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This Kurdish lentil soup is lovely and smooth. Simple but nicely balanced. A handful of rice balances the lentil flavour nicely and the whole thing becomes very smooth (even without blending it).

Thanks to the Asylum seekers' and Refugees Support Group, Nelson, UK, for writing this down, and thanks to the Kurdish woman whose name I don't know, for passing this recipe on!

Makes 6--8 servings, takes 45 minutes.

• 400g lentils (split red lentils, my mum uses - I don't know what's standard)
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1 stock cube
• handful (e.g. 100g) basmati rice
• sunflower oil
• 1/2 tsp crushed chillis
• 1 onion chopped fine
• pinch of salt

Wash the lentils in warm water, then rinse them in cold. Put in a pan with ~4cm of cold water over them, cover, bring to boil.

Once the lentils boil turn the heat down, skim off the scummy bits - no need to be precise, doesn't matter if some remains. Do this while in parallel you start the next step of cooking the onions. (Maybe this means cooking the lentils for 10-15 minutes or so?)

Chop the onions finely and fry in a frying pan with the oil, on a medium heat, until starting to brown.

Tip the onions and oil into the lentil pan, plus 1 mug cold water or more (a pint?). Add salt, chilli, turmeric, rice.

Gently simmer for about 30 to 45 minutes - so that it is the right soupy consistency you want! If you need to add more water as it gently summers, do so.

Oven-roasted fennel is great - it's roasty, and yet still fresh and fragrant. This simple dish makes the most of it. We made this in 2019 and remembered it today! And it's as lovely as it is easy.

Serves 2. Takes 35 minutes.

• 1 bulb of fennel
• 1 packet (250g) of fresh tagliatelle pasta, plain or spinachy (but not wholemeal)
• 1 lemon (juice and zest)
• 1 clove of garlic
• olive oil
• 1 tbsp oat cream
• 1 small handful fresh parsley

Preheat an oven at 180C, and lightly oil a baking tray.

Chop the fennel in half top to bottom, then cut into slices approx half a centimetre thick. (Those cuts are also top to bottom, so that you're left with connected half-moon pieces.) Save any wispy "fennel tops" to one side, to use as garnish at the end.

Crush or finely chop the garlic. Zest and juice the lemon. Put half of the lemon juice into a mixing bowl, and add 1 tbsp oil plus the garlic and a good pinch of salt. Whisk this with a fork, then add the fennel pieces and give everything a good but gentle mix, to get them evenly coated.

Spread the fennel pieces out on the baking tray, then roast in the oven for 30 minutes. Half-way through, turn the pieces over.

Meanwhile, wash and finely chop the parsley.

Five minutes before the fennel is ready, in a large pan of boiling water, cook the tagliatelle according to the pack instructions. Once you've drained the pasta, return it to the pan, and add a dash of olive oil plus the oat cream, salt and pepper. With two forks, toss this around so that all the pasta is separated and nicely coated. Check the seasoning. Then add the parsley and mix again.

Take the fennel out of the oven and add it to the pasta. Sprinkle over the lemon zest and the remaining lemon juice, and gently stir again to mix.

Serve in 2 dishes, with the fennel tops chopped and sprinkled over.

Did you know that cranberries and rice are the 2 crops that can be grown on fully-saturated (i.e. damp) land? I learnt that this week from a colleague who studies how Dutch "polder" land can be farmed to absorb the most carbon.

So I decided to try making a rice and cranberry dish this weekend!

It's getting wintry here, too, so a nice festive wintry dish is needed. I was inspired by this recipe by Little Spice Jar, but I think their way of pre-cooking the rice is odd and a bit complex, so my version is (I hope) easier and makes the most of the saffron. One thing they're right about: use good quality basmati rice. You'll really notice.

Total time: 50 minutes. Serves 2.

• 1/2 a mug of basmati rice (thus approx 160ml - I know it's odd to measure rice by volume, in a recipe, but I do it with a standard British tea mug.)
• 35g approx butter or vegan butter
• 1 small red onion, thinly sliced
• 1/4 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/4 to 1/2 to 1 tsp granulated sugar (choose how sweet to make it)
• 1/2 teaspoon sumac powder
• 1 handful dried cranberries (or dried cherries, or barberries)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/8 teaspoon saffron (we'll soak it - see below)
• 1 handful roasted shelled pistachios (or slivered almonds or pecans)

Pre-soak the rice. Measure out the amount, rinse it in a sieve under running water, and then soak it in fresh cold water for 20 minutes. Meanwhile do the next steps.

Heat up a small frying pan on a medium heat. If your pistachios haven't been roasted, you can first toast them at this point, and then put them to one side. You'll be re-using the frying pan.

Boil hot water in a kettle, and then use this to soak the saffron. BUT do this in an exact quantity of water, as follows: one-and-a-half times the amount as the rice. We'll be using the classic way to "steam-cook" rice in a pan, and one-and-a-half times is how much water will be absorbed. Leave the saffron to soak in this warm water for about 10 minutes while you do the next part.

