In deciding to give up meat for 40 days I didn’t anticipate developing an even stronger fixation on food.
It’s Day Five and I can’t stop thinking about food—when I’ll eat, what I’ll eat, where to get it. I’m not even thinking of meat specifically or craving it strongly. I just want to EAT.
Mid-workout on a treadmill this morning, I happened to glance out the window straight at the McDonald’s restaurant near my gym. Now, I haven’t had fast food in almost four months, but suddenly I wanted to be at McDonald’s—not for meat—but just to eat SOMETHING.
I can’t decide if my new cookbooks are helping—staving off temptation with ideas for no-meat dishes—or making matters worse—“Look at what you really could be eating!”.
Perhaps I should be grateful that I’m obsessing over food and not he-who-shall-not-be-named.
Over the weekend, I busied myself making vegetable stock and a spinach-broccoli-gorgonzola soup. Weird mix with the cheese, I know, but it actually turned out quite well. I had the leftover for lunch today.
Tonight from the cookbooks: seafood with garlic, chili and tomatoes; and for my sweet tooth, creamy rice pudding—from scratch!
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Turns out the blackout two Saturdays ago at Mecca was no accident. A bartender was murdered outside the club.
The story: the victim flirted with the wrong woman; her ticked-off boyfriend objected with a handgun.
Extreme violence—gun related or otherwise—is rather unusual here; I was shocked when a friend recounted the story at a party I went to last night. Many expats will tell you that Czechs are largely non-confrontational people. It’s other Eastern Europeans you may want to worry about. (The shooter was Albanian.)
The blackout was a shutdown. When Gabe and I had walked out of the club I saw an ambulance and several squad cars. “All this fuss over an electrical overload?” I wondered. Then I noticed paramedics working on a body about fifty feet away; I assumed someone had overdosed. I didn’t realize the two events were related.
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Lent started yesterday. I’ve decided to give up meat. I hear the laughter already. “You, forsaking a food group?!”
The idea came up last week between a coworker and me. We’re both not particularly religious, but as meat eaters—she, German; me, Nigerian—we wondered what doing without for a period of time would be like, though I don’t hope to or want to turn vegetarian as a result. (Only medical necessity would send me down that path....)
(Posted on Lola's fridge in London: an alternative—no food involved!—approach to Lent.)
Being a 21st century American, I have my loopholes ready:
*Lent starts today because yesterday I was still "on vacation"; I returned home last night to an empty fridge, was too tired to go hunting for a salad at Tesco and had to eat two pieces of sausage rolls.
*Meat is beef, chicken, pork, lamb, bison, etc. Fish is NOT meat. Screw anyone who wants to tell me otherwise—“Fish is a living thing, so it’s technically ‘meat’, blah, blah, blah….” I live in Prague. Do you know how crappy vegetarian food is here?
*I’ll allow myself fish/seafood once or twice a week. (Anabela and Davina are coming over mid-March and they deserve not to have me be a miserable protein-deficient hostess.)
I went to Tesco this evening and my shopping cart would have made a vegan proud: tomatoes, carrots, leek, potatoes, broccoli, red & yellow pepper, mushrooms, nuts…. To be honest, I’m already irritated—I see days of salads and soups ahead of me—and hungry.
But yours truly is abandoning more than meat for Lent.
I’ve also decided to give up Jan.
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Okay, so maybe Ms. EVOO has very little to fear from me. She’s got a television show, a magazine, Oprah as a friend slash mentor, and legions of fanatics who swear by her culinary skills. I, on the other hand, have friends and family who to my exasperation think I can’t cook (even those who’ve never tasted my food!) and a tiny studio apartment that may go up in flames in my effort to prove them wrong.
What I’ll admit about my cooking is that I’m not likely to come up with anything new. I’m an avowed recipe follower. Once in a blue moon I think outside of the box, like with the pasta sauce I made a month ago only to find out it was a variation on
puttanesca, but in my defense (or to my credit?) I had no idea at the time what puttanesca sauce was.
Admission number two. An old Achilles Heel: I was a health nut trying to drain the fat out of anything I was making. It shouldn’t take a genius to tell you that “tasty” and “fat-free” almost always occupy opposite ends of the culinary pole. Anyway, I’m a recovering fat-phobe and these days I welcome butter, cream and lard wholeheartedly.
