I was making bean soup today, and as we all know, nothing ruins a good bean soup like the absence of good cornbread. Now, pre-ground cornmeal is not as common here as it is in the U.S., so I started looking through our pantry for something I could use to substitute. Durum wheat had a similar golden color to cornmeal, but a brief search on Google revealed that Durum wheat is really better for pita-type breads.
Semolina appeared to have a similar consistency to cornmeal, but another search on Google also didn't lead me to believe that it could be used to make a cornbread-clone.
Finally I found a bag of plain popcorn kernels. Well, we do have a grinder, as Manuela loves to grind her own whole-wheat flour for cakes and breads, so I decided to make my own cornmeal.
The recipe called for one cup of cornmeal, so I poured a heaping cup of popcorn kernels into the grinder, expecting that (like chopping nuts), the ground product would lose some of its volume. First of all, the grinder did not react well to the popcorn kernels. I managed to rescue it and them by adjusting to a much coarser grind, but then I ended up with more than a heaping cup of half-ground popcorn kernels. I thought that perhaps that the change in proportion was due to the fact that there had been some wheat flour left in the grinder from Manuela's last usage, but in any event, the half-ground popcorn kernels definitely wouldn't be any good for popcorn any more, so I decided to try it again. This time, I adjusted the grind ahead of time, and poured the corn very slowly (just a few kernels at a time) back into the grinder. It worked this time, but I was shocked to see that the cup I had used to measure the kernels was now nearly twice as full as when I had started.
Is it like that with all grains, that they INCREASE in volume during the process of being ground? Or is it something peculiar about corn? Did you know that if you fill a glass of milk completely to the brim, you can add another entire glass full of popcorn, and the milk won't overflow? Crazy.
The cornbread is in the oven now. I'll let you know how it turns out.
Eigentlich, fahre ich Zug sehr gerne, aber ich verstehe die Analogie. Früher ging es mir ungefähr genauso: so viele Verantwortlichkeit hatte ich durch meine 4 verschiedene Jobs, dass ich das Gefühl hatte in einem Zug zu sitzen der einfach weiter fährt, egal wie schön die Umgebung sei. Aussteigen hätte ich schon gekönnt, aber was wäre passiert wenn der Zug ohne mich angekommen wäre? Damals wäre ich lieber mit Auto gefahren: wenn man anhalten will, kann er danach einfach schneller fahren, damit er noch rechtzeitig ankommt. Aber jetzt, wo mein Leben ein bisschen ruhiger ist (hahaha....es muss ruhig sein, ich wohne doch in Diethardt ;), merke ich wie schön es ist mit Zug zu fahren--man kann die Umgebung anschauen ohne auf die Straße aufzupassen, und wenn man anhalten will ist es ganz egal ob man ein Parkplatz findet ;). Eigentlich will ich gar nicht wieder nach L.A. wo man immer mit Auto fahren muss....
It's been a crazy couple of weeks (and my fingers lapsed back into German mode just then: the first time through, they typed "it's bin a kouple")
Norina's birthday was on May 6th: she turned 8 years old. As promised, she received an "IOU" for a kitten, but unfortunately, none of the cats in our neighborhood are expecting until the end of the month, which means we won't actually get the baby until....probably after I'm gone. I asked Manuela why she didn't just go to an animal shelter or a breeder (or even a petstore!!), but since she doesn't know much more about cats than me, she was of the opinion it would be better to get one from someone we know. I had to agree that her reasoning was good, although I doubt if I would have come to the same conclusion on my own. Then again, I'm pretty sure all the cats I know in the U.S. are spayed or neutered, but in Germany, that can't be assumed. It tends to be the mentality that you only have to worry about your female creatures, because if your male fathers babies, they aren't your responsibility. What I find most interesting about this difference in attitudes is that it doesn't seem to cause a shortage in puppies and kittens in America, nor a surplus in Germany.
Anyway, Manuela had so many great ideas for games and scavenger hunts for Norina's birthday party, and I was supposed to be in on the plan, but suddenly that afternoon as the guests started to arrive, I began to feel nauseous and had to lay down. I woke up several hours later as the guests were leaving, but was assured by Manuela that Simon had done an excellent job in my place. To my frustration, the strange illness had not gotten better by the next morning, but rather had migrated into my head, and I've had headaches, sneezing fits, and a hacking cough ever since. I was convinced they were caused by allergies, but after it had been going on for a week and I finally went to the doctor, he assured me it was still just a cold. I suppose I should be grateful, because that means it will eventually go away, but I can't remember the last time I had a cold that lasted more than a couple of days.
