Jenyfer Matthews

I took this picture on an early morning walk down my quiet suburban street in Cairo on Tuesday morning. It really struck a chord with me because it is true.

After a week of mounting tension and anxiety my family chose to evacuate our home of five years with four suitcases to parts unknown. I am relieved, anxious, sarcastic, stressed, and heartsick by turns. My relationship to Egypt was like one of daughter to mother – there were things that caused me to roll my eyes and irritated me but so many good things too and don’t let anyone else criticize the place to me now. Though I have tried to provide insight and glimpses over the years here on my blog, you cannot truly understand until you live in a place and even then, I was always a foreigner looking in.

I sincerely hope that the friends who chose to stay, who thought me to be panicking when we decided to leave, are correct and that things settle down sooner than later. It does make me wonder at what point I would ever feel comfortable enough to go back. Our future plans are up in the air but at present it doesn’t seem likely that we will go back to do more than tie up loose ends. I feel like the heroine of one of my own stories – picking up the pieces of my life and starting over when I least expect it.

I would like to say that I never myself felt in any imminent danger in my area and that everyone I ran across, foreign and Egyptian, was very cooperative and helpful to one another in a very trying situation. I’ll have more pictures and posts in the coming days, when I have had some time to settle down and process everything. For now we are taking a few days in Istanbul to regroup and make further travel plans back to the US.

It occurs to me that many of you might wonder why it is that I am writing about pumpkin bread and jam making, given what is going on in Cairo right now. Frankly, I don’t have very much to add to the discussion and I’m trying to keep a low profile in more ways than one: bloggers who have been too vocal / critical have actually been jailed.

Happily, my own quiet suburb has remained that – quiet. It seems to me that there are more police around now, in places where I do not usually see them loitering, and they have a more experienced and seasoned look about them as compared to the young nose-pickers who are usually napping on the end of their rifles (yes, really) The police are watching and waiting like the rest of us.

As for the rest of the city / country – is there room for improvement in Egypt? Yes. Do the demonstrators have legitimate complaints? Yes. Will their demonstrations lead to change. Maybe. My main concern is that if they indeed they do succeed in removing the current ruling body they may not get the change they want. Without a strong fair leader who is ready with a plan of action to step into that vacancy, things could get a lot worse before they ever get better. Nothing happens overnight but there are better and worse paths to follow.

All I ask is that if it comes down to it, they allow me to depart of my own free will at that point.

For now I am sticking close to home and watching to see what happens.

Edited to add: If my blog isn’t updated as usual or you don’t “see” me on Facebook, etc, the internet has been up, down, and S-L-O-W lately with all the “excitement”. It apparently takes a lot of bandwidth to organize a protest…

At last – the pumpkin famine is over! My local grocery store had double cans in stock this week (for a mere $5.67/can) so after checking the expiration date, I bought three cans. Yes, it’s a bit steep for canned pumpkin, but in the end it boils down to how badly do you want it – as it does for many things in life. And I wanted pumpkin bread, not sweet-potato-substitute-bread.

Pumpkin bread really ought to be called pumpkin cake for all the eggs and sugar it includes. I admit I tweaked the recipe a bit – I cut the sugar by a cup and replaced one of the three remaining cups with brown sugar. I also replaced some flour with ground flaxseed and wheat germ. Ssshhhh! My children haven’t noticed one bit of difference. It’s just vitamin enriched cake now.

This batch didn’t take as long as you might think either – my oven will bake 24 muffins and a loaf pan simultaneously. I love my oven.

While I was in the kitchen I also decided to take advantage of the fantastic strawberries available locally now and make some jam. I don’t have canning jars or fruit pectin or experience, but I wasn’t going to let any of those things stop me! I decided to make freezer jam because it was the best option for a novice like me.

Did I follow the recipe? Sort of. The basic recipe was 4 cups of chopped strawberries, 4 cups of sugar, and a splash of lemon juice (to supply the pectin). I cut the sugar by half – strawberries are sweet enough on their own. It wasn’t such a radical departure on my part – the recipes I looked at varied a lot by how much sugar they used. I used more lemon juice however – more pectin seemed like a good way to go.

I hulled two packages of strawberries, about 800g per package, so probably ended up with about 3lbs all together. I didn’t weigh them, I just guesstimated how many cups there were once I gave them a spin in my food processor. It was more than 4 cups but probably not quite 6 cups. I compromised and used about 3 cups of sugar. It’s kind of appalling how much sugar you have to use, but it helps to preserve it and also makes it set.