So to get on with my “project” of shaking things up in the kitchen, I picked up two cookbooks on Monday. (See pretty covers above. And yes, I could go online, but I like to look at the pretty pictures even if the food does include make-up….) Nothing in them is low fat or fat free; just about all the recipes call for heavy use of cream and butter. Yum-o.
When I try something and it goes well you might read about it. If it doesn’t go well you’ll read about it too. Unlike the Bush regime, I’m all for full disclosure.
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I have a crazy theory about 10th year birthday parties: I think #10 is one that decides what other birthdays in your life might turn out to be like. It’s a kind of tradition-starter and it’s best to make it good and not think twice about turning it into a pre-pubescent bacchanal—tons of cake and sugar, lots of friends and hanger-ons (adults), trashy inappropriate music, loads of gifts, the works.
I remember my 10th birthday party very clearly for the pitiful reason that it was my first away from home—I was “stranded” in boarding school.
A bastion of education it was not. Hell on earth was more like it. The notion that childhood should be a time of innocence, wild abandon, merriment, love, warmth and protection? Please. We were cheap labor, used to clear soccer fields, de-weed the school grounds and scrub pit latrines. Fed rock-hard bread, rice with stones, thumbnail-size meat, beans with bugs and cold corn porridge—at portions even Weight Watchers would declare inhumane. Back home, our bamboozled parents assumed we were getting educated. They were always so shocked when we’d returned home a few months later rail thin and ignorant of world affairs, yet they always sent us back. Didn’t make sense to me back then and still doesn’t now.
I guess I must have inspired so little consideration on my 10th because no one in my family thought of organizing a rescue party to liberate me from the concentration camp fronting as a school for girls. I spent birthday 11, 12 and 13 in that gulag. Some form of rehabilitation came with #14—we had moved to America. But by then the damage had been done. I wasn't going to be one of those who celebrate yearly and with fanfare.
Anyways, it's not like I'm bitter or anything.
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Glad to report that my British Airways flight decided not to make a mid-air detour into the ocean; it dropped me off safely at Heathrow at least 15 minutes ahead of schedule this morning.
The prayers worked, as did the charms. Ha. (Hey, I’m Nigerian—we don’t believe in taking chances…. God could be on a lunch break when disaster decides to strike.)
Something funny I’ve noticed about when I fly—I seem to always be sitting on or pretty close to the wings.
What’s the agenda in London?
EAT, eat, eat.
Starting with a birthday party for my friends’ much adored cousin. Royal China sometime before I leave.
Use up gift certificate from Christmas to buy new books.
Candidates:
Francine Proust’s Reading Like a Writer
Dave Eggers’s What Is the What
What else? Suggestions.
Shop for a bathing suit.
Okay, so it’s February and maybe a little too early to think of beaches, and gee, I don’t even know where I’ll be when the weather warms. But I really, really would like to own a great bathing suit. It’s like a little black dress. Every woman should have one.
Buy a cooking book.
I’ve figured out what I’d like to work on this year. (Not losing weight—why torture myself like that? Or becoming a better person—I like being mildly evil.) I want to cook—get a bit more adventurous, versatile in the kitchen. I’m actually excited about it and I’ve been browsing “The Minimalist” video archives on the NY Times site in anticipation of stuff to try out.
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Not much that I feel like saying today. But I want to share a picture from last night. I was in a pub having a red-white-and-brown dinner—that is, Czech food—with my co-workers when a couple walked in. The woman was holding on to an odd but rather neat Valentine’s Day curio. What do you think?
On the authenticity richter scale, I think it certainly outscores a bouquet of red roses....
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Dear Ondrej:
You're a really good instructor—patient, intelligent, witty. Unfortunately, no one would know it from listening to me, your latest student, butcher your language….
Czech is driving me nuts. Five months later, I’m even more confused than when I first started. Back then, I thought pronouncing strings of consonants would be my biggest concern. Ha. I snort at my own naivete.
What frustrates me about the language is that nearly everything you say is about context. And please, I’m not even talking verbs, tenses, gender and the such. I’m talking about something more basic: Nouns.
Can’t a “Car” just be a car, or a “Book” just a book? In the Czech language, the answer to that is NO.
As a new student of Czech, I quickly discovered on the first day (and many more after) the hell known as “Declension” or the case system. It means nouns change forms depending on the context. I outline my “case” below with the words “Car” and “Book”.
