------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recipe:
Margherita pizza
Ingredients
Dough
1 2/3 cups flour
1/3 cup water
1 tsp salt
1 package instant active yeast (if you are not using instant, make the water warm but not hot and dissolve the yeast in that and wait until the surface of the water is brown with small bubbles)
2 tbsp olive oil
Toppings
1 ball of buffalo mozzarella
1 large tomato
A bunch of basil leaves (for example, off the basil plant you grow on your windowsill in your dorm room)
2 cloves of garlic, pressed or very finely chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
THE DOUGH
There are two ways to make a pizza dough. Way one involves making it like normal bread, kneading it for ten minutes and allowing it to rise until doubled in bulk and then throwing it into the air to make a lovely pizza. Way two involves you having just come home from a bunch of castles, not having time to let it double in bulk. Not letting it rise at all, attempting to throw it up in the air, dropping it on the floor in front of all the people you are cooking it for, and then rolling it out with a rolling pin (which you are really not supposed to do with pizza). Way two still tastes really good.
For either way two, or way one: Mix flour, yeast (!unless its not instant!) and salt. Mix oil and water. Add oil and water to flour mixture. Knead it. Add flour to the dough until it becomes elastic again. Then either pick way one or way two for making a pizza dough.
THE TOPPINGS
If you like your crust brown you can stick it into the oven for ten to fifteen minutes before adding toppings. Even if you just cook it with toppings on though, it will cook through. Brush the pizza with the olive oil, and disperse the garlic over the top. Slice the buffalo mozzarella and space the pieces out over the dough, do the same thing with the tomato and the basil. You can do so in a way you think aesthetically pleasing, or not. Bake the whole thing at 1800C (350) until the cheese is very melted, even a bit brown. The basil leaves will look withered and ruined. That's okay. If you don't like that look though, add them after baking. Take pizza out of oven, share it with your flat mates.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the most amazing things about living in a city, especially an historic one, is how much there is to see and do. For example, within a ten minute walk of my flat there is Edinburgh Castle, Prince’s Gardens, the Walter Scott Monument, the National Gallery of Scotland, the house that Robert Burns stayed in when he first came to Scotland, the Writer’s Museum, the National Library of Scotland, Greyfriars Kirk, the National Museum, and more. There is so much to do here. And I have homework.
This past week, on the theory that it was better to just get it over with, I signed up to do the first oral report in one of my classes. Day after day I sat in my flat, combing through piles of articles, looking for obscure bits of information on the Iron Age. After that report, I am perfectly qualified to wear a button that says, “Ask me about pre-colonial metal smelting in Africa!”
Saturday, however, I vowed to leave the whole day open, studying all night if I had to. This was because Saturday was Doors Open Day - a day where an incredible number of venues normally closed throughout the year let the general public in for free.
So, Saturday I took a break. I slept in. I went for a really long run in Hollyrood Park (an awesome location that must be visited if one is in Edinburgh.) I went down to St. Margaret’s Loch and did some bird-watching. (Since arriving in the UK I have seen lesser black-backed gull, magpie, blackbird, moorhen, muted swan and tufted ducks). It wasn’t that early, but for some reason all the tufted ducks were asleep, they had their heads tucked under their wings and were spinning slowly over the water like tiny tops. It was incredibly adorable.
At around eleven o’clock I set out for my first stop on my Doors Open Day tour - the anatomy museum. The anatomy museum is located in the department of medicine at the University. Normally, it’s only open to medical students and staff, but on Doors Open Day, anyone can visit.
It’s a pretty cool exhibit. The whole room features instruments used back in the good-old-days of surgery of yore, as well as aged textbooks, and life and death masks of various famous figures. Oh, and of course, there’s anatomy. Lots and lots of anatomy. Shelves and shelves of skulls. More shelves of spines. A few hips. Some random bones that were laying around storage. Then there’s the non-bones. I will not go into detail here, except to say that it’s remarkable how long tissue can be preserved when suspended in the right concoction. One of the main exhibits - right in the center of the room - was a mummified dissected body. Have I mentioned that there were quite a few young kids wandering around?
