Culiblog nominated in Gridskipper's weblog awards
November 30, 2005
How cool is it that I regularly read all of my competitors!
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Culiblog nominated in Gridskipper's weblog awards
How cool is it that I regularly read all of my competitors' blogs!
Posted by debra at 06:01 PM | post to del.icio.us
And the answer is... community supported agriculture
image courtesy of the Real Dirt on Farmer John website
Well, at least that is one of the most positive answers to the questions that came to my mind after watching Erwin Wagenhofer’s We Feed the World (Austria 2005) Saturday night at the IDFA. Although reviews and film descriptions already abound, here's culiblog's quick take on the films The Real Dirt on Farmer John, We Feed the World and Bullshit.
Context is everything, although this hadn't occurred to me weeks ago when I reserved my tickets for the IDFA and Shadow Festivals. It was pure coincidence that I chose Taggert Siegel’s The Real Dirt on Farmer John (US 2005) instead of We Feed the World as my first IDFA film. But the documentary about John Peterson (I heart him) is such a poignant portrayal of his pursuit of agricultural viability on a very personal level, that the film armed me with an outlook positive enough to take on the eloquent doom and gloom of the other documentaries. I wish my fellow audience members had been so lucky, because their anger and disillusionment about the realities sketched in Wagenhofer's, We Feed the World and even Holmquist's Bullshit was palpable.
Please read more... "And the answer is... community supported agriculture"
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The Hunger Artist
November 24, 2005
Here's one for the archives: Google (images) 'Hunger Artist'
Happy Thanksgiving, by the way.
Please read more... "The Hunger Artist"
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Beets in hibiscus salt crust
November 22, 2005
Preheat oven to 220°c/475°F. Mix in just enough water with the salt to make sandcastle-style sand. Add dried hibiscus flowers to the mixture in a few swift turns of the fork. On a baking sheet covered wtih baker's parchment, pack the beats in the salt. Bake for 20 minutes. Crack open and serve the beets piping hot.
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Food-related film, art, design and culture in Amsterdam
November 17, 2005
Starting next week culiblog is feeding itself with food-related films from the Shadow and IDFA documentary film festivals. Themes such as the family farm, food distribution, foodstore owners, olive trees, Japanese home cooking and of course globalisation, feature prominently in my selection.
The Netherlands has two film seasons each year. In November and December it's documentary season with the Shadow Film Festival and the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). In January it's the International Film Festival Rotterdam. I have known couples that, when they broke up, had to decide who would get to go to which film festival. Seriously. Big stars like artist Allan Sekula, who presented his documentary Fish Story at the Shadow Festival in 2002, show up for these events in our dark but cosy Polar Circle villages.
The culiblog programme of food-related documentary film (Nov 25-Dec 03, 2005, Amsterdam NL)
Friday 25.11
12.30h Film Museum: Meat Vegetables and Dessert
14.45h City 7: My Dear Olive Tree
18.30h Calypso: The Real Dirt on Farmer John
20.20h Cinerama 1: Profils Paysans (Profiles of Farmers: Daily Life)
Saturday 26.11
12.00h City 1: Bullshit
21.00h City 1: We Feed the World
22:00h Uitkijk: Autumn
Sunday 27.11
16.00h Melkweg: Taimagura Grandma
Monday 28.11
11.00h Cinerama 1: The Real Dirt on Farmer John
14.30h City 7: Het is een Schone Dag Geweest (It's been a lovely day)
21.45h Cinerama 1: Our Daily Bread
22.00h Uitkijk: Alimentation Generale
Tuesday 29.11
20.00h City 5: Bullshit
21.30 City 1: We Feed the World
Wednesday 30.11
19.00h City 1: Our Daily Bread
Thursday 01.12
10.45 City 7: My Dear Olive Tree
Friday 02.12
20.15 City 3: Meat Vegetables and Dessert
Saturday 03.12
12.45h Calypso 1: We Feed the World
14.15h Film Museum: Profils Paysans
17.30h City 2: Our Daily Bread
19.00h City 3: Bullshit
19.15h City 7: Het is een schone dag geweest
For IDFA reservations:
IDFA +31 (0)20 4277452 (open from 12-17h)
http://www.idfa.nl/
For Shadow Festival reservations, contact the locations:
de Melkweg +31 (0)20 53 18181
Lijnbaansgracht 234/A
de Uitkijk +31 (0)20 6237 460
Prinsengracht 452
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Just experimenting with raw cruciferous vegetables
November 16, 2005
It would be absolutely no problem for me to go on and on about the conceptual and nutritional inconsistencies of the raw food (culture) diet, but I have to admit that this raw food culinary experiment has seriously increased my intake of *cruciferous vegetables. And that's good a thing because all cooked cruciferous vegetables taste to me like fart. And that's a bad thing.
