Christmas family pics!

I relaxed soooo deeply in Dundee this Christmas. Much needed.
I drank a lot of red wine. For some reason I associate spending time with Mother with drinking red wine.


This is how my family looks early morning during the Christmas holidays. I love them, you know.

Christmas (Again!)

I'm home for Christmas. Some people think I lie when I claim to be an expat from Dundee. If this isn't proof for you, then I don't know what will convince you.


We had a Nordic-style Christmas dinner. Sure beats turkey.
We hired a pair of Nordic actors to accompany us, just to get the right feeling.
No, seriously, that's me mum and dad.


Didi was Santa last year, so this year it was my turn.
Here I am handing a nice gift to my mum.



We gave my dad the latest iPod. He looks pleased about it. Notice how Didi has mixed feelings about this. He's probably thinking he's going to steal it. We gave him some poker chips for his Christmas present. Actually I bought him a Wii (the games console) but once I saw he had out-grown me I quietly returned it.

So Didi, if you are reading this: now you understand the consequences of all this handsome-and-tall nonsense you are playing. If you want nice presents from me, stop growing and wear a brown bag over your head.

Didi must die!

The nerve of the young man! How dare he grow taller than me?

I come visit once a year and all I ask for is a bare minimum of respect. And this is how they treat me. 1.83m he measures, and considering his mum is 1.80 and his dad 1.90, he'll probably end up the tallest in the family. Bastard.

Expanding charter

Thanks everyone for the overwhelming support for DidiForPresident! We've had some great feedback, and we've agreed to expand the charter with the following item:

- We want to grant Australia as a nation the power to veto any EU president that is not of Icelandic, Swedish or Scotish descent. This should add an element of clarity and distance in the election process and a useful balance of power.

Sichuan soup and Didi

I'm trying a new approach to worcestershire sauce. If you use too much of it, it tastes British Pub. But in the background, it makes sweet stuff more adult. Add it to a kiwi/pineapple blend and oh my god how delicious!
Tofu on the other hand has joined chili on the central pedistal of my life. I've learned how to make an excellent soup centred on bamboo shoots and rice vinegar- add tofu, chili, sichuan pepper and bean paste to make it 'sichuan'. It's so easy to make, I expect it to become a regular (if not daily!) feature on the Dundee menu.

It is not all about food though. I'm currently working on setting up a fan-club for Didi: DidiForPresident.com. The charter of this club will be to change the EU laws in the following way:
- We want a permanent EU presidency with limitless powers over all countries in the union. We would prefer a dictatorship, but expect this may be difficult to get past some of the larger countries. Limitless power is a good compromise.
- We want the minimum age for candidates for this presidency to be reduced to 15. We don't expect to amass the required support for another 10 months or so, so we thing that will work well.
- We want citizens of Scotland, Sweden and Iceland to have FIVE votes each in all elections (including the vote for presidency), to recognize their cultural SU-PE-RI-O-RI-TY.

We're not yet open for new members, but do post your interest in the comment section.

ADDED 29 January:
Didi escaping my worcestershire centred cooking.

Update on worcestershire/banana combination

While interesting, definately not a combination to keep at the center of the experience. The lime and thyme turned out to be essential. However, I'm not too happy with the Britishness of the taste. I think my passionate relationship with Worcestershire sauce may be coming to an end. However, lime, thyme and banana is a combination worth exploring.

Bananas, Worcestershire Sauce and Singapore

Today I woke up fully recovered from Mount Kinabalu. Waking up alone in Dundee, I feel it is imperative to explore new flavour combinations. On the flight to Hong Kong, my neighbour recommended Worcestershire sauce as a must-use ingredient in any cooking. I used to put this sauce on toast when I was at uni but never figured any other use for it. It struck me as a very "British" flavour, and who want's to eat British?

Having now rediscovered this sauce, I am completely fascinated by it. It's really quite pungent, spicy and zangy. It even contains anchovies! So what to do with it? Mix it with banana of course! The sweetness makes the pungent flavour more inclusive. Right now I'm waiting for some beef that is marinating in a concoction based on this interesting combination.

