Serendipita

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Tomorrow is the last day of school before the summer holidays. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to six weeks without school, but I really can’t complain like some of my colleagues because I only had half a job for the last couple of months and thus only half the work and half the stress.

On the other hand, I will be unemployed as of Saturday, but fortunately only for six weeks because it looks like I will be employed full-time after the holidays. If everything goes according to plan (and there doesn’t seem to be much that can go wrong at this stage) I will have a full-time job at the school I started working for in February (got the job only a few days earlier). It is in another state (Rhineland Palantinate instead of North-Rhine Westphalia) and about 85km (55 miles) south of Bonn, so the (not so) new job means moving as well.

André will continue to work in Bonn, so we compromised and looked for a new flat about halfway between Bonn and Koblenz. We found out that it can be much easier to find a new flat in a small town than in a city like Bonn, and rents are cheaper, too. We were very lucky and found a nice flat after looking at three or four others, so it took only one afternoon (plus some research beforehand). We’re going to move in a couple of weeks, and while I’m a little sad about leaving Bonn, I’m also looking forward to the new beginning.

Indian Cooking, part two

Meanwhile, I’ve tried all the recipes I linked to the other day. I liked the Murg Jalfraizee best, but the other two were really good as well. A kind reader sent me a link to his Indian recipes via e-mail: The Aardvark cooks. I’m going to try Seekh kefta and/or Murgh dopiaza this weekend. I’ve never heard of some of the spices mentioned in the recipes, but Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages (auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) are a vauable source of information.

Physic(ist)s

Feynman is one of the coolest physicists, so of course I have to link to this essay: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine by W. Daniel Hillis for Physics Today.

Link via Schockwellenreiter und Physikalische Kleinigkeiten.

Photos from around the World

Terra Galleria offers “galleries of travel, adventure, landscape, and nature photography by Quang-Tuan Luong. The browsable image bank contains more than 8000 pictures from around the world (including many large format images), available not only as fine art prints or for commercial image licencing, but also for personal use. [...] New material is added monthly, so come back often!”

Link via Ingi.

International Cooking

I wanted to try some new reicpes this weekend and decided to try some Indian cuisine – despite my low tolerance of spicy food.

I did a Google search for Indian dishes with chicken in them and came up with Murg Jalfraizee (Chicken with Green Bell Peppers). In fact, I substituted the green peppers for yellow and red ones because I had them on hand, and used onions, garlic and ginger instead of pastes, but the meal turned out very tasty – much better than I had anticipated.

It’s not that I’m a bad cook, I’m able to pull of, say, Italian dishes quite well, but I usually need some practice with a new cuisine until I understand how the spices work or how a certain way of preparing food works.

In fact, it was so yummy that I’m going to try another new recipe tomorrow: Chicken Kundapuri. The Murg Korma (Cashew Chicken) also sounds great – maybe next weekend?

Unfortunately, there are very few Indian restaurants in Germany (maybe because most Germans don’t like hot food?), so I have only tasted real Indian food once or twice and can’t really tell if my concoction comes close to real Indian food, but it sure was fun to cook and a new kind of taste in our daily fare. If you’ve got a tried ‘n true Indian recipe you think I should try, feel free to post the recipe (or a link) in the comments! I’m also keen on trying some Thai or Indonesian dishes.

I also did some research on Indian Cuisine (and cooking in general) this afternoon and found some useful questions – and answers – at Ask MetaFilter:

• A thread on how to start cooking Indian style
• Another on how to cook papapds/pappadams
• Because I also like Mexican food: Looking for an extraordinary guacamole recipe
• A herb that is common in both cuisines is coriander or cilantro. I didn’t know that it tastes differently to different people.