Fishing in Vienna (part I)

Well, it has been a while since I posted anything and my 2 whole followers are probably anxious to read about my new adventures. I went to Vienna for a lab workshop on fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques in microbial ecology. The workshop was held in the University of Vienna and began early Monday morning, which meant that  i had to fly in the day before. i tried to minimize my stay because I didn't want to leave my kids for too long. So very early morning, on the last Sunday in February, i got on a plane to take me to Austria and my new adventures. The flight turned out to be quite interesting, I sat next to a real life model. She asked me to hold her hand during take-off because she's afraid of flights. she was really beautiful and skinny and wore no make-up which made it quite apparent that the perfect polished look we see in magazines is the result of heavy use of technology. Anyway, since i got to Vienna early Sunday morning  the hotel room wasn't ready yet, and i went to explore the city.

I actually got lost a bit although i had a map. i was a bit sleepy, as the flight was early morning. but i discovered the imperial part of Vienna with all the old palaces and museums.

Here is the Museum of Natural History. i will come back to it later.

And here is the entrance to the Hofburg Palace complex with the main square with all the statues.

The day i landed in Vienna the sun came out after a week of snow and all was covered with white, it was very pretty. The image of a winter in Europe i had in my mind. Coming from a hot and sweaty place like Israel the change in the weather was a blessed one. So i wondered around the city admiring the scenery and couldn't quite decide what i want to do. First i just wanted to have a look around and walk a while in the great sunny but frosty weather. Since it was Sunday, shops were closed but the cafes and restaurants were open. I'm embarrassed to admit that i went to eat a toast and coffee in Starbucks but i was a bit flight shocked and wanted to be on familiar grounds with access to free Internet.

This is the the part of the palace close to Starbucks.

During my haphazard walking i stumbled upon the site that impressed me the most: the archaeological remains of ancient Vienna, from as early as the  Roman period. This is a hole in the middle of the city, that shows what lies beneath modern day Vienna. How many layers the city has. Even though i come from Jerusalem, a city that has a history of 3000 years and an archaeological site in every corner, this hole in the ground that is a window to ancient times, was very impressive.

After my gourmet lunch i continued in the direction of the Albertina. on the way i encountered a bizarre site: camels in the centre of the city!

It turned out there was a filming crew in the place. There were cameras and lights and policemen that stopped traffic, quite cool actually, too bad it wasn't a film with any actor i know....

This is the palm house or green house of the Hofburg gardens, they now serve beer. I finally decided that i wanted to see the imperial quarters and the Sissi Museum. I've always liked lovely princesses stories and nice palaces. I took some pictures of the huge china collection the Royal family had. God, no wonder they built such grand palaces, they needed somewhere to store all this china...

After the royal tour, i went to see if my hotel room was ready. i went by foot and discovered very nice sites on the way back, like the city hall "Ratthouse" just a 5 minutes walk from the hotel.

The hotel room wasn't very big, but its was clean and warm and i had plenty of hot water in the shower.

I ended my first day in Vienna in a restaurant recommended by the hotel receptionist: "Selena". it was a 2 minutes walk from the hotel, which suited me very well because i was tired and all alone in a foreign city. it was quite an expensive restaurant but the food was great and i didn't feel mortified sitting and dining there by myself.

The chocolate cake i had for desert with a real edible gold leaf on top.

The rest of my adventures in my next post: Fishing in Vienna - the sequel.

"This means nothing to me, oh Vienna" or Pizza night!

I'm flying this morning to Vienna for a course in a specific method in molecular biology. The course is held in the University of Vienna and is 5 days long. Because it starts Monday morning, I'm arriving Sunday noon. So I'll be a week (!!!) away from home. I've never left the kids for such a long time. I'm really pleased that I was accepted to this workshop and that my boss agreed to fund the whole week, but I'm so apprehensive of leaving my kids for so long. Of course they are left with their dad, and grandparents, which will provide the best possible care.
Well, I'd like to confess: I am a control freak, and a perfectionist. Now if I was in a CFA (control freaks anonymous) meeting, all would have declared:" we love you Yael!" It's hard for me to let go and believe they'll manage without me, (although they will, and brilliantly). On top of that there is the guilt that always accompanies me because I'm a working mom. There's always this little voice of the guiltiness demon:" you don't spend enough time with the kids", "they'll grow up to be miserable sods", "and you don't deserve to have fun, ever" etc. I know that its complete rubbish, I work very hard in both my full time jobs but it's always there.

