour until, the best I can describe it is that it tastes confusing, it doesn't taste like sweet-and-sour sauce as you find in anglo-Chinese food, it tastes sweet and sour at the same time. Normally when I cook leeks European style, I cut them into fairly thick slices and don't cook them for too long, so they are eaten still crisp and oniony. But lots of people don't like the oniony flavour of leeks, and doing them very slowly with minimum liquid means that they end up more like a leafy vegetable and less like an allium.
So we had bright orange lentil curry and bright yellow rice and dark green leeks and lovely pink wine whichceb contributed, and lots and lots of fun conversation. We weren't really truly hungry for dessert, but we nibbled at the baklava and gulab jamun selection I'd picked up in the Naz. And we sat at jack's fancy dining table which we found in Emmaus a while back, and it was light until quite late, and I have turned into a boring middle-aged person who spends Friday night having dinner parties and then blogs about them, but it was really perfect.
The problem with this idyllic picture is that in between,jack and I were trying to buy a house. I am not going to fill up this journal with bitching that the Cambridge property market is really scary, because I'm really extremely fortunate that we can contemplate spending about 10 years average earnings on a house, even if I feel like morally we shouldn't have to. During the week I was in town, we managed to carry out three viewings and arranged another two, which jack attended this week on his own as I had to come back to Stoke. We have done a lot of advance planning because the ridiculous housing bubble means that you have to make huge financial and life-changing decisions really rapidly. Three of the houses were unsuitable, primarily because they didn't seem well-enough constructed that we'd be able to be sure they wouldn't get damp and mouldy and set off my asthma. We made an offer on this ugly place in Fen Ditton (it's much nicer on the inside!), and today we were told that they'd had an offer for more than we're prepared to pay so we have withdrawn from that. And then we made an offer of a really really scary amount of money for this prettier house in just the perfect location in Arbury / Kings Hedges. So possibly in the next few weeks we will turn literally every penny we've saved in our working lives and then some into a house where we can live together in Cambridge. Which is exciting but omg terrifying.
The weekend we spent, as planned, helping my parents and sibs with passover prep. The housebuying stress was making us both emotionally volatile, which was a bit horrible, but we mostly knew that it was stress and more or less coped with it. I did have a really nasty mood crash, where rationally I knew that things were ok or even good (yay buying a house! yay spending time with my family whom I really like!) but emotionally I felt like everything was awful. It was really weird to experience such a disconnect between my mood and the way my body was reacting, from my actual assessment of the situation. I got the point where I couldn't look forward to the long-anticipated seder meal, I couldn't get motivated about either the ritual details (our cleaning was honestly pretty perfunctory) or the debates and discussions about what religion really means to us today. The seder went off fine, in fact, Screwy did a generally good job of leading the liturgy and making it fresh, and there were lots of people present, both family and friends, whom I really like. But I got disproportionately sad about things like the usual Reform-style pieties about how there's still slavery in the modern world, and about Screwy's volunteering with asylum seekers and deportees, and the fact thatjack and I, who have well-paid professional careers and no dependants, can barely afford a half-decent house, so what about all the people who are only averagely well-off, let alone actually poor. I mean, maybe it's not disproportionate, these things are actually terrible, but being all teary and sitting around feeling hopeless about the state of the world and unable to enjoy anything are not very useful responses.
The day after the seder, which is supposed to be a festival as the first day of Passover, was just the nadir. I didn't really get enough sleep since we finished clearing up the meal only at about 1:30 am and got up at 8 sojack could go to work and we could finish sorting out the house. I also found myself horribly resenting having to get a mid-morning train back to Stoke to run the second seder here; I wanted a day to relax with my family, or even go to synagogue and reconnect with religion. And I had a ridiculous panic about a friend writing me a perfectly normal and friendly email mentioning that they hadn't seen me around for a while and missed me, and even though I could rationally see that the meaning was perfectly clear I was reacting emotionally as if they were annoyed with me and I had screwed up. I settled down on the train to catch up on the internet after being offline for a few days, and the first thing I found was Twitter discussions about the antisemitic fatal shooting in Kansas. So then I got exaggeratedly upset over the fact that people hate us for being Jewish. I mean, it is a terrible tragedy for the families and communities affected, but there are fatal shootings pretty much every day in America, let alone other parts of the world, and I'm not particularly in more danger from antisemitism than I was last week, so there was no real reason for me to be thrown off that badly by one more piece of bad news from the world.
