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.

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:

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).

So you get robbed, and you put in new locks. You sleep badly for a few days, but eventually fatigue sets in and you have to get over it.  Ten days later your excellent insurance company delivers a brand new laptop which begins to make up for the irritations, the time lost, and the holes the assholes made in your world. Life approaches normal. How do you say? Oh yes, “shit happens”. How cathartic. You remember how to relax.

Then they come back. They take your brand new laptop and everything else they can get their grubby hands on (passports!). Your house is covered in foreign fingerprints you can’t see – and neither can the illiterate cops.

But of course. It could have been worse. We could have been here when it happened. We could have lost important work (praise be to Dropbox!). They could have taken my Kenwood Chef! They could have taken the single malts! They could have taken a shit on the floor!

They didn’t. But if that’s supposed to make it somehow better, it doesn’t. Neither does it make it better that “they” are quite likely among, or friends of, the group of builders renovating close by, who we continue to see every day, and who have been able to watch as we slowly turn our home into an impenetrable fortress. Will they bring a bazooka next time?

Things will be replaced, and deep sleep will return. But sadly I am not sure if I can re-find the Cape Town I have lived in for most of my adult life: the one un-threatened by “them”, and the nauseating idea of “next time”. I suspect I’ll be keeping my young friend close at hand, just in case:

I have a birthday coming up in a few days, and for the first time in years (ever?), I am quite happy to let it pass quietly by. See, I’ve just spent 14 days in various manifestations of the pictures above: mostly on a boat (pictured centrally, she is Isola Bella, the beautiful island), where many hours were spent watching waves, less hours (but rather a lot) drinking gin and tonics to yet another gorgeous sunset, some time sitting on deck chairs in various marinas watching other boats while sipping gin and tonics, and even a few stolen afternoons lounging at pools with other hot and weary travellers. We were a small crew: our captain, my father-in-law; his son, my husband and first mate, and yours truly, the galley slave (later to be promoted to galley admiral, and thereafter commander – either because the sandwiches got better and better, or because I became less tolerant of interference with the sandwich-making. This remains unclear).

Our home point was Kent Narrows, Maryland – where la bella lives when she is not out sailing – and our destination New Bern, North Carolina, where my Raleigh family came to hang out for a day before we turned around and headed on back. Little did I know that I would also be greeted with a bucket-load of birthday presents to make up for their not being here on the actual day. And you know how people sometimes give you all sorts of useless crap because they feel they have to give you something? Well, this bounty was the exact opposite of that. I got a rocking brownie pan (the one that makes lots of edges) that I’ve been coveting ever since I got into the sordid business of finding the best brownie recipe (it’s all in the pan!). I got some funky Bodum and Scanpan accessories (it’s sometimes nice to be Danish). And all the way from Jamaica:

So, after two three weeks of eating and drinking copiously (oh, the Maryland crabcakes. Oh, the North Carolina shrimp. Oh, the captain’s steak Fiorentina. Oh, the beef jerky!), and coming home with a stash of goodies to a kitchen that has already had one big gift this year (oh, beloved Kenwood Chef), who needs a birthday?

In fact, I rather like the idea of drinking water and eating apples for the next few weeks. And working from dawn till deep into the night, like some mad monk.

OK, that last part was bullshit. I would never be so irresponsible. Work and apples should be used in moderation.

These pages would similarly be dripping with pictures of fantastic plates of fillet, osso buco, and even chicken (!) from our favourite local,  Societi Bistro, where we spend enough time eating that everyone really should know our names by now.

There might be a picture of a delicious little grilled sardine sampled recently on a sunny winter’s afternoon at La Boheme (before moving on to the much less successful new X-Men movie).

But that’s not how I roll, so if looking at pictures of food is your thing, then I can recommend heading on over to Tastespotting, and if looking at pictures of food spotted in restaurants gets you going, then head on over to Foodspotting (where you can even look at a picture of sirloin steak from Societi Bistro).

Instead I just eat and drink, and generally forget to update my blog, which is also the likely course of action for the next three weeks, when I will be on a boat, sailing from Maryland to North Carolina. So expect no pictures of (pre-lunchtime) gin and tonics, or crab cakes picked up along the way. I definitely won’t be sharing any of the pulled pork I plan to slather liberally in the general direction of my mouth (because that’s just pornographic!). Imagine it, if you must. Me, I’ll just be cruising.

1. Do not trust IMDB ratings (7.6: really?).

2. Do not be fooled by the quality connotations of “Kenneth Branagh” or “Anthony Hopkins”.

3. Do not expect visual wonders from “3D”: here it was obviously just a ploy to sell you stoopid glasses @R6 each.

4. Natalie Portman does not make everything better.

4. Take home lesson: Do read many reviews before committing to 2 hours of schlock.

On the cinema-experience:

1. Cinemas are full of morons.

2. Paying for popcorn at cinemas is a fucking rip-off.

3. On Nu-Metro’s chocolate salt for popcorn: really?

4. Take-home lesson: stay at home (or just enjoy a drink by the fireplace at 221, perhaps followed by a steak at Belthazar, and then go home).

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:)

We say RIP to the dead, but I wonder if we don’t need it more for ourselves. However much Stephen’s death saddens me, it is the thought of his wife and two children that saddens me more. Because of course I cannot help but imagine myself in their position, and it is that thought that stops my breath for a second and fills me with terror. The thought of learning to find rest again in a life that was restful, and safe, and loving. It seems impossible.

I suppose the worst thing about finding a space of rest, and safety, and love is the very real possibility that it can disappear so quickly. When my father disappeared 11 years ago, I thought it would be impossible to live without him. I am sure my mother thought it impossible. We have all managed, some with more rest than others.

I have little doubt that Stephen Watson is resting in peace. I hope his family can learn do the same.