Dolmas 1 - fefe 0

Tonight I tried to cook stuffed wine leaves. I had the ingredients (leaves, spices, rice, ground meat), and was ready to spend the time. I cleaned the leaves, boiled them for 10 minutes, and rolled everything:


I put everything in a pot of boiling water with tomatoes to perfume the water, and a plate on top so nothing moves, and cook for one hour. Well despite having a good professor to roll the leaves, they all unrolled, liberating the rice in the water. And worst of all it didn't only look bad, it didn't taste good... /cry I am going to buy a shawarma.

Vindaloo

Today I felt like cooking something I never cooked before. I happened to have bought some pork meat yesterday with Octavio and Mounir. Buying fresh pork meat here is almost harder than buying drugs ;), but they know the "dealer": a butcher in an Arab village in the mountains of Galil. So I have my fridge full of meat what can I cook ?
Well it's been almost 2 months I have been away from India and I kinda miss it. I think out loud I never ate any pork vindaloos; digging in various books and on the net I find a few recipes, and I happen to have all the ingredients in my kitchen including all the spices in their raw form (proportions slightly changed and probably nowhere near what a purist would do though):

1 teaspoon whole cumin seed
2 to 3 dried red chilies (I did put 5 :)
1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon cardamon seed*
1 small stick of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoons whole black mustard seed
1/2 teaspoon fenugreek seed
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 coarse salt
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 onion peeled and finely sliced
1 cup water
3 cloves
1 pound pork, trimmed and cut into 2cm cubes
1cm cube fresh ginger, peeled and finely minced (I had only dried ginger)
4 garlic pieces
1/2 tablespoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Do some ginger-garlic paste, grind the remaining spices, fry the onions till golden brown, mix all into a vindaloo paste. The recipe was not saying to do it but I marinated the pork in vinegar and spices before, figuring it couldn't hurt. I then fry a bit the pork in a wok pour the paste and the water and cook under slow fire for 1 hour. I served it with basmati rice. I probably had enough vindaloo paste for more serving but I put it all, it was strong but delicious. The picture isn't good but best I could do while waiting for my new camera to be delivered.


I finished by a glass of green "Chartreuse", just to finish happily the travel between orient and occident.
Next step is to prepare stuffed wine leaves, I got a few fresh leaves and fresh kafta in the fridge, and Waffa showed me how to roll them. That's gonna be tough but I'll manage it, worst case I won't show pictures.

Istanbul

Taking advantage of two Israeli Holidays this week I flew to visit an old friend in Istanbul. This time I spent most of my time in the modern part of the city, namely the Beyoglu quarter. We toured restaurants, bars, clubs by night and I visited the old city while he was at work.


Two main discoveries this trip:
- Every door, every apartment in Beyoglu hides a bar, every stairway hides a nice terrace. One lifetime is probably not enough to visit them all, but some are trying.
- Saint Sauveur in Chora, a very old small church with amazing paintings and mosaics, mostly coming from the apocryphal gospels, probably the most beautiful I've ever seen.

More pictures here

Bad day

This morning I woke up too early, way too early with quite a headache. Well I guess the "few" drinks from last night did it, anyways it was really early so I went and sat at the computer, read e-mail and picked up my camera and started playing around with it. I dropped it a few times in Tibet and it was a bit sloppy lately. So it starts, I take a picture and during focusing I hear "SCREEEEETCH". Mmmm is that the autofocus noise ? SCREEEEETCH yes it's the autofocus, after playing 5 minutes I realize that I can take one non blurry picture if I focus on infinity and then need to reboot the camera. It's gone, lasted almost one year :(.

Once at work I gather a few people to come with me for lunch out, using the occasion to vote for the presidential elections at the consulate. We actually settled on one of the nicest places around. Omer asks if I can pay for him as he forgot his wallet at home.
I: "sure, let's go"
Him: "thank you, let me drive so you can relax"
...
Nothing strikes you ? Well nothing striked me at that time either so we just drive there. Once almost there we remember that the way is really long and painful unless you take a forbidden left turn. We settle on the second option. We look right, left, nothing... GO GO GO !

You're still with me ? Already guessed what's next ?

Well I am in a car that just took a forbidden left car driven by a guy that doesn't have his wallet... with a cop car right behind us... Yeah, I promise right BEHIND us. So we get pulled over, the cop is quite nice and Omer just gets 1 ticket for the left turn instead of the 3 he could (1 for the left turn, 1 for driving without ID, 1 for not having any ID on him). 15 minutes later we go, find a parking spot near and walk to the restaurant, which is closed on sundays. I am not joking, it was closed, just like every sundays.

We finally ate at an ok place, I went to vote and drove back to work, finished a long day at work and... Well the french picked the short and nervous option for president, the one I didn't vote for and the one I sincerely dislike (I could get only low quality profanity in english so i am not trying). He got 53%, good luck for the next 5 years, finaly it's not that bad to be an expatriate. Only thing remaining to be seen is how many cars will burn this week in France.

And then I realized why my camera died this morning, it suicided, it didn't want to see that. As I was looking around if that was something known on the web I found that blog about photographers tossing their cameras in hope for great shots and decided I would give it a try as they get really cool shots (cf their flickr group). After a few dozen toss nothing good came out that unable-to-focus camera so I pulled its predecessor out of a box and kept on tossing it frenetically. I finally got 2 pictures half successfull, I'll let you be the judge.





So now I am looking for a very portable camera with high quality optics... So either I buy the same one again. The Canon SD800 was fine but I'd like more freedom, better optics and still something compact as I don't really see myself carrying a DSLR. Only thing I found is this, so I'm gonna think twice or more before doing that replacement...

Zenfolio and Lightroom

So I really liked Zenfolio so I decided I would store my photos there. I spent the weekend selecting and uploading 450+ pictures from these past years. I still have quite a bit to upload but it's already quite a good sample.
Why did I prefer it over Flickr or Google ? Well it uses the same automatic scaling techniques as google but it feels nicer, is easier to browse through than Google, is almost as easy to upload to as Google using Picasa, has a better look and feel. And as I moved away from Picasa to using Adobe Lightroom to sort and post process pictures it is actually more convenient. By the way I recommand Lightroom to anyone not willing to spend hours under Photoshop CS3 but to whom clicking "I feel lucky" under Picasa is not enough. Finally it stores and display EXIF information from pictures which is really nice.
It doesn't have the social network side of Flickr nor ability to leave comments, but anyways most of the visitors of my flickr know me, so if you want to comment, just leave me a note here.

Photos

I am trying a new online tool to store and view photos to replace google photo and flickr. I am not yet sure I'll do the switch but I am filling it up for now. Please let me know what you do think about it: it's called Zenfolio and here are my pictures.