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Oliebollen

In the Netherlands, the whole New Year thing is called “Oud en Nieuw”, which means “Old and New”. One of the traditional things to eat around this time is Oliebollen, which translated literally means “Oil balls”. Essentially, they’re deep-fried balls of dough, dusted liberally with powdered sugar. Mmm, donuts.

But don’t picture American style cake-like donuts, or British style sweet dense bread-like donuts. Oliebollen aren’t for dunkin’. They really are oil balls. They’re fried to an greasy golden crisp on the outside, and are hot, thick and sweet on the inside. You can buy them in bakeries and in oliebollen stands on street corners. Buy them from a street vendor, and they’ll come in a white paper bag that will be saturated to the point of see-through by the time you get them home. If they last that long. They’re delicious on their own, or with a beer, or with some champagne at Oud en Nieuw.

We bought my parents a deep-fat fryer for Christmas. Guess what we were munching on Boxing Day?

Here’s the recipe we used, cribbed (and translated) from the web site of Bakkerij Steevens:

Ingredients (makes about 40 oliebollen)

  • 1kg flour
  • 1l water
  • 25g salt
  • 50g sugar
  • 80g yeast (yes, really 80g)
  • 10g cinnamon powder
  • 200g raisins
  • 100g chopped apples
  • A splash of lemon juice

Dissolve the yeast in the water. Mix the cinnamon, salt and sugar into the flour, and then add the yeasty water. Stir this for a short while (or use a blender on slow) until you’ve got goo. Fold in the raisins, apples and lemon juice. Then cover the mix with a damp tea towel (to stop it drying out) and leave it to stand and rise in a warm place for at least 45 minutes. Make sure you put it in a big container, because it’s going to at least double in size.

Heat your oil to 180° C (350° F). Use an ice cream scoop or a large spoon to drop lumps of the dough into the oil, and let them sit and bubble for about 5 minutes, turning them over half-way through so they are golden on both sides. Then take them out and let them rest on some kitchen roll.

Don’t eat them immediately, because they’re burning hot. You can let them rest for a while until they’re merely warm, or you can keep them for longer and then gently re-heat them in an oven. Don’t re-heat them in a microwave, because they’ll go all soggy and horrible. (You can eat them cold, too, but they’re really meant to be eaten warm, on a frosty night.)

To serve the oliebollen, place a whole bundle of them on a big plate, and smother them in powdered sugar. Then make sure that everyone has enough napkins to wipe their fingers with….

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Jak II: Renegade

Jak II: RenegadeI finally finished playing through Jak II: Renegade yesterday evening (well, kinda early this morning, actually). It’s an excellent game, but in places it’s fiendishly hard and frustrating.

Tough boss battles I can handle. At climactic moments in a game, it’s fair to throw some heat at the player. You push and push, you spend time learning the boss’s moves and attack patterns, and you gain great satisfaction from overcoming your adversary. Jak II has some pretty good boss battles. But there are also a handful of missions in there that are even harder, and they pull the game’s progress curve off balance. There were occasions where I spent hours trying and retrying a mission dozens and dozens of times, only to finish it and see a measly 1% added to my tally.

These missions, and the incessant back-and-forthing across the city (because no mission ever ends any closer to the beginning of the next than two or three minutes cruising through trigger-happy-guard-infested streets) are intensely annoying in their own right. However, what’s even more annoying is that the game has a good story, and very engaging characters that made me want to know what was going to happen next. So no matter how much I swore at the screen and the game designers, I couldn’t just throw the controller away in disgust and bite chunks out of the disc. I had to keep coming back for more punishment.

I suppose that’s the sign of a “great” game, but I’m still not convinced that it was. In too many of those really tough missions I felt like I was battling against flawed design rather than pitting my wits and skills against the in-game baddies. For most of the second half of the game, the missions were something to be suffered between cut-scenes that advanced the plot. For a game that ought to have a wide appeal, I imagine that only a relatively small proportion of people will actually play it all the way through to the end. Which is a shame, because the final pay-off is worthwhile, and despite all the frustrations I did enjoy it. A lot.

