Cooking Goodness

It is somewhat comforting to know that the headlines in Austrian newspapers also reach the news in other countries. At school you always have some lessons in which you take newspaper articles of different newspapers and compare them. I never found much interest in it, but I (occasionally) like comparing articles from different countries. It shows how facts change when crossing borders and how different facts get highlighted.
I never read in any of the Austrian articles that they lived in an upper-middleclass suburb. Maybe the newspapers just assume that, as a local, I know what social class people living in that part of town belong to (I don't. I'm also fairly sure people living further away don't.). I wouldn't even know how to translate "upper middleclass" - not in the context in which English people use it. Funny thing.

In relation to that, I'm currently reading "Watching the English" by Kate Fox, an anthropology book on English behaviour. I've only read the first few chapters so far, but I can already tell that the book is awesome. It's intelligent, funny, cleverly written and insightful. It's also very helpful when looking back in retrospect on experiences in England and helps explain stuff that seemed strange in my time in Oxford, i.e. when you meet your boyfriend's friends and offer them your hand as a greeting, and they look at you as if you're barking mad; after reading the chapter on greetings you know that you are not the one who is mad.
It's such a shame that you can't study anthropology in Austria. I first got in contact with anthropology in Oxford, where I took a lecture on pop culture and a seminar on Japanese art. Loved it. It seems like a wonderful thing to delve into.

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Last weekend I made Paella for the whole family (without the mussels). Christine used the opportunity to try out her new camera (which is way superior to mine, as it can do videos with sound, as opposed to mine, which is restricted to videos without sound).
Fun!



A small part of the ingredients. Not visible are peas, chicken wings and all the liquid parts.



Prawns in the pan (after getting some colour). I was glad that I didn't have to behead them and rid them of their intestines. That sounded a bit gross and violent.



After some time Markus decided to take over the pan and pretend to be important, so he could get all the fame, while I was left with spicing the chicken wings. After some evil glares I took over the pan again.



Yummy!



Here we again fought over who was allowed to put the finishing touches on everything (and also who got to eat some of the sausage while decorating the rice stuff). We managed a more or less peaceful solution after neither of us had won another glaring contest.



Here is the almost finished meal, before it was shoved into the oven and forgotten.



Check out this awesome natural lighting. The blue comes from the window (no artificial lightsource responsible for that). Who'd have thought midday could produce such a saturated metallic blue?



Aaaand here's the result of the 2h cooking marathon as presented on Christine's dish.