How to Make Mikayla's Awesome Balsamic Chicken Dinner

The online recipe you are attempting to follow calls for a cup of chicken stock. England doesn’t have ready-made chicken stock. The back of the cubed-stock package says 400ml or ¾ pint boiling water per cube. You don’t know what 400ml looks like, but you do know what a pint of stout looks like. However, you remember that a UK pint is 4oz larger than a US pint. You also have no idea what 4oz of water looks like, and you don’t have any liquid (or dry) measuring cups, because while you have looked everywhere, UK stores don’t seem to carry them. Even if they did, this would not matter, because UK Imperial cup measurements are not the same size as US cup measurements. You decide that two coffee mugs stacked on top of each other looks very roughly like an oversized pint glass. Put 1¾ mugs of water into a pot to boil. Add chicken stock cube. Reduce a lot until it starts tasting like what you imagine chicken stock should taste like, having never actually tasted plain chicken stock, but having seen your mother pour it into cooking pots before.

The recipe you are following assumes that you have already roasted a whole chicken (you will be making this sauce to drizzle over it), and tells you to put the fat drippings into a saucepan. You have uncooked chicken breasts. You decide that a moderate drizzle of olive oil should suffice, especially since you don’t really have much else in the way of possible substitutes.

The recipe calls for two minced garlic cloves. Figuring that garlic cloves, like everything else in Europe, are probably smaller than they are in the States, you mince three cloves. The recipe also calls for one minced shallot. You have ½ an onion. After taking your knife to it such that the pieces are halfway between chopped and garlic-sized-minced, you decide that ¼ of an onion is plenty, and really mincing it would be overkill, so you stop there. Add garlic and onion to oiled pan, then add a dash of nearly-reduced chicken broth for added moisture.

The recipe also wants you to add two teaspoons of freshly chopped thyme. You add 1½ teaspoons of dried thyme. You are aware that dried has less flavor than fresh, but 1½ looks good enough.

When the onions start to get soft, you decide that this is as good a time as any to add the chicken—two breasts, whole. You also add most of the chicken stock and the mustard. The recipe calls for two teaspoons of Dijon. You have Colman’s, but close enough.

According to the recipe, you are supposed to wait for this mixture to reduce to ¾ cup and then whisk in two tablespoons of unsalted butter and two teaspoons of sherry vinegar. Not having a whisk, and no longer preparing a sauce to pour over chicken like the recipe intends, you decide to add them now. The butter is fine and dandy, and probably the only part of this recipe you have actually followed. You like vinegar a lot, but only have balsamic. Add three tablespoons.

Reduce. Reduce, reduce, reduce. You go from having chicken stock soup to having a sticky sauce. While reducing, flip the chicken over, taste the sauce occasionally, and add in ½-1 teaspoon of more thyme and an additional 2-2½ teaspoons of mustard (you are eyeballing, so you're not entirely sure how much you add). Forget the pepper you were supposed to add entirely.

As your chicken is nearing done, and the sauce is very reduced, decide that just chicken isn’t going to cut it for dinner, and throw in a bag of raw carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli. Getting impatient with the cook time on the veggies, but not having a lid for your saucepan, you cover the majority of the veggies with the lid from your chicken stock pot. Leave the chicken outside of this mini-steamer, since it’s already cooked enough.

When the veggies are sufficiently steamed, but not limp, put the chicken and veggies on a plate and drip the remaining sticky sauce over the top. Serves two, so put half in the fridge for tomorrow. While eating, congratulate yourself on your super awesomeness. When you see your flatmate come into the kitchen and start heating up chicken nuggets, gloat inwardly. Wash down with a cold mug of milk (you don’t own drinking glasses).

To see the recipe this stemmed from, click here.

I'm Getting an Inkling

Yesterday, I sat in a pub for four hours with Jon and Magda, working on Latin homework. It was actually kind of awesome. I felt very Tolkien/C. S. Lewis-esque. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were professors at Oxford (Tolkien was primarily a linguist, Lewis a medievalist, though there were definitely crossovers). They and their buddies formed a group called the Inklings, and would get together at the Eagle and Child pub to discuss their latest works, including The Lord of the Rings and Out of the Silent Planet. Actually, the Hobbit actually started as a linguistics project, and then grew into a full-length fantasy novel.

