Back to the Cutting Table

Off.

Did you hear that, when I finally finished? I just completed a major project on my journey to a less cluttered house (which is all part of our devious plan to get a dog).

My office/sewing room is a pretty big room with a large window front. My desk and my sewing table stand at a right angle to the windows, what is left of the walls has bookshelves and cupboards and some chests of drawers. This leaves a pretty big space in the middle, which got constantly more and more cluttered. No crafty person has ever enough storage space, neither does any teacher, and the combination is a lot. Any attempt at cleaning up was doomed to fail since I didn’t have any storage space.

I finally got fed up and decided to do something about it. Especially since the master plan is to get the house into a state where it’s possible to add a fluffy four legged family member to the mayhem. The idea was to take some chests of drawers the right height to work on them standing, out them back to back with some space in between, and then add two desk tops to make one big surface.

Problem 1: the Ikea Malm chests either come in 80cm (too low) or 100 cm (too high). I finally went for the 80 cm and added feet, which was no easy feat, since Ikea furniture is not made for “unauthorised” changes. We had to add some pieces of wood with some metal angles to create enough surface to add the hardware store feet. Halfway through I was like “fuck that shit, we’ll return the one chest we haven’t opened yet and get kitchen cupboards, they come with feet, but then I saw the price tag and decided, I could stick with my original plan.

Problem 2: The original plan was to create a surface of 1.6m x1.6m. While this fitted, it made the room too cramped. We finally decided on 1.4×1.6. Now the ready made desk tops were too large and need to be returned. It wanted to buy some solid wood panels, but they absolutely don’t come in the sizes I need. I’d have to buy 4 pieces of  40cm x 200cm  and then have 60 cm cut off each panel. This seemed like a lot of waste, plus it would cost another 150€, so I decided on two laminated boards that would fit in between, which leads us to ….

Problem 3: The Malm chests are pressed flake boards where you have little chance of adding a decent screw. In the end we glued and screwed some strips to the backsides of the chests so the boards can rest on top. At this point I was ready to throw everything out of the window. This works, kind of, but I think I’ll have to bite the bullet and buy those wood panels. In the end, it just took 4 more days to clean everything up, but look at this!

View of the two chests of drawwers, with the sewing table in the background

©Giliell, all rights reserved

I finally have the possibility to clean up, let’s hope it stays that way.

Have some Sheep

It’s been a week and a half since school started and I really could do with some holidays. It’s not the kids, it’s being new at with a new class. Having to do all the administration while significantly lacking in knowing how to is a drag. Each school has their perfect system and, well. It’s also funny what is pretty normal at one school but an absolute no go at another. Because I need a holiday, you get some holiday pictures.

A white sheep on green grass in front of the blue sea

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Sheep are vital in maintaining the dikes. Their hooves put just enough pressure on the ground to make it hard enough, their grazing is just right to encourage the grass to grow deep and strong. Cows are too heavy, goats are too greedy.  Sheep are also cute. While most will run away when humans approach, there’s always one or two that enjoy cuddles. Yes, I cuddled a sheep. It was very fluffy.

So enjoy your fluffy holiday break.

white sheep on a green dike. The sea is far in the back

©Giliell, all rights reserved

 

School starts tomorrow – and I’m nervous like a first grader

Back to school in colourful lettersTomorrow the new school years starts in my neck of the woods and hell I’m nervous. This year I finally got an unlimited contract (but not tenure because working for ages on limited contracts I’m now deemed too old and high risk for tenure, but that’s a different conversation), but it also meant that I have to change schools and I really didn’t want to, despite the new school having much nicer working conditions.

My old school was a hell of a commute, 90 to 120 minutes each day, and it had two different locations which meant that I often had to spend my rare breaks commuting as well. We were also a school next to a poor part of the state capital with all the challenges of working with underprivileged families, lots of refugee families with language barriers and also plainly neglected and abused kids. And while having the qualifications for teaching high school up to year 13, I usually only got to teach up to grade 9 and never Spanish, because that’s year 11.

My new school is pretty close, 10 minutes by car and I’m planning on getting an E-bike next year. The small town has less social problems (though of course they exist everywhere), more space and I get to teach high school and Spanish.

