April 27, 2005
Hors d'oeuvre of affliction
Some years ago a friend of mine waxing rabbinic told me that during Pesach week, whilst eating charoset one must never say, 'Mmmmm, I love charoset!", because charoset, a delicious mixture of apples, honey, and/or nuts, dates figs, symbolises the mortar used by slaves to build the buildings of the fill in the blank here, and don't take things too literally, you!
That sounded like a quirky but plausible Jewiish behaviourism to me and I decided to incorporate it into my narrative.
Yesterday evening, two friends of mine from Kampala were back in the Heimatt and fortune placed them at my dinner table. Oddly I didn't feel much like cooking when I wrenched myself away from my work at 19h and I don't know how I did, but I did somehow manage to slap something together for us to eat. It just wasn't me not to want to cook for dear friends and somehow I convinced myself that it was OK to serve a ritual combination of matzah, charoset and bitter herbs (horseradish) as an hors d'oeuvre!
I show Alice and Lee how to do like the Jews do, make a little sandwich by piling the charoset and bitter herbs onto the matzah, how you take enough horseradish so that it causes you to shed at least one tear for the slaves that once were, for the slaves that still are, and finally, that even if you like the taste of the mixture, you're not supposed to say so. Charoset stands for the mortar of the enslaved and we're supposed to hate it.
After the lengthy explanation I space out and Alice and Lee get to work making their own hors d'oeuvres with the materials provided, all the while telling me funny stories about the Amakula International Film Festival that they set up in Kampala last year. Alice takes a bite of her d'oeuvre, and with a pleading look on her face grasps her throat, pounds on her chest, shudders, starts looking frantically for her napkin as if she wants to spit in it, is barely able to swallow the mouthfull, slams her hand down hard on the table with a resounding BAM and pronounces, 'YHhUCK!'
I am completely shocked. The combination of witnessing a cherished friend intensely dislike something that I've dished up, plus all the guilty feelings for not giving it my all earlier that evening, plus a little bit of wonderment thrown in because I'd never actually heard of someone not liking the ritual combination. It's all just a bit too much. 'What, you don't like my cooking?'
Alice and Lee look at me with these puzzled looks on their faces and finally Alice musters, 'But, didn't you just say that...'
Doink. (Images are left to right, charoset leftovers, an egg yolk that escaped under the table, and the bowl of special kosher for passover fox noodles that I prepared for poor Alice and Lee.)
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April 22, 2005
Passover cleaning
In December 2004, a Spanish Talmudic scholar named Sinterklaas was cited translating the Torah,
'Passover is the holiday when it behooves
us to clean the barnacles out of our grooves'.
If you don't have anything in the fridge, it's easier to clean it. Smetvrees, the fear of contamination, is an ancient Jewish tradition and therefore a once yearly scrub-down (and burning!) is on the menu today, the day before Pesach. Before the week of Passover commences, it's necessary to rid the house of all items containing leaven, creating an elaborate excuse for rarely performed activities such as dusting and refridgerator cleaning.
Since March 11 I've been in my home exactly 3 days. The contents of my fridge (l to r, top to bottom) are: 2 eggs, jars of mustard and homemade sambal from January 2004 (a gift from a then-not-yet-ex, indicating the period of time that has passed over since... YIPES = LEAVEN!!!), 1,5 train station supermarket courgettes, leftover film from a photoshoot in 2003. 2nd row; 2 1000 yr. duck eggs, 1 open packet of gari (pickled ginger), pickled daikon radish, 1 jar of anchovis. 3rd row; 1 tin of sheep cheese in brine containing 1/8th of a cheese, 2 tins containing only brine which I will also categorise as clutter I mean leaven, 4 St. Marcellin lait cru cheeses brought from Occitania on Wednesday.
In the vegetable 'crisper', which I realistically refer to as 'the rotter'; 1 piece of burdock from a 2004 automnal dinner, 1 carrot from same dinner, a lot of paper bags that act as an absorbent layer when I'm gone for any length of time ( = LEAVEN), 500ml of half fat milk, bought at the train station, 1 bottle of ketchup from last century. Ketchup is oddly exempt from all dietary law.
Contents of the freezer: (top shelf) a scarily old piece of salmon labled 'TOSS ME in 2002', diet margarine (!) left by a guest = YUCK = LEAVEN, ice cubes (I guess I'll make new ones), a bit of delicious organic coffee stashed so that I wouldn't return to an empty coffee larder (how can a wonderful surprise be considered leaven?). Behind these items are 3 packs of wonton skins, picnic blue ice, a box of bicarbonate of soda, and more ice.
Bottom row; 1/2 bag of edame soybeans, ice cream maker, terrible peanut butter cookies (I was planning to use them in a crumb crust one day = LEAVEN), celeriac puree from autumnal dinner ( = BORDERLINE), peas, a 1998 snapshot of the author in a swimsuit indicating what I unrealistically think my body should look like now ( = HOLD ON TO THE DREAM = NOT LEAVEN), bottles of wodka, sliwowitz and Rosie's Lime Cordial. Behind these items are two tupperwares containing archives of chicken and duck fat ( = UH, NOT LEAVEN).