But back to Latin. Discovery of the evening? I am, by some strange coincidence, very adept at translating sentences involving the words "book," "sword," and "war." This ability doesn't stem from my being a proficient of any other aspect of Latin, trust me. Furthermore, for some equally bizarre reason, our textbook seems to always throw "book" in the same practice sentences and phrases as "sword" or "war." (For those who don't know, I did my undergraduate thesis on legendary swords in medieval literature). I think it's a sign--I was definitely meant to be in Medieval Studies rather than English Literature.

A Book of Books of Books

On Monday, I had my first Research Skills for Medievalists class. It was probably one of the most exciting classes I've ever had. Not the most exciting, but I'm definitely putting it in the College Top Ten because of it's overwhelming usefulness.

We learned about bibliography books and concordances. Prof. Putter gave us each a booklet, a bibliography book of bibliography books, so to speak, containing all of the concordances and bibliography books pertaining to the Western Middle Ages.

Bibliography books are books that list every book written on a particular subject, along with a brief description of what that book covers. Think of them as almanacs. There are bibliography books on everything from Hispanic Arthurian Literature to Biographies of St. Augustine to Iconography of Christian Art. If you want to research, say, 12th century wool trade between England and Normandy, you could go to the Handbook of Medieval Exchange, where it would list all of the known documents and manuscripts pertaining to your topic and which libraries to find them in.

Then there are motif books. These books are a bit like thesauruses. They list all instances in which certain motifs show up in medieval literature. For example, there is the "Rash Boon" motif, where a person asks an unspecified favor of someone else, who grants it too quickly with no questions asked, and then finds the favor not to his or her liking. The motif book would list the motif (and description), and then give you all the variations on the theme. Variation one: The Lady of the Lake tells King Arthur that she will give him Excalibur in exchange for granting her a favor at a later date. Arthur, anxious to get his hands on a magical sword, agrees. A little while later, the Lady of the Lake rides into Arthur's court, where she tells the king that she wants him to decapitate his best knight and give her the head. Now Arthur seriously regrets granting the Lady of the Lake such a rash boon that day out on the pond, because he's unwilling to kill his best knight, unwilling to give up Excalibur, and unwilling to break his promise to a lady.

"King Arthur Asks the Lady of the Lake for the Sword Excalibur," Walter Crane

Variation two: Gwawl ap Clud tricks Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, into granting him any one thing within his power to give. Pwyll agrees, only to find out that this "one thing" is his bride-to-be, Rhiannon. He is forced to hand her over. It's up to Rhiannon to save the day, outwitting Gwawl and marrying her true love.

"Rhiannon," Alan Lee

Then there are concordances. The authors of these are sad little men and women with no social life and a sick sense of fun, for which we all thank them profusely. Concordances are like indices. They list every time a certain word or phrase is used in a text and on which line and page in the text each one can be found. This would have saved me so much time if I had known of these when I was doing my undergraduate thesis. There are over 800 instances in which a sword is mentioned in Beowulf, not to mention the swords in The Song of Roland, or worse yet, Le Morte d'Arthur (a book whose size gives the Bible a run for it's money). And I counted them all by myself. Now, come to find out, I could have just typed "sword*" into a concordance database (or found a hard copy, if need be) and voila! Now the only question that remains is: why were my earlier professors holding out on me?

Say Hwaet?

Shakespeare did not write in Old English.

Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English. Yes, Shakespeare is modern. In fact, the proper term for the Renaissance is “Early Modern,” because there were lots and lots of renaissances over the course of several centuries.

A renaissance is a “rebirth” of classical knowledge. It means that people are suddenly really interested in what the Romans and Greeks were doing, the local monasteries clean up their act like frat boys the night before Moms’ Weekend, and everyone starts using Latin a lot more.

The Renaissance hit its height in the 16^th century, but arguably spanned from the 14^th all the way to the 17^th century. To distinguish this über-renaissance from the rest of the renaissances, historians refer to this period as Early Modern.

So if Shakespeare is Early Modern, what constitutes Old English?

Let me give you a visual ... and an audio. If you click the link below each passage, it will take you to a YouTube video where you can hear the words pronounced. (Trust me, you’ll want to do this—Middle English may look normal-ish, but it sure doesn’t sound like it.)

