Ahh winter

There was a massive winter storm in Minnesota this week, and people are just starting to dig out. Funny that, it makes me nostalgic. I don’t miss the realities of Minnesota winters, but I do miss the romance! I lived most of my pre-England life in really snowy places (Minnesota and Michigan) and when the Christmas songs start playing, I start dreaming of a white Christmas. Even though I am almost never in a white Christmas kind of place these days. Last year in Australia I was definitely not in that place, and I quite enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of being in a sunny clime over the holidays. And seeing a gigantic Christmas Pelican with presents in its beak. And eating Christmas dinner outside by the pool, with freshly grilled fish as the centerpiece.

Now I’m heading for Florida, and I’m guessing there will not be a white Christmas there. I don’t miss the realities of it all, and I quite like that my window is open to air out my flat here in England where it’s been quite temperate. But Christmas really is the season of nostalgia, isn’t it? Dreaming of idyllic childhood holidays and happy times. Bing Crosby dreams and all of that. For this, I think the most appropriate thing I could say is in the lyrics of the Tori Amos song ‘Winter’ which was also my ex-husband’s favorite song of this season. He loved the part about putting hands into the father’s glove. I love this part:

When you gonna make up your mind

When you gonna love you as much as I do

When you gonna make up your mind

Cause things are gonna change so fast

Things do change, so fast. When I was with the ex whose song this was, I had never been to Europe. I’ve now been living in the UK for nearly 10% of my life, which is a scary thing to contemplate. And I’m relatively settled, I have plans for the future and they don’t involve much but continuing on with my current plans and existence. I will have to deal with an application for residency in the next 1.5 years, and I will have to continue to work hard and live up to my foreigner status as a net contributor to the UK economy.

But I’m sure I’ll always feel nostalgic for snow at this time of year, even when I know that a storm such as the one that hit Minnesota would bring my life here to a standstill. I don’t miss owning a house in Minnesota. I don’t miss shoveling the driveway. I don’t miss worrying about parking when Snow Emergencies are declared. What I do miss is the beauty of the snow, the break in time that takes place when things shut down because the weather really is that bad. So I guess I have to learn here in the UK to take a break and enjoy life, Christmas, and the whole thing.

This year’s party effort

Following up on the success of last year’s Christmas party for my group from work, I did it again. A few things were different. First, the gauntlet had been laid down over the bake-off, so as you saw earlier this week I made Krumkake. Let’s just say they were a hit. I have 9 cookies remaining, after having made literally dozens. Given the fact that there were 10 people at this little soiree, and I did not have any once I started seeing how popular they were, I think the team averaged 4-5 eaten cookies each! Second, I also cooked something hot in addition to providing cheese and crackers (all American ones, Triscuits, Club and Saltines, from my cracker bounty!) and nibblies. When I was in the US last summer with one of my colleagues, she had remarked after several different hot dips at restaurants that she loved them and did not remember having seen them on British menus nearly as often as they appeared in American restaurants. So I made (what I thought was) an enormous vat of crab and artichoke dip (think three packages of cream cheese and four containers of crab meat to get the scope of the scale of this thing) and I swear they left nothing behind, the entire thing went–and quickly! Finally, in addition to my contribution to the bake-off, one of the temporary visitors to the group offered to make and bring a Tiramisu. We nearly polished that off too. (I swear, I am am not a slave driver and I have no idea why they were all so hungry!) The best, though, was when people discovered that the hollow centers of the Krumkake were the perfect place to put the Tiramisu. Like me, my team is largely made up of expats and so clearly this sort of fusion had broad appeal!

Photos of the before and after:

(The dip was not out of the oven, nor had the Tiramisu arrived yet).

The Christmas miracle was that I ended up with more and better wine than I started with. Aside from a few generous creatures bringing a bottle each, one of the gang found an import wine merchant that had oaky Californian Chardonnay and brought me 6 bottles! Enjoying a lovely glass now… Happy Friday Night!

Krumkake and on being Norwegian

I have mentioned before that my grandmothers were both first generation American-born, one was Dutch and the other Norwegian. As a result, I had the opportunity to grow up in America but in a family in which European languages were spoken and in which European holiday foods were the norm. I have a very special cookbook that was a gift at the time of my marriage in the 90s, and which is a photo album with recipe cards in which many family recipes were captured in the handwriting of my beloved grandmothers.