* cabbages, kale, broccoli, bruxelles sprouts, cauliflower, get it?
Please read more... "Just experimenting with raw cruciferous vegetables"
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Audible gasps caused by morphogenetic fields
November 15, 2005
I was perusing my daily share of food writing, food photography and food porn, when what should I spy with my little eye? An aged eGullet entry about Grant Achatz' tasting menu at his much praised restaurant, Alinea. I know, I know, everyone's been eating honeycomb since time immemorial, but honey is apparently extra hot right now and Grant Achatz uses Ohio honeycomb at his restaurant, whereas I use Turkish and Dutch honeycomb... at home.
Images from top to bottom: honeycomb dessert image attributed to eGullet contributor 'yellow truffle' in his October 14, 2005 entry on Grant Achatz' buzzy restaurant, Alinea (hopefully used with permission), a prototype of my honeycomb cocoa nib bonbon photographed by the author herself
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Everything but the squeal
Sometimes in a recipe, you want to instruct the cook to go outside her normal boundaries of food preparation. I used the term 'everything but the squeal' to describe the use of every single living part of a beet and a radish in an entry titled Yurt and Garden and in an entry on Indian Leafenware earlier this year.
"Everything but the squeal" is a quote attributed to the meat-packing industry and it was first signalled in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, the Jungle which described the vile and unhygenic working conditions under which meat was reaching American consumers 100 years ago. If we can believe PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (and I do), not a whole heq of a lot has changed. I do not recommend visiting this site if you plan on eating any part of any animal, wearing fur, leather and even wool, or even drinking the fruits of an animal's existence, any time soon. The PETA organisation is all about the squeal, and I have to say, the practices that they document are abhorrent.
But one needn't result to scare tactics to make me reduce my intake of animal protein and feel guilty for wearing a fur hat during winters up here in the polar circle. Mark Kurlansky's Cod doesn't mention once the issue of animal suffering. In Cod, it's all about extinction dot dot dot.
Please read more... "Everything but the squeal"
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And now for something completely simple, honeycomb cocoa nib bonbon
November 14, 2005
Images r to l: bonbon prototyping, the box it came in
Recipe for Honeycomb Cocoa Nib bonbon
Cut a piece of honeycomb into desired shape.
Place the dripping honeycomb on some raw cocoa nibs.
Alternately, place some raw cocoa nibs on the dripping honeycomb.
Serve.
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Food Subculture Club visits a raw food (un)cooking workshop
November 13, 2005
When cooking with meat or dairy, it's always easy to create foods that are delicious, rich and complex in flavour. By combining processed grain flours with an oven, or brown rice and a rice maker, it's simple enough to make comfort food. But I have always been curious as to whether a diet of raw food could fulfill the very normal culinary hunkerings for diversity and satisfaction. By this I mean, the potential nutritional benefits of eating a raw food diet aside, is it possible to make an interesting raw food repetoire that is well-suited to the Northern European winter?
On my cookbook shelves there are two cookbooks about raw food cuisine; Roxanne Klein & Charlie Trotter's R A W, and Juliano Brotman's Raw, the UNcookbook. I had tried several recipes from
Just from a culinary prespective...
The workshop, held in an anti-squat in exceedingly picturesque Broek in Waterland just north of Amsterdam, ended up having a lot in common with one of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, except that I'm nowhere near as charming as Louis is/was and the workshop was in the middle of the week. During the introductions I inadvertently started things off on the wrong foot by not giving the correct answer to the question, 'how raw are you?' My answer, 'Pretty dang raw, but I'm not a vegetarian' caused more than a few of the other participants to gasp audibly. I could have known that by trying to explain my omnivorous culinary bend that I would become the pisspole of raw food guru-ji Juliano.
Personal affinities aside, it is only fair to mention that I found all of the food that we prepared in the workshop to be 'rock my world' delicious and most of my prejudices with regard to this subculture's cuisine were quickly dispelled. The food wasn't all wet and cold, it didn't taste like 'health food', it didn't taste like vegan food, it was neither bland nor monotonous. In fact, at the end of the workshop, I really started getting cravings for something SIMPLE, like a piece of undressed lettuce. Juliano prepares foods like a parfumier makes a scent. He composes flavours and textures out of his ingredients. His knowledge of the flavour characteristics and textures of the ingredients he uses is impressive. Were it not for this fact, I would have been so out of there, having very little tolerance for statements like 'cooked food is pure poison', and 'I know someone that has been raw for six hundred years'. There was an unspeakable culture clash, but boy can this guy (un)cook.
