Category Archives: Personal Journal

Personal Journal, Uncategorized

Boterkoek and Basterdsuiker

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I mentioned around a year ago that I was learning Chinese. I still am, but after four months spent on the wrong side of mental health I decided I needed an easy win, and that’s not Chinese.

So I picked up Dutch, which, since I’m proficient in English and German, is proving to be remarkably easy. Think of it as German lite with extensive English overlaps. The grammar is essentially the same as that of German, but heavily simplified, and around 80% of the vocabulary is covered by English and German together, plus the occasional Latin influence (which is not a problem, since I’m Italian). The main challenge is pronunciation, and with it listening comprehension, but that will come with time.

When learning a foreign language it’s always a good thing to explore one’s interests through the lens of that language, and in my case that includes cooking. In short: I didn’t realize that Dutch sweets and cakes were so delicious! Within a few weeks of finishing the first Dutch course I found myself pulling up recipe after recipe from my bookmarks, until I settled on my first experiment.

My new love interest is called boterkoek, literally butter cake. The taste of the raw dough is not too dissimilar from that of Scottish shortbread, another favorite of mine. Like shortbread, the taste is heavily influenced by the butter (you don’t say) and by the interplay of sugar and the oh-so-important little teaspoon of salt.

One of the differences lies in the type of sugar that is used. As far as I know, shortbread requires regular sugar, while boterkoek, just like many other Dutch cakes and cookies, utilizes something called basterdsuiker. I am not sure what it is, exactly, but it is almost completely impossible to come by outside of Belgium and the Netherlands, so I made it myself. The result is akin to a wettish, aromatic, caramel-like sugar.

Boterkoek with basterdsuiker

The recipe I followed is this one, but since it’s in Dutch I’ll describe what I did.

To make the “bastard sugar” I poured 250g of sugar (8.8 oz) into a bowl and added 2.5 tablespoons of sugar beet syrup. I believe most other kinds of syrups will do, such as agave syrup or molasses. The recipe says you should be working with a fork to mix the two together, but I lost my patience after a few seconds and resorted to brute force with my hands. So it only took a minute to make the sugar and licking my hands at the end was extra fun.

For the cake, I mixed the basterdsuiker with 300g of all purpose flour (10.5 oz). Then I cut 250g of cold butter (8.8 oz) into small chunks, added it to the mix together with a good deal of lemon zest and 1.5 teaspoons of salt. Don’t skimp on the salt: it’s what creates the contrast with the sugar. I whisked a large egg and added a little more than half of it to the dough, then kneaded all together by hand. The final texture should be firm and sticky, not too dissimilar from raw cookie dough or shortcrust, but more moist than shortcrust.

I pressed the dough into a form lined with parchment, making sure to spread it evenly, then brushed the surface with the rest of the beaten egg and used a fork to create the design you see in the picture, and that you probably see better in the recipe I linked. Then off in the oven it went, at 180°C (355 Fahrenheit) for a little under 25 minutes (the recipe calls for 30 minutes, but my oven pulls no punches).

MQS

Personal Journal

Back From The Ashes

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You may have noticed some silence on this blog, considering I have posted almost daily for a while and then disappeared for a couple of months. I’ve already talked about the reasons why in my previous post.

But now that I’ve recharged my batteries and taken care of myself I’m back and my fingertips are itching, since I’ve got a couple of projects I need to catch up on (concerning the tarot, playing cards, magic, Enneagram, geomancy and other stuff. I’ve also got a couple of videos lined up)

In other news, I have finally managed to locate my form responses from the contact section, and I have caught up on all my correspondence. The only exception is the user Sonya: I’ve tried using your email to answer your message but it bounced back with an error message. If you see this post, feel free to contact me again (possibly with a different email) so I can answer your question.

MQS

Personal Journal

Unavailable Messages

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As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, I was away for several weeks to take care of myself. In the meantime people have been sending me several messages over the form. Unfortunately, WordPress seems to have changed something about the interface, so I can’t for the life of me figure out how to read those messages. Bear with me, I am a very special kid, thanks 🫣 I will answer everyone as soon as I understand how

Personal Journal, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

On Managing Attention

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You know the old adage that people who sell solutions need the problem to remain unsolved. I’m not talking about odd conspiratorial crap, like “the government is hiding the secret of immortality”. I’m talking about observable facts.