We had a going-away party for Simon on Friday, which I really enjoyed. I hadn't really expected to know very many people there, but I was surprised to find that I had met almost all of them at least once before. Willow came, as did Anna and Jan. Mathias Klein, the one we went to visit in Trier way back at the beginning of the year, was there, and Phillip, who is also a native Diethardter, but was in Iceland over the summer, and I only met him once before he started University. Katrin, the girl in Wiesbaden that I had so much fun with the couple of times we hung out, spent the night, and Hannes was of course there, along with Simon's friends from Weisel: Sören, Joschka, and Josch's girlfriend Safira. It was the sort of party which could have ended up being awkward because (with the exception of the Weiseler), there tended to be only one or two friends from each different circle, but I found this actually gave the party a rather intimate feel, even with so many people there. I felt like I really got a chance to connect with each person there, which I particularly enjoyed with people like Mathias and Phillip, with whom I couldn't communicate as easily last time I saw them.
Monday was Pentecost (actually it was Sunday, but Germans like getting the day off work when there's a church holiday), so the whole group of us (7 Pakis, Costas, and Paki-Costas, plus Willow and me), went canoing on the Lahn river. Speaking of, is it spelled canoing or canoeing? When I was typing this blog entry on Word, it was spell-checked as "canoeing", but the Firefox spell-checker corrected it to "canoing". Wir waren also Kanu fahren, und es hat richtig Spaß gemacht. Ich habe die Fotos von Manuela's camera auf Facebook hochgeladen, wenn ihr Lust habt die anzuschauen.
Willow blieb noch einen Tag, und wir haben mit Simon in Wiesbaden eingekauft. Erst Klamotten bei H&M (und richtig schick--hell-färbige Langarmhemden und Hosen aus Leinen die ihn gegen Mücken schützen, ohne in der Afrikanischen Sonne zu heiß zu werden. Dazu haben wir ihm einen tollen Rucksack gefunden, und eine Mütze die zu seinen neuen Klamotten supergut passt, und auch hat er sich ein Mosquitonetz gekauft. Es hat den ganzen Tag gedauert, aber endlich hatte er alles gekriegt, was er brauchte.
Donnerstag war der Abschied: Um 20:00 Uhr war der Flug, also wir hatten noch Zeit davor ein paar Kleinigkeiten einzukaufen, und gut war es: das Kind hatte gar nicht gepackt! Die Zeit wurde richtig eng, aber letzten Endes saßen wir um 4 Uhr nachmittags im Auto, und waren schon am Flughafen als wir erfahren haben, dass der Flug fast 6 Stunde verspätert war! (insert here a German interjection that sounds a little bit like, "Oh, why!", but which I don't know how to spell) Wir sind mit ihm am Flughafen bis fast 21:00 Uhr geblieben (Iris und Flo sind auch gekommen um sich von Simon zu verabschieden: das war auch nett), aber endlich haben wir uns von ihm verabschiedet. Manuela and Simon were both on the point of tears, which almost put me over the edge, but I didn't even cry at my own going away (did I? to be honest I don't really remember), it would have been silly to cry then. After all, I will see him again before I go home, even if it is only for a week. I planned it on purpose that way: Simon was mean enough to buy his return ticket for the exact DAY when Willow and Rendy fly home, which bothered Willow just a bit more than it bothered Rendy ;), but luckily for me, I hadn't bought my ticket yet (Since I don't have to worry about being home for start of fall semester, I had a bit more flexibility), so I postponed my stay an extra week.
I had originally planned to do something really exciting this weekend, to remind myself that I don't need Simon to have fun, but in the end, I decided what I really wanted was a little bit of time alone. But, shhh, if anyone asks, I tell them it's because I'm still sick. I've listened to a lot of music (hence the title of the blog and the Jack Johnson track), read a lot (I finished O Alquimista), went to Norina's "Schulfest", and tomorrow we are going hiking with Joel's Kindergarten group.
Anyway, I just discovered that the power adapter for my laptop is not charging, so I need to end this entry before the computer hibernates on me. Now I'm just waiting for Rendy to accuse me of not taking care of his old laptop ;) His line: It worked fine when I gave it to you! My answer: Yeah, and now it's a whole year older than when you gave it to me. Laptops don't last forever ;). Still, maybe it'll turn out to be no big deal and he can fix it when he's here next week. If not, my internet activity may become even more limited than it's been ;)
Love you all!
I spent the weekend in a town about 50 times as big as Diethardt, which is still not saying much. The town of schwaigern is in the district of Heilbronn, about half an hour north of Stuttgart, and is the home of Willow's new German best friend, Sascha. She met Sascha through her tandem partner, Lisa, the girl she partnered with in Tübingen where they mutually tutored each other in English and German. Now that Willow has moved to Stuttgart and enrolled in a new university, Sascha has become for her pretty much what Simon is for me: a connection to German people our own age.
