cooking for two

Tags

cooking, food, friend, J.R.R.Tolkien, love, magic, spieces, taste buds

A friend is coming over tonight and I have decided to cook. I love concocting lovely meals, and while I measure, boil, bind and spice I can’t help but think about magic.

My pots lined up like bubbling cauldrons, smells bellowing up in hot puffs of air, tempting me to come and try. Spices tickling at my taste-buds, making my mouth water and my tummy begging for more.

And how your home transforms into your own little castle, a fire crackling in the hearth, flowers nodding their fragrant heads in time to the ‘minstrals’ singing from the CD-palyer. An expectant chair waiting for a friendly bottom to take a seat at the “dressed-up” table, wanting to enchant the guest to leave the day behind,  a trail of desserts and cake leading the way.

The secret about this kind of home cooked magic is simply a little bit of time and lots of love. But since time is running out my bottom has to get into gear and my hands have to start cooking for two. So i leave you with the creator of a magnificently magical world of his own, J.R.R Tolkien

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world

tedious teens

Tags

dorkey, Dublin, embarrassing, family, friend, niece, teenagers, uncool

My bedroom has been taken over by my teenage niece and her friend for the week. They flew over from Germany yesterday evening and even though it hasn’t even been 24 hours yet I can already see the week is going to be long.

Getting them to talk is a challenge in itself, it’s like pulling chewing gum from between their teeth, you have to pull, pull and pull some more. Trying to figure out want they would like to do is like going on an excavation, you have to scoop out the information while digging down into their psyche that is hidden behind walls of silence, shrugs and grumps.

But as soon as I leave the room or have even just turned my back it as if a switch flips and they chatter, giggle and prattle on about this that and mainly other people. And no matter how quietly I reenter the room or how how slow my stop-motion turning around is, the moment I am back in the picture silence falls down heavily on them, like a thick blanket covering up all their teenage secrets.

And while I have been racking my brain to figure out what to do with them today the only ideas I have come up with that seem to appeal to their teenage nature is shopping, possibly (with lots of trepidation) going to a nail salon and more shopping. So when my sister called me this morning to make sure the two still sleeping beauties were okay she told me to just lay down the  law and make them do some culture.

Feeling good with the backing of a mum I have decided to go to a museum or two and maybe, just maybe a pub. A little visit to a touristy watering hole in Temple Bar defines what foreigners think of as Irish culture and might just earn me few cool points.

After all I have no delusions about the fact that I am totally dorky, embarrassing and uncool in their eyes, so maybe I should just play up to that and make them cringe. But for now I have to get these tedious teenagers out of bed and down to the breakfast table, I wonder if I need pliers and a wrench to get them to budge.

pop-tarts and parties

Tags

american goodies, breakfast, flappers, food, friend, frosting, party, pop-tarts, poptarts, roaring 20s, strawberries

I was at a roaring twenties party last night and with whiskey sours, gin gimlets and highballs on offer we definitely were defying the prohibition, taking full advantage of the speakeasy in my friends living room. With light jazz bringing out the inner flapper in us we chatted, drank, danced and some even smoked cigars till the wee hours of the morning.

It was past four when I crawled into bed, my head and limbs a little bit heavy but with a happy heart and a prize sitting on my kitchen counter ready for me to devour this morning: pop-tarts, the frosted strawberry kind!

The birthday girl and flapper instigator is American and a good while back the two of us were in a specialist sweet shop in town, which was stacked to the rafters with American goodies. At the time I remarked at how in films or sitcoms people always seem to eat pop-tarts for breakfast and that I had no idea what they were and that I was curious what the whole hype was about. Sadly the shop only sold ones that my friend didn’t approve of declaring that if I was going to try them they had to be the right kind: frosted strawberry.

Time has past and I have to be honest I haven’t really been losing sleep over my pop-tart inexperience. But last night my lovely, quirky and very special friend presented me with a box of pop-tarts imported all the way from the USA. So this morning my palate has enjoyed the sweet stickiness of pop-tart delights.

I did what I was instructed to do, try them in both the toasted and un-toasted variety and I was warned that they are quite sweet. But I have to admit pop-tarts taste better than I thought they would, even if the sweetness does make your teeth crawl and a sugary aftertaste lingers on the back of your tongue, stuck there no matter how many sips and gulps of tea you take.

The un-toasted variety seems to be less sweet but also less strawberrish, although I would argue that there probably aren’t any real berries in the pastry, just more brightly coloured and highly flavoured synthetic look-a-likes. But then when has that ever bothered the American food industry?

