Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Generally, if you try and pull this sort of shit, they label you a survivalist - but I guess femivore is a little more genteel. The NY Times invents a new word:

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

You're only one bug out bag short of a Unabomber.

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.

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??

"Kedgeree" with brown rice and split mung beans, boiled egg, lime pickles and raita and crossword


"Kanom Jeen" creative reconstruction attempt



"Kanom Jeen" and macbook



Wakame and silken tofu soup with crossword


Parsi style scrambled eggs and silken tofu with avocado on rye


Udon Salad


Lentil, spinach, celeriac, onion and carrot soup with chorizo


My latest excellent Sunday morning fry up creation - paratha bread, with chickpea vege pattie, fried egg, tomato kousondi and raita

"Students eating dinner in college were given a basic ration of a joint of meat and a glass of beer, but Darwin was apparently quite fastidious about forking out a further 51/2d per day for vegetables."

(source)

Maybe the injera I ate in Boston was made of the teff grown in Idaho...

The Teff Company founder, Wayne Carlson, first became involved in Ethiopian affairs during the early 1970’s. In the course of his work there Wayne lived as a guest of the local farming folk. The farmers were eager to show their guest their farms and crops and he became devoted to the local food. The farmers have a wide variety of crops including barley, wheat, sorghum, maize, finger millet and now even potatoes. But they prefer to grow and eat teff even though the yield is much less than that of barley or wheat. Since all the work is done by muscle power, Wayne wondered why they didn’t devote themselves to that grain which would grow the biggest return.

Later, in Idaho, Wayne was fascinated by the geological and climatic similarities of the Snake River region and the East African Rift. Both are the result of major dynamics in the earth’s crust, resulting in massive basaltic lava flows and tectonic movements. And both are subjected to hot summers with intense sunlight. The idea came that it may be possible to grow teff in the Snake River Valley. Why not change the direction of cultural influence? Rather than exporting “development” practices to Ethiopia, why not take some wisdom from an ancient culture? From there it was a small step to contact Ethiopians living in the American metropolitan areas and re-establish the relation between the Ethiopians and their favorite grain.

The Teff Company has been supplying the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities for nearly twenty years with American-grown Maskal Teff. With the fertile fields and ecologically sensitive farming methods some of the best quality teff in the world is produced in Idaho.

As word of the superior nutritional properties of Maskal Teff spread it has become available nationally in health food stores and by direct mail.

Hmm.

The assumption that the cultural influence is unidirectional and the bits about "ancient culture" sound a little cheesy, but how else can you put it, to keep a faithful face to this endeavor?

Hopefully they won't get into patenting the hybrid teff, like RiceTec that made Indians furious for patenting hybrid basmati rice.

Besides, it is a bit disappointing that they don't have a recipe for injera in their recipe page, where they only suggest mostly Western style recipes:

Mocha Tofu Apricot Teff Pie
Cook Teff with Other Grains
Millet and Teff with Squash and Onions
Mocha Teff Scones
Apple or Pear Crisp
Tofu Vegetable Quiche
Teff Polenta
Pancakes
Teff Banana Pancakes
Peanut Butter Cookies
Dessert Pie Crust
Apple Teff Crumb Pie
Lemon Poppy Seed Cake

These recipes are interesting by itself, but do they assume teff flour buyers already know how to fix their injera?

I'd be curious if Ethiopians would taste test the Idaho teff and Ethiopian teff.

