travel anne

My baking is a preskise skience (and not remotely travel-related)

I’m comparing one country’s gluten freeness to another’s, that’s travel, yeah?

I’ve been less than impressed by England’s gluten free/wheat alternative flour. Over the last three months my cookies have almost always ended up puffy in the middle and soft like cake or on the few times I’ve tried to compensate for this they’ve ended up rock hard. More what I go for in a man than what I go for in a cookie… oh hoh. Pardon me.

I finally cracked it tonight.

Dove’s plain white gluten free flour is the closest to the flour I used in Australia. I’ve tried the buckwheat and the bread flour mostly because there were no other wheat free alternatives on offer at the time, but finally found the plain white flour mix at the Sainsbury’s in the orthodox Jewish area (Finsbury) of all places.

My cookies finally ended up flat and chewy, which is how I like em.

Two notes: use slightly more sugar than you normally would (I think that’s what made them chewy) and only add enough flour to make the dough just a little firmer than stickymess (otherwise the cookies end up way too dry). Other than that, the recipe is the same as normal cookie recipes. Observe:

1ish cup sugar
1ish cup butter
1ish egg
a bit less than two cups of flour
some chocolate bits or whatever

Cream butter and sugar infront of Mediawatch. Change hands regularly to challenge your dexterity and make sure you don’t end up lop-sided. I guess you could use a machine if you have one, wimp. Note: the dough is now at it’s most delicious.

Whisk an egg and add most of it, furrow brow then shrug and hope it was enough. Actually, probably put all of it in.

Smash bits to bits (nuts, chocolate, whatever) and add them before the flour so you at least get one smashed bit per cookie. Make a mental note to earn more money to buy more chocolate to smash up for the next batch of cookies. Wonder how many chocolate bits you could fit in to a single cookie. Reckon at least 70.

Measure out the flour and mix in most of it until the dough is just past sticking to fucking everything.

Collect it in to a ball and Glad - sorry - cling wrap it. Make it cold.

Preheat oven to just under 200C. Go back to the internet for a while.

When the dough is chilled, smash it down to thinish, cut in to circles with something, put the cookies on a baking paper lined tray. Any that don’t stay round in the transfer process can become squares with a little bit of squishing and people get really impressed that you made square cookies. Weirdos.

Put in the oven probably for about 12 minutes, but my last batch took like 20 for some reason. Best to obsessively check them.

Oh, also rememer to let them cool on the tray before transfering them to a rack. In my haste tonight, two cookies lost their guts and had to be sacrificed to the Anne Gods.

Om nom nom.

The Anne Gods are pleased.

London: take three

London was warm and sunny today, I got to wear my green coat, it gets a lot of attention.

Everything is cinematic here, especially in Camden. I had another very cinematic moment today on my way to a room viewing…

I was walking to view a room, singing along to my music. Two floppy haired British boys about my age, one on a skateboard, turned to look at me as I walked past. I noticed but I didn’t stop.

Turn and look all you like, boy on a skateboard; it was a day for Girl Becomes Woman scenes, not Boy Meets Girl scenes. Besides, it would have never worked out. Your tartan was red and mine is green.

When I showed up, the room had already been let, reality came flooding back. So I bought a halal street plum and walked slowly home to a different soundtrack.

in:inbox DIAF!

I just had a minor melt down trying to filter my emails. I maintain that I should not have to be a computer programmer to be able to work out how to filter emails from multiple people at the same domain as well as other completely different addresses that are all providing a similar service, i.e. ‘Travel’.

I don’t sign up to a hundred million websites for every aspect of my life for two reasons:

1. It causes me extreme mental trauma to try to remember my password each time I try to log in to “howtocookgnocchi.com” or whatever. Each site has varying security rules which they tell you when you sign up, but not when you try to log in three months later. I’m paranoid enough not to want to keep a file called “MY IDENTITY” on my computer.

Solution? Maybe I should keep a file called something slightly less obvious than “MY IDENTITY” on my computer.

2. I can’t deal with the email traffic. I find myself yelling “I DON’T CARE” at each incoming email then having a panic attack if I need to respond or react in any way.

Solution? A thousand labels filtered to skip the inbox! I’ll check it when I’m feeling stable again! HOORAY!

And there goes my day, tumblring about doing stuff instead of actually doing stuff.

Edit: I’m told this is a classic problem. Therefore, I think someone should FIX IT NOW.

Take it from me; while you’re away being all cosmopolitan and international and junk, there’s nothing quite like putting on Iron and Wine and doing the washing up.

A care package from Australia arrived today, it included some things I’d asked my best friend Adam to send (webcam, headset, camera, chocolate) as well as a card full of pictures he’d taken of some of my closest friends.

I expected to cry and want to go home, but I didn’t. I feel loved and missed and supported.

Right now I’m choosing a crazy international life and career over the simple stuff at home. I imagine I’ll go back to wanting the simple stuff again eventually, maybe in Canberra, maybe somewhere in the UK. Maybe with a partner and a child, maybe with a dog and some bees.

…or a dog with bees in its mouth, so when it barks, it shoots bees at you. I’m a simple girl.

Painfully basic tips for a native English speaker living in a non-English speaking country who’s trying to make friends with non-native English speakers.

Now I’ve typed this out, this seems like simple stuff, but no one explained it to me. It took me a couple of weeks of learning for myself and talking to non-native English speakers about how it works for them. I’m still getting there and people are (unfortunately) far too polite to tell me off when I’m acting like a jerk.

1. Slow the fuck down, shut the fuck up. Probably the most important tip. After about ten minutes of basic conversation you can start to gauge a person’s level of speaking English.

2. Most people understand more English than they speak, so don’t over simplify. I didn’t realise this until someone told me, I’m sure a few of the people I met in my first week here think I’m a jerk.

3. Simple language and simple concepts are not the same, don’t confuse them. Get better at expressing yourself concisely. It’s a good rule in writing too, but can be tough.

4. Much like with native English speakers from a different town, city, state or country, you can easily alienate people with constant idioms and obscure language. So don’t be a jerk.

5. Be yourself. Unless you are a jerk. Then don’t be a jerk.

As an aside: it’s worth being prepared to adjust your pronunciation of certain words that you use regularly for clarification. For instance, I often had to repeat and sometimes even spell ‘Canberra’ as I pronounce it “Cambrah”. I’ve started pronouncing it “Can belr lra” where the ‘lr’ is a sort of rolled or hard ‘r’ (can someone send me a proper phonetic symbol for this?), how it’s often pronounced in European languages. It saves a lot of time, repetition and air-writing.