Saturday, April 2, 2011

Clarissa's Sauerkraut Salad: A Recipe

This is a very traditional salad that we make often in my culture. Since good sauerkraut is hard to come around in the area where I live, I make my own. It isn't difficult at all to make it, and if people are interested, I can share how it's done. My country isn't rich in vegetables and vegetarian options do not abound. This is probably the closest we come to a vegetarian and healthy dish. (Here I do need to remind you that Ukrainian cuisine is probably among the most unhealthy in the world. Everything is salted, pickled, and smothered in lard. It is what it is, so I'm just trying to make the best of it.)

What you are going to need:

sauerkraut
potatoes
beets
pickles
scallions
canned green peas
olive oil

Some people also add carrots but I make my sauerkraut with carrots, I don't add any more to the salad to avoid overpowering it with a carroty taste.

I don't put any proportions here because it is really a matter of individual taste. Just keep adding ingredients and stop when you reach the taste profile that makes you happy.

1. Boil some potatoes but make sure they are not overdone. Nothing is worse than a mushy potato in a salad. Potatoes should still remain pleasantly firm inside after you boil them. 

2. Many people boil their beets too, but it's always better to bake them in foil. Beets should also be taken out of the oven before they become mushy inside.

3. While things are boiling and baking, cut up some scallions and pickles and mix them in a big bowl with sauerkraut and green peas. Don't overdo the pickles. Two medium-sized one are more than enough for the bowl of this size.

4. In the absence of a Russian food store in a close physical proximity, these are the pickles that I use for all my recipes because they come very close in taste to the real thing. I don't suggest getting any other brand of pickles because the strong vinegary taste of most North American brands will demolish the taste of all my recipes.
5. Then, when potatoes and beets are ready, dice them and add them to the salad. The smaller you dice them, the better the quality of the salad will be. Then, add a little olive oil (I never add more than a tea spoon, unless the sauerkraut is extremely dry), mix everything, and enjoy.

Badminton Season

Today was the first time this year that we played badminton. Now it really feels like summer.


The neighbors seem used to seeing people play badminton on this block, which is just as well because we will be doing it all summer long.

Compliments to Clarissa's Blog

Look at the nice things people say about me:
Unfortunately, I've never heard the word "philosophy" at school, but I am sure it doesn't deserve hating. With a good teacher, I think we both would be interested. Clarissa at http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/ (VERY recommended blog in general) wrote numerous, fascinating posts about the subject (among her books' reviews). And you love logic, since you like programming. "If A, then B..." doesn't mean A is ever true/false. Ditto RE online discussions, otherwise why blog? There is science and there is junk science, and sometimes real science gets twisted and reported as junk one in newspapers. The less formal field of knowledge is, the easier is to twist it and let general public see a fake as a real thing. F.e. mathematics is very hard to twist, but evolutionary psychology is an easy victim.  In short, we love philosophy (studying how people and society work among other things, based on Clarissa's reviews of books by famous philosophers), logic and online discussions, it's fakes and shouting matches we hate. :)
This was published on a blog that I think is run by somebody from Sweden, which I always considered an enlightened country full of intelligent people. This nice comment was left by a user whose blog you can find here.

It's great to know that anti-Clarissa bloggers are balanced out by such appreciative, nice people. I feel very valued right now and encouraged to blog even more. Especially about philosophy.

Is Spring Finally Here?


I know that everybody must be sick and tired of my not extremely professional (to put it very mildly) photos by now, but this tree that grows next to my house is so beautiful right now that I couldn't help sharing it with people.

Now I really hope that there will be no more snow falling on it.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Decorating Spaces

Another thing that I bought in New York was this beautiful drawing (ink on canvas.) They are sold by a painter called Yuri who works as an illustrator of fantasy fiction. He makes these drawings in his free time and sells them on weekends at the Union Square. They come in many colors, and I really wanted to buy the purple one (which is my favorite color at this point) but my sister claimed it for my niece's bedroom, and I couldn't say no to that.

For twelve years I led a very nomadic lifestyle. I knew that every place I lived in would be temporary. School, then more school, then graduate school, then a temporary teaching position. The goal was always to have as little material possessions as possible in order to be able to pick everything up and move across the continent at any given time. I learned to live out of a suitcase and not to fret too much when that suitcase was lost. 

Now I am getting used to the idea that I can finally stay put. Hanging a picture on the wall of my house or my office has a great symbolic meaning for me. It is a sign that I can finally truly inhabit the spaces where I live. It will take time, of course, to learn not to look at any new object from the point of view of how hard it will be to pack it and to substitute functionality with aesthetics.

New Page: Reviews

I don't know if everybody has noticed but there is a new page titled "Reviews" that I added yesterday. The page will contain my most popular reviews of books, movies, and, in the future, possibly restaurants. People come to the blog specifically for the reviews very often, so I decided to make things easier for them.

Does anybody have any suggestions for other pages that could be added to make the blog more convenient to use?

Friday, April 1, 2011

El sueño del celta / The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa: A Review


In case you found Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine difficult to understand, here is Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel El sueño del celta to explain to you exactly what happened in those novels. Roger Casement, the novel's protagonist, was a British consul who traveled to Congo and the Amazon and wrote scandalous reports about the horrible treatment of the natives of Africa and South America by the colonial forces. Later on, he joined the Irish nationalist movement and militated for the cause of Ireland's independence.

This is not a novel that offers much - or any, I would say - space for the reader to analyze, interpret, imagine, or look for his or her own answers. Everything is spelled out with painstaking attention to detail. As a result, some parts of the novel sound like they were copy-pasted from an encyclopedia. Sources of historical data, short biographical sketches of real-life people who appear in the novel, dates and gigures populate the pages of El sueño del celtaVargas Llosa seems to have lost his capacity to relinquish control over his text and allow the readers to interact with it on their own. For those who managed to remain unfamiliar with the civilization versus barbarity conflict, Vargas Llosa makes absolutely sure that you will be sick to death of both terms by the end of the novel. And for those who didn't get the message that imperialism is wrong, it will be hammered in on every other page.

Everything I have written so far has probably made you think that I hated the novel. This, however, is not true. El sueño del celta doesn't offer much for analysis but it is surely informative and very well-written. I now know everything I ever wanted to know (and a lot, lot more) about Roger Casement, his travels, struggles, ailments, friends, foes, hopes and dreams. This novel is anything but boring. Vargas Llosa is a great narrator who can turn anything into a great story. I have no doubt that this novel will be quite successful if only for the fact that it is very easy to read.

The enumeration of sufferings inflicted by the colonial forces on the natives of African Congo and the indigenous people of the Amazon becomes painful to read at a certain point. This, of course, is a story that needs to be told and repeated as many times as possible lest we forget that imperialism can never be excused. I have to warn you, however, that an honest piece of writing about colonialism (such as this one) will be so disturbing as to prevent you from sleeping at night.

There are people who insist that Vargas Llosa is a Libertarian. It is a statement that is as silly as claiming that Juan Goytisolo is a Communist. Writers have a tendency to try on political discourses without really knowing what those discourses are about. They don't, however, allow their political triflings influence what and how they write in any way. It's been a while since I have read an indictment of the horrors that free market and wild capitalism inevitably bring along that would be as passionate and convincing as El sueño del celta. Anybody who believes that it would be a good idea to let market forces act freely, without any restraints from the government, should read this novel and hopefully just shut up already. In El sueño del celta,Vargas Llosa condemns the horrifying greed of free market capitalists better than any writer I have read in a while.