So with a new day starting off with a new experience I think it is safe to say that it has not been wasted, even if I decide to stay at home and not do much. And while I enjoyed my excursion to pop-tart-ville today, for tomorrow I think I will revert back to good old toast and jam, the more traditional and less sweet breakfast of choice.

friemily ties

Tags

chat, family, friemilies, friend, Germany, love, miscellaneous, party, random, thoughts, trip

What a trip, fun filled, lots to do, make and bake, family filled festivities and very little sleep. I saw and talked to most of my relatives, made table decorations, hugged and kissed my niece and nephews, squishy cuddles and wet ones in the case of my brothers nine-month-old baby boy, slept in guest-rooms and on sofas, went to an art exhibition and for walks with dogs, cooked, cleaned, shopped and jumped on a trampoline. Now I am home and quite exhausted.

I do love my family, at times because I want to and at times because you are meant to, but it got me thinking about what family actually is. After all as a single, with no children living on my own and in a different country from the family I was born into, are the people I saw on Sunday really the most important ones in my life?

As I sat at the table and chatted to my aunts and uncle I realised again how very little we have in common and how we know even less about each other. I always get asked the same questions, no mater if they saw me a year or a month ago: “How is Ireland?” “What are you doing now?” and the dreaded one “Is there a man in your life?”

The first is easily and almost always answered the same; Ireland is doing fine, the weather is a little mad and it looks like the financial crises is getting better in miniature steps. The second is an odd one as I have been doing the same things for a long time. My projects change and so forth but I haven’t suddenly become an astronaut or a gymnast. The third is the question I ignore or give a knowing smile and change the subject when asked. After all is it any of their business? And if I am really honest I am not convinced they want to know anyway. Their questions aren’t really about me, but for them to feel they made the effort.  Of course there is the exception in the form of my godmother who I have a different relationship with. We talk (or email) regularly and she knows me and what is going on in my life. But that also means that our chats are different and we don’t ask mundane, standardized questions.

So as my eyes drifted over the faces of people I have know for most of my life I had a thought, maybe family isn’t what we think it is but what we make it be.  After all my friends are the people I turn to when I am sad, need to vent and have fun with, not necessarily relatives. Some family members straddle the void between family and friends, others are stranded safely on a side I only visit a few times a year. And I am quite happy with that, seeing as there are only so many stories I need to hear about some cousins child, dog, friend or husband.

With that in mind I think we need a new definition of what family is, maybe even a new word for it. With the number of singles living on their own growing steadily the conventional idea about family and it’s structure seems outdated. But with the word “friend” being overused, including people we have just met or kind of know, maybe a word like “friemily” is what we should be using to describe those people in our lives that are the most important to us.

After a good nights sleep and a long list of to-dos I think today I will get in touch with some of my friemilies and tell them I missed them.

chatter box

Tags

chatterbox, email, friend, Molly Ringwald, phone, random, talking, texting, thoughts, voice

My head is spinning a little this morning with all sorts of information. Over the last two days I have been catching up with friends from all over the world via phone and skype and now I am all talked out.

I love chatting away to my friends and getting glimpses into the lives they lead so far away or listening to problems they are having or just being silly together. But as I hung up last night I remembered an article I had read on the New York Times website a good while ago.

It was a long article  about the fact that more and more communication has be reduced to texting and emailing, that calling someone on the phone is considered rude, interrupting and out of date. I remember thinking at the time how odd that is as verbal communication can give you so much more information than a text or an email can. After all we have to use those smiley faces and abbreviations just to let someone know that something is a joke or how we are reacting to something they said.  When talking to a friend I can hear if they are smiling or if there is a small quiver in their voices. I can tell if they are happy or sad and they way they say certain things lets me know how serious or not something is.

I do understand that in the world of business an email may be more efficient, straightforward and you can read it when you get a minute. But there is something more personal about hearing someone else’s voice. Is it deep and sexy, squeaky and high, is it a friendly singsong or maybe it has an exotic accent and the way people use words paints a picture of who they might be.

Maybe my love for the phone is a little old fashioned and maybe it stems from a time when I thought it was the epitome of independence to have your own phone in your bedroom (Molly Rindwald has a lot to answer for). But I still think that knowing  someone is  only a phone-call away helps keep long distance friendships alive.

So what if being a phone lover is retro and having hot phone ears is a rare condition, I think I will keep the phone alive and make a few calls later. After all I haven’t spoken to my sister in a few days and maybe a friend has a solution to my problem. So instead of letting my fingers to the talking I will use my voice and stay a chatter box.

Don’t call me, I’ll call you