Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic (Recipe Not Included.)

Say you find a recipe called Roast Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic. The instructions read"throw everything in a slow cooker and wait four hours," snd say that the garlic cloves turn out  really really good - particularly smeared across a fresh sliced French baguette.  And say that after you’ve dreamily chewed your way through half a loaf, your husband yelps and says "Hey! I've only had two cloves!" and you look down and discover that you've eaten the other 38.

Hypothetically speaking.

That night, you just might just find yourself sleeping by yourself on the living room sofa. For health and safety reasons. 

It's just like French onion soup. Only louder.

Halloween in the Calle Rosas

This morning my mother-in-law  took a little trip into Centro - the old heart of Santiago -  for a little Halloween shopping.
            Our first stop was a little arcade just outside the Plaza de Armas- the arcade was mostly hairdressers and cell-phone-cover stores, but I remembered a little toy store in there that had a wall of boxes full of rubber animals. You know the sort of thing - rubber snakes and technicolor stegosaurus and wolf-spiders with fangs the size of hubcaps. I wanted to see if they had any plastic rats.
            Did they have plastic rats? Does New York have a Big Apple in it? Did Gustave Eiffel design some rather nice train stations in South America? Did they have rats?! -
            We left the shop with a bag full of big black red-eyed rodents, a handful of little black mice and a clutch of nasty rubber spiders. My mother-in-law insisted on carrying the bag.

On the back side of the Plaza de Armas is a street called Calle Rosas. Down the west end of the street there are shops selling fabric and sewing machines and fabrics and parts for sewing machines, but what Calle Rosas really does is parties.
            Chileans take parties seriously. For a start, you need a pinata. And hats, lots of hats. Not the good old Australian party standby - the paper cone with an elastic band to go under the chin and maybe a streamer at the top, but crowns with jewels on, and policeman's helmets, and dragons to roost on your head and coil down around your ears, and Egyptian cobras done in gold lame, and pirate's tricorns, and veddy English top hats, and feather bonnets, and green fedoras and flapper cloches -
            Hatted out, you need your streamers and balloons. And banners, done up in glitter with the name of the guest of honor written three feet high, and horns and hooters and poppers and silly string - 
            Imagine all that and then, add Halloween. Calle Rosas had gone bananas. There was no other word for it - the stores that normally can't breath for confetti and paper streamers were tricked out (see what i did there?!) in balloons and paper bats - there was so much Halloween dangling from the ceilings of the stores that you had to enter in a sort of semi-crouch and sidle around barrels full of rubber masks and plastic pitchforks with plastic blood on to even get inside. 
            We started in the smaller stores that exist wistfully on the fringes of things where Calle Rosas bumps into Veintiuno de Mayo (21 May 1879, the Battle of Iquique. Chileans like to name streets after significant dates) and, creeping bent between racks of vampire capes (basic black, sex-bomb red, virginal white, or cotton-candy pink) we came away with bunting and streamers and bags and bags of little black plastic spiders. 
            And we bought Mr Tabubil a hat - a black bowler with cobwebs and big round eyeballs on it, and dangling wads of grey cheesecloth from around its ears. It is glorious.
            Our purchases were bagged by fellow in a cowl and a hockey mask, who gurgled liquidly when we said Gracias. He had coughed at us when we entered, liquid and hacking, and when we flinched, he had  reeled sideways into the arms of a dancing skeleton and clutched at a plastic pike with plastic blood on the handle - he was having a wonderful day. 
            After that we braved the bigger party stores.  Who knew what we'd see?  
            If we could get through the doors.  It wasn't the flying bats or the whispering ghosts or the jiggling hanged men with battery-operated jiggles - it was the flying bats and the whispering ghosts and the jiggling hanged men.  But mostly it was the people.  I don't know if any stores made any money anywhere else in Santiago today, because the entire city was out shopping in Calle Rosas. The only thing that made the experience bearable was the army of pumpkin-shirted men and women that patrolled the crowd, looking to latch onto anyone sufficiently wide-eyed and desperate, and took you and your shopping list in hand and dragged you bodily through the scrum.
            They did abandon us, sporadically, so that we could be menaced by men in hockey masks (clearly the spook-face of the year) and army jackets that looked as if they'd been shredded by claws and buried for a month. A monster would come close - and closer, and we'd notice that behind the hockey mask was another mask - this one with scars and maggots and a reek of fresh rubber. Bending down, he'd shrug, slightly, and we'd notice that the clinking sound we were hearing was the chains that he wore draped across his shoulders and over his chest, and we'd see that his leather motorcycle gauntlets were shredded by the same steel claws that had done for his coat, and once he'd seen that we'd seen, he settled down to make us feel really uncomfortable.
            Above us, the ceiling howled and cackled and laughed manically, mechanically, because every single square foot of it was occupied by those whispering ghosts and jiggling hanged men, and a little girl, screaming with laughter, was jumping up and down and setting them all off.
            We laughed too, and our hockey-mask maniac winked at us and shuffled off to menace someone else.
 
Outside the store, we walked to the end of the street and there was no more Halloween, anywhere at all.  It was a whole festival confined to that one street, and nowhere else in the city. We caught a taxi and drove home and unpacked our loot on the kitchen ledge.
            It's all about context, I think.  Take our Ghastly Severed Hand, for instance.  At a Halloween store, no-one would look at it twice, but at mid-afternoon outside the Calle Rosas, when Mr Tabubil came around the corner from the laundry and saw it lying on the kitchen ledge, he hit the ceiling. 
            Quite literally.  He screamed and then he jumped.            
            It is a rather good severed hand.  
            Also, there is a small black rat sitting on Mr Tabubil's nightstand.  My mother-in-law and I are trying a small psychological experiment.

