This Christmas plate magically fills up with chocolate...

The holidays are never a time to plan diets but this year, I might possibly be making it worse for myself because I’m also using this time to try out fun recipes that I don’t have time to make when school is in session. Yesterday, I made a delicious apple pie with my mother. The crust is simply margarine, flour, water and a tablespoon of salt, and the filling was made with 6 Golden apples, lemon juice, 100 g of sugar, a hearty dose of cinnamon and a handful of flour; before putting it in, I put a layer of sliced almonds on top of the crust. I had to adapt this pie from a recipe given to me by a co-worker at my last internship. Her recipe also includes either cherries or blueberries but none of those were available to me. It was all still delicious.

This is what it looked like before going in the oven:

And this is what it looked like when it came out after around 45 minutes baking:

It smelled pretty scrumptious

I chose to eat it with some cream… I’m pretty proud of myself and my mother!

Christmas has come and gone and now the countdown until January 1st is well underway… Time flies. I say that all the time, and I feel like a lot of my blogging has been infused with that sentiment but it really does amaze me. I think that’s why I am so intrigued by the hours I spend traveling between different time zones; it’s the only time when time technically stays still or moves particularly slowly (but then I get a reality check when I travel back the other way and time moves extra fast). Anyway, this is how Christmas celebrations went for me; I hope everyone else also had a wonderful time!

I had a pretty delicious dinner on Christmas Eve at my uncle’s house. I dressed in elf colours as I like to do during these festivities and opened my stomach up to an endless stream delicious treats.

Dec. 24th: My uncle's glorious tree

Dec. 24th: Sitting down to eat

Dec. 24th: I'm always amazed by the man's dashing tableware

We started the meal with home made foie gras, cooked by one of the guests, my uncle’s friend Francis. I don’t generally like foie gras, but I was pleasantly surprised by this one. Its taste was subtle, not overly earthy and married itself very well with the onion confit. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Dec. 24th: Tasty prawns with soy and sesame

I don’t have pictures of our main course, a stuffed capon but it was also a success. I always have capon at Christmas because on the 25th, you can count on my grandmother to throw one in the oven for our big family lunch, but she likes her capon without frills so sometimes, it ends up being a bit dry. But with his meaty stuffing, my uncle added unknown dimensions to what I knew that meat to taste like.

Dec. 24th: It's not Christmas without a sweet dessert

Dec. 24th: Needless to say, we ate well

Let’s fast forward to Sunday at my grandmother’s. Even more family, and even more food.

Dec. 25th: My sister serving up some amuse-bouches

Dec. 25th: Olive-filled puff pastries by my one of my cousins

Dec. 25th: Our table

Dec. 25th: Shrimp over a caramelized apple, foie gras with onion confit, smoked salmon and gingerbread by my aunts

In this dish, the apple was particularly nice touch. Not anything I would ever have thought of putting together (although to be fair, I don’t have very sharp cooking chops yet; I’m starting to work on it though). Again, my dedication to photographing the meal was beaten when the next items came on the table: oysters. Having them meant we didn’t get escargots (part of me was disappointed) but I really only get oysters at this time of the year so it was a still the highlight of the meal.

Dec. 24th: My grandmother's Christmas staple #1, Goose

Dec. 25th: My grandmother's Christmas staple #2, capon

It was a much more “meat and potatoes” type of meal here compared to the kitchen pyrotechnics of the previous evening, but it’s just as nice. Especially in the complicated times many of us are facing, it’s always nice to remember to appreciate simpler pleasures. Besides, we left off with very sweet treats for dessert.

Dec. 25th: Fair trade chocolate brought by my sister

Dec. 25th: As tradition goes, my sister also cut up our ice-cream dessert for everyone

Dec. 25th: My grandma even shared the tea she got as a present after all the eating was done

Speaking off presents, I can’t speak about Christmas without sharing some present opening pictures from both events. Here they are! Hope your Christmas celebrations were as full of smiles!

The first documentary I’m watching: Hoop Dreams. My thesis advisor, Jason Samuels, gave this 1994 doc about two teenagers pursuing their basketball dreams rave reviews so I figured I should watch it, especially since it’s on Hulu. Now, in terms of visual presentation, this doc has a great advantage because basketball inherently provides the filmmaker with great visuals, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be inspired.

The first thing that’s great about this documentary is the amount of access the filmmakers had to the families, the schools (even inside the classrooms) and the neighbourhoods that allow the viewer to truly get a feel for what these boys’ lives were like. With the crazy amount of work I had this semester, between my internship, the radio station and getting the footage that I needed, I was not able to spend as much time as I wanted simply building trust. With my lighter semester in January, I should be able to do that more. Jason is always talking about us shooting verite and becoming a fly on the wall; the Hoop Dreams documentarians were following these players for years so they had great luxury, but I can manage to insert myself more in the small time frame that I have, I think.

Through their intimate link to the families, the documentary also manages to deal with issues that have nothing to do with the game of basketball, from domestic violence, drug problems to unemployment in the black communities. I don’t have time to dedicate as many minutes of my project to peripheral issues, but I do want to make sure that beyond the personal, student loan debt appears as one problem linked to several others, and I hope that people who do see the project will understand that this is not just the tale of a few people’s struggles.

