A New Zeal!

From today I have a new zeal! I am starting to learn how to make original Khaleeji coffee or Emirati coffee.

2 years ago at Christmas Eve I successed in making an original Turkish coffee after 20 times of failures.
Now, I am heading forward to make Khaleeji coffee in memory of my years in the UAE as well as a kind of preparation before departing to Ras al Khaimah in winter.
But the first test at 27th October failed!

I asked my Syrian friend (who lives in Vienna for sure!) how to make „Arabic Coffee“ and she recommended me two coffee brands we can buy at „Naschmarkt“. At last Thursday I hurried there but no-one seemed to know these brands and I was tempted to buy „Najjar“-coffee from Lebanon.

I was sceptical because Lebanon is in the Near East and not in the Middle East but the seller was so typical for a seller in an Arabic souq: he assured me that this is one of the best coffees.

Hah – if I wasn´t despaired, I wouldn´t buy it, but I tried it if it´s really the Khaleeji coffee…

At home I opened the packing and saw a nearly black coffee – darker than any Turkish coffee like „Mehmet Effendi“ from Istanbul. My sceptic rosed more!

Well, let´s try and see.

I have to confess something: I don´t drink coffee!

What a laughter – I don´t drink it but I like to make it.

So my parents became my testing animals and the Lebanese-pseudo-Khaleeji-coffee became a disaster. The taste was too thin, to unspeakable!
But I used the traditional recipe from „The Complete Cookbook of the UAE“ of 1995!
Then it was clear that any coffee from Lebanon or any Near East area is not a so-called Saudi Coffee! The Saudi Coffee has an amber-color and mine was pitch-dark. No way!

I searched in the world wide web again and then a wonderful blog of an American expat living with her Palestine husband in Dubai explained everything so perfectly!

A real Emirati Coffee is made of raw coffee beans which should be roasted very lightly so it will have a light brown color – this is it!
But where to get raw beans in Vienna, the capital of the cultivated coffee society?

Again in the world wide web I found a „Caffee Compagnie“ which sells raw beans! Horray!

In the next days I want to try to get there and find a pack of Yemenite coffee or Ethiopian at last. And I will ask how to roast it perfectly.
I remember that there is an electric coffee roaster somewhere in the www too, but I want to stick on the traditional Emirati way. And this is roasting in the pan!

And how to grind the roasted beans? My mom and my grandmother had an electrical grinder, but I remember, it went broken and we threw it away.

To use a mortar and pestle like the old ways in the desert? This will take a long time and a strong wrist! Perhaps I will search my mothers kitchen in the hope to find and grinder which still works.

A new adventure and a new zeal lies ahead of me!

Please wish me luck!
I will keep you informed!

Eid al Adha 2012

Sorry for my long silence!

Last Wednesday I made my comeback to the office and this week I get used to the office noises without getting too tired at evening. I didn´t have the strenght to write some words. Sorry!

 Well, tomorrow will be a National Holiday and at the same day Eid al Adha. I remember an unforgetting, warm and welcoming Eid al Adha in Marrakech in November 2010 when I was kindly invited by Kristina and her family. And I ate the most delicious grilled meat of sheep in my life!

I hoped to join my Moroccan brother and his family at Eid tomorrow, but the surgery of my ear took away my joy to celebrate Eid. I am not allowed to enter an airplane for three months after surgery.

But next year, I will celebrate it in Fes with all of my heart, Inchallah.

 Thus, for my Austrian friends: Have a nice National Holiday!

For my Muslim friends: Eid Mubarak! Have a Happy Eid!

TV-movie "Whispers of the Desert"

With my Sylvanian Families I created something new and different.

I bought them many years ago in the UK and Japan and now I don´t play with them - I display them.

 

Tomorrow, "Whispers of the Desert" will be broadcasted! And not in February 2013 as I mentioned in an older blog.

 



Autumn Impressions

To train my balance organ and to see how much I can bear with the tiredness after having 7 quiet weeks full of up and downs before starting my comeback to the office, I had a walking with my parents to a calm place with a nice forest.
It was also a totally beautiful day with autumn scents and rustling leaves.

For a second time, I could hear a bird!!
And after 10 minutes of walking through the rustling leaves, they were getting on my nerves - rustle, rustle, rustle forever!
It´s a whole new situation for me to hear nearly everything around me and I have to train myself without getting tired because it´s really a lot of informations around me which I am not used!

I love autumn! There are so many small details - lovely too:

At last: a perfect composition of sky and earth.

Day 49 with CI - Day 23 with Speech Processor

Well, after seven weeks after surgery and 3 weeks with the speech processor, I am still impatient!
But I am writing a diary with all the up and downs of my days and all new achievments I experience, so I will never forget the first months of hardship! This will give me a secure timeline for my second surgery.
If I am satisfied with the first CI, I want to have my second CI in July 2013 (it gives me a good time for reconvalescene during the summer break at work).
Because after finding out that Morbus Meniére is also in my left ear, I want to finish this uncomfortable disease! This means to release the inner ear from the fluid which is filling the cochlea - the result would be deafness.
Well, to finish this disease would ease my life more than living with the thought if I would survive the next day without any dizzy attack and to have the fear that this might happen on an open street!
16 years with it is enough!
So I am planning my second CI next year! Gosh, going through all this hardship again! But now I am not alone any more!
I met a lot of wonderful people who really gives me the courage to overcome these days with lots of unanswered questions.

The Dazzy Dizzy Days are over!

Hooorray! The medicine against Morbus Meniére ist working!
From Sunday I am free of this stupid dizziness in my left ear and at Tuesday I dared to try to drive with the tramway alone. From my station 20 minutes to Westbahnhof and then walk 10 minutes at Mariahilferstrasse.
The tramway was no problem - thanks heaven! But the walking was like an earthquake in my head and I found out, I should wear shoes with very elastic or soft soles. No heels, even if they are only 1 cm high!
I learned my lessons to keep my high heels stoved away still.

I went back home via subway, no problem too. Gosh, I did it and I am so happy that using the public transportation is not a problem any more.
I am walking to normality at last!

Yesterday it was my first day to use the subway to AKH, with my mother as aide. Till this day, I was brought to AKH with car because the Dazzy Dizzy Days didn´t allowed me to use the public transportation.

Sooooooo glad about this!!!!! I never thought that I would be super happy for using a tramway alone as if this would be a jackpot at lottery.
People easily forget to be grateful for daily chores and are reminded about it when they are sick or had a looooooong reconvalescene like me.

Next week, I want to start my comeback to the office and be part of the boring daily routine I will accept with a handkiss!
Perhaps I should refrain from kissing the floor of the office like the pope would do ;-)

Soon, Halloween is coming...another Scrapbooking story

All years again, there is the perfect opportunity to become spooky, ghostly, scary and make all these wonderful things made of newths eyes, bats wings, vampire blood, frogs legs and others you will only find in a kind of a Harry-Potter-World in a lurky alley.

It´s HALLOWEEN soon!

The early darkness of the days, the low dark clouds and the dying of the summer nature into winter rest is somehow giving the people the feeling that even the death below the earth will move in their coffins. I know it´s stupid.
I am not a Gotic Freak nor I believe in vampires or other blood-sucking species even if I like to read the Black Dagger Brotherhood or the Midnight Breeds novels ;-)

But October and it´s early rising of the evening gives me the opportunity to grovel my fantasy thinking and run wild with the scary things.
And to warn my friends of the countdown to All Hallow´s Eve, I made these cards in Scrapbooking style.

 

 Details