motivation!

Dear S.,

thank you for your last two posts! I reeeeally feel like rhubarb cake,mmmmh :)
yesterday N. and I made a sauce holandaise to go with fresh asparagus and little potatoes, and it worked out! At the second try, that is. So, seen that there were some eggwhites left, we made meringues. Come by and fetch some if you feel like it!
I'm so exited about our elderflower sirup, can't wait to bottle it later today..

For now, I have some motivational stuff to keep you going:





I know it is busy right now, but eventually we are gonna be fine!

love, M.

easter in germany= baking ( like crazy)

and the second post for this evening ( i listen to the music of the movie where the wild things are, i just love childeren movies..)

and it kind of fits.
this time in germany i just felt incredebly blessed. i sucked in every minute. it was nice sunny warm weather. i had olenty of time with my parents( mr le chef and daya). made long and less long bike tours. we wnet to a lake which seemed so fare away as a child and isn't that fare away after all. how perception changes still fascinates me. on one of teh trips we saw a little lamp abandoned by the rest of the sheps, my mum and i where directly overwelmed by motherlyfeelings but on our way back the mother cared again about it.

going to the market to buy some good food. i love especially one stall owned by a woman named maya. she is old, quite rough and speks the lokal dialect, next to veggies from her fields she sells the moste beautifull flowers...




i also baked ..like crazy. some times even in this homienes i go a bit crazy... this time one cake collapsed on the ground and i threw it verry angry into the zink, with the result of some dough on the kitchen window... after this sudden emotional outburst everything was ok again.
and also knowing that at home( i mean the other home, antwerp) there was waiting somebody for me. but first i had to go to amsterdam to meet an young artist. more about that later on..





Eastereggs: we had chicken, duck, goose, chocolate and marcepein ones. i backed some gist nests for them. and a delayed birthday cake for may mum. rubarb cake, so the chocolate butterflie doesn't really fit but looks good.

sleep well
it's proably not the best idea to go to bed with a stomache full of warm cake but just today i won't cre( so fare to my suggar free diet...)
kisses
s

Ringel ringel Reihe, sind wir Kinder dreie, sitzen unterm Hollerbusch machen alle husch, husch husch

dear m,
a nightly update first our action yesterday... hunting elder flowers. it was really a kind of hunt. while you two managed to make a gras field in the front of the tikkis garden the bottom stayed unchanged wild. which i love. and somewhere hidden between fir trees, evy, other more obscure trees and an ancient wall full of spiderwebs we could see the elderflowers floeting in the air seading this incredible smell of spring. but of course they where fare away, so the hunting part started. you with a kind of saw/hook pulled them down and i cut them standing on my toetipps with a verry long garden scissors. it was jolly good fun ;) giggling and woowing we went back up to make partly sirop for cold and less sunny days against all the upcomming colds, and partly we cut them to dry them and make tee. wee had a sneak peak on what the tea would taste like. dear n. made some lemone, honey, fresh elder flower tee. mhmmmm.
the wohle air was full of the yellow dust they spread, best perfum ever, but you had to sneeze and my eyes started iching ...



i'm looking forward to the result of the sirop. now the flowers are ate the window in my living room to dry( so charlie wont play with them and spread them alover your place) and a honey cake is in the oven... i just need some homey comfort after all this running around and doin stuff today...

kisses s.

stressed=desserts ?!

Dear S.,

It is now 11.30pm. While I am writing this text, my oven is baking a bunch of cupcakes. I am baking them at this hour because I can’t deal with myself anymore. (Besides, any time is the right time to bake.) So, it’s May today. Wow. 30 more days and my Bachelorwork has to be finished. 31 days and my exams will start. So, I am kind of freaking out a little. I am sooo incredibly tiring to myself like this! I have stayed inside (well and on the newly cleaned terrace) all day long to write. At least like… 10 pages or so. But, of course, after having written a few sentences, I notice that I actually do not really know all that much about what I’m writing (some narratological questions). So I think: hey, let’s get that book from first year to refresh my knowledge about narratology. Having found the book, I notice that back then I had only read like a third of it- it was my very first real Dutch uni book. It was sooo incredibly difficult to understand it, the field is quiet complex and then that new, strange language… So, what do I do: I start reading it on page 1. And whenever I read a theoretical book, I like to take notes. Like a few lines per two pages, in a word document, so that I have the core information at hand whenever I need it. As you can imagine, this takes up QUITE some time. The book I’m talking about has 177pages. Ok, it was utopical to think that I could do them ALL today, but, come on, I’m only at page 50 now, after say 3 ½ hours of work. Also, I have only written one single page for my work. 1. Sigh. So, this is basically how every single day I am trying to do productive work and end up desperate and with no output whatsoever. That is why I am baking now. I can sometimes be so incredibly tiring for myself (and my surroundings), when I have the feeling I’m not working well enough. I tend to get all hyper, sing awful songs in a horrible voice, start meowing like a car just rolled over my imaginative tail, start running around like a headless chicken (haha, like Charlie a little bit… We just found a little bell and put it around her neck with some lace… she is so funny! –and she’s ok, don’t you worry.)


(this is the postcard I gave you for your last birthday... isn't it just unbelievable ;) )

Ok, it’s time to get the cakes out of the oven. The icing is already waiting for them!
00:46. Can't wait to get my teeth in one of these!







N. and I decided to go for flashy colours. and love, of course. I have tons of love for her. and cake.

my dear, now I've written all about how exhausting studying is, and just yesterday I worked at a kinf of info-market at my Uni, trying to convince possible future students of how exiting and fun language-and literature studies are... :)
I guess, that's just how my life goes.

also, I still wanted to say that I miss us blogging more. i know we both have extremely busy times, but still our blog makes me happy everytime I visit it.

sleep tight, I'll enjoy a pink cake and read some more!
xxx

M.

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....