When we arrived at our home exchange flat in Madrid, the first thing we saw was an extremely realistic bronze lamp lighter. During our visit, we found four other bronze statues of the same kind plus a “fake” one in the form of a “living statue”. It was amusing to see how people would give them a friendly pat on the back as they went past.
When Fraussie suggested I write a post for her blog (I’m the Aussie exchange student who appears in this blog under the name of Brainy Pianist), I really didn’t have too many ideas. “Talk about food”, she told me, “everyone loves to read about food”. Fair enough, I thought, but how can I make it a bit different? And then it hit me. When I was leaving Australia last August, never having lived away from home, and (almost) never cooking (although I am capable), most people would ask what was the one thing I was going to miss most. Beyond my family and friends, the answer would inevitably come back to a good, home-cooked meal. In my case, that’s synonymous with pretty much everything that comes out of our kitchen, but especially a good curry.
I guess in part that’s one of the greatest things coming from an Anglo-Indian/Australian background and being exposed to different cultures and cuisine. Dad grew up in India, and Mum spent hours and hours watching and learning from my grandmother (and the trusty copy of Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook). As a kid I couldn’t stand most curries, whereas my little brother was getting stuck in before he could even walk! But times have changed, and more often than not, I’ll be hankering after a good hot curry. And moving to Paris, it’s surprisingly easy to find fantastic Indian restaurants (particularly around the 10th arrondissement), and spice shops. I get a real kick ferretting around in the stores up near Gare du Nord on Rue du Faubourg Saint Denis.
So, here’s a recipe for one of our family’s favourites – and it’s easy as well!
The ingredients are:
– 500g mince (I generally use beef – but you could probably use lamb as well)
– 1-2 tablespoons oil
– 1 large brown onion, finely sliced
– 2 cloves garlic, crushed
– 1 piece of fresh ginger, about 2.5cm long – peeled and chopped
– 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
– 1 teaspoon chilli powder
– ½ cup natural yoghurt
– 2 teaspoons garam masala
– 1 teaspoon salt
– Freshly chopped coriander leaves to serve
Now the method:
1) Heat oil in saucepan and fry onion until soft.
2) Add garlic and ginger and fry until onion is golden brown.
3) Add turmeric and chilli powder and fry for a few minutes. If you like, you could add some ground coriander at this point as well.
4) Add meat and fry, turning meat constantly until colour changes. Break up any large lumps of meat.
5) Stir in the yoghurt, lower the heat, cover and cook for 15 minutes. (This should be a gentle simmer)
6) Add garam masala and salt, leave the lid off, and continue cooking until meat is cooked.
7) Stir through fresh coriander and serve.
Just a couple of helpful tips: the amount of chilli powder depends a) on how hot you want the curry to be, and b) the individual chilli powder. Every powder is slightly different in its strength, and its potency also changes with age. If you’re opening a new packet, be cautious in the quantities!
The final cooking stage varies, but Mum told me just to leave it as long as it takes to cook the rice.
You can also control the final consistency of the curry: if you like a lot of gravy, you can add a little water at the final stage (but be careful you don’t add too much, especially if the meat gives off a lot of fat or liquid). If you prefer a drier curry, you can increase the heat in the final stage – but watch it closely and stir frequently– with the yoghurt, the curry will have a tendency to stick to the saucepan.
And don’t forget – if you’re increasing the quantity of meat, you mustn’t increase the amount of spices in the same proportion. For instance, cooking a kilo of mince, I would only put 1 ½ teaspoon of chilli powder – otherwise it can be very spicy!
Serve with cooked basmati rice (I like to add some dried curry leaves while I’m cooking the rice – I can’t get the fresh ones we have in the garden back home, but dried ones give quite a lot of flavour), natural yoghurt, pappadums, and for that extra kick, a spicy Indian pickle. Bon appétit!
The idea of a home exchange first came to me when a French friend told me that her stepson and his Australian wife were going back to Melbourne to live. I consoled her by saying she and her husband could visit them for longer and at less expense if she did a home exchange. I even recommended a website I’d been told about: www.homeexchange.com. And it has an iPhone app as well. The next thing I knew she had organised a 6-week stay. I immediately set about persuading Relationnel to do the same thing despite his reluctance in the past.
We were planning our next holiday in Australia to include a family reunion in Armidale. During our absence, friends from Canberra were to stay in our apartment in the Palais Royal in Paris for part of the time. They recommended that we go to Tasmania so we organised a 12-day exchange in Launceston and Coles Bay including a car. Our exchangers will be using Paris and our new house in Blois as well as our second car while they are in the Loire Valley. We then started receiving other offers – Victoria, Hobart and Adelaide – so we set up some non-simultaneous exchanges as well, some of which won’t be redeemed until our next trip in 2014!
