Too much salt will send you to jail

By E | Posted on: September 11, 2007

‘A McDonald’s employee spent a night in jail and is facing criminal charges because a police officer’s burger was too salty, so salty that he says it made him sick.

Kendra Bull was arrested Friday, charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct and freed on $1,000 bail.’

Read all about it here.

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Telling Lies

By E | Posted on: September 6, 2007

It’s dawned on me that one of the fundamental tropes of human communication is trying to convince your interlocutor that you’re not telling lies. Getting dressed in a public changing room this morning, I happened to overhear (not by choice) a conversation between two women that involved one of them trying to convince the other of an amazing new product she had recently discovered (some form of packaged, cut, fresh fruit, without preservatives):

Woman 1: “It’s fantastic, and so convenient!”

Woman 2: “But how can there be no preservatives if it’s fresh fruit?”

Woman 1: “I promise you, it’s all fresh!”

Woman 2: “So you can take it on picnics, send it with the kids to school…??”

Woman 1: “I promise you, it’s one of the best things! It’s almost changed my life!”

(I know excessive exclamation marks are irritating, but they only begin to approximate the sound of Woman 1′s voice and intonation).

And so on, including (from Woman 1), “it’s fantastic for throwing together fruit salads too!”.

Fortunately Woman 2 was quite the cynic, and after going along – for some time – with the half-question/half-amazement factor, she finally tried to put an end to the ridiculousness by asking, “So, what’s so great about a fruit salad, anyway?” When Woman 1 tried to protest, no. 2 just ingnored her and kept looking at herself in the mirror as she put the final touches to her lipstick: “I mean, fruit salads can be pretty shit if you ask me”.

So, Woman 2, in the end, wasn’t convinced.

But that’s really what we’re doing all the time, isn’t it; trying to convince other people of things. Take what should be the most meaningful words in our armoury: “I love you”. What do we say? “Really?”

That may be an extreme example, and even a false one, because that’s a case of rhetoric in the service of response. You ask the question to indicate not so much disbelief as (hopefully) some emotional movement.

But it’s still interesting that incredulity should be the soundest way to express conviction.

Maybe that’s as it should be, and the fact that it’s rhetoric now – “Did you hear that Owen Wilson tried to commit suicide?” “You laaah-yi! [sic]” – can be a disturbing reminder that people don’t ask enough real questions anymore, meaning that all those who really are telling lies just get away with it.

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Americans are brilliant

By E | Posted on: August 23, 2007

Who else could have figured out how to deep-fry Pepsi:

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Even more brilliant is the fact that, as per new HEALTH regulations, all these deep-fried wonders are now trans-fat free. In other words, go ahead, have another three…

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Getting the Punctuation Right

By E | Posted on: August 19, 2007

Courtesy (in amended form) of Achewood:

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Hef the Hefty

By E | Posted on: August 16, 2007

So the girls of the Playboy mansions are back on television and, incredibly, they are engaging in events that I haven’t yet seen, despite having seen the thing close on (sssh) twenty times.

This time they were celebrating Hef’s (x) birthday, and as “Hef” likes to do every year, there was a Casablanca extravaganza in his honour.

Three of his bunnies snuck off to get his present, and they came back each carrying a parcel almost twice their size.

Subtle.

After the candle blowing, they called Hef to open his not-so-subtle presents. They helped him by unveiling – Surprise! – portraits of themselves.

And – Surprise! – they all looked the same.

Now the bunnies have gone and there is what looks like an hour of discourse on how people in Hollywood wax. Body hair. I must to bed before I absorb a whole lot of information that I don’t need.

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Stocktake

By E | Posted on: August 15, 2007

So stuff just happens and suddenly it’s another month, or day, or year, and you’ve forgotten to remember some of the nice things in between. Like a well executed Kung Pao chicken, or, in Pei Mei’s phrasing, Chicken with Gongbao sauce. Pei Mei is my favourite Taiwanese kitchen companion at the moment, not only because she wrote the first Chinese-English cookbook to emerge from Taiwan (and which is now in my kitchen), but because everything I have so far tried at her commendation has been good, and good to make.