It doesn’t take so long for the juices and the sugars to dissolve together. Once it boiled, I let it cook, stirring frequently, for probably 15-20 minutes. If you have a candy thermometer, good for you. I boiled it until it was thick enough to start gelling on a cold spoon, but short of crystallizing into hard candy (been there, done that!)

Did I mention that I didn’t have any equipment or canning jars? Here’s where I went all pioneer woman and improvised. With freezer jam, you can just put it in a container and throw it in the freezer. I did that with some, but I also wanted to try a nifty trick I saw mentioned in the comments of a recipe I looked at and create a seal with a regular old jar – I used an empty pickle jar. Obviously I could have used a smaller jar had I had one or I could have filled this one up more, but I didn’t have a smaller jar handy (I had to get the pickle jar out of our recycling!) and I was hedging my bets! I didn’t want to ruin all my jam, if the jar trick didn’t work out. I boiled this jar to sterilize it and kept it in the hot water until I was ready to fill it using my (sterilized) ladle. I kept the jar inverted for about 15 minutes before I put it in the fridge.

I’m happy to say there was a satisfying pop when we opened the jar this morning.

The jam was thick but also wonderfully spreadable. It’s definitely a spoonable jam. Fairly sweet, but hey – it is strawberry jam. I’d be curious if I could cut the sugar a bit more, but I suspect if I wanted to do that I should just make sure and buy some fruit pectin when I am back in the US in the summer. This jam would be equally wonderful on waffles or ice cream. It certainly was great on my morning toast.

I am totally applying both of these things toward my recipe goals: one new recipe and also dessert for the week…

Except a long to-do list.

I have a few thoughts I want to develop into blog posts, but no mental energy or time to actually do it. I’m nearly finished with proofing ONE CRAZY SUMMER for re-release and then get to go on to the last book, ALL THE WAY HOME. Then I get to do all three again, because that is just the way it goes with typos. You never seem to get them all in one go.

It’s not as if life doesn’t go on however. I still have to get the kids out to school every morning, keep up with the usual housework, cook, run errands, and keep up with two active children and their individual schedules. If all that wasn’t enough, it’s Book Week at school.

I hate Book Week. Obviously, I am in favor of books and reading. I just wish the school didn’t require costumes to drive the point home.

Every year for the last four years, I have suffered through Book Week and the necessity to not only think up a character for the children to dress-up as but also to find the proper attire to convey that character, which is much more challenging than you might think. The first year my daughter was the Troll from the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The next year, my daughter dressed as Zorro and my son was Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk. Last year, my daughter was Fern from Charlotte’s Web and my son was Peter Pan (though everyone though he was Robin Hood).

This year? My daughter said that she and two friends were going to be the ugly stepsisters from Cinderella and my son has agreed to be Huckleberry Finn. He would make a wonderful Christopher Robin – and just think how easy it would be! – but he won’t cooperate. I think it was only the hobo stick I promised to make him that sold him on the Huckleberry Finn idea.

It was much, much more fun to come up with the clothes for my daughter to wear to the retro-80s dance party she was invited to over the weekend. In the end she looked much better than I ever looked in the 80s, that’s for sure! It was also astonishing how much older she looked and how pretty. I’m going to have to get a bat to keep near the front door to greet any of the young men who will no doubt start hanging around soon.

And guess what? My son came home with a tooth in his front pocket so it looks like I have a night shift tonight as well…

My husband and I were invited to a Coptic Christian wedding this weekend, the first since we attended a wedding the first winter we lived in Egypt. Unlike the last time, I actually have several choices of appropriate evening dress clothes – I went shopping after I had to borrow items from three different friends to put together an outfit the last time! – however this time we are not attending. The pretty cocktail dress I wore to the Women’s Fiction Festival in Italy a few years ago will have to wait a little longer for an outing (I added a picture from the conference just for you guys, scroll to the bottom).

Given the recent tragic incidents in the last few weeks, not to mention the political instability in Tunisia, my husband and I think it best to maintain a low profile. The tension between the Muslims and the Coptic Christians in Egypt is nothing new – I have been hearing stories of people being prevented from converting from one religion to the other for years now and it was ongoing well before I arrived. Maybe the stories are true, maybe they are propaganda – hard to know in a place like this where there is no real, trustworthy news source. What is real is that some fanatics are taking things to a new level by targeting Christians with bombs and bullets.

