I'm not trying to make you jealous. Promise.

May has been a ridiculously great month. I almost wish it wouldn't end. I mean, not to rub your noses in it or anything, but I have been doing a lot fun stuff. I just wanted to update you on what has been going on lately, and why I love being in Europe at this time of the year. Last week was Husband's birthday. Yay! We celebrated with some good friends and a BBQ and my sister came over from London! Yay! After the party, we (Husband, sister and I) decided to chase the sun by driving to Italy where we stayed in a small, wine producing town close to Verona. We basked in sunshine, blue skies and temperatures of around thirty degrees everyday. I'm telling you people IT WAS GREAT. Here are some pictures from the BBQ and from Italy. Just to give you a little bit of an idea of what we have been up to...

Cooking at Meera's: Tom Yum Soup

I have a friend here in Ulm named Meera. She is from New Delhi and I met her in the Ladies' Room located in the Ulm University canteen. As you do. She was really friendly and back then I must have looked like a total freshie. It was my first month in Ulm, I was taking part in a German course at the university and feeling a little bit lost. Anyway, she was very friendly, asking me where I was from and what I was doing here. We exchanged numbers and have since become good friends. The other day, we met in the city and were confronting our usual dilemma of what to have for lunch. While Ulm is not short of cafes and restaurants, nothing we suggested to each other really sounded very appealing at all. There are times when you just feel like something you can't quite put your finger on and you know you probably will have to cook it yourself. That's when I remembered, that in my own kitchen, I have been quite obsessed with all things Asian. I have a Neil Perry cookbook, I've had it for ages without really looking at the recipes and now, all of a sudden, I have been using it on a daily basis. And that is what I found myself telling Meera. 'The other day I made a chilli paste,' I told her, 'and I used that chilli paste to make my own Tom Yum soup.' 'I'll never buy the instant paste again!' I found myself declaring. Before we knew it, we were both heading to her place with all the ingredients we would need for our lunch. What a joy it was to cook in Meera's kitchen. Hers is about 20 times as big as mine, with the luxury of bench space I have not known in years!
What follows are the recipes for the chilli paste and the Tom Yum soup. You need the chilli paste to make the soup. I have added some notes with modifications of mine. This makes quite a lot of chilli paste (about 3 cups), so you could reduce the quantity by half but I wouldn't recommend it as it keeps in the fridge and you can use it to add spice to just about any Asian inspired dish. All the ingredients are available in Ulm, I usually go to Asia Shop Nguyen, opposite Galleria Kaufhoff and on top of Metzgerei Bunk. They speak excellent English and if you can't find something on the shelf, just ask, it is usually hiding somewhere.

CHILLI PASTE (Simply Asian, Neil Perry)
2 cups peanut oil
1.5 cups diced red onion
1.25 cups sliced garlic (I only had enough garlic for about 1 cup and it still turned out OK)
6 tablespoons dried shrimp, pounded (if you don't have a mortar and pestle you could just whizz them in a blender for a few seconds)
1 cup palm sugar (I added about half a cup and that was enough sweetness for me, I recommend you add sugar to taste)

1 cup tamarind pulp, mixed with 1.5 cups hot water then pushed through a sieve (while I did add the tamarind when I made this at home, I totally forgot it at Meera's, we didn't really miss it though, but then we are Indian with guts of steel. The tamarind helps to tame the chilli so don't miss this step if you feel that is what you need)

3 tablespoons chilli powder
1/2 cup fish sauce

In a wok (or a deep fry pan), heat the peanut oil until just smoking. Add the onion and fry until very dark brown but not burnt.
Remove with a slotted spoon, drain and set aside. Add the garlich and fry until deep brown, then remove, drain and set aside.
Add the dried shrimp and fry until golden brown.
Return the onion and garlic and to the wok, then add the palm sugar and cook until dark brown and caramelised. Add the fish sauce, chilli powder and tamarind water, and boil for 30 seconds.


Pour the paste into a blender and process until smooth. Store in a screw-top jar in the refrigerator, where it will keep well for several weeks.

Use this paste to make the Tom Yum soup below. Please note that if you have an outdoor stove, it would be a great idea to use it, as the chilli paste does really have a strong smell that lingers. If not just open all your windows as wide as they can go.

SOUR AND SPICY PRAWN SOUP or THAI TOM YUM (Simply Asian, Neil Perry)
4 cups fresh chicken stock (I used a concentrate, still delicious)
1 stalk lemon grass, trimmed, cut into 2cm lengths and crushed (I used two)
5 slices galangal, crushed
2-3 kaffir lime leaves, crushed in your hand
2 tablespoons CHILLI PASTE (recipe above)
4 tablespoons lime juice
5 green bird's eye chillies, chopped
2 teaspoons palm sugar (I didn't add this as I found my CHILLI PASTE sweet enough)
4 tablespoons fish sauce
6 large cooked king prawns, shelled and deveined
1 tablespoon coarsely chopped coriander leaves
6 oyster mushrooms, sliced in half

Heat the stock in a pot until boiling. Add the lemon grass, galangal, lime leaves and chilli paste. Season to taste with lime juice, chillies, palm sugar and fish sauce - the soup should be sour but balanced, and fiery hot.
Add the prawns, coriander and mushrooms. Simmer for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat. I chose to add about half a bunch of white, baby asparagus (these are in abundance here at the moment) and some pressed tofu.

Delicious!

Golden syrup puddings

I think these may be the most baked item of my life so far. They are what I feel like eating when I need some love and it is nowhere to be found. I bake them when I find Husband dusting the TV cabinet, grumbling that I need to 'contribute to this living community more'. By 'this living community' he means apartment and by 'contribute' he means, keep the place clean you lazy so & so. I bake them when my students tell me that the DVD that I thought was hilarious, and couldn't wait to show them is LAME. When a non-native speaker uses the word 'lame' you know it must be bad. I bake them when it has been raining the whole week and a check of the forecast makes me wonder how many people are contemplating ending it all because they can't stand another month of overcast, below 20 degree weather. Am I the only one who feels like making a cubby house with my doona and living in it forever?

I haven't been able to find golden syrup in Ulm so I get my sister to bring over the Lyle's brand from London.

These puddings are also pretty quick to put together, so I make them for dessert when people come over, timing it so that I can get them out of the oven just when the guests start wondering what's for dessert.
I guess what I am trying to say is, I make them all the time and I don't really need much of an excuse. Not very helpful for Gina and The Twins. Yes, I know, this is my first mention of Gina and The Twins but they're old friends. Gina and The Twins belong to my, er... midsection. Which seems to be growing though the rest of me has stopped. Causing, as you can imagine, some minor (at risk of becoming major) problems with proportion. So familiar have these disproportionate bits become to me, that I've named them. Don't let that put you off baking these. You are probably far more disciplined than I am and for the Australians heading into the colder months, you can hide your Ginas under you warm clothes. No worries. I got this recipe from a book called 'Old Food' by Jill Dupleix. My brother bought this for me when I was still in high school. A whole twenty dollars it cost him. He can rest assured, it wasn't too bad an investment.
Golden syrup puddings

4 tbsp golden syrup
140g butter
140g soft brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tbsp milk
140g self-raising flour

Heat oven to 180C. Butter four 200ml oven proof moulds, and pour a tablespoon of golden syrup into each one.

Cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add milk and stir in well, then add flour and stir in lightly, until the mixture is quite thick. Spoon the mixture into the pots until three-quarters full, and cover each one with buttered foil. Place in a baking tray of hot water and bake for around 45 minutes until the puddings rise, and spring back to the touch. Remove from oven, and rest for 5 minutes before removing foil and turning out the puddings carefully onto serving plates. Serve hot with pure cream or clotted cream.

Note: I usually bake these in a 6 cup muffin tray with a capacity of about 125ml per cup. I find these to be quite rich and this smaller serving size suits me better. I just butter a big piece of foil and cover the entire muffin tray with it, folding in the edges. Of course, if you bake them in pots the syrupy part is more moist and gooey then when you use a tin. When it comes to turning them out, I do so on a big plate or tray that can hold them all and then transfer them to serving dishes. The white bits you can see in the pictures are chopped macadamia nuts, I added 50 grams to the batter with the flour.

I ate lunch for the two of us...

Happy Mother's Day Izy. Remember when you were here? Around this time of year it was, doing funny things like writing your name with pebbles on the Italian seaside?
We didn't forget you this year. We went out for lunch to celebrate and I made sure I ate enough for both of us. Just so you know, I had asparagus soup with smoked salmon strips in it, grilled fish that came with wild garlic pesto and three different coloured pasta and vanilla mousse with strawberry-rhubarb compote. Yes, I thought you'd approve. The servings were huge, and had you been here we would have shared but you weren't, so now I am stuffed. Hope you had a good day too.

Nothing to tell you

How can it be, that after a month of absence I still feel like I don't really have much at all to say? Perhaps the truth is, that there is indeed so much to tell you, and well... Where do I begin?

The Australians

We were visited by some Australians in April. The type of Australians that come and stay, expecting hospitality and tours of the country. Did I hear someone say 'high maintenance'? That would have made for a much better story, but they weren't. They were the type who didn't ask for much at all but appreciated everything to such a degree, you felt like giving them more. They left us with a super cute 'Thank You' card and some fond memories. Unfortunately, nothing juicy to write about. They were here for about 3 weeks, taking off now and then to see other parts of Europe but always returning to declare that Germany was their favourite. Now, this may have had something to do with the beer and the leather trousers but I'd like to think it was the tours and the hospitality. I am so glad they enjoyed it. They ate our food and loved it, drank our coffee and tolerated it, sat in our garden and chatted in it. Our place hadn't seen so much action since last Christmas. On parting they made promises to re-invade and invited us to do the same the next time we are in Oz. You don't have to ask us twice. After all that blood, sweat and hospitality we felt like we needed a break.

One of the Aussies twisted my arm into climbing the Münster. The view from half-way up.

The Holiday

Husband always maintained that he wanted to do nothing but lay in the sun, winter had turned his skin an interesting shade of transparent. But I on the other hand, like to think of myself as a young and sprightly adventurer. Surely a week at a resort, with nothing but sun and sea would kill me? I insisted on Madrid. I mean, what kind of person has lived in Europe for three years and hasn't even been to Spain? I put my foot down and Husband agreed. Madrid it is, he said. And that is where I came undone. If he had said 'no' I would've insisted and Madrid it would have been. But he said 'yes'. Knowing, I believe, precisely what kind of reverse psychological effect this would have on me. I started thinking and the more I thunk, I realised the very thought of scouring the city for the perfect tapas made me lethargic. Madrid isn't going anywhere, I told myself. Maybe a week of indulgence and nothingness is what I really need? And that is how we ended up in Makadi Bay, a few kilometres drive from Hurghada, in Egypt. A huge, but tastefully designed resort (almost as big as a small German village and possibly with more restaurants than one), where we could snorkel with the many multicoloured fish of the Red Sea. After 7 days of lying by the pool, swimming, snorkelling and handsome Egyptians, I've never felt fresher. And you can't see Husband's veins any more.

Where we stayed, Makadi Palace by night.

The Garden

Yes, we have one now. For those of you who know of our front garden as the bare, desolate place of wood chips, things have changed. The garden no longer serves as the neighbourhood cat restroom. It is home to life.

Photo taken on the mobile (sorry), our Japanese Larch.