4^th to 11^th century: Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon

hƿæt ƿe ȝardena in ȝeardaȝum,

þeodcyninȝa, þrym ȝefrunon,

hu ða æþelinȝas ellen fremedon.

oft scyld scefinȝ sceaþena

þreatum, moneȝum mæȝþum, meodosetla ofteah,

eȝsode eorlas. syððan ærest ƿearð

feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre ȝebad,

ƿeox under ƿolcnum, ƿeorðmyndum þah,

oðþæt him æȝhƿylc þara ymbsittendra

ofer hronrade hyran scolde,

ȝomban ȝyldan. þæt ƿæs ȝod cyninȝ.

Beowulf--opening lines

*Just to clarify, the ȝ and ƿ should blend in size-wise with the rest of the text, but unfortunately, there is no Unicode for these runes, so I had to copy-paste pictures of them into the text, rather than be able to type them or insert them as symbols.

11^th to early 15^th century: Middle English

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The drought of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open eye-

So priketh hem Nature in hir corages;

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Chaucer's "Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales

Late 15^th to 17^th century: Early Modern English

To be thus, is nothing, but to be ſafely thus:

Our feares in Banquo ſtick deep,

And in his Royaltie of Nature reigns that

Which would be fear’d. ’Tis much he dares,

And to that dauntleſs temper of his Minde,

He hath a Wiſdom, that doth Guide his Valour,

To aƈt in ſafety. There is none but he

Whoſe being I do fear, and under him

My Genius is rebuked, as it is said

Mark Anthonies was by Ceſars.

Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act III scene i

By the way, yes, that’s Ian McKellan. Judy Dench plays Lady Macbeth in the same Royal Shakespeare Company production.

The majority of my studies this year will involve me reading Middle English, but next semester, I will also be taking a course on learning how to read and understand Old English. As to that Shakespeare stuff—that’s way too modern for me. ;)

Not All Those Who Wander are Lost

Yesterday, Madeleine (English Lit, from Norway) and I went wandering around the northeast part of Bristol. Here are a few of our findings:

The museum part of the Bristol Museum/Law and Earth Sciences Library Building.

The fountain outside of one of the student union buildings. It's not the Student Union Building, but at least for orientation week it has operated in much the same capacity. Across is the Victoria Methodist Church. This and one other church are right along the bar/club street. One stop shopping for sin and atonement?

One of the more interesting pub signs I've seen in Bristol. This is for the Penny Farthing Pub.

The chimneys in the residential sections remind me of Mary Poppins.

Chim chim-in-ey, chim chim-in-ey, chim chim cher-ee!

Rent-a-church, anyone?

Yes, that is a giant two-headed blue goose sculpture on a rooftop. No, I don't know why it's there.

A typical Bristol house.

A bridge over some (rather pretty) train tracks, leading to a (rather small) park.

A view from the park. It makes Bristol seem like a quaint, picturesque little town, when it's actually a bustling city.

We came across this incredible garden fence in some part of the residential section (we weren't entirely sure where we were at this point). It's covered in iron creatures that live in and around the water. I have some close-ups of a couple sections of it below.

Baby elephant graffiti! Isn't it cute?

This is an almshouse founded in 1483 by the Mayor of Bristol, John Foster. The chapel on the left edge of the screen was founded by him a few years later. It's so over-the-top whimsical--especially for an almshouse. It looks like it came out of the "It's A Small World" Disney ride.

Close-up of the detail work on arched doorway of the 13th century St. Mark's Church right next to my building. What, exactly, were those medieval monks smoking in their incense burners? At last, mysticism explained.

Hops and Hills

My flat/dorm is at the bottom of a rather steep hill, and my classes are at the top of it (of course). Here's a photo taken halfway between the two points, where the ground levels out for a little while.

The right-hand fork will take you down the hill to the building I live in. To the immediate left of this photograph is the Bristol Museum, which is connected to the Earth Sciences and Law Library. Below are two photographs of the library part of the building.

Needless to say, I am very, very jealous of the Law and Earth Sciences students. Everyone on campus is going on and on about how fantastic the Humanities Library is, because they renovated the interior this summer. I appreciate the timeliness of the renovation (usually everything happens the year after I graduate). However, our building is really modern on the outside as well as the inside. I can get modern at home. I can't get this!

