Recipe: Basmati Rice & Pomegranate Salad

Basmati Rice - Pomegranate Salad

Ingredients:

  • 100 grams basmati rice
  • 2 tablespoons pomegranate seeds
  • 1 carrot
  • 1 small spring onion
  • 1 slice smoked tofu
  • 6 cherry tomatos
  • salt, olive oil

Instructions:

  1. Rinse the basmati rice, bring to a boil enough water to boil it (about five times the rice’s volume). Add the rice to the boiling water, add a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt, stir, and let boil for 10 minutes.
  2. Meanwhile, peel the carrot, cut it in half, and slice it in half moons. Clean the spring onion, cut it in quarters and then slice.
  3. When the rice is boiled, drain excess water, and put in a bowl. Add the carrot, the onion and the pomegranate seeds, and mix.
  4. Cut the tofu in 1cm cubes, heat a little oil in a pan, and stir fry until golden.
  5. Add tofu to rice, mix carefully. Season with some more olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Decorate with the cherry tomatoes. Serve.

Notes:
This dish can be served warm, as above, or chilled (or at room temperature). Makes a great tupper meal! (This is tomorrow’s meal for me)

I’m Not Dead…

I’m just dead busy!

Here is the deal: this semester I have six courses and three labs, and that means at least all morning at university (plus mondays evenings) and the rest of the time trying to study all the notes and making exercises and doing lab reports and sleeping. Ok, and eating, I would skip that part, but seems my body isn’t happy with it ;)

Also, starting the 1st of November, I’ll be trying to write around 1,700 words per day, because I’m doing NaNoWriMo. It’s set! I have a plot, I have to develop the characters now, and write a decent outline so I can reach the 50k goal. And I’m also working on that at the moment.

On other news, Jan was over here this past week. He put up with my stress and my classes and my studying, and took me out for dinner at Vegaviana, a very nice vegetarian restaurant. When I wasn’t in class, I just tried to do nothing and enjoy him. So it was a bit quieter.

And on the knitting front, after finishing the Turkish Stitch String Bag, I put knitting off for a couple of weeks. And then I ripped off the too narrow kilt hose, and started it again. This time I learned proper crochet cast on.

More updates as time allows. And probably a few teasers from my NaNovel too.

Back To School Requires Lunchbox!

So, here I am, already one week into this semester, and next week I start labs in the afternoon. That means I have to take my food to university, because, to be honest, the cafeteria isn’t anything to call home about. And they don’t have a vegetarian menu *pout* So, this year I decided, instead of eating salad every time I have to stay, taking my own mjummy food, heat it in the microwave there, and eat healthier.

However, this whole “take your own food to uni/work” is not very stablished here, and there are no proper lunchboxes, or bags, or anything. And ordering would take at least two weeks to get here, and be expensive. So what’s a girl got to do? Think! Take some fabric and make your own lunchbag:

ikea fabric lunchbox bag

That’s 110cm of a 45 cm wide Ikea fabric made into a drawstring bag with handles. Of course, this bag hides things. I’ll take my food in two Ikea tuppers, and my drink in an Ikea thermos. Of course, I’m also taking cutlery, and I made a pouch out of a scrap of (more Ikea) fabric to hide it. Wanna see it?

lunchbox

What did I learn with this? First, plan your sewing project. I just went to Ikea, bought the tuppers and the thermos, and then guessed how much fabric I’d need. Yes, I was in a hurry! I could have used 50cm more for a couple pockets, maybe. Second, the sewing machine hates me. It’s a cheap machine my mother got years ago, and she’s never sewn with it, it’s only me who started using it recently. This time, I had to clean it because the tension was very wonky (weird, but just cleaning worked like a charm, didn’t take it to the repair shop like last time), and a needle broke mid-project. And third, I can make an easy bag in a morning if I need to.

F.O.: Turkish Stitch String Bag

Finally finished the eternal Turkish Stitch String Bag. And I call it eternal because it’s taken me months to finish such a simple patter. I first started and followed the pattern with sizes and stitches and everything, and when I got to the strap I run out of yarn. So rippit! And then I casted on less stitches and knitted away and got distracted by the spinning but it’s done! Yay!

Turkish Stitch String Bag

string bag

  • Pattern: Turkish Stitch String Bag, by Judy Gibson.
  • Yarn: Katia Mississipi (60% cotton, 40% acrylic), green 85776 (found the labels *yay*), 2 skeins, 50 grams and 95 metres each.
  • Gauge: no idea, I didn’t bother checking!
  • Needles: Pony circulars, size 7mm, 100 cm long (had to use some sort of magic loop).

Notes: In the end I used smaller needles than called for (10mm), and casted on 11 stitches instead of 15 and adjusted the pattern accordingly. It’s a very easy pattern, even I could memorize it.

More pics:

close up

crochet detail

NaNoWriMo

I’m seriously thinking on joining the National Novel Writing Month, and try to write a 50000 words novel between the 1st and the 30th of November. Right now the theme that appeals me the most includes a young woman, an imaginary museum, and some real paintings that come to life. I still have over a month to take some notes and research some paintings. Or think of a totally different story.

