"Half of a Yellow Sun"

I had to read this book as part of my book club reading list. Even though it was sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while now, for some reason it was never high enough on my personal list of "to read" books. 

What a mistake! I should have read this book long time ago. Not because it made me a better person and not because I had fun reading it. This is not this type of book. It talks about war, the worst kind of war, civil war and famine and death. Not a fun subject unless you are seriously mentally disturbed.  But it is not a war novel and you are not overwhelmed by the dramatic to the point where you have nightmares. The strong and integrated characters make sure that this does not happen to you. You follow their everyday life in a country that became alive only to die unrecognised by the rest of the world. It's legacy, though, remains. And yes there are bombings and famine and death, but there is also love and passion and family. 

It is a well written book by a writer who does not pretend to know things she doesn't. It has the right amount of everything, history, politics, emotions and at the end it instigates a need in you to go and find more books and novels written by African writers about Africa.

Windmills of your Mind

As I was preparing to write this next post, this song popped into my mind.....

The original version, performed by Noel Harrison, made me feel a bit anxious...The singer melodically recites the lyrics but the quick succession of the words almost suffocated me. Isn't this though, the deeper meaning of the song? To take your breath away by the realisation that it is futile to resist the never ending circle of some things... night becomes day, winter becomes spring, sadness becomes happyness, and the again... night, winter and sadness come back "like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind".  Just be careful that the windmills don't become wind whirls....

Let Life Happen

Photo taken from http://yonisomanasikara.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/comfort-for-control-freaks/

I've been thinking about what to write in the profile section of this blog. What is this blog about? Who am I?
I've been thinking about this for a few days now...


Then I came across this post from another blog. His words hit home immediately. So I've decided. This blog, my speck of dust in the vastness of cyber space, is going to be the beginning of my attempt to "let life happen". 


I will not try to control it. I don't have a specific idea or format in my mind. I will slowly fill it with my thoughts and feelings, my books, my recipes, my paintings...I promise not to control it.

Magic Time Warp

In November 2009 I walked into a sunlit, barely furnished room, sat on a hard, wooden, dark brown chair and said to the person sitting opposite me: "I have no friends. I only have acquaintances, people that come and go through my life without touching me". 


It was a very challenging period for me both physically and psychologically. I was just out of a three week rehabilitation programme after a lower back operation and a stomach bleeding that almost killed me. I could not bend my back, sit for more than 15 minutes, eat raw, fried, or roasted food without getting a stomach ache, and had to do intense physiotherapy twice everyday. 


It sounds tragic? It was for me and for my close family. I was irritable, miserable and plainly helpless to do anything by myself. Clearly, I was in no mood to meet new people, and new people would run away immediately after they met me! Who wants a crying, miserable and bitter person in their lives?


Maja was the physiotherapist who was assigned to my case. I saw her everyday at 10:30am.   I started slowly 15 minutes the first week, 20 minutes the second, half an hour the third and so on and so forth. Our relationship evolved, grew deeper as the time of our sessions  grew longer. I ended up staying in the gym for 2 hours everyday and I was able to start exercising  like a "normal person" in 6 months time!!!


In June 2010, I walked into a sunlit, barely furnished room, sat on a hard, wooden, dark brown chair and said to the person sitting opposite me: "I have a friend". 


That friend is Maja. Every time we meet each other the time flows like water. We can talk for hours about everything and anything. I forget myself in the time warp that our friendship has created!

Salmon with Swiss Chard

Today has been a full day. 
After about 2 and 1/2  weeks, the temperature rose above 0C thus, I decided to go to the gym. My trainer, Ante, was quite judgemental concerning the pour state of my muscles but I chose not to listen. I know my body...I am not an athlete. Not so long ago I weighted 90kg (that is 198 pounds for my American friends) and now I fluctuate between 62kg and 64kg depending on how cold the weather is. 

But anyway, I completed my workout quite successfully and headed back home to get ready for a nice afternoon with a bunch of girls to watch a friend's of ours television début.   

In the meantime I cooked a light but quite tasty and filling meal for my husband to have in my absence. 

I love salmon (who doesn't right?) in all its forms: raw, smoked, poached, sheared or roasted. 
I also like spinach very much but for some strange reason I never seem to find it fresh in the market when I need it. So instead, I chose to use Swiss chard which, here in Croatia, is the main green leaf vegetable that people feed on year round. It took me some time to get used to its bitter, earthy flavour but being an equal opportunities advocate and with the added help of onions, garlic, lemons and olive oil, I managed to create a flavourful green bed for my foil roasted salmon fillet to sit on.

Herb Salmon with Swiss Chard
Adapted from  "The Food Doctor Ultimate Diet" by Ian Marber

Serves 1

Ingredients
300gr salmon fillet
A handfull of chopped dill
A handfull of chopped parsley
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Zest of 1/2 lemon
1 clove of garlic, crushed
200gr washed fresh Swiss chard
1 medium onion cut into thin wedges
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt
Lemon pepper

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 180C. Rub the fish with the lemon juice and zest and coat it with the herbs.
Place it on a slightly oiled foil sheet and season with black pepper and the crushed garlic.
Fold the ends of the foil into a parcel and cook for 20 minutes. 
Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a non stick pan and sauté the onion for 3 - 4 minutes. Set aside.
Prepare an ice bath: Fill a large bowl with cold water and ice cubes.
Boil the chard  leaves for 5 - 8 minutes (depends on the tenderness of the leaves). 
Remove from heat and immediately drop into the ice bath. This will help maintain the vibrant greenness of the chard. 
Strain and season with salt. Let it stand for 1 - 2 minutes so that most of the liquids that are released by the salt drain as well. 
Put the pan with the onions back on the stove and add the strained chard. Season with lemon pepper and salt and sauté them together for 2 minutes.
To serve make a nice bed of the sautéed chard and onions and place the salmon fillet on top.

This is what my husband ate today...as for me...well as I said earlier I was out with the girls and this can only mean one thing....Pizza and Wine!! 
I guess Ante is right to shout at me and my underachieving muscles...

Sunday - الأحد

Today is Sunday.

Day of rest and repose. 


Well not if you live in Saudi Arabia, where Sunday is like your average boring Tuesday. By now you must be asking yourselves "why is she always talking about Saudi, when her location tag on the site reads Zagreb"? 


I don't blame you. I would have done the same thing. You see I spent three years and four days living in Riyadh. I wouldn't say that it was a life changing experience even though on a deeper, more personal level it was.


 ...But as I said... today is a day of guiltless repose and I'm going to take full advantage of it. I suggest you do too...

Associations Behind the Title

Hi there, I'm back.  What were the chances, right?. 


Oh! Dr. H is going to be ecstatic when I tell him on Monday. Am I going to tell him tough? I'm not sure yet. I haven't told my husband. Only my cat knows. This is my little secret - a bit oxymoron really given the fact that it is a blog and by definition a blog is public and open to about 3 billion people. But I am really excited and scared, but, mostly excited about this. 


All day yesterday I was thinking about the many different things I can write about here. It felt exhilarating. What should I write about first: start with sharing some of the 3000 recipes that I have on my hard drive, talk about my travels, my life in Saudi Arabia, my health problems, my cat, my life in Zagreb, the problems of my country. My brain was spinning at 5000rpm, couldn't sleep, took a pill, fell like a log...


I woke up this morning and somehow my mind was back on track..."baby steps Maria", it whispered to me, "baby steps. First learn how to crawl and then we will think about it again". 


So for my second post I am going to talk a little bit about the title of this blog. 


When, yesterday I was prompted by the blogger.com creating template to insert a name for my blog I tried many, many, many combinations with verbs and nouns that had to do with food, wine, books. All of them were taken by other bloggers. I felt so common, so un-original. Then as I glanced around my bedroom, I noticed the box of socks I have at the bottom of my closet and boom I had one of those "light bulb" moments (ok mine was more the size of a Christmas tree tingle light but who are you to judge me, right?). This box is full of other peoples socks, my mom's, my aunt's, my sister's, my father's, my husband's, my ex-boyfriends'.. You see I constantly have cold feet, I wear socks all year round. I even wore socks when we lived in Riyadh. When the outside temperature was 60C I "kept my socks on". 


If you invite me to stay with you for...let's say a day or two...I will ask you for socks and then I will leave with them. Mind you I'm not doing it on purpose. I just forget to return them...and they stay with me...in my sock box.

There you have it then. A very concise description of the associations hidden behind the title of my blog! I promise that I will give more details in later posts and to whomever is interested in this obsession of mine at a later time. Now, I have get out of bed and feed Psipsini....

New Blog on the Block

My cat, Psipsini, just hopped onto our dining room table, where I'm currently high-jacking my husband's lap-top, as if she wants to pledge her trust and approval for my newest endeavor, this blog. Off course being true to herself she just stood looking at me for a couple of seconds and then occupied herself with the more important things in life i.e. licking her paw and other unmentionable - at least in this first post - parts of her black xtra fluffy body.


I am not a writer. In fact I hate writing, I love talking, though, I can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk....you get the picture. This "hate writing" phase has been going on for years. I tried seriously to overcome it. I even talk about it with my therapist but no...i just hate writing! Having said all that, there must be something wrong with me starting a blog where I actually have to write stuff, right? I don't know the answer to this...only time will tell for sure.


Another thing I have to say up front is that I am not a native English speaker. Some of you might have already figured it out. My native tongue is Greek, but I have spent almost two decades of my life living abroad and communicating in English with both native and non-native speakers. So, please accept my apologies in advance if you find me butchering this wonderful and very expressive language.


"So why have you started this blog?" you're going to ask. Because I had to...Yes, that's right I had to. I was cooking in my small kitchen and I just got this irrepressible urge to start a blog. I was just about to cut into the pumpkin when I left the knife down, logged into blogger.com and started thinking about a name (more on that later...) and voila I've got my own blog. Now, what I'm gonna write about here is another question...For sure there's going to be food, lots of food, and wine, oh my God I love wine, and books and photographs and well I don't know, whatever comes to my mind.   


There you have it...My first blog post! and I haven't even figured out what to write for my profile..