I’ve been experiencing various levels of annoyance at various times over the last few days. Much of this is heat(-wave) related, but mostly it’s from witnessing the brouhaha over the Paula Deen “scandal’ in the food media world. Practically every media outfit has their own take on it, but the facts are these:

- Deen (the “butter queen“, or as Frank Bruni put it, the ‘deep-fried doyenne of a fatty, buttery subgenre of putatively Southern cooking’) recently announced that she has Type 2 diabetes;

- She has known this for three years already;

- She is receiving money from Novo Nordisk to plug Victoza, a new diabetes drug (with as yet questionable benefits: those evil Danes!). Victoza is pretty expensive compared to other drugs on the market – think $500 a month vs. $20 a month.

The scandal includes any or all of the following:

a) she has deceived her audiences

b) she is a shill

c) she is a shilling a product that ordinary (read: poor) people cannot afford 

d) she is still fat (well, no one says it like that, but that’s what they mean when they comment on her not having made ‘significant lifestyle changes’)

e) she wasted three years not teaching her viewers how to cook healthy food.

Now, I’m not going to enter into the shilling debate. This piece in the LA Times did a fairly good job of convincing me the major problem with this, which is the illusion of a quick-fix solution that Deen’s deal with the evil Danes promotes:

‘The life of a diabetic is somewhat less than swell — but Novo Nordisk is selling swell, alongside drug companies that promise to medicate away depression, gas, incontinence, clogged arteries and fibromyalgia. … Support and encouragement is one thing, but what we’re being sold is magical thinking. In the battle between healthcare reality and fantasy, Paula Deen is small potatoes (steamed, skins on, no butter), but what she represents matters: another attempt to market immortality to a culture that’s particularly in love with misbehaving, followed by an easy fix.’

What does irk me, though, are the various permutations of a) and e), above. Suddenly now (or then, as it happens) that she has diabetes, Deen is only allowed to cook “healthy” food on television? Suddenly she now has a responsibility to make her audiences healthy too, and thereby fix the diabetes/obesity crisis? Maybe it would be a good idea for her to stop tasting and eating the food that she is apparently so good at making (even though she has pointed out that – surprise surprise – what we see her make on TV is not actually how she eats every day, and that her shows are for entertainment), but that shouldn’t stop her fans from making her fatty, buttery recipes if they damn well please. Should watching Anthony Bourdain sucking foie off a plate come with a diabetes advisory?

Bruni’s piece does an excellent job of describing the classist hypocrisies at play in much of this finger-wagging. But I am less disturbed by that than the evidence, once again, of how ready people are to blame their problems on someone else, and to expect someone else to fix them. It’s also an appetite for scandal which turns out to be a really convenient excuse to not think clearly about the actual issues, which as chef José Andrés also points out in this CBS interview, are quite simply not Paula Deen’s to fix.

Rant over. Now go buy the book.

If bitters interest(s?) you, go read this description of a bitters tasting, complete with fascinating stuff like why the ‘Ango’ label is bigger than the bottle, and what goes with what: ‘Ango’ pairs well with rum, whisky, gin, coke (!), and coffee (!), but not with Cognac, while Peychaud’s works with Cognac, tequila and whisky, but not with gin.

Even more interesting is what led me to that post in the first place, which was my own sneaky suspicion that bitters and ice cream would rock. And so they apparently do – over at the Angostura site their advice is to ‘to dash 5-6 dashes of Angostura aromatic bitters onto some plain vanilla ice cream. Voila, your ice cream is transformed into a gourmet dessert!’:

Gourmet yawn. Nah, what we need is the bitters in the ice cream. I am talking rock shandy-flavoured creamy goodness. Made with creme fraiche, a touch of lemon, and plenty of the red stuff to offset all the sugar in the condensed milk. The perfect post-Christmas tonic.

Now excuse me while I go talk to my ice cream machine.

(It’s apparently never to late to be the geeky kind of fan who would paint the inside of their front door to look like a travelling time machine. I take full responsibility. Every Doctor should have a Tardis.)

Still, I was sorry that one of the first things I said to the Philosophe this morning was one of those wifey-naggy comments about him not dusting off his feet before getting back into bed for our first cup of coffee. I was (am) sorry because a few minutes later he would learn about the death of Christopher Hitchens, someone he has admired for a very long time, and for whom I also (belatedly) grew to have deep respect.

It is a very sad day. It is one of those sad days, I suspect, that will have thousands of people not only lamenting the loss of a great thinker, but also confronting their own mortalities. I know this is the case for me, even as I wish it wasn’t. Death is unnerving like that. Not the idea of death itself, but rather the idea that it will come too soon. That I will not have finished everything I want to do. That I will not have become the person that I want to be (ie. the one who has accomplished it all). That I will have (ugh) regrets. Worst of all, that it will come too soon to someone else whom I will then have to live without. Death makes us pathetically, frighteningly small.

