OK, not really. I have to say, the resemblance seemed much greater and more hilarious when you were downing a Guinness on a Friday night. And Mark Knopfler has a weakness for rust-coloured suits which these local bandsters do not dare pull off, preferring to stick to traditional garb of t-shirt and jeans.
And of course, fashion aside, they did not play Dire Straits. Bon Jovi, yes, Dire Straits, no. What is wrong with people????
I’ve always loved new recipes – after all, what better way to lighten the unbearable darkness of being than to mess around with brightly-coloured vegetables and chop and fry onions and so on. Why do you think first-world countries have become so obsessed with cooking shows and gourmet ingredients and sushi? To eat healthy? No indeed. Merely that cooking is a bright and practical way to relieve the perfect tedium of daily existence combined with the screaming angst of impending mortality…
Back to the subject at hand. Ah yes. Cookbooks are some of my favourite reading matter, and when “Hasan” was around in Halifax, we spent many a bright moment together talking about cooking and yes, Sunday dinners had become an institution I looked forward to, to experiment and prepare new kinds of dishes- lamb with pistashios and apricots, chicken with paprika and chorizo, bright stuffed peppers. And drink a lot of wine. And the kids gamboled around our feet.
But last fall, “Hasan” had to flee Halifax, and so on.
Yes. This is a blog post about cooking. Specifically, how you don’t need to follow recipes exactly to get a nice meal. I regard recipes as a form of challenge and inspiration. Not a literal word-by-word instruction manual.
Take the dish “Chicken Pepperonata”, which I cooked yesterday. Here is how I diverged from the actual recipe:
-I used breast instead of leg, because that was on “Special” at Superstore.
-Added sesame seeds and paprika to the flour for dusting the chicken.
-Couldn’t bear to throw away the remainder of the flour because of the sesame seeds and paprika, so I stirred it in the chicken stock, making a thicker gravy.
-Did not use green peppers, only red and orange, as I don’t really like the taste of green ones. Also see below.
-Did not garnish with fresh oregano as the golden boy will not eat anything green/ or with green on it.
-I cooked the chicken for the 20-25 minutes required, and found the resulting pieces to be tougher and more stringy than I like. So I let it simmer for another hour or so. We Iranians like our stews “well-settled” (ja-oftadeh). The result looks somewhat like a classical khoresh-e gheymeh, rather than the proud distinct pieces of pepper and chicken ready to attack, but the taste, I assure you Gentle Reader, had nothing to do with gheymeh.
So, I prepared this dish and it was good. No angry Italian housewife leaped out from the pages of the cookbook to scream invective at me, as one hears they are wont to do. Gentle Reader: do not be intimidated by recipes. Let them be your guide, but not your master. And you will have a very nice Sunday meal, with hopefully leftovers for the office next day.
Guess which one is mine and which is the picture from the cookbook?
(You can find the answer by hovering over the pic)
So we were told. He had won a national competition of some sort and received a medal from the hand of the king of Iran. He grew up in a small mountain village north-east of Tehran, and he skied to school every day. His father had made his first skis for him from wood.
Later on, he married and had children, none of whom followed his footsteps to sporting success. The last time I skied was – oh- twenty-five years ago? He had bought my brother and I state-of-the-art skis from Germany, and the most adorable ski-mitts, with smurfs- pink for me, blue for my brother. He took us to his own childhood village, and we skied there on several occasions, sometimes staying overnight and skiing for a couple of days. Days from paradise. Now those skis are quietly rotting in a basement storage back in Tehran. I went to that same village for my honeymoon.
Yesterday, parents of the princess’s friends, whom I had barely exchanged three words with before, dropped by to pick up their daughters. As they were waiting in the doorway, waiting for “Julia” and “Katie” to put on their thousand winter wraps, I found myself babbling hysterically and out of nowhere about my father’s famed skiing prowess. They listened politely, and then one of them commented that it’s quite expensive to ski around here- she had estimated that it would cost well over a hundred dollars just for a day ski trip for her family. We all nodded solemnly. And that was that.
It’s past 8 pm. I have not yet had supper. I am starving and cold. I have two options: (re)heat the same rice and beef meat stew which I have been having for every.single.meal since Sunday, except breakfasts. Or boil a packet of instant noodles and crack an egg in it.
It’s a no-brainer. I’ll still be having the stew for tomorrow lunch and possibly supper as well. So I tear open the package of dry instant noodles, and push a pan of water on the stovetop in one smooth, spontaneous movement.