The Big Pink!

This is Mr Tabubil on the subject of Valentine's Day:
            "Did you know that price of flowers goes up by seven hundred and thirty percent on February 14th? The florists know you're coming. Flowers and chocolates mean nothing except that you are a sheep following a ringleader that’s baa-ing just as loudly as you are.  All of the romance -  if there ever was any - is lost in an expensive wash of cheap sentimentality - and sheep. Roses, particularly, are a meaningless gesture in a mercenary sea of overpriced artifice and scripted spontaneity and I think everybody should pull their quilts over their heads and stay there until the whole horrible thing is over. Gnnnrrrrggghhhh."
            "Can't you just appreciate the spirit of the day and take the occasion as an opportunity to express love and joy toward the people you care about?" 
            "Since I already feel as if I’m being sucked into the hungry maw of the ugly capitalistic advertising machine, I don't think people should even kiss on Febuary 14th because if they do, Madison Avenue will get the wrong idea and start charging hearts and sparkles to my Visa card." 
            "Does that mean I don't get flowers, then?"
            Which just shows that you can help anybody reach their breaking point if you do it right.
   

But I'm not really a bad person. In fact, I felt for the poor fellow. It's true that February 14th is undoubtedly over-commercialized, and last year I thought I'd empathize a little - I'd embrace his horror of the season and do things his way.
            I was thinking polyester. Polyester granny panties, a box of chocolates with a bite out of every single one, my oldest, saggiest bra, and a dinner of liver 'n onions.
            Vive l'horreur.
            It certainly helped that he'd gotten home the morning of the 14th  from a trip overseas and was jet-lagged to a point only a shade this side of lucid. I may not be a bad person, but I'm not always very nice.
             "Oh Tabubil!" The man wailed. "I didn't get you anything and here you are making dinner all for me-e!  I don't deserve a wife like you!"
            "No kidding." I thought, and bent over the frying pan, holding my breath.  I set the table and proudly uncovered -
            "Calf liver?"  Mr Tabubil breathed, turning green.  "Have I never mentioned to you that I don't… um.. er..." 
            "No." I lied firmly. "You never." I took up a knife and sliced.  He covered his mouth and made a choking sound.
            "I'm sorry" he mumbled through his hand "but the smell..."
            And then the jet-lag kicked him in the back of the skull and he came over all remorseful.
            "And you cooked it all for me-e! Even knowing how I feel about the 14th. Well, I feel awful. I should be grateful - I should be loving this.  I'm a bad bad baaaaad bad husband!"
            Fortunately for both of us, there were leftovers in the fridge that he could eat while I choked down a slice of the liver. 
            "Tabubilgirl, your face looks sort of, well - "
            "Not at all!"  I gasped.  "S' lovely!  Not quite what I was expecting, but it's the first time I've made it, and - mmm-mmm!  Yummy! And special - all made just for you!" 
            And that went straight down the black hole of remorse as well.  He knew things weren't quite right, but  was too strung out on time-zones to do anything but swallow the flashy neon malarkey I was peddling wholesale. He  felt so terrible he ate half of what was left on my plate.
            Liver disposed of, "Valentine's Day presents!" I cried, bouncing up out of my chair to grab the chocolates.
            "Sweeetie..."Mr Tabubil moaned, and when I handed him the big heart shaped box his face took on an expression intended to convey love and gratitude, and guilt, and deep deep remorse for not repaying me in kind. 
            "I don't deserve you."  His eyes said, damply, to my own. "You dear dear sweet sweet darling."
            And then he opened the box, and his features turned- in rapid succession- to shock, distaste, disgust and at last, a deep, dawning suspicion.
            Swallowing a deep breath, he stalked in high dudgeon to our bedroom, where he shut the door firmly in my face and proceeded to laugh his head off.
            Eventually he calmed down enough to let me in and we went back to the kitchen for proper dessert - a big squashy chocolate cake. He made me take the first bite. Which hurt, because I'd selflessly resisted the urge to bake our leftover Halloween spiders into the middle layer. And if he really loved me like he said, he'd never even have dreamed of thinking it.  I'm not all bad.
            Things were perfectly amicable until we went to bed, and then he saw the granny panties and I had to make a run for it.
            O divine granny panties - $5.03(less tax) of slippery nylon knit, oily plastic sheen and the ambiguously pink color of an undercooked ham. They creeped up past my belly button and drooped down past my thighs, and capped the dimples above my knee-bones with embroidered nosegays all done up in ecru plastic lace.
            Don't ask how long I spent looking for drawers that looks like that.  It was an odyssey of many parts and many stories, of triumphs, tragedies, great leaps of faith and heroism past the bounds of woman and of man -
             O  raise your voice for vinalon and acetate - for britches that ride up past the ribs and briefs that wallow underslung - for running hosiery and slipped knits - for bobble knit, for ladder stitch, for gossamer translucency,elastic bands that clamp your thighs with purple grip -
            Stripped to my dreadful nylon drawers, I stood, chin raised, and proudly stared my husband down.  He looked at me and looked at me and sat very very still.  His mouth opened, and he said "Take those off."
            And then he turned his head to the wall and very firmly went to sleep.

Happy Valentines Day!

