That was great

I turn the oven switch on, a white round ribbed knob with my fingerprints of harissa and olive oil, from yesterday, on it. Alright. It's going to get hot, I holler to Anthony who is in the bathroom, under the water. Slowly the temperature inside the apartment rises to a hundred degrees, possibly more. A million of sticky, sultry, sexy centigrades that will loop the apartment to penetrate every surface, from the cotton blanket to the metal sink, and then fall out on the skin in the form of sweat. This last week it finally started to feel like real summer to me but everyone you ask is grumpy and inconvenienced. Too hot, they'll say, and wipe their heated foreheads with the back of their wrists. Some will point to the skin peeling off their pink shoulders, as if to say, See? 

– Even the coldest shower setting has felt like it's at room temperature. Do you really have to do this now? Anthony asks, out of the shower.

– Yes, I do. I really want to cook dinner for you now. It's our first free day together like, what, in a month? I say and extend a can of chilled beer. Besides it'll be quick, I just want to soften these apricots, no more, in fact they are ready. See?

I pull a tray with them out of the oven, a little juice oozes from each half. The room is filling with the smell of sauteing onions.

– Alright, alright, but whatchya making? Anthony asks and opens the beer can. Click.

– You'll love this – giant couscous with apricots and harissa. I made it for myself a few times before, a great dish.

– I love tiny couscous, and not in the least for its fluffiness. Is this one going to be fluffy?

– No, it's going to be chewy and soft and spicy and flavourful, I say. Then add, You'll smack your lips, trust me.

Anthony walks around the kitchen table, turns on the ceiling fan and picks up the big glass jar with giant couscous for inspection. Mo-gra-bia, he reads out load the name on the label, breaks it up in syllables. Never heard of it. Where did you get it?

– A Middle Eastern store in town.

I pour the cooked couscous into the prepared sieve over the sink, run cold water through it.

– If you could just mix these two together, the dinner will be ready in a minute, I say and point at the harissa and olive oil lined up along the cutting board.

The recipe is meant to yield four servings, but at the end we push each other's forks out of the bowl for the last bits – the sweet-tart apricot threads, the starchy lone couscous pearls, the left-out deeply savoury soft onion dice, the smears of harissa paste on the bottom of the bowl.

– That was great, thank you, Anthony says and pulls my silk skirt off the back of a chair to hand to me. Let's get out for ice-cream now.

I dump the dishes in the sink, check if I turned the oven off. I dab a little lipstick on my lips with my fingertips, notice how it still smells of garlic and cardamom and how the lips are still burning from harissa.

We shut the door behind us, only leave the ceiling fan on.

Pearl Couscous with Apricots and Harissa

Adapted from TheKitchen Diaries II, by Nigel Slater

Serves 2 (as a main) or 4 (as a side dish)

Unless you have apricots so ripe they practically ooze themselves inside out, I'd suggest to briefly roast them to get them juicier and more fragrant of the themselves. Not too long, somewhere around fifteen minutes in a hot oven.

I found the couscous needs plenty of liquid to cook and not get stuck to the saucepan's bottom, so I upped the amount of stock (water) from 300 ml, as per the original recipe, to 750 ml. (I thought to mention this in case you own The Kitchen Diaries II, look up the recipe and question my choices.)

For the couscous

750 ml vegetable stock or water

150 g pearl couscous

2 Tablespoons olive oil, plus a little extra

1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 teaspoons harissa paste

a small bunch of flat-leaf parsley

For the apricot dressing

3 Tablespoons olive oil

2 small onions, finely diced

5 pods of green cardamom, lightly crushed

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

finely grated zest from 1 small lemon

250 g ripe apricots, halved and stoned (see headnote)

To prepare the couscous, bring the stock or water to the boil in a large saucepan. Pour in the couscous, bring back to the boil and salt the liquid very well, as you might for pasta. Simmer for 15-20 minutes, until the couscous is tender but still with a little bite. Drain in a colander and run cold water through it to cool it quickly. Tip it into a bowl and toss gently with a few drops of olive oil to stop it sticking together.

In the meantime, warm the olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the onions and saute them gently till soft and lightly golden (don't brown it). Stir in the garlic, cardamom pods and lemon zest, and cook until the garlic has softened. Cut the (roasted) apricot halves in two or three and add to the onions.

Stir the warm onion and apricot mixture into the couscous, then stir in the lemon juice. Put the harissa paste in a small bowl, stir in the 2 Tablespoons of olive oil, then fold gently into the apricots and couscous. Taste and add salt if needed. Remove the leaves from the parsley, chop them roughly and stir into the couscous.

This is how it works

This is how it works: as a student, here is a student accommodation for you. Finished your studies? Congratulations! Now go and find another place to live then, oh yes, and good luck!

In other words, my two-year rental agreement for a shared student apartment expired last week, by which time I had to find myself a new home in Amsterdam. And so July 15th was moving day for me. Actually, that’s not true, because it was moving day for me – and Anthony.

I think it’s now an appropriate moment to mention that Anthony and I, well, we are buddies. I mean, we are together. Our story, it didn’t begin with fireworks. We both agree that the day we met was not exactly a memorable experience, except that we had quite a spectacular cloud-like sardine mousse on rye bread as a starter at dinner in a restaurant where we went. Later, we started hanging out regularly enough for me to make Anthony feel sick at the sight of toasted buckwheat grains (when I get to know somebody unfamiliar with Russian cuisine, I stuff them with buckwheat porridge a fair amount!). We became close friends. And I wanted to keep it that way, no relationship drama for me, thank you. And so it was -- until I went to Russia for a month. It’s probably a cliché to say, but distance does help to filter through the mental trash and see what’s important. It appeared to me then that I want to stick by Anthony’s side. Now I tell him every night to unplug all the electrical devices before going to bed because I believe that the electricity field all those gadgets create messes up with my sleep and he tells me to go and see a psychiatrist because I seem to have a plugged-in device phobia. I let him know he is an idiot; he informs me about my being stupid. We are buddies.

So we moved in to a new place. It’s small, but it has an oven, a Jacuzzi bath, and a DVD-player. And a tailless cat, Flash. We can stay here until the owner has come back from her travels, which will be sometime in late fall. And what’s also great is that I’m now only ten-minute bike ride from the bakery, as opposed to an hour one before. There is a café below us, and a spacious attic up a few stairs where the cat can chill out when she is stressed.

Today I was going to not only tell you all that. I was also going to make a six-minute chocolate cake for you, to give us all a treat. Unfortunately, that didn’t go as planned.

I, a baker’s apprentice, kept the cake in the oven for too long which gave it a taste of, in Anthony’s words, “burnt toast with chocolate flavor”. And if that wasn’t upsetting enough, I accidentally knocked the stuff off the kitchen counter. Golly gee whiz and a bucket of hog wash!

I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.

Believe it or not

Looks like I might have fallen off the earth, right?

And while that’s not the case, it must, however, be told that time, this savage beast, fell on me and chewed holes in my fiber. I mean, how else, Dear Reader, could I explain the fact that I haven’t coughed up a word here for more than a month? The thought of it makes me sick, literally.

What was I doing then, you might, I hope, ask.

Studies-wise, I was, and am, feverishly grinding up the gristle of linguistics. Academic articles on metaphor have solidly taken up residence on my desk and bed table. My brains? They are afflicted too! Academic essay writing, Power Point presentations and all that jazz are my religion now.

As to my job in the bakery, on this front things are in full throttle too. I can do the dishes and tartlets real fast now. A week ago I rejoiced over my small personal achievement: Issa, our master baker, taught me how to make pate sucree, an event that marked my evolution from a tartlet molder into an occasional tartlet-dough maker, occasional because I can only lend my helping hands in the bakery in between or after I tackle newly-formed mountains of dishes. Besides, every week I’m learning new, more interesting ways to cut my fingers or to bruise my limbs. My latest finding is that you can easily traumatize yourself with a plastic dough scraper (don’t ask). But the accomplishment I’m most proud of is that I made friends with a bunch of exceptionally fine, fine people from the bakery.

One of whom is one French girl named Maud. She took pride in dirtying every single bowl while preparing stuff for baking, to keep me busy, as she explained when I gave her furious glances of appreciation. Yet, I can’t complain. She fed me macaroons, and croissants, and financiers. Oh yes, Maud and I we hit it off all right from my very first day in the bakery. A few weeks ago Maud left back for France and now we are all very sad. Me, I am not sad. I am sorrowful.

But I’m here not to whine. Instead, I’m going to tell you about white wine cake. Before Maud and her boyfriend Jean-michel (a fine Dutch guy with a French name!) bid adieu to Holland, I hurried up to invite myself over to their place for dinner. I knew well that I would be served delectable food. What I did not expect was that I would be exposed to five (!!!) cakes for dessert alone. “I didn’t know what to choose, so I made five”, revealed Maud. That left me breathless with admiration and awe, but only for a second. What followed was an orgy of dessert eating: chocolate cake, tarte Tatin, two charlottes, and ...white wine cake.

Later that day I, over-desserted all right, would be coming back to Amsterdam and it’d be there, on a night train with just a few sleepy passengers lullaby-ed by the late hour, that I’d realize I’d found a new friend whose name was white wine cake. It’s simple, it’s sweet, it’s spirited. If you think it’s tipsy from wine, it is not, not a bit. It’s sober and means business: It pumps you up and makes you smile.

When the mist is thick and you feel somewhat reluctant to poke your head out there and do whatever you should, call for white wine cake first. You take eggs and separate them, then you mix the yolks with sugar and white wine; afterwards, you add vanilla, whose fragrance will make you feel warm and homey. Then you fold in flour, along with baking powder, and mix everything well. Oil, for moisture, goes in next. Last parade the egg whites to which you added a pinch of salt earlier and which you whipped up before adding. All this you pour in a buttered cake pan (or a loaf pan, why not?) and send in the oven. After 30-40 minutes white wine cake will be ready.

And I’ll tell you what, the moment you slice and put a sun-coloured piece on your plate, say, the one with tiny flowers around the rim, the clouds will part, believe it or not, reminding you to never give up, stop fretting, and be always grateful – for the friends, for the cake, for everything.

I’m happy I’m here today. I missed you, Dear Reader!

And before I round off, I should also say that since I’m oven-less, this time my cravings for baking were enabled by a philanthropic soul, Anthony. Who is Anthony, you may be wondering. Anthony is, quite simply, my brother in arms: He stoically tolerated me in his kitchen as I baked, and sometimes burnt, this white wine cake, which I did four times within two past weeks. In real life, Anthony is an American Amsterdammer doing graphic design, at leisure an outstanding thinker, for only outstanding thinkers can list activities such as ‘idiot ignoring’ and ‘weekend enjoying’ among their favourtie pastimes. So thank you, Anthony!

White Wine Cake

Adapted from Maud Chalons

Head note: when you choose white wine, go for the one with fruity and floral aromas -- basically, the more fragrant the wine, the richer in flavour the cake.

3 medium eggs, at room temperature
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup (200 gr) light brown sugar

2/3 cup (160 ml) white wine, at room temperature

2/3 cup (160 ml) non-fragrant oil such as sunflower oil

1 Tbsp vanilla sugar (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)
1 3/4 cup (200 gr) unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted
1 Tsb baking powder


1) Pre-heat the oven to 180 C (350 F).

2) Separate the eggs. Add the salt to the egg whites.

3) In a large bowl, beat the yolks with half amount of the sugar. Whisk in half amount of white wine and mix well. Add the remaining half of sugar plus vanilla sugar (or vanilla extract) and mix very well again. Proceed with the remaining amount of white wine; mix whole-heartedly. Pour in the oil; stir until fully-incorporated.

4) In another bowl, whisk the flour and the baking powder together. Pour the white wine mixture into the flour mixture and mix just until the flour is incorporated. Don’t overmix; it’s ok if there are some lumps in the batter, they’ll dissipate during baking.

4) Whip the egg whites until stiff. Using a rubber spatula, gently fold them in the batter. Pour in a buttered 9-inch round cake pan (I think it's not a crime to use a standard-sized, 9 by 5 inches, loaf pan) and bake for 30-40 mins, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and let cool for 10-15 mins.

This cake is delicious plain, but I find that a piece of fruit, say, a juicy pear or a crunchy crispy-skinned apple, is not wrong here at all. Not a bit.