In order to reduce the guilt trip and feel more like a good mom and a domestic goddess I decided to bake the family a homemade pizza. In my personal explorations these past months I've been to a baking class with my best friend Sarah and we learned to bake pizza among other types of bread. I even got a pizza stone for Valentine from my dear husband.

So, Friday morning began with shopping for cheeses, flour and toppings for the pizza like mushrooms. I cooked the tomatoes' sauce myself! It took 1kg of fresh tomatoes with sautéed onion and garlic. After almost 2 hours of cooking I mashed the sauce and passed it through a sieve to get rid of all the seeds. It tastes great.

Then I moved to the dough. According to the recipe we got in the course, I used my lovely Kitchen Aid and eventually before I put it to leaven, I pinched a piece and stretch it in order to see the gluten network so necessary for good dough. We bought ready-made gluten-free pizza base for my celiac afflicted daughter.

After the first leavening I cut the dough in 8 pieces for pizzas and focaccias, and left it for a few more hours during which we roasted bell peppers in the oven, cut mushrooms and sliced mozzarella cheese.
When all was ready, we just assembled the pizzas, with the home made sauce and each one putting on top his favourite foodstuff.

It was a great family fun, and I'm leaving the gang with some good and tasteful memories. Now I'll finish packing and hope I'll have some great time in spite of the guilt demon. i'll try to keep a Viennese blog and add my lousy pictures of the tourist attraction in the city and maybe some photos of food.

I saying goodnight with that song by Ultravox, oh Vienna…

Science project

Sometimes I think I'm doing a good job. Most of the time I have a horrible sense of incompetence: not a good enough scientist, not a good mom, a lousy housewife, etc. BUT there are good days that I feel on top of the world, and wonder where the hell the truck with the medals is?
Yesterday was one of these days. Not only was I efficient at work but I got home before 4 o'clock and all the kids were home early. I managed to help my middle daughter with the homework, have fun with my son and his new fire engine and even get the girls to play the piano, without threats or shouts. I felt like Gandhi. Then my friend Shiri called. There was a science project from school and our daughters were teamed together for it. I met Shiri 2 months after my eldest daughter was born, when I was on verge of complete collapse and post-natal depression. Meeting her in the neighborhood supermarket with her own 3 months old baby was the start of a long friendship where I give and get a lot of help and support. Our daughters are best friends since the cradle. Shiri is a creative person, that’s what she does for a living she's an interior decorator and it renders her as responsible for all sorts of school projects where I am the loyal side kick. Yesterday she bought 3 meters of pipe for the school science project: "the digestive tract". Of course the girls were supposed to do the project, but as I say, Shiri is a creative person. I was called in as the science expert (it's my unofficial role even though Shiri's dad is senior doctor). So Shiri drew this figure on a huge cardboard and using nylon stockings we created the liver, stomach and Shiri's masterpiece, the colon! Using a hot glue gun without any of us getting serious burns, we glued it all. Two women and six kids, all of them under twelve and we managed to create this marvelous model of the human digestive system. Isn't that being superwomen or what?
Here is the photo of the masterpiece, anatomically accurate people! Including the pancreas! It will be presented in the girls' school from Wednesday.

We got home, had dinner, showers, bed time story for the little guy and when my husband arrived at around 10pm, the house was asleep.

