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.

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.

Fashion designer Karen Walker enjoyed her candlelit dinner at home, and TV3 newsreader Samantha Hayes spent an hour in the dark, thinking about the impact of her lifestyle on the climate.

Really NZ Herald?

I firmly believe the best burgers in the world are to be found in good old New Zealand, at a chain called Burger Fuel. Their third-pounder with cheese (extra beetroot) is one of my definitions of heaven. I'm not usually one to top up my calorie intake with a shake and fries either, but at Burger Fuel this is mandatory: their malted shakes are the bomb and their kumara fries with garlic mayo are, in terms of dopeness, weapons of mass destruction.

So New York's Shake Shack (supposedly one of the city's best burger spots) has frozen custard in tomato, sweet corn or caramelised peach flavours. So what. Burger Fuel has coconut ice malted shakes!
Suck on that!

Note: coconut ice is a type of old-fashioned sweet, common in Commonwealth countries, especially at garage sales, school fairs, and in grandmothers' kitchens. Crumbly pink cubes composed of dessicated coconut, condensed milk and pink food colouring. Here is a recipe.

I mentioned in a post to K'Jam that I'd write out this recipe.

For the malt, I use Horlick's. It was the only brand that my shitty supermarket stocks. Friends have tried using malt extract from the brewing process, hops and all, and this proves to be a grim and terrible mistake. It's not to say that hops has no place in icecream. The new lychee/passionfruit-y Nelson Sauvin cultivar might work well if applied extremely judiciously, but you'd need to destroy too many batches of bitter ice cream before you came to a decent result.

Once you've eaten this, you'll wonder why malt ice cream isn't the world's most popular beige food.

Ingredients:

150gm palm sugar
250ml milk
Pinch of salt

6 egg yolks

500ml cream
100gm malt powder
50gms chopped walnuts

Method:

Grate up the palm sugar and warm in a saucepan with the milk and salt.

Whisk together the malt powder and cream in a large bowl.

In a different bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Once the palm sugar has dissolved in the milk, slowly pour the sugary milk into the yolks, whisking constantly. Pour this mix back into the saucepan and return to a medium heat, stirring constantly until the mix forms into thin custard. You'll know when it is done when it coats the back of your spoon.

Pour the custard into the cream and malt mix. Whisk and set in an ice bath to cool.

Once chilled, pour the mix into your ice cream maker. Add the walnuts just before it is finished. Try to eat without forming a smug grin.

One very simple but handsome menu



House of refreshment

Just to prove it's not all eat & no work,

Here's a page from a gig guide produced here at the Academy in Toronto (written by trusty cohort Max Cole aka Moxo Tengu - listen to his track Cookie Jars by clicking the link)

Some of the participating DJs and producers described as ice cream flavours, with tongue firmly in cheek...

Ahmm... slap-stick humour??

Posters in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn:





Sex on a stick huh?

6.30 am in the Big Apple. Outside the sky slowly brightens like sun through grey linen, the trees along this row of spotless red brick tenements in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn rustle, first autumn leaves dot the curb and shiny automobiles as their owners have Saturday sleep in. A few old gas-lamp modelled lights still glow in porticoes above Cosby-style front steps up to doors.

Nice to have a moment at dawn alone with the NY Times, some mouthy pectin-enhanced low fat organic yoghurt with organic plums, a McIntosh apple (the 'archetype American apple' that actually originated in Ontario), coffee with soy milk.

The soy milk tastes different here – it's a modern phenomenon that every country has its own soy milk peculiarities with regards to taste. I prefer soy milk in general to cow's milk. The better organic US brands are very good, though it's hard to describe the difference. A bit less 'soy-ish' than some German brands, though still clearly a soy taste. Less sweet obviously. And not too cloying or heavy on the palate when drunk with coffee (unlike Vitasoy or whatever Starbucks uses). Very light but not thin - and almost a little bit toasted tasting when mixed with coffee. A very homey, American, organic superstore, rain-over-Puget Sound and oatmeal pancakes taste to me. Blame it on Seattle.



One of the things I like about NYC is that you can get hippie organic mass-marketed healthfood at 10.30 pm at night. I definitely wouldn't say that Wholefoods is better than the Biomarkt in Germany; on the whole there seems to be a greater abundance of mass produced products, and their prepared foods section is not all that appetising in my opinion, except for the sushi and soups. BUT it's still nice to have the option of big tubs of Stonyfield Farm yoghurt, the big orange American pumpkins, basically everything big or with cinnamon or blueberries in it (cinnamon apple pita pockets!), and definitely the cider. Cider in the States is not alcoholic – it is just unfiltered apple juice and I think has a lot more 'mash' cloudiness in it even than in the cloudy varieties in apple juice-mad Germany. That Sir Real brand is so good – in case you're not sick of cinnamon (and I will never be) it has a slight naturally occurring cinnamon-like flavour to it.

And even if the whole-grain Wholefoods sushi with eel isn't purist's sushi, it's a pretty decent, healthy late evening snack. How conveniant that you can step off Union Square into a big brightly lit consumer wonderland and then carry your low-calorie bounty home on the subway. UM, except the subway stops going around 9pm.

Moral of the story: the States will make consumers of us all.

Kelis - Milkshake

Posted Dec 18, 2003

She shakes her mighty milk jugs and all the boys come to her yard. Drink it up.

Another food song......yes I'm procrastinating