Chumus

It is no small feat to get your chumus salad right. However, these days I make new portions for our household every week and I no longer am intimidated by the challenge. I have established a stable quality that has found wide praise and I have found the secret ingredient: ... naah, that would be telling. :)

I have browsed through many a cookbook, I have interviewed orientals in the neighborhood, who wouldn't want to be found dead with a bought chumus salad in their house, I have searched the internet and nobody mentions the ingredient I have discovered -- and I find it indispensable. If you want to get your salad right, nice and creamy, nothing that sits like concrete in the stomach, you are going to need it. All right, I am going to divulge it anyway, so let's go and mention it here and now: I get my salad right with ... water. Yes, water, as simple as all that. I suppose tap water will do, but I use bottled water, for what it is worth.
The problem is not with the chumus, that is the chickpeas (Nederlands: Kikkererwten), the problem is with the tchina, that is the tahin, the paste of sesame seeds. If you make chumus the way sephardi grandma's or Arab food stall owners tell you to do it, the tchina makes the salad lump like heavy dough. What, if you ask, makes the salad creamy, is either not answered or if it is, you will use too much of the additive: lemon juice or olive oil or the water in which the chickpeas were cooked (or held in case you use a can). Once it was even suggested you need to separate the peas from their skins. For one that was an awful lot of work, and second: it didn't make any difference.
You need lemon juice in chumus to lighten up the taste, but use too much and the lemon gets too dominant and the salad is too sour. Olive oil, I do not use at all. I may add it to a serving, but on the whole I try to keep the calories down in what I cook. Besides, oil doesn't make for creamy salad, it makes for oily salad, which is a different taste and also oily is heavier in the stomach -- what we wanted to prevent anyway.
Now, the chickpea brew... Here is what brought me to water. You see, the water from the can is salted, not so tasty, ripe with additives you may not like in home-cooking and ... Hey, I do not use canned peas anyway. I buy them dry, I soak them for half a day and then cook. What happens during cooking, is, apparently, some kind of starch gets separated from the peas into the water. If you allow the brew to stand and cool down you will see the starch thickening. Needless to say this is also heavy on the stomach. In addition, I have learned to cook the peas with baking powder (sodium bicarbonate) and I wouldn't want that in my food.
Hence, I tried my hand with water and it worked -- perfectly. So here goes. My recipe for around 500 grams of chumus salad.

250 grams dry chickpeas
200 grams tchina טחינה גולמית=
1 tea spoon salt
1 tea spoon ground cumin
1 clove of garlic
juice of 1 lemon
2 tea spoons sodium bicarbonate
water

Soak the peas at least 8 hours in water and one tea spoon sodium bicarbonate. Skim the foam that is separated from the peas. Note that while soaking, the peas make popping sounds. Don't go looking for a leaking tap, or a scurrying insect, the noise comes from the peas.
After soaking, cook the peas with lots of water and one teas spoon of sodium bicarbonate for circa 30 minutes. Right from the beginning there will be a lot of foam you'll need to skim away. Next, stir while cooking and observe how some pea skins come floating about. They are tasteless; if you have the patience, remove as many as you can. When the peas get the right taste and smell take them off the fire and throw them in a sieve and rinse with cold water.
Put the peas in a blender with salt, garlic and cumin. Make an initial blend. Add the tchina and blend again. The whole will develop into a thick dough. Start adding water and blend till you approach the correct texture. Then add the lemon juice. Blend again and taste. Maybe you will want to add just a tad more water and then you are done.

Holy Sepulchre

Somehow it never happened until now. Today we drove to the old city of Jerusalem and this time, apart from visiting the Western Wall, for the first time in my life, after so many missed opportunities: I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
My old schoolmaster would have been proud of me, maybe hoping my soul is yet to be recovered for Christendom, but no such luck.
Just as the Kotel looks to me like a mere bunch of stones, the church of the HS looks like a dilapidated, anachronistic smudge. If I liked being there, it is only because it spoke to me on whole different level -- nothing religious or even spiritual.

