This morning after I'd dropped off the car for its regular service, I wandered down to the nearby Hutt Street Precinct for a protracted mooch and dawdle in flâneuse mode till the garage should call and let me know the car was ready to be picked up.
Some time later I found myself passing a narrowish restaurant frontage: old black-painted wooden door, delicate little old-fashioned door-knocker in the shape of a little wreath, ancient art nouveau leadlight panel above the door. All incredibly familiar. I peered inside and recognised it as the restaurant that four of us went to for dinner the night our English Honours results came out in 1976; we'd hung out as a gang all year, and had planned the dinner as an act of solidarity no matter how well or badly each of us turned out to have done in the exams. And we did.
The restaurant was Neddy's, which had been opened by the now-legendary Cheong Liew the previous year, and was already one of the earliest signs that Adelaide was about to transform itself into a city of excellent restaurants, with radically new fusion-style cooking and an equally radically new emphasis on fresh local produce.
I found a near-empty cafe in an old and not-too-tarted-up building, ordered a hot chocolate and had just sat down with my novel when the music started up: Jimmy Barnes, another Adelaide boy, singing 'Flame Trees'.
... and I'm just savouring familiar sights
We share some history, this town and I ...
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
ZOMG!!11!!1 Six figures!
Oh yes, it would be nice if that title referred to my income ... heh ... but ... haha .. I probably wouldn't blog about it .... HAHAHAHAHAHA oh well. Sorry, let me regain my composure for a moment here.
No, the title refers to the number of visits to this site since I first installed the stats counter (the one with the numbers at the bottom of the page, not the country-counting one in the sidebar; that's more recent) in March 2006. I didn't expect to get to six figures for another few days, but a couple of links from well-attended sites yesterday put a positively alarming spike in the visitor stats.
I gather that many bloggers obsess about numbers of visitors and comments but I've given it much less attention than I thought I would when I installed the counter, which remains the very basic freebie one that doesn't do all that much fancy stuff. If one blogged in order to make money, I suppose it would matter more -- but then, if one blogged in order to make money it would be incredibly tedious and dreary and I wouldn't do it, so.
My favourite features of the stats counter are (1) the maps that show you where visits are from, (2) the details about visitors' computers, browsers, locations, addresses and so on that help you to stalk your stalkers, and (3) the often hilarious information about what search terms have led total strangers from Chile and Uzbekistan to finish up at your blog.
I haven't done a 'search term' post for ages, but an odd fact leaps out at me every time I check them out. Apart from the usual variations on the themes of 'Pavlov' and 'Cat', the two search terms that most frequently land people here are, wait for it, octopus tentacle porn and frog cake.
The latter now has its very own Wikipedia entry, complete with cross-section. Frog Cake t-shirts are also available.
No, the title refers to the number of visits to this site since I first installed the stats counter (the one with the numbers at the bottom of the page, not the country-counting one in the sidebar; that's more recent) in March 2006. I didn't expect to get to six figures for another few days, but a couple of links from well-attended sites yesterday put a positively alarming spike in the visitor stats.
I gather that many bloggers obsess about numbers of visitors and comments but I've given it much less attention than I thought I would when I installed the counter, which remains the very basic freebie one that doesn't do all that much fancy stuff. If one blogged in order to make money, I suppose it would matter more -- but then, if one blogged in order to make money it would be incredibly tedious and dreary and I wouldn't do it, so.
My favourite features of the stats counter are (1) the maps that show you where visits are from, (2) the details about visitors' computers, browsers, locations, addresses and so on that help you to stalk your stalkers, and (3) the often hilarious information about what search terms have led total strangers from Chile and Uzbekistan to finish up at your blog.
I haven't done a 'search term' post for ages, but an odd fact leaps out at me every time I check them out. Apart from the usual variations on the themes of 'Pavlov' and 'Cat', the two search terms that most frequently land people here are, wait for it, octopus tentacle porn and frog cake.
The latter now has its very own Wikipedia entry, complete with cross-section. Frog Cake t-shirts are also available.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Saturday Bookblogging: Sacred Food
People seemed to like the animals-in-art book I posted about a little while back so I thought I might blog a few other books from my 'what an arresting and unusual idea for a book and isn't it gorgeous' collection.
Elisabeth Luard's best-known book is probably European Peasant Cookery, which I have the early edition of and which contains my default recipes for osso bucco and rosti among other things, so when I saw this book in Imprints (think a smaller and scaled-down but equally classy Adelaide version of Readings or Gleebooks), the combination of a familiar and trusted authorial name with a beautiful idea for a book was irresistible.
Like most of my favourite books, it's a mongrel: cultural history, recipes and truly sumptuous illustrations. There are four chapters, each holding forth on the food of particular events that happen everywhere in human life; one of the lovely things about this book is that it rises effortlessly above the notion of the sacred as contained by a single belief system and goes straight to the heart of the events and seasons that humanity has built its religious rituals around. So a lot of thought has gone into the way the table of contents is arranged, to signal that; it looks like this.
1fertilitycultivationharvest
2birthbaptisminitiation
3courtshipbetrothalmarriage
4deathremembranceresurrection
Chapter 2, for instance, goes from a description of the eastern European custom of 'birth baskets' -- 'a kind of edible baby shower ... ritual gifts presented by well-wishers to ensure the baby never goes hungry' -- to one of the classic Dickens illustrations of a huge Christmas pudding being carved up by a chubby mumsy type at a table crowded with rioting ratbag children. There's also a beautiful full-page photograph of a young Ghanaian girl contemplating the gifts of fruit, vegetables and cloth that she's been brought as part of the puberty ritual in which she is presented to the community, various members of which are standing around behind her, looking on. There's a recipe for German Christmas roast goose (lots of apple, cabbage and sage), an explanation of Hanukkah, and a description of the sacred food of the Iranian midwinter festival, its pagan elements similar to the Christmas ones:
The sacred food, ajeel, is a mixture of seven varieties of roasted nuts and dried fruit -- pistachios, almonds, chickpeas, melon or pumpkin seeds, apricots, raisins, dried figs. The vigil of watching through the night is known, appropriately, as shab-chera, night grazing.
Berber wedding pancakes, with chopped pistachios, preserved cherries and cream, plus the dish of honey in the middle and, apparently, a cup of 'tooth-achingly sweet' mint tea on the side.
The disquisition on Spanish 'pilgrimage food' gets shoehorned into Chapter 3 under 'opportunities for courtship' which I'm sure was just an excuse for Luard to wax eloquent about paella, one of her favourite things and an excellent illustration of the fact that food is so much more than fuel:
Among the most remarkable of the Whitsun pilgrimages is the long trek across the delta of the Guadalquivir, southwest Spain, to the sanctuary of the Virgin of the Dew, hidden deep in the sage brush and cistus scrub of a watery wilderness. These week-long picnics -- requiring eating and sleeping under the stars -- are a happy compromise between pagan and Christian preoccupations ... open to all who care to take the new road from Seville. The pilgrimage is a merry one ... guitars strum and drums beat day and night to accompany the dancing and singing ...
