The Power of Wishes...

I think I have become an optimistic pessimist...

If I had a choice I'd opt for my head in the mist.

I am not a pessimist really but what is actually happening around the Globe doesn't give room for optimism.

My country of birth, Algeria has not seen much peace for the last half century and it seems that there are those who promise many more deadly waves of suicide-bombers to this beautiful corner of the Mediterranean.

Benazir Bhutto, whatever her agenda, hidden or otherwise, is another victim of terrorism, state-sponsore or otherwise.

Kenya's rigged elections have sparked deadly riots in this hitherto most peaceful corner of Africa.

In numerous other parts of this world of ours countless ordinary people are born and die without have tasted a peaceful day. Afghanistan, Irak, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chechnia, Nepal, the Middle East, etc...

I am writing this on New Year's Eve between the early service and the late one.

We have just fed, watered and entertained over 80 people. The staff are resetting the tables for just as many customers again.

The only thought on the minds of these diners is to have a great time surrounded by their family and friends to the sound of children's laughter.

I just wish that each and everyone around the world could be freed from strife to enjoy their life with their nearest and dearest in total peace and security.

Am I asking for too much?

Couldn't the power of wishes make a real difference?

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Tasty leftovers...

Ah, Christmas, bloody Merry Christmas....

I always promise myself that the next one will be perfect.
This one was perfect...
Well, nearly... That is until one of our head-chefs was diagnosed with severe angina! The poor guy, a loyal employee of over 12 years, is now awaiting a triple-heart bypass operation.

As a result, the run-up to the Christmas was a very busy and stressful period for the rest of his team who had to work twice as hard to make up for his absence. I tried to help a little in the middle of dashing between three restaurants tweaking, smiling, shaking hands, kissing, troubleshooting, shooting troublemakers...

And you know, when chefs get stressed out and tired they suddenly turn into Prima Donnas in need of love, reassurance and motivation!
Motivation in the form of a bloody kick up the arse and a pat on the back.
Every Christmas I could write a tragicomedy!
In actual fact I could commit a tragedy.
Such as shooting half a dozen chefs, two or three customers before riding away into the sunset!

But Christmas being the season to be merry, I have decided to bite on a few chocolates and my tongue while letting the New Year begin in bloodless harmony.

Ahhhh... That was therapeutic. Thanks for listening.

Happy New Year to you all great listeners.

I took this photo in a Brussels Square after that famous November wedding.
For this contented dog, "Happiness is a bowl of tasty leftovers."

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Whatever we believe in...

Whatever our convictions...

I am sure that all our wishes are for Happiness for All and Peace on Earth

May these wishes come true...

Happy Holidays to all my blogfriends.

My first car...

At the tender age of 28!!!! A white Ford Cortina. An ex-taxi.

I was working at an Italian restaurant at the time and got to know many of the customers. One of them owned a local taxi firm and I regularly used it for our diners.
Cliff offered to let me have one of the taxis he was replacing, a ten-year old Cortina for a bargain £175! The valeting alone must have cost £30! When I went to pick it up, my beautiful white chariot was gleaming inside and out.
I sat for a few minutes while Cliff explained the controls.
It was a Concorde compared to the tinny tiny Micra in which I had learnt to drive and passed my test.
He then waved me goodbye as I chugged to a shy start.

My first exploratory trip was that same afternoon to a town ten miles away.

My wife sat in the passenger seat. In the back, next to our two-year old son, Adam, sat her aunt who had been invited to go shopping with us.

I set off with a Cheshire cat's smile on my face, looking out for a familiar face to blow the horn at.

A couple of miles down the road we came upon a traffic accident. A policeman was surveying the scene and, as it happened, so was I.

Suddenly my wife let out a chilling scream.

Startled, I looked ahead.
An oncoming car swerved out of the way onto the pavement to avoid me. I had been so captivated by the sight of the two inept drivers who had collided, that I had veered onto the wrong side of the road. I quickly slipped back in the right lane. The aunt's face was as white as a sheet. Adam was screaming. My wife gave me a killer stare that forecast many frosty days ahead.
A few seconds later a flashing blue light appeared in the mirror. I stopped the car and began shaking like a leaf.

The policeman who had been attending to the accident was fuming. So was one of the drivers who had just missed a head-on collision with my Cortina. He had followed the police car to add further oil to the fire and ensure the admonishment was severe.

"Are you here on holiday?" The policeman asked. After all, I had briefly driven on the wrong side of the road.

After sheepishly apologizing and confessing that it was my first sortie in my brand new Cortina he let me go not without a reprimand and a caution to be more careful in future.

A year and a £10-water pump later I sold the Cortina for £225! A net profit of £40!

Come on then, what was your first car?

What's your carrot?

