Culinary Repertoire

When I first applied to Sussex University, I discovered that my room and board did not include a money-stealing meal plan scheme. In effect, I would be forced to buy and prepare my own food. This could have turned out in one of three ways: either I would get extremely lazy and buy only pre-processed foods; I would prepare eat the plainest, simplest foods possible; or I would learn to cook. The results have been a combination of all three possibilities: I do buy a good deal of pre-processed foods, but actually many less than I ate in the States (I was just unaware of how much pre-processed food I ate there before I came over here). I also eat a lot of plain food (rice with soy sauce, steamed vegetables, tuna from the can, chickpeas with salt, etc.), but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because I like plain foods.

Also, I have become a better cook. I say this not only because what I have made for myself and others actually does taste better, but also because I can cook without recipes (successfully, that is) more capably now than ever before. That is a sign of improvement, in my opinion. I can also make a few more dishes than I could before, and because I have made them successfully several times with makeshift ingredients, I consider my “cooking repertoire” to have expanded. Here is a small list of my new “specialty” dishes:

Ratatouille—a slightly spicy vegetable dish made of eggplant (i.e. “aubergine,” as the English term is), zucchini (i.e. “courgette”), peppers, and tomatoes; served over rice

Stir fry—made with whatever I happen to have, best with broccoli, cabbage, peppers, garlic, ginger, and (if I have it) chicken

Indian Chickpeas—a spicy chickpea-tomato dish

Curry Cabbage—exactly how it sounds: cabbage with a dressing of lemon juice, curry powder, and salt; sometimes served with onions

Curry Rice—basmati rice boiled with curry powder

Fruit Salad—with fresh and canned fruits, this can be particularly yummy

Salsa—I make this myself and then eat it with pita bread (which, needless to say, I do not bake myself)

Pasta Sauce—vegetarian-style thanks to the influence of my friend Fluf; made with soya mince that you’d never know was not meat!

Chicken Noodle Soup—I can’t claim this recipe as my own, but I’ve made it successfully and even taught it to a friend (Angela), so I feel justified in including it

See what a repertoire I’ve built up? Unfortunately, I’ve had no opportunity to do any baking here (too difficult having to buy a sack full of flour for just a cup’s worth, unreliable ovens, etc), but I look forward to resuming that activity when I return home. Thus, if you’re ever hungry and want to test my newfound culinary abilities, just ring me up and make a dinner date!

Old School

Angela, her friend Sha, and I watched Save the Last Dance tonight. I had already seen this movie several years ago, when it first came out (in 2001, I believe). However, seeing it again brought back fond memories, not only of seeing and enjoying the movie the first time, but of my high school experiences, as well. One of the features that made the film so enjoyable the first time I saw it was its correspondence to real life. The high school it portrayed was very similar the high school I attended (although mine had a significantly greater white population), and many of the experiences were very accurately portrayed. For instance, the way Sarah (Julia Stiles) has trouble dancing is exactly the way most white people have trouble dancing, while black people seem to have an “innate” sense of rhythm and affinity for hip-hop dancing. When she first tries to dance at Steps (the club her friend Chenille takes her to), she attempts to move her body from her shoulders. Successful hip-hop movements must start with the hips. I learned this early on from attending junior high and high school dances (although I am not particularly successful at applying this knowledge), and it was amusing to recognize Sarah’s development as a dancer in this way.

Another similarity was the crowdedness and chaos of the school. I never recognized it as such when I attended it—although I did acknowledge and complain about our zoo-like hallways. Everything area of the school was noisy, with kids jostling each other, from the hallways to the lunchroom. Sha wanted to know if we had “locker rooms like that” where I went to high school during a gym locker room scene. I hadn’t considered the locker rooms significant or unusual at all, but apparently they don’t have those in Singapore. “Yes,” I told her, “ours were just like that.”

And, of course, the interracial factors were very true to life. While most people don’t cross racial boundaries (black or white), those few who do have very assertive personalities (like Chenille) and usually somehow “integrate” into the opposite culture. (For instance, Derek tended to dress more “white” than his black counterparts, and Sarah had to learn to talk the “hard core” language of the company she kept.) It was very eye-opening to watch this movie and think of the high school chapter of my life “in retrospect.”