Alice of Wonderland, Scourge of Cobwebs, Despoiler of Halloweens Everywhere

I began sewing this dress a couple of years ago for an Alice of Wonderland party, but I never finished it. I was dressing as the titular Alice - a rather bashy, brutal sort of Alice, with a contract out on the head (complete with frozen glass eyes and a zipper to make a purse) of the Cheshire Cat. On the morning of the party, before the final seams were sewn, Zoe, the party's hostess, called in floods of tears.  She'd found her beloved cat Horse lying in the back garden, dead from a snake-bite.
            We were all shattered. My costume stayed unfinished. There are some things that nice people just don't do. 
           Three years later, Alice of Wonderland, Cheshire Cat Hunter, received her last stitch.  And she was a most appropriately Halloween-y sort of costume - absolutely loaded with horror and dread, and the day after the party, in the cold light of morning, what fifteen assorted people cannot understand is how European Civilization survived half a millennium of hoopskirts. 
            I couldn't pass a decorative cobweb without trying to take it away with me on my pink petticoat - as well as whatever the cobweb had been attached to, which was usually a chair, which meant that whoever was sitting on the chair came too.  I nearly took down the buffet when I leaned gingerly in for a pineapple kebab - the hostess had cleverly swapped out the tablecloth for more cobwebs, and when three people reached out to catch me, i found that the pork platter and a bowl of punch were strung out on a cobweb lead line, teetering on the brink of total party disaster.   
            I was banned from the living room the second time I passed the coffee table - my swinging skirts were setting glasses of punch flying. That second pass had taken out the refills of the ruins of the first, and as I fled, disgraced, the conversation turned from how the hostess had illegally given herself a bye into the semi-finals of the Pictionary tournament, and moved onto candles and farthingales and pocket-hoops and how on earth the Victorians had managed to survive the bustle.  Those inventive Victorians had lit their houses with kerosene lamp and gas burners at the ends of clumsy rubber hoses. Swinging hoops are bad enough, but a bustle you can't see coming or going - the mind shudders.
            I had hoped that the other guests would thank heaven for small mercies and call me back, but instead I was banished to the corner of the dining room and set counting the votes for the costume contest. The seal on my funk was set when I found that people had been writing opinions in the margins of their ballots - my Alice dress had narrowly missed out on the prize for "most genuinely frightening costume" because people were worried that someone would have to present that prize to me in person.

And the evening's true ignominy? The final seal and funk? 
Reader - it was my party.

Cueva del Milodon

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

 

The Mylodon is an giant ground sloth that inhabited Patagonia up until about ten thousand years ago. They were very large animals – weighing in at around two hundred kilograms and standing three meters tall in their socks, and little bony plates (osteoderms) lodged inside their skin. Not many other animals would have tangled with a mylodon. They were tough customers, and it says something about how very tough the humans of these cold, windy parts were that they managed to take all of them out. One by one.

The Cueva del Milodon is a very large cave, where almost a hundred and twenty years ago, in 1895, the German explorer Hermann Eberhard dug up a cache of Mylodon bones and petrified Mylodon scat.  Five minutes later, the place was overrun by looters and treasure hunters, but one hundred and twenty years later, archeologists still haunt the place, digging fitfully in corners, trying to convince visitors that the potholes and debris piles are just how the prehistoric human inhabitants left it.  
              When I first visited the cave nine years ago, Dad and had I considered the extinction a significant blow for interior design.  I mean, really...  Streaky mud floors, creeping damp, salt damage….
            The cave doesn’t need the Mylodon – its two hundred meters of depth are staggeringly impressive all on their own. But a week of wind makes you punchy.  It drives you to desperation, and when you snap, you break out in chintz.  Dad and I considered something in an oversize floral print.  Maybe a tiki bar in the back, to justify a few prehistoric flaming torches.  And oh, the potential for hi-fi!  At the back of the cave, where the wall curves up against the scree slope, the echoes get really big. 
            Dr Tabubil and and I halloo’d the reverberate fjord.  “Tabubilgirl  -erl –erl is a hottie  -hottie -ottie!)”
            Dad looked at us and looked at us and said dryly how pleased he was to see how far the level of human culture had risen since humans moved into the place.