I just found this website called bifurcated carrots and was reminded to last year's controversy at my uni regarding one professor's presentation entitled "The Fractal Yam: Fractal Recursion and Agency in the Trobriands"

Abstract

As Jim Fox and his collaborators on the Comparative Austronesian Project have amply demonstrated, the arboreal idiom of ‘base’, ‘branch’ and ‘tip’ animates the origin structures of precedence of many if not most societies of the Austronesian world. Less attention has been directed at indigenous elaborations of base-branch-tip in other cultural and social domains of the region. This paper traces the ramifications of base-branch-tip articulating numerous dimensions of the culture and social organization of Northern Kiriwina in the Trobriand Islands (PNG). Based on recent ethnographic enquires at Omarakana, the site of Malinowski’s original fieldwork, this paper argues that the sequential recursiveness of base-branch-tip across North Kiriwinan contexts is fractally structured – borrowing a notion from chaos theory. The production of every ‘tip’, in other words, becomes the condition or ‘base’ of further base-branch-tip transformation, and so on. In this way, base-branch-tip recursions in the Trobriands serve as the cultural template for social action, or ‘action scenarios’. Re-examining a number of Trobriand cultural contexts as enchained base-branch-tip transformations sheds new interpretive light on many topics of long-standing anthropological interest: e.g. the production, display and exchange of yams and other values, the classification of village and garden spaces, human procreation, the relation of dala ‘subclan’ to valu ‘village’, sagali mortuary de-conception, the nature of chiefly agency, kula exchange, and villagers’ relations with baloma spirits of the dead.

So I wondered, if fractal yams are key to understanding Melanesian society, symbolically speaking of course.....could bifurcated carrots hold the understanding anglo-saxon cultures...or would that be reading too much into a carrot?

Bras bristled at being pressed into the locavore mold. “Look,” he said, “if we ate only what comes from the Aubrac, we’d have nothing but potatoes, pork and cabbage.” He called his famed devotion to local herbs “caricature. It’s only part of what we do.

Thank you to Michael who pointed this out .

If you happen to be in Canberra on the 19th of January, then you may be interested in this.

Thai fresh markets to Tai hypermarkets: new class based consumption in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Increasing attention is being given in academic and policy research to the rise of TNCs supermarkets in the Global South but few cultural analyses or ethnographic investigations of this 'supermarket revolution' are yet available (Coe and Wrigley 2007). This research uses ethnographic study in Chiang Mai, Thailand to reveal how European supermarkets are integrated into national and local level modernities, histories and narratives, and used by local subjects to define class differences and create middle class identities around notions of cleanliness, leisure and development. In particular, this paper examines how Chiang Mai hypermarkets transfer agency away from the consumer as they present themselves as new spiritual and cuisine authorities, rendering fresh markets as nostalgic motifs of obsolete Thai tradition. The research also explores the possibility of local circumvention and resistance of global markets by considering Chiang Mai consumers' parallel participation in the relational economies of local fresh markets.

Australian National University Human Geography Seminar
Monday, 19 January 2009, 3.30pm - 5.00pm, Seminar Room C, Coombs Building

Bronwyn Isaacs
Geography Honours Student (University of Sydney)
ANU Summer Research Scholar

Question? Are Thai hypermarts "red" or "yellow". Personally I prefer to shop at Wealthy Mart in Siem Reap in Cambodia to affirm my class status.



Source

Sometimes I feel like the parallels between class and food is overstated and somewhat boring, especially in places like Thailand where even the "middle class" love to eat at shabby noodle shacks. Indeed, the princess of Thailand is rumoured to eat at a number of famed street noodle stands. And if supermarkets are all about development and supply chain domination then perhaps its only a matter of time before every poor man/ woman and their dog is sourcing their cheap eats from sterile isles?

So I'm at another anthropology talk fest. Auckland University this time. There's not a lot in the conference program that interests me. It's mainly a lot of academics bleating on about cultural heritage and "identity". Issues that never cease to bore me senseless. I'm presenting tomorrow in a "development" politics panel, but am aiming to try and get to the panel entitled "Appropriating Rurals" and although I should probably be sitting in a lecture theatre on gender or LAND.

