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.

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?

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).

The Loading Bay, for all non-Capetonians (and that includes some of you who actually live in the city but who – like ourselves – roll on different wheels), is a clothing-accessory ‘luxury apparel’-coffee-food-shop. They serve food all day (including a burger), but Thursday nights they stay open just for burgers. ‘Capetonians’ know about this, and there are enough of them to make booking a necessity. This is how they describe their burger (veggie available too, but who cares):

Looks good enough, no? So we booked (accepting a rather early slot, which was the only one available), we went, and I got so Capetonian on that burger that I even ate the whole thing with my hands.

Yes, so I’m one of those irritating people who usually leaves the bread and tucks into the patty with a knife and fork (technical term: going Danish on a burger). It’s not that I don’t like bread. I like bread. A lot. It’s just that usually burger rolls turn into these soggy, useless discs of starch that add no value to the meal, except as useless, soggy starch. A bit like mashed potatoes, come to think of it.

But eating the Loading Bay burger was one of those rare experiences when the whole package just worked: good patty, righteous bun (lightly toasted, as I recall, and dense enough to serve a palatable function), good cheese, condiments, etcetera. Being a Capetonian is rather delicious, it turns out.

Then the Capetonian in me got greedy, and decided that we needed to search out the best burgers in town (which is a) yawn, and b) why bother when you’ve found something that works?, as my brother-in-law pointedly remarked of the venture). We have been impressively committed to the task, hitting some most of the spots people bother to talk and blog about in the burgerverse.

The results, in a word: Meh. With the exception, of course, of the glorious bacon and blue cheese numbers that the Philosophe himself conjured on the braai just the other night (coming a close second to another home-experiment involving hand-chopped meat and duck fat). And then there was this morning, when we found ourselves in the decidedly un-Capetonian hinterland of Somerset West Mall. Look, no-one forced us there. We happened to be driving past, and decided on the spur of the moment to watch a movie in the middle of the day (because that’s the sort of thing you can do when the only creatures you have to look after are yourselves, and three cats).

11am, an hour to kill. What to do? Spur of the moment indeed:

See that processed cheese? Now imagine some crispy bacon on there, and a good puddle of Spur’s secret BBQ sauce. And no, I didn’t eat the bread. But I had a bloody mary with it, and on a Sunday morning in Somerset West, it was the very best brunch to be had. Lessons learned (attention Heston Blumenthal!): why mess with something that works?

I have been reading (and writing) about Mr. Oliver’s latest LA venture for some time now, but I didn’t get to *enjoy* the full spectacle of the first episode until last night. Late at night was a stupid time to watch, because it sent me to bed depressed.

Smite me with your bleeding heart if you must, but I am not depressed about the obesity “epidemic” in Los Angeles, America, or the rest of the world for that matter. Which is not to say I don’t find it sad that so many people get it wrong when it comes to feeding themselves and their families. Nor that I don’t find it sad that some children are made to eat something resembling airplane food on a mostly-daily basis. But getting depressed about these things would be a waste of my time and energy, a) because the reasons for this state of affairs are much more complex than even I dare to imagine that I fully comprehend, and b) because there is little I can do to change it.

Not so Mr. O. He’s depressed alright. And he also has the conceit to imagine that a) he understands everything about the system that he is taking on, and b) that it his responsibility – nay, his right – to take this system on. He keeps talking about how it is his “job” to do this and that: his “job” to try to force the LAUSD to let him into their schools (where he’s been banned from filming); his “job” to try to persuade Dino – the nice man who let Jamie into his burger joint Patra’s – to make his burgers with grass-fed Black Angus beef, and his milkshakes with yoghurt instead of ice cream. Dino really is a nice man. He lets Jamie mess about in his kitchen, and lets him fix a yoghurt smoothie, and then rightly responds: “I tried it, and it tasted good, but he missed the point. This is a great drink, but it’s not a milkshake.”

