Yellow Monday

Photo taken at Warner Bros. Theme Park near Madrid, Spain, two years ago. These birds starred one of the shows at the park. Visit more Mellow Yellow Monday participants.

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Tabasco Original Red Sauce

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of TABASCO® Original Red. All opinions are 100% mine.

TABASCO® Original Red, the sauce made of vinegar, red pepper, and salt, and aged in barrels for three years, does wonders in my kitchen, for it blends well with endless foods. As I always am in a hurry and I'm not the best cook ever, I usually make simple dishes, like onion omelettes. I learned some rules about this recipe: never overcook the omelette (this is a challenging one for me), add one teaspoon valsamic vinegar to the sauté onions, and finally put this sauce on the whole thing. Simple to make but they taste scrumptious.

You can get ideas and a wide range of recipes as well as cooking demos in Game-Day Party Menu, a funny and easy-to-browse page in Tabasco site. There are some must-eats in this page, like Pesto Pizza, and I found one personal favourite, which is the Spicy Spinach and Artichoke Dip. It features many more chicken wings, pizzas, and chilli recipes, and quick snacks and appetizers. The Tabasco site also includes tips on the Pizza Perfected. Now that it's football season and in the United States everyone will be watching the Super Bowl again, combining TABASCO® Original Red and pizza sounds like a great game day tradition.

Being more than a hot sauce, Tabasco Original Red enhances the flavor of food so that you can enjoy it even more. My modest tortillas can attest to this!

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In Besalú

My photos from Besalú, northern Catalonia, Summer 2008. It's not Bruges, but this tiny medieval city is well worth a visit. View more Wordless Wednesday participants.

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Blue Monday

I failed to take a good picture to participate in Blue Monday. Is it because today is the bluest Monday of the year?... As I read on the news, six years ago Professor Cliff Arnall invented a mathematical equation, 1/8C+(D-d) 3/8xTI MxNA, according to which today, January 24, is the worst day for the mood of 2011. Arnall's formula takes into account six variables: C is the climatic factor; D represents the debts of Christmas period; d refers to money we get paid in January; T is the time elapsed since Christmas; I represents the period from the last failed attempt to stop a bad habit; M is motivation, and NA is the need to change our lives.

There's no need to let ourselves down by mathematics though. Despite the media coverage of his theory, Arnall's study was in fact a simple task for a successful advertising campaign of Sky Travel agency.

Actually, I feel like participating in Mellow Yellow Monday too. As Vincent van Gogh once said, there is no blue without yellow.

Have a terrific day.

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Pantone Man in Pew

Image source: Man in Pew by PJOnori on Flickr.

I'm participating in one of the writing prompts provided by A Thousand Words. This is also my contribution to #fridayflash on Twitter:

PANTONE MAN

    It had been a busy week at the publishing house. On friday night, she said to him again that he was too much stooped.

    "... It is just because my center of gravity is in my eyes after editing all those books", he answered.

    "And look at your pigmentation", she replied.

    "My what?".

   "You promised me", she said, "that you would work in something colourful this week. I'm sick of cheap paperbacks. Another friday, and again you are not even a duotone. Listen, this is not funny. Am I supposed to attend my nephew's birthday party dragging a hunchback guy in black and white?".

    She was not cruel, in fact she had a childish and calm heart. Still, it did not prevent her from attending the party without him. He could not understand. All he did during that week was follow his heart.

    Alone, he wandered the streets. He entered a church, sat in a pew and assumed the most helpless, dull, insignificant, and grey pose. But no one was there to watch him, at least no one he was aware of, and besides, it was dark outside and the stained glass windows were just plain black. So he got up and made his way back home.

    As he crossed the street she made a call. "She must be fed up right now with the nephew's party", he thought as he heard the background noise across the phone.

    "Oh well, you got me", she said on the phone. "You know how I love the drawings to color".

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Good Morning

Photos taken at my family's farm. Visit more Wordless Wednesday participants.

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Secret Bakery

Do you remember my saying that from now on I wanted to stick to the topics of this blog, which are books and literature? Well, don't ever listen to me.

Today we'll make typical Catalan cakes. Note down: three eggs, water, wheat flour, coriander, aniseed, salt, sugar, 1 ½ liters of sunflower oil. As a result of a work omitted in my report, we first get this:

We knead it a little more until we get to the next phase. We're still in the funny first steps, so try to enjoy now:

The oil is boiling. We've overcome the tedious phase of stretching the little balls of dough as much as possible without holing them or leaving them stuck on the counter forever. We can take our revenge by frying them using any torture instrument we happen to have at home such as a stick and a spatula.

One minute in the pan is enough, for they're very thin. Then we scatter an inordinate amount of sugar over each one and store them in boxes lined with fine paper. You can eat them as soon as they cool.