Back then there wasn’t much there: a car park, marked roughly with logs, and a gravel path up the hill to the mouth of the cave –
            Today the Cueva del Milodon has a café, a visitors centre, a ranger station, and an elevated walkway to take you all the way to the cave while walking six careful inches above the pampas grass. On a natural promontory in the mouth of the cave there is a life-size milodon done up in fiberglass and a plexiglass box holding a mummified scrap of genuine milodon skin, with genuine milodon fur on it –
            We duly marveled and went down into the cave.  It’s still hugely impressive – two hundred yawning meters of dark brown echoes and poetry of the gaping cavernous sort. Today, though, you can’t get near the echo wall.  A gravel path circles through the cave, with chain-link ropes on each side and everywhere, signs explaining that only a fraction of the cave floor has been dug up and priceless artifacts lie centimeters beneath the virgin surface in every single direction, so kindly, gently, courteously please stay on the path.  The signs urged, begged, pleaded and even tried for stern nursery tones, but it was patently obvious to even the most credulous viewer that nothing further from virgin earth had existed this cave at any time in geological history –
            The floor of the cave looked like a major European city center during the blitzes of world war two, after the rescue crews had been through the place and added a layer of shafts and ladder holes to the chaos.
            Chileans don’t much like being told where they can – or cannot - walk, and to my discretely outsize pleasure, every square meter of the cave floor that wasn’t actually vertical had recently accumulated a brand new layer of archeological interest – the overlapping footprints of hundreds and hundreds of sneakers and hiking boots.  All together, they made a rather fetching pattern of interlocking divots and caterpillar prints, vaguely reminiscent of a carpet in a low-rent casino in Las Vegas.  It would have gone great with the tiki bar and torches.
            I took a step toward the echo wall, but Sarah blocked my leap across the chain-link rope. 
            “You have to think about examples, Tabubilgirl.” She said, and looked meaningfully at little Laurie hanging about behind me, round about the level of my knees.
            “Yep.”  Miles nodded sadly. “You’re a role model now.  You want him learning bad habits? Do what the sign says except when you don’t because that doesn’t count, forget you ever saw it?  Really, Tabubilgirl?”
            I looked eloquently at the carpet of footprints, and mouthed a rude word over Laurie’s head.
            “He’s two feet tall.” Sarah said. “He notices people, not the background stuff.  You just spent two days playing patty-cake and spot-the-birds-on-poles with him in the backseat of a car. He thinks you’re the best thing to hit the earth since that first time he heard us singing baa baa black sheep.  He’s tracking everything you do like those great big eagles on poles track sick sheep! Do you really want this for your legacy? What comes next?  Running in the street?”
            Well fine, then.  Nine years since I was here last, and now, no echoes. I loitered moodily, sulking and kicking gravel about with my feet and taking bad photographs of the inside of the cave with no flash lighting until Laurie and his dismal parents had cleared a debris pile halfway to the entrance, and then I grabbed Mr Tabubil’s hand, nipped over the chain-link rope, and made a run for the wall.
            “I don’t get this” Mr Tabubil panted as we climbed and slipped our way up the scree slope.“The cave echoes. That’s what caves do. But the echo isn’t any different over here-“
            “HERE!!!” the cave rang.  “HEREHereherehere Here!”
            “Oh.” Mr Tabubil said, very softly, and the cave whispered back to him. I laughed, and the cave laughed.  I tittered and the sound ran back and forth across the roof, chiming like stone bells.
            Mr Tabubil growled a low “Ho Ha Ho.” Rumbles of sound around the walls of the cave, shivering through the rock.  We laughed at each other and the cave laughed back – high, low, happy, gleeful, heated, cruel – until the air rocked and trembled and little Laurie in the mouth of the cave was crying in fear.
            “Are you happy now?”  An exasperated shout came from the cave entrance.
quake
            “Appy!”  The cave called back.  “Ow?  Now?”
            “For Pete’s sake.”  The voice said, disgusted.  “You’ll be running on roads next.  Right in front of him.”
            Holding tightly to each other, Mr Tabubil and I slithered down the scree back to the path, grinning like loons.  I could walk on the paths for another eight or nine years now. I was filled up.

Slapstick

Slapstick is a state of mind – like zen, you embrace it and follower wherever it runs.
            This morning I woke to the sound of howling.  I followed and found a two-year-old with no pants staring down the toilet bowl and screaming his two-year-old head off.  His mother was bent over him-

            “It’s gone!" She shouted, trying to be heard over the din. "It’s gone and there’s no point looking! It’s not coming back!” 

            I loitered in the doorway of the bathroom and cleared my throat. “Um," I said. "Shouldn't he be used to this part of the proceedings by now?

            Little Laurie turned toward the door.  His face was screwed up into an expression of truly piteous distress.  

 “It’s his dummy.”* Sarah said. She was rather red and rumpled herself. “He threw it down the toilet when I flushed, and then he got angry and pulled my hair elastic off my ponytail and sent that down too!”

          Laurie’s face crumpled even further, cabbage-like, and he turned his face up toward the ceiling and screamed. Sarah threw up her hands. 

             “Oh, don’t even try!" She yelled. "She can’t help you! It doesn't matter what she does! It’s not going to come back!”
             “No kidding.”  Miles wandered into the bathroom with a toothbrush in his hand. “We lose a lot more stuff down there than we did before he came along. You had your breakfast yet? There’s a cup of tea in the kitchen if you want it.”

            I did want it.

Right now that same toddler is melting down all over our living room because he doesn't want to put on his blue socks.  Poor little soul. 
            Sarah, Miles and Laurie fly home to Australia tonight. We are going to miss them enormously. Life contains a certain extra zest and dynamism when a two-year-old is around!**

*pacifier.

** except when you’re trying to leave the apartment. Then it goes like toffee in a deep-freezer. 

Recipe: The Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse of All Good Dreams

Mr Tabubil tells me that my chocolate recipes are my dowry, and dreamily recounts the way I came to him with a notebook: a fat cardboard portfolio bursting with photocopies and handwritten recipes, all heavily smudged around the edges with egg, cream and chocolate – and rum.       
            I’m a boozy sort of cook. The recipes that Mr Tabubil counts among his favorites are a chocolate almond cake – with rum; a chocolate raisin mousse – with  lots of rum; and a boozy chocolate fondue sauce that kicks your teeth down the back of your throat and puts you to sleep at the table. If I could find a way to put rum into a cookie I'd try it, but philosophically speaking, an alcoholic cookie, doesn't feel quite right.  A cookie's a wholesome thing, and rum is hot and thick and dances on a tropical beach at midnight with its shirt off.  For cookies, dark chocolate alone (85% caffeine!) is as far as I dare go. Caffeine leave me dancing on a beach at midnight with my shirt off and bongo drums banging in both my ears, so I reckon that is sufficiently damned decadent.