Christmas was always the dominant season for being linked back to the mother-land, and my Norwegian grandmother still makes a great bounty of old-world treats for the holiday season. When I first got divorced (although I don’t know why I waited that long) I bought a krumkake baker, the implement required to make the classic Scandinavian Christmas cookie in our household. And yes, these are cookies cooked lovingly one (or two) at a time in a waffle-iron-like device, and not baked in an oven. There are two sorts commercially available (at least in the American midwest, where the Norse expat community dominates proceedings), the traditional stove-top model:

or the more modern electric, non-stick variety:

Admittedly my grandmother has gone over to the non-stick electric model with the dual cookie process, but when I bought mine, I was feeling nostalgic for my childhood and I got the stove-top single-cookie model. And it sat in the box for many, many years. Eight-ish. As is made clear by the fact that I got divorced in 2001 and I have just used the thing for the first time.

I am having a holiday party for my team, and as part of our recent bake-off, I promised them Norwegian Christmas cookies. So on the weekend, I broke down and opened this krumkake baker box for the first time. This particularly well-travelled krumkake iron (MN to VA to MN to England) now had the chance to spring into action. I checked in my recipe book, and found to my shock and horror that I had not a single family krumkake recipe in the archives. Picked up my iPhone and called Grandma, who was busy playing Scrabble with one of my cousins, but indulged me in taking a quick break to reveal the family recipe. Which was nothing like the recipe in the krumkake baker package, nor the recipe on Scandinavia.about.com. Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks the classics are readily available on the internet!

A grave concern of mine was that I would not have a proper wooden roller for making the cookies, which cook flat, into cone shapes. I searched my English town, bought a thin wooden rolling pin at John Lewis, only to discover when I finally opened the krumkake baker packaging that the roller was included. Whoops.

I ’seasoned’ the baker on Saturday, by cooking it with vegetable fat to make the surfaces non-sticky. And last night I broke down and made krumkake. The most challenging aspect of the ingredients list was cardamom. Cardamom is one of the key ingredients in Indian cooking, being a crucial component of Garam Masala seasoning, but also is the critical element in Norwegian baked goods. And I have no idea why! I was able to find cardamom in pods, but not ground, in my local grocery store, so I had to shell and grind it myself:

I did not add nearly enough, in the end, and now I know this for future attempts at krumkake. But overall, the process worked remarkably well, especially for someone who was channelling her childhood as concerns when to flip the krumkake maker over the heat. The first try along with a later attempt:

And the eventual successes, looking and tasting like actual krumkake even though I can clearly see now that this is best a two-person process:

Lessons learned: I should not have waited so many years to do this, it was remarkably cathartic to try something from my childhood as a 30-something. I only had to make minor adjustments to deal with a British stove and burner size. The results are totally worth standing at the stove for two hours. But I need to up the cardamom levels.

My slightly unusual T-day

I have quite a few, perhaps too many, good American friends in the UK. But the sad fact is that it was impossible for me to participate in any traditional Tofurkey day rituals. There are many reasons for this. One of my good American friends is back home in America for the week, for obvious reasons. Two of my good friends have babies less than six months old. Another (Kat from 3bedroombungalow) was celebrating, but inconveniently located over 20 miles away and NOT on a major train line. My living in an urban center and having no car makes this a bit tricky. Especially since I had to work straight through until after 5 pm, so no big ‘dinner at 2 and the Lions on television kind of day’.

So my T-day feast ended up looking more like the meal Peppermint Patty shuns in the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. (And props to fellow expat rheaj for Twittering the YouTube link for the Charlie Brown special, made my expat holiday.) I had a team meeting this afternoon. My team is a bit of a mini-United Nations and we’ve been having a bake-off. Today was Italy’s turn to provide treats, which meant amazing hard cheese with crackers, and some positively sinful bite-sized chocolate treats made with ricotta cheese and coconut. So my big T-day meal was Italian snacks around a table with my team, while I spoke on using web 2.0 features for engineering, including using blogging software to make simple websites and Twitter to gather technical information.

After that I went to the gym (which was open, since no one here seems to think it’s a holiday!) and grabbed a bite on the way home. I know I’ve ranted about sandwiches before, but this is different: no soggy factor since it’s made fresh to spec, and frankly something American seemed appropriate for the day. A subway veggie patty (toasted) sub:

Happy Tofurkey day to expats and natives, where ever you are. And if you have kids in the car, I hope they sing a rousing chorus of “Over the river and through the woods” which we definitely always sang en route to Grandma’s house. Happy memories of Thanksgiving from when I was a kid. This one will perhaps be memorable in a different way.

Thanksgiving

This week Americans will mark Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving. I love it for many reasons. I love that it is a celebration, a big family holiday that involves a feast with no religious overtones. I think there should be more of these. Gatherings of friends. Opportunities to meet around a dinner table. Groups of people, larger than you would normally have at a dinner party if it wasn’t a holiday. I live in a tiny one-BR flat in the UK, so I’m a bit paralyzed when it comes to hosting a big T-day dinner. (Where T in my world stands for Tofurky, not turkey. Yeah, that does interfere with the whole turkey day thing a bit.)