I know that by not attending we are “giving into the fear” and in a way, the terrorists have won. I suppose that is one way to look at it. However, there are degrees to this argument. I still walk the same streets where I have heard many reports of purse snatchings in recent months, for instance, because I need to get from place to place. I take what precautions I can by wearing my purse cross body and always looking purposeful and being aware of my surroundings and who is about. I’m also allowing my children to attend a school activity in Alexandria. The wedding however is not for family or even close friends – we were invited as a courtesy by the mother of the bride who is a colleague of my husband’s. I truly hope that the wedding is a peaceful and joyful occasion for all, but I do not wish to risk being caught up in a bad situation because some lunatic decides he is going to seize the moment to make some copycat religious / political statement.

I myself have not sensed any trouble or unrest in my tiny corner of Cairo, and in fact most of the regular Egyptians I know have gone out of their way to express how dismayed they are by the attacks on the Christians here. Let us hope that this sort of reasoning prevails. While I do think that there is room for improvement in the government here (as there is in most countries) I hope that it doesn’t take a civil war to change things. In the meantime, I’m just going to keep my head down and my eyes and ears open.

We’ve been invited to another Coptic wedding in April/May. Perhaps we will feel more confident in attending next time…

My birthday party was a complete success. The cheese ball was awesome (and I declined to share the recipe, HA!), the hummus was perfect, the chocolate cake I made was moist and decadent, the truffles were a hit, and the bakery didn’t drop the cheesecake on their way up the stairs to my place. There was enough food, but not too much, and I didn’t forget to put anything out this time (I made a list!) People ate, mingled, laughed and no one sat in what I think of as the “dreaded circle” – you know, where everyone ends up sitting in a circle around the couches or a ring of chairs and tried to participate in a stilted group conversation about some boring general topic like the weather or their job.

I was a bit worried in the afternoon because the sky had an ominous look about it.

The last time I spent all day cleaning to have people over there was a thunderstorm complete with hail that ended up flooding my living room. Nothing like a levee made of beach towels to add a bit of ambiance. I am happy to say that though there was thunder and a bit of rain, all the puddles stayed outside this time!

I might even do it again in ten years

With the party food, I more than met my dessert resolution for the next couple of weeks, but I’m beginning to think that I need to revise my previously announced goals because so far they aren’t all working out.

1) Make one dessert per week. Yes, I have been doing this. My children love love love it. They are however driving me insane with requests for truffles and cake for breakfast! I had thought that they might get used to the treats in time and calm down but I think that they are stronger than I am in this matter. I may have to cut back on the frequency of this goal.

2) Take a walk after I put the children on the bus in the morning. Hasn’t happened once. It hasn’t even occurred to me to do it. Why? Because walking in my neighborhood is not fun. It is in fact a serious risk to life and limb. The one sidewalk that I was planning use is now torn up with construction. I am still doing power yoga twice a week and am considering adding in one more morning yoga class. Yoga and housework and my usual walking to get around will have to do.

3) Eat better / more fruit. I’ve done pretty well on this one actually. It’s easy when strawberries and citrus fruits are in season.

4) Time Management. So far so good. I’ve been able to get myself moving to do the things that must be done around the house by lunch time so I can have the quiet afternoon hours before my children get home from school to do some computer work. I’m happy when I feel like I’m getting things done, even it sometimes it means vacuuming and laundry!

I ran across a resolution that I really liked on a fellow author’s blog and I think I’ll adopt a version myself. Essentially, she has set herself one goal per month. Obviously, I will pick different goals, but I like the concept. I might even pick a goal a week – it would depend on the goal because some are more involved than others. For instance, this week I need to scrub the tiles in my shower. Not fun, but necessary. For February, I’d like to finish up one more baby quilt and take what I have in stock to a local boutique to see if they’ll take them on consignment. This sort of rotating goal is something I could definitely get into.

How are your resolutions going – or shouldn’t I ask?

And I’ll ban children if I want to. It’s actually kind of funny how shocked my children were when I told them they had to stay upstairs in their room during my party this evening. It’s not as if they want me to participate in their parties in anything other than a servant / organizer capacity so why are they so surprised that I wouldn’t require their participation in mine?

Don’t feel too sorry for them: they will be setting up a “tent” in my daughter’s room and watching a movie I rent for them. An indoor camp out. They’ll be fine.