             Chocolate, done properly, is a mouth full of silk and black velvet – with that lingering caffeine buzz.  Alcohol is a mouth full of fist and somebody else’s teeth.  Chocolate and alcohol, together, are a pairing that is divinely inspired, in which the alcohol ceases to be boozy, and becomes something intangible, a sensation that hovers, ghost-like, at the edge of your plate.  Try to pin it down and you won’t find it, but if you let go and return your attention to your plate and your fork, it will sneak sideways around the edges of your palate and lift the chocolate up into the realm of the sublime.

             Mr Tabubil has come over to the computer and snorted hugely and said that I wouldn’t know what to do with an elusive alcoholic essence if it came up to me on the street, wrapped its arms around my knees and begged me to take it home.  My recipes, he says, use alcohol in quantities that resemble a one-two punch, a knockout blow that leaves the eater flat on the floor with the carpet wrapped around his head.

             To which I replied that a dessert that isn’t intended as a showstopper is a waste of time and chocolate for both guest and baker, and referred him to the chocolate mousse I made for a party last Saturday night – a chocolate mousse that broke two diets, left four guests under the table (albeit smiling) and sent everyone home in taxis.

            Mr Tabubil snorted again and said it was a fault of my upbringing, and went away. 

            Mr Tabubil is not entirely wrong.  I was raised in a household both sozzly and decadent. Not to drink- my parents never drank, but they kept booze on hand for guests who did, and after the really good dinner parties there were always half-bottles by the score that needed using up - so we cooked with them. And my mother, an almost-teetotaler, tippled while she cooked, and dinners that started with beef bourguignon went down deep and twisting rabbit holes to places that were extremely interesting indeed.  

             Her magnum opus was the evening, two days after a really good party, when I came home to find that she'd used the leftover red wine in a cabbage stew, soaked the cucumber salad in chardonnay instead of vinegar (I don't recommend the substitution) and, halfway down the second half-bottle of the stuff, she'd had a brainwave and boiled the rice in champagne.
             It wasn't a meal that was precisely edible, but it got us through all of the leftover bottles, all right. The liqueurs and chocolates that we ate for dessert were almost conventional - except for the moment when someone giggled and cried 'whoops!' and sat down and missed her chair - with a carafe of hot coffee in her hand.  The next morning was all about caffeine - believe me- but the bongo drums came first.

             In her honor, and in the honor of the six sozzly guests of Saturday last, I present to you my mother’s own recipe for Chocolate Mousse.  You can work with the given amount of rum, or you can go the whole Tabubil and magnify it.  I leave the choice to you.  I will only note that dinner invitations to our house are a highly sought-after commodity, and a guest who doesn’t have a headache after the dessert course is a guest we haven’t yet satisfied. 

Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse

Begin Marinating raisins 2 days ahead of serving.

Make the mousse 1 day ahead of serving.  

You need at least twenty-four hours to soak the raisins (a full week is even better), and the completed dessert must rest in the fridge for another twenty-four before you serve it so that the flavors can blend and mellow.  Serve it early and you will be astonished by its insipid banality.  Wait a day and you will be hit with a bolt of pure chocolate goodness.

Ingredients:

225g semi-sweet chocolate (substitute for 112 g dark chocolate and 112 milk chocolate)

1/2 cup sour cream

3 eggs, separated

1/2 cup loosely chopped raisins (slice them open to allow entree to the alcohol)

3 tablespoons dark rum (start with 1 1/2 and add the rest as and when needed)

300ml thickened cream

2 tablespoons castor sugar

The day before you plan to make the mousse:  

 Put the rum and raisins together in a shallow bowl.  Cover and leave to soak.  Add more rum as and when necessary.  Use as much as you like!

The day of the cooking:   

Bring the sour cream and egg yolks to room temperature.  Melt the chocolate.  Add the melted chocolate to the sour cream and egg yolks and stir until smooth; add the raisins and all the unabsorbed alcohol.  Lightly whip the cream and fold it in. 

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, gradually beating in sugar.  Fold beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture. 

Spoon into serving glasses (keep portions small!) and refrigerate overnight.

Enjoy!

(Important note – you must always add melted chocolate TO the eggs and dairy – and not the reverse.  There’s a complicated chemical reason for this that I can’t precisely recall  – but I can tell you from extensive personal experience that if you do it wrong the chocolate tends to seize and solidify and ruin, and you have to start over!)

Le Flirt

A man from our building flirted with me MOST severely last week. 

He was a clean-cut, good-looking fellow - the sort who lifts weights six times a week and wears a sleeveless t-shirt to prove it, and carefully gels his hair so that when your eyes finally drift away from his biceps and wander up to his face, you are assured that he takes care of the rest of himself, too.

He caught me in the lobby.

          "Well, helloooo." He said to me suggestively, catching at my purse. "Didn't  we run into each other yesterday?"

Polite confusion.

           "The day before, perhaps?  Oh, come.  I know YOU Remember. There was  a - "

           "Of course!  There was that - "

           "Yes, the baby!!  You DO remember!" 

How could I forget?  The two of us coming in the front door, and across the lobby a baby in a pram doing its level best to level the building through sheer acoustical horror.  The howls echoed off of the polished stone floor and the polished plaster walls and we had waggled our eyebrows at each other, attempting to convey our mutual dismay and horror and headache and then we'd each gotten the hell out of there. Separately.

            According to this fellow, what we'd had was a deep, intellectual meeting of minds and souls and the loss was mine - a deep, soul-bending, heart-scaring loss -  that I had not recognized the communion we had shared.  It was very moving.   He flexed his biceps for me and tilted his head so that light glinted from the windows and off of his white teeth.