With Blois and the Palais Royal combined, the possibilities seem endless. I thought that we might appreciate a break in sunny Spain before the final signature in Blois in mid-March. Miguel, who lives in Madrid, had written earlier on to see if we were interested in a swap over Christmas but we were having our bedroom ceiling repainted, so I contacted him again to see if there was a weekend in March that might suit us both. Bingo! We bought our airline tickets, arranging our flights so that he would arrive in Paris before we left and thus exchange instructions and keys.
The next question was how to get the apartment ready, especially for a short stay of four days. Should I empty the fridge or just leave a couple of shelves? What about sheets and towels? How about kitchen essentials? Our Adelaide exchanger, Kathy Stanford, a fellow blogger (Femmes Francophiles) is much more experienced (she uses www.homelink.org) and offered to share her “instruction manual”. It provided me with a good base that I could adapt to suit our particular situation (and country).
After a rather frenetic morning on the day we were going to Madrid, I now know that we need to have some spare room in our cupboards to be able to easily free up space for our guests. We had decided to buy extra sheets and towels so that there wouldn’t be the problem of changing our sheets before we left and finding enough clean sheets to make the bed when we got back. But just storing all this extra linen takes up space we don’t really have. Fortunately we will be able to transfer a lot of things to Blois which is much bigger. That should make things easier in the future.
Next time, I will specifically leave a tray with kitchen essentials that don’t need replacing and indicate food in the fridge that our exchangers are welcome to use. For just a few days, it’s rather silly to have to buy oil and vinegar, tea, coffee, butter and sugar, for instance. Miguel left us a basket of fruit which I thought was a great idea. I regretted not having done the same. I put clean tablecloths and serviettes in our usual drawer in the living room but it would have been much more sensible to leave them on the table as he did. I also forgot to put the remote controls for the TV in an obvious place.
The other thing I think is essential is to have a blown-up map of the local area and indicate the closest supermarkets, grocery stores, bakeries, restaurants, pharmacies, etc. We didn’t find the supermarket in Madrid until the day we were leaving! When you don’t know a country and language well, it’s not always easy to find such basic commodities. I’ll also take along some Earl Grey tea bags with me next time. I strongly believe in “When in Rome, do as the Romans”, but not for breakfast!
I’d love to have feedback on your home exchange experiences, particularly any advice you’d like to give a new home exchanger. Oh, and I nearly forgot to say that we found it a very positive experience and are looking forward to the next six we’ve already organised over the next year. Relationnel totally regrets his former reluctance!
www.homeexchange.com (which turns into www.trocmaison.com, www.intercambiocasas.com, www.scambiocasa.com, www.haustauschferien.com, etc. depending on your language!) www.homelink.org (not always easy to follow, but you can sign up as a visitor to consult the listings without joining) www.homeexchange50plus.com/ (a newcomer but promising because of its speciality) http://www.lovehomeswap.com/
Snippets from other blogs that I’ve enjoyed recently. Thank you to all those who wrote the posts.
Summer transforms Paris!! To all our guests who have booked their summer in Paris…enjoy Paris Plages as the banks of the seine will be yet again be transformed into temporary sandy beaches with Palm trees brought in, deckchairs, ubiquitous ice cream sellers, and concerts for French and foreign guests! :). Read more
If you’re travelling by car to France this year, don’t forget to furnish yourself with a breathalyser which you must by law have in your car from July 1st, 2012. If you are found without an “alcootest” or an ” éthylotest ” , you will face an on the spot fine of 23 euros… Read more
My second date with Sir Lancelot was planned for an early September night that turned out to be a horrible rainy day. Knowing that any plans to be outside were foiled, I received a text message from him that morning inviting me over for a “euro-trash” dinner cooked by Sir Lancelot himself. “Oh, a man who cooks!” I thought. Read more
Apart from the Prado, Madrid’s main attraction to me are all the unusual things you keep coming across that I’ve never seen anywhere else. These are just some of them.
You can just see a building on the left that’s a squat and has signs up that seem to indicate the people have been evicted. During the day, all their clothes and furniture are gathered together in the middle of the square (Santa Cruz) and at night, they line up their mattresses under the nearby arches.
How to keep warm in a terrace café!
We saw a lot of cartoon characters in various places throughout Madrid posing for photos and asking for money.
Particularly in front of the Palacio Real, various invisible men were to be seen. This was my favourite.
The “living statue” is a well-known attraction everywhere in Europe but we were not convinced that this “escapee from Vesusius” was really alive. I think he might just set up his plaster cast and collect the money at the end of the day!
There are many shops with this type of fashion. Always very colourful. Lots of fabric shops as well which have virtually disappeared in Paris outside the Quartier Saint Pierre.
We came across seemingly hundreds of these queues and couldn’t work out what they were all about until we eventually came to a church that was bursting with people already.
Another indication of how alive religion still is in Spain is this stall on the Sunday flea market.