I think about the things I could add to my noodles-and-egg dish to make it a bit more interesting. I eye the contents of my fridge dubiously. Mayonnaise? No. Cheese? Yes. Kale? No. The contents of a molding can of peaches left over from the princess’s birthday party? Definitely not.
But what is this, so brown and glossy, yet so shy and humble, hiding behind the bags of salad, peeking out? Aha! A small saucer, packed with fried onions, spiced with garlic, turmeric and a hint of cinnamon, the colour of caramel, the flavour of heaven. Now I remember. I had prepared fried onions on Sunday for the now-despised meat stew, and I had saved this batch for later use. Which is now. The addition of a fistful of caramelized, spiced onion turns my humble egg-and-noodles into a dish of the gods.
Moral: Gentle Reader, always fry more onions than needed for your dish, and keep some behind. Use it to add love to anything: soups, sandwiches, stir-fries, stews. You simply cannot go wrong.
I love, love, love how mature and smart Christina [Aguilera] is. I mean, I’ve always liked that about her, but I love it when people are able to be good about breakups and divorce for their kids. I cannot WAIT for her new album! (random internet comment)
Dear people of the world: this is a really, really stupid comment. Please do not buy Christina’s new album because you think she is a smart, mature woman. Buy it because you really enjoy her music, you love the way she dances, the quality of her voice thrills you to the core, heck, buy it because you just think she’s awfully pretty, but DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT buy the album based on your assessment of her moral worth, maturity and so on. It is a piece of pop music, entertainment. Buy it because of its music qualities and its ability to keep you entertained, not the personal qualities of the entertainer. About which, honestly, you do not have a clue.
Why do we all do do this? We all want our celebrities to be good, decent, loving, kind people – until we flip the other way and want them to be raving mad, savage, if not downright evil lunatics. Kurt Cobain made some nice music. Granted. So why can’t we bear any suggestion that he himself may have been an antagonistic, obnoxious prick? Axl Rose made some very, very, very brilliant songs. Enjoy them. Stop thinking about how insane and immature and violent he was. Or was not. Do I need more examples? Roman Polanski. Are you his lawyer, or a Californian judge, the Swiss police, or a plaintiff in the judicial process? No? Then shut up. Your proud decision to a/ continue watching b/ never again watch another scene of his films is totally irrelevant to the quality of his work. Chris Brown beat up Rihanna. Yet he continues to make music which sells (incredibly?) well. Sometimes people behave well, sometimes not. Their personal behaviour has nothing to do with the quality of their work. This may seem obvious. Yet so many people have difficulty understanding and accepting this simple statement.
Yes indeed. The picture of smartness and maturity. Go on and reward her by buying her album. I’m sure your approval will inspire her to drink less and behave even better in the future.
Photo credits: http://partyfail.com/?p=779
We have come back from skating at the Oval. Or rather, Golden Boy and I have come back from watching the princess struggling on ice to keep up with her much faster skater friend. Still, we are all tired, and collapse into separate pockets of squashy space, paying no attention to each other.
***
It is after three, the winter sunlight casting bright stripes on the wall. I am on our huge soft bed, which I can’t get enough of since our return. The princess is on one couch, watching Glee. The Golden Boy is on another couch, playing a game. Smurfs, I think. The Glee episode is centred on Britney Spears, and snatches of her songs drift into the bedroom …Slaaaaave…I’m a slaaave for….. the high school bell, characteristic of Glee, rings, again and yet again, and the sunlit stripes creep higher up the wall. I turn the pages of my crappy satisfying detective story. The tinkling sound of the computer game mingles with the bell, and again, another song …oh baby baby… I crack a roasted pumpkin seed between my teeth. In the bed. The children would have a fit if they saw, for no food is allowed in the bedrooms. Ever. But they do not notice- one is away in a forest, leaping and running with little blue white-capped cartoon creatures, the other is dreaming of stardom, her mind befuddled with too much pop music and stories ….my loneliNESSSSS is KILLING meee…. The sounds of my children’s playtime soothes my heart and reassures me that I am not lonely, I am well-beloved, I am a lucky, lucky woman…I must confess… I still belieeeeve…
There are two levels of problems, for “ordinary” middle-class people.
Level “A” is when they or their loved-ones are dying from cancer, Alzheimer or any other horrible, lethal, non-curable disease.
