Dear members,
We hereby send you the ETCETERA newsletter for the month February! We will give an overview of the fun activities that are on the calendar for this month, Michael has posted on the NoteBoard, and Nils has written a Member Memo.
Calendar:
- 4 February 20:00: Gamenight: On Februari 4th, we're hosting our usual gamenight: fancy a game of pictionary, among us, or cards against humanity? Make sure to join!
- 11 February 18:30: Surprise dinner through take-away: A surprise dinner in your own home! Draw lots and find out for whom you will be ordering food and who will order yours. You will get €15,- to spend! Information on how to sign up will follow shortly in the WhatsApp group. If you are not part of that group chat, respond to this email and we will send you an invite.
- 18 February 20:00: 'Borrel': The usual: drinks and 'gezelligheid'!
NoteBoard:
For this month's NoteBoard, our secretary Michael has provided you with a delicious recipe:
After sitting through the year that’s called January, I can safely say that any new year’s resolutions I had have gone through the window and onto a street a mile away. For those that are (still) committing to eating healthily, you may not want to read on.
For those that are still here, it’s time to go to the nearest supermarket: it’s baking time! Seeing as not a lot has changed since the beginning of January, I thought I’d share with you something that has made a couple of days a little less boring; the rest of this quick note consist of an easy recipe for a New York Cheesecake. Good luck!
Ingredients
- 200 grams of digestive biscuits
- 100 grams of unsalted butter
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
- A dash of vanilla extract
- 600 grams of cream cheese (MonChou, for example)
- 2 tablespoons of flour
- 175 grams of white caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 125 grams of crème fraiche
(Feel free to add other ingredients like lemon juice or blueberries, or whatever else you would like to add.)
Method
Preheat the oven at 120 degrees Celsius.
Making the base
Grease your springform cake tin with butter, don’t forget to put baking paper in the base. Melt the butter, and bash the biscuits up until you have a crumbly mess. Add the biscuits to the butter, and mix them together until you have a (semi)crumbly sticky mess. divide this mess evenly across the whole base of your tin, pushing down firmly. Put your base in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
Making the filling
Mix the cream cheese, flour, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, and crème fraiche together in a bowl.
Putting it all together
Spoon the filling onto the base (so into the tin), and smooth the top. Using the round side of a spoon is a good way of doing this. Place the cake into the oven for about 1,5 hours. Afterwards, put the cake in the fridge for another 4 hours or so.
Enjoy!
Member Memo:
For this month's Member Memo, Nils has sent in a piece:
It’s nine o’clock, Monday morning. I get up, grab the first clothes that I can find and with a drowsy head I find my way to Canvas for what feels like the millionth time this year. When I finally find enough strength to press that Join meeting-button, I see a screenful of faces, faces that I only know from that damned Zoom-screen with that sweet, red Leave meeting-button that gets more appealing to press with every minute that passes. For me, the characters of the people behind those faces are as flat as the screen on which I see them. 95% of them I have never ever seen in real life, the other 5% only once or twice in that tiny window last September when we could go to the campus for a whopping 2 optional hours per week. I can’t stand that wall behind my desk anymore. I can’t stand that awkward waving goodbye after every meeting anymore. I can’t stand the teacher trying for 10 minutes to share their screen properly anymore. And yet that’s exactly what I do: I gaze at my orange wall, I wave goodbye when the meeting is finished and I patiently wait for the teacher to share their screen.
I see an e-mail coming in. It’s Vinod Subramaniam, who apparently is my Rector Magnificus. He proudly tells how happy he is with the on-campus and online hybrid form of education that they have been able to put together, especially for the first year students. It makes me angry. What on-campus education? I, and with me a lot of fellow CIS-students, feel forgotten, ignored, overlooked. Like we humanities students don’t matter. But deep down I know that this is nobody’s fault, which actually makes it even harder to accept the situation. We all want a scapegoat to blame everything on, and that’s why we sometimes unjustifiably create one for ourselves.
I ride my bike towards a huge building with large GGD-flags in front of it. I show all my paperwork and am accompanied towards a chair and a doctor with a needle standing next to it. Within a couple of seconds it’s over, and suddenly, despite the pain in my left arm, I feel happy. Is it true, that all those problems that we have can be solved by a small needle within just a blink of an eye? Apparently it is! I walk out of the vaccination room and into another room with dozens of other vaccinated people having the exact same, happy, relieved smile on their face. This is the beginning of the end of this crisis, you can feel it.
Stay safe for the homestretch, take the vaccine as soon as your invited and, most importantly, be kind to each other. There’s nothing more we can do.
Nils Buitenhek
If you want to be featured in the next Member Memo, please respond to this email.
That concludes the newsletter for this month. We hope to see many of you at February's activities!
Kind regards,
The board of Kliché