Stomachs on legs are proud to present

I've already documented my devotion to heavenly Japanese sponge cakes. I didn't think it could get any better - but it just did.

We had colleagues (or should I say 'alcoholleagues') visit from Japan, and they brought with them a bottle of sake and this wonderful alcohol-infused sponge as souvenirs. How could the sponge retain that dense, yet very fine and soft melt-in-your-mouth texture while stored indefinitely in foil, stewing in its own tipsy juices?

The taste was, like any good castella: lovely, light and a little eggy, with only a yeasty hint of methylated spirits from the booze.
(Note: I think the soaking alcohol may have been shochu, but would love if Nalika can provide insight here).

Each square of this palm-sized cake really packed a punch. I wish there was a way to mail-order it from Japan.

The first cocktail arose in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago

McGovern, professor at the Pennsylvania University, Philadelphia, studied the evolution of viticulture in the East and West, finding some earthenware along the Tigris river showing traces of tartaric acid (an element which is characteristic of the grape fermentation), honey, apple juice and brew barley (a sort of beer ante litteram).

Link

I'm no archeologist, but how do they know that the people in question didn't just use the same pot to drink wine, honey, apple juice and beer separately? Archeologists, please explain

One of my favourite movie lines of all time is "don't fuck with the wongs", a nice variant of which is "don't fuck with the Hmongs". I would like to now introduce a new addition to this phraseology - Cambodian edition 2009 - "don't fuck with Miss Wong"

Miss Wong is the latest and might I add coolest new addition to Siem Reap's night scene. Located down a small quiet laneway, across from the Silk Garden and taking inspiration from 1920s Shanghai the small, intimate and classy bar is dressed to the nines as any petite flower girl of "Shanghai Grand" would be. Draped in deep red with, gold pagoda ceiling, every nook and cranny contains unique and elaborate objet d'art, lamps and paintings.









Even the ashtrays are fabulous. New York Times reporters, of outstanding taste agree... as do all but a few curmudgeonly passé expats



Miss Wong's cocktails are more than worthy of the decor with many of the ingredients made from fresh tropical fruits and home made vodka infusions



Miss Wong's proprietor is Dean Williams, ex-radio host and ex-Auckland NZ personality/ boy about town. He dropped by in Cambodia in our final days in the country in 2006 and liked it so much he decided to stay.



If you're a kiwi pop in and say "hullo"

Miss Wong
The Opposite Laneway to the "Passage" on the opposite side of Pub Street
Siem Reap, Cambodia

Above is El Porró: the Catalan wine glass/jug. Sergi reckons his grandmother can pour it into her mouth with her arm extended straight in a salute as the wine cascades in an arc of half a meter. Don't pass his grannie the mic. And don't pass me the Porró 'cause I'm wearing a white shirt.

It was National Day of Catalonia on Thursday. Instead of celebrating by burning the Spanish flag like some people around here, we went to Set de Born xarcuteria and ate 'esqueixada': it's a salad of tomato, onion, vinaigrette, olives and soaked salt cod or 'bacalao'. Bacalao is also popular in Italy and Portugal: Mayuko tells me that in Lisbon, the signs advertising bacalao are strung up with flashing fluorescent lights that put the red light district to shame.
I really get that. Bacalao is awesome.



Catalan 'farm-produced' goats cheeses like Nevat goats cheese (acid), Sant Mateu (strong & tender) and Mutanyola (soft & tasty)



According to wikipedia, Catalunya has an official population of 7,210,508 from which immigrants represent an estimated 12.3% of the total population.

The name Catalunya either derives from 'Land of the Castles', or Gothia, "Land of the Goths" since the Spanish March was one of the places known as Gothia, whence Gothland and Gothlandia theoretically derived, though critics usually consider it rather simplistic.

Source: New York Times

I remember, growing up in New Zealand, that most parents who were into wine would have a box of chardonnay or savvie handy in the fridge. For some reason my nurse aunt and doctor uncle spring to mind. Feathered bleach blonde hair. Noisy afternoon drinking on an outside deck made of greying timber. The ladies had those silver metal & elastic arm adornments for holding up their shirt sleeves in a fashionable scrunch. On special days they'd do your hair in a french braid. We would blow up the plastic innersleeve bladders from the boxed wine and use them as floaties when we went swimming.
No, not really.
But people weren't shy of cask wine in the '80s. Oh, those halcyon days.

