Bad eating habits
February 16, 2005
Mille pardons. Culiblog is temporarily suffering from bad eating habits.
Love,
Debra
debra at 12:58 | Comments (4) | post to del.icio.us
Lacking and craving
February 8, 2005
Supposedly craving a certain food is your body telling you that your diet lacks a certain something. But what is it that my diet lacks if I get cravings for 1000 year eggs with Cheese in a Can Soup? Could the lack of light and earthy outdoor fun up here in the Polar Circle have made me wood ash and lime deficient? Do I need to get my tochas down to Occitania where I never crave these elegant looking duck eggs?
1000 year eggs are raw duck eggs that have been coated with a paste of salt, wood ash and lime and then rolled in rice chaff to keep them from cementing together. They are placed in a ceramic pot and rotated every few days for two weeks. After this time the insides of the eggs have become ’softboiled’ and turned dark transluscent amber (the white) and greenish greyish black (the yolk).
The design of my old Mac G3 laptop (a Pismo) always reminded me of a 1000 year egg. I find this colour combination extremely elegant - the ‘white’ of the 1000 year egg is like a golden amber aspic, sometimes with fractal designs forming in it!
Doesn’t it just make you wonder how a preservation technique like this develops?
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debra at 10:23 | Comments (8) | post to del.icio.us
Cooking Challenge, Pôts de Crumble
February 7, 2005
In French that’s pronounced poh and the term can mean everything from a pot to piss in to a pot to plant some blood orange apple crumble in. Recycling fool that I am, these pôts originally contained storebought creme caramel but serve as excellent ramekin substitutes.
This past weekend was the Paper Chef Challenge, a little game some food bloggers like to play not dissimilar from the BBC television show Ready, Steady, Cook. The group agrees to use a group of ingredients in a recipe over a finite course of time. Wheat flour, cinnamon, blood oranges and creme fraiche, with extra points for using broccoli, chorizo, stale bread and something else. After a botched batch of stale cornbread French Toast (which in Dutch amusingly translates into a dessert called Turning Bitches), I decided to do something very un-Debra and stick to the menu.
Desserts based on the apple crumble principle have always been my back-up dessert. I actually never eat dessert but perform it exclusively when I have guests and consequently dot dot dot. The blood oranges in this dessert give it extra tang, for those of us that truly don’t have a sweet tooth.
One thing - the only kind of orange I like is a blood orange, and I use every single part separately.
Another thing - there are many sorts of cinnamon but for baking only Sri Lankan stick cinnamon will do. Ignore the dried pre-powdered kind and buy a proper stick of very thin bark. The thick stuff is for making meat stews anyway. You pulverise the cinnamon into splinters between your fingers - and there are few things finer than biting into a cinnamon bit, an explosion of flavour reminiscent of the RedHots candy of my childhood.
Oh and another thing - Whole meal chappati flour ‘is not just for hippies anymore’. This finely ground wholemeal is definitely light enough to use for baking.The trick is to work with a light hand and to not over-mix the thing that should not be over-mixed, in fact, to become light yourself.
Ohm and one last thing - Creme fraiche (d’Isigny) is best taken straight up, with a spoon.
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debra at 10:05 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