In other news, I went to the Freshers' Fair yesterday, where all of the campus clubs have tables and business representatives from around town forcefully accost you with leaflets and promotional coupons. I didn't really care to sign up for anything; I'm planning on spending my time studying and sightseeing, not hanging out with the Pantomime Club. And yes, they do have that here. However, I did join one group. They are the Bristol Real Ales Society, or as I call it, Pub Club. We'll get together once every week or every other week and go taste beer and cider at pubs and cellars around town, plus members get discounts at some pubs when they go there on their own as well. It was too British for me to pass up.

This Pub Club and its discounts will also come in handy in a couple weeks, when Emily comes to visit. I bet her yesterday that England would win the England vs. France Rugby World Cup tournament this morning. I lost. I now owe her a pint.

As Promised

As I promised in my last post, here is a photo of the view out my window.

As you can sort of see, there are several church spires. I hear them ringing their bells all the time. It's quite beautiful. The Hippodrome below has all sorts of plays. It's currently running Dirty Dancing, so every night at 9:00 this week I've listened to "The Time of My Life" as they open up the doors to let people out. Next they will be performing Peter Pan, starring David Hasselhoff as Captain Hook.

Below is a picture of the Humanities Graduate Center (where I intend to be living most of the time).

To the left of it is the main Humanities lecture building, where I have been told I will probably be having most of my classes.

Aren't European buildings amazing? However, as with the HGS (above), the outside is Victorian, but the inside is quite modern. This seems to be common with buildings in this area. On the way from my flat to classes there is an old monastery with ultra-modern department stores on the inside. It's very odd to look in the windows.

And Now for Something Completely Different

I'm in Bristol. I flew in at a little before 9:00 am on Saturday. It's been a topsy-turvy few days, full of registration hiccups. The most notable was that I discovered that everyone else had registered for classes two weeks ago; I didn't get the email giving me thelink to the class registration form. Lucky me. This led me to spend hours on the University of Bristol website (possibly the most disorganized and labyrinthine website on the planet) trying to figure out a class schedule. This, in turn, brought me (and I'm not entirely sure how--as I said, the worst website layout ever) to the Medieval Studies department page, and their offered classes. I began to panic. These were the classes I really needed to be taking. This was the school I needed to be in. And I wasn't.

To make a very long story short, I went to the admissions office, emailed the heads of both the English and Medieval Studies departments, and am now a member of the School of Medieval Studies. The head of English was sorry to see me go. He even offered to give me Intro to Old English and make a deal on Latin, but admitted that if medieval lit prof was what I wanted to be eventually, then Medieval Studies was where I needed to be now.

My new head of department, though I've only met her briefly, seems awesome, as does the Humanities department as a whole. Apparently being part of the Humanities department gives me access to our main building, which has a common room, study rooms, seminar and meeting rooms, printers and copy machines, two kitchens with free coffee and tea, a full set of cookware, fridges to store meals in, lockers, and even a shower. And I believe it's the only graduate building on campus with full 24/7 access. I could potentially never leave.

On another side of campus (which is interspersed amongst the city--there's no true "campus") is my flat. There are five other students and myself who share a kitchen/common area. There's Simon from London, Nosherwan from Pakistan, Ana from China, Myzone from Malaysia, and Rissen from somewhere in the Middle East. "Share" is a loose term; I hardly ever see my flatmates. They tend to all hide in their rooms, and if they must scuttle into the kitchen, they just as quickly scurry out. It's very awkward. The only really social one is Nosherwan, who I believe spends most of his time with his friends in other flats. I went the entire day today only seeing one of them (Simon). I got three sentences out of him before he fled the kitchen.

The good news is that the Medieval Studies, and really all of the Humanities students I've met so far, seem very social. Apparently each school within the Humanities department does a lot of social activities together as well as reading groups, study groups, and classes.

Before I sign off for the night, I'll give you a tour of my room.

My bed, taken just to the right of my door. Down the little hallway there is my bathroom. And the wall is purple! How perfect is that?

Just beyond the foot of my bed is my HUGE desk. So big, so exciting!

I'll take a picture of my view tomorrow. It's too dark to see much of anything now, but I'm on the perfect floor. I'm on the 5th floor (6th in U.S. terms), which is right at the skyline. It's as low as I can be while still getting a great view. This is especially important, as the elevator has been broken all week. Hopefully it will be fixed by Thursday or Friday.