Osso Buco Milanese; warmer weather; more gigs

It was a pretty busy weekend... On Saturday morning we tidied up the house in preparation for dinner guests.  Raoul and Luisa live just a few steps away from our old house in Watermael, and we hadn't seen them since before Christmas.  They were happy to meet Yoshi, and Clyde; Bonnie is still pretty skittish around new people and so she didn't make an appearance.

The dinner started out with some Scottish smoked salmon and Boursin cheese, with capers and red onions, on my homemade Swedish multi-seed crispbread, or Knäckebröd.  These crackers are delicious but quite expensive in the store, and I decided to make some myself.  As it happens, the recipe is dead easy, and you can substitute whatever seeds or flour you happen to have on hand.  We have several friends who are sensitive to wheat flour, or who need low-glycemic-index snacks because of diabetes, so I usually make mine with rye or spelt flour.

Knackebrot (Swedish crackers)

Ingredients

• 220 g wholemeal flour (wheat, or spelt, or rye, or whatever you like)
• 220 g rolled oats
• 2 tsp salt
• 150 g sunflower seeds
• 75 g sesame seeds
• 75 g flax seeds, poppy seeds or chia seeds
• 40 g pumpkin seeds
• 700 ml water
• 2 Tbsp olive oil

Directions
Heat oven to 130C.  Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl and add the water and oil. Oil a very large oven tray or two smaller ones and pour the mixture onto the trays. It should be the consistency of porridge.  Spread it as thinly as possible (the thinner the better) and bake in the oven for 15 minutes.  Remove and cut into pieces as desired - either cracker size or larger rectangles. Put back in the oven and bake for one to two hours until they are golden and crisp.

In the morning I went to the halal butcher to get some veal shanks, and made osso buco.  I am completely in love with this recipe from Fine Cooking Magazine...

I've made it once before but had forgotten how truly outstanding it is.  Like many stews it starts with salting and peppering the meat, then dredging it in flour, and browning the pieces.  Then any leftover oil is discarded and some fresh oil and a little butter is added to the pan.  Then comes the standard battuto of onions, carrots, and celery; in French this is called a mirepois.  After this trinity of vegetables have been fried, they are called a soffrito.  I begin ragu alla bolognese or carbonade flamande in the same manner, but while for bolognese I add red wine to the soffritto, and for carbonade, dark Belgian beer, for the veal it's a dry white wine instead.

Another interesting trick that intensifies the flavour of a tomato-based sauce is to add the tomato concentrate to the soffritto before you add the wine.  Stir the tomato paste and fry it in the hot oil with the softened vegetables until it changes colour, before you add the wine and any additional tomatoes; it carmelises some of the sugars in the paste, and sweetens and deepens the flavour.

Maggie produced an amazing risotto alla Milanese using a chicken stock that I made the day before, and added some mushrooms, and I made a huge amount of sautéed rapini with garlic.  We finished up with vanilla ice cream and my olive oil brownies with flaky Maldon salt, made with our own olive oil from Tuscany.  It was a truly monumental meal, and warmed us all up on a chilly weekend.

I say that chilly, but that is by Belgian standards, and compared to Ontario it is warm, and there are already signs of spring here.  We received a number of plants as presents from Andrew and Julia as they moved back to Scotland, and they have wintered over outside without any problems.  This one is a type of hydrangea I think, and it is blooming on our front step!

As well the crocuses are coming out in the front garden, and the snowdrops are out on the back lawn.

Sunday morning we all trouped into church early.  I am part of the Vacancy committee at St. Andrew's, that has been tasked with finding a new minister.  One of the projects is to make a short video showing the members of the congregation, that can be shown to prospective candidates, and also might be appropriate to post on the church's website.  Our friend Marjan and I have been taking the lead on the video project, and we decided that it should be in the form of a documentary.  Her daughters and Duncan are to be the hosts/interviewers of members of the congregation, and so we needed to get to church early to get some establishing video, and also to carry out some interviews.  It all went quite well, and we will film again next Sunday.  I'll be sure to share the video with you when it's ready.

Yesterday was another busy day; it started with my fourth 8h30 physiotherapy session, which I am pleased to report is going very well.  I happened to meet Kiana in the lobby of the medical centre; she was there for a consultation, and we had a cup of coffee and caught up a little.  They are renovating their house, and making good progress.  Maggie is getting lots of ideas, and she has already warned me that she wants to get going on some of them next week while she has a week's holidays for Carnaval.

It was very sunny yesterday morning, and I was a day overdue for my run, so I took Yoshi out for a fast 8km.  Then I got cleaned up and warmed up my voice, and rode the train into Brussels to meet with David Miller, my coach, to sing through the Vaughan Williams dona nobis pacem prior to the big rehearsal on Thursday evening.  It really was only a half session with David, as I have only three short interjections to sing in the piece, but I have learned from past experience that for important, highly exposed singing it is really important to make sure that you have the harmonies solidly planted in your memory.  As well it's an important safety check to have external ears listen for anything weird in the intonation, diction, phrasing, and to make sure that you have the rhythms completely internalised.  Solos like this one, with such a high-profile group, in the BOZAR, don't come along every day, and it is very important that I make the most of this opportunity and do a very effective job.

After my coaching I met up with Roy Dickinson, a former choruster and amateur singer who works for the European Commission.  He founded an international choir at the Commission a couple of years ago, and has asked me to conduct a workshop for the choir, to give them some help with the basics of singing technique, diction, breathing, posture, etc. as well as some performance technique things like how to mark your scores, stage comportment, etc.  I wanted to have a little face-to-face meeting with Roy in advance of the workshop so that we could get to know each other.  All went well, and it looks like that workshop will happen on March 3rd, a Sunday afternoon.

I seem to have been pretty lucky recently to have a number of things come to me this season; along with the choral workshop, I also wrote last blog post about a Matthäuspassion... I replied to the conductor but haven't yet heard back from him with all the details.  I do hope that is confirmed soon...

I also had another lead bear some fruit recently.  Back in 2015 I had a long trip to Canada, to perform and to audition, and part of my itinerary included visiting Bruce in Quebec City, where he was singing in Tosca.  I took a detour to Montreal to visit Penni Clarke, shortly after she and Damien moved the family there, leaving Brussels.  While visiting Penni I auditioned for Marc David, who conducts several orchestras, including the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra.  At the time he suggested we do a Messiah together in St. John's, but it never panned out.  There were issues with the singing agency, and in the end there was no need for my services as a bass soloist that year.

However this past September I happened across a video clip of Marc conducting something, and sent him a quick note of congratulations.  I heard nothing back from him at the time, but then on Sunday evening I received an email offering me Messiah in early December 2019.  That's great news, as I love Newfoundland, and have never sung there.  I am hoping to couple those performances with something else; there is an annual Messiah that my friend Donald Fraser conducts in Charlottetown, so that's a possibility, and of course there are other productions in Ontario around that time as well.  I currently have a Christmas Oratorio on December 22nd here in Brussels, so probably would want to come back for that, unless something really big came in that would keep me in Canada and require that I withdraw from the Brussels concert.

I see outside that it's sunny again, so I am going to get the kitchen cleaned up, call the insurance company about some minor car repairs, take the dog for a walk, and do some more singing!