I confess I went overboard, adding quite a lot of other gunk into the mix. This is the problem with northern European style cooking, where you have a very limited number of dishes. When you make only one dish, it's difficult to exclude flavours. I much prefer the Asian style that I've got used to in Hong Kong, where you order several dishes and share. Then, you can focus each dish on a limited number of flavours in each dish while still getting variety by eating several dishes.

While waiting for the beef, I'm dreaming about Singapore. What a neat place that was, even though I only spent one night there. I've always been good at 'gut-feeling' a city as soon as I arrive, and there was definately something about that place that made me feel good and at home. That's right, I'm planning another escape. Last time I planned for Australia and ended up in Borneo. Maybe if I target Singapore, this time I'll end up in Brazil???

Mala doufu and an obvious obsession with Mount Kinabalu

Mmmmmm, I dream of Mala. Tickly spicy. Sichuan peppercorns and chili. But however much I put into my cooking, it never seems to get quite as tickly as I remember from the restaurants in Hong Kong. Even tried roasting them like some websites suggest.

Tried to do Mala Doufu with pork. Tasted super nice, but way too much tomato puree. It also appears that taking photos of food is really tricky. I'm starting to understand why photographers use all that lighting equipment. The flash manages to get the worst out of everything. A bit of blur seems to help.

Speaking of photographers. When I climbed mount kinabalu, spending the afternoon on the veranda of the base camp was probably the most pleasant part of the whole experience. The final climb and actually reaching the top was the greatest adventure ever but I could not describe it as pleasant.

Among other great personalities, sitting on the veranda I got to know a professional photographer/masseur who also turned out to be a philosopher/traveller/writer- Mark. He was an excellent storyteller and one of those amiable people who collect wise words from the people he's met. He had a great, inspiring idea:
- Have a goal that you can communicate clearly.

It's not the "have a goal" bit which is so ingenious of course, but the bit about communication. Any self-development book will tell you to have a goal. No, the idea that you make it into a tag-line is the really cool bit. For instance, take Mark's goal. Compare:

• I want to travel the world
• I will cycle through 100 countries

The former suggests he's a back-packer with too many ideas and too much time on his hands. The latter suggests he's a man on a mission. It's specific, it's measurable- we will all know when he's achieved his goal.

A good way to end this post would be to declare my own tag-line goal. However, what Mark and every self development book out there misses is that you are really lucky if you know what your goal is... That's why we have religions, "family values" and nostalgia: to fill in that absence of real goals. So for now, I will remain goal-less. But not without a plan...

The escape starts now

Ha! I did it! I'm out!
I woke up early this morning when I could work unobserved and prepared my escape. I packed only the essentials. A couple of shirts, two pairs of jeans, some nice black shoes and some sandals- you never know.
I made a dash for the train station, but lo and behold, here in the UK we don't believe in trains running over christmas. It is inevitable that we will ultimately figure out how to get things to work in this country. Why not take the pain now and do things properly? Are there not muslims or jews or hindus working for the national rail? Not even a viking?
Anyways, after the initial shock that my plan has already been thrown, I quickly regrouped and managed to sneak into a car outside our house. I couldn't believe my luck- they were heading out of dundee to IKEA in Edinburgh. To cut a long and terrible story short, I escaped the car somewhere west of our capital and made a dash for the airport. I've escaped Dundee, but as long as I'm still in Scotland I'm at risk of being recaptured.

ADDED 22 January:
I was pretty please with myself this gray monday morning. Thought I had it all planned- With just 9 kgs of hand luggage I was going to disappear forever. How was I to know that only a couple of weeks later I would be crawling back to Dundee, licking my wounds from the great climb up Mount Kinabalu. My own Mount Doom...

The Great Escape

Like a good friend of mine once said: I'm planning my Great Escape. Don't get me wrong,- I love Dundee. The weather, the people, the gym. The Christmas decorarations. But there comes a time when every boy must grow up, and that time has come for me. Well, it came and passed about two years ago... so maybe it would be a good idea to move out of my parents house.

So, here officially begin the chronicles of Christian's Great Escape from Dundee. For my friends, family and also for some people I don't like very much but still treat very nicely but inside I am thinking bad thoughts.