Here’s what Dino looks like when he’s explaining that Jamie is crazy for thinking that he can take burgers and fries off the menu at a burger joint:

And here’s what Dino looks like when Jamie tells him that using grass-fed Black Angus beef for his burgers will make his burgers cost $4,89, instead of $2,69 (warning: picture of a scared man):

I nominate Dino as the Food Revolution hero, because Dino gets it right. He gets that Jamie is missing the point if he thinks that putting a smoothie on the menu of a burger joint is going to do a damn thing to curb obesity. I’ve never been to LA, but I’m also pretty sure that people who want smoothies can find them elsewhere. Dino gets that he is running a business, and servicing customers who come to his restaurant because there’s something on his menu that they want to eat. He gets that there is a difference between freedom of choice and responsibility.

What Jamie Oliver does not get is that saying, on leaving Patras, “I don’t know if I can work with Dino” is in fact a very stupid thing to say, because he does not have to “work with” Dino, and neither does Dino have to work with him. Just as the LA Unified Schools District has no mandate whatsoever to work with Jamie Oliver. (Which they did in fact offer to do, just not on camera. But that, as someone else put it summarily, ‘is not a TV show‘.)

But my case is not really with Jamie Oliver, just as my case, in another context, is not with quacks like Gillian McKeith. No, my case is with the many people who do listen to them, and who do not get that these people, who may even have their hearts and concerns in all the right places, are simply not the authorities that they make themselves out to be. What’s the harm, especially if *something* improves? The harm is that worshipping pseudo-authorities is a slippery gateway to compromising all our rational decision-making faculties, believing whatever scare stories and half-baked statistics they throw about, and soon everybody will be taking advice on how to live their lives from someone called Oprah. Oh wait…

(And oh, if do ever find yourself at Patra’s, don’t forget to try the new Jamie Oliver Revolution burger, made with grass-fed Black Angus beef. If you’ve got $4,95 to drop, that is:)

That is, watch him try to feed hay-smoked mackerel paired with blueberries to a naval submarine crew who normally subsist on a full fry-up and something ‘comforting’, like steak and yorkshire pudding, followed by shortbread and custard (or some such) – every day. (This is HB trying to regenerate their tired, overfed, brain cells.)

Watch him get BA passengers to begin their in-flight meals with a nasal spray, which causes much nasal gunk to drip in the general direction of gravity, which is also in the general direction of their actual food trays: not pretty television. (This is HB trying to rehydrate their dehydrated noses so they can taste their food better.)

Generally he ends up looking like a tosser for the first 38 minutes of each 45 minute episode, until he finally cottons on to the (big) difference between the world inside his restaurants and the world the rest of us live in. Like that a naval submarine crew don’t have time, space, money, or any bloody interest in on-site hay-smoked mackerel and blueberries, but they respond very well to a good ol’ Irish stew (sous-vided for a couple of months, naturally). Or that BA passengers quite like to eat something they can recognise as food while they are hurtling through the air, like a good ol’ shepherd’s pie (taste-powered by the secret addition of seaweed, since umami is the only flavour that doesn’t get lost in the sky. Naturally.)

Each of these institutions has supposedly recognised that the food they deliver is shite, and each is genuinely (supposedly) looking for a real-life solution to that problem. And in the end, food-mentalist HB ends up being a totally wasted commodity, because the solutions he creates that can actually be implemented are totally pedestrian. And by pedestrian I mean the kind of ideas that anyone with a food-brain who can also cross a street would be capable of coming up with. Problem: Fresh ingredients take up too much space on a submarine, and too much time to cook? Solution: Cook them on-shore and vacuum pack them for easy on-board storage in the fridge or freezer. I can’t decided if Channel 4 is taking the piss out of HB, or out of its viewers.

Then there’s his popcorn ice cream in cinemas. (This is HB trying to get people to stop eating popcorn.)

Well, ok, that sounds pretty cool actually. Genius Heston strikes again!

Except that if he spent a bit more time on Google, and less time in his science books, he would also have discovered that that’s hardly an *original* idea (WTF Heston?). I bookmarked a recipe for that AGES ago (last year) already – not to mention that in 0.14 seconds, Google comes up with 7,400,000 hits on it.