          "It's nice and quiet here, now that the... babies... are all upstairs, don't you think?"  He asked with a polite leer.

I nodded in agreeable assent.  

He pursed his perfect lips.  "And now that it's just us - "

The  door to the parking yard opened and our concierge walked in.  

          "Were you needing anything?"  He said, and tilted his head quizzically at the beefcake.

My swain darted a trapped look at the concierge, then at me, then back to the concierge and mumbled  "M'toilet's backed up again."

And blushed deep red and fled.

O Varlet! Base Coward!  When two Souls are met in Communion, surely they can overcome the ignominy of sewer backwash and know that base matter is but a Proving Ground for Souls!

We Climb a Tower

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Pisa, visiting the Leaning Tower.

After we had listened to music happening in the baptistery of the Pisa Duomo, we went and climbed the infamous leaning bell tower.  The lean has been stabilized – at great effort and expense – and today you can climb it all the way up to the top.  The climb is a deeply enjoyable head trip. The lean of the tower is only four degrees from vertical, but four degrees from vertical raised sixty meters in the air can feel like some considerable angular displacement – almost four meters.  Go check your trigonometry.

A spiral staircase around the perimeter of the tower climbs sixty meters to the top, housed in a stone shell between the inner and outer walls.  There are a few narrow windows here and there, but almost all of your orientation comes from your inner ear.  Part of the time you’re climbing uphill, and part of the time you’re almost walking flat, and part of the time the stairs are twice as tall as they should be, and ALL of the times that you pass a window, the view is just plain WRONG.  Sort of stomach-dropping, and inductive to manic giggles.   XXXX

XXXXAt the top of the tower, the stairs pop into open air and you circle the sloping tower on a narrow walkway with only a metal mesh between yourself and the view.  There was a breeze at the top of the tower – a soft, cool, gentle wind that would certainly pick you up and toss you against the mesh, and the mesh would burst and you would blow outward and fall -
            “It's strong, see?" Mr Tabubil said, leaning on it – leaning out and leaning DOWN. "Made of steel!"
I burst into tears.  I don’t do heights, and I do depths even less than I do heights, and when the depths are more than fifty meters deep and you’re leaning toward them on a slippery stone ledge that doesn’t stay flat like any respectable stone ledge fifty meters in the air –
Urrrggghhh.
About when I was ready to release my death-grip from the door-frame, we popped back inside the tower to climb another thirty-six steps up another weirdly sloping stone shaft up to the very top where the bells were.
            “Steel.”  Mr Tabubil urged.  “Strong as houses.  I’m an engineer.  I know these things.  Would I lie to you?”
I believed him implicitly, but my stomach wasn’t hearing it.  I wanted to do a circuit of the roof sitting flat on my bottom and sort of scooting around with my back pressed tight against the tower wall.  And to look at the view with my eyes closed.

But I did it.  Slowly, and stiffly, but on my very own two feet and with my eyes wide open. It took some time;  most of our group was half-way back down to the ground level by the time that I was half-way around the top.  But I did do it, and even I stopped to admire the view.  On the uphill side.  On the downhill side, I moved faster and I may have cried again.  Just a little. 

Uuuurrrrrgggghh.

Back on the ground, I fell asleep on the grass, and Mr Tabubil took photographs of people taking photographs of other people pretending to hold up the tower.  Out of context, it makes for MARVELOUS family photos. 

Tourist-Wranglers on the Palatine Hill (with bonus Harrumph)

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Rome.

We rather liked the Palatine Hill.  It was quiet there.  At the end of the afternoon we found ourselves on the South-east end of the hill, on a promontory at the top of the ramparts of the built-up terraces of the baths of Septimus Severus palace, with a view over trees to the brown domes of the baths of Caracalla.
It was a big open space, there were nine or ten of us floating about it, but the space and the views were expansive enough that we all contrived to feel alone.  Mr Tabubil and I found a sunny corner and settled into it.
            “This is more like it!” Mr Tabubil sighed.  “No crowds, just history, a cool breeze, a warm sun, and it’s only five o’clock.  The park doesn’t close till six.  We can stay up here for ages.”
And right on cue, someone blew an ear-shattering blast on a whistle, about three feet behind his right ear.
The effect on Mr Tabubil was electric – his limbs flung out spasmodically at right angles and he rose up from the ground – vertically – pop-eyed with outrage.
Behind him was a woman – short and cross and scowling, with an official ID necklace around her neck, and a bright red whistle in her hand.
            “You need to leave now.”  She said, looking back and forth across all ten of us on the promontory as if we constituted her personal work day hell.   “All of you.  Park closed now.  Go away.  Get out!  Right now! go!”
            If she has tossed a ‘please’ in there instead of blowing that infernal whistle, if she had made the smallest concession to social convention and politesse, no matter how false the ‘please’ had rung in our ears, we’d have all gotten up and moved.
            But she didn’t. She blew her whistle again.  Three times.
            And nine – or ten- people found themselves wedging a little deeper into their seats, focusing extra- hard through their camera viewfinders, burying themselves in their guidebooks and turning away, ever so slightly, from her and toward the view –
            Mr Tabubil pulled a paperback out of his backpacked and ostentatiously opened it to the very first page, but he was feeling sore.
The lady huffed and stamped her foot.
            “Now!  You go now!  All of you!”  She blew the whistle again.  “You and you and you!  Good-bye!”
With much ill-grace, and a great many last photographs taken and last guide-book pages read, she had us on our feet, and shouting and blowing her whistle, she herded us off of the promontory - the worlds least-competent sheep dog and a flock of the worlds worst-tempered sheep.
            “It only takes ten minutes to walk down to the gate.”  Mr Tabubil whispered to me.  “Do you think we can double back when she’s gone?”
            But ahead of us, a metal gate had materialized out of the shrubbery, and a man – with a grace-saving smile on his face – stood ready to close it behind us as she chivvied us through.
            On the other side of the gate, the sheep revolted.
            “Doesn’t this spot have an amazing view of the coliseum?”  Someone said, in Spanish.
            “Si.”
            “Ja!”
            “Oui!”
            “Yes!”
            “Hai!”
And nine – or ten – people dropped their bags and hat on the ground, lifted up their cameras, and would Not Be Moved.
            Behind us, with the ghost of a grin, the young man melted away.  The cross woman huffed and fumed and stamped her feet and blew her whistle at us, but we had an entire hour to be out of the park, and we weren’t going anywhere as long as it was her telling us to, and eventually, with one last long ear-shattering blast of that whistle, she went away.
            Once she was gone, so did we – and got ourselves creatively lost twice, and we were still down the hill and out the gate ages and ages before the warning gong.
            “There’s still so much to see.”  I said.  “Next time we visit we’ll have to go and see the catacombs-”
            “Catacombs?” Mr Tabubil stopped dead.  “Rome has catacombs?  You’re telling me that we’ve been dragging through every church in the city of Rome when we could have been looking at catacombs?”
            And he sulked all the way around a whole circumference of the coliseum.
            I’m sure I’m terribly sorry, but when a man tells his wife to go ahead and plan the itinerary without mentioning once his passion for catacombs, she doesn’t necessarily know that subterranean engineering trumps history and aesthetics.  Humph.