What a weird place it is. A dark, amorphous dungeon, with numerous alleyways and niches and shady parlors on worn flagstones and filled with tourists, gazing pilgrims and the odd priest looking more like a prop from an Indiana Jones film than a proper priest. For example there was this crooked, young looking, skinny priest, with a long black beard and a crocheted black head garment. He had set up shop with a huge host of religious trumpery, almost impossible to make out, for there was so little light in his cramped alcove. He was devoutly praying in the way of a religious Jew from a prayer book with Arab script.
An Armenian priest with black robes and upside down top hat was energetically managing the entries into the Tomb itself, while chewing tobacco, or otherwise jawing and spitting about. Some pilgrims looked distinctly out of place, such as the Russian lady with flashing red outfit befitting a brothel, rather than a Church, or Dutch pedestrians, seated on the stairs in a yogi pose.

This looks nothing like the kind of Christianity I grew up with. Well, I know that, I am prepared for that. Never, when I visit some Christian site in Israel, I find light and sober Calvinist churches. If it looks like anything I once associated with something proper, it is the Roman Catholic stuff you find for example in Nazareth and on Mount Tabor. Over the years I have come to know also a little bit better the Greek style, not just in Israel, also as a result of journeying Greece. However, this looked not even much like that. The odd icon, perhaps, but it was all too dark and dirty. It was Armenian mostly -- with the Armenian script also dominating the walls around the tomb. And I had the strange praying priest pegged as a Syrian.

I am probably not going to be moved either, if it would have been Calvinists running the show, simply because I have strayed from the path too much. Apparently I am not susceptible to the mumbo-jumbo that is attached to Holy Sites. What struck me though and had me fascinated was how thoroughly Un-European this site is. If you think Christianity is a European faith, look at this holiest of holiest of it and you see nothing of it. Well, I suppose the majority of Christians aren't even Europeans, but if so, they are Africans, Asians, South-Americans, but this was not their atmosphere either. This was the atmosphere of where the Church originated: the Middle-East, or more precisely, where the Church as an institution originated: the Eastern Roman Empire. I felt as if I were in Constantinople before 1453 or even before 1099, before the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. That is what fascinated me.

Educational podcasts, a search.

Podcasts are extremely suitable for education. I have said it before, I am not the only one to say it, but just as with other podcasts: you have to know where to find them. Especially those institutions that put out their lectures as podcasts, apparently do that for their own students only and therefore invest no effort in making it known to the wider public that they are there. It is hard to find them on the internet, in podcast directories and other places where you might look. If you are interested to know what podcasts are offered by the various educational institutions in the world, you will have to look them up one by one or go through unfiltered directories and so on.

A case to bring this problem home is my History 5 podcast. I am on the look out for History Podcasts all the time. I have already discovered this series from UC Berkeley and figured it is delivered twice a year. I even came into contact with the professor who delivered it in 2006, but the 2007 series still eluded me until yesterday. Not for lack of searches, mind you. I queried the professor, I queried the iTunes directory (which so far got my marks for being the best source for searching podcasts) with no result.
Yesterday I stumbled into it and this was while discovering one old and one new place on the web that delivers some inventory of educational podcasts:

1. Free Academic Podcasts
2. Learn-on-the-go

I am off to learn History 5 again. This year, not with Thomas Laqueur, but with Margaret Lavinia Anderson. I have listened to the introductory lecture. Very different style from professor Laqueur, but I am sure I'll get used to it and I am eager in anticipation for getting the history of Europe 1450-2000 in a new style, per chance, from a new perspective, in any case with new insights.