**
“Auto” & “Kniha”
This is the NOMINATIVE case, that is, the normal way you say car and book respectively. Easy enough. It’s the way most languages go. Except maybe when dealing with the plural form or gender, changes that are to be expected.
**
I have a book = Mam knihu
Oh-oh, your book has become a direct object. Welcome to the ACCUSATIVE case. Nouns ending with the letter “A” must lose it to get a “U”; nouns ending in “E” must change that ending to “I”. If your noun ends with an “O” or a consonant, those letters stay the same.
(Am I losing you already? Boo-hoo, but I just got started….)
**
I am sitting on (or in) a car = Sedim na aute
I am writing in a book = Pisu v knize
Hate to bust your bubble, but buying a Global Positioning System will not save you from the headache of the LOCATIVE case. You may think this case has something to do with location or position as the name suggests, but it’s mainly just about what happens when you use the prepositions “in” and “on”. Ideally, this should be an easy case to deal with since consonant endings gain an “E”, and vowel endings lose their letters and also take the "E".
But what if your noun originally ends with an “E”? (Hey, you're catching on!) Then it drops that "E" for an “I”.
(Ay Dios Mio! I know. But please don’t close the browser yet. I promise that the LOCATIVE case gets better….)
Notice the funky change going on with “Kniha”, your “original” book, to “Knize”. That’s because the noun ends in “HA”—no, it’s not funny. And neither is the fact that you have to change endings “KA” to “CE”, “CHA” to “SE” and “RA” to “RE”. (Hurrah! Hurray!)
(It's quite alright if you're completely lost by now. Just go through the motions, for my sake and for the time I put into writing this, and finish this post. Kisses.)
**
I am going by car = Jedu autem
Lucky you, you bought a car. You’re going to wish you didn’t. In fact, you might want to stay at home and avoid any means or instrument of transportation. The INSTRUMENTAL case: if you use an object to accomplish an action, just tack on “EM” to the noun. Let's not bother with how the vowel or consonant endings change. Just ignore 'em.
By the way, I see you’ve taken my advice and have locked yourself at home. Supr! But now you’re feeling hungry. Wait, are you about to “use” a knife to dab a bit of butter "on" that piece of toast? Sounds like an instrument to me (and a bit of the positioning too). You know what you have to do….
**
I am going to the car = Jdu do auta
Didn’t I just warn you about "moving"? Look what you’ve done—opened the can of worms that’s the GENITIVE case. Who knew going “to” and “from” something or some place would involve this much trouble? Your “O” ending noun must now take on an “A”. Do you want to know what happens to all the other vowel and consonant endings? No, I didn’t think so….
**
There are two more cases to go—DATIVE and VOCATIVE. Lucky you, I won’t kill you with the details of these two because…I haven’t learned them yet! But I’m sooo looking forward to those lessons…
Cau!
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I donned my push-up bra, slipped into my dancing boots and went looking for a much-needed boogie session last night. Enough with meet-ups at bars, I wanted to dance.
It was to be a group outing of seven or so girls, but three, including the two organizers, backed out last minute due to sudden illness or fatigue. Pause for a side comment:
[Is there something doomed about club outings of more than four people? Seriously, I think the last time I went out clubbing with an intact group bigger than that was sometime in the late 90s…. Is it age? We’re gettin’ old! Ha. Or the headcount? Perhaps coordinating becomes logistically more difficult after person #4. What do you think?]
Still, the right incentive—free entrance for ladies!—was there for me to want to salvage the evening. Three other friends—Tania, Ruth & Yuriko—joined me at Mecca, a club in Prague 7. (Gabriel, my Romanian friend, showed up later—escaping the boredom at home eventually superseded his dislike for Mecca.) The DJs were imports from England; their turntables were up-to-date and included occasional nods to old club hits. Anyone remember, “Return of the Mack”? Some unexpected mixes as well—my favorite had to be Kelis’ “Milkshake” looped in with Prince’s “Kiss”.
But something must have been in the air at Mecca. Or was our outing just plagued? About an hour into the boogie, Tania bailed—she was feeling a bit ill. Ruth was next—though she hung on for a bit longer. Yuriko—no physical complaints—left after the third hour, leaving me and Gabriel together like old times. But that girl had good timing. About fifteen minutes later the entire block suffered a blackout.
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A friend got an unexpected psychic reading this week. She didn’t go looking for one, rather the medium offered. The woman was spot on: from deceased relatives to live ones to misgivings about a current beau. There was even mention of little feet.
