Our man in Amman

Loyal readers, apologies for the delay in continuing the tales of our adventures in Ethiopia.  We’re not quite there yet, but stick with us, and in the mean time read on about Amman…

The intrepid young travelers you met in earlier blog posts ended up spending almost 24 hours in Jordan.  Despite wishing and hoping for a morning flight, they eventually found out that there was no way out of Jordan until the next evening (unless you wanted to pay $1000 – ha!).

What do you do when you and 20 other people are stuck in a hotel in the middle of the Jordanian desert for a day?  You go to the conveniently located travel agent (in the hotel lobby), who miraculously has a 6-hour bus tour of Amman and surrounding areas, and even more miraculously, they have enough room for everyone stranded by BMI.  I sense a back-room BMI business…

After ensuring we actually could leave Amman that evening, we signed up for the bus tour, and spent the next 5 or so hours in large vans, driving around the desert and the city of Amman.  Unfortunately for C, we never did see the Dead Sea up close, but our trusty man in Amman pointed out a hazy body of water in the distance and claimed it was the Dead Sea.  He also pointed to a hazy patch of land, and said it was Jericho, on the other side of the Israeli border.  We assume he was right…

Our tour included an old Greek monastery with beautiful mosaics, a visit to Mount Nebo (with more lovely mosaics) where Moses is said to be buried, and a tour of the city of Amman.  Oh, yes, and plenty of stops at ‘touristic’ shops, hawking all manner of Dead Sea beauty products, leather and mosaic patio tables.  I think these were primarily to allow our man in Amman to have a cigarette every 20 minutes.

The city tour began with a drive through the wealthy and ostentatious neighbourhoods (read: ugly and over-the-top).  There’s something amoral about lush lawns and gardens in the middle of an arid desert.  This neighbourhood is also home to the US Embassy in Jordan.  Where the other embassies are large, semi-well designed buildings, the US Embassy is a hideous fortress with a line of black Hummers parked outside the gates, and machine guns at the ready along the roof.

Our favourite part of the city tour, though, was the drive through what we like to call ‘real’ Amman.  This is the older and poorer part of the city, built on hills, with buildings that look like they’re piled on top of one another.  Narrow, steep roads are barely wide enough to accommodate modern vehicles, and the innermost parts of the city seem to be a warren of alleys.  We drove up to one of the highest points of Amman to look over the city.  As our eyes adjusted to the hazy sky and the stone buildings that seemed to blend in with the desert, we realized we were also looking at hundreds of kites.  It was an amazing sight…small kites bobbing up and down, scattered through the sky.  It was like gazing at a starry sky – the longer you looked, the more you saw, until the sky was filled with small, flying objects.  I finally understood what was described so beautifully in The Kite Runner.

Mosaics in Greek Orthodox Church

View of Amman

The good, the bad and the merely adequate…

A culinary review of 2008.

This blog is dedicated to our favourite recipes of the year, trusty recipes that got us out of a bind, and recipes that weren’t worth the ink they were written in.

We’ll start by saying that our most successful culinary experiments have come from Alford and Duguid’s Mangoes and Curry Leaves, with Nigella Express coming in a close second. Particular highlights from the former were Zinet’s chicken with tomato and greens, Colombo chicken curry (note that this isn’t called ‘Colombo chicken curry’ in Colombo. Trust me, I’ve asked…. I think they probably just call it ‘chicken curry’) – a brothy, zingy dish made with rice vinegar, yogurt, cilantro and lots of onion.  Also delicious were the ginger-lamb coconut milk curry, and Katchhi village potato curry. In fact, there hasn’t been a recipe that we’ve tried from that book that hasn’t been a resounding success, as this blog will prove.

Regardless of what you may think of cookbooks that promote the shortcut route, Nigella Express does have some handy tips for those office-till-late, crazy-commute-home, can’t-be-bothered-to-cook weekday evenings. Naan pizza has been one of our most popular recipes this year (the variations are endless….).  We’ve even gone as far as testing all the varieties of naan available from the major supermarket branches (branch T won out). We also loved her delicious pear and ginger muffins.

And as for those recipes that were, at best, merely adequate… Well, let’s just say that flaked haddock and Camargue red rice cakes may sound nice on paper, but in practice, these structurally unsound creations are not worth the aggravation and frankly, become rather tedious after the second one. And the second day. And the second week…..when they become simply inedible.  We may have discerning palates, but it takes a lot for us to declare a recipe as unworthy of repeating.

The disaster with the Camargue red rice cakes, however, did lead to the resounding success of the filo pie from another of Nigella’s cookbooks, which was actually improved by the substitution of Camargue red rice for plain rice.