The cheery optimistic post – nothing like pancakes (gluten free)

What would we have done without Nigella Lawson? Her recipes are simple but tasty and made with the best ingredients. In our household they proved themselves time and again as a great success. I already wrote about the chocolate cake which was voted "desert number one" by my family. This time I want to recommend the pancakes from the book "Nigella bites". We have modified them to be gluten free. These pancakes make Saturday mornings a real treat. The warm sweet smell of burning butter early in the morning makes us all smile. So even though we had a difficult week, sleepless nights and we tend to forget to be grateful about our lovely family, this breakfast units us all with sugar high. We all sit together and munch on pancakes that are spread either with lots of Nutella or with real maple syrup (the one from Vermont is very good but costs a fortune here in Israel) and we discuss the events of the week and whether this round of pancakes was better than the last one. It's a family meal where we're all in a good mood, laughing and joking as if we were the Brady Bunch.

Here is one of the gluten free versions we've tried. Hope it will make your Saturdays mornings lovely. You will need:

30gr unsalted butter
225gr gluten free flour combined from 1/3 corn starch, 1/3 tapioca flour and 1/3 soy flour
2 heaped teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon sugar
Pinch of salt
300ml milk
2 eggs
Butter for frying pancakes

Melt the butter and set aside to cool while you get on with the rest of the batter. Put everything in a blender and blitz. Heat a non-stick frying pan, smear a small amount of butter and start frying. Pour small amount straight from the jug so that you have discs of about 4cm in diameter. When you see bubbles erupting on the surface, turn the pancakes over and cook for a couple of minutes on the other side. Makes about 20 pancakes.

Don't they look very nice? as if they were full of Gluten....

Trouble sleeping

Well this post comes after a week of very troubled sleep, too much caffeine and no exercise. My energy levels have reached rock bottom and with them my mood. This depressed frame of mind is completely physiological, I’m sure. Sleep deprivation was shown in endless researches to be a cause for many ailments among them depression and even psychosis, weakened immune system, decrease in cognition and ability to perform the simplest tasks. Well I’m there. My youngest sons’ cold had left me and The Husband beyond exhausted. Not sleeping properly for a week takes me back to the days when my kids were newborns and I woke a few times at night to breastfeed them. I used to feel like my life is not completely real, as if I live in a hallucination. I have this sensation today after a whole week of waking 2 or 3 times to a crying baby and then finally wake up at 6:30 to go to work (see my post about mornings). The thing is the patient aside from the bothering night cough is having a marvelous time. The other day when I was on sick shift with him at home, he had some much energy we spent 2 hours in the playground. I kept the caffeine in my blood stream on steady levels.
So, I’m looking forward for the weekend and some rest. I bet I’ll be euphoric after a 7 hours sleep night or even after a long cozy siesta. Next post will have to be cheery and optimistic. I know that there are moms out there that have kids that do sleep, but for me sleeping kids are like unicorns – only in fairytales.

                                Isn't this a pretty drawing of a sleeping unicorn?

On cloud nine

First of all, I want to warn you all that I am no photographer. Ask my friend Sarah. When I took her picture in a vacation in Rhodes, she was so tiny you could only spot her with a magnifying glass. So when I took the pictures of the cake I'm going to write about here only one of them came out semi-normal. So yeah, it's a lousy photo but since this is not a food blog and I have no intentions in the area it will have to do.

So this is a chocolate cloud cake a recipe extremely popular at our house because
a) It is a cake with lots of chocolate and we are a household of heavy chocoholics.
b) It's very easy to make and very impressive - great when you have no time and energy to fuss with dessert but you still want to get the compliments from your dinner guests.
c) It's Gluten free.
My eldest daughter has Celiac disease and although the rest of the family didn't change their diet, we try to find great food that all of us can eat, especially cakes and cookies but without wheat. Since she was diagnosed 5 years ago we are always in search of better and varied Gluten free food for her since bread and its derivatives are essential and we wanted replacements that she'll like and wouldn’t depress her because she's not like other kids who can eat whatever they want. In the search of a good chocolate cake for birthdays and other occasions I stumbled upon Nigella Lawson's recipe for Chocolate Cloud Cake. It’s a flour free cake, a bit like a soufflé. The "cloud" in the name comes from the heap of whipped cream you put in the middle of the cake that tends to crush down once the cake cools.
So for all the Gluten sensitive, Chocoholics, working mums with no spare time and applause seekers out there, here is the recipe. It’s a piece of cake….

