The Quest for the Preserved Lemon

This week I've been feeling tired and listless: either the days of wintry cloud cover (which gave way to golden sunlight today) or perhaps the cancellation of two of my early morning classes might be to blame.

That said, cycling to university for my other classes has been invigorating.

Today I practiced a little for the choir concert, which will be next weekend with a dress rehearsal early in the week.

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Then I went grocery-shopping because of a Yemeni recipe with lentils, zhoug paste, beetroot and preserved lemons.

After buying other groceries like flour and coffee beans at the zero-waste store, I found coriander and parsley at a nearby Turkish supermarket, and picked up a carton of mazafati dates from Iran while I was at it. (These dates are very soft and melting on the inside, totally different from the tough, pale fruits that I grew up eating.) What the supermarket didn't have are the lemons.

The excursion to the zero-waste store was livelier thanks to the police van and a BVG (Berlin transit authority) vehicle nearby. It turns out that a water pipe burst underneath a street and flooded the area nearby. Based on my experience, the BVG official(s) was/were there to report back to the authorities when buses will be able to drive along the street once more. Usually I've seen them when a larger protest march is blocking a thoroughfare.

Next I tried a specialty grocery store with Middle Eastern imports in the neighbourhood. There I looked for the lemons in vain, and instead picked up strawberry-flavoured wafers. At home, these wafers turned out to be from Syria. I hadn't expected to wonder if I was propping up a dictatorship after grocery-shopping, and am crossing my fingers that I'm supporting peaceful commerce instead.

Lastly I popped into an African import store nearby, and they didn't have the lemons either. But I glimpsed boxes of fufu, fresh arrowroot?, and what looked like green plantains and large yellow cooking bananas. Maybe I should finally cook recipes from West Africa.

As I vaguely remembered, Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbook Jerusalem has a recipe for preserved lemons. Unfortunately it's impractical for my purposes, as the lemons must pickle for four weeks.

Aside from that, I bought more yarn from a sewing shop, because I've darned enough socks lately to run out of material. And I went to the bank. All in all, a productive day, and I tried to 'treat myself' after the hard work for university.

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I've been messaging with a classmate with whom I'll be doing a presentation in Spanish class, and finalizing the bullet points for my part of it. It's a little nervewracking, because I worry whether I'm micromanaging the presentation, whether she'll find her part of the presentation interesting and enjoyable enough, and whether I should have finished my part sooner so that she has an easier time of it, ... Also that my spoken Spanish won't meet the needs of the presentation. We are only allowed to write down keywords and not a full script... Terrifying!

But I feel smug for having started the reading for my Monday afternoon class. The book chapter we were assigned was written by the type of academic who thinks that his peers won't respect him if he doesn't use decasyllabic words derived from Latin or Ancient Greek often enough to totally confuse his meaning. After posting two of the silliest sentences to a family chat, I felt better.