My first post of the new year....
We are now more than halfway through the first week following the return to school for Maggie and Malcolm and Duncan. It’s been great to have some quiet time around the house to get some things done here… as I’ve written before I love spending time with loved ones but it’s very hard to focus on anything else when they are around, and there are many things to do to keep the career ball rolling…
We had a lot of happy times together over the Christmas holidays, with a ton of socialising, catching up with many of our international friends here in Brussels. On December 23rd the tree that Malcolm and I were pictured carrying home in my last blog post was put up, and our English friends Craig and Deborah came over for homemade eggnog, a curry dinner and an evening of tree decorating, followed by a game of Settlers of Catan. If you’ve never played this amazing strategy game I would encourage you to do so. Unlike Monopoly, where it’s clear early on who is winning, making the rest of the game a slow, humiliating, and frustrating rearguard action for the other players, in Settlers of Catan it’s anyone’s game right up until the very end. Even if one doesn’t win it’s still satisfying, because unlike Monopoly, or Risk, one doesn’t win by destroying opponents, but rather by a combination of positive actions. The base game can be played by 2-4 players but you can double up into teams if you have more players, or you can buy extension sets that allow up to six players.
Here are some photos of a few Christmas decorations:
Here are some photos of a few Christmas decorations:
a creature from Breughel's painting "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" (1562)
given to Maggie by a student
given to Maggie by a student
souvenir of the Düsseldorf Christmas market
and my first complete Weihnachts-Oratorium in NL
and my first complete Weihnachts-Oratorium in NL
the TARDIS of Doctor Who
a Delft angel, souvenir of my Christmas 2013 debut
with De Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam
Tronna!
Our current home
A Doctor Who Dalek
The completed tree
On Christmas Eve we had a lovely souper with our friends Gediminas, Rasa, Simonas and also Austeja (who was visiting from Paris) with many traditional dishes from Lithuania. They even gave me a cookbook by a famous chef and author friend of theirs, so I have a vision of some Samogitian specialities in my future…
In the later evening we went to our Canadian/Portuguese friends Raoul and Luisa a few doors down for their Christmas Eve dinner… roast pea-hen and truffled scalloped potatoes, scampi, and lots of other wonderful dishes.
with Luisa and Raoul on Christmas Eve
Christmas Day was quiet; we didn’t go out, but had our Scottish friends the Gardners in for a cup of coffee, and then did some facetime conferences and telephone calls with family in Canada to wish them a Merry Christmas, too. We also played Catan again, read our Christmas books, and listened to and danced to some records, including the Village People's "YMCA" on 45 rpm vinyl...
prepping the bird
my goose is cooked
On Boxing Day Malcolm and I went back to Gediminas and Rasa’s house for the afternoon, first for the fathers to go for a short run (to work off some of the Christmas food) while Malcolm and Simonas warmed up and played for an hour or so, and then we had some liquid refreshment and then joined them for a jam session. I was really quite nervous about starting up running again since my ankle stress fracture in late September, but fortunately we managed to do a gentle 2.5km at a 6-minute pace without incident, so I am optimistic for my running chances in 2017.
Then it was a quiet couple of days before the Gardners had their early New Year party. I helped out with mixing the martinis and I think that I have managed to bring a few people over to my way of thinking on this important topic… My martini recipe is a bit old-fashioned (pardon the pun) but I think it has a reliable historical basis, and more importantly tastes good.
A few words on martinis… frequently, discussion about martinis centres around the meaning of the term “dry”. This word has two possible senses here: dry can refer to the proportions of vermouth, with a dry martini containing less vermouth relative to gin, and a wet martini containing more. (You’ll notice that I don’t say anything here about vodka: that’s because if it doesn’t have gin in it, it’s not a martini, period. Go drink a cosmopolitan or a moscow mule instead.)
The second sense of the word applies to the type of vermouth used; French vermouth like the famous white Noilly-Prat (my personal favourite) is “dry” while Italian vermouths are usually sweet. Keep in mind that while sweet vermouths were historically red, Cinzano, and Martini & Rossi do make a sweet white vermouth (Cinzano Bianco is Maggie’s favourite).
For those fundamentalists out there, keep in mind that the oldest surviving recipe for Martinis (from 1888) indicates a sweeter-tasting drink, using not only equal parts gin and sweet vermouth (45 ml each) but also 2 dashes of simple syrup, 2 dashes of bitters, and a dash of orange curaçao (Grand Marnier). Try that one on for size! My recipe is simpler than that, and is tuned to drier modern palates:
*variation: Maggie prefers a sweet martini with the same proportions, but made with Cinzano bianco sweet vermouth instead of dry, garnished with a slice of lemon peel.