And on the same flea market, just look at this sofa!
On the same market, the dummies are obviously having a whale of a time.
I don’t know whether the emergency medical service is a colourful in the rest of Spain!
Our Plaza Mayor turned into a very busy and eclectic collectors’ market on Sunday.
Anyone for crisps?
And you can follow them up with sweets …
And last, but not least, we have Cervantes with his famous Don Quixote and Sancho Panza with a typical skyscraper from the Franco era (1950s).
Before we left Paris, Miguel, our Spanish home exchanger, had a look at the list a French friend had given me with places to eat near the Plaza Mayor. The first address was El Madrono. “Ah yes”, he said in Spanish, “El Madrono is good, but just across the plaza, there’s a better one. You like fish? El bacalao. Very good restaurant. If you can’t find it, just ask”. That’s what I understood anyway. So he drew this little mud map with a cross in the middle, showing El Madrono on one side and “bacalao” on the other.
We didn’t get to the apartment until after 9.30 pm, but as we discovered in Sevilla last year, going out to dinner at 10 pm in Spain is not a problem. They do everything about 2 hours later here. I don’t know how Miguel’s going to get on in Paris! Relationnel followed the map to the Plaza Mayor and we started looking for the Bacalao. Lots of other restaurants in sight, still no Bacalao. We asked in a souvenir shop but the girl had never heard of it. We then asked a couple about our age, showing them the paper with El Madrono on it. No problem. They knew where it was. Then I explained (in my Italian-style Spanish) that we didn’t want El Madrono but the Bacalao, which was supposed to be better.
They both laughed. The man got out his business card (he turned out to be a lawyer) and wrote down the name of a good Basque restaurant for the next evening with a phone number (that he knew off by heart !). After that they showed us the way to what we thought was the Bacalao. Suddenly Relationnel saw a big stone cross. “There’s your cross and look, there’s El Madrono!” So, after consulting the mud map again, we set off the look for the Bacalao.
After at least a quarter of an hour, having tried in every direction, I suggested that we forget the Bacalao and go to El Madrono instead. We went in and were taken through to the dining room which was completely deserted. We consulted the bilingual menu and then it dawned on me. “Bacalao” means “cod”!!! Miguel had obviously said “a good restaurant to eat cod, better than El Madrono”. No wonder our lawyer and his wife were amused.
We obviously ordered “bacalao”. Every time I thought about the confusion, I laughed. So much for my Spanish!
The photos below are representative of my first impressions of Madrid – the Plaza Mayor, which is our neighbourhood for 4 days, long, sweeping avenues with enormous buildings, little shops and restaurants in the old quarter covered in ceramics, ceramic street signs and the Palacio Real, the counterpart of our own Palais Royal.
There is a first for everything. A laptop in a plane. Probably nothing new for most of you(I can hear my drummer brother saying “2time for a Mac, sister”) but until I bought my Dell about a month ago, I had never found a laptop I was comfortable with. The seats in these planes are getting smaller and smalller. Before you used to have a place to put your book or bag. Well Iberia doesn’t have anything. Also you pay for your drinks these days. I’m using my Asia Miles. The flight turned out to be more expensive than if I’d booked directly! Do not use your miles on short flights!
So we ordered our Cavo del Penedés (a natural sparkling wine it says in English) , fuet tradicional (long thin dried sausage affairs with miniature bread sticks) and pringles in lieu of the gin tonic and peanuts we usually have in planes. So I’m feeling very Spanish. Our home exchangers arrived this afternoon in Paris and we exchanged keys and they told us all the great places to eat in Madrid. We babbled away in English and Spanish (not Relationnel who just stuck to French) and we think we know how to get into their apartment in Madrid.
We nearly didn’t make the plane. Well, with luggage anyway. The day Relationnel told me he was “give or take an hour” I changed my whole attitude to life. I used to be give or take 5 minutes. I still am with planes. Our flight was leaving at 6.25 pm. Relationnel initially said that since we were taking a taxi we could leave at 5. I insisted on 4.30. Still no news at 4.12 so I sent an SMS. No answer. I waited another 5 minutes and phoned. “Just closing up the office”. He arrived at 4.26 telliing me the taxi was on its way.
We live in the middle of Paris and were going to Orly. The traffic was unbelievable. They have these special bus and taxi traffic lanes but they were full of buses and taxis … I remained very calm but I was sure we weren’t going to make it. We had this young driver that managed to weave in and out of the traffic with frightening determination. We arrived at the desk after they had closed the baggage check-in. Fortunately we had reserved our seats and boarding passes on-line last night.
We were sent to another desk. Our flight hadn’t boarded but it was too late to check in our baggage. “Just one”, I said in French and she checked her computer again and said “OK”. This other guy, a Spaniard, was trying to get her attention, but it was too late. His flight was closed. She asked me how come we were late and I explained the awful traffic and she commisserated. Thank goodness. Of course, when we finally got to the waiting lounge, it wasn’t even boarding. I even had time to buy a book.