Marrakesh streets are used by buses, cars, motorbikes, mopeds, bikes, horse-and-carts, donkey-and-carts.
A mish-mash of vehicles that often renders driving a hellish nightmare.

The last time I was there I hired a car and drove a little around downtown MK but mainly on the open road towards the Atlas Mountains. I managed to drive around without scratching the hire car.
The truth is that there is seldom real risk of a serious accident as the traffic unfolds mostly at crawling pace.

Often, at peak times, that is between 8am and 11pm, many a two-lane street is transformed into a four-lane car park where one can dance the salsa to the sounds of the blaring horns, neighing donkeys and bleeting sheep...

Just another facet of colourful MK.

I doctored the above photo using Corel Painter and added a stick and a carrot. This is to jump to the next topic.
What is your carrot? What drives you?

Personally, the minute I find myself sitting still, either my body or my mind longs to be busy.
Busy contemplating the next enterprise, busy travelling in body or mind.
I just hate plateaux.
I don't mind mountains to climb, as in a new challenge.
I enjoy the odd slide, as in a thick slice of recreation, be it travel, partying or gourmet dining.

But plateaux, no thanks...
So, as far as I am concerned, movement, life and vitality... That's what drives me...

So, what's your carrot?

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Mama's food...

On the farm my mother made bread every other day on a charcoal burner and a terracotta platter.
She sat on a tiny stool, surrounded by all she needed. The dough balls covered with a cloth inside a large wooden bowl, caraway, sesame and poppy seeds and a jar of virgin olive oil.
As a young boy, I watched her prepare the bread and other dishes with great interest, always helping her shell peas, take the leaves off artichokes, peel potatoes, pick herbs, etc...

My favourite late morning snack, after helping my mother prepare food for seven people, was a fresh, juicy tomato sprinkled with salt and pepper and a chunk of warm bread dripping with butter churned by our own milkman.

She cooked Algerian tagines, French stews, Italian pastas or Spanish paellas, rarely remarking that many of them were some or other country’s national dish. For her it was just food, pure and simple.
She prepared our meals faithfully following recipes passed on from mother to daughter since the beginning of time.
As a family, we rarely ate out. My parents sometimes invited other relatives and friends for family meals. The hospitality was always returned within days.

Whenever my mother cooked a new dish, she often sent me over to a neighbour or an aunt with a small sample of her latest creation. The gesture was always reciprocated. In fact I was never let go without taking back a few spoonfuls of food in the hurriedly washed and dried dish.

Cooking took up all my mother's mornings. Well, that was before Papa brought her a brand new pressure cooker after we had moved to the town and the place came with a gas cooker.
From then on, my mother was a liberated woman. She had finally discovered Fast Food, long before I did. Under pressure, most dishes took less than half an hour to cook.

She ended up with so much time on her hands that she began doing volunteering work. Within weeks, she became the first female president of our town’s Red Crescent branch.

During my student days, while trying to recreate her delicious dishes, I often rang her all the way from England when I could not remember certain ingredients. The phone call regularly cost more than the food itself.



I took the photos below in Spain.
My favourite is the bottom one. Those cakes were just one delicious mouthful each. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.....























Back in July I loved Marrakesh so much that we're off there for a few days...


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Radio Gaga....

Whenever I am in Spain I try to listen to the Algerian Channel 3 French Radio, from just across the Med, as it reminds me of my student days and my weekends at the beach.

Last Wednesday I sat on our porch just after midnight, listening to a phone-in. The guest was a local potter who was being interviewed about his work. The guy knew what he was on about as most of his family has been in the pottery business since the turn of the century.


Every now and then someone called. But invariably, most of the calls were of the type:
"Can I wish Happy Birthday to so-and-so?..."

Short of people interested in the subject of pottery, the presenter asked how the callers were enjoying their Ramadan evenings.
"With friends and family..."


After half an hour of listening to silly phonecalls the bottle of red Rioja that was keeping me company decided that I should call the radio station just to remind the listeners that the subject in discussion was pottery.

The researcher asked where I was calling from.

"Spain."

"Where?"

"Spain... Espana..."

He recovered from his shock and put me on hold.
Within 15 seconds I was LIVE on Algerian Radio, talking about Algerian pottery...

"Why is it that little is known about Algerian pottery whereas its neighbours, Moroccan and Tunisian are very popular in Europe?"
The guy had the right answer:
"Lack of tourism..."
We waffled on for something like fifteen minutes and then the presenter asked a question that nearly made me choke on the wine...
"So how are you enjoying Ramadan in Spain?"

For what seemed ages, I mumbled and fumbled for an answer... but before I could finally think of a lie, the phoneline got cut off.

The following day, Thursday, it rained so much that golf was out of the question...
Karma?






I enjoyed my rest very much and am back at work dreaming up my next escape which is not that far off... A Belgian wedding...

A burning ambition...