Other than cleaning up, I am mostly ready and I even made two new recipes this week. I finally used the “secret” cheese ball recipe that a good friend gave me years ago, after I promised never to use the recipe for a potluck function that we were both attending. Not a problem now that I live in Cairo and she lives in Qatar! The only thing I did differently was to put the mixture into a pretty bowl rather than roll it into a ball. It will get smooshed down anyway so I just skipped a step to keep it tidy!

I also made my step-mother’s truffle recipe. It was easier than I thought it would be, though it was a multi-step process. I melted the chocolate in the microwave which worked well. I used a bag of mint chocolate chips and a dollop of Bailey’s for the filling and dark chocolate for the coating. They. Are. Divine. I can see how making truffles could be a dangerous talent to possess however!

Other items on the menu: mixed nuts, hummus, baked tortilla chips, fresh strawberries, and a mushroom quiche that is coming from the bakery along with a blueberry topped cheesecake. I may also make a chocolate cake just to be sure that there is enough cake to go around but that’s easy. I’m getting hungry just thinking about all the wonderful food and I haven’t even had breakfast yet!

I’ll post some pictures soon. Let us hope they are not accompanied by a funny disaster story!

I fired the maid.

I tried to like her, I really did. She worked for us for six weeks and she was (nearly) always on time and fairly industrious while she was working. She didn’t stop for breaks or lunch, she just worked straight though. She was nice and seemingly trustworthy as well. With all that going for her, why did I let her go?

I fell back on the it’s-not-you-it’s-me argument.

I found myself going behind her and being frustrated because she had dusted around things instead of moving them. When she did move things, she didn’t put them back the way they had been in the first place. She’d take the cushions off the couch to vacuum crumbs and put the cushions back zipper side out. She’d leave the windows open after she cleaned them with no screens and let in flies. I always felt I had to leave to be out of the way and a few times I came back and found that she’d finished and left early, but hadn’t totally cleaned up after herself. I didn’t care if she finished and left, but I wasn’t happy about finding my kitchen sink half-full of dirty water from where she’d done something (???) and scooted out.

I really tried to focus on the bigger picture and just accept the less perfect aspects. I even tried to give her more direction about what I wanted done and how, but when I started thinking that I would just do my own bedroom… and the kitchen… and the bathrooms… I decided to follow my impulse and just let her go and do it all myself. As guilty as I felt about letting her go, I was so so happy to have the house to myself again. I guess I’m just a territorial freak.

Since I’ve been on my own again, I have cleaned my refrigerator, the microwave, under all the beds, and the under-stair storage room in my kitchen. It feels good actually.

My daughter was asking for more allowance recently so I decided to let her have a go at cleaning the bathrooms. We’ll see how long her enthusiasm for her new job lasts, but she doesn’t have to love it – she just has to do a decent job of it. As for the rest, I may not get things done in one day – and in a family of four nothing will stay clean for long – but at least when I do get around to my various chores, I’ll know they are being done to my standard. It’s much easier to ignore my own imperfections and shortcuts than someone else’s…

Many people decide to start the new year with resolutions to get fit, exercise and eat right – so why are we preventing our children from doing the same things?

I admit it: I don’t read or watch the news. Most of it is worthless anyway and the really newsworthy items filter back to me eventually. (It’s a good system actually) This is probably old news to many of you, but it recently came to my attention that there are cities in the US that are banning sledding, at least in public areas.

This didn’t surprise me actually, but it did make me sad. I can remember when I was 3 or 4, our house sat on the top of a fairly steep hill, at the bottom of which was a busy street and a T intersection. I spent many hours racing down that hill, skidding to a stop at the last minute with my feet, just short of the street. Talk about a rush! I’m not saying that situation was ideal or that kids should be allowed to sled out into traffic, but children shouldn’t be denied the pleasures of winter snow play because parents aren’t willing or available to supervise them.

The first time I noticed this sort of legislation, it was merry-go-rounds in playgrounds. Many of the parks in Dubai included them while most in the US do not. (Of course many of the parks in Dubai also include broken equipment and jagged posts but I digress) I suppose some children fell while running to get them going or fell / jumped off while they were spinning and hurt themselves so someone, somewhere decided merry-go-rounds were too big a risk and had to go. I don’t doubt that there have been many broken limbs and stitches caused by merry-go-rounds, but using that sort of logic what about stair railings? How many children have been hurt sliding down a railing and flying off at the bottom? Should we do away with railings, essentially a safety feature, because a few goofy kids used them in a way not intended and got hurt?

