Shortly after I moved to Brussels I found out that the Belgians - those living in this city at least - love cobbles. I'm not a huge fan but I can put up with them. Sadly, I cannot put up with them in the thin soled shoes I had bought a couple of years beforehand. I needed new shoes with sturdier soles. I went shopping.
My mum has a nice new iPod Nano. It's just the right size to fit in her purse and can store her photographs, movies, contacts and calendars. Oh, and she also has some audio files on it, too.
It's that part of the year when the US has moved from winter time to summer time and Europe hasn't. That means my regular evening call is an hour earlier than normal and so I'm a little more rushed in the evening. So rather than shop for raw cooking ingredients I popped into the English/Irish/Swedish shop and picked up some things that didn't need preparation.
When I was a child, my mum used to make a fantastic cake that I called "Cup of Tea Cake" because it's made with a cup of tea. When I visited her in London last weekend she had made one of those cakes for a tea party she hosted. She sent me the recipe and I made one for myself this morning. Frankly, I'm quite impressed with the cake and will be sharing it at work tomorrow.
- 1 cup of brown sugar
- 1 cup of dried fruit, like raisins
- 1 cup of good, strong tea
- 2 cups of self raising flour
- 1 egg
- 1 pinch of nutmeg
Despite copious amounts of Emergen-C in the last few days I have a cold. When I woke up today, my nose felt drier than a box of tinder, although that changed as soon as I'd had another glass of Emergen-C.
I looked in my fridge and realised I very little that was suitable for curing colds, so I turned my store cupboard and decided to make a soup with my last few shallots and red onions. I sliced them thinly, added in half a bulb of garlic (peeled but not chopped) and gently sweated them in a pan for 20 minutes or so. Then I added half a mug or orange lentils and a few mugs of water and cooked it all at the lowest heat on my stove-top for another couple of hours.
Soups are always better the next day as the flavour in them takes time to develop. But I wanted to eat something that might help fight my cold and so I tried a bowl of onion and lentil soup for lunch. It was remarkably good for something that hasn't had a chance to mature.
I'll be making this one again.
Olof and I popped into l'Atellier just after lunch as he wanted to ask about a booking for a party. While he was chatting with the people at the front desk I took this snap of the door to their toilets. Frankly, it fits the area of the city beautifully and makes it far less likely that anyone dining there will be caught short.
I went to the zoo in Antwerp with my brother and his family on Wednesday. It's actually a pretty good zoo, although I think the lion enclosure needs major improvements or to be relocated to a safari park. The lion looked very, very lonely and his enclosure was bare concrete with none of the environmental enrichment available to the primates. The monkeys and apes have rope pathways, tyre swings, foliage and companions. The big cats looked very sad and frankly a little bit insane.
But on the bright side, the zoo mostly seems to be doing the right thing as none of the animals look underfed and even the big ones looked fairly happy in their small enclosures. These giraffes look elegant and well fed.
When you travel, do you use a guidebook so that you're well prepared, or do you go without much prior knowledge so that you're surprised?
Submitted by Jack Yan.
The most preparation I do is consult Google Maps for directions from
one place to another, once I've decided on where I want to go. I don't use guidebooks and I never read the tourist literature that hotels leave in hotel rooms. I much prefer to talk to local people and ask them what they think is good and worth doing. I also like walking around places and getting myself lost. Paris is especially good for getting lost in. If walking isn't practical because the place is too big then I like to use public transport and then loaf around in cafés.