You will need:
250g dark chocolate 60% cocoa solids.
125g unsalted butter, softened
6 eggs: 2 whole, 4 separated
175g caster sugar
2 tablespoons Cointreau liqueur
22cm spring form cake tin.
For the cream topping:
250ml liquid cream 30% fat
1 tea spoon vanilla extract
1 table spoon Cointreau
- Preheat the oven to 1800C
- Line the bottom of the cake tin with baking parchment and oil the walls with butter
- Melt the chocolate with the butter in the microwave or in a double boiler until you get a smooth paste.
- Beat the 2 whole eggs and 4 egg yolks with 75gr of the caster sugar then gently add the chocolate mixture and Cointreau .
- In another bowl whisk the egg whites and gradually add the rest of the caster sugar while beating the whites till they hold their shape but not too stiff.
- Fold the whites into the chocolate mixture.
- Pour into the tin and bake for 35-40 minutes without the turbo if you have a turbo oven.
- Bake until the cake is risen and cracked and the centre is no longer wobbly.
- Cool the cake, while it cools the middle will sink in.
- Open the spring form tin and place the cake on a serving plate, whip the cream until its firm and fill the crater in the centre of the cake with cream easing it out towards the edges.
Try to get a piece before everyone else will finish it….

Anemones of winter.

Winter is short and violent in this area. Most of the time the weather is dry and warm but then suddenly in a matter of hours a storm erupts and showers that should have went down in a month go down in just a few hours. In the Negev (the south part of Israel) it creates floods. An area that is arid and dry most of the year suddenly is swept in tidal waves of water. It's an amazing phenomenon. This week was one of these times. The news was filled with floods rescue stories (one of them ended tragically). My husband and I saw the pictures and cursed ourselves for not dropping everything and going flood watching too. There are safe view points for that purpose in the Negev and if you stay out of the waters' path you're pretty safe. This Saturday the weather was again warm and sunny and we went south to see the desert blooms with our friends The Artzies.

We went to the Besor area, in the north –west part of the Negev, an area that up till a year ago was known as Kassam Land. I'm not relating to politics here at all (I'll do that in following post and very briefly) but the area was bombarded constantly for more than 8 years. Now it is serene and peaceful and even though it is geographically defined as desert, it is now green and filled with the spectacular red blossom of anemones.

We stopped in our way to the Besor watercourse in a pretty park near Kibutz Reim. The park is around a tributary of the Besor named Wadi Grar. The whole country thought it’s a good idea to travel due south today and the place was pretty packed, though here I managed to take a picture of the Wadi without all the cars and with a lovely anemone in the corner.

Wadi Grar is mentioned in the Bible as a place where Abraham and Yitzhak his son dug wells for their herds. The area has many archeological remains some 4000 years old. We decided that what was good for Abraham is good for us and we ate breakfast while the kids were enjoying the outdoors and winter sun.

After we finished eating and after my little one patted the casual huge dog on the grounds, we went further south to the Besor trail. The trail is a dirt road that stretches for about 15km in a park where there are several view points and sites of interest. Check out this link for more info http://www.israelinphotos.com/tour-Eshkol-National-Park.htm
Of course the trail was ridden with all sorts of vehicles including buggy racing cars and crammed with people.
Here is a picture of us trying to cross the rope bridge on the Besor, but give up when we see the queue….

At some point we got tired of just riding in the car so we got off the trail and went to hike in the hills where we found many fascinating things like animal's bones, and snails. We saw more flowers springing straight from the sand; we saw lovely birds called spur-winged plover (siksak in Hebrew) and even two large rabbits that we scared and run from us in supersonic velocity.

 

We ended the day in a picnic at Eshkol national park, where the kids got a chance to soak themselves completely in the fountain waters that run through the park. My husband even brought his portable burner and a pan to cook chicken steaks for all. It was a treat, especially eaten by the water side.

On the way home my husband had only himself to talk to. The 3 kids and I were snoring up until he parked in front of our garage door.