So why on earth did I not want to change? Well, people. I had amazing colleagues and I actually genuinely like kids. I am a notorious “Gutmensch”, a goodie two shoes, bleeding heart progressive person who wants to see kids thrive, regardless of where they’re from. But I’ve accepted the change and am looking forward to new colleagues and new kids and so the term starts tomorrow with my brand new 8th grade who mostly don’t want to be in my class, because they, same as me, had to change.

The German school system is horribly stratified with social background having a huge influence on kids’ school career. While I’m not opposed to our different school leaving certs and vocational training system, putting the kids in different schools after year 4 is bad. It used to be 3 different schools: for the kids of workers who should become workers, for the kids of employees and clerks who should become employees and clerks, and the kids of academics who should become academics. While there’s only two types now in most states, the Gymnasium (yes, that’s a very false friend) where you get the highest leaving cert and the comprehensive schools where you get all the others and often have the possibility to go for the highest cert as well (like in my new school), people still think the Gymnasium is the best and the comprehensive school is the rest. The Gymnasium considers itself an elite school and if you have problems you don’t belong there. Not a type of school where I want to work, despite having the formal qualifications. I much prefer working with all kids and getting some of them to the highest leaving cert despite all odds. Anyway, because of these structures, around year 7 and 8, we see a steady influx of former Gymnasium kids in comprehensive schools, as well as the overwhelming majority of refugees and migrant kids, which means it’s not uncommon for comprehensive schools to form a new class in year 7 or 8 and that’s my class. Now, schools hand it differently how they do that. My old school used to form a new class with the new kids and then put all new arrivals into that class. My new school put kids from the already existing classes as well as new kids into my class. Both ways have their pros and cons, the biggest con for me right now being that I’m going to have a class where a lot of kids don’t want to be in because they lost at the raffle. That’s going to be a challenge. But hey, I’m taking it on, it’s not like there’s an alternative anyway, I’m just here voicing my feelings of being very, very nervous.

So, wish me luck!

There and Back Again: Towing a caravan with an EV

View over the marshland towards the sea

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Some of you will remember that last year, our old diesel died several times on our way home from the holidays, until we had to have car and caravan shipped to us and get home by train. Fortunately we had already been looking into a suitable EV to replace it and were lucky to get a Kia EV6 with all the trimmings on short notice. In our daily lives, the car is just the best one I’ve ever had: I can charge at home, with my own energy in summer, but there is pretty little data on towing a caravan over long distances. There were two major issues: reach and charging and we were a bit anxious about the whole thing.

First of all we, made the most important change beforehand: we changed our expectations. If you keep comparing it an measure it by the old diesel experience, you’ll end up unhappy. The EV will not have the same reach, you will be slower, you need to plan accordingly. Since this was the trial holiday, we were happy to go along when friends proposed to go to the North Sea together. It was only 600km and within Germany and we planned to go there in 2 days, since we had zero experience. Beforehand I said that I would be OK with a reach of 150km, I would be absolutely happy with 200, but less than 100 would mean looking into alternatives.

Normally we only charge the battery up to 80% to go gentle on its life cycle, for the first part we charged a full 100%. Generally, the last 20% charge slowly as fuck, again for the sake of the battery, but that’s no problem when you charge over night. Anyway, we started our journey at home and soon got a feeling for the energy consumption. I usually drive the car around 15 kw/h per 100 km  in summer, my beloved at around 18, but I’m sure there’s lots of people who regularly need 25kw/h. Towing the caravan got us between 30 and 40 kw/h. Energy consumption is much more direct with an EV, because it’s much more energy efficient. A combustion engine uses a hell lot of energy just standing there, so the increase is less steep. An EV doesn’t do that. The first leg of our journey took us through the medium mountain ranges of the Hochwald and the Eifel (Charly will know those) with lots of ups and downs. Once we were past Dortmund, everything became flat. We were pretty careful and always charged the car when we still had at least 30% left, so we made 4 stops in total each way, which gives you that 150km range. If we had very carefully planned the stops, we could have made it with three, but that would have left no margin for a non functioning charger or things like that.