IF I'm feeling flippant I might try and get to the talk by Adrian Peace from the University of Adelaide called: "Barossa Dreaming: food, fetsivals and fetishism in rural Australia"

Abstract

It is difficult to imagine a rural region of Australia more thoroughly integrated into the world economy than the Barossa Valley in South Australia. Dominated by a handful of transnational corporations, the wine industry is as thoroughly incorporated into the hegemonic system of global commodity flows as any other part of the country. It is therefore somewhat paradoxical to find that images and representations of heritage, tradition and the authentic community figure pervasively in the intense commodification of the Barossa. In this paper, I detail the representational and discursive processes by which food and festivals are fetishized to constitute the Barossa Valley as a site of nostalgic dreaming. I argue that the advent of the Slow Food movement is the latest addition to these processes. But it is equally important to recognize what is strategically omitted from view.

If I get to go I might ask him some annoying questions on why the words "global" and "hegemonic" are so often conjured in food systems "discourses" and other annoyingly nitpicky academic questions of no particular consequence.

I'm pretty keen on the whole recent anthropolgists schtick of unpicking rural food tourism in general though

I'd also like to see what this presenter has to say...perhaps I'll treat myself

Gifting the Self: the metro-rural idyll and ideal reflexive individuality

Abstract

'I think I'll treat myself.' 'Go ahead, treat yourself.' 'This holiday is a treat to myself.'

These are familiar refrains that may be overheard in the cafés, craft shops, and vineyards of Martinborough - a popular weekend tourism destination for the new middle-classes of nearby Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. These narratives emphasis - personally and socially - notions of gifting the self (Howland 2008) and thus give insight into the calculated reflexive individuality of Martinborough's tourists. Specifically they highlight a reflexive awareness of the self as an object that may be subjected to self-assembly and development regimes. They also underscore an attentiveness to multiple, context-specific selves as evidenced by notions of reward or compensation of the 'working self' to the 'leisured self'. In addition, tourists routinely cast Martinborough as metro-rural idyll - an enchanted, performative setting of leisured consumption that draws upon pervasive notions of the vernacular rural idyll to provide a moral foundation for their urbane consumption activities, social distinction negotiations, and pursuit of ideal reflexive individuality.

Anthropological analysis of kinship-orientated societies often situates reciprocal gifting as the principal mode of economic exchange and vital to social integration and cohesion (Mauss 1972). By contrast, analysis of post-industrial societies often casts commodity, market-based exchange as primary and socially alienating (Carrier 1994). However, gifting the self clearly articulates the hegemonic ideologies and practices of ideal reflexive individuality and as such contributes to the reproduction of the dominant social structure of the 'second modern' (Beck 2002) - namely the institutionalisation of individualism

Peter Howland (Victoria University, Wellington)

Here's a new idea....Chez Panisse is passé

GASP!!!!!!!

I took the train to Berkeley, less than two hours from Davis towards San Francisco. I checked in at the French hotel and dined in the restaurant across the street. We are talking about Alice Waters’ place, Chez Panisse a restaurant well known to the readers of this blog and in-flight magazines.

There is the formal restaurant downstairs (fully booked) and the café upstairs (a late table was available). I had wine made of Zinfandel grapes.

I took the US$29 fixed menu. It had a garden lettuce salad, spaghetti alla Norma with eggplant, tomato, basil, and ricotta salata, and a Concord grape sherbet with roasted Thompson seedless grapes and langues de chat.

These were the variety names on today’s menu: Concord grape, Thompson seedless grapes, and Little Gems lettuce.

And these were the farm names on the menu: Cannard Farm3, Andante Dairy, Soul Food Farm, Marin Sun Farm, Lagier Ranches, and Frog Hollow Farm.

Terroir trumps agrobiodiversity at Alice’s place.

It is a good restaurant. It is very French. The waiter spoke of terroir as if his name were Claude Duchateu. It is very cheap for a famous restaurant. It has a local twist to it. The food is good. But is mainstream now. The menu in the Davis Best Western Palm Court was not that different.

I suppose it is fair what everybody says, that Alice created some sort of revolution. From the wasteland of the American diner to Good Food. Just like her neighbor Alfred Peet transformed mainstream American coffee from diluted sewage to the best coffee anywhere save (perhaps) Italy. But that is ancient history.

But, just for your information, Chez Panisse is passé now. Go look somewhere else. I have heard of an underground restaurant movement in New York.

Chez Panisse is sold out every night, I think. Alice can experiment. But she does not. She chooses the middle of the road. Their produce comes from “farms, ranches, and fisheries guided by principles of sustainability” but the majority of entrees (main dishes) are a fish or meat dish.

Chuck out the meat. Serve different varieties of other veggies than tomatoes (even the Andronico’s supermarket across the street sells heirlooms). Use something locally evolved rather than merely locally grown. The native Californians used hundreds of edible plants.4 But no miner’s lettuce or acorns on the menu of the Queen of Slow Food. Come on, Alice, surprise me!

Source: Robert Hijmans Agricultural Biodiversity Website

Hmmm, so where can slow food and "locavores" go from here? A good point indeed since the restaurant business is so competitive one does need to constantly be redefining ones niche in order to add novelty and therefore value. It is essential to maintain the buzz.....and with more and more restaurants serving Alice Watery style menus.....such as Applewood in Brooklyn I'd have to agree with Robert.




The meal we had here was not astounding. While everything was well cooked and tasted nice it was simple and I must say that aside from the price tag there was precious little appreciation to be had in eating organic local beets and salad. The food was good, or better yet "nice".

Applewood, like Chez Panisse is a farmer to restaurant type deal. There is organic/ fairtrade hand wash in the bathrooms and the tables were adorned with vases of fresh cut thyme which I snapped off "a la Thai style" and added to my under-seasoned beef tartar (I asked for extra chili but they wouldn't give it to me)

The bill around USD$80 including wine.

I had beets, the tartar and "artisinal cheese selection" to finish

Beets


Beef


Cheese


I was too busy talking to notice what other people ate....but here are some other photos

Delicious selection of handmade butters and dips to start


Maine Lobster thingy


???


???


???


Chocolate Ding Dong, as Hock likes to call them....always a crowd pleaser


So now that most inner city hipster regions of the United States now have their very own version of Chez Panisse what happens?

How much more "in touch" can this restaurant niche get? Should restaurants of this theme, as Robert suggests, go deeper still attaching perhaps scientific names to the menu and explaining the role your food played in an ecosystem? Should they only allow diners to eat a limited portion of meat? Perhaps they should only be cooking off the menu of under-utilised species in line with the principle that eating endangered species is the best way to preserve them.


With some quarters of food criticism already underway against molecular gastronomy , should Alice Watery restaurants be moving towards more sophisticated cooking techniques or furthering the general populaces' appreciation for quinoa?

Or hows about molecular Khmer food....anyone?

Since Thailand is in the middle of yet another political melt down, and the sore looser opposition - the so called People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) - have engaged in their dangerous game of brinkmanship aimed at ousting Thailand's democratically elected government, the old part of the city has become off limits unless you want to become stuck in outrageous traffic or potentially a military crackdown. What is being interpretted by international media and leading scholars as a class showdown between the overwhelming majority rural and urban poor voters that support the government versus the minority PAD middle class Bangkokians and elite royalists, who are hoping to change the entire electoral system to 70 per cent appointed and only 30 per cent elected, the current meltdown has the potential to spell the end of democracy in Thailand. (See New Mandela for more commentary)

Of course this is very upsetting and on a less serious note, it makes me wonder, am I fated to never go on Austin Bush's famous Banglamphu eating tour. Last time we tried it was a Sunday and most of the places closed. Before that I was out of the country. I wonder, will I never taste the delights of Chote Chitr's real mee krob? That Sunday , before the meltdown, we ended up at Sorndaeng an old school restaurant near the independence monument, a place that my PAD loving father recommended. I'd like to go back again but I wonder, are my hopes of another Sunday lunch at Sorndaeng dashed before I depart Thailand indefinitely?

Located near the independence monument, the site of previous military crackdowns of the past, Sorndaeng has stood the test of time. Governments and coups have come and gone but Sorndaeng, it seems remains. Replete with its piano lounge singer, chintzy chandeliers and bow tied waiters. It's as old school as the king and all that represents









On the particular day that we went, there was the usual mix of old school Thai ladies with their bouffant hair do's and drawn in eyebrows, a scattering of western tourists attired in shorts and eating "prison styles" (one dish per person not shared) and some Japanese groups. Aong got excited remembering having eaten at the restaurant on special occasions as a child.

We ordered the mee grob, which I was informed is still not at good as Chote Chitr. But it was still pretty good.




Yum Som Oh - Pomelo salad, it was simple and delicious.


Cute little starter, which I forget the name of but apparently the restaurant is famous for it.




Hor mok, Thai's version of Amok


Fish maw (stomach) fried with egg and beansprouts


cocounut pudding


Mango sticky rice


The food was excellent. Austin gave it the thumbs up and said it is one of the best upscale Thai restaurant experiences he has had. A big call. But I have to agree.

What was saddening however was when Aong and I went to the bathroom and Aong peered into the kitchen to see the staff eating what appeared to be left overs from the restaurant tables. Although we loved the food at Sorndaeng, perhaps Sorndaeng and all that it stands for has had its time. With its unnecessary airs and graces, its stuffy decor and chintzy facade, although the food is yummy, it can still make you feel ill.

B for BBQ

The Research School of Humanities presents,

A WORK-IN-PROGRESS SEMINAR

1- 2.30 pm, Tuesday 5 August 2008, Theatrette, Old Canberra House.

Enabling new ways of thinking about the world?: The Australian food writer as activist

Associate Professor Donna Lee Brien Associate Professor of Creative Industries, and Head, School of Arts and Creative Enterprise, Central Queensland University.

Abstract

Food writing makes up a significant proportion of the books, articles, weblogs and other texts written, published, sold and read each year in Australia. While the food writing in cookbooks, magazines and other publications is often thought of as providing useful, but banal, practical skill-based information, recent scholarship has begun to suggest that food writing is a more creative, and interesting, form of cultural production. As part of a biographically-based study of Australian food writers, this work-in-progress seminar focuses on the roles the contemporary food writer plays in an environment where food is the subject of considerable scholarly, policy and personal interest and anxiety. In such a context, a number of contemporary food writers engage with issues around food production and consumption. These issues include sustainable and ethical agriculture, biodiversity and genetic modification, food miles and fair trade, food safety and security, and obesity, diabetes and other health issues. In this activity, the Australian food writer is, moreover, not only a media commentator on these important contemporary concerns, but is, at times, a forward-thinking activist, advocating and campaigning for change.

At least it is if you're counting in Roman numerals.

I know that this may be adding a dash of kero to the flamewar, but Maytel's redacted post reminded me of a point that Michael Pollan makes incredibly badly. From the everyone's favorite justification for carnivorousness, The Omnivore's Dilemma (p.231):

Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans somehow imposed on animals some ten thousand years ago. Rather, domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own.

Pollan goes on to explain that domesticated animals lead much cushier lifestyles than their counterparts whom languish in what is left of Nature. This argument seems like an ecologist's version of the bumper sticker slogan that if God hadn't wanted us to eat animals, He wouldn't have made them from meat. Just replace the deity with evolution. A few pages later, he argues that unlike domesticated animals (who made themselves through their own opportunism) humans made bisons. He quotes Tim Flannery:

"the bison is a human artifact, it was shaped by Indians"

I'm still confused as to why Pollan attributes agency to domestic animals (it was their own fault that they exist and are full of meat) but not to wild ones (who man made full of meat, through predation).

I spent the best part of an hour procrastinating on Amazon's kitchen section, hunting down useless but mildly appealing kitchen equipment

So for lack of better things to blog about at present I will begin a new series on stupid kitchen equipment

Item 1:

Cake-Sicle Pan



I like things on sticks, but I don't see why you can't just jam a stick into a muffin and call it a muffin-sicle...

Item 2

Hello Kitty Toaster



This being Bangkok I'm surprised I haven't seen one of these earlier.

Put a money value on time, and the cost of a can of beer looks academic

Date: April 19 2008
by Marcus Padley

The average wage in Australia for a full-time working adult was $64,844 a year, at last count. That is $1247 a week, about $31 an hour or 52c a minute.

That is earnings. But when it comes to spending, you have the Australian Tax Office in the middle. It will take $14,803. Now you are earning $24 an hour or 40c a minute.

In finance we constantly talk about the time value of money. But in life we now have the basis for calculating the money value of time. A minute is worth 40c in cash and 52c in earning capacity. Brushing your teeth (three minutes) costs the average man $1.20 in cash and $1.56 in lost earning capacity.

More seriously, a can of VB appears to cost $1.66. But under the money value of time formula, a can of VB costs you 4.15 minutes of your life, and if you take more than 4.15 minutes to drink it the cost doubles. So drink fast. Take this a bit further and a slab of VB costs you 1 hour 40 minutes of life. On top of that if you go to a bachelors' and spinsters' ball and drink the whole slab it will cost you another 24 hours of lost earning capacity.

Put like that, a single can of VB can, if drunk in the company of 23 of its closest mates, will cost you 4.15 minutes plus one hour of incapacitation. That is 64.15 minutes of life lost per can. Or put another way, $1.66 plus $24 in money value of time; $25.66 a can. If you earn more than the average wage then VB becomes more expensive. For someone on $100,000 a year, a minute of life is worth 58c cash; on $150,000 it is 82c, and for someone earning $200,000 a minute of life is worth $1.04. Of course earning $200,000 is great, but it does mean you only have 1.6 minutes to drink a VB before the price doubles, and if you go to a B&S ball the price of VB escalates to a heady $64.06 a can.

Link

The great NZ beer review apparently cost you more than you thought

It was a lovely warm easter weekend in New Zealand, and out in West Auckland an informal home made pasta lesson took place. "It's easy" said Hock in the kind of way that Jaimie Oliver says things are easy and really they are time consuming and difficult.



With Hock over seeing, G&G rolled it and folded it and rolled it again, and when at first they failed...they tried again



First homemade pasta dish of the weekend involved our dead easter bunny....Hock and Ginny took charge of this. First they pan fried the loin and the kidneys, then they made a stew of rabbit, bacon and tuber veges with a light white wine and sage sauce. They served it with fresh "beginners home made pasta" parpadelle





And we drunk it with some damn good NZ wine.




Later that weekend the lesson continued and G&G graduated onto the ever tricky ravioli, stuffed with chicken. Hock pronounced, as resident chef, that the "ravioli must be sealed properly with no air bubbles otherwise it would split and we'll end up with a gruesome bowl of boiling water with bits of broken up pasta and poached mince meat."...He said and everyone looked horrified and set about double checking the ravioli for air bubbles and broken seals.

"Ravioli is difficult, that's why in the 1990s there was that time when everyone made one big ravioli, because making small ones is annoying and often disasterous".



But of course, it's not exactly rocket science either


We put basil, roasted tomato, mozzerlla and parmasan on top, well they did...I watched and drunk wine and complained about being hungry. Then they heated it in the oven, just enough for the cheese to go gooey.


Someone set the table


And we treated ourselves to another damn good bottle of NZ wine, a well earned bottle of Mt Difficulty. I love my sister and her wine cellar.



Papadelle hanging out to dry