Finally, for those trusty staples. Our standard granola recipe (from Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Café) has undoubtedly been our most-used recipe, largely encouraged by any sane person’s refusal to pay £3 for a bag of Liz’s granola (to say nothing of the £8 you pay at Borough Market for 600 measly grams). And the gooey chocolate puddings – a recipe courtesy of SN – which are great backup in the event of a dessert emergency (every other day, really….).

What will 2009 bring? We’ll keep you posted. I peer over at the Culinary Institute of America’s Breakfasts and Brunches as I type (a recent addition to our collection)….

Sunlight Café granola

Naan pizza

Chocolate pudding

Don’t move your head!

…or ‘The Scary Russian and the Cheap Haircut’…

I recently had a comment about this blog…do you do anything besides eating and cooking?!  Yes, we’re rather fond of both activities.  But sometimes, one needs to attend to the more mundane things in life, like getting a haircut.

I have usually managed to time my hair cuts with visits to Edmonton, thereby saving myself at least $50 (not including the plane ticket home, of course).  This November, I finally agreed that perhaps I should find someone locally to cut my hair.  This is my slow way of admitting that I’m not here JUST for my PhD.  Through a trusted Canadian friend, I found out about a hair academy we shall refer to as T&G.  For a mere £5, you can have the pleasure of a 3-hour hair cut at the hands of a trainee stylist.  T&G run a tight ship, herding groups of 5 to 6 willing ‘models’ up to their training floors, sorted by the kind of hair you have and if you want your hair coloured as well.  Let it be known that this was the first time in my life that I was a ‘model.’  And likely the last…

My lovely trainee, E, assured me that she was a hairdresser in Moscow, so I had nothing to be worried about.  Perhaps her grim expression should have tipped me off.  That, and as a friend said, ‘Have you seen womens’ haircuts in Moscow?!’  Trainees have to tell their instructors exactly what they are planning on doing before they can take a pair of scissors anywhere near your head.  The plan seemed fine until…

E gave me a stern warning, ‘Do not move your head at all when I start cutting.  You must keep very still.  This is VERY IMPORTANT.’  Who’s to argue with a woman with sharp scissors and a hunk of your hair in her hands?  It took E about 90 minutes to trim 1/3 of my hair, with frequent requests to her instructor for help.  I was certain that nothing was really being cut off.  As time wore on, she seemed to become increasingly perturbed.  The force with which she combed my hair straight was enough to move my head off its perfectly aligned centre position.  Then came the warning, ‘Don’t move your head! (Pause).  Please.’  With every tug of my hair, the warnings became louder, ‘I SAID, don’t MOVE YOUR HEAD!’  I wanted to gently remind her that no normal human being can keep their head perfectly still while someone is tugging on their hair for three hours.  But I kept my mouth shut.  She was from Moscow, after all…

Three hours and twenty minutes later, I had slightly shorter hair, styled into a strange curly poof with a middle parting and flattened at the top.  E told me it would look better once I’d washed it.  Indeed…

All said, my hair doesn’t look that bad, and it was only £5.  But whether I’ll return to T&G Academy and put my hair into the hands of another scary Russian remains to be seen…

It’s not nut-loaf…

…it’s Nigella’s chickpea and courgette (zucchini) filo pie, and it’s SO much better than any nutloaf.  For those of you unfamiliar with the nutloaf phenomenon, let me explain.

The Sunday roast in the UK is a deep-rooted tradition.  Pubs everywhere have a Sunday roast special and with the changing tastes of Britons, the traditional beef roast has expanded to include lamb, pork and occasionally, chicken.  The widespread popularity of vegetarianism brought about the infamous nutloaf.  Think meatloaf…with nuts, vegetables, etc.  There’s nothing wrong with a good nutloaf, but I pity vegetarians who really only have one option at a Sunday dinner.

A few weekends ago we invited some vegetarian friends for lunch, and decided to try something a little different than the usual fare.  Enter Nigella.  To be accurate, enter Nigella’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess.  For a few years, I’ve harboured a secret desire to have this book on my shelf (more for the title on the spine than anything else), and my wishes were granted just days before the lunch party.  As usual, I spent a few hours reading the book and found this recipe, which sounded suitably tasty and unusual.

We made alterations – substituting French Camargue red rice for the Basmati rice – and next time would consider other types of squash instead of the courgette/zucchini and add more chili.  Making a pie in a springform pan out of filo pastry was lots of fun, and for any one with a fear of filo, be not alarmed.  Filo pastry is actually much less fiddly than rolling out dough.

This dish is definitely in the running for our Christmas meal (for the vegetarians, of course – the rest of ‘em can eat turkey)!