Toffee baskets cannot stand the heat. The strands of caramel are so thin that by the end of a busy service those that have not been served will have begun melting.

So, every evening, before service I made a new batch. Luckily, the caramel itself can last a long time if it is kept covered and free from moisture.

As the syrup has to initially be heated up to 170° to turn into caramel, the handle of my faithful pan had got a little looser with the years.

The early Nineties. Thursday, 6.30pm. Service started at 7.30pm. So I was preparing my usual batch of baskets for the evening.

All of a sudden I felt a volcano erupt and rivers of molten lava spread over my left hand.

I screamed with pain but had the sense to plunge my hand into a container full of cold water. When I took it out, some of my fingers were already covered in blisters. An agonising fire raged inside my fingers. The handle had come off the pan and toppled all over my hand.

Karen immediately took me to the local hospital. I held my throbbing hand out of the car as she sped through the streets. A doctor gave me a shot of morphine. The pain subsided a little. He bandaged my hand and I returned to work. Being right-handed I managed to serve 50 or so diners with the help of my two young commis-chefs.

After a restless night, I got up to agonising pain, the effect of the morphine having waned. The blisters now looked like over-inflated pink balloons. Back at the hospital the doctor insisted that I had to go to the burns unit at another hospital in a neighbouring town. There, the consultant announced he would keep me in for two days.

"Who the f… is going to do the cooking?"

Two days later, Saturday evening, 8pm I was sitting with a friend of mine and my young son at a restaurant some twenty miles away, wondering how my two commis-chefs were coping with a full house.

Karen came home well after midnight. I waited up for her.

"They did sixty-two customers! And not a single complaint!"

I felt both elated and disappointed at the news.

Disappointed that I was no longer indispensable to the operation.

But I was secretly happy. Happy that I was no longer tied to the stove.

My accident marked a defining moment in my life.

The moment when I realised that I was free to get out of the kitchen and plan for the future...

Nowadays, I look at my slightly scarred hand and thank my lucky stars I hung my apron up a long time ago.

Photo: "Mauna Loa." Online Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

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Two Blogging Years...

Two years on and this blog has been rated for general audiences.



Does this mean that people between 7 and 77 can log on without fear of having their minds warped by the content of my posts?

I started blogging because it was a novel way of wasting time. Most of you faithful blogfriends have been there for the ups, the not-so-ups and the downs...
You see, I often make the running of three restaurants sound like a walk in the park and it would be if I did not have to employ staff, feed customers, or just get back to work after my holidays.

When I started over 22 years ago, it was a challenge, a way of looking after myself, Karen and the kids. The first restaurant came at a time when the town was devoid of decent ons, so what I had learnt in a couple of pizzerias, came in handy. I began aiming for the stars and improving, got rid of the pizzas within a month of opening and got the place noticed by a few guides.
What does one do after such a cushy start?
Simply look for the next challenge.

Today, after a few moves and openings, financially it can be attractive to have three restaurants, ego boosting too, because of the recognition.

But I did not really mean for life to go so fast! And that's when the dreamer in me rises to the top.

Travel lifts my spirits and liberates me. Spain is exciting, the South of France, enchanting, Marrakesh, magical... And every time I go somewhere I want to stay for ever.
Art fascinates and transports me... I want to do everything, from mosaics to drawing, sculpture to painting...
Reading enchants me and tempts me to write in a language that is not mine, even though it is the only language I feel comfortable with.

















If this blog goes slightly quiet it is because this dreamer is dreaming of turning his dreams into reality, one at a time...
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Papa's Raising Sultans...

Vit has just written a post on family trees and illustrated how hard it is to unravel branches and roots, etc...
I really do admire all those people who spend long years in libraries and record offices, meticulously sifting through mindnumbing archives in an attempt to trace their ancestry.

The BBC's popular series "Who do you think you are?" prompted many viewers to begin their own dig.

A few months ago, when I phoned him to enquire about the price of eggs in Algeria and how he was keeping, Papa, in his infinite wisdom calmly claimed:
"We are descendants of the last Sultan of Granada, you know!"
I was truly taken aback. Papa does not drink and he is a very rational man. It usually takes him days to mull over an idea before saying anything.
He is the kind of guy who would spend hours and days trying to repair a watch, stowing it the bathroom cabinet for months "just in case" before finally admitting defeat and discarding it.

I put his fantastic claim down to his 86 years and tried to humour him.
"I am telling you it's true! Why don't you check on your computer?"
What is the world coming to? Papa has heard of computers!

As soon as I got off the phone, I Googled and found out that our family name and that of this Moorish Sultan are uncannily close but for a spelling variation.

It sounds absolutely outlandish but could Papa be right?
Come to think of it, didn't the Alhambra car park attendant direct me to a well shaded spot when I visited in February?

