Category Archives: food+drink

food+drink

Curry

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I’ve been thinking a lot about food this week. Which I suspect is because we’ve had a week of eating exceptionally well – more of this in the next couple of days, I hope. Not un-naturally my thoughts turned towards curry.

I love curry. I’ve been eating curry almost as long as I can remember and I always have loved it. I’ll eat almost any meat or vegetable curried. Lamb or beef are the favourites. Pork would be my last choice of meat; somehow it never seems to quite work when curried. But I’m not keen on prawns in curry – their flavour is too delicate – and I’ve not been impressed the couple of times I’ve tried curried fish.

I’ll eat curry as hot as you care to make it. I regularly used to make vindaloo when I was a student, and I do still occasionally, although I generally don’t eat vindaloo in restaurants as one never knows quite how stunningly hot they’ll make it or how good it will be; Madras is a safer bet in terms of hotness and goodness until one knows the restaurant. I’m not so keen on the mild, sweeter styles like Kashmir, but that’s because I dislike sweet with meat. I love coconut in curry although we tend to avoid using it due to the high fat content.

And curry to me means Indian sub-continent curry. I don’t dislike &ndash indeed I do rather like – Thai green or red curries but for me they don’t have that quintessential curryness. The same applies to other hot spicy dishes from SE Asia – they’re good but not really quite like curry.

I don’t mind whether my curry comes with rice, or nan bread, or (preferably) both. I’m not a great one for the traditional accompaniments to curry. Mango chutney is horrible – it’s sweet with meat again and also sweet with vinegar, neither of which I like overly. But I do quite like raita or yoghurt or even mayonnaise. At home we most often eat chopped banana and/or chopped avocado as an accompaniment to curry – they work surprisingly well. Curry is always washed down with either a couple of beers or industrial quantities of gin and tonic. Never wine. I know many people say wine is OK with curry but it doesn’t work for me.

We make curry at least once a week, and it is always different as we usually blend our own spices – well really it’s more like just chuck in random amounts of a few spices; nothing scientific – depending on who’s cooking and how we feel. The two constants are turmeric and chilli. When you grow your own chillies you can vary the chilli flavour and hotness easily. We tend to avoid pre-prepared curry pastes as they are really much too oily, although the flavours are good. Like almost everything else we eat we always cook the curry from scratch: fresh meat and fresh veg. And it is very often accompanied by Noreen’s special lemon rice – seriously good!

We don’t eat curry out very often these days. Sadly most Indian restaurant curries are far too oily and thus high in calories, and as one has the tendency to over-order we therefore tend to over-eat. Moreover curry houses are establishments which, as a general rule, I don’t trust with their hygiene unless I know them or have been given a solid recommendation. If I am eating in a restaurant I will usually have either Dall (lentils) or Channa (chickpeas) as an accompaniment – something I never bother to cook at home.

What I don’t understand, though, is why an hour after eating curry I always feel the need for something sweet. Not a horrible sticky Indian pudding. More like a couple of chocolates; just a mouthful; a couple of chocolate covered Turkish Delights hit the spot well. Why this craving for just that mouthful of sweet after curry? Anyone got any ideas?

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