For that matter what about trees? The son of a friend of mine recently fell out of a tree in his backyard and gashed himself behind the ear on the way down and required stitches. Should we cut down all the trees to prevent accidents like this in the future? Trees clean the air, give homes to birds, and provide us with oxygen but isn’t protecting our children more important?

Statistically most accidents happen at home, in the bathroom. Shall we do away with those too? Children get hurt, even under supervision. Life’s a risk.

Dig deeper and much of the problem comes back to lawsuits. Too many people see their own bad luck at getting hurt as a get-rich-quick scheme, but until the court system in the US stops wasting time listening to people trying to blame other people for their own actions and consequences, laws prohibiting this and that will just keep popping up. Was the merry-go-round was so poorly maintained that it flew off its axis while spinning? Maybe there are grounds for a lawsuit. Did a child, lacking forethought, jump off mid-spin and land on a rock? Suck it up, pay the doctor, and go about your business.

But there’s a greater problem that comes out of all this legislation of our behavior: obesity. Obesity is a huge problem in the US among adults and children. Experts and wring their hands and point the finger at poor food choices and that is, at least, part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that children today aren’t allowed to do anything anymore. See above.

My children have been asking for a Wii ever since they came out, and so many of the parents I know who have given in and bought one use the argument that at least when the children play games / sports on Wii they are off the couch and moving. In Cairo, I can almost buy that argument because there are few good open spaces for children to run and play in this huge, overcrowded city and hardly anyone has a backyard. However, I do not believe that standing and waving a remote around the living room is a replacement for the real thing – and until I meet someone who mastered skiing on Wii and then successfully skied down a real mountain in real snow, I will remain unconvinced. Too many children I know who do have a Wii are still pudgy and uncoordinated.

(I don’t have a Wii because my children are active enough on a daily basis that I don’t begrudge them a little couch time.)

We think we’re protecting our children with all these rules and laws but what I fear is that we are raising a generation to not only lead a sedentary lifestyle but also to deny taking any responsibility for their own actions and behavior.

I did some of my shopping in the US last summer, some of my shopping in Germany earlier in the month, and the rest of my shopping in Egypt. On the one hand, shopping over a longer span of time is less stressful during the holiday season. On the other hand, if you shop too far ahead of time or while you are traveling, you can’t take things back if they don’t work out.

Everything I bought was well received. My husband especially liked the clothes I bought for him in Germany and I was greatly relieved that everything I selected fit properly. The problem? One of the t-shirts I bought as a layering piece for a sweater sprung a hole in the shoulder seam the first time I washed it, before he ever wore it! I can probably fix it, but I shouldn’t have to start mending things immediately. I was even more disgusted when I noticed that a new pair of socks I bought him had a hole in the toe after one outing. They were not inexpensive socks! Now I have to darn the toe of them if he’s ever going to wear them again. Not exactly what I had in mind to do this week, especially as these were meant to replace other older socks…Grrrr…

I also bought him a digital alarm clock in Germany. That at least works fine – sort of. The box said it was “radio controlled” which I assumed meant that it had some sort of central, official time keeping feature. I wasn’t sure that it would work that way in Egypt, but surely you can just manually set the clock, right? Hmmm…maybe.

The clock is a nice one, but it a bit more complicated that it really needs to be. I bought this particular model because it was one of the few that actually had a power cord. My husband read the instructions and set the time zone – what do you know, there is radio control in Egypt. The problem is that the control tower doesn’t know what time it is here! I can’t blame them really – there was an awful lot of confusion for the inhabitants back in Aug / Sept when the government kept switching the time back and forth to suit their Ramadan schedule. However, it isn’t so amusing when the clock insists that it is actually an hour later than it really is and in turn wakes you up an hour earlier than you intended! He reset it once after a “false alarm” and it happened again the next morning. I hate gadgets that think they are smarter than you are. Now he has to figure out what time zone would be compatible with our current time just to fool the clock into showing what our local time actually is! Grrrr…

My own gifts were much more successful – at least nothing has yet fallen apart! Who can go wrong with earrings and books? My daughter bought me a pair of small “gold” hoops, channel set with little zirconia – earrings that she chose and bought herself at her school Christmas fair. She was a bit nervous when she gave them to me because they weren’t “fancy” enough. They are in fact lovely and I cherish them more because they were obviously so heartfelt. That is what the holiday should be about.

I’ll try to remember that next time that clock wakes me up at 4AM…and I’m darning new socks!