I’m tempted to ask for an introduction. But do I want to go there? Why do I need someone to tell me what lies ahead? Shouldn’t I just have faith that all will be well? Haven’t I done just fine up till now with not knowing? (Okay, perhaps some past and current events could use some reevaluation….)
And what might you unleash by dabbling in the supernatural? To avoid a supposedly bad outcome, could you end up disrupting an auspicious event that’s further ahead? Do you become an addict, unable to function without a weekly psychic “fix”?
I’m curious about certain things but not everything. Me and Jan, yes. Me and someone else? Yes. My career or calling, yes. Will I return to America? Yes. Children, maybe. Illnesses, no. (It’d be horrible having to become even more of a hypochrondriac than I am now.) Death—if it’s of old age, yes; anything else, depends. Dead relatives watching over me, why not?
But maybe I have even more pressing concerns at hand: I’ve had two dreams lately of surviving near plane crashes. Perhaps the dreams wouldn’t bother much if I didn’t have two plane trips coming up—next weekend back to London and in April to Nigeria. With the first dream, I tried teasing out allegorical references to my life. “Oh, maybe, it means you have some rough times up ahead but you’ll come out okay….” But by the second dream? “Screw the metaphors!” I immediately called my Mama who told me to pray for divine protection.
So I find myself trying to decide if faith and instinct should be enough to reassure me about the future, or if I should get a second opinion.
The psychic will be back in Prague in April.
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Wanting to meet some fresh faces—I'm getting too comfortable staring at my four walls—I met up last Wednesday with a group of expat women for dinner at Oliva, a Mediterranean style restaurant in Prague 2.
Okay, I want to pause to say a bit about the food. My pumpkin-vanilla soup had a good balance of sweetness and herbs—much enjoyed. My starter: B’stilla—a chicken-almond-citrus mix stuffed in fried pastry shell—confused my taste buds. One second, I’d be getting into the crunch of the chicken and almonds and then in the next I’d wince from the bitter taste of the orange peels. The stars of the evening were the olives and trio of olive oils: Greek, Spanish & Italian, that came with the bread. Exceptionally tasty.
Like Chatterbox from last year, this group was varied—two Americans, two Australians, a Filipino, Czech and Romanian. Three were married—one to a Czech—and the rest attached. It was a pleasant way to spend a midweek evening, and I met up with one of the women Sunday afternoon for a tasty Gulas meal near my apartment. We had much to talk about, specifically the erratic behavior of our Czech partners.
So, “Girls Night Out” as it is called—not the most original name, but it gets to the point—convenes 7:30 on Wednesday evenings at restaurants around the city. Last night, three of us returned and were joined by an Austrian girl at Da Emanuel, an Italian restaurant in Prague 6.
Everyone seems to know a place to get “great” this-or-that. (Which is how I ended up at Husa on Sunday for Gulas; and thankfully, it didn’t disappoint….) We were at Da Emanuel to try the mussels because supposedly it had “great” mussels.
How were the mussels? In general, good—no grit, hallelujah—but the tomato base could have done with less salt. We talked a lot about food, especially Italian food—one of the women was half-Italian and the other had lived in Italy. They lost me on the wine talk. I couldn’t tell you a Merlot from a Cabernet. With wine, the distinctions in taste are often lost on me because I don’t drink much wine to start off with, so I have a minimal catalogue of past tastings to reference. But I really enjoyed the Vermentino we had, and with the discussion about wine I wondered if getting schooled in reds-whites-and-roses wouldn’t be such a bad project.
I came away with an odd but so-simple-even-a-monkey-could-do-it recipe for fish:
Place a gutted whole fish, preferably sea bass, on a baking tray and cover COMPLETELY from head to tail with crystalized Italian salt. Drop a few sprinkles of water on the salt heap but make sure not so much to dislodge any crystals and expose the fish’s skin. Pop into an oven for 20 – 30 minutes. (I’ll have to get the temperature setting….) When done crack the surface of the salt mound and get to your fish. Fillet and serve with a salad.
I’ll try it someday soon and let you know how it goes.
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I love riding the trams, but I’ve developed a habit of sizing up the person sitting behind the seat I’m about to occupy.
…Looks all right. Don’t think he/she’ll try anything funny…decide to reach out to cop a feel.
