Category Archives: food+drink

food+drink, ramblings

Early Burns

On 25 January the Scots celebrate their national poet, Robbie Burns, with the eating of haggis, mashed potatoes and mashed neeps (turnip and/or swede depending who you believe) and the drinking of whisky. Not being traditionalists, nor of Scots ancestry (at least in the last couple of generations), we celebrated Burns’ Night in our own way this evening. Yes, we had haggis; but no we didn’t have the whisky.

In fact what we had was a rib-sticking meal of haggis, crushed potatoes, steamed Jerusalem artichokes and steamed broccoli. It was a very quick and easy meal: the potatoes and artichokes took the longest with the haggis needing just a few minutes in the microwave. The artichokes were steamed, with the broccoli florets added almost at the last minute. The potatoes were also steamed and then broken up rather than being mashed to a pulp. We forewent the whisky in favour of supporting the Auld Alliance by washing it down with one of our last bottles of 2010 Beaujolais Nouveau, which had just the right roughness to complement the haggis. The broccoli and artichokes went extremely well with the haggis too. Yes, it was good!

So it wasn’t traditional. So what? I remember buying deep fried haggis and chips from the local chippie when I was a student in York. Equally not traditional but bloody good food on a cold winter’s night on the way home from the pub.

I’ve always liked haggis and fail to see what so many people (think they) dislike in it. These same people would be happy eating gamy terrine, and dishes containing oats (eg. porridge, oaten biscuits). So why the aversion to haggis which is really only a lamb-based, slightly dry, slightly peppery, terrine or coarse sausage with pinhead oats. OK, yes, so it does have offal in it – so does most terrine and sausage. And yes traditionally it is stuffed in a sheep’s stomach – but then traditional sausage casings are pig intestines. All these foods were originally designed as ways not to waste small, less appetising, pieces of animal especially during the lean times of winter. So where is the problem?

Moreover haggis has the advantage of being extremely filling. You think what’s on your plate is a mean helping, but I assure you it isn’t – it’s all in the oats!

If you’ve never had haggis now is the time to try it. Most supermarkets will have haggis at the moment; indeed many now stock it all year round. The commercial brand leader seems to be McSween’s, although if you’re in Scotland you’ll likely find haggis in most butchers. And, for the veggies, McSween’s also do a vegetarian haggis; which I must try sometime, if only to work out how they do it.

So why not push the boat out and have haggis for Burns’ Night on Tuesday? You’re unlikely to regret it unless you overdo the whisky!

amusements, food+drink, sexuality, thoughts

A Difficult Question

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OK, so here’s a really hard question for everyone which I saw being discussed on the internet a few days ago.

Which would you rather give up forever … cheese or oral sex?

And no, you aren’t allowed to negotiate restrictions and loopholes. It means all oral sex, both given and received. And it means all cheese: from cheddar to Camembert and Gorgonzola to cream cheese.

Although it is interesting to speculate why one might ever have to make such a decision, it is a hard question, isn’t it?

I think I have to agree with the apparent majority and elect to forego oral sex. As one person has remarked: there are lots of ways to have an orgasm but only one way to eat pizza, macaroni cheese or deep-fried brie.

What would you choose – and why? (And no you don’t have to make your decision public if it embarrasses you!)

food+drink, science

Beer is Better

And now for some real, if esoteric, scientific research. This from the February 2011 issue of Scientific American:

Beer Batter Is Better
How it makes a great fish ‘n’ chips

If you’ve ever sat down at a pub to a plate of really good fish and chips — the kind in which the fish stays tender and juicy but the crust is super-crisp — odds are that the cook used beer as the main liquid when making the batter. Beer makes such a great base for batter because it simultaneously adds three ingredients — carbon dioxide, foaming agents and alcohol — each of which brings to bear different aspects of physics and chemistry to make the crust light and crisp.

Beer is saturated with CO2. Unlike most solids, like salt and sugar, which dissolve better in hot liquids than they do in cold, gases dissolve more readily at low temperatures. Put beer into a batter mix, and when the batter hits the hot oil, the solubility of the CO2 plummets, and bubbles froth up, expanding the batter mix and lending it a lacy, crisp texture.

That wouldn’t work, of course, if the bubbles burst as soon as they appeared, as happens in a glass of champagne. Instead beer forms a head when poured because it contains foaming agents. Some of these agents are proteins that occur naturally in the beer, and some are ingredients that brewers add to produce a creamy, long-lasting head. These compounds form thin films that surround the bubbles and slow the rate at which they burst.

Foams also make good thermal insulators. When you dunk a piece of beer-battered fish into a deep fryer, most of the heat goes into the batter rather than into the delicate food it encloses. The bubbly batter can heat up to well over 130 degrees Fahrenheit — the point at which so-called Maillard reactions create golden-brown colors and yummy fried flavors — while the fish gently simmers inside.

The alcohol in the beer also plays an important role in moderating the internal temperature and crisping the crust. Alcohol evaporates faster than water, so a beer batter doesn’t have to cook as long as one made only with water or milk. The faster the batter dries, the lower the risk of overcooking the food. If the chef works fast enough, he can create a beautiful lacework in the coating that yields that classic beer-batter crunch.

[W Wayt Gibbs and Nathan Myhrvold]

amusements, beliefs, environment, food+drink, quotes, thoughts

Food for Thought

I came across the following a few days ago. I had to think hard to grasp exactly what was being said, but having done so I think the message is powerful. It relates to false life, as propounded on my Zen Mischief website. Sentimentality is a manifestation of false life, through false emotions. True sentiment (“what one feels with regard to something; mental attitude; an opinion or view as to what is right or agreeable; a mental feeling, an emotion; those feelings which involve an intellectual element or are concerned with ideal objects” – OED) is part of a considered reaction to and engagement with real life in the raw. There is a rather large difference …

Sentimentality creates the CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] farm – the sentimentality that says we are too weak to bear the pain of knowing animals and watching them die. This is what turns our food into Styrofoam packages and allows CAFO agriculture, where animals are carefully hidden from our view, and the relationship of our purchases carefully concealed. Sentimentality allows us to care about the extinction of the preferred charismatic mega-fauna of our choice […] but that we see no connection between our purchases, our acts and the habitat destruction of the animals in question. Sentimentality enables us to care about the child Pakistani-flood victim on nightly TV enough to send some money – but not enough to try and reduce the number of climate-related natural disasters by giving up some of our privileges. Sentimentality enables the patriotic fervour that allows us to not know how many Iraqi or Afghani civilians die in the interest of our national “greater goods.” Sentimentality is the emotion that emerges from the condition of not knowing – and it is what you have left in a society that conceals at every level real knowledge. It too is both cause and effect – it permits great evil, and it facilitates lack of knowledge of the real.

Sentiment – love, anger, attachment, affection – real emotions – these derive from knowledge, and they can’t be faked. And when you know things, the choices you make get more complex. The realities you live in get harder and greyer. Sometimes love means you have to kill something. Sometimes one love means that another loved thing get sacrificed. Sometimes you have to go against your feelings. But the only way that never happens is when you substitute sentimentality for real feeling.

We live in a world where sentimentality poses as real emotion, where we are often actively discouraged from understanding consequences, from developing real love for people and things, and from paying attention. It is easy to miss the distinction between the two entirely – because we have blurred so many things together.

[Sharon Astyk at Casaubon’s Book Weblog]

amusements, food+drink

Cooking by Internet

No, not an original title! And if you read the post called Cooking by Internet from Douglas Adams (yes, he who created Dilbert) I think you’ll see it isn’t quite so daft.

Adams is out to lunch (pun intended) but at the same time he’s often fucking brilliant. This is so daft it is awesome.

As he says “Don’t lie. You’d pay extra for it.”! Hmmm…

beliefs, food+drink, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

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I’ll spare everyone another picture of Rye or the Romney Marsh today and instead I offer this week’s crop of amusing and/or thought-provoking quotes.

Plan B and Arcade Fire get Q nods
[BBC News website headline]

We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.
[Lily Tomlin]

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
[Antoine de Saint-Exupery]

Balnea, vina, Venus corrumpunt corpora nostra; sed vitam faciunt balnea, vina, Venus.
Baths, wine and sex spoil our bodies; but baths, wine and sex make up life.
[Epitaph of Tiberius Claudius Secundus]

Inside every old person is a younger person wondering what the fuck happened.
[unknown]

Come, bring hither quick a flagon of wine, that I may soak my brain and get an ingenious idea.
[Aristophanes, The Knights]

Leadership is a form of mental illness.
[Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert]

Oh and I thought I’d spare you more from the Dalai Lama on Compassion – that’s all he seems to talk about at the moment, although I do see why as that is largely, at rock bottom, what Buddhism is all about.

amusements, books, food+drink, thoughts

Squashed Buttered Nuts

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Noreen bought a book yesterday.  I stole it.  I stole it because it contains such twinkly brilliant gems as:

Bottled at Source. Abbey Well, Highland Spring, Glenpatrick, Ty Nant Welsh Spring, Pennine (bottled at source in Huddersfield) … Apparently, you can’t walk more than a hundred yards in the UK without falling into a natural spring, an Ice Age glacier, a gushing source of healing, sparkling spring water or a 400-year-old magical fairytale wishing well with purifying pixies, adjacent sandstone filter, bottling plant and market-research department.

