copycat

Dear S.,

post n°100- yay!

Two sets of photos for you today.
I am in Austria right now, for a week, during a part of my Easter holiday. (which is not actually a holiday for me, writing on my Ba-work, an Ma-presentation and so on.. also, I fell ill, my throat is a field of horror. Also, all my family members are wanting to see me at least once, but if you have a huge family, that is a looot of once's.)

ok, but here are some images from my home town:






I spent some wonderful hours with my dear friend H. We just spent 7 hours talking- I loved it. Time with friends is vital.
Yesterday, I picked her up and we watched the sun set from a hill/mountain (for Belgians might consider it a mountain :p). This is what you see on the pics, obviously.

And now the second set of photos:
The result of my copycat-action some time ago.
I've always loved your short black dress with the press-buttons in the back. I've worn it all the time when you left it with me while you were in Portugal :)
So I decided to make one myself.





Quite happy about it, it is one of the few home-made things I actually wear a lot!
my dear, my writing sucks today, I feel a little feverish- I'll leave it with this

love,

m

long holliday absence...

dear m.,
time is rushing by...
just 2 month to go and i will leave uni behind me. and still so much to do.
besides this some canges happend in my private life, and i 'm really happy. but also have to get uesed to it.

so here are the last 2 weeks in pictures.
i was in genk ( an old mine city on the german-belgium border) to attend my masterclass. It was so nice to have a project and to give one week everything for it so it#s ready by frieday for visitors. much more my way of working.

one week of stiching, hammering, glueing... at the end i looked like a mine worker, all black from the coal dust...




from genk i directly went to the opsssit border of elgium. the coast. one weekend with my dear one in an appartement just at the beach. one weekend without stress, befor we both rush into the countdown. so we tried to get everything out of it because we'll won't see each other so much for a while ( especially not relaxed).
it was full of good food (incl. self made mayonaise on this very blurry pic), lazynes,fireworks, kites and beach walks.







monday we really went early to gent to get is eye checked ( he had an operation a week before, but all went good) , but had to wait there for ages, so like a soap bubbel the relaxation was gone. so the last week was buzzy buzzy again. i try to take my time to vistit people. and get everything done which needs to be done. to-do list are an illness from which there is no cure, i guess.

and my plants are growing. i try to take good care of them. i took them inside because it gets pretty cold at night, and i don't want them to freez. so now i water them and even talk to them so they will becaome beautyfull flowers and give me a bit of a nture feeling in summer.( by the way the grass in your garden is doing great )
and isn't it funny that there hide their heads still in their seedcaps when they come out of the ground...



kisses
and how are the mountains
s.

tarte au citron à la m.

some midnight indulgence for you!
love,
m

pasta!

Ciao S., (read "esse", in Italian)

today N. and I made fresh pasta.
Here's a small tutorial:





per person, take 100g flour and 1 egg, plus a pinch of salt. We decided to take 400g of flour; to dry half of it.






knead! a lot! it might help to seperate the dough into smaller portions to get it all smooth. put the dough in the fridge for a while.

Then comes the magic machine:
(you can roll it by hand, my grandma used to do so up to the age of 88, but it is hard work). You gradually go from the broadest to the thinnest "lane"- position. (oh yes, my English is failing me. nevermind.)







it's much easier and nicer to prepare fresh pasta with two!
then cut the pasta as you wish. We went for a very simple form, stracchi. Which are basically just random pieces (rags, actually, but that doesn't sound too nice).




According to Jamie Oliver, well-dried pasta can be stored up to two months in an airtight container. If you made spaghetti or tagliatelle, wou will want to hang them on a stick or so to dry them. We simply put our stracchi on a clean tea towel, together with lots of flour- they like to stick together.

The other half we prepared after letting them dry for an hour or so. I simply baked aubergine cubes in olive oil, added some pepper and salt. Make a quick tomato sauce with garlic and onion, serve with some fresh basil in parmiggiano. and then enjoy :)




If you have never tried to make pasta yourself, please do so. This is the very simplest of hundreds of pasta recipies, yet it is so nice and entirely different to dried pasta from the store!

eccola, pasta fatta in mano.

tanti baci,

M.

green...

