History of The Daily Grind




Coffee is the lifeblood of our morning ritual. Many of us think it nigh on impossible to start the day without imbibing this bitter dark liquid. It’s no wonder then that coffee has become the world’s most legally-traded commodity after oil, another dark liquid, yet decidedly less delicious. Today we have a variety of ways of consuming coffee, more than a dozen different preparations; the most respected being the espresso. It was said that the coffee bean was discovered in the highlands of Ethiopia somewhere in the 9th Century. First eaten by domesticated donkeys, the unroasted green beans bestowed a powerful stimulating affect upon these beasts of burden, then able to stave off fatigue for extended durations.

It wasn’t long until people discovered that roasting the bean created a marked improvement in the flavour and colour, leading to a rapid growth in consumption and trade of the bean. Coffee began to play an important role in many societies, for instance in Africa and Yemen it was used in religious ceremonies; as a result the Ethiopian Church banned its consumption for many years. Then from its beginning in the Muslim world, coffee found its way to Italy, with the first European coffee house opening in Italy in 1645. The Arabs had tried to secure their monopoly on coffee by prohibiting the exportation of plants or unroasted seeds. In 1616 however, the Dutchman Pieter van den Broeck was able to smuggle seedlings from Aden into Europe, thereby opening up the market to the world, with vast plantations being cultivated in Java and Ceylon with the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular throughout the British Colonial Empire.

There are many different gadgets that have been created over the centuries to extract the flavour and caffeine from the coffee bean. The first being the Turkish ibrik popping up around the 13th Century, involving the repetitive boiling of coffee grinds in water, to deliver the super-strong and rather bitter acid tang we associate with Turkish coffee. Centuries of scientific advancement to produce a machine, able to produce a coffee of minimal bitterness and extract the most desirable and flavoursome component of coffee – the crema. The espresso machine was invented by Gaggia of Italy in 1947, its key improvement over earlier machines, was a spring-loaded piston which enabled hot water to be pressurised to nine atmospheres – one atmosphere is the air pressure we feel on our bodies at sea level. When ground roasted coffee gets friendly with high-pressure hot water, a sublime thick liquid is extracted, the consistency of oil and powerfully aromatic, this crema is the most flavoursome part of the espresso and requires utmost care to ensure it is not bitter or acidic. This is why in many countries around the world and increasingly more in the cosmopolitan centres of India, people search out for the best coffee shops in town, where well-trained baristas toil over achieving perfection in a cup. This is rarely found in the larger chain cafes and one must venture to the boutique independent outlets to find this. The top cafes will usually have their own brand of roasted coffee, which will rarely be more than a week old. In comparison to major brands such as Lavazza or Illy, which will in many instances have been roasted four to six months prior to finally making it passed your lips! You only need to think of how enticing freshly baked bread is, to realise the difference time can make and how packing coffee in an airtight container will not preserve the intense aroma of freshly roasted beans. Which leads us to the other component of any good coffee, espresso or otherwise – the bean itself.

The coffee bean comes to us as two major species, Coffea canephora (Robusta) and Coffea arabica. Robusta plants are easier to grow and maintain so is cheaper to produce, it has less flavour than Arabica but twice the caffeine. Because of this it finds its way into instant coffee and cheaper coffee blends. With regards to the Arabica, there are two factors - where it’s grown and under what conditions that directly influence its aroma and taste. Think of the world of wine with reference to growing coffee. Whilst wine is grown in more temperate climates of the world, coffee thrives in the tropics, Ethiopian Arabica is known for is complex fruity flavour, Jamaican Blue Mountain Arabica for its mild flavour and lack of bitterness and the most popular for premium espresso blends - Columbian Arabica, is known for its heavy body and intense acidity when freshly roasted. In analogy to French Sauvignon Blanc wine that typically tastes floral and perfumed, with New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc tending to exhibit traits of tropical fruits and fresh grass. Where it is grown and under what conditions, make all the difference. It is because of these factors, that many small coffee plantations are now returning to methods such as shade-grown or organically cultivated coffee beans, realising that coffee aficionados will pay the extra price for this gourmet coffee.