The moral of this is that you should leave plenty of time to get to the airport. Traffic in Paris is entirely unpredictable. Next, it’s better to take public transport! Madrid, here we come!
Part 1 ended as we left Castello de la Sarre on our way to Milan. Hotel Vecchia Milano turned out to be somewhat old and decrepit despite the photos on the website. I gave up staying in the “oldest hotel” in this or that city long ago. I should have paid more attention to the “vecchia” bit. However, the room was fairly spacious and the bed was comfortable. The breakfast was awful but that is often the case in Italy. I’d chosen the hotel because it was so well located – very close to the Duomo – and the fact that we could park in an underground parking lot at a reasonable price. Remember we had our bikes on the back. But more about that later!
We fell instantly in love with the Duomo as everyone must. The change of colour as the light waxes and wanes is fascinating and so are all the incredible architectural details. We had our aperitivo at a café opposite the northern façade (I only know that because churches always face east) and spent a lot of time with our binoculars scrutinising the impressive number of sculptures. Then we found a very nice little restaurant for dinner called “Da Vin – La Toscana e il resto del mondo” in a little street near the Porta Ticinese and ate a tagliata in memory of one of our most unforgettable culinary experiences in Italy. We arrived in a little town called Castiglione Fiorentino at lunchtime, tired, hot and hungry in our pre-Tom Tom days, with our tempers a little frayed. There was a nondescript restaurant next to the church called “Da Muzzicone”.
There was no menu and no one spoke anything but Italian. When the lady told us what we could have, I identified insalata mista and tagliata which I knew was some sort of red meat. It was cooked on hot embers in the far corner of the room and was served with an olive oil, rosemary and green pepper sauce. We still talk about that meal. Tagliata means “sliced” so can actually be any cut of meat but the version you get in Tuscany is really a côte de boeuf without the bone. And we know how much I like côte de boeuf.
Back in Milan, we visited the inside of the Duomo next day and were not disappointed. I also love the statues outside that are shiny from everyone stroking them. Other places to see are the Piazza delle Scala, home of the famous opera, the immense Galeria Emanuelle Segundo with its mosaic floor, Piazza Mercanti with its mediaeval façades, Santa Maria delle Grazie containing Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper for which you have to book a couple of days in advance (which we didn’t of course), San Maurizio, once a Benedictine monastery, with its magnificent frescoes of Noah’s Ark and the Castello which contains Leonardo’s last unfinished sculpture which he started at the age of nearly 90.
Excellent aperitivo at the Marcenti Caffe, 21 Via Dei Mercanti, where we were joined by friends who happened to be in Milan that weekend! We trekked down to the canal which was literally alive with Milanese and tourists. It was also alive with mosquitoes to my great dismay as mosquitoes find me particularly attractive. We sat down in the armchairs outside one of the many bars along the canal and discovered that you can practically have a complete meal just buying a drink that gives you unlimited access to the buffet inside. A lot of the people had repellent with them. Had I only known! I had some Wackoff back at the hotel. However, I would recommend going to Cheese at 11 Via Celestino IV just next to the Porta Ticinese instead. By the time we got there for dessert, covered in mosquito bites, the buffet was over, but we’d seen it the night before and didn’t know how the system worked. It was sumptuous.
We left next morning after paying a horrendous garage bill – 103 Euros for two days instead of the 60 Euros announced by the hotel. It turns out that their “agreement” with the underground parking lot had changed but they had omitted to tell us. I was furious but it didn’t change anything of course. Next stop Ancona.
I keep reading all these interesting posts on other people’s blogs so I’ve decided that on Wednesdays, I’ll bring you some snippets so that you can enjoy them too and perhaps discover some blogs you didn’t know. Thank you to everyone I’ve quoted!
Writing the unwritten rules of travelFemmes Francophiles at www.femmesfrancophiles.blogspot.com
Fairfax media’s Ben Groundwater has published his Ten unwritten rules of travel. My personal favourite on his list is about not reclining your seat on planes during meals. His article started me thinking as to what are my rules for travel. In no particular order here is my list. Read more
by Doni Belau at www.girlsguidetoparis.com
Renting an apartment in Paris, particularly if you are going for a week or more, is always a good choice. You’ll enjoy more space than a hotel room, and you’ll save money. A lot of the apartments for rent are truly gorgeous, but there are always some things to watch out for, and it pays to ask a lot of questions and do your research. Read more
The Local Way by Bryan and Anna at www.paristhelocalway.com
Want to know the places to get baguettes in Paris? Our hosts will guide you through the city in search of the best bread. Read more and see the wonderful video in English on how baguettes are made!