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Recruitment Agents

Recruitment agents, taken collectively, are sharks and snakes. I’ve spoken to a number (a very small number) of friendly snakes, and I know of at least one shark who sees fish as friends, not food. But they’re a tiny minority, and they’re still sharks and snakes.

Just thought I’d get that off my chest. Draw your own conclusions about how the job hunt is going.

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“Pickles and a .45”

No-one does a good rant quite like Karl over at Word Soup. Today sees one of his best ones:

Obviously Saddam, who was the sole mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and was planning bio and chem attacks on the U.S. (right? RIGHT?), was coordinating the Iraqi resistance with a hot-dog and some fig newtons in a fucking hole. I mean he was dangerous pre-war, what with his army and airforce grounded, Inspectors coating the landscape and the CIA up his ass, but he was super-EXTRA dangerous hiding in that fucking box with pickles and a .45.

I haven’t written much about politics lately because I don’t want to embarrass anyone with the bubbly enthusiasm I tend to run over with whenever I get on the subject. But take Karl’s post, rotate it across the Atlantic, and you get to pretty much where I’m at right now. Sign me up for that Paypal fund, dude.

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On being laid off

There’s obviously no such thing as a good time to be laid off from work. Some times, however, are worse than others. Five weeks after joining a company, two weeks before Christmas, and a month and a half before your new baby is due has got be hitting the red zone of the bad-o-meter. I’m curious, therefore, why I don’t feel utterly miserable. I mean, I’ve been pretty down for the last few months anyway–why hasn’t this tipped me over the edge into gloom and despair?

Yes, I’m bummed out about 40,000 people suddenly finding themselves without home insurance, and I feel really bad about all of my colleagues who had been at Tribune a lot longer than I had. I hadn’t been there long enough to build up any kind of real attachment to the company, but there were a lot of people there who were very bitter and angry about being let down in this way. I spent an hour and a half yesterday afternoon alongside now-former colleagues, queuing in the cold outside the company’s closed doors, waiting to fill out redundancy papers. There were some laughs and joking around, but it was gallows humour.

Yet I feel like a cloud has been lifted from me. It makes me wonder how happy I really was there. While I was looking for jobs in September, Tribune was the first company to offer me a position, and (after a certain amount of talking) I accepted it. I wonder if I might not have been too hasty at the time, choosing a good offer quickly rather than taking my time to wait for the best offer. (If there is such a thing.) At the time, though, I wasn’t feeling too good about myself. My self-confidence was at a pretty low ebb, and I was finding it hard to believe (really believe, rather than just hoodwinking myself with the available, reasonably positive evidence) that anyone would want to employ me.

Things are different now, though. Even though I was only there for five weeks, I did some good work at Tribune–work that I felt good about–and that has gone a long way to fixing some of the doubts I had about myself and about my future in the computer industry. Ignoring for a moment the financial constraints imposed by the lack of a job, I’m looking forward to having a short break from work. (Because let’s face it, the chances of finding anything before New Year are pretty slim.)

If there’s anything I’ve felt short of recently, it’s time. Time to play with Alex, time to read some books, time to work on this web site, time to prepare for Christmas. (Christmas, argh. I can’t remember the last time I felt so unprepared for the holiday season, and so completely devoid of any kind of seasonal cheer.) I know I’m going to have to devote a lot of my free time to looking for a job, but there’s a big gap in my mindscape where the nine-to-five used to be, and that feels extraordinarily liberating. Its absence won’t last, but I think I’m in a good position right now to do two things: 1) enjoy the space and time while it’s there, and 2) fill the gap with a job that will really work for me.

When live gives you lemons, you’re supposed to make lemonade, or lemon meringue pie, or lemon curd, or something. I’m certainly trying.

Update: Another reason to feel glad about not working at Tribune any more is that essentially, they were a bunch of crooks. It looks like one of their major underwriters stopped backing their policies about a year ago, and yet Tribune continued to sell policies. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t just get overlooked at a monthly board meeting. Senior managers must have known that they were operating illegally, and that makes them crooks.

The story is hitting the national news now: