More raw beets for the neighbours
January 31, 2005
Raw beet ravioli. Delicious, beautiful and here I am hybernating. It was time for all of my vegetarian architect neighbours to meet over dinner. Click below for recipe.
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Fish and Chips, Surinam Style
January 30, 2005
Telo is my favourite dish from Surinam. Delicious shredded salt cod piled upon deep fried casava with Madame Jeanette salsa fresca dumped in the corner of a plastic container. A completely inadequate coloured fork features prominently in the visual but serves no other purpose.
Typically I drink the only softdrink that I like, young coconut drink, flecks of coconut flesh floating around in the can and clogging up the straw. In my opinion the best telo in the Netherlands can be found at Cong's Corner in Rotterdam and every single time that I go to Rotterdam I look forward to eating at this completely unglamourous snackbar on the corner of one of the most museum-filled street on Earth. I'm here for the Rirkriit Tiravanija retrospective at the Boijmans van Beuningen where I also enjoyed the Anri Sala films. My friends Quirine Racké and Helena Muskens' film Celebration is in premier at the Lantaren Venster.
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Gullet Girl
January 24, 2005
This is the correct Dutch way to eat a herring.
By firelight.
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Do like Data does and bake me something
January 22, 2005
Yesterday Data baked a strawberry jam muffin declaring to her mother that she no longer wants to be a chef, but a chocolatier! This is probably because when Data was 3, way back in 1997, her mother's nickname for her was "Data Chocolata". Or maybe there's another reason.
Data sent this lovely muffin (which I tucked into before I could get the camera out) with her mother to the History of Web Design hosted by the Piet Zwart Academie, the Institute of Network Cultures and the Stedelijk Museum and which took place amidst the grand views of Amsterdam's Club 11.
One of the speakers, Peter Lunenfeld showed us a slide of Paris, a Barbie-like doll designed in Silicon Valley to appeal to 10 and 11 yr. old girls - and whose profession was web designer! I won't elaborate further in this culinary weblog about this conference devoted to looking backwards and forwards but I did adore running into old friends.
And Data's muffin was excellent with my tea. Bedankt Lieve Data, perhaps in 10 years time when the web has evolved into something else entirely you will have become Data Chocolata La Chocolatiere!
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Brain Food
January 20, 2005
This terribly sad but well written book by Mark Kurlansky is a gripping history from the perspective of the cod. Kurlansky tells how fishing for this gadiform has deeply affected the wealth and development of many nations and technologies. I'm thinking the Flounder by Gunther Grass that I read back in the day but even more I'm thinking Fish Story, the mega-artwork by Allan Sekula, about the 'sweatshop called the Pacific'. (Sekula's visual history Fish Story was part of the the last Documenta XI in Kassel. One photograph in particular gave me goosebumps. You see a ship painter giving the Exxon Valdez a new name...fishy stuff.)
It turns out that cod in the form of stokvis (wind dried cod) turned out to be some good thinking-man's protein for the Norsemen. That extra portable brain-power enabled them to encounter New Foundland in 1000, where they also encountered the Beothuk People who had already discovered it and were not enamoured with the idea of sharing their space with the pink and hairy people from across the puddle.
Basques added salt to the stokvis recipe to make salt cod increasing the quality of the preservation and enabling Basque fishermen to to travel even farther - to the mouth of the St. Lawrence river. When explorer Jacques Cartier got there raring to claim his 'discovery' he encountered almost a thousand Basque fishing vessels. And a bunch of angry native Beothuk people getting pissy about the incessant attention.
Cod is inextricably tied to land (to dry it) and salt (to preserve it) and Salt is in fact the title of another one of Kurlansky's wonderful books.
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Keeping one's vows
January 19, 2005
Remember in October when I had just bought Roxanne Klein's R A W and I reported how it made me homesick for Laurel's Kitchen? And then upon rereading Laurel's Kitchen I made a vow to 'take cashew cheese seriously' from now on?
Well, I have been taking cashew cheese making very seriously indeed, and I believe I have improved upon the Good Ladies' recipes. Pictured above are some of the steps in this easy process (from l to r: placing the blended cashew butter in a cheese cloth, cheese cloth hanging in the window, cheese cloth dripping with cashew milk and dark winter sky).
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Like raw beans in a hippy's beard
January 18, 2005
In less than 2 months I will be heading off to India again and as I prepare the Indian version of the Nomadic Banquet Workshop I find myself hunquering for Indian food. I'll be writing about the Nomadic Banquet in future culiblog entries.
Hippy Beard is the nickname I gave to the Southern Indian (Karnatakan) mung dal salad that I adored in Bangalore and adapted to my own liking once back in the Heimatt. If you thought that nothing good could ever come from eating raw beans, you really need to try this simple recipe. The salad is very light and the good kind of crunchy with no negative... uh, aspects.
The cukes I replaced with zukes and unfortunately I had to omit the 'curry leaf' because I can't find it anywhere in Europe. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out why I call this salad Hippy Beard and just like in a real hippy beard this salad keeps for a few days. I'll ask my buddy Zeenat Hassan (who is neither a hippy nor does she sport a beard) for the real name of this refreshing snack with the cheerful 'mouth-feel'. It was her menu choice for that fine afternoon in Bangalore... (recipe follows).
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Culiblog on holiday until the 14th I mean the 18th of January
January 11, 2005
Due to my being perpetually en route in the coming days I will resume writing and reporting on the 14th I mean the 18th of January. Looking forward to seeing you then.
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Juicing, but not frothing, and you?
January 06, 2005
So far this juice fast has yielded quite a number of discoveries, the usefullness of oat milk being one of them. In my opinion grain and nut milks qualify for a juice fast because they are simply the wrung out water in which grain or nut meal has been soaking. These 'milks' don't give the gut flora anything more to do than a glass of apple juice does but they are useful in making things taste 'creamy'.
Other discoveries concern how to make 'comfort food' for the fast yet maintain its nutritional value. Roxanne Klein (and all raw foodies) feel that valuable enzymes in vegetables and fruits are destroyed when heated above 50°c. For this fast I've kept to this parameter while still being able to serve up some warm soup on these cold Occitanian days.
Here are a list of some of the liquids that my ruthless jury has deemed delicious enough to sip even when not on a juice fast: (This is not a menu.)
Cucumber Kiwi Juice
Kiwi Zucchini Juice
Pineapple Juice (fresh squeezed is entirely different from the storebought stuff)
Carrot Grapefruit Juice
Celery Juice
Avocado Zucchini Soup
Celeriac Oat Milk Soup
Green Curry and Carrot Soup
Broccoli Stalk, Zucchini Soup with Guacamole Dumplings
Red Pepper Tomoato Miso Flower Broth
Date and Pear Sorbet (pictured above)
Banana Chai Ice Cream (pictured above)
Pear Sorbet
The juicer that I am borrowing from Fred and Kristine for the duration of the fast is a real Cadillac (Magimix Le Duo). Only crit about this machine is that it doesn't produce foamy froth - like my Braun back in the Heimatt. I think that some of the recipes could be improved with new texture additions. At home I use the foam from the juicer.
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Milk tasting, and you?
January 05, 2005
As I said, not eating solid foods affords you a chance to try new things. Tonight we did a little experimental milk tasting. Because we're on a juice fast and generally behaving as self-righteously as we can we decided to bypass the locally produced cow, sheep and goat varieties and test the locally imported almond, rice and oat milks.
Oat milk was the clear winner in the category; Tastes Like Something I Might Drink Even When Debra Isn't Forcing Me.
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Juice fasting, and you?
It may look like a *beer but it's just fresh-squeezed pineapple juice. We're fasting, remember?
After the holiday gorging, after the guests have gone, we decided that it was high time to do a little juice fast, just a short 3-day holiday gift to our gut flora for putting up with the over-indulgent behaviour of the past weeks.
I like to fast a few times a year and JT was curious about my assertion that fasting can be relatively painless. I will address some of the issues of juice fasting in the coming entries.
What I most enjoy about fasting is the opportunity it gives me to approach food in an entirely different manner. I use the juice fast to create new recipes and techniques for all things liquid.
And how is JT doing? Just fine. We just returned from a long walk along the river, through 17 farmers onion fields and vineyards, strutting over too low fences and broken stone walls up to and around LaRoque and back. JT will be glad to tell you that lunch was satisfying even if it was entirely brown (home-pressed juice from local apples and a bowl of miso soup).
* A Belgian Wit Bier
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Enough with the raw food already
January 03, 2005
We just couldn't eat them all so they've been in the fridge in a wet tea towel since the 31st. I wouldn't have guessed that after so much time you could still eat them raw, although upon opening more than 2/3rds of them were perfectly delicious looking, smelling and tasting. Those deemed not perfect were only a bit dehydrated, not unlike ourselves after overdoing the champies.
I decided to warm them in some melted butter, chopped garlic, rosemary sprig and bay laurel from le chateau.Gawd damn do I love oysters! It was J's first time on New Year's and we told him that eating an oyster is like biting into fresh and solid seawater. Now he sees oyster eating as a superior option to actually going swimming.
Oh and here's what else was going on... JT, Kristi, Fred, Kristine, un grand tour de leur chateau, aussi la Palmiére, la cascade, et toutes pour lui.
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I want you raw (part 2)
January 01, 2005
In la douce France they eat oysters on New Year's Eve. Although in the past year we may occasionally have been known to bitch and moan about cultural convention, assimilation has never been so painless as it was tonight.
JT sniffs out some unsavoury goings on.
(Photos by Jogi Panghaal)
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