SIGN WITH AN E

I really must do something about my food photography. The other day I decided it was time for yet another violation of my (increasingly silly, as I’m coming to see it) aversion to mixing meat and bread. It was time for hotdogs.

Of course for the novice this poses all sorts of difficult decisions when shopping: what kind of sausage? What kind of roll? (Can I really just buy the ubiquitous – and decidedly unsexy – supermarket “hotdog rolls” that are no-brainers for schoolchildren?) What condiments?

In the end, dinner was modelled on what the Danes (bless their porky perversions) call “en med det hele” – or one with everything. If you order this at a Danish hotdog stand – and which I did for the Philosophe do when we were in that country, and he liked them so much he made me order them again and again – you get a basic (roll + sausage of your choice) plus mustard, ketchup, remoulade, crispy fried onions, raw onions, and cucumber relish.

Minus the remoulade and raw onions, we concocted something pretty damn good. Start by frying some smoked cabanossi (here the important factor is the knæk):

For the cucumber relish, I guess gherkins would work, but even better is this “salad” of thinly sliced cucumber that’s been marinating in vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper for a couple of hours (think crunchy salty sweetness):

Slice up an onion as fine as it gets, toss in a little flour and seasoning (Old Bay works well), then deep/shallow fry those babies until you get some good crunch:

Yes, I really must do something about my food photography. It’s a real problem, especially when you get to the best part, which is the combined action of assembly and eating. When I took this next picture I just knew it wasn’t going to do the thing justice. But perhaps I should be happy to report that when it comes down to it, the eating is far more important than getting a better shot. So you’ll just have to imagine the rest.

Did I already say this was good? It was.

Now I have to go hand-chop some rump steak for tonight’s burgers. If there are no decent pictures, you’ll understand.

Not having a bathroom turns out to be an amazingly effective way to not do a whole lot things you’d think have nothing to do with having a bathroom. Like cooking, because everything is so dusty. And working, because how can I settle down without being able to get up to pee every 5 minutes. Of course I don’t actually do this, but it’s important to know that I can, so instead I end up spending afternoons in other places where they have flushing toilets, and coffee and whisky and wine and food. As we discovered with our new kitchen last year, half the price of renovations is hidden in all the money you spend trying to get away from the temporary devastation of your home.

But things come together after they fall apart, and we now have floor tiles and a flushing toilet and hot water in our taps again. Showering still has to take place elsewhere, but it won’t be long now before I can go back to my normally obsessive behaviour of visiting the gym only five instead of seven days a week. (Funny how you start to think that everyone notices when emerge from the gym looking fresh after just 10 minutes, and probably think you’re hopelessly conning yourself that somehow being in the vicinity of active gym bunnies has some effect).

Anyway, I’ve been trying to capitalise on quiet kitchen space this weekend, so yesterday I tried David Lebovitz’s recipe for carnitas: what we enjoyed for dinner was obviously inauthentic because we resorted to pita breads rather than tortillas, but the combination of very slowly cooked pork that was somehow crispy and super tender, together with avo, and some fresh herby chilli-ish salsa was right up there.

Next up are a couple of ducks legs which have been marinading in Mr. O’s suggested soy sauce, star anise, five spice and cinnamon concoction for a couple of days. They are halfway through their 3 hours of slow roasting in the oven, and the aromas are beginning their rounds. It won’t be confit, but it will be a juicy, ducky, crisp-skinned delight (which may even stretch to a Peking pancake or two sometime during the week).

Otherwise I have been delighted (thanks to a food listserv I belong to!) to find a very helpful instructional video on Youtube demonstrating the correct method to fold a fitted sheet. She makes it look so damn easy! I tried, and failed. Watched again, tried again, and failed again. I even submitted myself to pausing after every step to make sure I got it right. I still failed. I guess I should be thankful that I’m the only one in our household that cares about what the inside of a linen cupboard looks like. But damnit, I must figure it out.

(On a concluding note, I finally got round to reading the latest “food” edition of The Nation. Unsurprisingly, much of it is drivel, with the usual suspects – Alice Waters, Michael Pollan – saying the same thing they always say. The one article I do recommend is a literature review by Brent Cunningham (Columbia Journalism Review’s managing editor), and a very good critique of the evangelising tendency of “foodies”. Here’s a taste:

‘It is always easier, of course, to identify a problem than to solve it, but the good-food revolution feels stuck, unsure how to move beyond its evangelical phase, which has been fairly successful in raising awareness about the ills of the industrial food chain. To be sure, far from the panel-and-documentary circuit, some important work is under way to change how our food is produced and consumed: the efforts by governments and nonprofits to make farmers’ markets food-stamp friendly; the growth in states and cities of food-policy councils, which bring together citizens, government officials and other stakeholders in the food system to work on all manner of food-related issues; the increasing number of mayors who are adding good-food initiatives to their agendas (…). Yet these efforts are nascent and uneven, and the tenor of the movement is still dominated by big ideas with a facile and vaguely paternalistic quality that is frustrating. Eat less meat. Plant a garden. Cook. Understand that “cheap” food has hidden costs. Appoint a food czar.’

Hear hear. The food czars abound. Now, how do we dis-appoint them??)

Being a Dane (when I feel like it), I’ve never had a taste for closed sandwiches. Which is not to say that I don’t love bread – I do, in all its glorious chewy starchiness. But in my universe, the best bread is eaten solo, with butter (perhaps cheese), while the main focus of sandwiches are the toppings, in which case all that bread is just a silly distraction (also, incidentally, why I love rice cakes: just platforms for piling on toppings).