I’ve had various experiences as an expat in the UK. It turns out that the English are actually reasonably pro-Thanksgiving. There’s a T-day service at St. Paul’s in London. I’d go, but it would interfere with the other things I have to do that day, sadly.

It’s funny, how the American holidays take on new meaning when you’re not in America anymore. At this precise moment, I’d give anything for green bean casserole. Brits may think it’s disgusting, but I’d take some if it was offered to me. I’d give my right arm at the this time for a vegetable casserole based on Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup and French’s fried onions. I know it’s not logical to like these things, it’s like how I love Velveeta and Cheez-its. It’s not rational. It’s tradition. (Cue the guy from Fiddler on the Roof singing.) I’m unabashedly American and my life is complicated. And I miss American holiday food.

On crackers

The word ‘crackers’ means different things in the US and the UK. In the US, it’s my favorite snack food, much better than potato chips (crisps) and often either cheese flavored or used as vehicles for cheese or other nice savory foods. Here in the UK this meaning is mostly the word I find confusing, ‘biscuits’ which can can be either like crackers or can be sweet and essentially like cookies. I am well-known on this blog for being obsessed with the American crackers called Cheez-its, which are my favorite snack food ever. They are amazing on their own, or are even better in a double-cheese configuration when dipped in cream cheese. This was the subject of my recent shock contest win from another blogger in the US, where I won a box of boxes of crackers mailed to me. The resulting bounty of snack foods are pictured here:

Yum. I’ll be busy for a few weeks with these, although as they arrived more than a week ago, I am already down one box of Wheat Thins and one of Cheez-its. Crackers don’t last long in my carb-craving household.

But as I was walking home from work today, I saw the seasonal British crackers in a shop window. I actually experienced this for the first time in Australia last Christmas, and there are pictures of me wearing a paper crown hat. Thank goodness for semi-anonymous blogs, as I have the perfect excuse not to post the image. But you can get the idea at the ‘Christmas Cracker Shop’ website. I looked downright silly. I can see how this is one of those holiday traditions that one retains from childhood, and I thank my Aussie friends for sharing their tradition with me last holiday season. Maybe I’ll even buy some this year to acknowledge my increasing adaptation to my adopted country. But on the balance, I think I prefer Cheez-its. And thank goodness I have another box yet to go.

I love Paris in the Fall

I have returned from my third ever weekend trip to Paris, all of which have taken place in either October or November. Just the way things have been. I would like to go in the springtime, but so far it just hasn’t happened.

But ah, Paris. What a great place to spend a weekend. First of all, you can take the Eurostar from London, and there’s nothing better about living in England than being able to take a train to France. Especially given how painful flying has become. And how much I have no choice but to fly to places like America and Australia for which trains aren’t an option. But the best thing about Paris isn’t Paris per se. One of my good friends lives there. My only expat friend who I knew back in the states. We moved abroad about 18 months apart, first me to England, then her to Paris. And in both cases, we were doing something that seems relatively unusual in the expat community: we moved as single women, solely for the purpose of jobs. We weren’t going to meet up with British men and live happily ever after. We weren’t moving with American partners to keep us company abroad. We are both living in 1BR apartments alone, working too much, and experiencing a slightly different sort of expat life.

I arrived at her metro stop in the 16e at 6 pm Friday, and we stayed up until 6 am talking. We did stop off at the Halloween party at the Australian embassy, but we only stayed for two drinks and then went to find food. The Aussies were only offering up sausages, and neither of us eat sausages (I’m a pescetarian and she’s a Muslim). So no go on the sausages. We ended up at an Italian place run by a Sri Lankan in St. Michel. And then back to her house for wine and gossip.

Saturday we rolled out of bed at about noon and got ready for ahem brunch, which ended up being coffee and omelets at a cafe at about 3 pm. We wandered through the Jardin des Tuileries, which was full of fall colors and I was a sleep-deprived idiot who had left my camera back at the apartment. Next we were off to the Louvre, where instead of going to the museum, we went to the museum shop and the other shops in the adjacent mall. This is part of our typical style; when she came to visit me in England, we got as far as Pizza Express and John Lewis. The point of these weekends is for us to talk, not for us to be tourists. Saturday night we walked up the steps at Sacre Coeur and then sampled some food and drink on the way back down. Again back to her place for more wine and gabbing. Again past 6 am. We really outdid ourselves this trip, 5 am had been our previous record.

After sleeping in again, Sunday noonish we did exactly what we had done the last time I was in Paris, and ran out to the market in Passy for fresh bread and cheese for brunch. I had to take the train out at 5 something, so it was one last trip on the metro before checking in for the Eurostar.

