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Wednesday 27 June 2012

Wednesday; Morning;


Good morning; an egg from my diligent hens and  fresh bread from the oven;
a good breakfast makes the day.


An old saying;  well I guess it is the old rhyme which might hold a kernel of truth. "Early to bed and early to rise makes one healthy, happy and wise.


My old friend has to say this about morning, he never disappoints...

The town was glad with morning light; places that had shown ugly and distrustful all night long, now wore a smile; and sparkling sunbeams dancing on chamber windows, and twinkling through blind and curtain before sleepers' eyes, shed light even into dreams, and chased away the shadows of the night.
  ~Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop







Saturday 23 June 2012

Sepia Saturday 131; Fun at the fair;


Knabenschiessen

Knabenschiessen is a traditional target shooting competition in Zürich .held on the second weekend of September each year. The festival, officially held for the first time in 1889, is one of the oldest in Switzerland, dating back to the 17th century
The competition is open to 13-17 year old, who either reside or are enrolled in a school in the canton of Zürich. Originally reserved for boys (German: Knaben, Plural, Singular der Knabe).
The competition has been open to female participants since 1991. The shooting is with the Swiss Army ordonnance rifle, SIG SG 550. The competition is held in the shooting range at Albisgüetli to the south-west of the city center, on the slope of Üetliberg.

Traditionally it is surrounded by a large fair.


I wished I had some of the photos, my mother made when I was a child and attended many fairs with her..
I went to fairs with my children, but I did not made photographs.




Two amateurish videos when I was in SWL and my cousins took me to the Fair in the Albisgüetli. It shows a little of the surroundings and the fair.





I have now managed to upload the videos. Enjoy. They are 1 minute each.







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Wednesday 20 June 2012

Wednesday; peace;


This morning when I went in to the garden, I noticed the flowers of this Hawaiian Hibiscus. The cold  has added  to its white flowers a deep pink flush. It looked so beautiful and peaceful under the early morning sun. Small wonders of nature lets one feel utterly content and happy.

Tuesday 19 June 2012

Tuesday; Sunday's Soup dinner, revisited...


Simple and nothing fancy... for a Goulash soup dinner.


The soup, made after an old family recipe does not need any commercial additives like stock cubes.

It needs, beef about 150 to 200 g per person cut into cubes.
2 medium potatoes and a couple of large carrots, 2 big onions.
3-4 tblsp sweet paprika, home made herb salt,  1 tblsp organic tomato paste,  my secret ingredient add 1 tbsp  of  a very good curry powder  while braising meat and onions;  a few laurel leaves dried or fresh; Water;  sour cream and hot chilie jam served extra to spice up the soup for the ones who like it HOT!


Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish, 
Game, or any other dish? 
Who would not give all else for two 
Pennyworth only of Beautiful Soup? 
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

From a poem by Louis Carroll.




Fresh bread from the oven is a must!



A couple of reds; Coonawarra was always a palatable wine, this one was a nice Shiraz and went well with the soup.


Dessert was Almond Orange cake. This was the leftover..

As we have now so many Navel Oranges, I cooked two big oranges skin and all as they are not sprayed  nor waxed, until pulpy  and mixed  them  with 250 g of ground almonds, 150 g caster sugar  and 5 whole eggs' and 1 teasp, baking powder; presto, bake on 190 C for  at least half  an Hour. Top with a chocolate ganache made from 100 g of Lind 85 % cocoa  a small lump of butter and some cream. You can make this cake a few days ahead as it is getting better day by day!



At this time the guests have left...

All had a jolly good time!

Saturday 16 June 2012

Sepia Saturday 130; Good by or Hello!




'Parting is such sweet sorrow' (Juliet, Act 2 Scene 1)

Perhaps the most well known "Goodbye"!


Romeo and Juliet Balcony Scene by Frank Dicksee












A well known scene at airports;

At Zurich Kloten airport my sister and I saying Hello, it was in 1990




Please visit Sepia Saturday 130;





Thursday 14 June 2012

Thursday; Lorca;

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27.
He may have been shot by anti-communist forces during the Spanish Civil War. 
In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca's death. The Garcia Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar. However, no human remains were found. 




Early years
García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles west of Granada, southern Spain. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a landowner with a farm in the fertile vega surrounding Granada and a comfortable villa in the heart of the city. García Rodríguez saw his fortunes rise with a boom in the sugar industry. García Lorca's mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, was a teacher and gifted pianist. In 1909, when the boy was 11, his family moved to the city of Granada. For the rest of his life, he maintained the importance of living close to the natural world, praising his upbringing in the country. In 1915, after graduating from secondary school, García Lorca attended Sacred Heart University. During this time his studies included law, literature and composition. Throughout his adolescence he felt a deeper affinity for theatre and music than literature, training fully as a classical pianist, his first artistic inspirations arising from the scores of Debussy, Chopin and Beethoven. Later, with his friendship with composer Manuel de Falla Spanish folklore became his muse. García Lorca did not begin a career in writing until his piano teacher died in 1916 and his first prose works such as "Nocturne", "Ballade" and "Sonata" drew on musical forms. García Lorca traveled throughout Castile, Léon, and Galicia, in northern Spain, with a professor of his university, who also encouraged him to write his first book, Impresiones y Paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes – published 1918). Don Fernando de los Rios persuaded García Lorca's parents to allow the boy to enrol at the progressive, Oxbridge-inspired Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid in 1919.


"The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever." - Federico Garcia Lorca  - Spanish Poet and Playwright  - 1898-1936

Nothing has changed, nor will it ever change; it can only get worse and it has, as long as the  common people are locked in trivial pursuits and are bearing their load and think it is normal to have overlords who drown in wealth while they drown in mire. Titania©

Dawn

Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.

Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood. 

Federico García Lorca











Wednesday 6 June 2012

Wednesday, sleuth.. Gallium;



Silvery white and soft enough to be cut with a knife, gallium has an unusually low melting point  at 29.7 C which allows it to liquefy in the palm of the hand.

Harmful effects:
Gallium is considered to be non-toxic.

1kg of Gallium costs $ 220.00
200 g of gallium would make an unusual gift!


Gallium
Metallic chemical element, chemical symbol Ga, atomic number 31.

The liquid metal clings to or wets glass and similar surfaces. Gallium expands on solidification and super cools readily, remaining liquid at temperatures as low as 0 °C .
In various combinations with aluminum, indium, phosphorus, arsenic, and antimony, it forms compounds (e.g., gallium arsenide and indium gallium arsenide phosphide) with valuable semiconductor and optoelectronic properties; some of these compounds form the basis for such electronic devices as light-emitting diodes and semiconductor lasers.

Discovery of Gallium
Before the discovery of gallium its existence and main properties were predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev. He named the hypothetical element eka-aluminum as he predicted the element would sit below aluminum on the periodic table.

Gallium was discovered by Paul E. Lecoq de Boisbaudran through a spectroscope in 1875.

Its now characteristic spectrum (two violet lines) identified it as a new element.

De Boisbaudran extracted gallium in the first instance from a zinc blend ore from the Pyrenees and obtained initially only 0.65 grams from 430 kilograms of ore. He isolated gallium by electrolysis of its hydroxide in potassium hydroxide solution.

The origin of the name comes from the Latin word 'Gallia', meaning France.