Of course, I have to write this (my first) novel, between going to class at university, and studying and going to labs and cooking and sleeping and having a bit of a life (not much, though). So I really need to plan this novel thouroughly, so I only need to write the actual thing during the month. I’ll try to aim at 1750 words each day, so I’m good on the count.

Also, I’ll be posting teasers on the blog, and maybe “publish” it in electronic form, depending on the response I get.

Will you join NaNoWriMo this year?

Last day of vacation, cooking time

So, today is my very last day of vacation, of the one week I’ve had after september exams. That’s a whopping whole one week of true vacation, without having to study or worry about exams or anything like that. On the last day of vacation, I decided to prepare a few meals that would only need to heat up or bake in the oven right out of the freezer.

The morning started killing a pumpkin and roasting it in the oven, then boiling and roasting its seeds with a bit of oil, worcestershire sauce and salt (mjummy!). Meanwhile lunch was cooking: a pot of lentils with onion, garlic, courgette and tomato, to which I added part of the roasted pumpkin at the end.

After lunch, I made a no roll pie crust, and a pumpkin pie filling, and baked it. Meanwhile (multitasking is your friend) I made lasagna with: onion, carrot, courgette, aubergine, blue foot and shiitake mushrooms, tomato and seitan, and assembled three of them with pasta and white sauce.

The only pic of all the cooking is this of the pumpkin pie (my first ever) right out of the oven:

pumpkin pie

Tomorrow, classes start at 8.30 *sigh* And I still don’t know in which courses I will enrole, so for the first week or so I’ll attend all of them and see which I like better for this semester. Wish me luck!

On the knitting end, the turkish stitch string bag is nearly finished, after having had to rip it off completely when I was a strap from the end. Just need to sew the ends in, and voi-là! Sorry, no pic yet :)

Summer in Belgium

After those lovely forty five days with Jan, I’m back home to take exams, do paperwork, and go back to uni for yet another year ™. What have we done this summer, you ask? Well, 45 days seems long, but it definitively wasn’t long enough for us.

We had joined a group trip to Scotland, but for several reasons, it didn’t work out. We traveled for about 30 hours over two days, slept some three hours during three days, and ended crashing back home. That was my first week there, and instead we just had a quiet time at home, since Jan had the days off anyway. We don’t think we’ll be doing any tour-like trip any more. We agreed that our next trip to Scotland will include nice hotels picked up by ours trully, a rented (stick, continental) car, a good guide and some maps, for the two of us to enjoy!

We fancied a boat trip, and so we went to Overmere Donk, rented a slow boat, and had fun around. We also walked in the park by the lake, so pretty. Pitty the triathlon was so noisy and taking most of the routes! I think we should go sometime again, hopefuly when there is no sports competition dirtying and trashing the park and taking half of the road.

We went to a friend’s wedding, that consisted of a civil ceremony with plenty of people I didn’t know and didn’t know me, and where I understood nothing, and a medieval party, which we had to skip (will link to pics whenever, if ever, they are up).

We went to Germany: Dusserldorf (and pics en route), where we met up with Susann and her husband, then from there to Greifswald (with more pics of the drive), where we met up with Laura, had lots of fun, went bowling and playing darts, and discovered the Spetzi (half cola, half orange fanta), and then we drove to Münster. And finally drove back home.

And we also went to Brugge, to buy chocolate at our favourite shop, The Chocolate Line, which you will know already if you read this blog often. I can’t praise this shop enough. All the chocolate is hand made in situ, and you can see the Meester Chocolatier at work through the window at the back of the shop. And visited the Sand Sculptures Exhibition. Lots of work involved in them, and all will be destroyed in a couple of weeks.

Other things accomplished during the summer: knitting (not much), spinning (two whole bobbins, still to be plied, next time I go to Belgium) – no pics of either, stash enhancement (four skeins, enough for a pair of socks and a skinny scarf, pics coming, sometime), cooking a few recipes from our database, visiting family, going out, going five(!) times to the movies (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Over the Hedge, Miami Vice, She’s the Man & Monster House), picking up and installing Jan’s new desktop (fancy machine, it is), general happy living together, adopting our two little critters, going out with a bunch of friends for bowling and dinner, discovering a couple new restaurants (‘t Gents Fonduehuisje in Ghent, and Pizza Milano in Aalst), happy couple living decorating furthermore our livingroom and much more. Oh yes, studying too.

And lets not forget, we went together with Jan’s mum to see Le Cirque du Soleil, in Brussels, near Tour & Taxis. We saw the Alegrí­a show. It was an amazing mix of handbalanzing, power track, manipulation, contortion, fire dance, aerial high bar, clowns, syncronized trapeze, flying man, russian bars, live music and singing. Well worth the price! We had a lovely evening.

