Stomachs on legs are proud to present

I like Rooibos tea.

It's a great any-time-of-the-day caffeine-free flavorful beverage that is rich in mineral.

After I ran out of the stock I bought in Malawi, in Thailand I could only find the ridiculously overpriced ones in Tops supermarket, so I stocked up when I was in Germany last year.

After I ran out of it, I met a Zambian NGO worker based in Thailand, who brought me a couple of boxes from his business trip to South Africa.

After I ran out it and the kind Zambian friend left Thailand, in the health food section of Watson's drugstore, I found Rooibos tea bags on sale, so I grabbed several boxes.


It has traveled quite a distance...


Sourced from South Africa, blended in Germany, packed in New Zealand, and here I am I bought it in Thailand.

So much of the food miles but at least it weights very little.

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.

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

Oh so cute.

For Nalika and her soft drinks

Now that I started mentioning Japanese beverage, I just cannot help but bringing up the infamous Pocari Sweat, also by Otsuk seiyaku.


























... which I think is probably fairly well-known in the world of Japangrish product.

I don't know how the Japanese beverage industry has gotten into the category of drinks that almost looks like a big joke.

Here's one from Dydo Drinco.

It is a word joke... "Ochou fujin" is this blond hair character which appeared in the "Ace wo Nerae", a late-70's cartoon in which high school tennis club members compete to each other.

In the cartoon, this blond woman's name is "Ochou fujin" meaning "Madame Butterfly." This Dydo's drink, which is prune juice supposedly good for regularity, is named "Ochou fujin", meaning "Madame Intestine."
Both "butterfly" and "intestine" has the same pronunciation, "chou", though they use the different kanji (Chinese character).

Even though they still have the press release, they unfortunately no longer sell this hilarious product... maybe constipated customers didn't feel comfortable taking the "Madame Intestine" drinks to the cashier.

It was sold by Otsuka Seiyaku in Japan from 2000 to 2003.

The TV commercial below takes place at a Japanese "snack" where people speak Osaka dialect...



Apparently they were trying to target the middle-aged "salary men"... to get the rigor like that of Maasai warriors...

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

http://view.break.com/487616 - Watch more free videos

In contrast to nearby tribes, for example, the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine. The Camba of eastern Bolivia would drink excessively twice a month. Sitting in a circle, they would toast one another, more lavishly with each pop.

In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions.

Western cultures are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation. “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable,” said Dwight Heath, emeritus professor of anthropology at Brown....The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”

Link

Your mama always said it was bad for you...

she said it would rot your teeth and maybe even your stomach

Well the Nutrition Research Center agrees with yo mama

Don’t drink cola if you want to be healthy. Consuming soft drinks is bad for so many reasons that science cannot even state all the consequences. But one thing we know for sure is that drinking Coke, as a representative of soft drinks, wreaks havoc on the human organism. What happens? Writer Wade Meredith has shown the quick progression of Coke’s assault.

The main problem is sugar. It’s an evil that the processed food industry and sugar growers don’t want people to know about. Even dietitians, financially supported by sugar growers and sugary product manufacturers, are loathe to tell us the truth.

When somebody drinks a Coke watch what happens…

* In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
* 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
* 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
* 45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
* >60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
* >60 Minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
* >60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

So there you have it, an avalanche of destruction in a single can. Imagine drinking this day after day, week after week. Stick to water, real juice from fresh squeezed fruit, and tea without sweetener.

German no label Premium Cola, more of a philosophy than a drink

It's Friday night...and I should have been here





Drinking this




As I was last Friday, but I just couldn't face another wild night of drinking with anthropology doctorate students and Chinese language and history majors and discussing the relative merits of materialism versus phenomenology as philosophical approach

Just kidding, we may be geeks but we're not that geeky (only sometimes), what we did discuss is the relative merits of Little Creatures and its higher price tag versus a cheaper alternative like say Victoria Bitter.