Some of her dishes have even withstood my inevitable tweaking – for what is cooking without tweaking – and that’s another good thing (take that, you damn muffins!!). So the other night the classic chicken with chillis and peanuts that is variously known as Kung/Gong Pao/Bao became Signe’s Gongpao Mushroom. That was good too (and there was more than one mushroom). I will be the Gongpao queen yet.

Then there was the Crema Catalana:

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OK, not exactly this one, which comes from Rick Stein in The Telegraph (as does the recipe, which you can find here). But mine looked pretty close. That was a really fine dessert; basically a Spanish creme brulee, the difference being that the custard base for this one is not baked in a bain marie, and is ultimately, therefore, much more silky and delicious, particularly because it’s flavoured (infoosed, I should say) with lemon and orange zest, and cinnamon. Try it for the mouthfeel.

I also baked chocolate chip cookies, but the wrong kind and I ran out of sugar so we won’t say anything more about that.

Last night I was wined and dined by someone who I look forward to doing much more of the same, and we ended up at a place we hadn’t intended but which turned out to be the best place to be. I mean, they give you free popcorn at the bar. And then there was excellently fried calamari, warm Sicilian walnut cake, and a good wine with a story behind it.

Today in the kitchen I did something I haven’t done for a long time and which Elizabeth David would scorn me for. I used a garlic press. But hey. Elizabeth can’t be the mother of us all. I have my own, and she makes the best garlic butter. With a press.

My mother also makes a damn fine onion soup. With any luck, the one I’ve got on the stove will be as good as hers. My father could never get enough of it.

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Don’t worry, be Danish

By E | Posted on: August 7, 2007

So, it’s official: Danes are among the happiest people in the world. And how do you stay happy when you pay up to 80% tax? Just be ordinary.

That’s the secret, according to sources in The Times, at least, who maintain that ‘the celebration of ordinariness is a recipe for contentment’.

It all sounds fairly simple; just don’t try be the best and you can’t disappoint yourself. There’s actually an unwritten law to that effect – “janteloven” – which is all about democracy and equality, and basically means that it’s never polite to sing your own praises or declare yourself better than anyone else.

The only trouble is – and I’m glad to see the article is honest about this – the secret formula only works for Danes in Denmark. If you are a foreigner or immigrant (which is a euphemistic way of saying refugee), the odds are not in your favour because Danes in Denmark don’t like to see someone trying to outdo themselves. More to the point, they don’t like the immigrant who runs a 24-hr shop in contravention of the standard 37 hour work week and ‘sacred weekends’, not really because, as they may claim, so-and-so is “taking our jobs” but because so-and-so reminds them of what they are not prepared to do to survive. They are not prepared to do it because they don’t have to, and not having to might make them happy, but it also makes them lazy.

Fine. That’s a massive generalisation and not all Danes are lazy and they’re not all xenophobic, but enough of them are, and I have the audacity to say as much a) because I’ve seen them, and b) because I am one. A Dane, that is. Now watch me sing my praises: I am neither lazy nor xenophobic. But then neither do I live in Denmark, which makes me the happiest Dane of all.

Still, there are things worth going back for. The beer. The licorice. The herring. The aquavit. Those crazy red sausages. And you haven’t been a really happy pig if you haven’t been to a Danish bakery…

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Curling papers and toes

By E | Posted on: July 30, 2007

My favourite new toy is the Google translator – a wonderful resource if you need to translate a whole thesis into Greek, or Japanese, in ten minutes. It’s also useful for recipe research, particularly with French terminology that you can’t remember the English for and don’t have the Gastronomique handy to look it up with.

I needed to translate paupiettes de veau, a dish (so Time magazine tells us) prepared on US television by Dione Lucas in 1955. First I misspelled what I was looking for, found a recipe for papillotes on a French site, and hit the translate button. I wish I had time to sit and laugh at them all, but so far I found two recipes, one for “Curlpapers of Calf to greedy peas”, and one just for “Calf Curlpapers”, which included a little preface about the joys of spring, and having gone shopping at “Large Expenses and we brought back a varied vegetable heap from there”. The greedy pea recipe follows:

Preheat the furnace with HT 7 (210°).