One great strength of this documentary is also that it’s just a gripping story and the process/progress of the two players sucks you in, even though the span of time covered is so long. I, who have no particular interest in basketball, especially on the high school level, found myself rooting for the two teens’ teams and gasping and screaming during the most exciting plays. That will be a hard feeling to create with my subject matter, but I hope the personal stories will be compelling enough that my viewers will care about the future of the borrowers I follow.

Finally, although my project isn’t going to be nearly as long as Hoop Dreams, I hope that I can manage to keep it interesting the entire time. I think the 2:51 hours I just spent watching the film are the most hours I’ve ever spent watching a documentary and it never felt particularly long. It certainly never felt like I was wasting my time. I guess a lot of painful hours will be spent in the editing room.

I need to see which doc is next on my list… I’ll be back in a few days!

From tech-information

I rediscovered my iPod.

I guess that phrasing is incorrect; I’ve always known where it was, I just haven’t bothered to plug it in for probably a year (I can’t remember for sure).

In that time, oddly, I only missed it a little. I wasn’t adding a terrible amount of music to it, choosing to listen to new (and old) material on YouTube instead. Hulu and its (almost) endless reserve of TV episodes–complemented by Netflix–had become my go-to tool for background distraction while doing my homework.

It’s weird. Music was so central in everything I did, from my shower to my mindless free time. But slowly this past school year, it’s taken the back seat.

Until now.

The reason why might sound stupid but now that I spend so much more time on the subway (the demands of Brooklyn life, I guess) made me feel I needed to bust out my iPod again. During the first few weeks of intense subway riding from Brooklyn, I read books but I soon saw that there were some times of the day (morning, late night, digestion time) when even the most gripping and thrilling book couldn’t keep me from succumbing to the sleepiness caused by the sustained rocking of the subway car. More sensory involvement was necessary.

So I took my iPod out of the front pocket of my camera case (that’s another piece of hi-tech equipment I need to use more often) and plugged it into my computer. It’s quite fortunate that only a few days earlier I found the cable that would allow me to synchronize my two awesome Apple products.

My only issue now? I really need new music. Listening to all these tunes I liked sometimes years ago is nice, but it makes me feel really old.

Obviously, I will admit that I let it eat away at my time willingly; I’m the one who chooses to turn it on or to sit down in front of it if someone is watching it. My biggest surprise is just to see how different it is to actually have access to a TV set compared to just watching TV shows on hulu or Netflix.

I spend a sizable amount of time on hulu. Often, it’s playing on one of my tabs while I am doing something else. And because I haven’t had a television for a year, I had forgotten what it was like to live that experience: the endless, bad quality commercials and mostly the all-powerful remote control, made to let me escape programs I’m not interested in.

Until these past weeks–I will have officially been here 2 weeks tomorrow–I had fooled myself into thinking that my menu selected television consumption was the same experience as turning on a TV set and watching what comes on. On one hand, you know what you want, you’re watching it and feel satisfied. On the other, you’re searching blindly, and the more channels you have, the more you find yourself thinking entertaining the possibility that there is something better on the other channels; the hunt never ends.

It makes watching television so much more distracting than I remember it! And the worst part is that evidently you won’t always be pleased with what is offered at the time you turned the TV on, but now that it’s on, it’s somehow a problem just turning it off because you’ve already reached a semi-lethargic TV-watching state , which only gets worse once you decide to settle for a subpar option.

All in all, I’m really glad I have a lot of things to do during the day because otherwise, the TV monster would get me.

I’m officially on summer break, I have started my full-time summer internship, I have moved into my new home for the next few months… I have no more excuses for not updating this blog. I’m disappointed to have messed up on Post A Week, but I am now starting over.

I found out the other day that Google and Newseum were launching the Journalist Memorial Channel on YouTube. “This channel will become a digital version of the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial, which is re-dedicated annually to honor journalists worldwide who have died during the preceding year. This year, 77 names are being added to the list of the more than 2,000 journalists who have been recognized for their sacrifices since 1837,” Google said.

With the highly covered crises around the world going on right now, I’ve never heard of more journalist deaths than these past few months. Just yesterday, I read about a Venezuelan journalist who was just found dead. At the end of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama ended his hilarious speech with a heartfelt note for journalists and praised their work in covering such dangerous issues.

I don’t know yet exactly what I’ll be doing when I graduate from school next year. I’m still not entirely sure I’ll be a reporter, but I do know that I want to be involved with journalism because I think it’s an essential resource for a society that functions well. I do know that I’ll be penniless as a member of that industry, but hopefully people will still have enough esteem in what journalists do to make me feel like I’m not missing out on something better.

Here is Obama’s speech because (1) it’s hilarious, (2) it has that special dedication to journalists I just wrote about, (3) I was going to write about the dinner in a post to complain about how the event had lost its prior purpose in the glamour but now it’s super old news so this is as close as I will get to writing that rant: