St Paddy's gigs

While you read this post, why not listen to a selection of recordings from these gigs by clicking here to load our MP3 page.

Being in Cairo's premiere Irish band means that mid-March is a busy time of year ;-)

We had two gigs lined up in as many weekends which, considering we're used to gigging once a term, was something special.  The first gig was on St Paddy's weekend itself (albeit the Friday rather than the Saturday to allow for a weekend lie-in) and the second gig was the following weekend (as we can't cope with gigs either after or before a school day).

The first gig was at the BCA in Maadi and was their first outside gig since their opening weekend (when a neighbour had apparently complained about the music, making subsequent outside music requests hard to get police approval for). We were looking forward to playing outside as when we play in the downstairs bar the sound bounces around the walls and the size of the room means it is packed and people don't have much room to listen, dance or do anything apart from sweat or stand close to the speakers.

The problem being that this winter has been the coldest and longest that we've known here in Cairo and it was actually pretty chilly on the day of the gig itself and it just got colder once dusk hit. We ended up playing in jackets! The other downside of playing outside that we hadn't really anticipated was the lack of crowd feedback - without the intimacy of the small downstairs bar the crowd was spread out over the whole garden and from the stage we just couldn't get a feeling of how we were going down with them.

We felt prepared for the gig as we had had three rehearsals in the week leading up to it, but when it came to it we were a little fumbly. Listening back to the recording my bassoon became progressively flatter during the evening (probably a combination of the cold and that I was having some difficulty with breathing / tiredness that was affecting the support I could give each note) and was not sounding good at all.

The good side of the evening though was that the Guinness was flowing and our home brewed stout was going down well too (the three rehearsals during the week had provided ample testing time too). Everyone we spoke to said that they enjoyed the gig and thought we'd played well. We had a new singer join us who was fab, Mary. And the sound for us was a lot better outside than it had ever been in the downstairs bar - for once we could actually hear what we, and each other, were playing!

Jump to a week later and we're at the Maadi House in the mid-afternoon ready to get set up for their Post-Patrick's Celebration. The weather has been warming up during the week which is promising, and we're feeling quite rested (as we haven't met up all week).  It's the first time for most of us to go to Maadi House as it's quite an exclusive club - you have to have certain US affiliations to be a member - and so it's a treat to be able to take advantage of their import licence. And take advantage we do - they have imported Sam Adams lager from Boston!

Although the crowd at Maadi House was a lot smaller than we'd had the previous week at the BCA there was something about the set-up of the seating and the lighting (or maybe it was just the temperature!) that made the gig just 'feel' better.  I think we played better too - well it sounds it from the recording anyway!

In the kitchen...

...We've been doing loads of cooking recently.

Yesterday had a whole shelf in the fridge dedicated to two large sprigs of broccoli, nearly 1kg of green beans, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms and courgettes. All of these we'd bought at the weekend and used some of, but were waiting to be finished in meals this week. We then went to the shop (well four shops actually, by the time we managed to find all the ingredients we were looking for!) and cooked up three different meals - two sets of lunches for work and our dinner. I think we manged to use every pan we have!

So what have we been cooking? Well a large part has been lunches for work during the week. For this we have been cooking soups. The first soup we made was a recipe that Scotty found with loads and loads of veggies in called 'Rainbow Soup'. The first time we made it we mainly followed the recipe (but struggled to find a substitute for spinach, and found ourselves shelling the green beans because we couldn't get hold of decent ones), but the second time we ad-libbed a bit more. Here's our basic recipe;

Rainbow Soup
Fry up loads of onions with diced carrot. Then add other veggies, like peppers and courgette (this was our ad-lib). Then add tomato sauce (we make our own passata as it's cheaper to use the fresh toms than to buy tins - simply boil up tomatoes for 10 mins, remove the skins and then whizz them in a food processor).  Add some chicken stock and green beans. Simmer away and add sweet paprika (we only have normal paprika and soon learnt that you need less of this than the sweet stuff to get it spicy). When everything is cooked then blend away!

The second soup that we made we found the recipe for in the Super Foods book that Fabs gave me as a birthday present. I think it was under the 'broccoli' section, but it could have been under the 'sweet potato' section as both are Super! We don't normally eat sweet potato even though it's usually quite easy to get out here, but this year we have been having it a bit more and so we thought we'd give this soup a go.

Broccoli and Sweet Potato Soup
Fry in a large pan onions, diced sweet potato (one large sweet potato per 100g of broc) and a chopped tomato. Once the sweet potato has browned then add stock and the broccoli and bring to a boil then simmer. Once everything has been cooked then blend and add pepper.

It was this soup that caused us the real shopping trauma this evening; it took us five shops before we found some sweet potato! We've said before how it's rare for anyone to be able to cook a meal out here without needing to visit more than one shop. This seems to be that some shops are better for certain ingredients, some shops are more reliable than others for having the range of ingredients in, and sometimes you forget things! This evening we gave Save Way a miss to start with as they hardly ever have sweet potato, we thought that Kimo would be a good bet but they didn't have any. At this point Scotty took all our other Kimo shopping home and I went a few blocks away to try Seoudi Market. No luck, so I thought I may as well continue another few blocks to Adam Market. This time when he shook his head I asked 'lei' (why?) and he replied that the season is over. That explains it, but it doesn't help the fact that we have two large broccoli stalks in our fridge that need eating. In a final attempt I head to Metro on Road 233. We've found that the veg we buy from Metro doesn't tend to be as good a quality as we get elsewhere but they do tend to have everything in. I strike it lucky when I find four 1kg bags of sweet potato left and leave happy.

After a quick trip to Save Way (because we needed juice and a few other things that it didn't make sense to carry half way across Maadi) we were finally home with everything we needed to cook our planned meals.

First up we made the Broccoli and Sweet Potato soup. Then once this was simmering we started to prepare our dinner of baked salmon with potatoes and green beans. With that cooking we chopped up some peppers and courgette to make an omelette with the six eggs that we didn't eat at the weekend. The plan here was to make an omelet that we could both take in to work for lunch, but once we added extra cheese and remembered about the bacon in the freezer it was a lot larger than we'd planned! Not to worry - we'll just have a few more meals out of it!

After dinner we bagged up the soup into portions and then stuck these in the freezer so we're all set for lunches during the week. How domesticated and how organised we have become!