British Airways: taking appalling service to new lows

British Airways never fails to amaze me. Even when I think I’ve encountered the worst of the worst, and lowered my expectations further, they continue to lower the bar. It’s quite something. Note to self: never, ever book with this airline again.
There was the time I approached the three staff members at the check-in desk with a question. They exchanged irritated glances among themselves, then glared at me collectively, until eventually one spat, “What do you want?”
It’s that irritated, imperious, who-the-F%#!!-do-you-think-you-are?! tone I’ve come to expect from BA staff.
There was the time that a 3-hour delay turned into a 24-hour delay that turned into a 48-hour delay. When the staff sneered and snarled at passengers – when they weren’t ignoring them totally. Where I watched them phoning around for hotels – 4- and 5-star hotels near the airport for staff, 1- and 2-star hotels an hour away for passengers. I got shouted at for booking an additional night at the hotel I’d been staying at – because it was one of the “better” ones that they were trying to reserve for staff rather than passengers.
My Christmas present from BA was that my 60,000 so-called Executive Club miles expired on the 25th of December last year. It had been impossible to use them; you can’t book less than 6 weeks in advance, but in fact anything less than a year in advance and there are simply no seats “for that class” to be had anyway. And you can’t use them to upgrade to a different class unless “there are seats for that class” available anyway – and in the ten years I’ve been traveling for publishing, there simply never have been.
But today takes the cake. Today I sign in to check in online, and discover that they’ve introduced a pricing system for choosing your seat from the seating plan. R316 for a standard seat. R379 for a “twin seat” (that’s just a normal seat sitting next to one person instead of two). And R632 for an exit seat.
Previously, you could choose a seat for no extra cost. Because, let’s face it, having the seating plan online and allowing passengers to make their own choice costs the airline NOTHING. They are not providing any special service here. They are not incurring any cost. Those prices are arbitrary, and are based on nothing more than what they think (or know) they can squeeze out of customers desperate to make a horribly unpleasant experience a fraction less uncomfortable.
Astonishingly bad, British Airways. Just nasty.

Potato bread, and a lovely soup

My potato bread for the ITJB challenge came out so unphotogenic that I can’t show you the loaves here. It would just be mean and unfair on them. They’re sweet and chewy and light, all the lovely things that potato bread is (that its name simply doesn’t convey).
So instead, here’s a lovely soup for this weird bit of summer where it’s hot but rainy but hot but still rainy.

Tomato and sweetcorn soup
A bag of tomatoes (italian), washed and halved
2 onions – I used red. Chop each into about 8 pieces
3-4 cloves garlic
about 60 ml olive oil (I didn’t measure; you just need enough to drizzle over generously)
salt, pepper and sugar to season
2-3 cobs of corn (or a tin of sweetcorn)
1-2 cups milk (or vegetable stock)
fresh basil leaves
extras for serving: some nice pesto and/or harissa, some nice bread

1. Preheat oven to about 200 deg C.
2. Put onions, garlic and tomatoes in an oven dish.
3. Pour olive oil over.
4. Season with salt, pepper and sugar.
5. Roast for about 45 to 50 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. Mix it around every now and then.
6. Cut some sweetcorn off the cob. Add the kernels to the oven mixture and roast another 10 to 15 minutes.
7. Transfer it to a pot or bowl and blitz it together with the milk or stock. Season again to taste. Stir in the chopped basil leaves.

ITJB: Honey-wholewheat challah

(Warning: technical baking-geek post).

I bake challah pretty regularly and I’ve been meaning to try it out with a pre-ferment, so that’s what I did when I made the honey-wholewheat challah for the In The Jewish Bakery challenge. I find that pre-fermented breads last longer, and have considerably better flavour development from the flour, with a ‘nutty finish’ to the taste that you don’t get on faster breads. I just wasn’t sure whether this would apply to such an enriched bread as a challah – I’ve certainly never seen an suggestions for pre-fermenting this kind of bread. I made several adjustments:

I mixed 50% of the flour with 1/3 of the yeast amount and the full water amount a day ahead of baking, and left that to ferment overnight for 8 hours at room temperature. I think 8 hours was too long, because when I came back to it, it had most definitely peaked and sunk in the middle.

The poolish (if that’s what you can call it) was pretty firm – like a runny dough more than the consistency of poolish that I’m used to. So I added an extra cup or so of water to the recipe, which I then ended up balancing with an extra cup of flour, so I guess on balance it was a bit extraneous.

On baking, day, I mixed up the dough and had to leave it proofing while I took Kolya out on a playdate. (Yes, I know, this is NOT orthodox baking.) So I dare say it overproofed somewhat. Then I did the final shaping – and had to take the shaped loaves to my mother’s house for baking, so more overproofing there.

Suffice to say, I was amazed that they worked as well as they did, but – amazingly – they did. The outside was a sweet, golden crust, and the inside extremely soft, with a ‘white bread’ sort of crumb. It’s hard to know whether the pre-ferment made a difference to the taste without doing a control test with no pre-ferment – next time I’ll be more scientific!

It stayed fresh for about 5 days. Oh and everyone loved the surprise of a bit of wholewheat in the challah – tonight is shabbat, and I’ll be making it again.

PS I like making challahs in loaf pans. It’s not quite the norm but my granny always did it; I suspect because it makes for easier handling when you want to make a sandwich the next day with the shabbat leftovers. Leftover roast chicken with picallili, if she was making it. So I guess it’s a different kind of tradition – Greenstein tradition.