Well I finally made it the other day. It goes against all my popcorn instincts. You have to soak the things (in cream, sugar and milk), which means you have to listen to all their delicious crunchy airiness die a slow pffffft into a soggy mess. Then when you’ve really drowned them good and dead (30 mins to an hour), you have to sieve them and mash the life force out of them.

Then you turn that creamy, popcorny goodness into a silky smooth custard (with an egg and mild heat). Churn that custard when it’s nice and chilled (not forgetting a good slosh of vodka to prevent it from freezing too hard), and there you have perhaps some of the most deliciously counter-intuitive ice cream. Go ahead and serve that with some salted caramel sauce, as recommended, and also a fudgy ginger brownie, if you have one to hand. It’s so delightfully wrong it’s almost like having HB in your kitchen.

(Disclaimer: Sorry, Heston. I’m just grumpy because the Philosophe recently ate a piece of pork belly that was cooked in one of your kitchens for 52 hours. I really should have been there. But you are welcome to come and try my popcorn ice cream – if you can handle defeat.)

Being an honorary South African (or Swazi, or Dane), I am a relative latecomer to the phenomenon of Alton Brown – who, as per above, has apparently been teaching (American) geeks how to cook since 1999. He’s entertaining and whacky in a Heston Blumenthal sort of way, except the comparison stops at invention: they’re both mad scientists, but Blumenthal is definitely one up on the Willy Wonka factor (never mind snail porridge: how many people can actually get their dinner guests to lick the wallpaper?). Alton Brown is fun to watch because he explains how stuff works, in a way that you could actually try at home (I once mimicked his recipe for mint juleps: they was good).

So it only made sense that I should break my latest vow never to make brownies again with Alton Brown’s recipe. I like it because it only uses cocoa (no faffing about with melting chocolate), and it contains four eggs, which should produce some nice thick, chewy brownies.

And I planned to follow it exactly to the letter, so I could only blame Alton if they didn’t work. Except for one minor alteration, which was to add an entire box of Dalla Cia grappa chocolates. How beautiful it promises to be in execution:

+

I wish I could say the above picture (of the brownie) came out of my own kitchen, but alas, my brownies are still cooling in the pan, so I borrowed this picture from someone who actually got it right (click on the image to visit that baker). And I may as well add right now that I didn’t have enough butter and couldn’t be arsed to go to the shop again, so I supplemented with a little oil. Oh, and I added some espresso powder too.

In theory, these will be the perfect ode to something the Philosophe and I call our cap-grap routine: cappuccino and grappa after lunch (which ideally includes a glass of some nice cold riesling for these hot summer days). But I fear that I – unlike Alton Brown – am a crap scientist in the kitchen. My last batch of brownies contained two whole boxes of Lindor chocolate balls. They should have been superb. Instead the whole lot ended in the bin.

Let’s hope the garbage trolls don’t get lucky again.

Well, OK, I felt a little sick first, but that’s only because I’m not used to stuffing hundreds of sugary ‘pillules‘ into my mouth at once. Which is really to say that I’m not used to stuffing my mouth full of sugar (unless it comes in the form of a brownie). But once I had washed them down with a good glug of water, I felt pretty good, and I can now say from personal experience – along with the experiences of my fellow overdosers – what we already know of homeopathy: there’s nothing in it. Except sugar, of course, and a large dose of bullshit.

This is serious. Do the 50,000+ fools (the Beckhams and the Queen included) who opt for homeopathic treatment every year in the UK realise how many empty carbs are in that stuff? And here everyone’s been pointing fingers at McDonald’s and Coca Cola for making the world fat.

Yes, there is one born every minute, but if you are going to stuff yourself full of sugar, you could at least make sure it tastes of a brownie.

“Normally getting into schools isn’t a problem. We’ve never had a total shutdown. In my country, it would be illegal.”

