A Month of Portugal...An Ode to Bolas de Berlim

I was going to do a post all about the wonders of Portuguese pastries, as found in (almost) any pastelaria in the country.

Like these.

Or these.

And then I went to Portugal for a week.

And all I ate were Bolas de Berlim.

Well, that and Torradas.
Lovely toasty Torradas. But that's another story for another day.

Back to the subject at hand...

Bolas de Berlim are a Portuguese delicacy (which turns out to not be Portuguese at all) which can be found all over the country but which seem to be impossible to completely replicate abroad.

When I lived in the United States - in a Portuguese immigrant community no less - I searched long and hard for a tasty facsimile of my favorite treat and was forever thwarted in my quest. I searched hard.

This means that whenever I go back to the homeland, I tend to overindulge...and then suffer for it.

But it's worth it. Anything for the sweet little ball of tastiness.

You might be asking, "Hey Monthy, you've been going on for a couple of paragraphs about this thing and we still don't know what it is".

Apologies.

I get slightly tunnel-visioned when discussing the doughy dollops.

Bolas de Berlim (literally Balls from Berlin) are a doughnut-like concoction found in Portugal. Based off the original Berliners from, you've guessed it Berlin, Bolas are a Portuguese take on a very German dessert.

But whereas Berliners are usually on the smaller side and injected (yeah, you read right) with jam and other fancy fillings, Portuguese Bolas are filled (traditionally) with Creme de Pasteleiro (Pastry Maker's Cream) which is always visible.

Probably visible from the moon, given it's neon-like color.

YUM!
(though it should be granulated sugar, not powdered sugar. harumph)

I've loved these little guys...ok, big guys, since I was a wee girl. I've heard stories of my mother ingesting a half-dozen of them at a time while she was pregnant with me, but I'm sure that's a complete coincidence and not at all related to my obsession with them.

Nope, no relation at all.

Delicious and the sugar's just right.
But this poor little Bola didn't know what hit it as it's been cut in half - always a sin.
The horror. The horror.

As well as being found in most pastelarias in the country, they can also - oddly enough i'm sure for foreigners - be found for sale at most beaches during the summer season. A seller will wander the sands carrying a tray of fresh Bolas for sale.

Like this guy:

Except maybe not as media-tastic as this guy 😁

I probably will never ever try to make them myself - recipe involves deep frying and me and hot oil don't get along - but I've found a very nice video showing how to make them the traditional way.

Without of course forgetting the wondrous Creme de Pasteleiro.

Identity hidden to protect the gluttonous 😉

For those who don't understand Portuguese, I also found an English language website listing a recipe pretty similar to the one shown on the videos above.

So, if you ever find yourself in Portugal and spot the well-known pasteis de nata, give them a pass at least once during your trip. And instead go ahead and indulge yourself in that most wondrous food of the gods, the amazing Bola de Berlim.

A Month of...Portugal

After a long hiatus - about 3 years! - I thought I'd restart this little blog and see what great things I could get into for the space of a month.

Group of Cockerels gathered for their annual family portrait.

I'll be heading to Portugal soon for a short holiday break to see family and do a bit of touristing, so I thought April could be all about (drum roll for those that didn't read the entry title 😀)... Portugal.

But "dear Monthy", you ask - we're tight like that, and you've given me a little nickname 😉 - if you're only going for a week, then how are you going to make this last a whole month??

Well, I thought I'd do all types of Portuguese-y things throughout the month. We'll start off with some (hopefully quirky) places to visit whilst in Portugal, and then read some books, watch some films, eat some food - well, I'll eat some food, you'll all read about it - and whatever else I can come up that's Luso-related.

I hope you'll  join me this month in finding out more about my homeland, aka where all the best pastries live.

May's Theme

Well, April wasn't too successful as the overwhelming lack of posts might suggest ;o)
But that doesn't mean nothing was accomplished during April. Some books were read and will be discussed, posts to come very, very soon. But it wasn't as successful as March was.

Basically, I think what I've learned is to not burn myself out with any particular theme. The whole point of this online exercise is to get me to try new things and stick to them for at least a month. But if I start doing similar things, i.e. reading projects, a couple of months in a row, then well, I'm dooming myself to failure. And since this is supposed to be a good thing in my life, not another source of stress, I'll be sure to not repeat myself in the future. Not to say that I wouldn't do another reading theme, in fact I have a few ideas up my virtual sleeves, but not one-right-after-the-other-oh-my-god-all-I'm-doing-is-reading-please-make-it-stop-now.

So in the spirit of 'innovation' and all that, this month's theme is [drum, drum, drum, drum, etc]:

A Drawing-a-Day!