Betty’s Bay

This summer holiday started in October 2010, when I decided I wanted to go stay somewhere pretty in December of that year. The holiday accommodation places all laughed me off the phone. Apparently, you can’t book anything for December after about June of the same year. So in 2011, I phoned so early that they laughed again: it’s only January, they said, try again around Easter.

So now I am the queen of Booking Early. Beach house, Betty’s Bay. I’d never been before, but will so be going back. Loved those wild beaches, and the mountainous walks (many thanks to the intrepid Dr Horsnell who leapt out of beds, regardless of lateness of nights before, to escort us along river beds and mountain trails).

Kolya heroically scaled the wooden ladders up the Luiperd’s Kloof (and made me promise to take him up Lion’s Head sometime soon), and we were all rewarded with waterfalls along the way. Altogether loveliness.

 

Florentines

Unsurprisingly, I’ve never hosted Christmas before. So 2011 was a first. We had a wire-sculpture little tree with some tinsel piled on top like a gold Afro, and a waxen Buddha and a picture of Channukah candles, just to even out the celebratory provenance of the day. Dave did a yellowtail braai, and Jacqui brought some utterly wonderful salmon-mascarpone pancakes which she served with a sort of Christmassy marmalade sauce. And there were salads and fruits and some plates of roast chicken. Not a gammon or turducken in sight, thankfully.

I used the opportunity to make the second of the challenge recipes for the ‘Inside the Jewish Bakery’ challenge. I’m weeks behind on it, but baking steadily away to catch up.

The florentines were delicious, but a little too floppy and finicky for my liking. My mom’s best friend has been making these things for years, so I guess I’m also just more partial to her recipe, which firms up more convincingly, and also incorporates citrus peel for a brilliant counterpoint to the nuts and chocolate. But I’m being picky, as usual. Florentines. Yum.

Mohn bars

Some bakers over at www.freshloaf.com are running a baking challenge from the lovely book, Inside the Jewish Bakery. I started a bit late as my book took a while to arrive from Amazon.com. But arrive it did, and the first recipe of the challenge was these lovely mohn bars. Mohn is Yiddish for poppyseed. The bars have a short pastry base, a sticky, slightly caramelised poppyseed layer, and finally a streusel layer on top. Streusel is a bit like crumble.

The book offers three different pastry recipes. This time I used the 1-2-3 pastry recipe, and loved it.

 

Colours of summer jamming

Meeting Russ

Russell Hoban 4 Feb 1925 – 13 December 2011

I met Russell Hoban on the occasion of his 80th birthday in February 2005. It was an extraordinary occasion, for many reasons. It was extraordinary because for anyone to spend 80 whole years on this earth is a feat, but even more so in the case of someone whose health had been failing for years. But more than that, it was extraordinary because Russ’s writing had inspired a small collective of devoted readers to organise a marvelous, gentle, soulful and utterly weird event, a Some-Poasyum. So devoted that some of us had flown in from other hemispheres, other time zones, just for the three-day event. A nuttering of weirdoes we were, gathering from near and far, from London and Chicago and Cape Town, from places in Belgium and New Zealand. (You can read more about this astonishing event here.)

I met Russ at one of the weekend’s events, a reading at Nomad Books in Fulham Road. He read an extract from Come Dance with Me, which would be published the following year. He answered questions, he signed our books. I had brought a birthday gift, a dish which I had made from clay. Later, back in South Africa, I received an email of thanks from Russ, which quickly turned into marvelous email correspondence.

Russ quickly became a mentor. He read and commented on my writing, he gently encouraged me, he put me in touch with literary agents. He gave advice, and heads-ups, and thumbs ups (and thumbs downs sometimes too). He warned me that he might not live to see me write my stories into print. He made recommendations, and every now and then, he put something marvelous in the post and sent it. The first of these (which is sitting on my desk next to me) was a Rockwell Kent-illustrated edition of Moby Dick. In one of Russ’s early letters to me, he quoted from it:

“Heart or wrought steel! Canst thou yet ring bravely to that sight, lowering thy keel among ravening sharks and followed by them, open mouth’d, to the chase on this, the critical third day? For when three days  blend together in one continuous intense pursuit, the first is the morning, the second noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing, be that end what it may.”

(I’ve quoted this from memory, so there might be errors.) The thing is , every day is the critical third day, nicht wahr?

Love X,

Russ

One of my favourite pieces of advice from Russ was this:

Action develops from characters and characters develop from action. Read The Bridge of San Luis Rey if you haven’t. Thornton Wilder. One of my favourite books. Don’t try to drive your writing like a herd in front of you. Let it lead you like a butterfly among the barley rows, like a dolphin frolicking in the bow wave, like music you can almost hear.

Bye Russ. I miss knowing that you are still making magic amongst your yellow paper and your exobrain, living ever so close to your critical third day. Thank you for all the magic.

Volunteer Wildlife Services Open Day

This might have been the best day of Kolya’s life to date. I have never seen him more excited about anything. ANYTHING.

First thing an aspiring fireman has to do is learn to switch on the water hose:

Max and Kolya check out the sights:

We discovered that we have heroic friends!! Who knew Adriaan was a fireman??

You have to picture Kolya striking a 70s disco pose, both fingers pointing in the air, and declaring: “Oh YEAH!!! That IS INTERESTING!!!”

Snakes. Ewww.

Photos from a weekend of artisanal breadmaking, île de Pain, Knysna