I’m intrigued as to which part of this situation could be considered illegal in the UK. Not allowing a celebrity chef to film a documentary in schools? Not allowing a celebrity chef to interfere with issues of public health (if indeed school lunches are that)? Or perhaps not paying attention to Jamie Oliver?

But the main problem here is not really any of the above, but rather that first word: “Normally.” There is really nothing “normal” in the world of Jamie Oliver, or in the world of celebrity chefs saving the fat world from its fat self, because everything is made up as they go along. And luckily for Mr. O, they’ve been going along quite swimmingly, not least thanks to his “activist” endorsement by TED last year.

Until now, that is. Which also makes it hard to not actually feel sorry for the man when you see a headline like this:

“I’m finding it really hard to tell the truth in this country,” he apparently said – adding that he’s never been “so deflated” in his whole career. Now, say what you like about him – and I have plenty to say myself – but the only reason that he’s been able to get to the self-delusional position of believing that he is some sort of truthsayer is because no one has ever gotten in his way before (OK, a bit here and there, but they “normally” come round to his side and everyone comes out larfin’).

It’s all a very curious drama to watch – including the sideshow which features Michelle Obama hooking up with Walmart (not for the first time, mind you) to promote “healthy” eating: some say it rocks, while others think it’s doomed.

And while the celebrities sulk and the corporations flex their (friend’s) well-toned arms, most people will probably carry on chomping their Pop Tarts and not giving a crap how many calories they eat.

Well I’ve more than once intended to post pictures of groaning festive season tables over the last few weeks, but technical problems have gotten in the way of that venture (probably for the best, since no one really needed to see a picture of me wearing a paper hat that came out of a Christmas cracker). So this will instead by my customary grumpy “new year” post in which I express relief that all the silliness is over and we can get back to work/life/normal silliness.

So, back to work, which for me means continuing to read too much food media, and which at this time of year gets particularly annoying as most people are on the predictable “detox” curve. (Fortunately these are as predictably countered by detox-debunking stories like this one, though unfortunately stupidity is as stubborn as people who continue to buy and wear PowerBalance bracelets, or refuse to vaccinate their children (%^$#%$#%!!!!), even though it’s clearly bullshit – to paraphrase Penn & Teller once more).

Yes, January is predictably an echo of this remarkable cover from Time in 1972 – back in the days when such a magazine cost 50c! Perhaps there’s a correlation between stupidity and inflation (hmm, behavioral economists?).

OK fine, so I admit that I once again ordered a wagon for the first days of this year, and this time I remembered to specify that it should NOT be stocked with whisky. So I did glide into this new year feeling rather virtuous (and slightly more grumpy than usual). But I’ll be the first to reiterate the fact that the idea of modifying your behaviour based on the time of the year is just plain stupid. Anyone notice how the gyms were suddenly packed in the first weeks of December? Then they were blissfully quiet between Christmas and New Year when everyone was off stuffing their faces. Now they’re full of guilty people again. I had a good chuckle at the story related by someone who I meet there quite regularly, let’s call her X (because I don’t know her actual name) – X told me she had been working out next to some new and eager gym bunny getting “in shape” for Christmas, and when bunny asked her when she had started training, X replied “40 years ago”.

So, wha’ever – the time of sanctified excess is over, and yes, it’s time to get back to work. Now if people could just remember that salads do not mean punishment. Sometimes salads are the very nicest thing to eat, especially when it’s too hot to slave over home-made pizza. But sometimes that’s what you have to do, just like sometimes you have to cook on an open fire on the hottest day of the year. And when that happens, you better make sure you have some premium ice cream (preferably home-made, with lots of cream) to cool you down and send you into sweet dreams.

Sometimes on a working weekday when the sun is shining you also have to give it up and go have lunch somewhere nice by the sea. Just because you can, and because you better be grateful for the fact that you aren’t in Brisbane right now.

On that note, and with my best grumpy cheer, happy 2011. Let’s hope we make it past 21 May. Oh wait, that’s bullshit too. Bon appetit.