When influencers started becoming a thing, it was simply a bunch of kids in their rooms talking about stuff they were passionate about. Corporations then smelled the opportunity and ruined everything, as they usually do, by turning them into advertisers.

There is, obviously, absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to make money on the Internet. My mom, who was a journalist, used to say to people criticizing that she made money off of reporting tragedies, that it’s possible to do her job well with professionalism and strong ethics. A look at the Internet today shows me that most people are not my mom.

Whenever you end up in a rabbit hole on a particular topic on social media or youtube, your feed is going to fill to the brim with people trying to part you from your money. Even if they don’t want to part you from your money, they still want to part you from your attention, and your attention is one of the most precious things you have, so you should administer it well.

I’ve already talked about the pros I experienced from reducing Internet consumption, learning again to stay with myself. I’m not some kind of Luddite or Amish. I don’t dislike technical progress. I just think it should serve me rather than the other way around.

I generally try to spend less than an hour a day on the Internet (which, for a Millennial, is quite the achievement) not counting the time I spend working on the blog or yt channel. I’ve found that most days I can safely stay under 30 minutes.

What I’ve noticed in my journey toward reclaiming my own attention is that it is especially easy to spot someone trying to sell you something on the Internet. Again, I’m not saying it is wrong to sell goods and services, and in a way all is fair in love and marketing, but the point is that my aim of keeping my attention to myself and deploying it only for worthwhile pursuits is at odds with most people’s need to make a couple of bucks off of me.

You can immediately spot a youtuber (and probably tiktoker) who is out to get your attention and/or money because they have a distinctive (and very effective) way of serializing even the most minute unit of crappy information they are going to give you. For instance, if you watch a video about fitness, you’ll be swamped with videos all telling you how you are missing out on every possible secret hack.

You will always notice that their way of pushing out ‘content’ is to make it seem as though that video is always going to be exactly the one thing you need in whatever niche you’re exploring, and without which you will utterly fail or be lied to by invisible entities who won’t tell you the truth about it.

That is, until the next video, which will drop 24 hours later, and which will also be exactly the one thing you need and are missing and are being lied to by others and without which you’ll fail. Once you start spotting these trends it becomes almost amusing to see how much sludge can be manufactured with so little actual material.

MQS

Personal Journal, Spirituality and Psychology

A New Shocking Discovery About Yours Truly

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As I may have mentioned in the past, I have been in therapy a long time. I almost took for granted that I knew all there was to know about the various phases of my life.

Yet recently I was talking to my new therapist about my late teens to early twenties, and I casually mentioned how I had lost a ton of weight in that period. I hadn’t been chubby before, just regular size, but somehow I had convinced myself there was too much of me.

As I explained to her my behavior with food (won’t go into details), she furrowed her brow and said “well, that’s called anorexia.”

It really hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew of course that men can suffer from anorexia too, but in my mind the term had been subconsciously filed away under ‘eating disorders for insecure teen girls’, so it never truly came into question as a meaningful description for whatever the hell I was doing in that period.

While I still feel weirded out by the idea, another part of me is glad that there are still things I need to discover about myself.

Creativity, Personal Journal

To Plan Or Not To Plan

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I have pretty much stopped making plans for this blog. I’ve realized that the reason I’m so glad working at it is that, while I have a broad vision of what I want it to become, I just follow my fixation of the day in order to get there. I don’t want it to feel like work (because it isn’t).

I know, for instance, that in the very near future I’ll go back to translate Fludd’s Geomancy handbook and other old works, but I don’t want to put a date on it (my husband, a perfect incarnation of the Prussian spirit, would shudder at the idea of not having a deadline).

I also know that I feel the need to explore the philosophical underpinnings of the stuff I’m into, but it is hard to get started as ideas accumulate in my head in no particular order. I know that I’m just waiting for everything to click into place, because I’ve been through the same process enough times to know how it works: you accumulate wood and sooner or later a lightning will strike it (or at least someone will drop a cigarette butt on it)

MQS