Rain in London

Today was supposed to be my good-duty day. I went to London specifically to buy Amy (my sister) an England sweatshirt (because she was did not decide until after she left what she wanted for her “souvenier”). Apparently, all of our nice weather was used up in April, because the temperature here has returned to the 50s, and it has been raining cats and dogs for the past several weeks. Thus, of course, it was raining today as I set off to catch my National Express bus to London.

Obviously I took an umbrella with me, but this did not prevent everything I was carrying in my bag/purse from getting wet. This wouldn’t have been so bad, had I not borrowed and brought along someone else’s novel (Naked by David Sedaris, borrowed from Angela) to read. The entire perimeter of the book got completely wet and is not drying in that ever-wrinkly fashion of soggy paper.

I intended to go to Camden market to buy the sweatshirt, because I knew I’d get a good price and there would be a good selection of the kind of zip-up hoodies Amy wanted there. Unfortunately, I happened to walk around Buckingham Palace at the exact time they were changing the guard. This means that the place was swamped with tourists: Germans scrambling for the best view, Chinese with their camcorders, parents herding children every which ways, and police people (women, too) in their neon yellow vests, trying to direct it all from horseback. Thus delayed, I tried to circle around this mob and be on my way. As you may predict, this only succeeded in getting me completely lost. I had arrived in London at 11 a.m. By 1 p.m., I had only reached Oxford Circus (approximately halfway between the Victoria coach station where I had arrived and my destination).

Rather than risk getting further lost and perhaps missing my bus back to Brighton (scheduled to leave Victoria at 5 p.m.), I decided to look around the shops in Oxford Circus for the sweatshirt. I found a few promising items at souvenier shops, and after much contemplation, returned to one I had encountered earlier in my search to buy the sweatshirt. Not more than two minutes after I had made my purchase—which, by the way, cost me five pounds more than my parents had given me to buy the souvenier—I wandered into another shop and found the exact same sweatshirt for nearly fifteen pounds less. That’s thirty dollars!

To further my bad luck, the spokes on my umbrella proceeded to snap one after the other until it was literally impossible to even open the thing. At that point in time, it was not raining very hard, so I chucked the useless instrument in a nearby rubbish bin and continued browsing the jam-packed stores. I managed to successfully navigate my way back to Victoria coach station and arrived back in Brighton at seven-odd in the evening. Unfortunately, by this time it was absolutely pouring, and—because I am trying to conserve my last few pounds here for food and other necessities—I was forced to walk the mile back from Poole Valley Station to Holland House in the rain.

By this time in the evening, I was starving, so I hurried into the kitchen to make myself some dinner. What greeted me, but puddles on the floor from a leaky refrigerator and a sink full of grimy water, soggy bits of people’s leftover dinner, and unwashed dishes. Needless to say, I worked around this to prepare my curry and even received some leftover rice from the ever-generous Fluf.

The final straw happened approximately twenty minutes ago. I decided to go to Tesco Express (a grocery mart located conveniently around the corner from our residence) to get myself some much-deserved dessert. Because it was raining, I was ultra-aware of how slippery the marble steps would be leading down from our front door. Tenatively, I placed one flip-flopped foot (because my sneakers were inside my room, hopefully dripping dry) on the step, and what happened? Out went my foot, and down the steps I flew, to land heavily on the right-hand side of my lower back. What made this fall worse was that because I was only going around the corner, I was holding my keys and my wallet in my hands. Both proceeded to fly from my grasp, and although I managed to find my wallet fairly quickly, my keys were nowhere to be seen.

Luckily, after much searching in the rain and darkness, I managed to recover the keys. (They were sitting by a gutter in a pile of cigarette ashes.) Tesco Express didn’t have the kind of caramel-filled Cadbury’s chocolate I like best, so I returned to Holland House empty-handed and tremendously sore.

What a day.