One of the things I appreciated most about the workshop is that due to Juliano's conviction that everyone in the entire world should become 'raw' immediately, he was eager to explain a feasible methodology for running a raw food kitchen and/or household. I had reported earlier that raw cuisine is labour intensive, and compared to throwing ingredients into a rice maker or grilling up some flesh, it is, but Juliano explained how to make some basic ingredients that could be worked into meals over a period of a week that made the idea of raw food meal preparation less daunting.
Please click 'please read more' to see an interview that I conducted with Juliano and Ariel that will probably answer some of your burning (sorry) raw food questions.
Please read more... "Food Subculture Club visits a raw food (un)cooking workshop"
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A garden in absentia
November 08, 2005
These are images of my kitchen garden in Occitania. Although I've been away for more than two months, it hasn't been left to it's own devices. My garden allotment neighbour Al Gouche, and my dear friend KvR have both been kind enough to water it. This amazing growth (I can't even see the fig tree, the plants are so high) is the result of lovingkindness and very inexpensive water.
Before leaving in September, I asked all my neighbours to eat whatever edible produce they could find from this garden.That's lots of leafy greens, probably too many eighteen-day radishes, and lots of green tomatoes for pickling. My garden has become a hangout zone for the middle-aged, a communal garden and a platform for Jewish guilt. Which is a nice thing, ultimately.
Thank you, KvR for these photographs that are making me so very, very homesick! Would you please tell Al Gouche that I'll start slashing and burning in the middle of December.
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Culiblog dot org is one year young
November 05, 2005
Museum Night 2005 marks the one year anniversary of the domain culiblog dot org and the ladies were there to celebrate with me at the restaurant that incorporates this domain name the most into its interior design. For the time being this is could only mean Food Facility, but lord only knows what the future will bring! The Ladies Debra, Julie, Renée, Helena, Quirine, Klazien and Aya especially enjoyed our bubbles with croquetas d'amour, presented in an inside joke of absorbant Dutch design.
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Chef Thor, Croqueta d'Amor, Medaille d'Or, Cultural Sectór!
November 04, 2005
images top to bottom: Croqueta d'Amor in process, the chef formerly known as Thor, Chef Croquette works on a Croquette Japonais
At a top secret location in Amsterdam's PostCS cultural hub, Chef Croquette and the Croquette Family get to work on the hundreds of croquettes ordered for a weekend filled with cultural events. It's as if the PostCS (home to the Stedelijk Museum, Mediamatic, Club 11, numerous artists' initiatives and one of the thirty-eight locations for the 6th annual Museum Night) suddenly needs it's very own croquette chef. Of course croquette commissioners from the cultural sector are the most demanding of all. To posh up their menus this weekend they unanimously chose two of the newest creations from the chef formerly known as Chef Thor; the Croqueta d'Amor ('No More War!' '7 Sabors!') and the Croquette Japonais.
Just like Willy Wonka's Magic Chewing Gum, each bite of the Croqueta d'Amor and the Croquette Japonais yields a different taste explosion, seven flavours in all. In the film as well as the book by Roald Dahl, the magic chewing gum is still in beta when bitchy Violet Beauregard (chewing gum expert and glutton) snatches a piece of the gum to give it a chew and to sell the recipe to a rival candymaker. Due to the side-effects caused by the experimental nature of the gum, Violet blows up into a giant blueberry and has to be juiced forthwith!
Let that be a lesson to us all.
Chef Croquette joked to me, 'er zijn kapers op de kust' , which is a charming Dutch way of saying, 'many is the chef that would pirate this recipe.' Indeed, as we prepared the croquettes in a location deep under the earth's crust, at least five chefs happened to 'pop in for a little chat'. I think they could sense that Chef C. had perfected the technique of creating an entire meal in ten cubic centimetres of croquette with no ill side-effects. That or the fact that the location was also a central storage place for beer. Either way, the concept of Open Source is not alive and well in the culinary world.
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Shedding light upon the dim
A rectification is in order. In my initial article about the Food Facility I said that it ' ... marks the first time that diners can experience their urban menu in performance format at one dining location.' This is simply not true, and Pieter van der Werf and Esther Plomp from MPD Export were on top of it enough to point this out to me. Apparently they have carried out this same concept several times since 1998, with enormous success. This is surely a sign from the gawds that it's time high time I started rereading Lucy Lippard. Has it been six years already? Don't believe everything you read.
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A belly full of raw food facility, reviewing a conceptual restaurant
November 02, 2005
Smart babies bring their own food to a restaurant opening
It's probably fair to assert that last Saturday was an all-time first in Amsterdam: two interesting culinary events in one day. I made sure to attend both Juliano Brotman's Raw Food UnCooking workshop as well as the restaurant launch of Marti Guixé & Mediamatic's Food Facility at the Post CS. Yoga and raw food in the afternoon, black clothing, pearl-swinging, wine drinking, cigarette smoking, take-away food in the evening. Time in between to change costumes I mean outfits, and I had the fixings for a well-balanced day.
The Food Facility staff (aka Mediamatic and Marti Guixé) giddy and a'blur
Just like normal people, raw food chefs can run a little late, and we were still busy with the results of the uncooking workshop two hours after it's scheduled end. I thought it wouldn't be a problem, assuming that raw food could in no way be complex or filling, but I was mistaken. At 19.00h when I arrived at the Food Facility, I had no desire to eat. Luck would have it that my belly full of raw would turn out to be a blessing.
Luck wouldn't have it that my erstwhile best-friend-with-a-deadline would call to say that she couldn't show up for dinner that evening. GASP, alone at a restaurant opening with a big fat reservation for two! The ever-on-the-ball Mediamatic nouvelles maîtres Arne en Jans, arranged a dinner date for me on the spot (and a delightful one). That, dear reader, is what I call excellent service!
Graphic designers guesting Food Facility catch the early bird special, Guixé designed chairs
Katarina eats spada on rosemary sticks well within three hours of ordering it
The restaurant was glowing with all manner of mixed spot and flourescent lighting, bright white, with HTML blue, black and green columns in the centre. Draped on the walls were large print-outs of the results of a Google search; 'food', 'food facility', 'Marti Guixé' and 'Mediamatic'. Of course this search yields lots of culiblog entries, and I have to say, there's nothing like seeing the name of your blog plastered all over an interior to warm your heart and coax out a favourable review. Designers, do like Marti does.
In the centre of the room Guixé placed a food island, where the delivery boys on scooters brought in the orders and from where the restaurant staff would bring the dish to it's rightful owner. The tables were laid with damaste (not real damaste), with large tumbler glasses, generous cutlery, and large cloth napkins (not real cloth). All of the guests were pregnant with expectation, and some were actually pregnant. Marti G. described the evening thusly, 'It was like attending my own wedding...'
My dining buddy Katarina and I ordered from a well-designed menu based upon the takeout menus from twelve different restaurants in Amsterdam. By 'based upon' I mean photo copied and by twelve I mean nine. We were having an excellent time, drinking and talking, waiting and drinking and talking, smoking and drinking and drinking and smoking and talking and waiting and drinking. Talking all the while, the friends were dropping by for a chit chat, we were being visited by extremely attentive maîtres and wait staff. Waiters are for waiting.
And then we did some more of that waiting. Which was fine. I still wasn't the least bit hungry with my belly full of raw, but some guests were starting to get peckish, and by peckish, I mean uppity. Certain tables began to organise exuberant betting pools as to who would get their food first.
The bride and bridegroom Guixé giggling at all the betting going on
The arrival of the first delivery boy with one baggie of takeout food
The paparazzi can't contain themselves
And then the first delivery boy entered the restaurant. Helmet on, a little white baggy filled with Chinese takeaway in his hand, and the entire facility went berserk. Cameras were flashing, guests were laughing and many stood up to applaud and 'whoop whoop'. All this for one little white bag of grits. This scenario repeated itself as each delivery boy entered the Food Facility until the very end of the evening. That, dear reader, is good restaurant interface design.
My sashimi arrived, well within one and a half hours. An hour, two glasses of wine and one and a half cigarettes later my green papaya salad arrived. You can see by my menu choices that I was doing my dangdest to keep the raw thing going. Ordinarily this amount of wait would be unacceptable, a good reason to do some non-positive wing-flapping. But this particular evening, I would have to categorise this as perfect timing. Perfect amount of drama and excitement, entertaining guests entertaining themselves just fine, excellent conversation (one of my waitresses turned out to be a sufi), food for thought and merriment abounding. Guaranteeing an excellent experience is also a part of restaurant design, and it's silly to go to a restaurant opening with the actual intention of getting fed.
Guixé and Mediamatic's Food Facility is open Fridays and Saturdays until December 11, 2005 and I highly recommend at least one visit. I have chosen Food Facility as the location to celebrate the one year birthday party of culiblog.org during Saturday's Museum Night. It was one year ago (Museum Night 2004 at Mediamtic) that culiblog launched it's domain. We're going to fill up on nibbles beforehand at my house.
Food Facility open Friday and Saturday from 18.00h - 22.00h
November 4 - December 11, 2005 at Post CS, Amsterdam.
Read Mediamatic's announcement here or call +31 (0)6 3376 8810 for reservations.
Please read more... "A belly full of raw food facility, reviewing a conceptual restaurant"
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