Level “B” are the normal problems of life: separation, rocky love-lives, no dinner ready, not enough money, no job security, bad day at work…
Basically, we are all bitching and bitching about level “B” problems, when we know that at any moment, we might get a phone call which will tell us about a level “A” problem, and then the world will burst in flames.
What do you do? What are you supposed to do then? How will you deal with your B problems?
“We should be happy for every minute that goes by”, I sternly told my sister at the eve of our departure, “that we are all healthy, and we know none of us is ill. At any moment, all of this may change.”
So, we are supposed to take comfort in this hard nugget of information: that none of us has a terminal disease yet, and swallow our destiny of long plane rides and distance and separation. OK. If that’s how it has to be, then fine. We’re happy.
The entrance area of our place is blocked with a pile of luggage- the huge suitcase and an assortment of old, torn bags my father donated for the extra stuff. Clothes, new and old, dried goods, mementos of the trip to Iran. Somebody needs to start unpacking. That somebody is me. But right now, I feel as if my body has been injected with some drug, and I am drifting. It doesn’t seem realistically possible that this huge pile of Iranian stuff can be removed from the kitchen and living room floor and organized away. I need a fairy godmother. Or at least a wand.
School and work will start day after tomorrow.
The Golden Boy keeps stating that he likes Iran better than Halifax. Then he asks me which one I like best. I can’t answer.
He states he wants a big computer “like aunt”, and he doesn’t like playing on his farty laptop.
He states he doesn’t want to go to farty school.
He states he wants to live in Iran.
I wonder whether it is worth explaining (again and again) that if he lived in Iran, he would have to go to school too, and he wouldn’t be spending all his time playing video games with his aunt and uncle. I lack the energy to do so, and his statements remain unanswered, unchallenged. I console myself that this is a good educational technique- probably the best.
I have learned to download TV shows and film, and even as I type, huge chunks of the princess’s current to-watch show are being transported to her laptop. I wonder what I would like to download for myself, but I don’t know. In the old days, I loved watching M*A*S*H, Poirot, Moonlighting, Picket Fences… But now there seems to be nothing I really want to watch. However, I refuse to feel sorry for myself on this account.
It is so silent here. That other house was so so noisy. The noise continued until the small hours of the morning, until the children collapsed. Here, the quiet envelopes and embraces.
I reread my blog post of yesterday. It was meant to be funny and incisive, making The Gentle Reader snort with derisive laughter. Instead, it sounds just petty, mean, and woefully uninformed about music. I can hear us chanting “you can go HARD or you can go HOME!” in Dubai.
Ah yes. I forgot. This is what this post was originally about- rolling about big light green eyes and actressing and all that.
photo credits: http://www.genemagazine.com/genepic/amanda-seyfried-want-a-new-look-14.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_r-PbcykFj5o/SMHrbaS9fpI/AAAAAAAAAqo/fYe3aPa27QM/s400/NikiKarimi.jpg
As usual, unlimited contraband satellite in Iran gives me ample opportunity to catch up with important events in the developed and undeveloped world, and it was thus that I noticed Oh dear! Another Great Skinny Old White Male Rock Star is reduced to whoring.
will.i.am is a kind of poor man’s Timbaland, though unlike Timbaland, he is unable, or indeed perhaps uninterested in putting hands on un-pretty, untalented, gawky nobodies and pushing them up on his golden melodies to the stars. will.i.am seems to prefer to work with what has already proven its value on the market- and thus the very, very, unfortunate “The Hardest Ever” was born. Oh dear, indeed.
Post racial, post postmodern? Stars and celebrities are forever bragging about their sexual prowess, but bug-eyed will.i.am, with the help of a black-lace covered J.Lo really really wants to rub on noses in how Hard he is, because if he isn’t, J.Lo will send him home. “You can go hard, or you can go home.” And J.Lo thrusts her creepily airbrushed barbie-fied black-lace-covered private parts at us while rockets explode round a bug-eyed william. The message is terrifyingly, nauseatingly simple. Really, J.Lo? Surely you can think of a better threat? Anyway, wasn’t your love supposed to not cost a thing? Don’t you think your love should be worth more than a limp dick. Or not?
But what- wait- what is Mick Jagger doing here? Oh- I get it, he signifies rock n’ roll! Harrrrd Rrrrrock n rrrrolll…. really rrrealllly HARRRRD… get it? Harrrd… rock n’ roll… harrrd sexxxxxx… J.Lo…. will.i.am… hard…or home… harder… or home(er?)
as flies to little boys, are the old rock stars to the gods… they torture them for sport.
