crack crack

Boil water. Put a good amount of basil seeds and goji berries in a bowl. A handful should be fine – my handful that is. When water’s boiled, pour a sufficient amount to cover the basil seeds and goji berries in that bowl, and a bit more.

In the meanwhile, get greek yogurt out of the fridge, wash fruit and cut fruit to bite-sized cubes. Apple, Pear, Watermelon, Mandarins or Navel Oranges, Strawberries, Cherries. Tear some mint or basil leaves and slice finely.

By this time the basil seeds should be of jelly-like consistency, and the goji berries soft. Put the fruit cubes and the sliced leaves into the bowl. Put enough spoonfuls of yogurt into the mix. Add enough drops of honey. Top with nutty sprinkles if you will. Mix.

Take this not more than 15 minutes after swimming, and make your body happy.

Twisted, I forgot to twist the cap of my water bottle off today. And there it was, my bag, acting as a temporary swimming pool for my Istanbul notebook, my reusable shopping bag, my keys, my wallet and my phone.

The Istanbul notebook is a collection of pulp now, between the dryness of the pages it shows Rorschach, pink post-it notes leaving their pink-ish traces, square-ish, corner-ish, the notebook has exploded:
Butterflies.
Butterflies.
A silhouette of a man and his shadow.
A silhouette of an older man.
Elaborate wine glasses.
Elaborate vases. One a mirror image of the other.
Mountains mirrored on the lake’s surface.
Is my imagination really that limited? Or is my Id blocked?

My phone was something else. I told it to go to menu and it says “l”, “ljkl”, I hit delete and it says “ljkljkljkl”. Dear Keypad, you don’t really have to stick together, I know it’s a wide wild world out there but you’re not really out there. I thought of my earlier thoughts this week of getting an iPhone instead. No. I’m on a budget. So I turned on my heater, and put a layer of paper on top of it, stripped the phone off its SIM card and battery, and cooked it.

Rice, Sab kindly tipped, will take care of it. Lucky I still had a bag of it in the kitchen. I sunk my phone in the pile of rice, and waited for several hours. No cooking. It worked. My keypad wasn’t afraid anymore. No ljkl anymore.

And that’s the moral of the story: next time anything is wet, just put it in a bag of rice and let it sink for several hours. It’ll take care of it. Nothing fancy – just old Saudi wisdom.

Boil some water. Put three dried shitake mushrooms in. Measure a plateful of shell pasta – I’m using Lumache 50. Put in pasta when water boils. In the meanwhile, take dried roasted ebi and dried wakame out of the cupboard. Take these out of the fridge: capers, spring onion. Wash spring onion, don’t cut. Take leftover red wine out of the fridge – I’m using Shiraz Merlot.

When pasta boils, pour water out. Get shitake mushrooms out. Leave the pasta in the pan, put back on the burner, and pour a bit of olive oil. Cut little pieces of spring onion with scissors into the pan. Stir-fry pasta and spring onion for a bit before pouring in a good deal of, but not excessive, red wine. Let stir-fried pasta boil in very shallow red wine. The pasta will eventually become brownish.

Quickly take a bit of dried wakame and break it to little pieces into the pan. The idea is to get the wine wet them. Go back to the shitake mushrooms. Cut them small with scissors. The idea is to get all these ingredients into small pieces so that they could be incidentally and randomly contained within the hole of the shell pasta. Put the cut pieces of shitake mushrooms back in the pan. Stir.

Put a teaspoonful of capers in, casually including the water in the spoon, as you would do anyway. Stir again. When ready, put dried ebi. Stir for the last time, put a bit of salt, two pinches of ground black pepper.

Serve.

Make spaghetti. For sauce, melt butter in frying pan, put in garlic and onion until golden brown, mix in chopped tomato, cubed broccoli stem, chopped champignon, a bit of cream cheese, a bit of white wine, a bit of nutmeg, a bit of basil leaves, a bit of crushed cashew, and a pinch of salt. Mix all. Cover for a while with low heat. When spaghetti’s finished, mix together, and serve. Yum.

Dessert is avocado, sprinkled with caster sugar.

This one is even quicker than quickie.

Put plain rice crackers on a plate. Put shredded parmesan cheese on top of them. Microwave on high for 1 minute. Tada. Add pepper to taste. Caper and eat with caper.

This is usually ready in 20 minutes.

Put rice in a pot, with enough water. You can measure how much water is enough by putting your index finger on top of the rice (pointing to the rice). The water should reach one digit of your index finger. Bring to boil (set your alarm to 5 minutes).

Cut garlic and broccoli while heating the wok with a bit of oil. After putting garlic and broccoli into the wok, cut shallot and champignons, put them aside, and sprinkle some salt into the wok. Stir garlic and broccoli in the wok. Take ground meat out of the fridge.

When alarm goes off, the water in the rice pot should have been boiling. Cover the rice pot, turn heat to small, and set alarm for 15 minutes.

When the garlic’s a bit brown, put the ground meat into the wok. Mix. Add a bit salt again, a bit of sugar, a bit of cinnamon, a bit of ground nutmeg, stir and cover.

Whistle.

Open cover, taste. The longer you cover, the nicer the taste. If it doesn’t taste nice, put some more of salt/sugar/cinnamon. Ground nutmeg perhaps, but not always. Stir and cover.

Sing, “A, lice, in Won, derland. How, do you go, to Won, derland. Tah, dadah dah, tah dah, tah dah, tah dah, tah dah, tah dah.”

Pee quickly.

Look at the alarm – when it’s approaching the 10th minute, open cover, put in champignons. Stir, cover a bit. Open cover, put in shallots. Sprinkle some pepper. Stir, cover.

Turn heat under wok to small. Prepare table.

Sing, “Aaaaa, happy merry unbirthday, to me, (to you?) to me, (to you?) a happy merry unbirthday, to me (to who?), to me (to you!).” Better do this while preparing the table.

Alarm goes off again. Turn fire under rice pot to ‘biggest’ and wait a bit, then turn off. Rice is fluffily ready. Turn off heat for the wok.

Eat.

*

Next, cheese fondue. I love cheese fondue.

Whole-kernel corn grated from cob, broccoli cut to small pieces, green bell pepper cut to small squares, baby spinach leaves, spring onion, grated pickled garlic, mixed together with a sauce of wholegrain mustard, kewpie mayonnaise, rice vinegar, salt and pepper, sugar, and sesame oil, sprinkled with cut nori on top.

Wholemeal bread, toasted, with pool of melted salted butter and excessive honey on top.

Today’s menu, my first chicken cooking ever:

Fry garlic and onion in canola oil until brownish, put in chicken cut in small cubes, add salt, black pepper, throw in sliced champignon, then add sweet soy sauce to taste. Pour that over (cooked) jasmine rice, add some chicken broth (with onion, salt, a hint of sugar, black pepper, and a bit of sesame oil) onto rice; and several small cubes of fresh tomato on top. Eat.

Nyum. I found out that slicing chicken meat is not much different from slicing raw salmon. Except that sometimes I would have to bone the salmon as well for raw meals. Somehow, the fact that the chicken was filleted and in a box made it feel unreal to the point that it didn’t feel like meat.

I thought of Margaret’s easter tradition – and that she said many of her friends would usually only come to her easter location (I imagined a rocky hill or piece of land – from what she told us) for the eating part, avoiding killing-the-goat-by-slicing-its-neck part.

I suppose it’s a reality that we now live in unreality.