We could have made it to our destination the first day, but since we only had booked for the next day, we called it a day early near Osnarbrück and enjoyed an evening of bathing in a lake and getting a good dinner. we arrived without any problems the next day and had some fun holidays. We made the way back in one day, again, with 4 charging stops and plan to make a longer voyage next year. On the way back we also planned our stops better, looking for fast chargers so charging actually didn’t take that much time. Two breaks for breakfast and lunch, and two for peeing and stretching your legs. A fast charger will go from 30% to 80% in 10 minutes, which is very reasonable.

But….

Nothing is that easy. The issue is that while there’s more and more charging stations and more fast chargers (though a Danish guy we chatted with assured us it was nowhere as bad as in Germany), they’re all made for cars only, so what about our caravan? We always had to detach it, move it somewhere we could park, sometimes do not quite legal driving manoeuvres and later hitch it again. It was annoying, but ok. The big disadvantage of all of this is that I got mostly banned from the driving seat. Not because I cannot drive, but because my beloved is really bad when it comes to all things digital, gets sick when he has to look at his phone to check out charging stations while driving and I am also really good at getting an overview quick, see where the chargers are and where we can put the caravan. This will have to change because if we really go to Spain it would be too much for him to drive alone.

Oh, and a final word on energy consumption: We needed about 180kw/h energy in total. Since one litre super fuel has 8.9 kw/h energy, this equals a bit more than 20l super or 19l diesel fuel for 600 km with car and caravan. No combustion engine is ever going to beat that.

A Jack of all trades is thicker than water

This is just a small post about sayings that are now abbreviated and have come to mean the opposite of their original meaning. Much like the poor word literally, which leaves me a bit unsure about how to express that I actually mean literally literally, not figuratively literally.

First one is “The customer is always right”. Especially in the US this has taken on a meaning of customers being allowed to abuse staff and make their life as difficult as possible, when it’s actually “the customer is always right in matters of taste”. They want a strawberry mustard cake? You bake it. They think that pink and green make a lovely facade? Let them have it. It doesn’t mean that they get to return a meal they ordered just because they don’t like the plating.

Second one is a “Jack of all trades, but master of none”. It’s used to dismiss people with a broad field of knowledge, but no real speciality. The actual quote is “a Jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one”. What use is a plumber when your electricity is broken? What use is a car mechanic when you need help in the garden? That’s not to dismiss specialists, but it also means that often a broadly educated and versatile person will be more useful.

An last but not least, the ever favourite “Blood is thicker than water”. The full quote is that “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”, meaning the exact opposite of the common understanding that blood family is the most important. Most important are your chosen relationships, not those you acquired through birth.

What other sayings come to your mind that have changed?

Land unter (Floodings)

Did you ever read that quote “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it”? (afaik by Perthsire Mags on the dead bird site)

Well, here I am

muddy brown water of a flooded river under a bridge. There#s less than 30 cm of space between the bottom of the bridge and the water

©Giliell, all rights reserved

This is our village centre. If you want a reference: Normally, if you jump off that bridge, you’ll fall for 3m and then break both your legs. On Friday, heavy rain started falling in the southwest of Germany, especially my Bundesland, the Saarland. While there had been warnings, it was even worse than foreseen as the rain just didn’t move on. Within 24 hours, more than 100 l of rain fell per square metre, in the capital more than 150l , which is twice the amount we usually get during the whole month of May. The situation evoked bad memories of the Ahrtal flooding three years ago, when hundreds of people died, but at least they seem to have learned from that and the crisis management worked really well, with just one person injured and no deaths.

Personally, I’m fine, our house sits above the wetlands that are there to absorb the rain and our village wasn’t that badly hit, though the people next to the river had flooded basements. Other places are much worse off, with evacuations and water up to the ground floor. Rebuilding will take time and money. Oh, do I need to mention that the same day we were hit by this, the legislative finally gave green light to gutting our climate protection laws?

Facon (Tofu bacon)

I have recently discovered my love for tofu. Turns out all the people who always told me that you just needed to do x to make it taste good were lying and you actually need to do Y. We’re currently using about 2 pounds of tofu per week and a lot of it is used to make fake bacon.

Start by making am marinade: soy sauce, barbecue sauce (if you really want it vegan, use some without honey), liquid smoke (the secret ingredient to so many things) and whatever you like. I often use herbs, or some fruit sirup, garlic, … Put it into a ziplock bag or plastic box. Slice some smoked tofu into thin slices and put into the marinade. It should be in there for at least a couple  of hours, best over night. You can now fry it in a pan or an airfryer, or use it like that. And unless you need to be careful with sodium, you can eat hlf a pound and still call it healthy.

The best vegan rabbit stew you’ve ever had

This was from our “watch the LOTR trilogy and eat like Hobbits marathon”. The original recipe uses rabbit or chicken, and is an homage to Samwise’s rabbit stew.

A plate with stew at the top, couscous on the leaft, and vegetable Tajine on the right

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Sorry for the bad pic…

Anyway, my friend made it with soy chunks and it was so good we had to make it again  a week later. It takes a lot of time, but not much work.

Ingredients:

2 pounds of unseasoned soy chunks, the “like chicken” variety that is pretty dense. I wouldn’t use tofu here

2-3 onions, depending on size and your taste, cut to taste

garlic

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon allspice

2 teaspoons sage or thyme

3 tbsp olive oil

2 teaspoons sugar

500 ml red wine

some red wine vinegar (I prefer crema de balsamico)

50g tomato paste

2 laurel leaves

salt and pepper to taste

  • rub the “meat” with herbs, pepper and allspice, set aside.

-use a cast iron pot, a dutch oven or anything that allows the stew to simmer nicely on the stove or go into the oven, heat the oil and gently brown the onions with the sugar for about 10 minutes. If you use the oven, preheat to 150°C now.

-add the garlic, fry for another minute. Add the “meat” and fry for five more minutes or so. Add wine, vinegar, tomato paste laurel and salt. Cover with a lid. Either put it into the oven or reduce the heat. Stir every 10 minutes or so for about 2 hours. I had to add some more wine and water because the soy chunks basically slurped up the sauce. Season again, garnish with parsley, and serve with po-ta-toes.

Just Bread

If you’re one of the three people globally who didn’t make their own sourdough bread during the first Covid lockdowns, this is for you.

Contrary to popular belief, sourdough is neither difficult or complicated, it’s just time intensive, because if you want to make it, you need to start at least a week before. Or you buy sourdough starter. Whatever. About once a year I get the strong urge to make sourdough bread. I start my sourdough, bake breads for a couple of weeks, and then at some point my starter dies. I feel zero remorse over this.

To start your sourdough, mix 50g of flour with 50 g of lukewarm water in a mason jar, and put it somewhere not too cold. Repeat every day for at least 6 days. Some recipes will tell you it’s fine after three days, but in my experience, it takes at least a week to get a really active sourdough.

Once you have a nice starter, you can make bread. Start the day before your want the bread, best around early in the afternoon. Take:

1kg of flour, 22 g of salt, 200 to 300 g of starter, 400-500ml of water. You can add nuts, grains, seeds to your liking.

I’m not telling you which flour to use, it should work with most gluten containing flours, but you’ll have to find our how much water you need.

If you want to give it a headstart, you can make a “poolish”: feed your sourdough well (at least a double amount), take off your 200-300 g, put those in a nicely warm place (30-35°C) for an hour. This step is optional, but probably wise if you only start late in the afternoon.

Back to the non optional parts: put everything into your kitchen machine and knead for about 10 minutes. You can watch internet tutorials that will tell you how to do it by hand, insisting that those very movements, turns and folding techniques are absolutely necessary, but in my opinion, that’s nonsense. Once it’s done, cover with a damp cloth. Every 1.5 to 2 hours, you wet your hands and stretch and fold it, right until you want to go to bed. Then you fold it a last time, shape it into a ball, and put it either in a special bread basket liberally coated with flour, or a bowl, cover again with a damp cloth, put it somewhere cool but not cold (I use our stairway as it is pretty much lways between 15and 20 °C)and go to bed.

In the morning, you bake it. There are several options here: you can just use your cookie sheet, a pizza stone (my preferred method) or a dutch oven (put in baking paper), but it’s very important that you preheat to 200°C, especially when using a stone or dutch oven. These need to be 200° as well, so I usuall preheat at least 30 minutes. Put the bread upside down on your stone/sheet, dutch oven and  cut the top. If you’re using a dutch oven, cover it for the first 30 minutes, if not pour some water on the bottom of your oven (or use ice cubes) to create steam. If you use the dutch oven, remove the lid after 30 minutes, bake for about 1 h. Let it cool and enjoy.

A sourdough bread with a golden brown crust, cut in half

©Giliell, all rights reserved

The Hobbits go plant based

I’ve long suffered from a bad conscience from leaving Charly to do all the work here, but I still couldn’t drag my butt in the metaphorical chair (no more real chair for me) to type something meaningful. I still don’t have the spoons to type anything politically interesting, but since I’ve been sharing more and more food on Mastodon I thought: why not write some lighthearted recipe posts? I think I can manage that.

The recipes will all be plant based. The Giliell family has significantly reduced their animal product consumption over the recent years anyway and a few weeks ago my eldest went fully vegan. Now, this is a disclaimer for all the posts here: I’m not vegan. I’m not trying to be and this is NOT and invitation to any vegans to try and convince me. You didn’t manage to do so the last 15 years and I doubt you will do so now. That’s why I’m using the label plant based as it describes my personal approach: creating delicious food while using plant based ingredients. This is about the joy of eating, not about discussing ideology or philosophy. Just yummy, no judgement.

Why Hobbits? Because during the easter week we hosted a Lotr movie marathon (actually 2 days, because eating took too much time) with mostly vegan food, mostly based on “things that fit the general middle earth theme” from an unofficial cookbook.

So, let’s get started with some hearty date and sesame bars that will give you lots of energy for walking to Orodruin or going to school

You need

150g of dried fruit: dates, apricots, raisins…, cut into small pieces. I wouldn’t use too much apples or mangos, because they’re lacking stickiness.

125g of flour

125g of oats

1 tsp baking powder

1-3 tbsp sesame seeds

Mix all dry ingredients

120-150 g margarine or vegan butter. Don’t try to reduce the fat or your mass will not stick

75 g brown sugar

1tbsp maple syrup or any other sugary syrup

Melt margarine, mix with sugar and syrup. Pour over dry ingredients and mash together. Put everything on a cookie sheet, push flat. Don’t try a dish. I did that the first time and they stayed nicely soft.

Bake at 180° C for about 20-25 minutes, cut while hot. They keep well. Or would if they weren’t gobbled up so fast. you can create your own favourite mix. Add sunflower seeds, leave out dates, your call.

rectangle bars in a plastic container and on a cookie sheet

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Going electric

 

As you all know, our old diesel has rather dramatically given up the ghost. Now, we knew the car was old and had thankfully already been looking into a replacement, though we’d hoped to do it by the end of the year after paying off the solar panels. Well, that didn’t quite work out, but it meant that we had already looked into new cars and decided on a model. We wanted an electric one, as it makes no sense to buy a conventional one now that will rapidly lose all resale value once electric cars dominate the market, and we sure as hell didn’t want a used one where you never knew when it would break down. Given that it needs to be able to pull our caravan and that the traditional European car manufacturers have stalled on developing electric cars, this left us either with the premium brands that are well outside of our price range and that use the electricity equivalent of a small town or the Kia EV6 and we were lucky to get one on short notice.

Now I know that cars are bad. Even electric cars. And I wished I lived in a world where I didn’t need one, or where we could get by with one car instead of two, but it’s not this world. I’d love to get there, but until that day, I need to eat and therefore work and that means driving a car. But an electric car is an improvement (especially when powered by renewable energy) and it really drives home the absurdity of conventional fuel powered cars in terms of energy consumption.

One big issue with all energy consumption is energy efficiency: How much of my energy consumption is actually used to produce the desired result. We all remember the old lightbulbs that produced 85% heat and 15% light. Modern petrol powered cars get about 40% movement. The rest is heat. When you apply the breaks, you turn more kinetic energy into heat. An electric car gets that up to 80%. Recuperation means that when you slow down, your battery charges. In case that you need to break (I hardly break anymore), your battery charges. My old car that Mr has now used 6 l /100 km super with my careful driving. My same careful driving now uses 15 kWh/100. This means that my commute already needs more energy than all household appliances together! But it gets worse: 1l super is the equivalent of 8.4 kWh, so the old car needed the equivalent of 50kWh. It gets even worse: Every litre of fuel that you put into your car has already used another litre of fuel in production and transport, so the 50kWh turn into 100kWh. Creating a car centric world was really one of the worst things we could do.