It was an amazing weekend for many reasons. We had so much fun talking about our expat existence. It was great for me to see and discuss with her the pros and cons of our very simple apartments. While she has a shower, I have an oven. She’s just in the process of getting a toaster oven-like thing that apparently is about the best that can be done in her kitchen. We both have washers but not driers, and we discussed the fact that after some time abroad, we are nesting and buying nice things to make our homes feel more like home. We’ve both been buying artwork. But the basics of the expat life are the same. We have to both do our jobs and enjoy our surroundings. As she said, “I may have to pick up my dry cleaning today, but I get to pick up my dry cleaning IN PARIS!” It was a good reminder of the things that expat life can hold. Admittedly she has it spectacularly well, her office has a picture window looking out on la Tour Eiffel.

The other funny thing that happened, and that was a big difference from my last visit to Paris a year ago, is that her French has become really proficient. Whereas last time we were two clearly American girls in Paris, this time she was a local. Her confidence had increased to the point that she spoke en Francais all the time, and even asked to speak in French when waiters or store clerks did switch over to English after hearing us chatting. She kept doing the “J’habite ici” thing, which then had a funny side-effect. I started listening to the French, and suddenly a few years worth of high school French kicked in. I really did not realize how much I had picked up, and never used, after so many years away. I laughed at a waiter’s joke without thinking. I chimed in with “moi aussi” (me too) at one point. Baby steps, for certain. But really, really fun. So I have a new expat life resolution: to start working on my French, so that the next time I get to visit my dear friend in Paris, I’ll be able to play along.

Brighton beach memories

No, not Brighton Beach Memoirs, totally the wrong side of the world. I was in Brighton, UK this weekend for the Brighton Festival, which had one of my favorite modern artists, Anish Kapoor, as artistic director and featured one of my favorite jazz bands, The Dave Holland Quintet, headlining a fantastic concert. Brighton was almost too zoo-y for me to enjoy the festival, with a seemingly endless parade of girls in 4 inch skirts and 6 inch heels and their tattooed boy toys. But I managed to enjoy it just the same. Did all the things one does in a different British town, which is to eat at the same restaurants that are in your own neighborhood and shop in the same shops that are on your own high street. But oddly enough for England, the weather was uncharacteristically gorgeous and I ended up sunburnt from long walks on the beach esplanade. Not a bad bank holiday weekend, not bad at all.

Happy Easter!

Bits and bobs

a.k.a. odds-n-ends in the states!

Brits have chocolate eggs for Easter while Americans have chocolate bunnies. I can’t imagine how it could possibly be satisfying to not have the ears to bite off! Also, apparently there has been an environmental call-out over the amount of chocolate egg packaging material, and today’s BBC magazine site had a whole article on the perfect environmentally-friendly egg package.

Earlier this week there was an article with ten key points on how to get served in a pub which seemed like making a complicated mountain over a mole-hill (although of course the academic study of British pub culture is part of the reason Kate Fox is famous…). I did chuckle over the whole paradox of Brits normally being queue-happy and how perfectly this contrasts, thus proving why being an expat is impossibly difficult in any country–the exceptions prove the rules. Regardless, if the pub is that busy, I’m probably at home, never having been one to like crowds and thus not a girl found in busy bars on weekend nights. I’ll also not get over the idea of buying a drink for the bartender instead of leaving a tip. But some of the new technology things sounded intriguing, space-age computerized pub technology to contrast the Victorian interiors?

Easter Parade from the brilliant 1948 Fred Astaire-Judy Garland movie of the same name:

I never, ever get tired of this movie, Holiday Inn or White Christmas not to mention a whole bunch of other oldies but goodies. These classic holiday musicals are timeless–if you haven’t seen this one, I highly recommend it!

Two small bits of admin, I’ve updated the Expat Blogs page but if you know of others I’ve missed (or if I’ve missed or mis-handled yours) please do leave a comment… especially for US/UK blogs out there. Also, a quick note on my twitter fiasco. I tried to join twitter a few months ago (time flies!) and ended up with the truncated name “notfromaroundhe” which I hated; last week I deleted the account and replaced it with “notfrmroundhere” which is slightly less worse. I then tried to install the twitterific app on my iPhone only to have my phone freeze and die due to some problem with the iPhone app store, which I think now was because my US credit card was frozen after I tried to use it to buy a plane ticket last week and had it declined. (Seriously, now my ever-reliable US card is not working? My luck with credit cards and banking is not so good…) So although I do intend to start tweeting, I’m still just trying to get it all organized. Talked to the credit people yesterday and now have to have another go with the app store. Ah, modern technology! So at the moment I’m mostly status-updating on facebook but eventually hope to obtain nirvana by getting that to read twitter too… it’s a technological challenge that I may or may not be up for!!!