And so, on days like these, I am tempted by all the things I could do better. Work harder. Read more. Write more. Write better. (Be more like Hitchens.) Drink less. Smoke less. (Be less like Hitchens.)

But that would be forgetting that today is not about me, and also that inspiration should come from life, not from death. I will miss reading new writing by Hitchens (his Vanity Fair pieces in particular), which never failed to inspire me to write better. But fortunately for me, there is practically a whole lifetime of Hitchens’ writing which I have not yet gotten round to, a good deal of which sits on shelves right in front of me.

Books are a bit like the Tardis, come to think of it. They can look small and boring, but the best ones are bigger on the inside, and they take us to really cool (though sometimes scary) places. People too. Hitchens was a giant for sure.

The next day (assured by Google that it wasn’t a completely hair-brained thing to do), I rolled blue cheese into the pastry. It looked a bit weird, but then I had a(nother) glass of wine and everything seemed fine. I cut it to size, scored it and put it on top of that Guinnessy goodness, gave it an egg wash, popped it in a hot oven and hoped for the best.

I was quite pleased with the result, but our dinner guest claimed it actually was the BEST Guinness pie she’d ever eaten. She’s apparently eaten lots (of Guinness pies), and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten any, so I’ll take her word for it. (Even if I do know that she on occasion eats baked beans out of a tin for dinner.)

So maybe I could get into this pastry thing. There is something rather splendid about taking a puffy golden pie out of the oven. And how cool is it to make funky crusts. What’s next: roast chicken with a goat’s cheese crust? The previously dreaded apple pie with a cheddar crust? (I now get the cheesy crust, but in a sweet pie??) What cheese goes with lamb?

Then again, maybe our guest wasn’t even talking about the crust. She did reveal that whoever used to make her Guinness pie pretty much put beef and Guinness in a pot with, like, nothing else. (Did I forget to mention that mine obviously included onions, celery, garlic, rosemary, tomato paste, salt, pepper, a squirt of Worcestershire, and extracts from the blood of a leprechaun?)

Whatever it was, it worked. As did the Guinness ice cream, which should really be called genius ice cream: sweet, bitter, creamy, and thanks to the addition of caramelised and salted cashews, salty and crunchy too. All food groups in one delicious mouthful (and then several more).

But no more food now. Is it beer o’clock yet?

Sláinte.

I wish I had done it myself, but letting someone else worry about the birds was in the end a brilliant idea, since all I had to do was sit back and enjoy: 

I guess Bukowski said it best:

Alas (as one of my friends says way too often), with the last few months occupied mostly by getting through three burglaries, sino-bronchitis (ugh), finishing off one book, starting (and very soon finishing) another, oh, and teaching/marking/invigilating/attending meetings, I have regrettably failed to get it together.

But birthdays are no time for regrets. If he can’t throw birds at pigs, he can at least enjoy a solid Danish birthday breakfast (because nothing will stand in the way of me channelling my inner Viking):

These are kanelsnegle, or cinnamon snails. Did I go all out and make proper puff pastry? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the dough does contain an essential, if little known, ingredient for Danish pastries, which is ground cardamom (any “Danish” that does not contain cardamom is an impostor – could even be a Swede!). And with the leftover dough, this:

This does look pretty Danish, and it would be if it was full of stuff like raisins, cinnamon, and if we’re going to get really fancy schmancy, marzipan. Instead it’s stuffed full of Dairy Milk Whole Nut chocolate (for which there incidentally exists a very silly advert). To be honest, I don’t know if such an un-Danish thing has ever been pulled off before, and I have no idea how it will go down.

But how bad can cardamom-scented bread full of chocolate (for breakfast) really be? Pain au chocolat and all that. I’d sure rather eat that than a stack of double chocolate pancakes. There are limits!

Besides, we wouldn’t want to spoil our appetites, or dampen our fighting spirits. Imagine if a flock of angry birds suddenly pulled in and darkened the birthday sky…

I never thought I would get a fourth birthday card again, but this was a stroke of genius. See, just over four years ago, we had a little impromptu gathering with a few friends, telling them we had some important news. Thinking that we were oh-so clever and funny, we told them that we’re having a baby… and its name is wedding.

There were more than a few minutes of extreme awkwardness as our friends tried to figure out what the hell we were talking about, and how to respond. Or rather, they (all!) first understood it to mean that I was pregnant, and that we were going to call our child wedding. For some reason, both of those possibilities seemed to them silly/preposterous/insane, but they did what friends do and played along. I think a full half hour passed before someone was brave enough to ask if we were serious, and the truth finally came out: We were getting married (duh!).