Dear S.,

a double post. just to create some colour-based order :)

Saturday I spent a day in Brussels. I really needed to get out of Antwerp and be on my own for a while. As usual, I had to convince myself to get my behind out of my chair and leave school work and mainly thoughts about school work behind.
Oh, it was such a good day!
As you know, my feelings about Brussels are rather negative. I have lived in Brussels for 4 months when I was 18, and I didn't have a very good time then. My life as au-pair was horrible, and I was so drenched with all my sorrow that even the city could not take off my mind. Since then, every time I go to Brussels I have a weird feeling in my stomach. But the beautiful thing is, that every single time I discor new, fantastic things in this city, and every time I seem to like it a little more. When I was 18, I just didn't know where even to start to look for good things. I was too upset to go to a museum, too shy to find good places for going out on my own and too dependent on my au-pair families and L., I didn't earn enough money to buy books, clothes, tickets or cake.
Can you imagine, I didn't even know that the Bozar existed, while I was living in Brussels! Or the beautiful German bookstore in the Leuvensesteenweg! Or the Magritte museum. Or Botanique.
And when I finally moved to the second au-pair family, I lived quite far outside of Brussels, I only had enough time to go to my French lessons twice a week in the city center.
So, after 4 months I ended my nanny experience and left Brussels, for good. Let me tell you, I was not the only au-pair that left after only a few months ;)

I still remember this feeling every monday morning, waking up in Antwerp with terrible panic inside of me, short of breath, sick to my stomach. Knowing that I had to get on the train and would arrive at Brussel Centraal 45 minutes later- the most uninviting trainstation I know. Then walking up the kunstberg, follow the Regentschapslaan, passing by the Kleine Zavel, with my heart beating in my throat. Opening the door to this cold, unwelcoming house, saying hi to "my" children and their mother, who didn't trust me a bit.... brrrrr

Ok, I think you get the impression.
I really enjoy it, that I can get to know Brussels again, with some distance to all these intense moments!

So, to return to the beginning of my story: I went to Brussels. It was the most beautiful day, t-shirt and sunglasses-weather! I strolled around a bit in the Kunstberg area. (One thing I like about Brussels: its hills! unique in Belgium :)
Then I went to the Magritte museum. Only that I didn't see anything of Magritte but one really disturbing work between Baroque-artists... I spent some hours admiring Old Masters- a first time in my life, really. Until now, I never had the patience to find beauty in these old works... weird, I know. I still don't like Rubens, but Bruegel, Cranach and Co really impressed me!



I spent a lot of time in front of this one:
De val van de opstandige engelen by Bruegel de Oude from (!) 1562.
(image borrowed from historiek.net)

It is mesmerizing. These figures are so surrealistic, you can look at it for hours and find still new things. I even started to talk about it with a stranger who also kept standing and staring in the Bruegel chamber..





2 more artworks: A globe by Jan Fabre. Look it what it is made of! He is really a master of fascination and repulsion at the same time.
And, a very philanthropic piece of art in the middle: A sereneda of green of myself ;)
I just liked the idea of putting the spectator in the center of a work.

So much for the green, and now comes....

... and mokka!

Dear S.,

today I made the most heavy cake ever- bisquit with mokka-buttercreme.
You wouldn't have liked it- and it was even very heavy for me. But N. and I both felt like this kind of treat to start into the new week.
here are some pictures: The cake looks so incredibly old-fashioned! Like in those awful
70's cook book photographs...
It tasted nice though, just very traditional and rich.




(the plates come from a vintage market in Dresden)

mokka the second:
Charlie and I performed some shadow puppet art yesterday night. I got quite a lot of scratches and bites, but she just loves to play with me. So funny, she really finds that I am the one to play with and she attacks me out of the blue if she wants to wrestle or play catch or poesbal. With N. she never does that- apparently she is the one to be nice to in our house, according to Charlie :)





as you said in your last post, we didn't see each other a lot, lately. But it doesn't matter: I know that you are around, I know that you are busy, and- the foremost thing- I know that you are happy. It is such a joy to see you enter the room with this very special expression of happiness on your face!

Much love,

m.

dearest m.,
well i couldn't decide which foto to upload so i'll post collages of my last 24 hours.

yesterday night i came to your place where we had a long talk, which was really necessary because it has ben a while since the last tete-a-tete .
while talking about everythingwhat piled up you made orage marmelade and meringues en i made easter cookies after a recipe of my godmother maria. they are really easy and delicous.
i'll post the recipe another time, i'm kind of in a hurry. first a bbq ( first of the season, yeah!) than going to my m., and tomorrow i go to genk for a week to finish my masterclass... .


so this morning i had a wonderfull breakfast on the balkony, another yeah! finally spring came around and it's warm enough. i had the cookies we made, with coffee, bread with chestnutspread, and yoghurt with cherry jam, yumyum!



than a good spring cleaning with django reinhard in the background. and i wore my new hart top, which made me feel doubble summery.

i headed of to the city to buy flower pots and earth to start planting... i acctually don't have a green thumb ( is there in english expression for it) so usually all flowers just die around me. but this spring i'll give it another try and hope for the helping hand of mother nature...
on my way back home i stoped by the botanical garden of antwerp. it is tiny, but especially the greenhouse is really nice . if you need a second of tropical heat it's the place to go! and i was amazed by all the funny plants.







i especially like the hart shaped plant ;)

how was bxl?
kisses
s.