Of course, the real main attraction was the skeleton of William Burke. For those of you unfamiliar with the history, surgeons used to learn their trade by dissecting dead bodies. Of course, only executed criminals were legally allowed to be dissected, and there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Thus emerged the lucrative body-snatching business. For every body given, the University would pay twelve pounds (to put this in perspective, professors were paid fifteen). There was a tunnel that led underneath the building to a back entrance where bodies were picked up. There’s actually still a trap door leading to it in one of the classrooms today.
William Burke and his partner William Hare took it a step further, and started murdering people and making a rather lucrative business of it. Until someone left something at their house, came back the next day, and found a body hidden under the bed. Oops. Unfortunately, when Burke and Hare were arrested all the evidence against them was circumstantial. So, Hare turned State’s evidence, and got away scot free, while Burke’s punishment was to be hung, dissected, and have his skeleton displayed in the medical laboratory where you can still see it now, one day out of the year.
After this cheerful outing, we went outdoors to Calton hill, and the Old City Observatory and Astronomer’s House. Now, some events in Doors Open Day need to be booked days in advance. These tours were two prime examples. Fortunately, when I e-mailed them the day before, they had had some cancelations, and were able to squeeze me in.
We first toured the Astronomer’s House, which has been restored by the Vivat trust, a charity that buys houses, restores them, fills them with period furniture, and then rents them out for vacations. They did a very nice job on the Astronomer’s House. The building itself is entirely too precious. It’s small, but designed in a castle-y style. There’s a magnificent view from every window and a round tower that houses three different rooms. The middle one is a dining room, my favorite part of which is an 80-pound table that is the only piece of non-period furniture and is thusly covered with a plaid tablecloth that reaches to the floor.
In between touring the house and the observatory, we wandered around Calton Hill. Taking pictures of the view of Edinburgh, enjoying the sunshine (which has been going on for two weeks straight now), jumping off rocks, and then walking up a tower and taking quite a few more pictures of the view of Edinburgh. (From left to right: The Mylne's court crew at the astronomer's house. Me and Thomas, a friend from high-school and... FUN!)
The observatory itself is in the center of the hill, and houses two telescopes. One, on the bottom floor, is set on a straight track along the meridian. Another, inside a tower under a huge dome, was used for taking pictures of the stars, but now is just used for star-gazing. Every moving piece (including opening and closing the ceiling and rotating the dome!) has a piece of rope attached to it, so that the person sitting at the foot of the telescope can control it all remotely. I even got to make the dome rotate! It was indescribable amounts of fun.
At the end of the tour we went outside and looked through a special telescope that allowed us to see the sun. I’ve never looked at the sun through a telescope before, on account of not wanting to go blind, and I have to say, the experience is amazing. You don’t realize just how incredible the sun is, until you actually see it. I stated that it was very cool, but the astronomer overseeing the operation assured me it is, in fact, quite hot.
As we were walking home, we passed by one of the sites I had very much wanted to see, but hadn’t thought we’d have time for - the Robert Burns memorial. The reason I had wanted to see it on this day in particular (as versus any of the other 364 days you could see it) is that members of the Burns society were supposed to be reading poems, and performing them set to music.
When we got inside a three-piece band (banjo, guitar, vocals) called “Ragged Glory” was performing some of Burns’ songs. They did a gorgeous rendition of “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose” and finished with a tune called “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (good rendition here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pGWkjwOBw&feature=related). As they began the song, everyone inside the memorial started to sing along. The cool thing was, a good number of them were actually Scots, quite a few in full kilts, and you could hear the accent, and that everyone knew the tune as they sang.
There were quite good acoustics in the memorial, and I find that there’s just a certain feeling that comes from being surrounded by people singing for sheer joy. They got to the last verse, and everyone sang a-cappella. “That Man to Man, the world o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.” Singing along to Rabbie - really not a shabby way to end a pretty spectacular day.
This past week, on the theory that it was better to just get it over with, I signed up to do the first oral report in one of my classes. Day after day I sat in my flat, combing through piles of articles, looking for obscure bits of information on the Iron Age. After that report, I am perfectly qualified to wear a button that says, “Ask me about pre-colonial metal smelting in Africa!”