Mozzarella. Mozzarella cheese comes in Silly Putty-shaped shiny balls … It tastes of nothing. Mozzarella is stored in those unsettling little water-filled tubs – displayed like some sort of soft-cheese Petri-dish specimen …

Muffins. Since when did it become acceptable to eat fairy cakes for breakfast? … You can keep the modern breakfast muffin. I’ll take the fairy cake any day. Not one of those chi-chi chain coffee shop cupcakes; a proper fairy cake, one with icing and those edible rice-paper cake-toppers in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s face, that crab thing from The Little Mermaid, the Wuzzles or the Popples.

Pacific-Rim Cooking. More fucking mangoes.

At several chuckles, sniggers or snorts a page Sausage in a Basket: The Great British Book of How Not to Eat by Martin Lampen is a must. If, like me, you loathe false food or if you just desire an amusement for that transatlantic flight, then this book will not disappoint.

books, food+drink, history, topographical

1599 Huguenots

More from Richard Tames’s, Shakespeare’s London on 5 Groats a Day which depicts the eccentricities London life in about 1599 in the words of the people of the time.

LONDON LIVING

Huguenot habits are catching on with other Londoners. Because weavers have to spend all day at their looms they brighten their workrooms by growing fragrant flowers in wooden boxes which they hang at the windows and keep caged canaries by them for the sweetness of their singing.

Thrifty Huguenot housewives have shown their neighbours that the tail of an ox should not be thrown away as useless but can be braised to make a hearty stew and the bones and leftovers rendered into a delicious soup.

They also gather scraps of meat to make a spicy, scarlet sausage called a saveloy. This can be eaten hot or cold and has become a great favourite with those whose work compels them to eat on the streets or on the move, such as porters and carriers. It is said that the main ingredient that gives the saveloy its distinctive flavour and texture is brains, but this may be only a rumour.

Love the bit on saveloy; clearly the MacDonald’s of its day.

books, food+drink, history, topographical

Capital Cautions

Indigenous food was ever a trap for the unwary. I came across this during this evening’s reading …

A ‘sallet’ is any vegetable dish, raw or cooked – including a salad, which might come with primroses, daisies or dandelions.

‘Good King Henry’ is not a loyal toast but a sort of spinach with a peppery punch to it.

‘Humbles’ (say ‘umbles’) are entrails, usually of a deer, baked with herbs, spices and suet to make a ‘humble pie’. The contents will include not only the heart, liver and kidneys but also the lungs, guts and spleen.

Brawn is a sort of stiff, meat paste made from the head and fore-parts of a pig. It is considered a great treat, usually reserved for Christmas.

‘Gravey’ is a thick sauce of ground almonds, broth, sugar and ginger and is used to dress rabbit, chicken, eels or oysters.

‘Blancmange’ is remarkable for the absence of any strong spices in its preparation. The ingredients are boiled rice, capon flesh finely shredded with a pin, almond milk and sugar. The surface is usually decorated with blanched almonds. On fish days it may be made into a main dish by the addition of dried haddock, perch or lobster.

Beware of English mustard. It is incredibly hot and, if you are not used to it, should be tried with caution. Londoners use it especially to override the flavour of dried, salted fish.

From: Richard Tames, Shakespeare’s London on 5 Groats a Day

beliefs, books, food+drink, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

Well if last week was quiet, at least on the amusing & interesting quotes front, this week has seen a glut. So here’s a selection:

I will also continue my preliminary work on Project Be-less-fat. Because I WAS working on that project and that was all going well and good, and then in the last couple of months that all dropped off a bit because there was stress and bother and worry and comfort needing to be had. I do so wish the words “Yes, it’s been dreadful, we’ve been so stressed out the weight’s simply been falling off us” ever fell out of my mouth, but I, my scales, the gym manager and the owner of our local chinese restaurant know this is very very not true. And much as I know in my clever new-brain that exercising stops me feeling sad or anxious, the only thing that I want to do when sad or anxious is curl up under a duvet and sleep, so it’s hard to balance the two.
[Anna at http://littleredboat.co.uk/]

Don’t ever show something is important to you or you feel strongly about something otherwise you will be ridiculed.
Accept all abuse without retaliating.
If someone accuses you of breaking any rules or laws – don’t rise to it and defend yourself – you’ll only end up in the wrong.
Everything you think is insulting is actually humorous and you’re the stupid one for taking it seriously – no good expecting your own comments to be taken as a joke because they won’t be.
[Jilly at http://jillysheep.blogspot.com/ on how to deal with internet trolls]

Flora or Fauna?
Do you mean which would win in a fight, which is better company when I’m lonely, or what do I prefer to spread on my toast?
[Times Eureka science supplement, 08/2010, interview with Prof. Jim al-Khalili]

The formalism of post-selected teleportation closed time curves shows that quantum tunnelling can take place in the absence of a classical path from future to past.
[Times Eureka science supplement, 08/2010, in a snippet on time travel]

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
[Fran Lebowitz]

A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.
[Tony Judt]

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
[Edith Sitwell]

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
[William Shakespeare]

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
[Leo Buscaglia]