... in the old days -- twenty years ago, when I made the pilgrimage across the dunes with my children on a mule-cart -- people took nothing with them but rice and oil (well, maybe saffron and salt) in the confident expectation that the Lord would provide the rest. Indeed He did. Anyone with a gun could be sure to pick up a rabbit, or a brace of duck. [Anyone with a gun and decent aim, surely -- ed.] ... The children would be able to gather the exquisitely patterned snails, no bigger than a thumbnail ... or search out the spindly but delicious shoots of wild asparagus. You could always count on a variety of herbs ... fennel, thyme and rosemary.'
On the previous pages there's a full two-page colour reproduction of Goya's The Pilgrimage to the Miraculous Fountain of San Isidro, which like most Goyas appears to depict an assortment of bodies and souls in anguish, writhing in a half-dark hell and a very long way from singing, dancing or catching rabbits for the pot; on the following page there's a recipe for paella complete with instructions like 'the true paella must be prepared over and open fire, and only by a man' (pffft) and 'the only essentials are rice, saffron and olive oil ... The rest is whatever comes to hand in the countryside and will serve to flavour the rice -- wild asparagus, wild garlic, crayfish from the stream, snails, pigeon, partridge, rabbit, frogs from the marshes, fresh water from the spring.'
This combination of image, recipe and cultural history is typical and the pictures are beautiful: a nineteenth-century Chinese painting of a wedding banquet; a sixteenth-century German engraving depicting the moment of transubstantiation; a moving black-and-white photograph of a 1940s French provincial Nativity play complete with a raggedy, sad-looking sheep; a photo from southern India of a sacred cow with painted and decorated horns in fetching shades of gold, red and neon pink, with little bells; and several obligatory Breughel feast scenes that provide evidence for Barry Humphries' assertion that with Brueghel you can always find someone in the background having a quiet chunder out of a window.
It's probably safe to say I'll never make the Epiphany Cookies, the Afghan Betrothal Ravioli, or the Bacalao de los Muertos (All Souls' Day salt-fish). But if the day ever comes when I have to choose five books out of my food-and-cookbooks collection to take with me to my little room in the End of the Road Aged Care Facility, this'll be one of them.
Mexican sugar skulls, for taking with you to the cemetery on the Day of the Dead, though why you would take skulls to the cemetery is a question that remains unanswered.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Don't mind the worms
My dad, now 81 and fit as a flea apart from his deteriorating hearing, snuck into the Navy in 1944 at 17 and trundled around the Pacific and the Indian Oceans and all the northern waters in between on the corvette HMAS Warrnambool for the best part of two years before he was demobbed in 1946, after which he went home and worked the family farm for 20 years. He was raised in and with an ethos of self-sufficiency that only someone brought up on a farm during the Depression could have so thoroughly internalised as still to have it the best part of a century later.
At my request he's written up some wartime memories for me as a few guest blog posts and they'll be up soon, but in the meantime he's developing his private theory that the solution to escalating food prices is to return to the days of the WW2 'Dig for Victory' campaign, and has asked me to find him whatever I can online about it.
So I Googled 'dig for victory' and this intriguing account is the first site that came up. All I could think of was the sketch in Beyond the Fringe about the imposition of rationing (in which the 'always out in the garden' tag line is a reference to the campaign): 'My woife came oot to me in the garden, her face ashen in hue. "Charrlie," she said to me, "rationin' has been imposed, and all that that entails." "Never you mind, my dear," I said to her, "you put on the kettle, and we'll have a noice steamin' cup o' hot water."'
What made me think of this was the astonishingly therapeutic hour I've just spent out in the garden at the end of a particularly traumatic work week, digging the leaf mould into the sandy soil and wishing my mum was still alive so she could show me how to prune the lemon tree.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
On thinking about not eating meat
Warning: long post
'I blame Peter Singer for turning my wife into a vegetarian,' said a friend of mine about fifteen years ago, and it was enough to send me off to read some Singer and see what the story was. I have continued to admire Singer even through the radical ideas that have made a lot of people write him off or worse, partly because I admire anyone rational and detached enough not to be automatically, unthinkingly anthropocentric, and partly because I also admire anyone who can follow a train of thought all the way to its logical destination without losing her or his nerve.
Also falling squarely into both these categories is novelist J.M. Coetzee, well-known for his views on animals and meat-eating, and since he and his partner Dorothy Driver moved to Adelaide it's been my good fortune to have encountered them in various places. One of the most memorable of these occasions was a public reading at a fundraiser in the Adelaide Hills where Coetzee read a passage from Boyhood about watching men on a farm kill a sheep.
Coetzee is not an elaborator, at least not in the writerly sense of what John Steinbeck once called 'hooptedoodle', but the unexpressed horror and fear and revulsion felt by the watching child is there in the syntax of these quiet sentences. Listening to the reading was a very weird experience, because on the one hand I could feel the horror in the writing, and on the other hand could imagine the scene very clearly because I'd seen this sight myself, many times, at a similar age in a similar place. And for me it's an interesting but matter-of-fact memory, framed by the context of a very happy childhood.
If you grew up on a farm in the 1940s or 50s or 60s, this was just something you saw. In my case we were (like every other kid in the district) inured to it as a natural part of farm life. If you farmed sheep -- and in those parts, everybody did -- you would regularly kill one for meat as a matter of course. There was even a kind of unspoken primitive-hunter-type 'honour the creature' thing going on when animals were killed to eat. My sisters and I, from a very young age, would be neither encouraged to watch nor discouraged from watching the sheep being quickly killed, hung and gutted, but if we were on the spot then we were expected to make ourselves useful, mostly by being handed a bowl of warm brains and kidneys and told 'Here, take that up to Mummy.'
Sheep destined for the table, like the doomed chooks for special-occasion meals, were killed quickly and efficiently; the worst thing they felt was a few moments of fear. A quick death was mandatory. A sharp, clear line was drawn between killing for food and causing pointless pain and suffering.
Any cruelty or neglect shown to animals was despised, and failure to look after one's animals properly was cause for shame. In tandem with the vivid but undistressing memories I have of watching sheep be killed, there are equally vivid memories of my father trundling around in rain, hail and gale in the middle of the night, bodily lifting pregnant ewes or newly shorn sheep into the back of the ute or even, in uteless years, the boot of the car to drive them to shelter.
Obviously much of this was economically based and God knows sheep are very hard to love, but whatever the motives may have been, I grew up steeped in an ethos of treating all animals humanely. Sheepdogs and farm cats were loved, cared for and regarded as individual creatures with personalities and feelings.
All of which is to say that I grew up with a clear sense of the difference between neglecting or mistreating animals, on the one hand, and on the other hand raising them in the open, providing protection from predators and weather, making sure there was always water and plenty to eat, keeping them mainly for wool and eggs and occasionally killing a sheep, a chook or a goose quickly and humanely for food. I think these things were too deeply imprinted ever to be erased.
So, on the continuing-to-eat-meat side of the argument:
-- I grew up in the country; there was enough money; my parents loved each other and me. Beliefs acquired in that sort of childhood cannot be shed easily, if at all.
-- I don't regard eating meat as in any way unclean or defiling.