Keeping Your Cool in Rome

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  We’ve just arrived in Rome.

In Rome, we are staying in the Hostel Luciano, a small hotel next to the Big Railway Station in a street where every building has a different hotel business running on every floor. The Luciano is up a flight of stairs that smell faintly of frying breakfasts, and through a wrought iron door into a small foyer, filled with blonde German girls on school trips.

Our bathroom is an Italian cultural blind spot; the shower is a nozzle mounted on the wall over the toilet.  The mirror over the sink (two steps away from the same toilet) has a bare bulb mounted on either side, and no matter how carefully we shower, both are rained on every morning.  I’m assured that the outside sockets are not “hot”, but Mr Tabubil brushed my hand against the similar bare bulb that dangles from a wire a foot above my pillow, and the filament exploded in a shower of red sparks.
We're taking nothing for granted.

We won’t eat breakfast here.  On our first morning, we tiptoed out of our room and peered, yawning, into the little breakfast nook to see just how continental the breakfast would be.
I saw a man break open a bread roll with his hands, then put it aside and leave.  I saw our manageress pick up the gnawed roll and place it before a woman at another table.
We decided that one of the little cafés back in the termini was probably a delightful place for a morning brioche.

But we had air-conditiong.  And in the heat of a late Roman summer, that is something glorious!
Rome was dreadfully hot – a sapping, sticky heat, almost forty degrees and more than a million percent humidity in the shade.  We would go out in the morning and look at churches (because I am an art history junkie like that) and then come back to the hotel and sleep a long roman siesta, and go out again at four when the sapping heat had begun to drop, and walk until late at night, when the city was cool.

There are other ways to keep cool in Rome.  We sat for a while one evening in the pleasant (save for the six thousand under-talented artists shilling original oil paintings of flowery piazzas and wobbly church towers) Piazza Navona and I remembered one very special way of keeping cool.
One of my favorite college professors had done his PhD in art history right here in Rome.  He is retired now, but still teaches one seminar a year, and every summer brings a group of students and alumni to Rome, and hopes to teach them to appreciate the city the way the way he does.  The Piazza Navona is a long, round-edged piazza with a large fountain – the fountain of the sixteenth century world’s greatest rivers. (The Nile for Africa, the Ganges for Asia, the Danube for Europe and the Platte for America.)
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the drains on the Four Rivers fountain would be plugged up on hot summer days.  The Piazza would be flooded, and the first families of the city would spend the afternoon splashing in their carriages around and around the Piazza, seeing and being seen in the cool of the water.
A few years ago, Professor Wallace decided to block up the fountain himself, and convinced one of his students to dive in with wads of newspaper.  It worked.  The effect was charming. The professor and his students stood, beaming, as they watched the water spill over the lip of the fountain and creep out toward the buildings at the edge of the Piazza.  Eventually a carabineri (policeman) sauntered toward him and suggested that he unplug the fountain, immediately, please, because the shopkeepers at the edge of the piazza were about to be flooded out.
            “But don’t you understand?”  Professor Wallace cried, waving his arms. “This is what you Romans used to do every summer!  Have you no appreciation for your own cultural heritage?”
When he tells this story, Professor Wallace still becomes emotional, moved to grievous frustration by the arid and stony soil that is the modern Roman soul, by their lack of poetry and sensitivity and any awareness of their own context within the grand sweeping canvas of Italian history.
In the actual event, the policeman was unmoved. 
            “Unblock the bloody fountain, you foreign idiot, and we’ll leave it there, eh?”
Professor Wallace waxed wrathful, but unplugged the fountain.