Coaching Alex

I had my first “coaching” experience a few swimming sessions ago. It was empowering.

I wrote once about Alex, the kid who cannot (or simply does not) do flipturns. When writing about him, I suggested but did not confirm the fact that he was faster than me. He is.

We were swimming a session at King Alfred, and he was in my lane with two other kids about his age (thirteen or so). I was leading the lane, and the other two were working hard to keep up, but Alex was just goofing off—swimming with no arms in the middle of the lane, taking long breaks while we completed the sets, etc. Finally, I was fed up, not only with his lack of effort, but with the lack of attention the coach was paying him. I am accustomed to coaches paying attention to everyone in the water (at least a little), and letting this kid get away with doing virtually no work would never have been acceptable at home. How would he ever develop self-discipline or get any faster if no one ever reprimanded him. Thus, I took it upon myself to motivate him to do some work.

The last set of the evening was four one hundreds (i.e. four lengths without stopping) sprint. Before we began, I told Alex that because he was faster than me, he should go first. He said, “no thanks,” so I told him we could make a deal. I’d go first, he would go second, and for every hundred in which he “caught” me, he could do one fewer hundreds. Essentially, this meant that if he caught me on the first two hundreds, he could skip the last two. He agreed, and we began the set. Needless to say, he did not catch me on the two hundreds, and so in order to keep him motivated, I made another deal. He still had to go second, but as long as he stayed ahead of the girl who was going third—which I was positive he could do—he could do whatever he wanted for the last one. “Basically, as long as you don’t let her catch you, you can not swim for the last one,” I told him. “Which is virtually what you’ve been doing all practice, anyway.” He stayed ahead of her, and I let him skip the last hundred, pleased that I had made him actually try for 300 meters of that set.

The next time we attended a session together, we ended up in the same lane again, but this time with just the two of us. As usual, he wasn’t making any effort at all during the practice, so on the sprint set (five one hundreds) at the end of practice, I yelled at him for not trying. He said he was “saving his energy” and would try on the last one. I told him that he had better beat me on the last hundred, because I hated people who slacked only to go fast at the end. If he beat me, though, I’d forgive him. He did. I told him that next time, he’d have to beat me on two of the hundreds.

These experiences all led up to my moment of greatest pride: We attended one more session together, and when Alex got into the lane next to me and I nodded hello, he looked squarely at me and said, “I’m going to work this time.”

Celebratory Blake

I am finished!
My final final (exam, that is) was this morning: English Literature 1740-1830. The exam was held in a large room with rows of desks lined up military-style, each desk possessing an exam and an answer booklet with the student’s candidate number written on it. Of course, like all procedures at Sussex, this procedure was unnecessarily complicated and had not been explained to me ahead of time. Thus, unaware that I would need my candidate number, I had to rush off and find out what it was (although, as it turns out, it was written on my student ID card all along) in order that I could take the exam. This mini-crisis notwithstanding, I finished my three essays in a record time of 2½ hours and was the first student to walk out of the exam room. Hopefully that was a good sign, as I have never been the first to finish an exam in all of the time I have studied at Rochester.

In honor of finishing this course—and because I can now happily forget all of the names and dates I memorized “just in case” I needed them for an essay—I will include some of my favorite quotes from the coursework. I particularly liked William Blake’s poetry, because he used it to examine the morals and beliefs of the time period. In one particular poem, “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake suggests that Heaven may actually be a “hell of rationality and rules,” whereas Hell may actually be a “heaven of sensuality.” His poetry builds throughout the piece to argue that Heaven coincides with energy, and anything thwarting that energy is bad. The following excerpts are taken from a subset of this poem, The Proverbs of Hell, (from which I quoted once before, in an earlier post):

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God./The lust of the goat is the bounty of God./The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God./The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

Other Blake quotes that are worth pondering:

The vision of Christ that thou dost see/is my vision’s greatest enemy.

Every night and every morn/Some to misery are born;/Every morn and every night/Some are born to sweet delight./Some are born to sweet delight,/Some are born to endless night.