Article in New York Times:

"ITALY’S Agriculture Ministry announced this month that some wines that receive the government’s quality assurance label may now be sold in boxes. That’s right, Italian wine is going green, and for some connoisseurs, the sky might as well be falling.

But the sky isn’t falling. Wine in a box makes sense environmentally and economically. Indeed, vintners in the United States would be wise to embrace the trend that is slowly gaining acceptance worldwide.

Wine in a box has been around for more than 30 years — though with varying quality. The Australians were among the first to popularize it. And hardly a fridge in the south of France, especially this time of year, is complete without a box of rosé."

From Wikipedia:

"The wine cask (or wine box) was invented by Tom Angove of Angove's, a winemaker from Renmark, South Australia, and patented by the company on April 20, 1965.

In 1967 C.H. Malpas and Penfolds Wines patented a plastic, air-tight tap welded into a metallised bladder, making storage much more convenient for consumers. All modern wine casks now utilise some sort of plastic tap, which is exposed by tearing away a perforated panel on the box.
The chief advantage to bag-in-a-box packaging is that it prevents oxidation of the wine during dispensing. After opening, wine in a bottle is oxidized by air in the bottle which has displaced the wine poured; wine in a bag is not touched by air and thus not subject to oxidation until it is dispensed. Cask wine is not subject to cork taint or spoilage due to slow consumption after opening.
After the wine is drunk and the bag is empty, the bag may be removed from the box and blown up through the tap valve like a balloon. The inflated bag makes a convenient pillow.
However, the bag is not hermetically sealed and has an unopened shelf life shorter than bottled wine. Most casks will have a best-before date stamped. [2] As a result, it is not intended for cellaring and should be drunk within the prescribed period.
Bag in a box packaging is also preferred by producers of more economical wines because it is less expensive than glass bottles. Unlike bag-in-box packaging of other liquids, wine is not under pressure so it is perfectly safe to remove the bladder from the box. A bag of wine, once removed from the box, will float on water; this allows quick cooling of a white wine by immersion in an ice bath."





Who wrote this! "The inflated bag makes a convenient pillow." Very cute, Wikipedia, very cute. Spoken like a true drunkard.

On the Sukhumvit Soi, next to Emporium, Sukhumvit Soi 24 I think it is, there is a izakaya which is not particularly tasty but exceedingly cheap. It's on the right hand side of the Soi, near the beginning of the street and on the 3rd floor of an extremely eccentric building...If you climb the odd staircase and pass by the Hong Kong-style hotpot joint you'll know you're on the right track.....follow the potato heads



Inside you'll find a large booze selection and laminated menu with usual izakaya suspects....



great wall adornments and decor....


and games where you can gamble on the size of your portion...play the "beef game", roll the dice and let fate decide if you get above or below the standard portion...fun times


The food photos below attest more to the skill of Hock and his N95 than the actual quality of the food





For example this sushi roll is far nastier than it looks


Of course the main indulgence here is not the cripsy rice cakes, but the lashings of cheap sake and beer to be had alongside. Food is really rather incidental here.






(makeshift food lighting enhancements)

Which was confirmed when I woke up on Sunday morning after a night at the Potato and remember that I had gotten drunk enough and so enamoured with the sake enough to have purchased their signature potato sake set. I recall making statements along the lines of "this sake set speaks to something deep inside my soul"

My next bier-tasting foray involved the organic filtered Kristall Weisse offering from Neumarkter Lammsbrau brewery. It's the brewery responsible for my thus-far-favourite beer, their Dunkel. But this filtered white beer - the style drunk at Munich's Oktoberfest - I am afraid to say, inspired nothing but ambivalence in me. In fact after half a glass I lost interest and tipped the rest down the sink. If I can't dig the most chugged beer in Germany, what kind of real potential can I have as a beer drinker?



Feeling overwhelmed by ambivalence, I decided not to rush into any more experimentation.