Sascha and his twin brother, Patrick, have a friendly little apartment where they allowed Willow and me to camp out in their living room. sascha's and Patrick's friends, keeping a tradition that is much more alive in Southern Germany than where I live, which is further north, were prolonging their "May Day" celebration over the course of the entire weekend. (Just to give you a sense of comparison, the celebration of the beginning of May in Diethardt consisted of a bonfire which was already dying down by the time I got home from German class at 10:00, and in Wiesbaden, May Day wasn't even a topic of conversation).
It would have been a tranquil weekend for me if I had stayed home. The kids had Thursday and Friday off school (Besides being May Day, which is not an "official" holiday, May 1st is also International Labor Day--in commemoration of the Haymarket Square Incident which took place in CHICAGO in 1886, and is recognized in every country I've been to *except* the U.S. Plus, because of Easter having been so early this year, Ascension Day also fell on May 1st, which is also an "official" holiday because of the fact that German government is still so deeply intertwined with both the Catholic and Lutheran churches.) Simon had to work all weekend because the church where he does his civil service was having a huge concert Saturday night which he had to help organize, so I decided that I had absolutely no desire to stay home.
It occured to me that it was the first weekend of the month, which is exactly when I've been wanting to visit Paris, due to the fact that the Louvre has free admission on the first Sunday of the month. However, a little bit of research made it clear that a holiday weekend was definitely not a cheap time to visit Paris, so instead Willow invited me to party with Sascha and Patrick and company.
We didn't stay late at the party Friday night because Sascha needed to get up early the next morning to visit his grandmother in Heidelberg, but told Willow and me we were welcome to stay at the apartment and sleep in, which we did with relish. We awoke some time around noon, and simply moved into the backyard, were we listened to music, read, and slept some more. That was when I noticed the tiny black spot on my forearm. Thinking it was a piece of dirt, I scratched at it absentmindedly. When it didn't come off, I licked my finger and rubbed a little harder. The area around it grew slightly red, and suddenly I felt the need to look at it closer.
"Willow," I said with a sense of mild curiosity, "Is this a tick?" She had worked for a summer at a Boy Scout camp, but it turns out they didn't have any more of a problem with ticks at her camp than we did at Rock-n-water, because she wasn't sure either.
It didn't hurt, itch, sting, or burn, like I would have expected, so Willow and I discussed the various methods we have heard of removing ticks. Tweezers: can be effective, but have the danger of removing the body and leaving the head attached. Heat: can also be effective, but may irritate the insect into regurgitating into the bite and increasing the risk of infection. Vaseline: suffocates the tick and causes it to relax its grip. Well, at least that's what we had both heard, but as we discovered, it takes a ridiculously long time to suffocate an insect who only needs to breathe a few times an hour, so when it was still attached quite some time later, we attempted the heat method, which caused me quite a bit of discomfort, but didn't seem to bother the tick at all. Finally, we decided just to wait for Sascha, who demonstrated the proper method of gripping the head with the tweezers, and twisting it to "unscrew" its grip on the skin. There was a barely audible ripping noise as he pulled the tweezers away, and I was terrified that that was the sound of the tick's head separating from it's body. Closer inspection, however, revealed a perfectly clean wound that was not even as large as a punctured pimple.
I know it's been exactly a month since I last blogged. It isn't that I disappeared off the face of the planet: It's simply that now the cold winter months are FINALLY over, I don't have as much desire to sit indoors staring at a computer screen. Simon was in the hospital for nearly a week after having his tonsils removed, and Manuela had her wisdom teeth removed, so I didn't get out of Diethardt much either. I didn't even make it down to Stuttgart to see Willow's new apartment until she had been there almost a month.
Tomorrow is Norina's birthday, and she is getting a present about which I am almost excited as she will be, when she finds out. Josef, who as a rule only likes animals when he is allowed to lay them on a grill, was finally persuaded by Manuela to let Norina have a cat. That's right. My last couple of months with the family, and I'll be getting to live with a kitten for the first time in my life.
We have always known that Norina is the type of person who would do well with a pet, but the situation became critical last month, as she and her friends developed the sweet but also rather repulsive habit of collecting spiders and building them elaborate cages out of cardboard boxes and cellophane, where she wrote each spider's name, and was careful to capture enough live flies to keep each spider satisfied. I do hope that, with a cat in the picture, this generation of spiders will be the last. And if not, maybe we'll get lucky and the cat will start to eat the spiders.
We've got yet another long weekend coming up (don't get me wrong, I'm NOT complaining ;): The Monday after Pentecost is also a Feiertag for schools and businesses. Friday night is when Simon is having his going-away party before Mozambique, and on Sunday, if the weather stays so beautiful, we are going to take a canoe tour on the Lahn river. Willow is coming up to celebrate Simon's last weekend in Germany, and the weekend after that, I'll be going back down to visit her, and (if everything works out!), she'll have gotten tickets to see the Stuttgart soccer team!
Anyway, in case it takes me as long to blog the next time, you'll have a general idea of what I'm up to.
LOVE,
Amy