This also means that if I order a burger anywhere, I’ll simply ignore the bread and eat the meat. (This is actually a fairly normal Danish way of dealing with minced beef. Hakkebøf, or “chopped steak”, is simply a meal of beef patties with lots of fried onions. Yum.)

Until last night. The Philosophe braai-ed (=bbq) us a couple of his 11 secret-herbs-and-spices burgers, including some Bobby Flay-inspired tip which involved spreading a cheesy-tomato mixture on the burgers in their final minutes of cooking on the grill. I had baked us some rolls earlier in the day, which we then sliced and buttered and gave a light toasting on the coals. If ever there was a time to try to full monty burger experience, this was it.

Mustard on the top half, chutney (!!), and pickles on the other. I closed that baby up, squashed it down, and went hand-to-mouth. And you know what? I finally get it! There is indeed a reason that these things have been around for so long. It was delicious. (Though it leaves no room for a brownie for dessert).

Then there was the Beef Wellington I whipped up the other night. There was nothing classical about it – I wrapped the fillet in onions and chorizo (no bacon/prosciutto or mushrooms in the house), and the pastry was not puff but some leftover croissant dough I had. Still, it’s a wonder what you can conjure with a couple of things from the fridge (yes, there just happened to be a piece of beef fillet in there too):

Ignoring the fact that the meat was raw the first time I cut it open – meaning we had to wait another 10 minutes for dinner – the combination of crispy pastry and melting tender meat when we finally got stuck in is truly good, even in all its kitschy glory. Now I understand why Gordon Ramsay keeps putting it on the Hell’s Kitchen menu (and I confess I had a moment of terror as I imagined his voice in my head when I first sliced it open: “you stupid c**t, you f**ked it up… throw it out…clear down and GET OUT! (Sotto voce) Holy f**k!).

No, thankfully there ain’t no Ramsay in this house. But we do have a black pig that roams about the neighbourhood. Sometimes it hurtles down the street for no apparent reason other than glee at being a pig (what’s not to love?).

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That’s right. Pulled pork sandwiches. Twice-cooked pork belly.  En croute. Somebody stop me.

I often make fun of other cars when I’m on the road. I find it’s a good alternative to getting irritated by how badly people drive. And often it’s the people in big cars with silly names who are the worst drivers of all.

The BMW X5, for instance, often contains small women who talk on their cellphones with a car full of children. They should be not on the roads at all, never mind driving such a big car. With a nod to my healthy general disdain for gaming, I call those cars Xboxes.

Then there are the Mercedes Kompressors. How very virile to spell it with a K! I call those cars (and their drivers) Kompressor Tossers.

Now for the really nasty part. Recently we acquired an Xbox. Not for the gaming, of course (who’s got time to play silly games?), but to fulfill the Philosophe’s long standing dream of achieving entertaining/tech nirvana. And it really is very cool. Now we can access pretty much everything on our computers through the box – music, pictures, movies, you name it.

But it’s still an Xbox, and so it came with a couple of sampler games, including Pacman which I was excited about for 5 minutes until I discovered I’m not the ace I used to be on the arcade game. The other thing with the samples is that you only get to try one level (the  object being, of course, that you go on to buy the actual game).

Unfortunately I have discovered a most silly game called Zuma (hey, I didn’t choose the name!) which involves a frog shooting coloured balls out of its mouth at other coloured balls. The idea is that if you have a blue ball in your mouth, say, then you aim for any sequence of two or more blue balls, which when hit, will disappear and prevent you from dying (or whatever) when and if the balls make it through the spiral to the holes.

(That’s me in the middle, about to die)

I’ve now completed the first level of the game, which is as far as the sample allows. But I can’t stop playing. And it makes my thumbs hurt too.

As a good friend said when he walked in the door yesterday after being out of town for some months (and I was too absorbed in shooting balls out of my frog mouth to even get up and greet him): “I see things have really progressed since you got your PhD!”

So I’m finally getting round to watching Our Daily Bread, a documentary about the food industry that is by now pretty old hat (it’s from 2005, and the present continuous tense is purposeful: the film is playing on the TV right now, as I write this on the couch, laptop on lap – as it should be).

Having read plenty of reviews, I was prepared for the worst, and even feared that eating popcorn would be a bad idea. I needn’t have bothered. It’s basically a montage of various food industrial clips: people picking tomatoes, gathering semen from bulls, sorting good little chicks from bad little chicks, pigs on their way to slaughter, and not to forget the human beings who do the sorting and slaughtering and semen collection, whom we get to see on their breaks, having a fag outside or a sandwich in a canteen.

There is no dialogue, no commentary, no music. In fact for an “award-winning documentary,” it’s pretty damn boring. It’s not that I need suspense – I watched, and was totally mesmerised by, the film about the famous headbutter Zidane, which really is boring from a narrative point of view (imagine a soccer match where you only watch one person, and he does basically nothing) – but watching a series of clips about where our food comes from is about as interesting to me as watching a film about the inner workings of a toilet.

Fine, there are arguments about how little people know (or care about) what they put in their mouths, and about us modernites being alienated from nature, about forgetting that a hunk of 22-hour braised pork belly was once inside little living breathing piggies. But films like this are not going to change that. Films like this only exist – and can only exist – as a result of that same culture. It depends on people being stupid about their food in order to make an impact.

Actually the one thing I did find fascinating (the film is finished now, thankfully) was all the sophisticated machinery used for gutting animals – piggies, fish, you name it. Technology really can be wondrous stuff.