Wednesday, 22 August 2007

Frozen tradition (Eng)

Today I had lovely ‘brain lunch’ with my colleagues. It means we just go for food in the nice place and discuss any new ideas, events, things in general which might have impact on our research. Pretty interesting and my brilliant idea! But it is not what made me to write this reflection today. It’s Pimm’s.

For those who doesn’t know what it is I will not explain – Wikipedia does it better. Admittedly it’s something you would expect people drink in Brighton, not in Newcastle. But day was sunny and we had a deal (free glass with the meal). I really liked it: cold, fruity, and lightly alcoholic (but this is wrong impression actually, I understood it 1 hour later) refreshing summer drink. I would call it English Sangria.

Having it made me to remember the day when I had it for the first time (and last time at the same time). It was exactly a year ago in my old office celebrating colleague’s birthday. I liked it then as well. But the memory of what I had with that made me shaking.

English friend of my colleague decided to cook Ukrainian borshch. Which is really nice idea and we really greeted it, though we never had soups in the office so the infrastructure for eating it was non-existent. Everything was ok until we found out (half way through eating) that she cooked it a week ago, before going to short trip to Southern Ukraine, and put it in the freezer. Normal stuff, any English person would say. Nonsense, any Ukrainian would tell you. But we ate it, quite courageously. The an hour after I and another colleague of mine were ill with food poisoning. Maybe coincidence, maybe not. But for a while I could not eat borshch or anything from the freezer.

I almost forgot the story, but today’s Pimm’s reminded me. I just though that probably it’s impossible to freeze the traditional Ukrainian food without damaging it. So, don’t try!

But today I didn’t have any soup. Feeling good so far!

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