-- I appreciate the benefits of protein and iron.
-- I really like meat.
-- These days I am very, very careful when shopping about the conditions under which the animals for animal products were raised. Eggs and chooks are free range only. I never eat pork or cured meats at all.
-- I take the point about the environment, but my shopping habits don't support the sorts of farms that do it the most damage, and in any case I think there are more urgent environmental disasters happening, and in any case anyway, I think it is too late.
-- Most of the extreme 'animal liberationist' rhetoric and behaviour I've seen has looked hysterical, irrational, ignorant, sentimental, self-righteous and/or obsessed.
And yet, and yet:
-- I once found myself, after several weeks of getting very run down through overwork and no proper meals, tearing into a couple of half-cooked veal chops still dripping with bloody juices, standing over the sink like Mia Farrow chowing down on raw hearts in Rosemary's Baby. I know the body demands meat -- but look at that comparison I drew there. Why is Mia Farrow chowing down on raw hearts? Because she's been possessed by the devil.
-- A.S. Byatt, perhaps the single living writer I admire most, spoke more than 20 years ago at the Melbourne Writers' Festival about how lived experience gets used in writing fiction. She told a story about opening her fridge one day, seeing the assorted sausages and bacon and chops and chooks, and thinking 'My God, this thing is full of death.'
-- I have no respect for or patience with the anthropocentric view that all other species are there for our convenience, and even less with the view that might is right and therefore the smartest species gets to treat all the others any way it likes.
-- I have even less respect for or patience with people who argue that animals do not have a 'self', feel emotion, or think; that to me simply indicates that these people have never spent any time with animals.
Grapple, grapple.
I can't imagine taking up a formal position on this, or sticking to it if I did. But what with Singer and Coetzee and Byatt, and living with two cats and a gardenful of birds, and the disgusting conditions -- physically as well as ethically disgusting -- under which so many animals are farmed, I can see myself moving further and further away from meat-eating. Not with any conscious resolve or intention to stop altogether, but more in the spirit of what Gertrude Stein once said about her unintentional estrangement from her brother. 'Little by little, we never met again.'
'I blame Peter Singer for turning my wife into a vegetarian,' said a friend of mine about fifteen years ago, and it was enough to send me off to read some Singer and see what the story was. I have continued to admire Singer even through the radical ideas that have made a lot of people write him off or worse, partly because I admire anyone rational and detached enough not to be automatically, unthinkingly anthropocentric, and partly because I also admire anyone who can follow a train of thought all the way to its logical destination without losing her or his nerve.
Also falling squarely into both these categories is novelist J.M. Coetzee, well-known for his views on animals and meat-eating, and since he and his partner Dorothy Driver moved to Adelaide it's been my good fortune to have encountered them in various places. One of the most memorable of these occasions was a public reading at a fundraiser in the Adelaide Hills where Coetzee read a passage from Boyhood about watching men on a farm kill a sheep.
Coetzee is not an elaborator, at least not in the writerly sense of what John Steinbeck once called 'hooptedoodle', but the unexpressed horror and fear and revulsion felt by the watching child is there in the syntax of these quiet sentences. Listening to the reading was a very weird experience, because on the one hand I could feel the horror in the writing, and on the other hand could imagine the scene very clearly because I'd seen this sight myself, many times, at a similar age in a similar place. And for me it's an interesting but matter-of-fact memory, framed by the context of a very happy childhood.
If you grew up on a farm in the 1940s or 50s or 60s, this was just something you saw. In my case we were (like every other kid in the district) inured to it as a natural part of farm life. If you farmed sheep -- and in those parts, everybody did -- you would regularly kill one for meat as a matter of course. There was even a kind of unspoken primitive-hunter-type 'honour the creature' thing going on when animals were killed to eat. My sisters and I, from a very young age, would be neither encouraged to watch nor discouraged from watching the sheep being quickly killed, hung and gutted, but if we were on the spot then we were expected to make ourselves useful, mostly by being handed a bowl of warm brains and kidneys and told 'Here, take that up to Mummy.'
Sheep destined for the table, like the doomed chooks for special-occasion meals, were killed quickly and efficiently; the worst thing they felt was a few moments of fear. A quick death was mandatory. A sharp, clear line was drawn between killing for food and causing pointless pain and suffering.
Any cruelty or neglect shown to animals was despised, and failure to look after one's animals properly was cause for shame. In tandem with the vivid but undistressing memories I have of watching sheep be killed, there are equally vivid memories of my father trundling around in rain, hail and gale in the middle of the night, bodily lifting pregnant ewes or newly shorn sheep into the back of the ute or even, in uteless years, the boot of the car to drive them to shelter.
Obviously much of this was economically based and God knows sheep are very hard to love, but whatever the motives may have been, I grew up steeped in an ethos of treating all animals humanely. Sheepdogs and farm cats were loved, cared for and regarded as individual creatures with personalities and feelings.
All of which is to say that I grew up with a clear sense of the difference between neglecting or mistreating animals, on the one hand, and on the other hand raising them in the open, providing protection from predators and weather, making sure there was always water and plenty to eat, keeping them mainly for wool and eggs and occasionally killing a sheep, a chook or a goose quickly and humanely for food. I think these things were too deeply imprinted ever to be erased.
So, on the continuing-to-eat-meat side of the argument:
-- I grew up in the country; there was enough money; my parents loved each other and me. Beliefs acquired in that sort of childhood cannot be shed easily, if at all.
-- I don't regard eating meat as in any way unclean or defiling.
-- I appreciate the benefits of protein and iron.
-- I really like meat.
-- These days I am very, very careful when shopping about the conditions under which the animals for animal products were raised. Eggs and chooks are free range only. I never eat pork or cured meats at all.
-- I take the point about the environment, but my shopping habits don't support the sorts of farms that do it the most damage, and in any case I think there are more urgent environmental disasters happening, and in any case anyway, I think it is too late.
-- Most of the extreme 'animal liberationist' rhetoric and behaviour I've seen has looked hysterical, irrational, ignorant, sentimental, self-righteous and/or obsessed.
And yet, and yet:
-- I once found myself, after several weeks of getting very run down through overwork and no proper meals, tearing into a couple of half-cooked veal chops still dripping with bloody juices, standing over the sink like Mia Farrow chowing down on raw hearts in Rosemary's Baby. I know the body demands meat -- but look at that comparison I drew there. Why is Mia Farrow chowing down on raw hearts? Because she's been possessed by the devil.
-- A.S. Byatt, perhaps the single living writer I admire most, spoke more than 20 years ago at the Melbourne Writers' Festival about how lived experience gets used in writing fiction. She told a story about opening her fridge one day, seeing the assorted sausages and bacon and chops and chooks, and thinking 'My God, this thing is full of death.'
-- I have no respect for or patience with the anthropocentric view that all other species are there for our convenience, and even less with the view that might is right and therefore the smartest species gets to treat all the others any way it likes.
-- I have even less respect for or patience with people who argue that animals do not have a 'self', feel emotion, or think; that to me simply indicates that these people have never spent any time with animals.
Grapple, grapple.