History according to Bob

If you are into History Podcasts, History according to Bob is an inevitable find. Bob Packett is a College History professor who is just in love with telling stories. He also happens to be married to a computer savvy wife and she probably bought him all the equipment and training he needed for podcasting just have him off her back every once and a while. Have him talk into a microphone in stead of piling the history trivia onto her head, because this man is unbelievable. He cranks out the podcasts by the day. In episodes that vary from five to over forty-five minutes, he tackles one incident or era or person, taking the faithful listeners on a fast moving merry go round through world history. One day you are with the Incas the next running for president with Lyndon B. Johnson, or breathing gas in the trenches or sorting out the popes from the anti-popes and the odd anti-anti-pope.
Bob has a contagious joy for the anecdotes throughout the ages, especially when they get tragic - you have to hear Bob say the word unfortunately laughing - bizarre or even tongue in cheek. Apart from the laughs and juicy stuff, he never forgets to point out what is important to know and understand, and also always delivers his sources. He has made over 500 podcasts already, some of which can be ordered in collections on CD, though in various archives can also be found on the web. One who subscribes to the feed will probably get only 30 to 40 stories from the backlog.
I personally cannot keep up with Bob, he speaks more than I can listen, so I pick and choose on the basis of subject matter, skipping also the question and answer sections. Still I have heard probably up to 400 podcasts of Professor Bob teaching me history; I guess, Professor Bob has not yet begun.

Wise Counsel -- podcast

Dr. David van Nuys whom we also know from Shrink Rap Radio, meets us again in another psychology podcast. Under the wings of 'Mental Help Net', he brings an interview podcast called ' Wise Counsel'. The podcast is similar to Shrinkrapradio in that Dr. Dave, in the familiar conversational style, conducts an interview with an expert, but so far, the six Wise Counsels seem to have a slightly more stringent formula. The interviewed experts are strictly from the field of applied psychology, mostly clinical psychology and the interviews have a direct connection with the mission of Mental Help Net: "The Mental Help Net website exists to promote mental health and wellness education and advocacy." In addition, there are no jazzy Dr. Dave promos and talkbacks with the audience through their emails and voice clips.
So if you are a listener to Shrink Rap Radio and tend to tune out as soon as the interview is over, this is just more of the same. The same being, a high quality, informative podcast, albeit slightly less entertaining.
The interviews thus far have been with:

• John Drimmer Psy.D. on Positive Psychology
• Jeffrey Young, Ph.D. on Schema Therapy
• Marsha Temlock, MA on Adult Child Divorce
• Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D. on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
• Timothy Kowalski on Asperger's Disorder
• Jeff Bernstein, Ph.D. on defiant children
• Anita Remig, Ed.D. on Child Development
  

Hoe het begon

Waar haalde ik het vandaan dat ik schrijver wilde worden? Ik had geen idee wat dat inhield en ik had tot dusverre ook geen buitengewoon talent getoond. Mijn cijfers voor opstellen waren middelmatig. Mijn bijdrages aan de schoolkrant bestonden voornamelijk uit collages. Ik had fantasie, ik hield van het bedenken van verhalen, dat was het enige. Maar als je zeventien bent, kan dat genoeg zijn. Ik zag op tegen de eisen en verantwoordelijkheden van een volwassen leven en ik dacht dat het eigenlijk wel een leuk ding zou zijn om gewoon door te gaan met fantaseren. Blijven op het niveau van de zandbak en zelfgebouwde hutten in het bos. Zo was het 1983 en schreef ik mijn eerste dingetje. In 1992 heb ik het nog een keer bewerkt, waar de oorspronkelijke versie is gebleven weet ik niet. Weggegooid waarschijnlijk, toen ik emigreerde en mijn schepen achter me verbrandde. Geen kind gebleven, geen schrijver geworden...

Terloops

Ik zit in de nis van een oud electriciteitshuisje. Niet alleen, er zijn nog drie anderen. Een van hen is een meisje met grijze ogen, die haar armen om mij heen geslagen heeft. Ze heet Thera. De andere twee zijn Bert en Yvonne. Ze geven een joint door die ik voorbij laat gaan.
Ik ril van de kou. Thera ook, ondanks de zware jassen die we dragen. Het is niet echt koud, maar de jassen zijn te groot. Ze kijkt me aan. Ik vind haar ogen fantastisch, om in te verdrinken. We zoenen hartstochtelijk. Ze duwt me tegen de wand, als ze met haar tong mijn mond binnendringt. Ik sluit mijn ogen. Deze avond gaat het gebeuren.
Tegenover het electriciteitshuisje, nog geen twee meter bij ons vandaan, staat een helverlichte telefooncel. Verder om ons heen verdorren kniehoge struiken, langs een trottoir met vuile stoeptegels in een saaie, vervallen woonwijk. Twee splinternieuwe straatlantaarns belichten onverschillig de straat. De wereld in grijze tinten met het felle groen van de telefooncel.
Ik bewonder haar schouders. Ik heb nooit een meisje durven zeggen dat ik van haar houd. De schaamte zou me verstikken als zij niet ook van mij hield. Ik streel haar borsten. Ze ontspant, ondergaat en moedigt aan met het geluid van haar ademhaling. Ik durf nog steeds niet.
Yvonne zit onhandig met de smeulende peuk in haar vingers. Bert kijkt me plotseling agressief aan. Ik zeg: "Hoi, Bert," om de spanning te breken. Yvonne kijkt nu ook naar mij. Doorgaans houd ik van bruine ogen, maar die van haar vind ik karakterloos. Bert komt overeind: "Je gaat tegen de muur hoor," grijnst hij. Thera opent geschrokken haar ogen.
Hij heeft vaker gewelddadige opwellingen en steeds moet ik het ontgelden. Dan doet hij alsof hij me wurgt, net als nu. Thera is bang voor hem. Ik niet, ik weet precies waarom. Vanavond knijpt hij harder dan gewoonlijk. Ik weet wel dat hij Thera wil, al slaapt hij alle nachten met Yvonne. Natuurlijk is hij groter en sterker dan ik. Bovendien is hij net begonnen met afkicken van heroןne. Toch kan ik gelaten wachten tot hij ophoudt.
Zoals ik het zie, is Bert een man van angst. Daarom kan ik niet bang zijn voor hem. En dan is er nog de sfeer met Thera vanavond. Ik weet dat het gaat gebeuren, dus weet ik ook dat ik zelfs deze aanval van razernij bij Bert te boven zal komen. "Laat Pet los, Bert," hijgt Thera onzeker, terwijl Yvonne schaapachtig toekijkt.
Bert is onder meer bang voor honden. Als er luid blaffend een bouvier door de straat holt, vlucht Bert in paniek de telefooncel binnen. Thera lacht en omhelst mij. Yvonne giechelt en duikt eveneens de telefooncel in. Ze begint op opzichtige wijze met Bert te zoenen. Ik geloof niet dat ze echt van hem houdt. Ik vraag me af of zij op haar manier verslaafd is. Verslaafd aan aandacht of iets dergelijks. Misschien is ze bang om alleen te zijn, dat kan ook.
De man die zijn bouvier uitlaat kijkt angstvallig naar ons. Bert kijkt op dezelfde wijze naar de hond. Verbeeld ik het mij, of kijkt Yvonne net zo naar Bert als ze zich tegen hem aan drukt? Overal heerst angst.
Ik ken zelf één angst. Als Thera en ik weglopen, moet ik daar opnieuw aan denken. Ik durf haar niet vertellen dat ik van haar houd. Ik wil met haar naar bed, maar ik schrik al van de gedachte. Zelfs al weet ik dat het gaat gebeuren. Zoiets zou ik nooit durven vragen, of zelfs maar suggereren.
Tegenover een vaart worden woningen gerenoveerd. De straat is opgebroken. Thera en ik worstelen door mul zand. Haar mond nadert mijn gezicht, de getuite lippen voorspellen een zoen. Verlangend ontspan ik. Dan fluistert ze terloops: "Pet, ik ben best wel gek op jou." Ik vergeet adem te halen. Zij heeft het gedurfd. Zo gemakkelijk. Het ging vanzelf. Ik wil zeggen: "Ik ook op jou," maar mompel in plaats daarvan: "wat is best wel?" Thera let er niet op. Ze is stil blijven staan en woelt met haar handen onder mijn jas. Ik doe hetzelfde. Met mijn tong duw ik haar lippen vaneen. Ze ontvangt me gretig.
Vanavond zullen we het doen. Mijn eerste keer.