I’m nuts, I know. Aren’t there bigger things to worry about on the trams, like choking on BO? Or tram inspectors on the day you forget to carry your transit pass? Or getting harassed out of your seat by the elderly?
I’m paranoid about my hair receiving unwanted attention; when I feel the slightest bit of pressure on them I look back nervously, of course only to find that the “tug” is from me resting on my own locks. Nothing’s ever really happened except for the time a toddler leaned out of his mother’s arms to grab a few strands. Afterwards, I started watching out for the babies too.
Then there's today. I was heading to work on the #20. The car was packed, but I scored a free seat in front of an elderly couple. Barely a minute into the ride and then a tug.
I looked back just as the man let go of my hair. “Prosim?”
His wife smiled apologetically and said something in Czech which I didn’t catch. And that right there was my dilemma. The freaking language and that six months later I still function like a deaf-mute.
At that moment, I sorely wished Ondrej had skipped over verbs of motion in our last FOUR lessons—I mean, really, how many places do I go and how far do I go in my day anyways?—and jumped ahead to something more useful, like the imperative form:
“Don’t touch!”
“Don’t do that!”
“Leave me alone!”
“Go to hell!”
(Hmm, the last one I actually know how to say, but think it would have been a bit too harsh for the situation at hand….? And not to mention make me sound like a hyper-reactive nut?)
I quickly got exhausted trying to think up a rebuke with my limited vocabulary. And besides, the couple was harmless. Getting off the tram, the wife stopped to smile at me and patted my shoulder.
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I got an unexpected “Hello” yesterday in the form of a postcard from a good Samaritan from my early days in Prague.
Remember Tomas who helped transfer my belongings—three bulky suitcases and twelve 1.5-liter bottles of Tesco water—from my short-term stay on Jungmanova into my apartment in Smichov, and then offered to accompany me to IKEA to buy my bed?
He sent me a postcard from the Canary Islands.
It was a surprise to read from him; he never responded to my email, shortly after the move, inviting him out for beer. (I was still pivo-happy in those days and had yet to sour on its gut-swelling effects.)
Even more surprising was that he remembered my address and I certainly never wrote it down for him. He spelled my first name correctly. But my last name picked up two extra consonants. (It must be a Czech thing: they love consonants.) Ha.
Here are snapshots of the postcard and his message:
I love his signature: “Tomas the one who had built your bed.”
Tomas darling, I understand where you’re coming from. Because in this land where parents for some reason cannot see beyond the same four or six names—Jan, Jiri, Pavel, Tomas, Martin, Daniel—it’s up to any man cursed with one of these names to find a way of standing out from the rest.
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Whether the wandering eyes of European men is the stuff of myth or fact—okay, maybe it’s more of the latter—legions of sensible women continue to fall prey to their rakish charms.
Why? Could it be the accent? Good heavens, the power of those accents. I imagine women swoon at the thought of a French or Italian or Croat (the list is unending) lothario whispering sweet nothings into their ears.
Or maybe it’s their way with words? Case in point: declarations like the one from former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to his wife after she accused him of humiliating her with his public verbal indiscretions with other women.
He wrote:
“Your dignity should not be an issue: I will guard it like a precious material in my heart even when thoughtless jokes come out of my mouth…. But marriage proposals, no, believe me, I have never made one to anyone.
“Forgive me, however, I beg of you, and take this public testimony of private pride that submits to your anger as an act of love. One among many. A huge kiss. Silvio.”
Umm, can someone cue some violins?... Please?
Reading today about the Berlusconi marital fiasco in the New York Times and on getting to the excerpt I paused—to let my heart melt—and uttered a loud “Awww….”
Suddenly I was having a change of sentiment. Yes, Berlusconi’s wife had a right to be outraged, and I even admired her spunk at showcasing it in a newspaper, no less. But after reading her husband’s seemingly heartfelt public apology (or maybe it was just a perfectly and poetically penned one) I conceded and chuckled knowingly, “Ohh, those darn Italians….”
All was forgiven.
And Mrs. Berlusconi? Did she relent after reading her husband’s apology or after he offered an even more ardent one in private perhaps, complete with flowers, bon-bons, baubles and the like?
I imagine that she did and that she has countless of times, after all, Berlusconi, oily rake, that he is, probably can’t help himself—he’s European….
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It’s Day Five and I can’t stop thinking about food—when I’ll eat, what I’ll eat, where to get it. I’m not even thinking of meat specifically or craving it strongly. I just want to EAT.