Add the olive oil to the frying pan, and start the onion frying. After about 4 minutes once the onion has softened, add the turmeric, sumac, dried cranberries, and stir. Add the sugar, and a small splash of water to help the sugar get absorbed. Once that has all mixed together, and the onions nicely softened with a touch of caramelisation, take this off the heat.

Drain the rice, using a sieve.

Add half of the pistachios to the cranberry onion mixture.

Now we can assemble the pilaf. Take a pan that has a tight-fitting lid, add the butter, and put the pan on the medium heat. Once the butter has melted and coated the pan, add the rice to it, and let it cook slightly on the heat while you add the rest. Pour the saffron and its water over the rice, making sure to pour it evenly around so that the saffron isn't in clumps, and then make sure the rice is spread evenly with a flat top. Then spoon the cranberry onion mixture on top of this, again trying to make a nice even layer.

Now put the lid on tightly, and don't open it again for the next 20 minutes! For the first 3 or 4 minutes, you should let it cook at medium heat Then turn the heat right down to very low - on a gas hob, I would turn it to the lowest it can possibly go, and on an induction I use setting 2 out of 9. You then have about 15 minutes to prepare other parts of the meal, or to relax.

The pilaf is ready when all the water has been absorbed. When this happens the pan gets hotter, and you can test it by putting a splash of water on the side - it should fizzle away.

Open the pan, give the pilaf a stir (or don't, if you want to preserve the layering), and then serve it, topped with the remaining pistachios and maybe a nice little sprinkle of some more sumac.

I've seen some great music played at some ace festivals this year. Here are my highlights!

• YoungRubbi - a punk/rap kid from Rotterdam, whose energetic, angry but inclusive live set that was everything you need! The circle-pit was full of people of all ages. Here's a highlights video you should watch! (They talk in Dutch in the video. But it's only short. I'm in the video for at least 1 frame.)

• Nai Barghouti - a Palestinian singer with a soaring, beautiful and powerful voice. We saw her at "Le Guess Who" festival backed by Amsterdam Sinfonietta - I'm not always a fan of orchestral gigs but these string players were light on their feet and doing interesting things. Nai ranged across many different moods, and I love to hear this "arabic" (?) singing style, powerful and ornamented. You have to hear her.

• An amazing church concert from Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko: Heinali played the most perfectly-judged electronic drone music, to complement Saienko who alternated between soft West-European churchy singing and the more "brassy" East-European style of her native Ukranian singing. This was the perfect music to host in the reverberant church space, a perfect collaboration, beautifully performed.

• Meth. This one's very dark and very heavy, not for general consumption. For me this was the stand-out show of Complexity Festival in Haarlem - far more than all the other heavies that day, they put across a performance that was brutal in its machine-like insistence. It's about human weakness and it's completely unforgiving. The tracks (from their recent album) are themed on vulnerable human emotions handled, largely, through screaming. Of course there are lots of bands that go in these directions, but the single-minded intensity was so complete.

• Ndagga Rhythm Force - at Le Guess Who festival, I'm always looking for some hardcore African drumming mixed with heavy electronics. This time it was the Ndaggas, from Senegal (via Berlin). Intense as it should be. (I'll admit... I'm still thinking back to Nihiloxica in 2023.)

• I Am Oak - he's a Dutch indie musician, who during the lockdowns recorded some lo-fi versions of his back catalogue. This led to the stripped-down intimate delivery of the live gig he gave us this year (at Peel Slowly And See festival). His quirky indie acoustic songs, simple rendition and soft voice are just completely loveable. (Currently touring UK FWIW.)

I'd love to hear your highlights too.

I've been doing a lot of academic travel recently: conferences, project meetings, workshops, PhD exams. Luckily, I've been able to do almost all of it by train, even though I've been to more countries than I can easily count!

Here I want to list these and make an approximate carbon footprint calculation, comparing it against the equivalent if I was flying everywhere. I've done these calculations before, but since I've made dozens of trips recently it's useful to show it and give a real-life example of what we do and to what extent it matters.

So! Here is a list of the academic travel I did in 2024 and 2025, with the reason for travelling, and the carbon footprint if I was flying. Then, I will compare those footprints against those for what I actually did. In most cases I took the train. Sometimes a boat (especially for the UK). For two of these I did fly part of the way, and I'll mention that in the table.

I live in the Netherlands. I'm going to leave out the trips to the Netherlands and Belgium, because it's simply inconceivable that someone would fly those! I will also omit the events I declined or attended online.

In this table, the numbers are the hypothetical footprint of flights I did not take:

Now, in most cases what I actually did was take the train. Using a carbon-footprint calculator I worked out the footprint for these, and surprisingly, it often comes out as approximately 10 kg CO2e, irrespective of how long the trip is! This is because of the different types of train: to go all the way to Sweden I took very efficient ICEs, while to go to Oxford I took a local train, plus a Eurostar, plus another local train, and it appears to add up to a similar amount. So, for simplicity I'm going to assume each train trip was 10kg. Since it's at least ten times smaller than the flight footprint, this approximation is acceptable.