But getting back from the Biomarkt, the Dunkel was not chilled, and there was still that bottle of Köstritzer Schwarzbier in the fridge. I brought it home the other night from the underwhelming selection at a shop nearby which dares to call itself a 'beer museum'.

Apparently this East German schwarzbier is a type of lager, and not supposed to be heavy like a stout. The Köstritzer brewery in east Germany has been owned by the Bitburger Brauerei since 1991 and is located in Bad Köstritz, which is close to Gera in Thuringia. The brewery was founded in 1543 and it is one of the oldest producers of Schwarzbier (black beer) in Germany. This particular old black brew was a favourite of Germany's proud author Goethe, at least on the days when he felt a bit ill.

A classic style, it is cold fermented and cold lagered, and thus, as I have read, "the finished product is relatively clean and free of fruity esters". I get the feeling I am not so much the fan of fruity esters.

Pitch black like coffee, with a head of foam that within a few moments deflated to a floating piece of brownish-creamy scum like sea foam after a storm. It then dwindled further to dregs with a certain mucous-like viscosity in appearance.
Clean and bitter, refreshing, quite a light malty mouth-feel and a rumour in the mouth of a pot of drip coffee that's been on the burner for a while, or tobacco. Like the 'Old Spice' of beers. Not much substance but full of promises. There is a taste to this one that makes me want to be a newspaper man with a black umbrella, in a city where a million hollow souls trade jaded glances between skscraper canyons.
In other words, I got a bit drunk and became a little bit too effusive. And couldn't spell skyscraper properly.

In this bottle of Köstritzer Schwarzbier, there is also a very faint freshness of a bitter grass or a tiny, tiny bit of sweetness: something hopeful.
Maybe the hope I'm tasting, is the hope that I can really be friends with beer.

There are now at least four or five types of beer that I can say I really enjoy. The cool thing about this one is that it is available from a lot of cornershop kiosks.

This week Phil brings us a story about banana pancakes as harbingers of mediocrity

More ominously The New Yorker explains why the global food market is about to collapse , which it blames it on the over production of mediocre food.

Given this I thought I should also include their witty ruminations on hang overs, because the previous article may lead you to drink

When you recover from your hangover you might want to get serious and check out some sites on survival gardening, alternately also called armageddon gardening and/or defensive gardening or hardcore homesteadingbecause according some of the opinions expressed in the NY article, you may as well get a head start if you're going to be forced back to the farm anyway

Which may not be as bad as you think because at least you'll be able to brew your own which brings us neatly back to hangovers

Hangovers are probably as old as alcohol use, which dates back to the Stone Age. Some anthropologists have proposed that alcohol production may have predated agriculture; in any case, it no doubt stimulated that development, because in many parts of the world the cereal harvest was largely given over to beer-making

So nothing to worry about really, so long as you master hardcore homesteading your food will mostly taste better and if it doesn't you'll be too drunk to notice anyway

Part 2 of an adventure in which a beer lite-weight tries out brews from the local kiosk, biomarkt and 'beer museum' shop in Cologne, Germany.

It doesn't get much more lite-weight than Neumarkter Lammsbrau's BLOND.
"Blond ist in!" said one website.

In fact though, and unfortunately for Neumarkter Lammsbrau, boutique beers like this are not the order of the day. As you would expect, traditional German beers rule, though Belgian beers are well-stocked at beer-shops and the bigger commercial brands (Becks, Corona etc) have their time in the sun, quite literally when it comes to their summer time offerings..

I bought a Blond from the Biomarkt (organic supermarket) and took it to the park to accompany our first BBQ of the season.
Quite like the packaging... one review said that only the label gives this beer 'Discotauglichkeit' (Disco-friendliness).

It would have benefitted from being more chilled than it was after 5 minutes in the freezer when I popped back home to pick up the picnic mat. Passed the Blond to DJ Adlib and his reaction was also a bit non-plussed. "Tastes like beer."

Conclusion: a very easy-to-drink gold beer, certainly clean and organic seeming: inoffensive with very little mouth-tackiness and very mild astringency, some would say a little on the bland side. But I would drink it again for the clean mouth feel alone e.g. on a summer afternoon.
This Blond is easy.



Went back home and cracked open another offering from the Neumarkter Lammsbrau brewery and my favourite German beer so far: the organic Neumarkter Lammsbrau Dunkel.
After commenting that he finds my increased alcohol consumption quite amusing (maybe it's like seeing your mum open a beer at the breakfast table), Denis aka DJ Adlib had a sip and said: "Somewhere near Malzbier" which was also Carmen's reaction when we tried it for the first time the night before.
That's what I like about it. It's as malty as these fake-beer malt-drinks called Malzbier, which are so delicious with their cold syrupy foamy maltiness, but must be about 5000 calories each.

This Dunkel combines toasty malt with just the right bitterness for refreshingness. A bit sticky on roof of mouth, creamy, full-flavoured but not super heavy. I read one review that suggested 'barnyard' notes. I wasn't sure but I thought I might have tasted chicken's feet.

Champion. Any time I'm in a beer mood after work or about to watch Muay Thai downloads from the K-1 fan forum, this will be my go-to beer from now on. Even if the package isn't so disco.

Here's a well-written review which says "The smoothness of this beer is out of this world, the medium body and moderate carbonation level make you want to take a sip quicker and quicker." The review goes on to note "the palate is clean from start to finish with only a ghost faintness of cooked veggies."

Have you ever been to a restaurant late and they accept your business but then start turning off the lights half way through your meal?

Bamboo House is such a place. It serves very cheap and rather tasty home-style Korean food, and is a bargain if you don't mind rude service and eating in the dark. The meal came to around $14 NZD each. We ordered shoju but they didn't give it to us stating that they didn't think we could drink it quickly enough before they closed. Aaahhh the delights of true Korean hospitality





9 Commerce St
Auckland City
Closing is at 10 pm SHARP

I know that when I go to chow down on a $75 USD teaspoon of Iranian caviar I always reach for a lime or sometimes a strawberry margarita







Recommendations for serving caviar.

dah nah nah nah, da nah nah nah naaah...it's the final countdown

and so far Hock and I are the only ones to have bid on the Asia Pacific Gut Feelings booze offering of 12 bottles of 42 Below Vodka and 6 bottles of Seven Tiki Rum

Code: AP24


Code: AP25


In hindsight I guess most people coming to Bangkok are tourists and don't know what to do with a whole case. So just to make it easier for you we can break up the bottles and give them to people you know passing through or even store them for you if you plan on making several trips to Bangkok.


At the moment however, we are the only ones with a bid on it, and if we win I don't like the chances for our livers

Plus our kiwi pals who donated the bottles will think us awfully suspicious if we end up with all their booze

So please...bid on the booze.

Instructions for doing so, found HERE

There are good odds on the dinner at Bed Supperclub (Code: AP28) and the whiskey (Code: AP23)

Again here's what you need to do:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope above or at the global prize list site

2. Go to the donation site at First Giving and make a donation.

3. Please specify which prize you'd like in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code.
Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02 - 2xEU01, 3xEU02.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

You have 26 hours before our livers will self destruct

Check back here on January 9th for raffles winner announcements for these prizes and on Chez Pim for global prizes.
Thanks for your participation, and good luck in the raffle!

In general, I am against the cult of personality, unless the person is dead, in which case a bit of mythology is sort of permissable. I might admire certain chefs and food writers, but I tend to eye celebrity chefs and their expensive restaurants with suspicion. It's all about how much muscle your mastercard can flex and how much the bankers want to throw away on the expense account and going to THAT restaurant becomes a lifestyle accoutrement just as much as the Italian catskin boatshoes are.

To put it more simply, I'm a bit stingy. Also, unless I am getting takeout jerk oxtail or baking a meat pie at home, I prefer clean, light, simple flavours and a multiplicity of dishes. I prefer food that is soaked in dashi and enhanced with handfuls of fresh chilli or herbs to something that is braised for three hours in butter to taste good. So I am very wary of expensive food, which in general seems to be very rich, and the monotonous focus on animal proteins and stodgy celeriac purees in a typical secondi is just too overblown: much like the rich people who typically love that kind of thing. OK, the dishes might be good, just not THAT good that I would spend the cost of four other equally delicious meals on it. In my boringly picky opinion, the only place where cost seems to have equalled value when it comes to fine dining is in Japan, and maybe at Hakkasan in London, but more on that another time.