But perhaps I should keep quiet about this... While Googling I came across a fundamentalist website blaming the Sultan for the fall of Andalucia and the demise of the Moors...

Could this be my new abode?

























Papa is 87 on Saturday!


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A busy weekend...

Friday night, we were invited to a wedding with a difference.
The couple were already man and wife. They had got married in the United States two weeks ago but as most of their family and friends could not attend, they organised another wedding party. The bride, groom, ushers, etc... got dressed exactly as for the wedding ceremony. Food and cake was laid on. Slipping out early from work, it was around 10pm before we got to the party, desperate for some food. A hard shift in a restaurant does make you ravenous, especially when you see platefuls of food flying past you all night.

Saturday night it was a fortieth wedding anniversary at some friends' house. Once again it was a good job there was some food left for us when we got there at 11pm. No, we do not eat while the restaurants are busy. The party went on till well past midnight. Got home full of red wine and spice cake.

Sunday came late and went early.

And then Monday, another do. This time it was the turn of one of our chefs to get hitched. It turned out to be one of the best weddings I have been to for many years. The civil ceremony took place in the function room of a hotel nearby. The bride and groom looked great. The weather turned clement just for them. A live band played while Pimms and champagne flowed. Lots of photos on the hotel lawn. The food was very good. The chef said that he had three tastings before he chose the menu. So much attention to detail. The place names were made out of chocolate. Can you imagine! Chocolate Cream!
The best man's speech made everyone laugh, especially as the young chef is not usually known for his eloquence.

After the dinner, the tables were rearranged, a dance floor magically appeared. More guests arrived for the evening do. Live dance music began at around 8pm. The guests danced the night away. A few stayed at the hotel. One of them, my party animal son, who everyone agreed is a great dancer. I wonder who he takes after...

I took this photo at a local annual festival. An Argentinian Tango duo.

Papa's colourful languages...

When I young, Papa often reeled the few German words he knew to coax into eating our meals: "Come on, Kartoffeln are good for you!"

During the Second World War, after the Allied landings in North Africa, our quiet town was swamped with foreign soldiers. Being close to the Tunisian border, our local French military hospital housed injured soldiers and among them a few Germans and Italians. One of these, Papa recalled, was a Wehrmacht soldier who had been wounded around Bizerte and brought back as prisoner of war.
Fritz spent months convalescing in Papa's ward and a cautious friendship developed between them. Papa found a stray kitten to keep Fritz company. He sometimes gave him fruit and vegetables from our farm.
Papa also tried to teach him a little French and in turn tried to learn a few German words. They sadly lost touch with each other after Fritz was moved to a secure prison camp.

Then the American GI's came through our town on their way to Tunisia and Sicily. The locals often reminisce about these giant soldiers who doled out chewing gum and chocolate bars to the cheering swarms of children who followed the jeeps bare feet across town.

A few years ago Papa came over to visit me in the UK after my mother passed away. He spent most of his time alone in the garden, probably thinking of my mother.
But one day, after lunch, as we sat at the dining table while my wife prepared the coffee, Papa scratched his head and tried to remember the few English words he had picked up during the war.

"Ha mucha dates?"
"Ha mucha oranges?” He mumbled in a funny Texan accent.
He explained that the GI's had often stopped to buy fresh produce from his fruiterer friend.

He sat there scratching his head, screwing his face, trying to dredge up buried memories. All of a sudden his eyes lit up "I know how to say "Go away" in American, you know!"

Before I could stop him he shouted: "Fuck off!" just as Karen walked into the dining room.

Two worlds...as one...

Having at last landed back from my Moroccan daydreams, I have already started planning my next trip to Marrakesh.
My first visit, as I have commented in my last posts, was a revelation.
You see, I grew up in a similar era and atmosphere as Marrakesh is in today.
A great mix of Arabic, French, Islam, foreign teachers, hippy travellers, tolerance, a sense of freedom as a student in the late sixties and early seventies. Life was easy.
Then Algeria lost its way. Corruption and kleptocracy ruled. Fundamentalism found a vacuum. It began exploiting youth unhappiness. The government sold out on secularism. Centuries of traditions were lost forever. And a reign of fear began. Around 200,000 people were massacred in an unprecedented period of violence between 1993 and 2003.
I did not go to Algeria for 15 years and when I went it was a foreign country to the one I left in the early seventies. Though things have slowly begun to improve, scars will take a long time to heal.

In Marrakesh I truly found my old country.
The old traditions are cherished and displayed with pride, while modernity is embraced and encouraged.
Marrakesh is what I would have loved my country to have developed into. But never say never...

Marrakesh Medley...

Here are the last photos of a trip to Magical Marrakesh...













Doing the Locomotion...




















Couz gets a Speeding Ticket...













Outdoor Shopping...
























Indoor Shopping...

Essaouira Beach Scenes...

Chillout...

A bientôt!