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One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Scottish Shortbread by BreadAhead Bakery

Tried a recipe from London bakery, Bread Ahead, that have been doing live tutorials during the corona pandemic. Their recipes and schedule can/could be found on https://www.breadahead.com/live-bake. Instagram stories are up for 24 hours https://www.instagram.com/breadaheadbakery/   ✌️

SHORTBREAD (made 16 fingers)

375g plain flour

250g cold butter diced

65g caster sugar

30g demerara sugar

30g soft light brown sugar (I used demerara again as I couldn’t find it)

4g fine sea salt

6 cm round pastry cutter (on the live tutorial they made shortbread fingers in tray)

Preheat oven to 120 C fan assisted/100 C no fan (I did 130 C as the lowest the oven goes). Get baking tray-sized baking paper ready.

Sieved flour + diced butter in large bowl - mix with fingers until like breadcrumbs (thickish).

Add sugars and salt, keep mixing until dough consistency

Roll out dough to the size of your baking tray (or griddle pan, in my case), ~1cm thickness and slide onto baking paper. My dough seemed floppier than the tutorial so I rolled it out directly onto baking paper, lifted the paper up and into the griddle pan.

Put in oven for around 1 hour (similar/less if you used cutters). Rotate the tray every 30 minutes - don’t want it to brown.

Once out of the oven, sprinkle with caster sugar and whilst block is still hot cut into slices (approx 1.5 finger width) I used a cleaver to chop lines and fork to poke holes.

Leave to cool on rack.

Enjoy with a cup of tea!

Tutorial Tips

#3 can use this topping for apple crumble 👌. Can use same type of sugar.

If wanting to freeze then do it pre-bake. You can bake dough out of the freezer, no need to defrost. Frozen dough lasts a long time.

Biscuits should keep in tin for about a week.

Note: you can’t speed up baking time by increasing temperature, it’ll change the whole thing.

I rewatched The Piano (1993) the other day.

‘After a long voyage from Scotland, pianist Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) and her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), are left with all their belongings, including a piano, on a New Zealand beach. Ada, who has been mute since childhood, has been sold into marriage to a local man named Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill). Making little attempt to warm up to Alisdair, Ada soon becomes intrigued by his Maori-friendly acquaintance, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), leading to tense, life-altering conflicts’

I chose the film for general motivation to practice the piano and because of the nice music, but after rewatching... Baines! So manly, rugged yet sensitive 

I think this sums it up https://lwlies.com/articles/the-sex-appeal-of-harvey-keitel/

I had remembered there was some full front nakedness, which was well done (I like how generally hair free the men are xD). Having said that, I do feel wrong for Googling an 80 year old man; the film was out over 30 years ago- what was I expecting? Also, it was more the character than looks that I found attractive.

Surprisingly, O and I had very different views of Baines: I was attracted to the frankness of character while O thought he was just a downright perv xD.

The King of Spain arrived yesterday in Oman. Read the newspaper in the morning and found out about it.

By the time I had finished work, I had completely forgotten about it. What normally happens is there are convoys which are either heading to Bait Al Barka or towards Bait Al Alam, both of HM's palaces. I was driving towards the Barka direction and on the opposite side on the highway, I saw numerous vehicles from government organisations such as Royal Oman Police, Royal Guard of Oman, zipping down. My side of the road was unusually quiet, so when I saw police cars driving past on the opposite, with flashing blue lights at the front, I felt a bit worried. Was I supposed to be on the road? At first I thought there was an accident or something urgent as I saw 3/4 pass by.

Then I saw the entourage of Audis, Lexus, government official cars, with the red and green plates. Then I remembered about the King. Though the strange thing was the cars off the highway that were blocking roads, presumably to stop cars from joining the highway, but most unusual was the guns on the top of the cars. Were they really necessary? Apparently they aren't armed with guns even at the palaces themselves, so why they were there among the civilians, I have no idea.

I started to feel a bit unsafe, even though I knew the guns weren't actually going to be used. After my bliss of driving on a quiet road, in front was the queue, whereby I'd have to wait with the other cars patiently, until we were 'released'.

Sounds like the King had fun. They went from one palace to the next with the military band and also motorcade (procession of vehicles). They enjoyed a 21 gun salute and were led by horses to the guest house.

I dreamt I was on land floating among a crowd of people waiting to go somewhere. Somebody told me to get on to a ship/vehicle to discuss the circulated version of the MH370 with a group of Chinese people. They couldn't understand how the reporters had penned such an inarticulate piece. I tried, but failed, to explain it to them in broken Chinese. Well, I think they got the gist and just didn't buy it.

I was told to move further down the cabin to talk to some other Chinese people who had theories. As I sat down beside them, a cabin attendee came into the cabin looking for non-Chinese passengers. He was approaching from behind but due to my exterior appearance, he didn't notice me. He shooed a Russian man out.

It emerged that the supposed cabin attendants were trying to keep the people in this cabin away from the outside world, as they came up with theories that were too close to the truth and couldn't be leaked. I sat with them and listened to their more probable interpretation of events.

---

Another phase of the dream was speaking to an Omani colleague, I thought, had had only one husband, but she actually had been married twice beforehand. 

--

Comment from my colleague on my wearing of an abaya.

I've been in Oman for over a year and I feel that I've not experienced half as many things as my other half's mother has when she's come for visits.

I've realised I'm not so much exploring new things with the other half, more that he's exploring and adventuring places with other people and then him showing me after. It's like a second-hand experience.

I'm a bit upset with this kind of arrangement. Nothing's new to him and everything is to me :(. Due to the non school-like holiday arrangements of my workplace compared to his, I get very little leave and can't discover things at the same time as him and his family.

I've not seen the dolphins. His mum has been twice. Here they are :(