In fact, (although having me review a fancy restaurant is like sending someone who's allergic to seafood to review a seafood restaurant), the only area where cost seems to more consistently reflect deliciousness is in the arena of cocktails, and Mark McEwan's 'One' restaurant in Toronto's upscale Yorkville area confirmed this, along with my other deep-seated prejudices.

The bar area was dimly lit and steeped in sepia brown chic hotel ambience. The cocktails which we had were excellent – a caipirinha made from crushed black cherries and raw sugar and cachaca; a mojito made with Grey Goose and cloudy apple juice; and an embarressingly pink concoction of grapefruit juice, an old-fashioned brand of Canadian creaming soda, key lime and an alcohol that I can't remember, served with a 'sour key' (classic Canadian candy).



When it came to the service and the food, our post-meal discussions on the drive home with Jim & Many, who are much more qualified to judge such an establishment, were echoed in this review by Amy Pataki. The service was awkward and at odds with the chic surroundings; so too, was the concept of shared plates when served on silverware. The forced casual-ness of the food and service clashed with Yabu Pushelberg's modernist design of the restaurant interior (the others in our party found the design too nouveaux riche though I actually liked it). The Kobe beef was cold by the time it reached our table; the braised beef shoulder was quite delicious but although slightly larger than a typical main, it hardly seemed designed for a fun shared eating experience. One would prefer large messy platters, gigantic salads, deep bowls and plenty of dipping things and ideally food that could be grilled or stewed at table.



The polenta with mascarpone & thyme and the spaghetti squash with ginger and the tuna sashimi with lemon & lime peel were very good, but again, didn't seem especially to match the whole shared eating concept. It was like a normal fancy restaurant experience, except that everybody was awkwardly picking off each other's plates. The fennel soup with roasted black cod as a starter was really yummy, even though I don't usually like these cream-based soups that are also very popular in Germany.



Polenta as communal fine dining:



Anyway, after we left Toronto, I finally got around to reading Jeffrey Steingarten's column in American Vogue, which had been sitting beside my bed all those weeks, and who did he praise extensively in it but Susur Lee, another of Toronto's hyped restaurateurs, who's been on Iron Chef and who I had been sure would serve up the kind of over-rich, overhyped boring pan-Asian food typical of places like Long Grain in Melbourne. (BTW Mark McEwan of One has a TV show too). But after reading Steingarten's review I was really kicking myself for not going to one of Susur's restaurants for a modest lunch. Oh well, that's what you get for being prejudiced against celebrity chefs. Bigots always get what they deserve.

Address: 116 Yorkville Ave.,
416-961-9600
Apparently dinner for two costs $250, owch!! Don't do it!

On Sunday I went to my first Aussie BBQ in a very long time. The weather was a balmy 30 degrees, I had spent the morning mowing the lawn and doing washing (just like neighbours) and at 3 pm I hitched a ride with some friends to the party with my 6 pack of grolsch and a melon

As to be expected, men grilled meat and others played cricket on the street



All the Southeast Asian girls had prearranged to buy all the ingredients for som tum and set about making it in the garden, sadly there is no green papaya to be found in Canberra so they made do with carrot instead.



As they busied themselves with pounding and chopping, I couldn't help but make the snide remark "spot the southeast asians", at which point I was promptly handed the mortar and pestle and instructed to squat and pound.







Carrot Som Tum Recipe

In a deep wooden mortar in pestle, must be deep otherwise it splashes everywhere

Pound a fist full of chilis
a few whole garlic cloves
a fist an a bit full of peanuts
2 fist fulls of chopped green beans
fist full of dried shrimps
1 to 2 chopped tomatos
a couple of cups of grated carrots
add lime
tamarind sauce
and palm sugar or brown sugar
an fish sauce of course

serve


They also had the foresight to make a crate of punch





As the day wore on, people peeled off home and me and som tum preparation leader Amporn were left drinking Chivas and arguing about Thai politics

Its Monday morning and I'm at home nursing a hangover