Saturday, however, I vowed to leave the whole day open, studying all night if I had to. This was because Saturday was Doors Open Day - a day where an incredible number of venues normally closed throughout the year let the general public in for free.
So, Saturday I took a break. I slept in. I went for a really long run in Hollyrood Park (an awesome location that must be visited if one is in Edinburgh.) I went down to St. Margaret’s Loch and did some bird-watching. (Since arriving in the UK I have seen lesser black-backed gull, magpie, blackbird, moorhen, muted swan and tufted ducks). It wasn’t that early, but for some reason all the tufted ducks were asleep, they had their heads tucked under their wings and were spinning slowly over the water like tiny tops. It was incredibly adorable.
At around eleven o’clock I set out for my first stop on my Doors Open Day tour - the anatomy museum. The anatomy museum is located in the department of medicine at the University. Normally, it’s only open to medical students and staff, but on Doors Open Day, anyone can visit.
Of course, the real main attraction was the skeleton of William Burke. For those of you unfamiliar with the history, surgeons used to learn their trade by dissecting dead bodies. Of course, only executed criminals were legally allowed to be dissected, and there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Thus emerged the lucrative body-snatching business. For every body given, the University would pay twelve pounds (to put this in perspective, professors were paid fifteen). There was a tunnel that led underneath the building to a back entrance where bodies were picked up. There’s actually still a trap door leading to it in one of the classrooms today.
William Burke and his partner William Hare took it a step further, and started murdering people and making a rather lucrative business of it. Until someone left something at their house, came back the next day, and found a body hidden under the bed. Oops. Unfortunately, when Burke and Hare were arrested all the evidence against them was circumstantial. So, Hare turned State’s evidence, and got away scot free, while Burke’s punishment was to be hung, dissected, and have his skeleton displayed in the medical laboratory where you can still see it now, one day out of the year.After this cheerful outing, we went outdoors to Calton hill, and the Old City Observatory and Astronomer’s House. Now, some events in Doors Open Day need to be booked days in advance. These tours were two prime examples. Fortunately, when I e-mailed them the day before, they had had some cancelations, and were able to squeeze me in.
We first toured the Astronomer’s House, which has been restored by the Vivat trust, a charity that buys houses, restores them, fills them with period furniture, and then rents them out for vacations. They did a very nice job on the Astronomer’s House. The building itself is entirely too precious. It’s small, but designed in a castle-y style. There’s a magnificent view from every window and a round tower that houses three different rooms. The middle one is a dining room, my favorite part of which is an 80-pound table that is the only piece of non-period furniture and is thusly covered with a plaid tablecloth that reaches to the floor.
In between touring the house and the observatory, we wandered around Calton Hill. Taking pictures of the view of Edinburgh, enjoying the sunshine (which has been going on for two weeks straight now), jumping off rocks, and then walking up a tower and taking quite a few more pictures of the view of Edinburgh. (From left to right: The Mylne's court crew at the astronomer's house. Me and Thomas, a friend from high-school and... FUN!)
The observatory itself is in the center of the hill, and houses two telescopes. One, on the bottom floor, is set on a straight track along the meridian. Another, inside a tower under a huge dome, was used for taking pictures of the stars, but now is just used for star-gazing. Every moving piece (including opening and closing the ceiling and rotating the dome!) has a piece of rope attached to it, so that the person sitting at the foot of the telescope can control it all remotely. I even got to make the dome rotate! It was indescribable amounts of fun.
As we were walking home, we passed by one of the sites I had very much wanted to see, but hadn’t thought we’d have time for - the Robert Burns memorial. The reason I had wanted to see it on this day in particular (as versus any of the other 364 days you could see it) is that members of the Burns society were supposed to be reading poems, and performing them set to music.
 |
| Inside Burn's memorial |
There were quite good acoustics in the memorial, and I find that there’s just a certain feeling that comes from being surrounded by people singing for sheer joy. They got to the last verse, and everyone sang a-cappella. “That Man to Man, the world o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.” Singing along to Rabbie - really not a shabby way to end a pretty spectacular day.
0 comments:
Post a Comment