Three Years and the Night After

Three weeks ago we celebrated the sixth wedding anniversary of our friends  Marja and Claudio.  We went out to a very nice restaurant and toasted them in glasses of French champagne and Chilean wine-

        "To love - "

        "To a lifetime -"

        "To memories of happy days and happy nights - "

 Claudio leaned back in his chair and looked at his wife and sighed mistily.

        "Six years ago today, Marja, I carried you across the threshold of our first apartment -"

        "After we'd walked up five flights of stairs - "

        "There was no elevator and our apartment was on a narrow landing -"

        "With only a railing over the stairwell, and you had to be very careful not to tip me over the edge as you picked me up and swung me around to get through the door!"

        "And then" Claudio smiled slyly,  "I carried you inside for a night of wild nuptial bliss!"

Marja and Claudio looked at each other fondly and held hands under the table.  But they didn't meet my eyes.  I narrowed mine, and leaned forward.

        "May I ask a question?"

        "Absolutely!"  Claudio waved expansively, and poured himself another glass of wine.

        "DID you have a night of wild nuptial bliss?" I said. "I don't know of a single couple who, in real life, on their actual wedding night, actually did.  A wedding is mostly this huge, stressy, organized-to-the-walls THING, and even if it isn't stressy or messy, the party afterwards is generally pretty epic, and by the time you've escaped from the guests and gotten back to your room, any reasonable person just wants to go to SLEEP.  I reckon that there isn't actually a single wedded couple  - at least, any a couple that isn't required to produce proof of consummation in the morning, or isn't 18 and invincibly horny - who DOES consummate their marriage on their wedding night!"  I sat back and took a deep breath.  "There."  I said.  "A speech."

Marja and Claudio looked at each other.  They looked at me.

        "To answer your question," Claudio said slowly, "We did NOT.  To be honest, I didn't even carry her very far over the threshold."

        "About three steps." Marja giggled.  "Then he fell over. It was two o'clock in the morning when we got upstairs, and it had been a  LONG day!"

        "First I picked her up at her parents house - at noon -"

        "And then we went to the courthouse -"

        "And then the church -"

        "And then we had a party -"

        "A REALLY good party- "

        "And after THAT, lifting her up to carry her across the threshold almost floored me. We sort of OOOZED across, with her feet about an inch above the floor -"

        "And then we went to sleep."  Marja grinned.  "But the day afterward - THAT was another story."

Mr Tabubil and I were married at ten o'clock in the morning, barefoot, on a beach.  We were married out of a small hotel in Titikaveka on the Island of Rarotonga, and after the ceremony, we and our few beloved guests repaired to the hotel's little restaurant for a truly EPIC wedding breakfast.  The weather was tropical hot and  tropical sticky, and when the party floated to a finish, Mr Tabubil and I, drowning in our splendid wedding togs, dribbled upstairs to our room, throwing promises behind us to see everyone again on the beach, in an hour - just enough time for a shower and a change of clothes and the briefest of restorative shut-eyes- that's all -

In our room we barely had the strength to close the door and slip off the dress and the suit before we fell face-down on the bed and fell asleep, his hand on mine, clasped together over our fine new rings.

We woke up three hours later to the sound of laughter and splashing below our window.  We slipped into swimsuits and went down to join our guests and only came out of the water when the sky had turned red and the sun was setting over the reef. 

Upstairs again, we discovered that while we were down in the water, the housekeeper of the hotel had crept up into our room and laid out a wedding tableaux.  Two cane chairs had been dragged over to the window and turned so that they faced the sea.  A small table had been placed laid between them, and laid with my wedding flowers, a candle and a box of matches and a bottle of champagne.  Over the back of the chair she had draped a brand new pareo, in the same shades of blue and purple as the water outside.  The bed had been turned down for sleep, and as a final touch, the housekeeper had gone into the closet and found a lacy little bit of nothing that I had brought with me in my suitcase, and she had smoothed it flat and laid it out across my pillow.

It was perfect.

But this wasn't an evening for romance.  We were new-married in paradise, but we were also in the middle of a one-week window where we had the north American friends that we loved best in the same place as ourselves, so we dried ourselves  off and walked across the road to a little cottage where our Canadian friends were staying, and a rather splendid after-party burst into the black tropical night like a catherine wheel.

We crept home again at three in the morning, and slipped into bed and fell straight asleep.

When we woke the sun was high in the sky, and looking around the room at the untouched wedding tableaux, we felt a terrible remorse.  The housekeeper had spent such time and shown such kindness setting up the perfect nuptial night, and there we were, the unspoken wedding cliché, and all her efforts wasted.

So we stepped into the breach.

Mr Tabubil dragged the chairs around to face each other and lit the candle to blacken the wick and blew it out again, and dropped the spent match on the table.  I wadded the freshly pressed pareo into a ball to crease it, and pulled it straight again, and dragged it across the floor half-way to the bed and left it there.  While Mr Tabubil twisted our bedsheets and pillows into a perfect storm of acrobatic disarray, I took the lacy bit of nothing and wadded it up and shoved it underneath one of the pillows - and considered it, and took it by the corner and dragged it out again and left it hanging artistically half-way down to the floor.

We looked at the chaos and smiled.  We'd said thank you.  In the best possible way - with a tableaux to match her own. 

And Mr Tabubil took my hand and we went down to breakfast.

Happy anniversary, Mr Tabubil.  It's been three wonderful years.  Here's to another three, to match Marja and Claudio's six, and three more after that and three score times three -

Here's to happy days and happy nights -

To love and to a lifetime.