I can't imagine taking up a formal position on this, or sticking to it if I did. But what with Singer and Coetzee and Byatt, and living with two cats and a gardenful of birds, and the disgusting conditions -- physically as well as ethically disgusting -- under which so many animals are farmed, I can see myself moving further and further away from meat-eating. Not with any conscious resolve or intention to stop altogether, but more in the spirit of what Gertrude Stein once said about her unintentional estrangement from her brother. 'Little by little, we never met again.'
Friday, May 02, 2008
New(ish) cooking/kitchen/gastronomy/culinary arts blog!
Now that I have been patiently led by the hand to the cyberplace where it resides, I can in turn direct the as-yet-uninitiated to Zoe-from-Crazybrave's beautiful new food/cooking blog, Progressive Dinner Party.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
You were only waiting for this moment to arrive
Blackbirds 1, Dirty Great Bright Green Garden-Eating Caterpillars 0.
God I love Spring.
God I love Spring.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Trying to think of a thesis topic? Take up blogging!
I first took up blogging after an Honours thesis I was examining blew the top of my head off with its brilliant and groundbreaking interdisciplinary analysis of 'infertility blogs' and their posts and comments. The student had used a mixture of narrative, psychoanalytic, new media, feminist and life-writing theory, plus material from the fields of anatomy, psychiatry, sociology and ob/gyn, to put together a brilliant analysis of the content of these blogs and of their democratic and therapeutic nature (including a few incisive remarks in passing about the relationship between democracy and therapy), and to formulate a set of propositions about future possibilities for the medium.
Blogging opens up a whole new field for analysis and it certainly lends itself to interdisciplinary approaches, one of which would be some kind of sociological/psychoanalytic/general-discourse-analysis study of how people behave at computers and what they put into search engines. The terms that turn up on one's own stat counter reflect both the nature of the blog and a cross-section of who's out there Googling and Yahooing, and it's quite an amazing reflection on human nature: on the things people want to find out about, the ways in which people use language, and the ways in which their language then gets crunched by the search engines.
In the course of this experiment in Ideas-Festivalblogging, I've had occasion to check the stats-counter information a lot more often than usual in order to get an idea of how many people have come to the blog directly from the Festival website or from searches about it. And I've not been able to help noticing -- as you do -- what some of the more exotic searches have been that have brought people here. Many of those people will have been bitterly disappointed; others will have found exactly what they were looking for, particularly in the case of the frilled shark.
So before I get on with the last two posts from the Festival of Ideas, here for your amusement is my version from the last 100 posts of the time-honoured Search Meme: here are some of the things people search for that bring them, sometimes kicking and screaming, to Pavlov's Cat. Yet again, I don't seem to have scored any of the real bottom-feeder dreck, for which I can only be grateful. And even just my last hundred visitors have thrown up a number of definite, and predictable, themes.
ABOUT CATS
'ideas to build a cat pen'
'magnificat cat'
'picture cat stuck in fridge'
'cat drama' (a tautology, surely)
ABOUT FOOD
'pauls brandy custard'
'frog cake'
'cherry puree+jelly recipe'
(Do you see a theme emerging here?)
ABOUT OBSCURE SCHOLARLY/LANGUAGE STUFF
'bachelard nests and memories'
'retromingent metaphorical meaning'
DUBIOUS MISCLLANEOUS
'wardrobe fall on top'
'wire in the blood sexual tension' (another tautology)
'prehistoric shark-half eel' (see above)
'cuckold tramp stamp'
I particularly love that last one. Observe the mix of the quaint outdated concept of the cuckold with the very contemporary 'tramp stamp', which is a tattoo on one's lower back or upper bum, depending on which school you went to, and for which the most usual synonym is 'arse antlers'. Poetry at its finest.
Blogging opens up a whole new field for analysis and it certainly lends itself to interdisciplinary approaches, one of which would be some kind of sociological/psychoanalytic/general-discourse-analysis study of how people behave at computers and what they put into search engines. The terms that turn up on one's own stat counter reflect both the nature of the blog and a cross-section of who's out there Googling and Yahooing, and it's quite an amazing reflection on human nature: on the things people want to find out about, the ways in which people use language, and the ways in which their language then gets crunched by the search engines.
In the course of this experiment in Ideas-Festivalblogging, I've had occasion to check the stats-counter information a lot more often than usual in order to get an idea of how many people have come to the blog directly from the Festival website or from searches about it. And I've not been able to help noticing -- as you do -- what some of the more exotic searches have been that have brought people here. Many of those people will have been bitterly disappointed; others will have found exactly what they were looking for, particularly in the case of the frilled shark.
So before I get on with the last two posts from the Festival of Ideas, here for your amusement is my version from the last 100 posts of the time-honoured Search Meme: here are some of the things people search for that bring them, sometimes kicking and screaming, to Pavlov's Cat. Yet again, I don't seem to have scored any of the real bottom-feeder dreck, for which I can only be grateful. And even just my last hundred visitors have thrown up a number of definite, and predictable, themes.
ABOUT CATS
'ideas to build a cat pen'
'magnificat cat'
'picture cat stuck in fridge'
'cat drama' (a tautology, surely)
ABOUT FOOD
'pauls brandy custard'
'frog cake'
'cherry puree+jelly recipe'
(Do you see a theme emerging here?)
ABOUT OBSCURE SCHOLARLY/LANGUAGE STUFF
'bachelard nests and memories'
'retromingent metaphorical meaning'
DUBIOUS MISCLLANEOUS
'wardrobe fall on top'
'wire in the blood sexual tension' (another tautology)
'prehistoric shark-half eel' (see above)
'cuckold tramp stamp'
I particularly love that last one. Observe the mix of the quaint outdated concept of the cuckold with the very contemporary 'tramp stamp', which is a tattoo on one's lower back or upper bum, depending on which school you went to, and for which the most usual synonym is 'arse antlers'. Poetry at its finest.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Festival of Ideas -- What to Eat: Personal Responsibility vs Social Responsibility
The Saturday afternoon session featuring nutritionist Professor Marion Nestle -- one of her more singular titles is '2004 Time Obesity Warrior', and indeed she is a mere slip of a thing herself, a practised public speaker with those lovely soft American good manners -- began very well when I recognised the man stepping up to the mic to introduce her: SA Minister for Health, John Hill. This is a bit of a feature of living in Adelaide; the SA pollies get out and about in non-ministerial mode quite a lot, so you'll often see Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith at the opera, Treasurer Kevin Foley at the theatre, or Premier and Arts Minister Mike Rann chairing sessions at Writers' Week.
Hill is one of the most liked, admired and trusted of the SA ministers; he's the friend of friends who have nothing but good to say about his integrity and intelligence, so I think there's a good chance he researched and wrote his detailed, charming introduction himself, putting the contemporary First World 'lifestyle disease' epidemic in its long historical context. By the end of his intro, Nestle was looking quite startled. 'It's a pleasure to be introduced by a Minister for Health who's actually interested in public health,' she said to the audience as she arrived at the lectern. 'He's really rare, so treasure him.'