Today Americans are going to gorge themselves on turkey and all manner of pies – some to ridiculous extremes - in the name of giving thanks (and good luck to them: I’ve attended one such shindig, and it was truly terrifying). Here, we give thanks to our wedding, which has finally grown out of its nappies and screaming fits and into something that’s old enough to be left in front of the television for a couple of hours a day. And since no birthday is complete without cake, I give you:

(Inspired by this banana cardamom cake with browned butter frosting: I added fresh ginger to the cake, substituted pistachios and coconut for the walnuts, and rum to the icing, because that’s how we roll.)

The best part? You can do this too!

All you need is:

1 good brownie recipe waiting for a new identity;

1 batch of goat’s cheese fudge lurking in the freezer (preferably homemade, and preferably blessed by Norwegian angels);

120 exam scripts to mark;

An oven.

In the approximate words of the immortal Nigella Lawson (or the Barefoot Contessa, or that Italian babe with the big head [GdL], or that annoying Brit who keeps annoying people whose job it is to involve themselves in childhood nutrition [JO], et al.), See how easy it is?

I like Twitter. I like it much more than Facebook, its evil not-so-twin. I particularly like the fact that, unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t force you to take part in social politics, like be-”friend”ing someone you went to school with two decades ago and never spoke to, and suddenly you are “remembering” when it’s their birthday and joining their other 500 “friends” to say Happy Birthday! Have a wonderful day!, to which they respond the next day with “Wow! Thanks all for the wonderful wishes. So special to be remembered!”. Yeah right.

#FollowFriday/#FF seems to me to veer dangerously close to this type of inanity. (For those of you with your heads in the sand not on Twitter, go look at How #FollowFriday works).

I understand the endorsement factor. Being included in a #FF tweet tells other people who might not otherwise find you worth following. But like the “friend” situation on Facebook, it messes with natural selection. I don’t want to follow someone because someone else says that I should. I choose to follow people based on discovering that their Twitter activity somehow adds value to my life. Sure, sometimes I’m wrong, and I may miss someone important, but I would rather miss someone important than end up following a bunch of people who haven’t earned my attention.

The beauty of Twitter is that by paying attention, you end up finding the people you want to follow without silly “traditions” like #FF. Like a particular columnist? Start following them on Twitter, and it’s likely that soon enough they’ll re-tweet someone else who you then discover is also worth following, and so on. Or if you retweet them, they may start following you, and so on. It’s the activity of attention that makes Twitter worthwhile – not attention for the sake of attention.

Which is why I also don’t like this “tradition” of welcoming new people on Twitter and asking your followers to follow them. I have good friends in real life who I enjoy having a glass of wine and a natter with. Chefs whose food I happily pay good money to eat. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to start following them just because they join Twitter. Show me that you’re worth following, and you’re in.

And if I then retweet or mention you, please don’t bother thanking me. I get that it’s polite to acknowledge acknowledgement, but can’t we just let the subtleties of interaction be without all the extra noise (“Thank you.” “No, thank you!” “No no, it’s you who must be thanked!”)? My mention of you is (perhaps) an endorsement to my followers to follow you, and you can thank me by continuing to add value to my life by tweeting interesting things. That’s it.

I am by no means a Twitter celeb, and neither is that my aspiration. But I guess some people who read this might get irritated by the grump I’ve got on. Maybe they will even unfollow me. That’s too bad. But if you’re following me for any reason other than the fact that you enjoy what I bring to the table, then you’re following me for the wrong reasons. Sorry, that’s it.

All I hope for is that Twitter doesn’t turn into Twitbook. So #TGINLFF. (And don’t get me started on #woofwednesday.)

Anyhoo. Needed a gift for a dear aunt(-in-law), and needed to make something different. So I did what any good American housewife did, and I baked chocolate chip cookies. Not just any, of course. Only the best will do, which is apparently this number from the NYT. (They really are the best. All the bloggers say so.)

I’m usually intimidated by the sheer size of American-style things (those muffins: seriously?), but I must say I quite enjoyed scooping golf-ball size globs of batter onto the baking tray.

(That’s a sprinkle of salt on top, by the way. It’s the secret!) And then watching them turn into jumbo cookies:

Of course I tweaked the recipe. I added two teaspoons of ginger powder to the mix, and a handful of chopped preserved ginger. An inspired tweak it was!

But as good as these are – and I mostly hope aunty will think so too – I reckon my most important revelation was finally understanding why Americans confuse raw cookie dough with something that is appropriate for ice cream. I mean, just look at it. It’s suddenly an easy confusion to understand. Shame (as we say in this part of the world).