Shrimp and Leek Pasta

Last weeks Monday lunch, I think. It was utterly delicious, and is really easy to make.
Just fry some finely cut leek in olive oil, add garlic, parsley, oregano, basil leaves, and what ever other herbs you desire, and then put in the shrimps together with pasta of your choice (I used rests of fusilli and penne as you can see). Makes a perfect, light spring lunch. Enjoy!

Now I don’t want this blog to become exclusively focussed on cooking and baking, but Easter (with its family reunions, and more free time at hand due to the holiday etc.) is another fantastic opportunity to try new recipes and record the efforts, so there might just be a few other food-related posts in the waiting line. I'll think of other things too, though.

Good times are coming up.

How Meta-

Probably my favourite frame from Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book.

This is how food works.

Blue Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
Ever since I came across a picture of a gorgeous version of this cake on tumblr, I’d wanted to try it out myself. Luckily an opportunity presented itself soon in the form of Lisa’s birthday last week. Unfortunately mine turned out a bit greener than the “original” but it was great nevertheless. Cream cheese frosting is officially the best edible, sweet thing in the entire world.

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Single¹ Girl’s Broccoli Quiche
Yesterday, I made my first quiche from scratch. I stumbled across the recipe, and because I wasn't in the mood for any meal based on any of the basic starch categories (rice, pasta or potatoes), I decided to give it a shot. Here’s the list of ingredients my recipe suggested:

dough
100 g flour
50 g cold butter
salt

‘topping’
a handful of broccoli florets
2 eggs
4 table spoons crème fraiche
2 table spoons grated cheese
salt & pepper

I made some minor changes to the recipe, using cream cheese and some extra milk instead of the crème fraiche, and using just one egg but a bit more of the grated cheese (gouda) than stated, and also adding some diced bacon. And thyme for seasoning.
Broccoli are cooked (or steamed), and salted, bacon is briefly fried in a pan. Then, after letting them cool a bit, they are simply stirred together with the other ingredients. For the dough, just knead flour, salt and butter together (it takes a while till it sticks) and spread it in a round pan.

The topping turned out really delicous, but I wasn’t at all content with the dough. I don’t know what went wrong - if it was simply not finished, or if I had somehow messed up the flour/butter ratio - but it tasted like greasy sand, and I ended up crumbling most of it off the quiche before eating it. I must work on perfecting this, as well as either use a smaller pan next time, or make a bigger amount, otherwise it turns out too thin. Apart from that, it’s a great and very simple addition to my food catalogue. Voilà!

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¹ I’m not really single, but for all practical purposes (like eating) rendered so by long-distance-relationshipping.

Spring has sprung (and so have I)!

Mid-flight is a good place to be.

Autobiographical Blogging = Boring!

Spring is here!, as exemplified formally and symbolically by this lamb.

Warm temperatures (15°C) coincide with an immediate lift in spirits, and positive outlook on life, even though not everything is ideal:

-

1. I have read far too little, in other words nothing by Jorge Luis Borges.
2. The Ekphrasis lecture I decided to do this semester is a huge disappointment and seems to be little more than an highschool English class with semiotic leanings. Why???
3. I keep putting things into food that I know I don’t actually want, for reasons I don’t fully grasp. (I think convention and optics usually play a certain role.) Yet I always end up picking red bell peppers or cherry tomatoes out of my meals, and simultaneously wasting ressources and somehow ruining it for myself. I must work on this.
4. Max is going to be out for dinner and all eternity today and that means I cannot annoy him with theoretical discos.
5. I’m out of unseen or forgotten Heroes episodes.

On the other hand:

+

1. I had pasta salad with avocado and shrimps, and the need for minor adjustments concerning garlic quantity and cherry tomato presence taken into account, this could be the stuff that dreams are made of!
2. I’m beginning to enjoy the Postmodernism Reader now that it’s started to deal with literature, and am actually getting a hang of the whole self-guided library study/research thing.
3. Rising early (before the alarm rings, woken merely by the sun and the ticking clock) turns me into a purposeful and functioning human being. Which is a nice change.
4. I’ve almost finished spring-cleaning the flat. It’s gonna be like new and the prospect of a weekend with room temperature outdoors makes my heart sing.
5. Love song posters - please ignore that it starts with U2. The idea is charming. Maps is my favourite.

Life’s a thrill, now that you made me ill!

Race Horses are my new favourite band of sorts. As you know, in the postmodern age, the concept of originality is outdated anyway, so it doesn't matter that they sound, at times, exactly like Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci (Euros Childs produced their album, and especially the slow ballads are very much in the same vein as Gorky’s) and at time exactly like ultra-early Libertines (think Legs 11, my long time favourite, which features someone other than Carl or Pete singing, and embodies the sort of prelapsarian innocence of the fictional time before everything went pear-shaped). Also, I’ve always said that if that which you copy is nice, and if you manage to invest it with some new energy and spirit, then please go ahead. And please, by all means use lyrics like “I wanna be your pony/ I wanna be your one and only” and “She wanted cake! She wanted cake! She wanted ca-ake!”, as well as those in the beautiful Welsh language. Because that’s all superb, you know. It’s also highly recommendable to feature a picture of a king fisher on your album artwork, thuswise:

Not only are Race Horses musically brill, they also have the acest bowl cuts since Leisure-era Blur, which you can view in the following video, to one of my favourite songs from their current album ‘Goodbye Falkenberg’, here, now, and lovelily. It’s about the man with the power (!). Go!

The Postmodern Condition.

“Once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about fiction - and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction. And we know that metafiction is about the impossibility of anything being about life, really, or even about fiction, or, finally, about anything. Criticism has taken the very idea of ‘aboutness’ away from us. It has taught us that language is tautological, if it is not nonsense, and to the extent that it is about anything it is about itself. Mathematics is about mathematics, poetry is about poetry and criticism is about the impossibility of its own existence.” (Robert Scholes, 1975)

Psycho Killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?

A random number of images (What I want but cannot afford, and other similar categories. You may guess which are which.)