Coincidentally enough one of my online friends started to do this very same thing right around the time I first came up with it, so maybe it's in the air. The need, the urge to draw, to reconnect back with that pure creativity so many of us seem to lose once we exit our childhoods. I see my little 2-year-old and how free she is with her drawing - which admittedly for now is a bunch of very colorful lines all over the place - and I want to get back to that. I took some classes (long, long ago) in college, but since then I've barely ever picked up a pencil, crayon, chalk to draw anything that wasn't a plan for something. A plan for a bedroom, a plan for a painted piece of furniture, a plan for an embroidery. But I never draw just to draw.  It's a muscle that needs to be exercised more often, so I thought this might be a good opportunity to get a work out.

I'll also be going on holiday as of tomorrow, so hopefully some of the drawings will reflect some of what I'm seeing and experiencing...or maybe they'll just be stick figures 'cause I'll be too tired for anything else :o)

But enough talking and let's get drawing!

April's Theme

It took me a little while to choose April’s theme. I have a good long list of possible themes for upcoming months, but at the last minute I felt like I needed to change what I’d do for April. At first I thought I didn’t want to do another month of reading (March was hard), but once I realized I didn’t have to try to read one book a day, but instead just read as many as I could, it opened me up to other reading possibilities.

I’ve been wanting to read more Portuguese-language writers for a while, since I’m originally from Portugal, and felt that I’d been neglecting my own mother language for a bit. But then I thought it might be more interesting to read Portuguese-language writers in translation, to maybe introduce some English-speakers to what’s available from Portuguese-speaking countries.

But how to choose which authors to read? Portuguese is the sixth most spoken language in the world after all. Hmm, how about reading all (or as many as I can) of the winners of the Camoes prize? For those not familiar, the Camoes prize is a bit like the National Book Award, Booker prize and Pulitzer all in one. Or for those Spanish-speakers, it’s like the Cervantes prize :o)

It’s been awarded since 1989 and I’ll be attempting to read one work by each author. I plan on reading as many of the writers as I can in English, but if no translation is available (or obtainable) then I’ll read it in Portuguese and do my best to translate whatever quotes I use in my posts.

I hadn’t even heard of half of the writers who’ve been awarded the prize, so this should be quite the interesting month.

Some of the works are longer than others, so I won’t necessarily be posting on a daily basis, but expect to hear from me every few days at most :o)

Que comece a leitura!*

lovely certificate awarded to each laureate...along with 100,000 euros, baby!

*Let the reading begin!

March Madness Round-up

March has come to an end and with it my goal to read a bazillion novellas written by women. I say a bazillion, because I sort of set myself up for failure. I’d originally meant to read one each day and well, things happened, like things are always going to happen, some every day things, and then some more extreme events, like my 2-year-old breaking her femur. She’s going to be ok, but that (along with other minor things) sort of threw off the whole schedule. So instead I ended up reading as many as I could, which if you check back my posts, came out to 22 titles. Not too bad, I guess, considering my time limitations.

As one of my dear friends pointed out, ‘Hey, that’s one for every weekday.’ Plus one :o)

And it served its’ original purpose, which was to get me back into reading fiction, which I’d sort of consciously (and subconsciously) avoided for quite a few months. And I got to read works by authors I’d never even heard of before, some of whom turned out to be amazing writers that I look forward to revisiting in the future.

Some titles that stand out were: Fire in the Blood, The House on Mango Street, Passing, The Return of the Soldier.

I used quite a few resources to come up with my list to read. Here are a few of them:

• Lawrence Public Library Spotlight: 50 Books, 150 pages or less
• 1001 Books Challenge: Page Counts
• Boxall's 1001 Books You Should Read Before You Die Discussion on Goodreads - shorter books

And finally here are some of the books that went unread, in case anyone wants a few more ideas of titles to read :o)

books that sadly went unread...some day, little ones, some day :)

A Month of Novellas, Book 22: Beasts - Joyce Carol Oates (2002)

ack! giant squirrel coming to eat us!

Beasts, a recent-ish work of Joyce Carol Oates, she of the incredulously prolific output, tricks you from the beginning.

It’s narrated by Gillian, a student at a women’s college, who is obsessed with one of her literature professors, Andre Harrow. All she can think of is him and even goes as far as to stalk his wife, a sculptor of grotesque sexual figures, around town.

All of her waking hours seem to be dedicated to analyzing the minutia of their interactions, the whole ‘he said this, could it mean that?’ nonsense that all young women (and older women too) have done throughout millennia. So at first, it all seems like this is going to be about a college girl’s crush, one that has firmly passed the infatuation stage and has landed smack dab in crazy-town. But things aren’t quite that simple and clear cut.