The hope is that someday - hopefully soon, you’ll enter a café in Singapore or Shanghai and have your senses saturated with the alluring aroma of roasting coffee. As you walkthrough you’ll hear the sound of the beans churning with cool air to arrest the hot beans and will be greeted a by knowledgeable roaster and barista who can guide you through the perfect blend of Columbian and Cuban shade-grown Arabica and should you prefer to drink it in-house, have it ground and extracted to perfection, the crema so thick it hangs from the spout like thick oil and is presented in your cup with a deep sheen, tasting nutty and rich, with nothing more than a slight hint of bitterness.

So next time your poured a cup of coffee by a charming member of your Cathay Pacific or Singapore flight crew, spare a thought for that weary little donkey in the highlands of Ethiopia and the centuries of religious, political and scientific upheaval that have transpired to produce perfection in a cup.
herring

Moving on to further milk products with dubious health benefits.

Last night I ate my first ever pickled herring in cream. But no ordinary pickled herring in cream: this was the 'Minus L' brand lactose-free variety. Another example of the traditional German palate colliding with the mass-marketed health food trends of recent times. Are that many of us clinically lactose-intolerant? Probably not. But why not eat the lactose-free version... it just sounds healthier.

As well as lactose-free yoghurt and lactose-free herb-quark, you can also get lactose-free meat salad, which is little strips of ham in a creamy dressing. 'Meat salad' doesn't sound all too appealing but Erik tells me it's excellent on toast.

As for my foray into pickled herrings, I liked them a lot. The cream was quite light and the sourness was yummy: a slightly fishy salt&vinegar chips vibe. It's appealing how vinegar-marinated fish becomes denser in texture. I regret turning up my nose at my Dutch father's brined pickled herrings (rollmops) for all those years.

Erik says as a kid his mum would sometimes serve these cream-spiked herrings for supper, with some rye bread on the side and grated apple on top (lunch right after school was their big cooked meal for the day).

We had them last night, sans apple, with thin sunflower-oil potato crisps and Americano cocktail on the side. It was a pretty good combo.

This sounds a bit wanky, but we had a really nice Americano with Cinzano sweet vermouth in the bar of Hotel Omm in Barcelona last week. We were there for Sónar festival, and went there at 9pm on a Sunday night, so the big couches were mostly deserted. I'm not sure I could bear the place's loungey soundtrack when filled with posers - but the Stan Getz-produced Brazilian music was totally fine in the company of a few rolex-encrusted senior citizens. But anyway, we were reminded how perfect it is when little dishes of really good crisps are served as a bar snack. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the chippie sandwiches of my youth, but I would say the Spanish, with their tasty olives and potato crisps, compete with Japanese o-tsumami for world's best bar snack repertoire.

The Spanish are also no strangers to combining the salt & vinegar punch of boquerones (marinated european anchovies) with crisps either. We ate the crunchy, vinegary, fishy plate below at Inopia in Barcelona last October.

Pickled herrings, potato crisps and Italian aperitifs might not be such an unholy euro combo after all. I'm inspired to make this a regular habit: lactose or no lactose.

boquerone chips

From Fizzy Yoghurt to Horse-Goat Milk

horsegoatmilk

Who doesn't dream of bubbles in their yoghurt? My favourite tingly (though not really bubbly) yoghurt product is filmjölk, a really yummy Viking-era delicacy, which, due to the healthy bacteria, gets extra coagulated (a nicer word would be 'creamy'). But at the same time it has a pleasant fizzy tingliness reminiscent of those Nerds candies that crackle in your mouth, or a pottle of vintage kimchi that's been sitting at the back of your fridge for at least 6 months. You know – the really good stuff.

But I had heard rumours of Nordic yoghurt drinks that were not merely tingly, but also carbonated, and I was intrigued. So when I saw this little bottle (pictured above) next to the filmjölk, I snapped it up.
Turned out not to be a bubbly yoghurt drink (Calpis soda is probably as close as I'll get to that kind of heaven). Instead, it is a whey drink made from horse + goat milk.

Horse milk, the label claims, is highly digestible by humans and rich in nutrients. I tried it - it tasted like any whey-based sports drink, very cold and watery, except with dominant sour and gamey (goatish?) top notes. Probably won't be my quaff of choice on hot summer afternoons.
I'm not actually sure anyone should drink it unless they are a lactose-intolerant person who is recovering from a marathon or diarrhea.
I'd write it off as yet another example of a fad where people will try anything for their health - but apparently horse milk was so popular it was actually delivered door to door during the First World War in Germany. And horse meat is a staple old-timey roasting meat here too. So the traditionalists and modern organic types can get together and go to town on this one.