Nestle was using a PowerPoint presentation, which could easily have been excruciating but wasn't; it was a tad too distracting, but she had put the images together cleverly (and it was, thank God, mostly graphics) and spoke to them with practised ease. Some of them were very funny, like the 'Shape of Things to Come' cartoon, a mocked-up parody of that 'evolution of primates' diagram that begins with a chimp on the left-hand end and moves through several 'Ascent of Man' type images to modern Homo Erectus -- except that there was a new figure on the right-hand end: a spherical, waddling slob clutching a burger in one hand and a shake in the other.
Nestle's topic was the contemporary obesity 'epidemic' and its origins, which she traced back to the 1980s. First, she said, a change in US farm policy in the 1970s saw production restrictions lifted and by the early 80s 'food became too cheap and too plentiful' (this had an absurd ring to me; I get the economic logic and the health consequences, but it still sounds a bit too much like the scene in The Grapes of Wrath where they're dumping and poisoning oranges while people with starving children watch them do it). In the early 1980s came the 'shareholder value movement' that saw pressure applied to food companies to show a profit, in this new buyers' market, every 90 days.
Other causes apart from the lower prices and the advertising push, she said, included the rise in consumption of food outside the home (at retail outlets there are almost always more calories and bigger portions); a rise in serving sizes (at this point we saw an alarming graphic of a gigantic paper cup called the Double Gulp, which apparently holds 800 calories' worth of non-diet soda; I don't know what this is in kilojoules but in my youth it was the daily calorie allowance that doctors put women on for a medical weight-loss diet, though not any more); and the new ubiquity of food, now commonly consumed at any time and in any place: 'When did it become okay to eat in bookstores?'
Her particular objection as far as the food companies are concerned is the way they market to children: 'You can argue "personal responsibilty" to adults about their food choices, but not to children.' On this topic she talked us briskly through 'brand loyalty' and the 'pester factor' before arriving at a phenomenon nobody can have failed to notice lately: selling food via cartoon or other cult figures, most recently the saturation exposure of the Shrek the Third 'brand' tie-in on practically half the food products currently available on supermarket shelves. 'Tell your kids that if they eat all the things that Shrek promotes they're going to end up looking exactly like him.'
Nestle listed a number of proposed antidotes, counter-movements and possible solutions to all this: the Slow Food movement; the organic revolution; the mainstreaming of animal welfare, leading to reform in farming practices (and if you think this one hasn't started working yet, go to a supermarket at the end of the day and look at the stacks of cage eggs left and the huge gaps where the free-range variety are all long gone from the shelves); the rise of local agriculture movements, manifest in things like the increasingly popular farmers' markets; a push for change in public health policy. 'I'm a firm believer in regulation,' she said. 'Government's role is to balance the needs of corporations against the needs of the population.'
Several commentators, including fellow-blogger Stu at Le Rayon Vert (who was there; see his recommended list of podcasts), have observed that the audience demographic at the Festival skewed 'old', but -- quite apart from being bloody annoying when it's meant as a putdown, though on the whole people over 50 think it's hilarious when people under 50 think "old" is an insult (and it's to Stu's credit that he doesn't) -- this isn't quite accurate in any case. Naturally the audiences at the Friday sessions tended to be older, because a lot of working-age people were at, um, work. The audience for the session the Chaser boys had all to themselves was, on the other hand, predictably very young. But on the whole there was a pleasing heterogeneity among the festival audiences in all kinds of ways, and one noticeable thing about Nestle's audience was the very large number of people in their teens and twenties -- many of whom, as became clear at question time, were apparently vegetarians or vegans.
There was also the bloke who asked the final question of the session, a fit and ferocious thirtysomething Nordic chap who addressed his question to the Health Minister. He worked in a hospice, he said, and he wanted to know if and when the Minister was going to do anything about some of the appallingly unhealthy food that gets sold in hospital cafeterias and canteens. Hill's reply kind of summed up the contemporary dilemma and the intractability of the problem. 'We're trying,' he said ruefully. 'We asked the people at the children's hospital in Melbourne why they don't get rid of their McDonald's, and they said it was because the parents had begged them not to. They say a trip to Macca's is one of the few things that will cheer their sick kids up.'
Hill is one of the most liked, admired and trusted of the SA ministers; he's the friend of friends who have nothing but good to say about his integrity and intelligence, so I think there's a good chance he researched and wrote his detailed, charming introduction himself, putting the contemporary First World 'lifestyle disease' epidemic in its long historical context. By the end of his intro, Nestle was looking quite startled. 'It's a pleasure to be introduced by a Minister for Health who's actually interested in public health,' she said to the audience as she arrived at the lectern. 'He's really rare, so treasure him.'
Nestle was using a PowerPoint presentation, which could easily have been excruciating but wasn't; it was a tad too distracting, but she had put the images together cleverly (and it was, thank God, mostly graphics) and spoke to them with practised ease. Some of them were very funny, like the 'Shape of Things to Come' cartoon, a mocked-up parody of that 'evolution of primates' diagram that begins with a chimp on the left-hand end and moves through several 'Ascent of Man' type images to modern Homo Erectus -- except that there was a new figure on the right-hand end: a spherical, waddling slob clutching a burger in one hand and a shake in the other.
Nestle's topic was the contemporary obesity 'epidemic' and its origins, which she traced back to the 1980s. First, she said, a change in US farm policy in the 1970s saw production restrictions lifted and by the early 80s 'food became too cheap and too plentiful' (this had an absurd ring to me; I get the economic logic and the health consequences, but it still sounds a bit too much like the scene in The Grapes of Wrath where they're dumping and poisoning oranges while people with starving children watch them do it). In the early 1980s came the 'shareholder value movement' that saw pressure applied to food companies to show a profit, in this new buyers' market, every 90 days.
Other causes apart from the lower prices and the advertising push, she said, included the rise in consumption of food outside the home (at retail outlets there are almost always more calories and bigger portions); a rise in serving sizes (at this point we saw an alarming graphic of a gigantic paper cup called the Double Gulp, which apparently holds 800 calories' worth of non-diet soda; I don't know what this is in kilojoules but in my youth it was the daily calorie allowance that doctors put women on for a medical weight-loss diet, though not any more); and the new ubiquity of food, now commonly consumed at any time and in any place: 'When did it become okay to eat in bookstores?'
Her particular objection as far as the food companies are concerned is the way they market to children: 'You can argue "personal responsibilty" to adults about their food choices, but not to children.' On this topic she talked us briskly through 'brand loyalty' and the 'pester factor' before arriving at a phenomenon nobody can have failed to notice lately: selling food via cartoon or other cult figures, most recently the saturation exposure of the Shrek the Third 'brand' tie-in on practically half the food products currently available on supermarket shelves. 'Tell your kids that if they eat all the things that Shrek promotes they're going to end up looking exactly like him.'
Nestle listed a number of proposed antidotes, counter-movements and possible solutions to all this: the Slow Food movement; the organic revolution; the mainstreaming of animal welfare, leading to reform in farming practices (and if you think this one hasn't started working yet, go to a supermarket at the end of the day and look at the stacks of cage eggs left and the huge gaps where the free-range variety are all long gone from the shelves); the rise of local agriculture movements, manifest in things like the increasingly popular farmers' markets; a push for change in public health policy. 'I'm a firm believer in regulation,' she said. 'Government's role is to balance the needs of corporations against the needs of the population.'
Several commentators, including fellow-blogger Stu at Le Rayon Vert (who was there; see his recommended list of podcasts), have observed that the audience demographic at the Festival skewed 'old', but -- quite apart from being bloody annoying when it's meant as a putdown, though on the whole people over 50 think it's hilarious when people under 50 think "old" is an insult (and it's to Stu's credit that he doesn't) -- this isn't quite accurate in any case. Naturally the audiences at the Friday sessions tended to be older, because a lot of working-age people were at, um, work. The audience for the session the Chaser boys had all to themselves was, on the other hand, predictably very young. But on the whole there was a pleasing heterogeneity among the festival audiences in all kinds of ways, and one noticeable thing about Nestle's audience was the very large number of people in their teens and twenties -- many of whom, as became clear at question time, were apparently vegetarians or vegans.
There was also the bloke who asked the final question of the session, a fit and ferocious thirtysomething Nordic chap who addressed his question to the Health Minister. He worked in a hospice, he said, and he wanted to know if and when the Minister was going to do anything about some of the appallingly unhealthy food that gets sold in hospital cafeterias and canteens. Hill's reply kind of summed up the contemporary dilemma and the intractability of the problem. 'We're trying,' he said ruefully. 'We asked the people at the children's hospital in Melbourne why they don't get rid of their McDonald's, and they said it was because the parents had begged them not to. They say a trip to Macca's is one of the few things that will cheer their sick kids up.'
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Adelaide Festival of Ideas 2007
I'm sure most people experience the daily battle between the little devil sitting on one shoulder telling you what you'd like to eat and the little angel sitting on the other, telling you what you ought (and, of course, ought not) to eat. The moralising of food and its consumption is as old as the hills; Gluttony isn't one of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing.
In an affluent post-industrial nation like this one, though, the stakes have changed a lot. There's now chemical input and genetic modification to consider as well; and the morality of international trade (such as the export of live sheep); and the treatment humane or otherwise of animals farmed for food and profit. The idea of what's "good" in the way we eat has become a lot more complex than it used to be.
Tomorrow's Festival of Ideas session 'Before You Eat' (Elder Hall, 11.15) features nutritionists Dr Peter Clifton of the CSIRO, Professor Marion Nestle from the USA (author of 2006's What to Eat) and Professor Kerin O'Dea from the University of Melbourne, with the redoubtable Dr Norman Swan as participating Chair. The program notes for this session end with the following list of things that 'we could afford to know more about':
-- The risks to health (real as opposed to imagined) from chemical inputs in the food chain
-- The costs and benefits to individual health of highly processed foods
-- ‘Food miles’ – the costs (nutritional as well as environmental) of having everything in season all the time
-- The further dietary implications of affluence that mean most people in the developed world can eat what would once have been luxury foodstuffs most of the time
-- The alleged ‘obesity epidemic’ and what we can do about it
-- The other risks of industrial-strength agriculture.
'What,' the notes conclude, 'are the desirable alternatives to the way we eat now?'
To me, the short answer to that question would be 'Produce as much of your own food as you can, eat it in season, and cook it yourself.' As a farmer's daughter of a certain age, I've got robust memories of childhood eating that make contemporary supermarkets -- much less fast-food joints -- look pretty lame.
Where I grew up, if you were hungry you went out and killed a sheep. Or, if it was a special occasion, a chook. Or you caught a fish, or shot a rabbit, or went yabbying down at the dam. In summer you ate tomatoes that your mother had grown, and in winter the gargantuan field mushrooms you'd picked yourself from up around the shearing-shed (no prizes for guessing the connection). You ate eggs that had been laid only hours before, with toast made from bread baked that morning before dawn in the big old ovens at the township bakery.
(Peace to vegetarians everywhere, but I don't apologise for the sheep, the chooks, the rabbits or the fish. I can attest as an eyewitness to their free, happy and well-looked-after lives, as I can to their quick and humane deaths; the worst thing that ever happened to most of them was getting bossed around by a Border Collie, which is a great deal more than can be claimed by most human beings.)
In the cities in 2007, most of us have lives that preclude the taking of time and trouble to maintain a close connection with the food we eat, which is why, although I still never eat fast food or even pre-prepared meat, I had never in my life grown a tomato until last summer. The astonished pride I felt when I picked my first three ripe Romas, brought them inside with some fresh basil cut from the pot growing on the back doorstep, did this with them
and then ate them is something I won't ever forget. It's not just that there's a powerful, primitive connection between producing food and then eating it; it's also that the process is beautiful and satisfying and will make you very happy.
In an affluent post-industrial nation like this one, though, the stakes have changed a lot. There's now chemical input and genetic modification to consider as well; and the morality of international trade (such as the export of live sheep); and the treatment humane or otherwise of animals farmed for food and profit. The idea of what's "good" in the way we eat has become a lot more complex than it used to be.
Tomorrow's Festival of Ideas session 'Before You Eat' (Elder Hall, 11.15) features nutritionists Dr Peter Clifton of the CSIRO, Professor Marion Nestle from the USA (author of 2006's What to Eat) and Professor Kerin O'Dea from the University of Melbourne, with the redoubtable Dr Norman Swan as participating Chair. The program notes for this session end with the following list of things that 'we could afford to know more about':
-- The risks to health (real as opposed to imagined) from chemical inputs in the food chain
-- The costs and benefits to individual health of highly processed foods
-- ‘Food miles’ – the costs (nutritional as well as environmental) of having everything in season all the time
-- The further dietary implications of affluence that mean most people in the developed world can eat what would once have been luxury foodstuffs most of the time
-- The alleged ‘obesity epidemic’ and what we can do about it
-- The other risks of industrial-strength agriculture.
'What,' the notes conclude, 'are the desirable alternatives to the way we eat now?'
To me, the short answer to that question would be 'Produce as much of your own food as you can, eat it in season, and cook it yourself.' As a farmer's daughter of a certain age, I've got robust memories of childhood eating that make contemporary supermarkets -- much less fast-food joints -- look pretty lame.
Where I grew up, if you were hungry you went out and killed a sheep. Or, if it was a special occasion, a chook. Or you caught a fish, or shot a rabbit, or went yabbying down at the dam. In summer you ate tomatoes that your mother had grown, and in winter the gargantuan field mushrooms you'd picked yourself from up around the shearing-shed (no prizes for guessing the connection). You ate eggs that had been laid only hours before, with toast made from bread baked that morning before dawn in the big old ovens at the township bakery.
(Peace to vegetarians everywhere, but I don't apologise for the sheep, the chooks, the rabbits or the fish. I can attest as an eyewitness to their free, happy and well-looked-after lives, as I can to their quick and humane deaths; the worst thing that ever happened to most of them was getting bossed around by a Border Collie, which is a great deal more than can be claimed by most human beings.)
In the cities in 2007, most of us have lives that preclude the taking of time and trouble to maintain a close connection with the food we eat, which is why, although I still never eat fast food or even pre-prepared meat, I had never in my life grown a tomato until last summer. The astonished pride I felt when I picked my first three ripe Romas, brought them inside with some fresh basil cut from the pot growing on the back doorstep, did this with them
and then ate them is something I won't ever forget. It's not just that there's a powerful, primitive connection between producing food and then eating it; it's also that the process is beautiful and satisfying and will make you very happy.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Let her eat cake
This cake, whose name is Dotted Swiss Dream and upon which you must imagine some lit candles fetchingly deployed among the marzipan roses, is for ThirdCat -- who has given me an excuse to write about the book from which it's taken, which is one of my all-time favourite books on the entire planet.
The recipe for Dotted Swiss Dream takes up three pages and involves some really majer esoterica, like wooden supports, framboise, non-bendable plastic drinking straws and something called Lemon Curd Mousseline, which is, says Ms Beranbaum, 'a thrilling buttercream to prepare because it starts off looking thin and lumpy and, about three-quarters of the way through, starts to emulsify into a luxurious cream.'
You can tell this woman is a professional cook from the way she is able to use the words 'thrilling' and 'emulsify' in the same sentence.
Copyright laws forbid me to give the recipe here for her Gingerbread cake, but let me just say that it contains golden syrup, dark brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger and marmalade, and that the method by which it is rendered sticky, moist and immortal is that you bake it first and then brush or baste it while it's still hot with a syrup made out of sugar, unsalted butter and lemon juice and then wrap it in Glad-Wrap till it's cool.
My personal variation, ginger and lime being so elegant a couple, is to use lime juice in the syrup instead of lemon. It tastes even better if you grew the limes yourself.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Yet another missed opportunity
I don't know. Reahlly I don't.
I bought a digital camera for a very specific reason: to enhance and improve this blog and have even more fun with it than I already do.
So far, so good. What I have to do now is remember to actually take it with me when I go places where I might see things that would make good blog posts.
Things like the sign in the supermarket this afternoon that said
BANANAS $1.99 PER KILO
I bought a digital camera for a very specific reason: to enhance and improve this blog and have even more fun with it than I already do.
So far, so good. What I have to do now is remember to actually take it with me when I go places where I might see things that would make good blog posts.
Things like the sign in the supermarket this afternoon that said
BANANAS $1.99 PER KILO
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Saturday Cityblogging: Adelaide Central Market
This is one of the places I drag interstate and overseas visitors to. I remember it from the time I was in high school, when the dominant cultural influences in South Australia, other than Anglo-Celtic, were German (a huge influence in SA since early settlement, when the state, founded by idealists, was a haven for religious refugees) plus Italian and Greek, by far the two biggest ethnic groups to end up in Adelaide in the postwar wave of immigration.
The Central Market in those days was where you went for imported groceries. There was an ornately fronted continental-cake shop run by a Viennese woman with whom our German teacher had an arrangement: every now and then for our German lesson we'd walk down to the market from school, which was less than 100 metres up the street, and buy a cake each. We had to ask for it in perfect, polite German before she'd hand it over.
It's got bigger and bigger over the years. Adelaide's Chinatown now kind of melts into it. There's a stall that sells Russian food. People queue up in droves to buy Asian greens. You can buy artisanal cheeses from the Adelaide Hills, or really seriously stinky cheeses from France at $86 per kilo. You can buy everything from bottom-of-the-range mega-shoddy mass produced statuettes of Ganesh the Elephant God to black pearls and unique gold jewellery of great beauty. You can buy fresh roast turkey and cranberry sauce baguettes, that morning's field mushrooms, corn-fed chicken, organic beef, giant chocolate crackles and still-warm wood-oven bread. The noise is overwhelming. The smell is fabulous.
Part of the car park is an old warehouse ...
... and when you get out of the lift, you see this.
These are the people with the gold, but their amber is even better.
I wonder where they keep the Mundane Fruit and Veg, and what it is. Parsnips, chokos and cabbage?
The Central Market in those days was where you went for imported groceries. There was an ornately fronted continental-cake shop run by a Viennese woman with whom our German teacher had an arrangement: every now and then for our German lesson we'd walk down to the market from school, which was less than 100 metres up the street, and buy a cake each. We had to ask for it in perfect, polite German before she'd hand it over.
It's got bigger and bigger over the years. Adelaide's Chinatown now kind of melts into it. There's a stall that sells Russian food. People queue up in droves to buy Asian greens. You can buy artisanal cheeses from the Adelaide Hills, or really seriously stinky cheeses from France at $86 per kilo. You can buy everything from bottom-of-the-range mega-shoddy mass produced statuettes of Ganesh the Elephant God to black pearls and unique gold jewellery of great beauty. You can buy fresh roast turkey and cranberry sauce baguettes, that morning's field mushrooms, corn-fed chicken, organic beef, giant chocolate crackles and still-warm wood-oven bread. The noise is overwhelming. The smell is fabulous.
Part of the car park is an old warehouse ...
... and when you get out of the lift, you see this.
These are the people with the gold, but their amber is even better.
I wonder where they keep the Mundane Fruit and Veg, and what it is. Parsnips, chokos and cabbage?
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Wednesday dinnerblogging
Because I can!
Tomatoes straight from the vine; basil straight from the pot; bocconcini straight from thewater buffalo supermarket.
It's all right, I'll calm down about this camera in a minute.
Tomatoes straight from the vine; basil straight from the pot; bocconcini straight from the
It's all right, I'll calm down about this camera in a minute.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Christmas Trifle (for Dogpossum)
Please note: this recipe contains no jelly, no port, no sherry, no tinned fruit and no bought cake.
Dogpossum has asked on a comments thread about trifle, so I thought I'd make a proper post out of it. This is what I plan to make tomorrow, up to the custard level, so that all the flavours can bed down together nicely by Monday.
Find a pretty, medium-to-big bowl, preferably see-through. (This trifle looks, if anything, even better than the one in that photo a few posts back, so it's nice to be able to see the layers.)
Ground floor: Savoyardis or other similar sponge-finger biscuits. Fill up the spaces with crumbled-up macaroons, Amaretti biscuits or similiar. Slosh some Kirsch on them (quarter of a cup for a small trifle, half a cup for a big one) to begin the softening-up process.
First floor: a generous layer of warmed jam, preferably strawberry.
Second floor: a very generous layer of fresh raspberries and sliced strawberries, plus some fresh cherries that you've softened by gently simmering in a bit of water with a couple of teaspoons of honey and a pinch of cinnamon. When they're soft enough to pit easily, drain them over a little bowl or mug, keep the liquid, and let everything cool.
You should then be able to pit the cherries by cutting them in half. Mix them up gently with the rasps and strawbs. Use some of the saved cooking liquid to soften up the biscuit layer a bit more (but don't drown it or anything).
Third floor: a finely judged layer of custard: it should cover or at least coat all the fruit and give you a more or less level playing field to decorate. Either use the homemade custard recipe of your choice (if you're going to take the trouble, you might as well do it using eggs and cream rather than custard powder) or a bought one if you want -- Paul's do very nice custard, actually, including a brandy-flavoured one. Also, this year I plan to introduce to the custard layer a few artfully deployed spoonfuls of King Island Creme Dessert (Toffee Caramel flavour).
Fourth floor: whipped cream decoration, using an icing bag and star nozzle or whatever, and making a pattern with cream swirls and toasted almonds and silver cachous and red and green glace cherries. Or whatever.
Here are the flavours in this dessert:
almond
Kirsch
brandy (if you take the Paul's cucky option)
caramel
cherry
cinnamon
coconut
honey
raspberry
strawberry
toffee
Here are the kilojoules in this dessert:
100,000,000
Dogpossum asked about a low-sugar option for a diabetic version but I'm fairly sure such a thing does not exist in nature. I think what I'd do is pick out the biggest, yummiest, best and most beautiful of the fresh berries and cherries, and save them for the diabetic person to eat out of a crystal plate with a silver spoon.
Dogpossum has asked on a comments thread about trifle, so I thought I'd make a proper post out of it. This is what I plan to make tomorrow, up to the custard level, so that all the flavours can bed down together nicely by Monday.
Find a pretty, medium-to-big bowl, preferably see-through. (This trifle looks, if anything, even better than the one in that photo a few posts back, so it's nice to be able to see the layers.)
Ground floor: Savoyardis or other similar sponge-finger biscuits. Fill up the spaces with crumbled-up macaroons, Amaretti biscuits or similiar. Slosh some Kirsch on them (quarter of a cup for a small trifle, half a cup for a big one) to begin the softening-up process.
First floor: a generous layer of warmed jam, preferably strawberry.
Second floor: a very generous layer of fresh raspberries and sliced strawberries, plus some fresh cherries that you've softened by gently simmering in a bit of water with a couple of teaspoons of honey and a pinch of cinnamon. When they're soft enough to pit easily, drain them over a little bowl or mug, keep the liquid, and let everything cool.
You should then be able to pit the cherries by cutting them in half. Mix them up gently with the rasps and strawbs. Use some of the saved cooking liquid to soften up the biscuit layer a bit more (but don't drown it or anything).
Third floor: a finely judged layer of custard: it should cover or at least coat all the fruit and give you a more or less level playing field to decorate. Either use the homemade custard recipe of your choice (if you're going to take the trouble, you might as well do it using eggs and cream rather than custard powder) or a bought one if you want -- Paul's do very nice custard, actually, including a brandy-flavoured one. Also, this year I plan to introduce to the custard layer a few artfully deployed spoonfuls of King Island Creme Dessert (Toffee Caramel flavour).
Fourth floor: whipped cream decoration, using an icing bag and star nozzle or whatever, and making a pattern with cream swirls and toasted almonds and silver cachous and red and green glace cherries. Or whatever.
Here are the flavours in this dessert:
almond
Kirsch
brandy (if you take the Paul's cucky option)
caramel
cherry
cinnamon
coconut
honey
raspberry
strawberry
toffee
Here are the kilojoules in this dessert:
100,000,000
Dogpossum asked about a low-sugar option for a diabetic version but I'm fairly sure such a thing does not exist in nature. I think what I'd do is pick out the biggest, yummiest, best and most beautiful of the fresh berries and cherries, and save them for the diabetic person to eat out of a crystal plate with a silver spoon.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Fresh Cherry and Toasted Almond Ice Cream
Ingredients
1.5 cups cream
5 egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
60g slivered almonds
500g ripe cherries
1/4 cup water
2 strips orange rind
2 teaspoons redcurrant jelly
Method
Heat the cream in a saucepan until is it bubbling on the edges.
Beat egg yolks with sugar until thick and gradually add the hot cream, stirring constantly. (NB wooden spoon is best.)
Return the mixture to the saucepan and heat, stirring until it has lightly thickened. Be careful not to let it boil. Remove from heat, flavour with vanilla, and stir occasionally till tepid. At this point, clingwrap over the surface will stop the custard forming a skin. Once it's cool, put it in the fridge.
While this custard mixture is cooling, toast the almond slivers on a tray in the oven, where they will burn extremely quickly if you don't watch them. Turn them once or twice till golden brown, then let cool on the tray. If you do this in advance, put them in a glass jar with a good lid and keep them in the fridge, but it's best to do it all together as the almonds stay crunchier.
Put cherries in a pan with water and orange rind, cover and leave to cook over a gentle heat until they are very soft. Add the redcurrant jelly, stir and let cool until you can remove the pips from the cherries. Puree stoned cherries in a food processor or blender, along with the bit of syrup in the pan. The puree should make one to one-and-a-quarter cups and it will contain tiny bits of cherry. Let it cool.
Mix cherry puree with custard. It should be a lurid fuchsia colour. If you're using an ice-cream maker, freeze the mixture acording to the directions, adding the toasted almonds at the finish.
Otherwise, freeze the ice-cream in metal trays in the freezer (personally I find a largish round cake pan is good) till it's just firm, then take it out and beat it thoroughly to mush with an electric beater, to break up the crystals. Add the nuts to the mush and return to freezer.
Best eaten within a day of freezing, or the nuts start to lose their crunch.
Serves four without accompaniments, six with. Suggested accompaniments: cherry compote, little meringues, langues de chat -- but probably not all of these things at once.
1.5 cups cream
5 egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
60g slivered almonds
500g ripe cherries
1/4 cup water
2 strips orange rind
2 teaspoons redcurrant jelly
Method
Heat the cream in a saucepan until is it bubbling on the edges.
Beat egg yolks with sugar until thick and gradually add the hot cream, stirring constantly. (NB wooden spoon is best.)
Return the mixture to the saucepan and heat, stirring until it has lightly thickened. Be careful not to let it boil. Remove from heat, flavour with vanilla, and stir occasionally till tepid. At this point, clingwrap over the surface will stop the custard forming a skin. Once it's cool, put it in the fridge.
While this custard mixture is cooling, toast the almond slivers on a tray in the oven, where they will burn extremely quickly if you don't watch them. Turn them once or twice till golden brown, then let cool on the tray. If you do this in advance, put them in a glass jar with a good lid and keep them in the fridge, but it's best to do it all together as the almonds stay crunchier.
Put cherries in a pan with water and orange rind, cover and leave to cook over a gentle heat until they are very soft. Add the redcurrant jelly, stir and let cool until you can remove the pips from the cherries. Puree stoned cherries in a food processor or blender, along with the bit of syrup in the pan. The puree should make one to one-and-a-quarter cups and it will contain tiny bits of cherry. Let it cool.
Mix cherry puree with custard. It should be a lurid fuchsia colour. If you're using an ice-cream maker, freeze the mixture acording to the directions, adding the toasted almonds at the finish.
Otherwise, freeze the ice-cream in metal trays in the freezer (personally I find a largish round cake pan is good) till it's just firm, then take it out and beat it thoroughly to mush with an electric beater, to break up the crystals. Add the nuts to the mush and return to freezer.
Best eaten within a day of freezing, or the nuts start to lose their crunch.
Serves four without accompaniments, six with. Suggested accompaniments: cherry compote, little meringues, langues de chat -- but probably not all of these things at once.
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