Retired from a long working life as secretary/assistant in UN and EU institutions. Freelance stress counsellor and proofreader/copyeditor. Now living in Berlin.
60 g peanut or almond butter (I used almond butter, and next time, I might replace some of it with tahin
50 g honey
4 tblsp pumpkin seeds
4 tblsp chia seeds
100 g oats
50 g chopped almonds
Optional: for extra nutrition, add 1 tblsp baobab powder, and for extra flavour, 1 tblsp of the best and darkest cocoa powder you can find.
Coarsely chop the dates and purée them with hot water. Start with 1 tblsp water and gradually add just enough to make a thick, fairly smooth purée.
Slowly heat up and mix the nut butter and honey.
Mix all ingredients well – best done by hand.
Line a small, square plate, 15×15 cm or similar, with baking paper, and PRESS the mixture into it. You want to be able to cut it into compact bars once it has set.
Again recently, a lot has been written about the health benefits of oats, so my current obsession is to try to incorporate oats into as many meals as possible.
2 cloves garlic and a small knob of fresh ginger, finely chopped
5 dl vegetables, in this case red pepper and zucchini, chopped
1 dl cooked green lentils
1 small tsp turmeric
Salt
Chili to taste, in whichever form you have available
1 tsp garam masala
Dry-roast the oats till they smell good.
Heat the oil and sizzle the cumin seeds. Add onion, garlic and ginger and sauté.
Add the vegetables and the rest of the ingredients except the oats, and sauté till the vegetables soften. If it starts to dry up, add water rather than oil.
Add the oats, stir well, and cook through.
Garnish with (preferably) fresh coriander, or any other herb you have available.
Much of the way along Landwehrkanal, this woman followed me (she stopped and lingered and looked at me every time I stopped to take a photo, which was quite often, so I’m sure). I shook her off shortly before the end of my walk. Who is she, and why was she following me?
The pandemic now pervades all of our lives to an extent that a sequel to the first Corona diary is in order, and therefore, this will be continued in “Corona Diary II“.
21 October
Autumn colours
17 October 2020
Which will win today – the mist or the sun?
Red basil in bloom
15 October 2020
Another grey and rainy day.
8 October 2020
Covid19 numbers are back to what they were during lock-down in early spring. And so is the weather, so this feels like “back to sqare one”. Looking out the window, mainly for splashes of colour.
The containers in the backyard of the neighbouring construction site about to be overgrown, and a bottle left from New Year’s Eve 2019/20.
6 October 2020
Between two buildings in the morning.
8 September 2020
28 August
With or without the tree?
22 August
It finally rained, and the construction site was quiet. Bliss.
14 August
Not exactly from home, but I am not at home a lot these days. This is not a good time of year to have to keep all windows and doors closed due to ear-splitting noise and clouds of dust (see “Neighbours from Hell”).
So on one of my getaways, I missed a train and therefore had time to photograph the starlings which reside on Bahnhof Alexanderplatz. Tiny but cute, with beautiful plumage.
31 July early morning
27 July
Probably my favourite lens – the 35 mm macro
26 July
Beautiful rain. I could not resist putting some of my plants back on the balcony. I usually scoff at people who spray water on flowers before taking photos of them. So I wait till it rains. A concept possibly better known as a form of hypocrisy.
15 July
14 July
Swallows (I think – correct me if I’m wrong). The acrobats of ornithology. They fly so damn quickly that I’ll never be able to get a sharp photo, even if they come quite close to our balconies. They are probably also the reason why insects never really make it as far the flowers on our balconies. Both a blessing and a curse.
I have tried to make my balcony insect friendly by sowing some wild flowers, and also counting on the herbs that eventually bloom, such as oregano and thyme.
So when there is finally a suitable macro photography model on my balcony, is it thanks to those efforts? No. It is because of a mint plant which I bought in a supermarket earlier today.
6 July
Splashes of yellow.
And some experimenting.
5 July
A crane disappeared and revealed a tower I did not know I could see. Now I have to go and see what it is. Sigma 150-600 at 600 mm.
28 June
27 June
It was just a tiny little thing, about ten mm long. And don’t worry, no animal was harmed in the making of this photo. It is safe and sound, back in the coriander plant where I found it. I love my Canon 35 mm Macro lense.
The underside
Clover, as part of my efforts to create an insect-friendly balcony. Failing miserably.
24 June
A small section of my early morning coffee view, with a little bit of exposure tweaking in Lightroom.
23 June
And in the early evening, I played with Mr Sigma 150-600
22 June
Enjoying the sunrise (very early morning). I do hate pigeons, but they sure make better models than, say, swallows.
Sigma 150-600 mm, at 600 mm, heavily cropped:
20 June
Thistles.
19 June
It was just a tiny little moth, not much bigger than a mosquito.
The wall has been looking like this since some time between 22 and 25 September when I came home from a trip. I wonder how long I will have to look at that.
This time, everything is covered in sawdust which I assume will not be too difficult to remove, but I had not planned on having to clean the balcony once more this side of winter.
This afternoon, I spent (wasted?) about an hour cleaning my balcony – again (see https://www.hellemoller.eu/2020/09/14/i-cant-believe-this-is-actually-happening/) (that was probably stupid, but I could no longer stand looking at the mess). It currently looks like in the photo above. I have not washed anything, and my gut instinct tells me it would be asking for trouble to put the furniture back once again. But at least I can sit on my balcony now.
This time, there was too much rubble to carry to their doorstep in one go, so I just threw their “gifts” onto the scaffolding. A lot of it was stuck, so it took quite a bit of hacking and scraping. Washing the floor and the marble shelves (which were brand new from February last year) would probably reveal some damage done, and that would ruin my mood which for some strange reason is relatively good right now. Perhaps because I have just been out of town, and am going away again next week, and for another two weeks after that will be relocating to house- and catsit elsewhere in Berlin.
I do appreciate the fact that I am able to get away most of the time, and that I live in a (for me) new country with a good train service and an endless supply of places to visit (although when during the winter I decided to sell my parking space, that was not what I planning on spending the money on :-)).
However, truth be told, given the lovely weather this month, not to mention Covid19 and my age, I would have preferred to be able to spend most of the time on my balcony and sometimes have one or two visitors over for brunch/lunch/coffee/drinks.
No, CNN and BBC World, it is – still – not “Europe’s migrant crisis”. It is certainly a crisis, to put it mildly, for the migrants. But for Europe, it is a crisis of xenophobia, bloody-mindedness, mean-spiritedness, inhumanity, and lack of empathy and solidarity, as well as of political will to solve an issue which ought to be a piece of cake for an area as large, wealthy, and some even say enlightened (yeah, well, just keep thinking that and it may come true one day) as Europe.