They are called orelletes (little ears), although the diminutive sounds like a joke because they can be quite large, depending on the capacity of the pan and the cook's expertise. Orelletes are crispy and higly addictive. They are mentioned in medieval cookbooks, and like most fried cakes they have an Arab origin, from the period of Muslim rule in Catalonia (eighth-eleventh centuries). We eat them in winter fiestas such as Carnival, and this time we made them for a big family meal.

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Resolutions

As my birthday is at the beginning of the year (today!) I always defer my New Year's resolutions, if I have any, a few days, so for me everything starts on the 13th January. This year my target is to blog as much as I did last year and, in general, not to be too ambitious — anything but complicated, as you can see. To continue with the good intentions related to blogging, besides checking some suggestions on promoting blogs and some web hosting reviews, I surely need to improve my use of social networks, and it would be fine if I stopped creating new accounts in websites that I barely know and do not need at all. It's like a bad habit. In return, however, I am not addicted to online interaction (that explains those useless accounts) and I rather feel the need to strenghten the relationship with my people. That's all. Well, to be truly constructive with regard to Secret Forest, I should recognize that sometimes it seems a mixed bag and I'd better stick to its main purposes, which are books and creative writing. But in summary, I can say that this new year I know well my resolutions: stay in the moment and enjoy.

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A Nice Shop

The Cancer Research UK online shop sells over 500 products, and 100% of the profits from the shop go towards cancer research. I found their site while looking for some info related to my father's illness. Having started his chemotherapy treatment last November, he has a good life quality and it only causes him side effects for three or four days every two weeks. Thanks to research, it is quite different than some years ago. 

I'm thinking on purchasing one of these personalized books available on their online store, although I'm not sure if I'd like to see my name instead of Mr. Darcy's when reading Pride and Prejudice (in any case Mr. Darcy would be the only character I would be willing to impersonate!).

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Brought by the Magi

So these are the bestsellers I asked the Magi to bring to my family, yesterday evening. 

I enjoyed a lot A Brief History of Time (1988) so I thought Hawking's new book would be a nice gift. Don't tell anybody, but I read it before the Magi could actualy give it to its recipient. Between both books, my favorite remains Brief History..., although there is a slight contradiction in this. In my opinion, in his first book he talked too much of God and his role in the Creation, where what mattered to me when reading a book by Hawking was science, his description of the universe. The thesis of his new book is totally opposite and now he exiles God from the Creation, with controversy included, which I thought would benefit the book because the author could focus more on the main theme. But The Grand Design suffers from a lack of interest in explaining this new thesis. Still, it is a good book, and the author spends great effort in popularizing science.

I don't know much about The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, except from its singularity, and the passionately favorable responses from critics. Stephen King said it is "wonderful, mysterious, long and satisfying: readers who pick up this novel are going to enter a richer world. I envy them the trip. I don't reread many books, because life is too short. I will be rereading this one." I couldn't read this long novel before it was wrapped as a gift, but I will borrow it in short.

Since I have some relatives who are interested in the Swedish crime writers, the third ordered book had to come from high latitudes, more appropiate for Santa than for the Magi. Camilla Läckberg is a very young author — 36 years old —, and this is her first book, written back in 2002. She's the author of 7 more books. Needless to say, I'm intrigued by this prolific and successful writer.

As regards my own gifts, I have a pact with the Magi: given that my birthday is on 13th January, I get their gifts a week later than usual, so I have no choice but to wait!

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First Book of the Year

This Christmas I didn't purchase any book, not for me at least, so I picked up one of those old-books-I-once-bought-and-never-read.
I've never cared for choosing a book to read at the beginning of the year, I mean I do not see it as a more special book than the others I read the rest of the year. So any book would do. It was quite surprising to find at home a book I never read and become aware that was interesting, The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene. It is more startling because the first 20 pages of the book are the most suggestive, and humorous. This is the story of a 12 years old boy who comes to live with a strange family and soon knows about his adoptive father's odd business — he's a thief to say the least. The story that follows has some blanks to fill in by the readers, and is not as brilliant as those 20 first pages, but it is worth a read, especially because it focuses on the need to love, which is embodied in many different ways, and the link between this need and the past. The Captain and the Enemy is a short novel (I read it in one day) and one of last Greene's books, published in 1988.

Soon I'll say something about those books that I purchased this Christmas and gave as gifts. These ones were harder to choose.

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The Digital Story...

Now that the Magi are about to come over and share their gifts, on January 5 at night, it is still a good time to watch this video. It was made by a Portuguese advertising agency named Excentric and soon will reach nine million views on Youtube. Enjoy!

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