If you are interested in the humorous aspects of Jewish dietary law (then you are a wierdo), listen to this hilarious reading of Shalom Auslander's short story, 'Blessing Bee' about a yeshiva bocher's struggle to learn the laws of kashrut and kill his abusive father at the same time. The piece starts at the 38th minute of a This American Life broadcast (My Big Break, Act 3).
Tomorrow is market day and I endeavour to stock up on leafy greens and fresh fruit before heading off to be a guest at a friend of a friend's Pesach Seder.
Posted by debra at 10:20 AM | Comments (4)
December 13, 2004
Re-enact creaming
Mediamatic and CASCO's performance night titled Re-enact was rife with food related performance art. My absolute favourite performer was Nezaket Ekici who oh so diva-liciously turned cream into butter with her bare right hand. It took 24 minutes or thereabouts.
Everyone was aswoon, Whoa Mama!
Here's a review by art critic Paul Groot in Dutch.
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November 23, 2004
Adam is the genuine article...
The very attentive Adam Kuban raced over on his, his, (whatever sort of motorcycle he's riding) to assure me that his weblog Slice is purely about offering the best possible pizza fieldguide and not about I-Pod applications, 'not that there's anything wrong with that...'
One lengthy browsie-browse later and I can't argue with him. Kuban has done his homework, meticulously logging it all onto his I-Pod (and generously sharing it with the world). I'd trust him to find me a slice. Take a peak at Slice or read an interview from the Gothamist about Adam. I have other questions that I prefer to ask in private first. ; )
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November 06, 2004
Halalchisch
What's wrong with this image?
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October 08, 2004
Learning through your Ass: The Return of Laurel's Kitchen
When I became a vegetarian at the tender age of 13, my parents, fearing that I would stunt my own growth gave me what was considered at the time to be a good introduction to vegetarian nutrition, amino acid chains and global food politics. It was my first cookbook ever and its pictureless recipes for soy-milk, cashew cheese and other 'technically advanced' foodstuffs threw me completely for a loop.
It was California in the 70's but my Mom wasn't about to go foodshopping in a store filled with goat-knitting long-hairs smelling like garbanzo farts, and I didn't know that you could simply go to an Asian supermarket and BUY a ready-made block of tempeh. So when one of Laurel's recipes called for say, soy milk and said, (see recipe page 138) I would actually make the soy milk - often with unsavoury results.
Due to a series of 'intrusive kitchen disasters' my mother decided that I could only do the big preparations for the week's food on Sunday. (Not the fresh things, just the... legume-rich things.) Considering that I had turned the family kitchen into a soybean laboratory it wasn't entirely the cruel thing to do. I would prepare my vegetarian food for the week ahead and microwave it warm each day. For an experienced cook, preparing food in advance wouldn't have posed much of a problem but I had very little PRACTICAL cooking experience. I couldn't tell beforehand if a recipe was difficult and mistakes I made on Sunday were the grits on the table the livelong week. This educational technique is known in some cultures as 'learning through your ass'.
I was cooking outside the repetoire of my family and Laurel wasn't helping. Laurel's Kitchen, although an amazing source of 1970's California anthropology was absolutely a crap book for an inexperienced cook.
But yesterday when I brought home Roxanne Klein and Charlie Trotter's R A W, the first thing I did was pull Laurel from my shelf for one more read.
This is the text on the inside flap:
"An original and, to me, irresistible presentation?as useful as it is inviting."
?The New York Times Book Review
Ten years ago, Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey decided to raise their families on natural foods. They had discovered that good eating habits lead to good health and made people feel stronger, happier, more alert, and more alive.
Laurel and her friends wrote this book because they wanted to share their unique kitchen experiences and pass on a solid collection of tempting, inexpensive vegetarian dishes. But Laurel's Kitchen is not just a cookbook. It is a handbook of vegetarian nutrition. Filled with practical information on viatmines and minerals, the four food groups for a meatless diet, weight control, and ways to preserve nutrients in your cooking, Laurel's Kitchen is the book Laurel and her friends wished they'd had when they took their first tentative steps into the world of vegetarian cookery.
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October 07, 2004
Ik lust je R A W
Wing flapping all around! Today I indulged myself and bought a cookbook that I have wanted to own for quite some time. R A W by Roxanne Klein (a culinary approach to vegan and raw food cooking) with Charlie Trotter, one of the US's most innovative chefs. Regular readers know that porkatarians like me can't also be vegans but I am still so very excited by this pairing of the minds.
A browsiebrowse through and so far there are lots of recipes that look like watermelon spit-up (maybe she took Trotter's 'froth thing' a little bit too literally) and I think that bit about preserving the enzymes is a load of halookie. If you put a blended something in a dehydrator for 5 hrs I doubt very seriously that there will be any 'living' quality left in the foodstuff. TEST: Put yourself in a sauna for 5 hrs and see how you feel. Now imagine yourself to be a carrot!
B U T
The book is brimming with beauty, love of a rich variety of ingredients and new techniques (new since *Laurel's Kitchen) and I swear I'm going to take cashew cheese seriously this time.
* You're going to have to wait until tomorrow's entry about Laurel's Kitchen, written in 1976 it was THE quintessential bible of Californian hardcore vegetarianism.
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May 08, 2004
Eat Yer Snakes
"Well because my Auntie was a Mormon missionary and she was actually E A T E N A L I V E by snakes. Ever since then I haven't had much apetite for snakes. "
"Nope, not even if they're skewered."
Posted by at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)