Gillian wonders about her fellow dorm mates, the ones that also attend Harrow’s poetry workshop. She wonders if they’re jealous of his attention to her – this attention that at first is thoroughly in her head. And then at some point he nicknames her Philomela, ostensibly because Gillian is quiet in class:

“I reread the tale of Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. I hadn’t realized how ugly it was. Philomela, a virgin, is brutally raped by a man who should’ve protected her, her brother-in-law Tereus; after he rapes her, Tereus cuts out her tongue to prevent her accusing him.
[…]
But mute Philomela is no passive victim. With the aid of her loyal sister she takes bloody revenge on her rapist. And in the end she’s metamorphosed into a bird with, as Mr. Harrow said approvingly, “blood-colored” breast feathers.
A happy ending then.
Is it?” p.46

This page tells you almost everything you need to know about what’s about to happen in this horrific psychological nightmare of a story.

Professor Harrow does end up paying more attention to Gillian (as well as her fellow class mates). Instead of writing and discussing their poetry, he has them write personal journals instead, with the deepest, darkest thoughts they have, to be shared with all in the class. For his amusement.

Meanwhile some of the girls in the class have started to drop off like flies. Sybil disappears one day and soon it’s as if she never even existed, at least not in the girls’ lives, not in the college.

And who keeps on setting all the small fires and pulling all the false fire alarms in the college?

Is Professor Harrow, or Andre as he wants his “special” pupils to call him, really interested in Gillian after all?
What’s really going on in his house after hours? And why do so many of his students keep on disappearing?

I really enjoyed my first foray into the worlds created by Ms. Oates and I look forward to reading another of her innumerable works.

A Month of Novellas, Book 21: Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan (1955)

doing girlie things

Bonjour Tristesse is one of those titles that become part of one’s cultural lexicon without one necessarily knowing why. Is it a film, is it a book, is it a song, that you’ve heard of long ago? Well, in this case it’s all three, but it all started with a book. A book written by Francoise Sagan and published when she was only 18.

We’re introduced to Cecile, a teenage school girl on summer holiday with her father. Her mother died when she was little and since then her father has been quite the raconteur. Cecile used to frequent a convent school but has been now living with her womanizing father for the last two years. He takes her everywhere he goes and some of those places aren’t exactly kid-friendly. Still, Cecile thinks herself lucky to have such a hip dad, even if some of the lessons learned aren’t exactly the best:

“Although I did not share my father’s intense aversion to ugliness – which often led us to associate with stupid people – I did feel vaguely uncomfortable in the presence of anyone completely devoid of physical charm. Their resignation to the fact that they were unattractive seemed to me somewhat indecent.” p.8

Charming, charming people.

They’ve been joined in this holiday by her father’s latest conquest Elsa, a vapid, albeit beautiful young woman, just like the type he usually beds. Everything is going along well – Cecile has met a young man who she plans on seducing – until her father announces there’ll be another guest joining them. Anne Larsen, a friend of his wife, and a type of mentor for Cecile, is coming to stay with them. Cecile immediately realizes this is a truly bad idea, but there’s nothing to dissuade her father.

Not too surprisingly, they can’t manage to maintain a contented home with two women vying for the same man, because that is what Anne is there for after all, and Elsa goes packing. Soon, they’re a happy little family, Anne, Cecile and her father. But Cecile is starting to denote a change.

“But I could not keep from thinking that although my life was perhaps at that very moment changing its whole course, I was in reality nothing more than a kitten to them, an affectionate little animal. I felt them above me, united by a past and a future, by ties that I did not know and which could not hold me.” p.44

Cecile who had previously been so enamored of Anne and her sophistication, now starts to grow resentful of Anne’s control over her own life. And when her father announces he plans on marrying Anne, Cecile’s whole world comes crashing as she foresees how their “happy” home will soon be pacified and neutralized by Anne’s tastefulness and intelligence.

“Yes, it was this I held against Anne: she kept me from liking myself. I, who was naturally meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced by her into self-criticism and a guilty conscience. Unaccustomed to introspection, I was completely lost.” p. 52

Cecile devises a plan involving her lover and Elsa to break up the happy couple. Once the plan is put into motion, she keeps on wavering on and off of it on the page, making the reader sometimes think that she regrets it and wants to put an end to it. But she’s one of the most fickle characters I’ve ever read and is soon enthused again about not only the original plan but in particular about her skills in manipulating so many different people into doing her bidding.

The ending will come as a shock, unless you remember the first paragraph of the novel:

“A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.” p.5

A wonderfully written novella about the shallowness and selfishness of youth as well as about a young woman’s burgeoning sexuality.