General consensus is that everyone loves Little Creatures, it is a sophisticated brew, full of complex flavours that left our descriptive abilities somewhat stunned into mere appreciative exclaimations of "mmmmmm"..."it goes well with salt and vinegar chippies"

But really, it is a great beer, a beer that can stand up to the task of not being drunk frozen cold, I'd even drink it luke warm and that's something for an austral-asian

But in my humble beer swilling opinion, it is the shiraz of beers. You really only want to have one or two bottles while still sober so you can appreciate all those little creatures swirling around in your mouth and then move on to a lighter cheaper beer with less hangover potential, if you are perhaps more of a man than me, and have more cash to burn you may want to go for 3. But you don't want to carry on drinking it past the point where you start dicussing at which stage it is appropriate to fart in a relationship and whether or not this debases your romantic involvement, then you may as well go for a cheaper option because you'll hardly notice what you are drinking anyway

In fact it may be barely perceptible to you that you now suddenly appear to be eating chinese food at Happys in the Civic Canberra, and drinking white wine, stumbling on to drink 4 single malts at a really awful bar and and ending up in bed somehow with a chicken souvlaki and a terrible case of the vertigo

I may be up for it again in a couple of weeks, and when I am I plan on sampling their new Pilsner, (before ending up in bed with another souvlaki)

Having eaten our way through many spots of both fancy schmancy and hole-in-the-wall varieties, we were left in no doubt of the culinary charms of Toronto. I must say that this city would definitely benefit from one reliable Sietsema-type reviewer though. (I urgently recommend Sietsema to begin research on a Toronto version of his books like 'Good and Cheap Ethnic Eats in New York City': he would have a field day in Toronto no doubt). You can easily find short, vague reviews on sites like Torontoplus or Toronto-ourfaves.com, but the best bet is to google the cuisine or restaurant you're interested in with 'Now magazine'. But not even Now has a complete (or completely reliable) catalogue of the city's offerings. And trying to figure something out from Chowhound is like playing darts in the dark. Oh la! Nothing to do but make sure you have a few reliable recommendations if your time in Toronto is limited.

Toronto's circa 220,000 strong Jamaican community largely came to the city after various dubious immigration policies ended in the '60s. Some of these immigrants contributed to Toronto’s hip hop, reggae, rocksteady, soul and funk scenes since the late ‘60s: including Jackie Mittoo and veterans of the Studio One and Trojan labels. Today the legacy continues with people like Kardinal Offishall, Canada's premier hip hop artist, who brings reggae roots into his beats.

Speaking of roots & beets (bada boom!), of course the West Indian community also brought with them some culinary fiyah. Albert Wiggon came to Toronto the mid 1970s, first as a factory worker, but by age 18 saving profit to open up his own business and practise the kitchen secrets taught him by his mother. His restaurant on St. Clair Avenue West spawned the smaller branch on Queen West West.

Albert's was the spot generally recommended to us by Torontonians of Jamaican descent. For me the allspiced rice 'n' peas and oxtail gravy (always ask for extra!) outshone the actual chicken, which was juicy and falling off the bone (island-style), but we should have got spicier (there's hotsauce on the counter).

Albert's also got the thumbs up from the New Yorkers who were in town. It was from Harlem-based DJ/writer Chairman Mao that I learned how to order the ultimate late night drunk food: a patty (or two, if you're a boy) on coco bread.

Jamaicans.com says

Ah, a warm, buttered piece of coco bread and a sandy beach... no one could ask for much more than that."

Fair enough, if eating a soft, white oversize hamburger bun on the beach is what you're into. And if that's your ting, along with your patty-on-coco-bread, you drink a bottle of grapefruit flavoured -yes - Ting.

The spicy meaty warmth of the patty and its pie-like suet pastry shell, the fluffiness of the bread soaking up the spice and the juice, the sting of the ting, combine to make it a late night drunken treat par excellence. And it's not bad by daylight either.

(Here is a recipe for a vegan version of patties with coco bread).





Next time we're in the vicinity of Albert's, I hope to try an oxtail dinner with caramelized plantain, salt-cod fritters, gongo-pea soup and dumplings with gravy.


Albert's Real Jamaican Foods

542 St Clair Avenue West
Toronto - (416) 658-9445

558 Queen Street West (tell the cab driver Queen and Bathurst)
Toronto, ON M5V 2B5, Canada
(416) 304-0767

Bryant Simon, Professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at Temple University with his study of how the desires of daily life are revealed from the comfy couches of Starbucks. Via Taste3.

Ben Roche also gives an interesting demo of some cool modern cooking techniques at the same annual gathering.

This is for Phil and Hasselhoff Experiment (who was living in Phuket but is now "doing the right thing" and finishing his studies in sunny Wellywood rather than becoming THE liquid chef of Asia).

Before Phil started writing for the Wall St Journal Asia he use to write kick ass beer reviews . I am sure this is how I stumbled across his blog Phnomenon. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was cooking in Cambodia and he was writing about Khmer food.

I am all about the beer, which I am sure both Phil and the Hass can attest to.

Phuket beer or according to the label - biere or birra or biere or cerveza or piwa - it's a beer that likes to cover all linguistic bases (much like the taste and the tourist mecca itself) - is one of the better beers in Thailand and the people of Belgium seem to agree, they awarded it 'monde' selection in 2006.

There is no noticeable use of rice or any metallic taste (a good thing?). The brewers website attests to manufacturing small batches and use this reason as an excuse for its relatively high price tag compared to other local Thai beers.

I like it and the can is pretty. It conjures all things tropical without any strict adherance to annoying geographical facts, like the fact that Toucans are only found in South America...fuck dat...it's Phuket man...home of white rastas and other such ethno-biological oddities.

(yeah yeah she wrote the last paragraph)

My pops emailed me with some generally vague food reviews and pics from Antwerp.

Sorry he isn't more specific as to where he has apparently been having such tasty meals. But he goes there often so if you are going to Antwerp and you really want to know where the baby boomers chill then I'm sure I can get some names for you.

Dear Maytel,

blah blah blah.....


PS it was not just the mussel that was real ymmy. I had the day before a real tasty Italian meal for luch, a plate of veal kidney cooked with champignon and lots of garlic. It was reallly good

A couple of evening before that I had for the first time raw herring served with this sauce made up of some creamy like substance with capers and chopped up onion.

For lunch I had a sandwich made with french loaf and eel and something quite tasty. (???)

For dinner.......see attached picture.

The ray was stunning. I didn't realise how good it could be.



Cheese Obviously



An unspecified drink

Hock and I just arrived back from a four day eating excursion to Singapore.

I like Singapore. I never used to. Overall media sentiment and the general vibe on Singapore these days is that "it's changed, it's no longer boring and nerdy". Perhaps.... but I'm more inclined to think that I'm the one whose changed and Singapore is just as boring an nerdy as it ever was, however now I am just more content to eat a good plate of chicken and rice and go to bed early. The best of which in Singapore is located at Maxwell St food court





The stall usually has a queue and we waited around 20 minutes for our plates of chicken and rice. It's good, simple fare and they serve it with a chili sauce and dark soy sauce, not with the salty ginger and spring onion sauce that I prefer.

Of course there are other things to eat at Maxwell street, including an excellent raw fish salad at the congee stand, deep fried silken tofu, also at the congee stand, endless variations of egg noddles, dim sum, fried oyster omelette and so on....

Maxwell St food court is the reason why we have stayed at the Scarlet Hotel twice now. The rooms may be small and dingey, there are no facilities and it is not a great hotel. But it is right in the centre of Chinatown and at any time of the day or night you can get up walk a few steps and put something yummy in your mouth...plus it is just around the corner from the trendy Ang Siang Hill that has bucket sized glasses of Hoegaarden on tap.

Today's issue of the New York Times has a style section about various foodstuffs, worth your perusal. You might need to join the site as a member to read the articles (it's free).

"Bertolli makes 5,000 pounds of fresh sausage a week. Today he’s scaled it down, using a Biro tabletop grinder to turn 10 pounds of cold butt and belly into ribbons. Coolness is key, he says: “If meat is at 30 to 32 degrees when it’s mixed, it favors the extraction of protein,” which is needed to bind the ingredients. (For more explanation, see the chapter on sausage making in Bertolli’s book “Cooking by Hand.”) Common problems with grinding meat at home are that the blades aren’t sharp enough and the meat is too warm. “Then you get what we call a smear,” he says. “It’s greasy, crumbly, doesn’t bind.”"

Watch Paul Bertolli
stuff salumi here. Since I am in Deutschland I am really thinking I ought to get a sausage stuffer and explore the world of sausage making... though to the idea of working with intestines in their raw form ... i can only say YUMUCK.

Other items in today's NYTimes:
- 'That's Amari'- a column about Italian digestive liqueurs.

- 'Passing the Bucket'- short piece about sawara wood buckets (cost $160 smackeroos) used to keep ice at its perfect consistency in Tokyo's snootiest bars.



- Grill Seekers
- a piece about all the latest BBQ gadgetry including the latest Viking r2d2-esque kamado-style ceramic lined BBQ: