Month: March 2012
Film – Journey 2 the Mysterious Island
I don’t remember ever being this excited about winter being over. I love winter but having three small kids makes it really hard to enjoy it. Skiing is out of the question and every time we go out we have to get three little people into their snowsuits. Everyone knows that snowsuits are kids’ most natural way of punishing parents. I think I am going to go and dump the lot of them into the laundry and then put them away for the season.
Then watch me wake up to another snowstorm….
Music review – Ligeti: Works for Piano by Lucille Chung
A few years ago I saw Lucille Chung in concert and enjoyed it so much I bought her CD. I played it at home a few times but it really did not work out because I can only listen to the music in one room and I am never there for long. It makes it difficult to listen to modern piano music because all I hear is “plink, dead air, plink”.
Anyhow, not having the opportunity to really listen to this CD, I soon forgot about it until I read someone gushing about Ligeti’s Grand Macabre opera on one of the opera blogs I follow. I finally got around to bringing the CD into my car so I can listen to it when I am not moving from room to room and I am finally enjoying it.
Yesterday as I was listening to it I wished I had practiced some of these pieces back when I was taking piano lessons in the late 80’s. At my dance school we were allowed to practice on free pianos but goofing around was frowned upon. If I was practicing Ligeti, the people whose job was to chase the non serious kids off the pianos would never know whether I was playing some complex and critically acclaimed passages or was just goofing around.
Burt seriously, would not piano lessons be much more fun if they included some modern stuff and maybe some jazz? Even though I always enjoyed classical music I can’t ever remember actually liking any pieces I was practicing. The only tunes I remember enjoying playing were Frere Jacques, Fur Elize and some improvisations that attempted to sound like Ligeti, none of which I would be allowed to play on the school piano for fear of being accused of goofing off.
Plink plink plink!
And yes, I have embarked on a new and ambitious knitting project. Wish me luck!
Film – The Artist
I craved a particular cake my teta Ruza used to make. It had a layer of dough followed by a layer of apple filling covered with a dough “mesh”. I never had a chance to get the recipe from teta Ruza* so I decided to make a close-enough recipe from a book apply named “Domaci kolaci” (homemade cakes).
*Well, I did ask her how she made orehnjaca once and she explained it to me. At the time it made so much sense that I did not think I needed to write it down. Needless to say, I forgot and all the recipes that I found in cookbooks and and the interwebs are not quite right.
Yah, “Domaci kolaci” assumes that you already know exactly how to make a cake so things like measurements for ingredients, pan sizes and rolled out dough thickness are intermittent or more likely absent. So there you go, I run out of dough for a mesh and had to use the biggest pan I had because I did not know how big the cake would be.
And oh, the oven temperature was written in Kelvins when I thought these were Fahrenheit. Did they write this book to be used in chemistry class??? Probably not, you need measurements in chemistry…
In any case, the cake is 80% apple so even burnt it did not taste badly. In all the rush, I placed the pan on a still hot stove element (trying to bathe Markus and eat lunch at the same time causes chaos, who knew?) and broke it under the cake. At least I did not have to attempt to clean the burnt part.
Moral of the story: If you have someone in your life that bakes good cakes, film them making every single cake they make.