Music and pastry
Jan. 18th, 2004 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetFriday was an industrial / industrial-rock sort of day: Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Velvet Acid Christ, KMFDM, and so on, in compilation and mix form. Yesterday was a Celtic Punk sort of day: the Pogues, the Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly. Today started as a neo-swing sort of day, e.g., Brian Setzer, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Royal Crown Revue, passing thence into 1990's "Red Hot + Blue" comp. from which, with Neneh Cherry and U2 as links, I have arrived at the "Until the End of the World" soundtrack. From there, who knows?
That's just how it is, some days.
Today I am fueled by boughatsa and coffee and (in an unrelated incident) creton on sourdough. I used to buy boughatsa (and coffee, come to think of it) quite frequently from random bakeries when I lived in Athens (a brief period which often seems unreal to me now, although as recently as last night I spent time in the company of people who shared the same hallucination, but they are also and, really, much more "Boston-life" friends, from five years of constant association and roommate-hood [*1], outweighing those two semesters in Kolonaki, followed by shamefully less frequent association over the last five years -- but I was talking about pastry). Now I am generally forced to bake it myself; and I do so from time to time. It's a tasty treat, let me tell you: although when I think about boughatsa I think about Thessaloniki, which stands out in my mind also as a city where one can buy convincing milkshakes [*2], but where they fiendishly put ketchup and mustard on gyros -- anyway, in re: boughatsa, Thessaloniki is a city with an astounding number of places to get such farina-custardy goodness, as well as an astounding number of Byzantine churches, and at least one place to get farina-custardy badness, but, really, there, I think, the badness was the fault of the cigarette smoke the chain-smoking baker had allowed to become trapped in the powdered sugar, and not of the farina custard itself; friends and I ate, or at least began to eat, specimens of same within sight of Roman archaeology while stray dogs had sex not ten feet away.[*3] Anyway, when I think about boughatsa, I think about that unholy version of it in Greece's second largest city, and that explains (at long last) the adversative "although" after "tasty treat" above.
Regardless of this bittersweet association, I sure do like to eat it. Fortunately, there's over half of it left, and we're going to trudge through light snowfall to the Y today, and probably do a bit of shoveling at some point, with the result that I can eat more of it with easy justification.
By the way, our sink has been fixed, thanks to the power of sulfuric acid.
I leave you to ponder this poignant question from Lou Reed: What good is seeing-eye chocolate? Perhaps you will reach the same conclusion as he.
---
*1. Then there's my actual roommate from that year in Athens, who, along with his girlfriend of a dozen years or so, lives a ten-minute walk from where I live: but I think of the two of them as "Athens-life" people because, despite our having got along rather well in Athens and having all lived vaguely in the Boston area since then, I see them now most often in passing on the train. Sometimes that's just how *that* is, too.
*2. In 1990 and 1991 American restaurant chains had not yet come to Greece, apart from a Wendy's and one or two Pizza Huts, all in distant suburbs. This was all well and good, but eventually one tires of the numerous ingenious ways the Greeks have invented for the preparation of lamb and tomatoes, and one requires a milkshake.
*3. On another occasion, a blasphemous mockery of baklava (the sort of baklava harpies baked for their victims before they decided that just crapping on things was easier than keeping the phyllo from drying out, ushering in a happier day for humankind; the sort of baklava that Morgoth in his envy and hatred of fair things fashioned before the first age of the sun to be a terror for the Children of Ilúvatar; the sort of baklava that drives eccentric wealthy Anglo-American dilettantes to madness and death when in that locked trunk they find recipes for it among certain ancestral papers -- well, I should have known that the American-slice-of-pie-sized portion was meant, unsuccessfully, to compensate for some rather severe shortcomings) -- this alleged baklava, I say, found a more welcome home than my stomach inside a stray dog haunting some Greek archaeology in the vicinity of Argos. No doubt the dog soon after acquired tentacles or a 666 barcode tattoo as a direct result, but on that rainy afternoon, for a brief moment, as he gobbled up the sticky crunchy mess that I was now spared, we were both happy.
That's just how it is, some days.
Today I am fueled by boughatsa and coffee and (in an unrelated incident) creton on sourdough. I used to buy boughatsa (and coffee, come to think of it) quite frequently from random bakeries when I lived in Athens (a brief period which often seems unreal to me now, although as recently as last night I spent time in the company of people who shared the same hallucination, but they are also and, really, much more "Boston-life" friends, from five years of constant association and roommate-hood [*1], outweighing those two semesters in Kolonaki, followed by shamefully less frequent association over the last five years -- but I was talking about pastry). Now I am generally forced to bake it myself; and I do so from time to time. It's a tasty treat, let me tell you: although when I think about boughatsa I think about Thessaloniki, which stands out in my mind also as a city where one can buy convincing milkshakes [*2], but where they fiendishly put ketchup and mustard on gyros -- anyway, in re: boughatsa, Thessaloniki is a city with an astounding number of places to get such farina-custardy goodness, as well as an astounding number of Byzantine churches, and at least one place to get farina-custardy badness, but, really, there, I think, the badness was the fault of the cigarette smoke the chain-smoking baker had allowed to become trapped in the powdered sugar, and not of the farina custard itself; friends and I ate, or at least began to eat, specimens of same within sight of Roman archaeology while stray dogs had sex not ten feet away.[*3] Anyway, when I think about boughatsa, I think about that unholy version of it in Greece's second largest city, and that explains (at long last) the adversative "although" after "tasty treat" above.
Regardless of this bittersweet association, I sure do like to eat it. Fortunately, there's over half of it left, and we're going to trudge through light snowfall to the Y today, and probably do a bit of shoveling at some point, with the result that I can eat more of it with easy justification.
By the way, our sink has been fixed, thanks to the power of sulfuric acid.
I leave you to ponder this poignant question from Lou Reed: What good is seeing-eye chocolate? Perhaps you will reach the same conclusion as he.
---
*1. Then there's my actual roommate from that year in Athens, who, along with his girlfriend of a dozen years or so, lives a ten-minute walk from where I live: but I think of the two of them as "Athens-life" people because, despite our having got along rather well in Athens and having all lived vaguely in the Boston area since then, I see them now most often in passing on the train. Sometimes that's just how *that* is, too.
*2. In 1990 and 1991 American restaurant chains had not yet come to Greece, apart from a Wendy's and one or two Pizza Huts, all in distant suburbs. This was all well and good, but eventually one tires of the numerous ingenious ways the Greeks have invented for the preparation of lamb and tomatoes, and one requires a milkshake.
*3. On another occasion, a blasphemous mockery of baklava (the sort of baklava harpies baked for their victims before they decided that just crapping on things was easier than keeping the phyllo from drying out, ushering in a happier day for humankind; the sort of baklava that Morgoth in his envy and hatred of fair things fashioned before the first age of the sun to be a terror for the Children of Ilúvatar; the sort of baklava that drives eccentric wealthy Anglo-American dilettantes to madness and death when in that locked trunk they find recipes for it among certain ancestral papers -- well, I should have known that the American-slice-of-pie-sized portion was meant, unsuccessfully, to compensate for some rather severe shortcomings) -- this alleged baklava, I say, found a more welcome home than my stomach inside a stray dog haunting some Greek archaeology in the vicinity of Argos. No doubt the dog soon after acquired tentacles or a 666 barcode tattoo as a direct result, but on that rainy afternoon, for a brief moment, as he gobbled up the sticky crunchy mess that I was now spared, we were both happy.