Anyway, the seder was fine, I've done this enough times that I can do it on autopilot and make it inspiring just as if I really felt deep religious joy at celebrating redemption. The food was good, the practicalities were somewhat less perfect than they have been some years but everything went smoothly enough. And I did draw some strength from being able to do this for my community, whom I care about deeply even if I'm feeling a bit burnt out just now.
Thank you to everybody who was friendly and comforting this week, it really does mean a lot, and I'm feeling extremely blessed to know you all. I still have a lot of things I need to deal with, both workwise and in terms of selling my house here and hopefully buying another one in Cambridge. But basically I'll be ok, and at least I don't have all that on my to-do list plus Passover prep.
There's still some amount to be done of settling into the routine of me spending normal weekdays in the flat we are starting to think of as our place rather than
jack's place. Still, it was mostly very good, having plenty of time to talk without it feeling rushed, and also we were quite good at getting on with things and relaxing in the evenings, rather than making it a special occasion just because we were in the same place. It was also really nice to be able to do a bit of Cambridge social stuff, which is the other reason why I am rearranging my life to live mostly in Cambridge even though my job is the other side of the country. So there was pubmeet on Thursday, which ended up moving from the Carlton to the Haymakers as the Carlton kitchen was off. Thanks to
fivemack for making sure we knew the group had moved across town! In many ways the Haymakers is a nicer pub than the Carlton, certainly the food is vastly better. (I particularly enjoyed a giant calzone while I still had the chance to eat chametz [leaven]). But the big advantage of the Carlton is the very fact that it's kind of run-down and tired, as a venue, because as a result it's always really quiet. The Haymakers is loud and crowded, even when they don't have live music as they did on Thursday. Happily it was warm enough to sit in the beergarden, but I can see why we mostly stick with the Carlton. And Friday
ceb came to dinner, yay. Taking advantage of where we're living at the moment, I raided the Nasreen Dar for tasty ingredients. I was cooking from memory as I didn't have my recipes with me, but here's an approximate recreation, since ceb asked:Main dish was a mild lentil curry I originally got from
j4. Started with finely chopped onions which I fried with chopped fresh ginger, garlic and black mustard seeds. Since it was a special occasion I did the onions properly, taking a good long time, occasionally adding a splash of water, to get them brown and sweetish like you're supposed to for (anglo)-Indian cooking. I tend to be lazy and just sauté until they soften, which works fine but isn't quite as tasty. Then I added some diced carrots and, oh, roughly 300g of lentils, I didn't measure very carefully, and coated them in the spiced oil. I put in two tins of chopped tomatoes and a tin of coconut milk, plus enough water to make sure everything was covered. Here the Naz let me down a bit because they didn't have any decent coconut milk, just cheap watery stuff which is mostly carrageenan gum. But this is better if you use as close as possible to pure coconut milk! Then I cooked the lentils in the sauce until they were properly soft and mushy, didn't time this very carefully but basically while I was dealing with the other parts of the meal. I topped up the liquid if it looked like the mixture was going to stick. Just before I was ready to serve the meal I added the juice of a lime and a bunch of salt and black pepper (it's important, I'm told, to salt lentils at the end of cooking not the beginning, otherwise they don't soften properly). I also let the mix cool a little bit because the flavour is better if it's not absolutely piping hot. Ideally this wants coriander leaves, but I didn't have any of those.I accompanied that with a variation on my mother's sort of pilau-ish rice. I fried cloves, a stick of cinnamon, some cardamom seeds, a pinch of cumin and a teaspoon of turmeric in low flavoured oil (sunflower was what was to hand, but any cooking oil will do.) Then I added basmati rice, about half a cup per person but again didn't measure it very carefully and I think this was a bit too much, and coated it with the oil and spices. I put in about three volumes of water, a bayleaf and a veggie stock cube, and let it simmer on the lowest possible heat until the rice was soft and fluffy and bright yellow from the turmeric.
And some leeks which I cooked in approximately the style I learned from
nou, though I couldn't remember the exact details. Also if I remember correctly this is a Caribbean dish not an Indian one, but whatever, I think the colour and the flavour matched fairly well with the lentil curry. Basically you chop the leeks fairly small and put them in a wok, I didn't add any fat or water, I just didn't drain them very thoroughly after rinsing them. Once the leeks were starting to wilt I added a bunch of balsamic vinegar (not enough to actually cover the leeks, just as flavouring), and a handful of leftover maple syrup candies which rysmiel brought us from Canada. When nou made this she used jaggery, which I think is palm sugar and I don't really know where to acquire it in Cambridge. I wanted something that was sweet but a bit more interesting in flavour than white sugar; the maple candies worked really well, but I think demerara sugar or even honey would be fine. I also couldn't remember which vinegar nou had used when she served this dish, I think it was something a bit exotic which I anyway didn't have, so I picked balsamic as being the most interestingly flavoured vinegar in the kitchen. Then I just carried on cooking the leeks slowly and adjusting the balance of sweet and sour until, the best I can describe it is that it tastes confusing, it doesn't taste like sweet-and-sour sauce as you find in anglo-Chinese food, it tastes sweet and sour at the same time. Normally when I cook leeks European style, I cut them into fairly thick slices and don't cook them for too long, so they are eaten still crisp and oniony. But lots of people don't like the oniony flavour of leeks, and doing them very slowly with minimum liquid means that they end up more like a leafy vegetable and less like an allium. So we had bright orange lentil curry and bright yellow rice and dark green leeks and lovely pink wine which
ceb contributed, and lots and lots of fun conversation. We weren't really truly hungry for dessert, but we nibbled at the baklava and gulab jamun selection I'd picked up in the Naz. And we sat at jack's fancy dining table which we found in Emmaus a while back, and it was light until quite late, and I have turned into a boring middle-aged person who spends Friday night having dinner parties and then blogs about them, but it was really perfect. The problem with this idyllic picture is that in between,
jack and I were trying to buy a house. I am not going to fill up this journal with bitching that the Cambridge property market is really scary, because I'm really extremely fortunate that we can contemplate spending about 10 years average earnings on a house, even if I feel like morally we shouldn't have to. During the week I was in town, we managed to carry out three viewings and arranged another two, which jack attended this week on his own as I had to come back to Stoke. We have done a lot of advance planning because the ridiculous housing bubble means that you have to make huge financial and life-changing decisions really rapidly. Three of the houses were unsuitable, primarily because they didn't seem well-enough constructed that we'd be able to be sure they wouldn't get damp and mouldy and set off my asthma. We made an offer on this ugly place in Fen Ditton (it's much nicer on the inside!), and today we were told that they'd had an offer for more than we're prepared to pay so we have withdrawn from that. And then we made an offer of a really really scary amount of money for this prettier house in just the perfect location in Arbury / Kings Hedges. So possibly in the next few weeks we will turn literally every penny we've saved in our working lives and then some into a house where we can live together in Cambridge. Which is exciting but omg terrifying.The weekend we spent, as planned, helping my parents and sibs with passover prep. The housebuying stress was making us both emotionally volatile, which was a bit horrible, but we mostly knew that it was stress and more or less coped with it. I did have a really nasty mood crash, where rationally I knew that things were ok or even good (yay buying a house! yay spending time with my family whom I really like!) but emotionally I felt like everything was awful. It was really weird to experience such a disconnect between my mood and the way my body was reacting, from my actual assessment of the situation. I got the point where I couldn't look forward to the long-anticipated seder meal, I couldn't get motivated about either the ritual details (our cleaning was honestly pretty perfunctory) or the debates and discussions about what religion really means to us today. The seder went off fine, in fact, Screwy did a generally good job of leading the liturgy and making it fresh, and there were lots of people present, both family and friends, whom I really like. But I got disproportionately sad about things like the usual Reform-style pieties about how there's still slavery in the modern world, and about Screwy's volunteering with asylum seekers and deportees, and the fact that
jack and I, who have well-paid professional careers and no dependants, can barely afford a half-decent house, so what about all the people who are only averagely well-off, let alone actually poor. I mean, maybe it's not disproportionate, these things are actually terrible, but being all teary and sitting around feeling hopeless about the state of the world and unable to enjoy anything are not very useful responses.The day after the seder, which is supposed to be a festival as the first day of Passover, was just the nadir. I didn't really get enough sleep since we finished clearing up the meal only at about 1:30 am and got up at 8 so
jack could go to work and we could finish sorting out the house. I also found myself horribly resenting having to get a mid-morning train back to Stoke to run the second seder here; I wanted a day to relax with my family, or even go to synagogue and reconnect with religion. And I had a ridiculous panic about a friend writing me a perfectly normal and friendly email mentioning that they hadn't seen me around for a while and missed me, and even though I could rationally see that the meaning was perfectly clear I was reacting emotionally as if they were annoyed with me and I had screwed up. I settled down on the train to catch up on the internet after being offline for a few days, and the first thing I found was Twitter discussions about the antisemitic fatal shooting in Kansas. So then I got exaggeratedly upset over the fact that people hate us for being Jewish. I mean, it is a terrible tragedy for the families and communities affected, but there are fatal shootings pretty much every day in America, let alone other parts of the world, and I'm not particularly in more danger from antisemitism than I was last week, so there was no real reason for me to be thrown off that badly by one more piece of bad news from the world. Anyway, the seder was fine, I've done this enough times that I can do it on autopilot and make it inspiring just as if I really felt deep religious joy at celebrating redemption. The food was good, the practicalities were somewhat less perfect than they have been some years but everything went smoothly enough. And I did draw some strength from being able to do this for my community, whom I care about deeply even if I'm feeling a bit burnt out just now.
Thank you to everybody who was friendly and comforting this week, it really does mean a lot, and I'm feeling extremely blessed to know you all. I still have a lot of things I need to deal with, both workwise and in terms of selling my house here and hopefully buying another one in Cambridge. But basically I'll be ok, and at least I don't have all that on my to-do list plus Passover prep.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-17 11:58 am (UTC)The Atkins Road house looks lovely, I hope it works out for you.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-17 08:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-17 12:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-17 08:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-17 03:48 pm (UTC)(I am low on brain but I like you; here is a thing -- is how this comment unpacks.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-17 08:04 pm (UTC)I'm a little surprised that the dear old Naz didn't have jaggery, in fact, it could well be that I just didn't find it. And maybe I didn't really need a huge block of jaggery on this occasion, it was fun experimenting with putting maple candy in my side vegetables :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-26 10:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-17 10:12 pm (UTC)House prices are mad. I live in a not-very-great area of London- I like living here, and there's just enough green stuff nearby to satisfy my urges, and there's shopping and public transport and we're living on a quiet street and all that - but it's neither fashionable nor close to the city nor really convenient to anywhere.
What you call a really scary sum for two professionals would not buy you a one-bedroom flat around here. And that's completely, utterly, totally bonkers, because while it could just about be argued that you 'don't need' a 3-bed house with a garden to live (I certainly appreciate living in one nonetheless) there's just no way that two average earners can live in half a studio appartment, which is all they can afford in these parts.
Your recipe sounds very yummy and I am going to try it at some point - we've been doing a fair few curries, and I like them, if anything, better the more I cook.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-22 03:33 pm (UTC)And I listen to Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch singing 'I'll Fly Away' from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Beautiful.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-24 08:24 pm (UTC)Also congrats to you both on the house.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-28 08:13 am (UTC)