The fragrance in my home was unbelievable when this came out of the oven. Quark, lemon, vanilla – Käsekuchen. The recipe is from My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss (she also writes a blog www.thewednesdaychef.com) and I make only one exception to this recipe. Well, two, I can’t find vanilla extract here, so I use organic vanilla powder. She uses lean quark. I use cream quark with 10 % fat, doesn’t get any fattier here. This cream quark is German, so in that sense I am true to the recipe. All Finnish quarks have a much lower fat content.
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My Facebook friends will know this already: I’m running out of ink for my fountain pen. A Mont Blanc. I bought it at Harrods in the autumn of 1994. Up here I’ve been able to get ink from the Academic Bookstore. They have recently been sold and the new owner has decided to concentrate on books, so I had to hurry to get a new bottle of ink before they run out.
The other day I drove to the parking area of Ikea. One of the Egg EggPress stops is over there. Exciting!
I had heard the queues could be quite long. I didn’t see any queues anywhere. I didn’t see groups of people hanging around, back-slapping camaraderie haven't-seen-you-for-a-while, I didn’t see people swapping egg recipes and egg peeling hints. Apparently, that’s all done on-line. There was one lady looking around, like she was waiting, close to where I parked. Waiting for eggs? I nearly asked her. As it turned out, she was waiting for eggs. The white delivery van came and, suddenly, there was queue, people appearing out of nowhere. Five cartons, three cartons, six cartons – these are 30 egg cartons I’m talking about. I bought one carton only; starting small. The Japanese have a philosophy of treating breakage and repair as part of the history of an object. They have a fancy way of going about this using golden joinery. I bought a small 14 ml pot of gold paint used for model airplanes and such to bring out the history of two objects. I used cheepo brushes bought from a stationary’s. The cup was my father’s breakfast cup, the pattern on the side long ago faided. With the cracks it can no longer hold liquids so I use it to hold nuts and other titbits next to my TV chair. The green thing is the top of a piece of ceramic pot also good for holding goodies next to my TV chair. The paint is practically water soluble. However, I would recommend using tight rubber gloves to avoid golden fingers and fingernails. The headache? I've just had Office Home & Business 2013 installed on my computer and it no longer has Office Picture Manager. I've spent at least an hour trying to figure out how to pack photos. Looks like I have to figure out how to archive my photos all over... Actually, this is a refreshing headache, similar to the one when drawing on the right side of the brain although, probably, this is on the other side of the brain.
Fairy lights on cafe terraces, garden hedges and balconies seem a bit out of date this time of the year. I’d rather expect to see little daffodils and pearl hyacinths in pots. So it’s still a bit cold for them, the poor things would be shivering on some days, but why hang on to Christmas decorations in late February.
It’s late February and I’m reading the March issue of Country Living (UK). Their April issue is on sale from 26 February. What’s the hurry? I was watching Shakespeare in Love. Watching and watching – at the same time I was checking my email, setting the table for tomorrow's breakfast, painting a birthday card for my youngest niece, testing different kinds of papers for this technique. There are lots of things you can do when you watch a film at home. You can listen to a film, a bit like an audio book. Then you go to the cinema and you can’t do all those other things, but that’s a different story. Recently I heard bits of a short interview with a man who went to 365 art exhibitions last year. He had been to some 200 exhibitions in the previous two years or so and thought he could easily do one a day. That’s quite an achievement! From what I heard I assume he lived somewhere closer to the center of Helsinki where all the galleries are. I live in a city that doesn’t even feel like a city, it’s more like a collection of villages. There’s no real centre and there really aren’t that many galleries around. The ones there are, are scattered around. What a load of excuses :-) There is a museum of modern art and I'm complaining.
Now I’ve moved. Now I’ve more or less settled down, but some odds and ends need to be dealt with. Once dealt with they set off a chain reaction.
