Avigayil Damm

When I just arrived in the office yesterday morning, I did my usual routine: unlocking my mobile drawer, plugged in my portable speaker, set up my iPod and pressed ‘start’. The iPod started to play songs, picking up where it left off on my departure yesterday. The first song that came on was ‘Scarborough Fair’ which is one of my favourite songs.

While I set up my laptop, I listened carefully to the song’s lyrics:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
For once she was a true love of mine

I wondered what the song meant, especially the ‘parsley, sage rosemary and thyme’ part since I thought it looked a bit out of topic.

When I did a Google search on ‘parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme meaning’, many results came up but I liked this explanation the most. According to that article, parsley represents something that takes away the bitterness, sage symbolizes strength, rosemary represents faithfulness, love and remembrance, and thyme symbolizes courage.

So, if something that happened in your past leaves you with bitterness, make some parsley soup. If you are facing some challenges in your life, strengthen yourself with a turkey sage chowder. On your wedding anniversary, whip up some mini rack of lamb with nutty beluga lentils and sauteed garlic spinach (yes there is at least 1 tablespoon of rosemary required to make the dish). And when you must do something which the whole world seems to be against, equip yourself with braised lamb shoulder with carrots and fennel.

As usual, Sunday is cake day. A few days ago, I set my heart on making brownies, but the easy way: Betty Crocker style. This morning, after breakfast, I thought since I was already busy cleaning up the kitchen after our meal, I may as well stay a while and make the brownies and have it done with. So that I did.

Of course, using Betty Crocker instant brownies package made it all easy. I only had to add one egg, half a cup of vegetable oil, and some water. It didn’t take more than 10 minutes to prepare, and before I could spell ‘chocolate fudge brownies and lamb with rosemary sauce’ backwards, the brownies mixture was ready for the oven.

Since it would take about 25 minutes to bake, I figured I would use that time to prepare the rosemary sauce for tonight’s lamb leg steak. Usually, we would use Gravox ‘lamb and rosemary’ instant sauce, but for some annoying reason, no supermarket in Jakarta (at least not the ones I frequent) sell them anymore. So I had to find myself a recipe and make it myself. For that, I did a lot of Google search, and decided to try this recipe from Epicurious. Originally that sauce recipe is for chicken but that was the only recipe I could find that I thought was easy to make and did not require ingredients that would be difficult to obtain.

The chocolate fudge brownies turned out to be very fudgy (well no surprises there), and since I felt like today I did something better than usual (by baking cake in the morning as opposed to later in the afternoon), I rewarded myself (and my hubby) with freshly baked brownies, served with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and a sprinkle of Hershey’s chocolate sauce. Yummy!

The rosemary sauce turned out to be a little bit too sour, even after I modified it by adding 100 ml more of cream than the recipe required. I guess I will continue to search for different rosemary sauce until I get the best one.