Leaving was hard, again, very hard. And I so want to go back very soon. Plans right now are me spending my “winter break” in early December and New Years in Belgium. Meanwhile, Jan will be coming over some time in October and November!

For those of you who care about my flight back, it was okay, if it weren’t for the more than three hours of a detour. The story is, we left Brussels airport on time without problems, the flight was good and we got to Madrid at the scheduled time, but there was a huge storm with lighting that kept more than fifteen planes waiting to land. That meant we had to wait over fourty minutes to land, but we didn’t have enough fuel and detoured to Valencia to fuel there. Once the storm was over, all the detoured planes wanted to leave for Madrid at once, and we got a slot for 10pm (that’s 2.5 hours after we were supposed to land in Madrid). We finally made it to our destination at nearly 11pm, then wait for my suitcase, which luckily was one of the firsts to get out, and get a cab to go home. I got home at midnight, a whooping three hours and a half after I thought I’d be! Luckily for me, I bought the last sandwich on board, and that was all my dinner.

Back Home Again

After those lovely forty five days with Jan, I’m back home to take exams, do paperwork, and go back to uni for yet another year ™. What have we done this summer, you ask? Well, 45 days seems long, but it definitively wasn’t long enough for us.

We had joined a group trip to Scotland, but for several reasons, it didn’t work out. That was my first week there, and instead we just had a quiet time at home, since Jan had the days off anyway.

We fancied a boat trip, and so we went to Overmere Donk, rented a slow boat, and had fun around. We also walked in the park by the lake, so pretty. Pitty the triathlon was so noisy and taking most of the routes!

We went to a friend’s wedding, that consisted of a civil ceremony and a medieval party, which we had to skip (will link to pics whenever, if ever, they are up).

We went to Germany: Dusserldorf (and pics en route), where we met up with Susann and her husband, then from there to Greifswald (with more pics of the drive), where we met up with Laura, and then we drove to Münster. And finally drove back home.

And we also went to Brugge, to buy chocolate at my favourite shop, The Chocolate Line, which you will know already if you read this blog often. I can’t praise this shop enough. All the chocolate is hand made in situ, and you can see the Meester Chocolatier at work through the window at the back of the shop. And visited the Sand Sculptures Exhibition. Lots of work involved in them, and all will be destroyed in a couple of weeks.

Other things accomplished during the summer: knitting (not much), spinning (two whole bobbins, still to be plied, next time I go to Belgium) – no pics of either, stash enhancement (four skeins, enough for a pair of socks and a skinny scarf, pics coming, sometime), cooking a few recipes from our database, visiting family, going out, going five(!) times to the movies (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Over the Hedge, Miami Vice, She’s the Man & Monster House), general happy living together, adopting our two little critters, going out with a bunch of friends for bowling and dinner, and much more! Oh yes, studying too.

Leaving was hard, again, very hard. And I so want to go back very soon. Plans right now are me spending my “winter break” in early December and New Years in Belgium. Meanwhile, Jan will be coming over some time in October and November!

For those of you who care about my flight back, it was okay, if it weren’t for the more than three hours of a detour. The story is, we left Brussels airport on time without problems, the flight was good and we got to Madrid at the scheduled time, but there was a huge storm with lighting that kept more than fifteen planes waiting to land. That meant we had to wait over fourty minutes to land, but we didn’t have enough fuel and detoured to Valencia to fuel there. Once the storm was over, all the detoured planes wanted to leave for Madrid at once, and we got a slot for 10pm (that’s 2.5 hours after we were supposed to land in Madrid). We finally made it to our destination at nearly 11pm, then wait for my suitcase, which luckily was one of the firsts to get out, and get a cab to go home. I got home at midnight, a whooping three hours and a half after I thought I’d be! Luckily for me, I bought the last sandwich on board, and that was all my dinner.

So that’s all, we’ll be back to the regular irregular updates of the blog after my exams and the end of summer cleaning week chez moi!

N is for Nero (and Macchiatto)

We just adopted two little guinea pigs, and I named them Nero (Black) and Macchiatto (Spotted – sort of). And they’re all jumpy jumpy happy hyperactive critters eating all the hay we give them and making our living room a bit more homey. Anyway, pics, right? Pics:

Macchiatto (left) and Nero (right)

It took me quite a while to get a decent pic of both. The one on the left is, obviously, Macchiatto, and the one on the right is Nero. We “rescued” them from a life outdoors, no hay… We got the biggest cage we can fit in our livingroom, some wooden pieces to jump over (and chew on), and mjummy hay and fresh veggies and all.

Test time!

As seen on GlittyKnittyKitty, here come two tests:


You Are an Espresso


At your best, you are: straight shooting, ambitious, and energetic

At your worst, you are: anxious and high strung

You drink coffee when: anytime you’re not sleeping

Your caffeine addiction level: high

.

I’m a Porsche 911!

porche 911

You have a classic style, but you’re up-to-date with the latest technology. You’re ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige – you’re one of the elite,and you know it.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.