Like all my CD’s which are still in a banana box (probably the most used box when people need to move things around – they’re sturdy and supermarkets give them for free). The cabinet where they ”live” needs to be moved to its right place and attached to the wall. Once that’s done, the cabinet shelves now on the dining table can be put in their place, the cd’s and my little collection of hippos etc can be unpacked. First packing up my home and now having more or less finished unpacking I’ve been thinking about what makes a home. I’m moving. I’ve lived here for 32 years. To get home I have to climb 24 steps as there is no lift. That’s no problem now. It wouldn’t even be a problem if I broke my leg; it would be inconvenient and slow, but not impossible. Even if a lift was built here someday, I still would have eight steps ahead of me. That wouldn’t be a problem today, but in the future it very well might. I once saw a friendly taxi driver carry my 90+ neighbour up the stairs. I do not want to find myself in that situation at her age. (If someone carried me up the stairs now, well, that would depend on the situation…) Where I’m moving has easy access to a big lift. I will have an extra room to use as a study. I can leave my handwork, painting, writing out to wait for the next bout of inspiration and not have to clear the table for dinner like now. A metro station will open about 400 metres away two years from now. But now I’m packing. And packing. I’m running out of floor space for the boxes as only four of them on top each other are allowed. So far I haven’t found anything oh-my-god-what-on-earth-is-this!! thingies, but as there still are things to pack something may turn up. I spent a lot of time decluttering earlier this year. I thought I did pretty well, I was actually quite please with myself. Now I find out there’s a lot more decluttering to do. There’s no time for it now. More time when I unpack. I’m afraid my stuff will fill all the storage space in the new place… so I’ll set myself a challenge: make sure some empty storage space remains. I’ve packed the television, the stereo set. I have a small radio in the kitchen. My niece invited me over for some cake. I’m delighted to go. Otherwise I guess I’d be reading a two-year-old home magazine I just found when I took the garbage bag out. The magazine was stuck in a slit in the wall. It was meant for me. Or I’d find yet something to do, like washing the bathroom walls. The moving van comes early tomorrow morning. I was in the country this weekend, wrapping things up for the winter. Nature seems to agree and disagree. It got below zero the night between Friday and Saturday. Water in the lake was 10C on Friday. Saturday morning it was -1C, the temperature was 4C, the water 9C. Mist was hovering over the lake. Getting colder, winter’s knocking on the door. Yes, I did swim, from the sauna. Not anymore at the crack of dawn. (That white strike in the sky on the left? That's a plane load of people wishing they hadn't left. The day was glorious.) The cowslips disagree about winter coming. They think it’s spring. Well, it did get up to 9C today, even 10,5C driving back home. The needlework I was working on earlier? I got pretty far this summer, which does not mean there were a lot of power cuts. I just thought it was fun to work on it. What next? I have some watercolours to paint for our group exhibition later in November. I want to get my paintings done well in advance as I will be moving. Next week Monday my place will be packed with red crates waiting to be filled with everything accumulated over the 32 years I've lived here.
I got up nearly at the crack of dawn (just before seven, the cracks of dawn come later and later as the year grows older) to make sure I’d find a place to park at the Slow Food Festival in the next village. It was still quite dark when I got up for my morning dip. The water’s 13C so it’s still dippable. The festival didn’t start until 10, but I like to take my time in the morning. I don’t remember what time I went to the festival last year, maybe later, there seemed to be more people then. This year I got there before ten. I was going to have some coffee and a cinnamon roll while waiting (it’s the National Cinnamon Roll Day), but the cinnamon rolls were still in the oven so coffee had to wait. Going that early was overdoing it a bit, but I was thinking back to the beginning of July and the antiques fair and nearly having to park in someone's field. Slow food doesn't seem to attract as large a crowd as antiques. A chunk of meat is a chunk of meat and you can always order more. You can't order more antiques. And yes, this was a Slow Food Festival |
AuthorI'm Piisa and I will be sharing with you my thoughts on this and that, maybe even on whatever. Archives
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