In other news, the Japanese beverage company Calpis has a newish lactic acid drink called MiLQ, "inspired by the benefits of mother's milk", which I'm dying to try.

Inflatable Breakfast



"A Light Breakfast" by artist David Sykes, no photoshopperry, just one shot on 5×4 transparency. His Obsessions series looks increasingly like my obsessions.
Loose weight - go Maori

Chopping carrots is bad for your health

What haute cuisine can teach the world, how to make carrots yummier

Kiwi food tips for beating the recession - Take up smoking - tobacco is cheaper than food and it's an appetite suppressant.

Popcorn and male virility

Vegetarian complains "worse thing about being a vegetarian is other vegetarians"

Example A

Maytel complains, "the worse thing about about being an omnivore is all the inventions of new names like flexitarianism to justify eating how you already eat"

Predictions that by 2025 we'll all be vegetarian? Only if the world can boost crop production another ten fold.....just think of all those lovely squares miles of soy monocultures we'll need instead

The Hungry Nation, Americans below the breadline

Creamy salty goodness?

Bacon is really bad for you, but will that stop anyone eating it?

American's in awe of Barack Obama's South Asian cooking repertoire....newsflash it's not that hard to make dahl

Grabbing Farmland blog...a threat to food sovereignty or the inevitable efficiency of globalisation

Stomach stapling for all!!!

Unlucky in love, its not because you are overweight (men only)

Taco-cat

Food, Inc.


I went to watch Food, Inc. yesterday.

It was not only in line with what Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan were saying - Eric Schlosser does not only show up in the film but also is a co-producer, and Michael Pollan speaks a lot in the film.

The story itself was not so new if you have been following the food issues in the past several years - what this film tried to do, it seems, is to make the message even clearer, make it approachable for the general public, or should I say, the consumers.

Sort of a similar fashion how Stonyfield grew into the third biggest yogurt producer in the U.S., and Wal-mart trying to move into organic business - efforts to bring the alternative into the mainstream are happening, and they are not without criticism for having come so far from the hippy small-scale idealism-laden operation.

There was something I did not like about the film - they sort of overused the image of the little boy Kevin who died of E-coli poisoning in the hamburger meat. I can see the filmmaker used it a lot to generate the sympathy from the concerned mothers - if that was the only effective way to communicate, it just tells me something about the self-centeredness of people - only when their children are at the risk, they want to make chanegs - in other words, they do not care unless they consider their children are at risk. The parents' protective nature may be only natural, but sometimes it seems that they only want to protect theirs and not many others.

In a strange way this movie made me cry, for thinking how far we have come to the point where they had to make this kind of movie, for thinking how this will appeal to the general public in the U.S., while at the same time it may be possibly viewed as a technological marvel in the eyes of the Third-World farmers, and for thinking why the U.S. consumers deserve to execute their purchasing power to change the world for the better - is this another kind of the America-saves-the-world story?
Women who own their home weigh 12 pounds more on average than women who rent. A study at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School compared 600 women and found that along with weighing more, homeowners were also "carrying around more aggravation, making less time for leisure, and were less likely to spend time with friends. Grace Wong Bucchianeri, an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, conducted the study and says that female homeowners "consistently report a higher level of pain — or what you might call negative feelings — connected to their home, and that's after controlling for all kinds of demographic characteristics, their financial situation, how many children they have and so on." She believes that homeowners spend more time working on their home instead of leisure activities like exercising. The study is currently under review for publication in the Journal of Urban Economics.


Link

I suppose that is some comfort for Hock and I who are looking to buy in the only country in the world where real estate is still going up. Perhaps we will spend a little longer paying rent to the fat cats.

Stuff White Melbourne People Like

Stephanie: If invited to dinner by a Melbourne white person, it is a certainty that the recipe will come from Stephanie. If you go to a lot of parties thrown by Melbourne white people, you might form the impression that everyone in Melbourne has a kindly neighbour called Stephanie who hands out recipes over the back fence.

In fact, Stephanie is short for Stephanie Alexander, author of The Cook’s Companion. Melbourne white people refer to Stephanie by her first name as if they know her personally. It is not known why this is so. All you need to know is that The Cook’s Companion is the official Melbourne white person’s cookbook. If you have to cook for a Melbourne white person, you should select a recipe from this cook book. The only exception is if you’re preparing quince, in which case it’s acceptable to refer to Maggie.


From Chris Scanlon, Upstart.

"Let's just say, they live in the dirt somehow"



Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany is currently showing off its new collection of found art: street food vendor stalls from around the world. I love the look of delectation on the curator's face when he says "It is so dirty".

Curry Chicken Extravagangsta: the Van Morrison remix

erik ultimate

NZ visual artist Ben Buchanan (who moonlights as rap-thug Erik Ultimate) has long been an inspiration to me. Not least due to his skills with a knife. As well as making fantastic artwork with spliced adhesive tape, his knife has been put to good use in many of Wellington's so-hip-it-hurts kitchens.

A life lived by the knife is not without its hazards - when we visited NZ's capital city to eat rendang and roti with him two years ago, Ben was fresh out of hospital with a cast on, due to an unfortunate incident with a mango during the brunch rush. (The exact words of his text message at the time were: "currently in hutt hospital after accident with a mango!!" Apparently there were at least two other chefs in the emergency room that day, also with knife wounds).

Here's an excerpt from a Q&A with BB after his Sleeping installation, hosted by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

You are quite a dab hand in the kitchen. What do you prefer to cook: risottos, rich reductions and masculine proteins, or deconstructed frozen sushi?

Hmmm...would have to go with rich reductions and masculine proteins. Definitely slow cook comfort stuff. I spent a year working in kitchens in Dublin and was kinda looking for the Irish cuisine. Aside from gaining a fondness for skate wings and Guiness, the best thing I found was at the chippers: chicken curry and chips, which is like deep fried chicken with chips and this awesome gravy with lots of curry powder in it. Sooo good... So my fave thing to make at home is to joint a chicken, marinate it in special crispy chicken coating from the Asian grocer [you gotta leave it in the flour stuff for a couple of hours]...then fry it with as much oil and butter as will fit in my or your pan [hey this is kind of a recipe], then roast with plenty of spuds... Whilst this is goin' [you wanna put the spuds on first]... Fry onions, garlic and mushrooms in butter. Add gravy powder from the dairy (get 2 packets, it's like 80 cents) and curry powder and dried chili, then boiling water, and stir etc. God damn, then yummo. So good....

What music genre best describes your culinary style?
Maybe Venga Boys doing a Van Morrison track.


.....Read the rest of the interview and see pictures of his latest artworks here.
This is my fridge in Thailand where only cooking I did was cooking rice (and go buy something to eat with rice) and cold noodle occasionally:


Left side:
  • soy milk
  • butter
  • tempura crispies from Japan (brought back for a takoyaki party at my friend's)
  • shelled tamarind a villager gave me
  • Leo beer (giveaway from a party back in... winter, I just do not drink by myself)
  • lychees,
  • isotonic drink left over from my flu hospitalization last year (I never drink it except when I am sick),
  • organic roselle jam,
  • organic pickled plums,
  • organic soy sauce,
  • miso that I never cooked, and
  • eye cream (so they don't go bad in the Thai heat).

Right side:
  • shiso powder,
  • ground organic black sesame (good with cold noodles),
  • leftover isotonic drink powder,
  • rustic cane sugar blocks a villager gave me,
  • facial toner,
  • sugarfree Mentos,
  • wasabi,
  • rice germ sprinkles,
  • brown sugar,
  • organic jasmine rice, and
  • the Thai refrigerator staple: drinking water.

Right now I am sharing an apartment with two Taiwanese people in the US, so sharing the fridge as well:


Not much of the stuff is mine.

I put:
  • organic soy milk,
  • cage free eggs from "vegetarian-fed hens",
  • butter,
  • multi-grain English muffins,
  • Cabot cheese,
  • organic soy sauce,
  • leftover black beans,
  • organic mushroom pasta sauce,
  • plum tomatoes,
  • red onions,
  • yellow Spanish onions,
  • zucchinis, and
  • an unopened jar of kimchi (made in New York).
I am not sure why somebody is refrigerating a box of dry pasta.

And a freezer that seems to resist frost a lot better than my Thai fridge:
Half of the bottom row is my stuff:
  • frozen spinach,
  • frozen peas & carrots,
  • frozen sweetcorn niblets,
  • frozen vegetarian dumpling, and
  • frozen blueberries.
Somebody seems to believe that used brita filters work as a deodorant in the fridge and freezer. Does it work??

Food the New Fur - Celebrities Take Up New Cause

Actors, designers, pop stars have all got behind the hot new ethical campaign: food. From saving species to investigating conditions for pigs, star quality is pushing it to the foreground. The use of celebrity skin to push an ethical issue is nothing new, of course. In the 1990s, Peta - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - convinced a bunch of supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, to appear in the buff under the legend "I'd rather go nude than wear fur". But fur is just so passé. And, in any case, Campbell proved just how fickle the modern celebrity can be by soon deciding that actually, come to think of it, she would much rather wear fur than go nude, and did so on the catwalk in Milan.

Where celebrities are concerned, it seems, food is the new fur. The current set of images featuring Scacchi alongside actress Emilia Fox, director Terry Gilliam and actor Richard E Grant, were launched to back the cinematic release of The End Of The Line, a film about the threat of overfishing - but they are only a part of it. Tomorrow, Paul McCartney and his daughters Stella and Mary are launching a campaign to convince the public to go meat-free for one day a week. Another movie, Food Inc, which looks at the excesses and foul side-effects of industrial food production has just been released in the US and will shortly arrive here. Plus there is a major investigation by environmental campaigner Tracy Worcester into the dark underbelly of the global pig-rearing business which is about to be screened on digital channel More4. Food, and more importantly, really bad food, is hot.


Link

While this may compel some of us at gut feelings to stop blogging now, I think I can speak for all of us when I say, "where have you been all this time?"

What to expect from the celebrification (yes new word) of food as a cause: over simplifications, annoying ignorance, no body actually caring
So as I may have mentioned, Hock and I are both living in separate countries in studio apartments with kitchenettes

My kitchenette is more functional than his, which makes sense because I can't get 2 dollar street noodles like he can.

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On my recent-ish conjugal visit to see him, I got to check out his kitchenette. And of course, what does he have sitting in there but a can of caviar.

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"It's not that good caviar" Hock explains, "someone from work bought it back from Russia for me, I think it is just cheap"

But never having had the opportunity to gouge myself on caviar like Hock, I didn't care. For him perhaps it was nothing special, but for me, a lowly student who does not have access to luxury food supplies at wholesale prices or even as gifts I got stuck in.

Caviar on rye with condiments
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"Kedgeree" with brown rice and split mung beans, boiled egg, lime pickles and raita and crossword
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"Kanom Jeen" creative reconstruction attempt
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"Kanom Jeen" and macbook
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Wakame and silken tofu soup with crossword
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Parsi style scrambled eggs and silken tofu with avocado on rye
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Udon Salad
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Lentil, spinach, celeriac, onion and carrot soup with chorizo
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My latest excellent Sunday morning fry up creation - paratha bread, with chickpea vege pattie, fried egg, tomato kousondi and raita
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Nothing to see here really except for the fridge of a condiment obsessive

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Frozen chinese broadbeans, make for a good healthy snack, some frozen water chestnuts saved for a rainy dumpling making day and of course hippy organic rain forest friendly coffee for the socially and environmentally conscious liberal graduate student

Did I mention that Asians are the "new white"

(given that I'm half white I guess that makes me half old white half new white....I'm sure Laura Ashley has an appropriately named paint colour)

Australiananana

pineapple

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has poked fun at himself while laughing off claims he's gone overboard with his efforts to sound blokey.:

Mr Rudd has copped flak in recent days for his use of ocker expressions.
Including

"fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate"

"Don't come the raw prawn with me, George."

"Or, coming from Queensland I'd say you'd get the rough end of the pineapple, but enough of that."

Australiana

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Australian Male with Meat Pie, June 2009, Canberra

Bittman apostasy

One of the few unifying traits amongst Gut Feelings authors seems to be Bittman love, which is why his last piece, on the ethical trainwreck that is eating fish, hurts us. It's honest, open and deeply confusing. What do you do when a man who knows more about buying and eating fish than you - and has written a book to that end - admits that he no longer has any systematic way of telling what is good or bad?

As Mark Bittman puts it in yesterday's NY Times:

In fact, and sadly, the list of fish that I don’t eat is much longer than the list of fish that I do. One could argue, as I sometimes do (mostly to myself), that one shouldn’t eat fish at all, fearing that if fish lovers begin consuming those few remaining species that are not in trouble — sardines, mackerel, squid — we might just make quick work of them, too. But though that may be the easiest argument to phrase, it isn’t likely to be popular, nor will it help the cods and flounders.


It is like being witness to culinary apostasy. As much as I feel like my foodblogging mojo occasionally drifts away, I don't lose my underlying faith in food.

My approach to eating fish is simpler than Bittman's couple of rules. Only eat fish that you could forseeably walk to a beach or river nearby and catch yourself. This rules out anything pelagic - shark, bluefin tuna, orange roughy, patagonian toothfish. It also means that you're forced to learn what fish is actually local (even if it is shipped in from elsewhere) and tends to favour underutilised species.

Ghanarama

MySpace Codes


Throwing up a couple of Ghanaian pictures today from a South African music blog that I've ended up on the mailing list for.
I won't link to the column because its "Gods Must Be Crazy" bonhomie is a bit much to bear.
But I must admit I wouldn't mind dropping past the “If God Say Yes Snack Shop” for some fresh Fufu (a local dish of meat, sauce and giant sticky dumpling, eaten with your hands).

MySpace Codes

The Social Construction of Italian Slow Food

Italians love to tell you how great the food in Italy is. They go on and on about, fresh cheese this, seasonal that. They initiated the Slow Food movement for crying out loud. Taken at face value it seems that Italians have forever been in step with nature, seasonal produce and local artisanal producers. This is just one of the many ways that Italians not so subtly demonstrate that they are well, better than us.

Apparently, however Italian food historian Montanari (1996:161) begs to differ.

Montanari emphasises just how much producers and consumers have traditionally seen seasonality as an affliction. He says 'symbiosis with nature and dependence upon her rhythms was once practically complete, but this is not to say that such a state of affairs was desirable; indeed, at times it was identified as a form of slavery'. This was especially true of the poorer sections of society, where consumption of foods such as grains and legumes was the norm precisely because these foods could be easily conserved. Access to fresh and perishable foods - such as vegetables, meat ad fish - was the luxury of an elite few. This, 'the desire to overcome the seasonality of products and the dependence on nature and region was acute, though the methods for doing so were expensive (and prestigious); they required wealth and power'. Montanari therefore concludes that it is 'doubtful whether we can attribute either a happy symbiosis with nature or and enthusiastic love for the seasonality of food to "traditional" food culture


In Morgan, K., T. Marsden and J. Murdoch, 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pg, 9

Are you a member of "The Chup Group?"

certificate

The Chip Group a partnership between local industry groups and the New Zealand Heart Foundation focused on improving the nutritional profile of chips or chups.

Judging from their website* and giveaways they have received some serious funding.

*Note awesome chip wallpaper.

If you do decide to join up like me you will be privy to some pretty spectacular videos covering topics such as optimum "chip size", "oil temperature", "basket drainage" and of course "salt"

After watching seven amusing clips which cover topics such as THUCK cut CHUPS are BUTTAR for your HELF and that you should not use SKUNNY CHUPS. I aced the tests (sorry modules) and received my certificate for which I am very proud.

The Chip Group recommends printing your certificate off and showing your work mates. Which is exactly what I did but Chalong my sous chef burnt it on an open flame. Where is the respect.

The Chip Group is now busily sending my two nieces in Auckland (I used their address as I thought it would be asking a tad much to send the goodie bag to Bangkok)

1 bottle of Kiwi Style Tomato Sauce (6 muthafucken liters!!!)
1 bottle of Kiwi Style Tartar Sauce (Also 6 ltrs!!! BURP)
1 Jar Kiwi Style Deep Frying Baking Powder (2 kg!)
1 jar of Kiwi style Chicken Salt Seasoning (2.5 kg!!!!!!!!)
1 apron and t-shirt (hopefully size XXXL as the girls little Hello Kitty t-shirts will not fit them after eating 12 liters of heavily processed condiments)

It was not a complete waste of 30 minutes. I learnt that 2.5 thousand tons of fat is equal 632 elephants. WTF? Actually this is the total amount of fat that they wish to remove each year from the NZ populations diet by cooking a better chip which is not a bad idea if you have ever seen Maytels dads tummy.

Anyway the password for my membership was horsefat which the website never once referred to which is a shame really as it is a nice middle ground, bridging the worlds of high and low saturated fats and producing a pretty good chip.

Anyway...Ella and Liv enjoy the 2 kg of Kiwi Style Deep Frying Baking Powder.

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