The two trips I've marked with asterisks* are the ones where I part-flew. Even if you can't take the train all the way, it's better than taking lots of hopping flights. Here's what I did:

• For Norway in 2024, I flew to Oslo and then took the train to Trondheim. It would have been 316kg to fly direct (and even more to fly indirect!), but I managed at least to reduce this one to 264kg by taking the beautiful Oslo-Trondheim train ride.
• For Finland in 2025 - it takes a long time by train from the Netherlands, of course! I was able to make the most of it by combining a conference in Sweden with the event in Finland. So this is a "triangular" two-stop trip and that's how I've calculated it. I flew back on the return, meaning my actual footprint was around 720kg rather than the max of 1277kg.

If you add up all those hypothetical flights in the table above -- and, just to remind you, those are flights I did NOT take -- you get 6959kg over 2 years, about half of an average EU citizen's "personal" footprint for the same time. So it's a notable amount. What I actually incurred was 1104kg, reducing it to about 15%.

It's a definite saving. Of course it's way above zero, it's an amount worth thinking about. (I won't comment here on switching to online attendance - I've written about that before and it would take too many words.) Note that this is not only an estimate, it's also an incomplete picture: not least because it ignores online events, and local events. I mainly want to see what was the impact of my choice not to fly on these business trips.

I think it's important to remember that we're aiming to change the system, we're not aiming to guilt-trip individuals. So the wider lesson is that grounded academic travel is possible, it makes a genuine difference -- approximately an order of magnitude reduction! -- and we need to support it (in the departments, in funding, and when you organise a conference).

This post was partly inspired by Rebecca Nordquist's post describing similar experiences. As noted by Rebecca, these long train trips are often also your "best day in the office" for some quiet work!

"Cobbler" is a British kind of casserole made with a topping that looks like cobblestones. It can be savoury or sweet. I grew up with savoury cobbler as a school dinner. And the topping, is, basically... scones! Stew and scones, what's not to like?

Here's my vegan version, a delicious mushroom and chestnut cobbler. The combination of mushroom and chestnut is a classic. The herby scones make a great complement to it, their dry scone texture soaking up the moist stew.

For the topping, I derived my version from domestic gothess' excellent vegan scone recipe. The coconut oil and butter make good "lumpy" fats to achieve the crumbly texture. In my version, the herbs and nutritional yeast make a lovely savoury complement to the stew. You don't need to serve this with bread, since the topping basically fulfils that role.

Serves 2. Takes 75 minutes.

Ingredients:

For the stew:

• 1 onion
• 250g mushrooms
• 100ml white wine
• 200g pre-cooked chesnuts (ours were vacuum-packed)
• 1.5 tsp flour
• 1 tsp miso
• 1 tsp italian herbs
• 2 tsp vegetable stock powder

For the scone topping:

• 175g plain flour
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 25g vegan block butter
• 25g solid refined coconut oil
• 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 2 tsp italian herbs
• 1 tsp salt
• 80--90 ml unsweetened vegan milk

Method:

Turn the oven on at 200 C (for a fan oven), to preheat.

For the stew:

Peel and finely dice the onions. Clean the mushrooms and chop them into nice bite-sized pieces. Chop the chestnuts to the same size (probably chopping them in halves).

In a stew pan, heat up some flavourless oil and fry the mushrooms for 3-4 minutes to give them some colour, then take them out and put them to one side for a moment. Heat up some more oil in the same pan, and fry the onions for about 5 minutes until they become soft and golden.

Add the 1.5 tsp flour and mix it through the onions. Then put the mushrooms back in, as well as the chestnuts, and stir.

Add the white wine to this pan, bring it to the boil, and scrape the bottom of the pan to deglaze. Turn the heat down to medium, add the miso, herbs, and veg stock. Boil a kettle, and add enough boiling water to cover the stew contents, then let it bubble gently while you prepare the topping. Don't cook it too hard, and try to keep it quite a "wet" stew - it's going to thicken up more in the oven.

For the topping:

In a mixing bowl, place the flour and baking powder and mix together.

The coconut oil and the butter - both of these, you want to add them in small chunks or small blocks to the flour. Keep them cold so they don't melt too quickly.

With the tips of your fingers, rub the flour into the cubes of fat, squishing the pieces of fat into the mixture. Keep doing this until the mixture turns into a "breadcrumb" texture.

Next sprinkle over the nutritional yeast, herbs and salt. Using the back of a knife, mix these through. Don't over-mix.

Gradually stir in the milk, again using the back of a knife, trying to bring the mixture together without over-mixing it (that's how you keep the crumbly texture). Bring the dough together into a loose shaggy ball.

To assemble:

Put the stew into a casserole dish - ours was about 15cm x 20cm rectangle.

Using your hands, shape the dough into 6 small "scones" and place them on top of the stew. They should be not too thick, maybe 2cm thick. When you place them onto the stew, try to keep them separate and not touching. Of course it's not a crisis if they're touching, you can separate them after it's cooked - but you do want there to be at least some space between the cobbles.

Put this into the oven, uncovered, and bake for 15-18 minutes until the top of the cobbles is golden. Remove and serve in dishes, making sure to keep the cobbles on top when you spoon everything out, with a big spoon or ladle.

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