Tag: Food glorious food
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On Ramadan, Tummy Bugs and Food Porn: Notes from Chefchaouen
I’m not even going to bother writing an impractical guide to Chefchaouen. It would consist wholly of stifling hot bedrooms, baking hot terraces, rumbling tummies, fevered brows, the same stretches of empty and well-trodden lane, closed doors, silence. You’d have to be floored with a ferocious tummy bug and exhaustion to truly retrace my footsteps.…
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Making You Jealous in Fes, Morocco
Perhaps after my last Fes post you might think I’d be skipping the jealousy series for that city. But no, that would be absurd. Fes is gorgeous. It’s just hard sometimes to see the forest for the touts. There is plenty for me to torment you with when it comes to Fes. In my previous…
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Making You Jealous in Meknès, Morocco
So, we are now in Meknès, about 3.5 hours by train from Casablanca and ever so much more likeable. This is the Meknès medina where we are staying. And after we arrived yesterday noonish, with the sun blazing down with peculiar ferocity, we retreated into the cool, sheltered laneways of Meknès to find lunch. We ended…
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Making you jealous in Casablanca
I was going to write a long, thoughtful post about arriving in Morocco and getting terribly, terribly lost in Casablanca today. I was going to make joyful noises about the realization that my French is still very much there, somewhere under the surface of the usable parts of my brain, so much so that every…
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Notes on working in China (the bossing-teachers-around edition)
As you may have heard, I have changed jobs. By this, I mean I am no longer unemployed. Or at least, unemployed in the technical sense. I have a day job now, and it isn’t teaching. Nope, I’m back in the director’s chair again. The last time I did this gig was about…
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Gardening in Shanghai and Other Indoor Sports
Doug said this morning that he really wouldn’t put it past me if I started raising chickens in the flat. I wondered if the neighbours would notice or care if I beheaded said chickens out in the shared hallway, between the lifts and the parked bicycle. That awful 3-legged yappy dork-dog from across the hall…
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Hello, Dalian! A Totally Impractical Guide to That City up by Korea
And by impractical, I really mean it this time. I have absolutely no information that might be of use to you here, unless you get sent up for work at the very last minute, as I did, and need to know where you can get really good sushi (*hint hint* the Grande Teda Mercure hotel…
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Pan-Fried Goat Milk Paneer with Chilies, Garlic and Ginger
Yesterday’s goat milk paneer recipe may have ended on a cliff-hanger. That final photo of the cheese cloth wrapped bundle of freshly drained cheese was only the beginning of the story. Paneer is a beautiful thing, and goat paneer has surprised me by being even better than cow paneer. It’s creamier and milder and a…
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How To Make Goat Milk Paneer (and a few meditations on place and purpose)
I’ve been back home for just over a week. The skies have been all sparkly and bright blue and the sun shines so brightly that, well, I have to wear sunglasses a lot more often than I’ve ever had to in Shanghai. Have I ever mentioned how grim Shanghai can be? Maybe once or…
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Further Adventures in Chinese Baking: Chocolate Coconut Cookies
I think the Plum Rains have started. This has been the driest year so far since we arrived in Shanghai in early 2009, though the low lying grimness hasn’t eased up. When I first moved here, I lived in a 4-story lane house out in the wilds of Pudong. My laundry line was a…
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Baking in China (and other improvisational activities)
A few weeks ago, we came across a hand-me-down counter top oven on www.unclutterer.com and decided to test it. Not a toaster oven. Not a microwave oven. An oven oven. The kind that can, like, bake stuff and roast stuff and grill stuff. But I knew I was better off grilling in one of those…
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A Totally Impractical Expat Interview #10: Marie Szamborski of Shantiwallah
Welcome to the esteemed tenth expat interview in my series of a bazillion. After a brief hiatus from interviews with human expats last week (hello Hector Lakemonster!) I’d like to introduce you to someone who has been with me (and this blog) since it was born a year ago today. Marie Szamborski is better known…