Wash and wipe lemon, cut it out of discs. Divide escalopes in two to obtain 2 equal pieces. Equeutez and fray greedy peas. Make bleach them 3 min with salted ebullient water. Drain them.

Cut 4 pieces of paper sulphurized, in the center of each one of them, pose 1 piece of escalope, salt, pepper, pose 1 lemon disc, then the other piece of calf. Distribute greedy peas around, strew with pink bays, add 1 cuil. of cream on the meat and close again the curlpapers.

Charge for 8 to 10 min, half-open the curlpapers, slip inside of the parsley pluches and are useful at once. 

Useful indeed. But hey, a valiant effort, I think. And it does add some mystique to peas to imagine them being greedy… (The French, by the way, is for pois gourmands, so now you know, if anyone ever calls you a gourmand, remember to get offended).

I did, eventually, find something close enough to end my search; paupiettes are not curlpapers but simply rolls (beef olive style), and the recipe calls for grass of Provence. How much more fun they would be, but even those of us who grew up in Swaziland know that herbes de Provence are not the kind favoured by Bob Marley.

Still, it was fun while it lasted. Now back to some real work.

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What’s square about a meal?

By E | Posted on: July 22, 2007

The philosophe asked me that question that other day and, being in the doubly uncomfortable position of not having a good answer (I suggested the four components of protein, starch, fats and …?), and getting nowhere with my work today, I’ve done a little research.

According  to Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder, there are a lot of good stories and plenty of twaddle to be found in the history of a ‘square meal’, some of which involve sailors and square plates, and none of which are substantiated, leaving, well, not much at all.

Never mind, and who cares, really, because who needs square meals anyway? For breakfast I had a pancake (which should have been a waffle) with bacon and maple syrup, and for lunch I’m drinking lemon-flavoured “cola” drink made from a seventies Soda-Stream (the coolest gadget in the kitchen – and don’t try this at home, but you can even make your own champagne!), and by the end of the day I may  or may not have had peanuts and an apple and a handful of popcorn, maybe a steak or a piece of coconut shortbread, and there’s nothing square about any of that but squares are for geeks. Except if it’s a sandwich, and you do like Elvis and get jiggy with peanut butter, bananas and bacon.

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That 80s Show

By E | Posted on: July 11, 2007

One of the most difficult things about growing up in deepest darkest Africa (a.k.a. Swaziland) was that good licorice was hard to come by. When I say good I mean salty. (There is a time and place for Allsorts, but that stuff is not good licorice).

Fortunately I had access, on an almost yearly basis, to Denmark, where I would stock up on all the good stuff to bring back to friends and watch them grimace over super-salty Piratos and “Turkish” pepper sweets. Piratos – licorice discs shaped like pirate money, in normal or super versions, and plainly some of the best stuff out there – are made by Haribo, and because there was a factory close to one of the towns we used to visit (indeed, one of the towns I sometimes called my “own”, particularly as I grew up and decided it was cool to come from Fakse, or close to Fakse, because that’s where Faxe beer comes from), I grew up under the misguided impression that Haribo was Danish. I’m sure I even spread the rumour on occasion.

Haribo is actually German (though fast becoming “global”, available in Giovanni’s Italian deli in Cape Town, if not in Pick’n Pay), and as the manufacturers of my favourite childhood sweeties (I liked sweeties a lot), it was both nostalgic and terrifying to discover – via the Food Section – that they are on display at the Fancy Food Show in the US:

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Not only have Haribo graduated to this kind of arty outfit (there is something cool about it), but it even has its own Wikipedia page, and, you can now get them on Amazon (if you don’t happen to live near Giovanni’s). Huh.

Which reminds me, I made the happy acquisition today of a genuine Soda Stream machine. None of this new stainless steel streamlined 007 gadgetry; good old-fashioned hard brown plastic, and an authentic bottle to go with it. Just watch, one day it’s going to be worth thousands, just like those little bottles of gelatinous sugar that were only made to keep little mouths happy. And hopefully when my Soda Stream is at the height of its nouveau chic, it will still be in my kitchen, fizzing water like it was made to do.

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