Sufficient stirring is something many people neglect, and it’s one reason their martinis aren’t to my taste. The martini tastes so good because of the marriage of botanical elements in the gin and vermouth; without sufficient stirring, these elements aren’t properly mingled. As well, stirring for 30+ seconds allows for more complete chilling of the drink, and allows for just a little bit of meltwater to be released from the ice, which means that one will taste more than just alcohol. The same is also true for adding the olive, or a few grains of salt; these act as flavour intensifiers.
More information on the history of martinis can be found here:
sabreing open champagne on NYE
aftermath of the fireworks
We had a quiet couple of days at home after the Gardner’s party, before heading to our American friends’ home in Bousval for their NYE celebration, which involved carbonnades, frites and salad, the sabreing open of many champagne bottles, fireworks and more musical jam sessions.
Malcolm playing bass guitar with Kenzo
The next morning we all had a nice breakfast and then set out for a trek in the forest, with a contingent of runners and another of walkers, making a tour of about 7km. A high point was the visit to the exotic animal sanctuary on the route, which includes a pack of grey wolves, a pack of white wolves, and a couple of tigers. Very impressive! We were lucky to even had a little bit on snow, enough for the kids to do a little bit of sledding on the hill behind the house.
As Christmas Day fell on a Sunday this year we had what felt like an extra-long school holiday, and had a pretty lazy first week of the year, and pretty much kept to ourselves.
On Thursday we went to the home of our English/Belgian friends Simon and Marjan, and said hello to the family's two kittens...
everything is better with kittens
The Gardners were also invited, as were our new American friends Daniel and Katy and their four children, and we all drove to the the nature reserve of the Doode Beemden between Brussels and Leuven for a nice long walk. This is really quite a beautiful place, and there are many observation places to view wildlife, particularly migratory birds.
Afterwards we warmed up in the kitchen with Glühwein and tea and soup, and a nice meal next to the fireplace, followed by an impromptu sing-along, with Malcolm on guitar and Marjan at the piano.
I'm very happy to report that Maggie made ginger marmalade and orange marmalade this past week. I found a couple of antique copper jam pans at the Troc a few weeks ago, and have been itching to use them; Maggie had a big can of already prepared orange peel sitting in the pantry, and I forced the issue by coming home with two kilogrammes of ginger root. Maggie peeled about half of it and decided to have a go using the Joy of Cooking recipe for making stem ginger.
first boiling of the julienned ginger root
This requires some patience; while not particularly difficult, it involves four stages of boiling and cooling the julienned ginger in sugar and water, spread over four days. But in the end you have a wonderful preserved ginger in syrup, which can then be used with boiling water as a base for a delicious warming drink, mixed in with your morning oatmeal, or boiled up with pectin and more sugar to make ginger marmalade.
We made half of the ginger into marmalade, and today the second half is in the process of being made into candied stem ginger slices for use in baking or as snacks. I don’t think we’ll buy candied ginger again; I think the 2kg of ginger root cost me something like 2,39 EUR. Add the sugar and pectin and fuel cost for the boiling and you’ll still be well ahead of the commercially prepared stuff.
orange marmalade
Other cooking fun involved breakfast... I'm particularly proud of Maggie's successful double boiler hollandaise sauce from this past weekend... with smoked salmon and poached eggs, homemade bread (hers, from Edna Staebler's Food That Really Schmecks Mennonite cookbook) and oven broiled cherry tomatoes and salad it was fantastic.
This week I picked up my new Canadian passport. It’s the big ten-year one so I hope to get onto filling it with stamps shortly; I’m in the process now of planning my next visit abroad, to Canada in mid-February to sing in Toronto, and then afterwards to audition in Western Canada. It promises to be a whirlwind of travel and auditions, but that’s something that is unavoidable in this profession…
That’s about it… I’m going to warm up and sing through the Bach Cantata that I will perform at the end of this month, and have a look at the Rossini Petite Messe Solennelle that I perform in Canada on the 19th February. Then it’s to the clinic, as I finally have an MRI this afternoon just to confirm that my ankle is ok for longer runs. I haven’t done much more than 5 km since resuming on boxing day, and there’s no pain yet, but I want to make sure.
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