Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Generally speaking I'm not a big pot fan. I used to be. In fact I smoked so much pot as a youngster growing up in NZ that I liken myself to Obelix from the Asterix cartoons, I fell in the pot when I was young and have had enough to last me a life time....in case you're wondering many NZ kids are the same....(shock horror, no your teenagers are not still tired at 3 pm in the afternoon from playing playstation). Anyways, the first time I had pot again was years later in Cambodia. The first time was unintentional. We ordered a pizza from a place called Happy Pizza. I had no idea until 3am that morning, when I still couldn't get to sleep, let alone stop talking. I put 2 and 2 together and figured it was the strange green herb sprinkled on our "margarita"

I smoked pot a couple more times in Cambodia during my stay. Unlike pot in most other places in the world where it has been hydroponically grown and manipulated to basically knock your head off, Khmer pot is still natural, smooth and above all relaxing.....

So I was unsurprised to hear the other day when Hock told me that many women in Cambodia will traditionally make a chicken soup with gunja when it is that time of the month. Apparently, in Cambodia men drink rice wine, the women smoke pot.

Recipe for Khmer Gunja Soup

- make chicken soup
- spinkle with gunja
- have a lie down

Whoever said that Fusion cooking was dead obviously forgot to tell the chefs of Bangkok




hmmm chicken larb pizza and sauteed fried rice with strawberries....

Tell me what is your worst fusion horror story?

Chicken and cranberry and camembert pizza always takes the prize for me...

or You Can't Have Your Authenticity and Eat It Too


Of course in Singapore we did manage to sniff out a couple of bad meals in the way that only a western tourist couple can, in a city 99% full of yummy food, I believe that most western tourists have a special propensity to encounter the 1% that's bad and it doesn't take much to lure us in. All you need is a few promises of authenticity and a bit of swanky branding, try a logo like the one below



WikiTravel says.....

"Gluttons Bay, Esplanade Mall #01-15, ☎ +65-63367025. Daily 6 PM-3 AM. Run by famous foodies Makansutra, this outdoor eatery puts together 12 of Singapore's most famous hawkers. Breezy location by the river, great views of the city and good location make this a winner. $5-10."

So we got all excited and headed down there, only to be served rotting prawns, yes rotting...being kiwis we discussed for at least 5 minutes about whether to return them, we did. We were served the dish again this time with fresh prawns. But by then we were far beyond any interest in completing our meal that was over priced (5 - 10 my ass) and not at all fresh.....

And here in lies the lesson. You cannot take the best hawkers in Singapore, give them a charming river side location, gentrified stall carts and logos and expect the food to stay the same, and to expect the hawkers to remain the best in Singapore. What makes hawkers stands excellent and unique is their connection to locals and place. It is the locals that make it good and keep it good, they are the ones that keep coming back, that keep the ingredients fresh, keep the hawker motivated and they are the ones that can elevate some hawkers to fame status. If you remove the hawker from their place and their customers all you get is a bunch of old rotting prawns.

What makes good food is not just the cook or the chef. It is the location, and the community. Good food is as much a product of place as it is the skills of a careful and conscientious chef. That's why airline and mall food will always suck....they are non-place spaces a bit like Glutton's Bay.

(or) MAKING A STAR MEATBALL THE MILKY WAY

When is a good burger not a burger?
The recipe I'm gonna share is not really a burger - it's a slightly different animal, better defined as a Japanese-style burger or really good homemade German frikadelle (meatball) perhaps. It is not grilled - but what it lacks in smokey, BBQ vibe it makes up for in juiciness, texture and general meat perfection.



I was reading an article by Matt Lee and Ted Lee in the New York Times (whence the above image came), and after a few drearily fancy descriptions of meatballs made with foie gras or veal and stuffed with ricotta (etc), they wrote about a key burger/meatball truth which I'd inadvertently discovered when experimenting with Japanese-style burgers. It seems to be the key to a dream burger. Quite simply, the wetter the better. This may not be anything new to you chef types, but to me it's like a breakthrough: milky meatballs!

"On the vital issue of meatball texture, all the chefs we interviewed had good tips and pointers, most of which spoke to the same issue: water. For Mr. Campanaro, the key is simple. “Just like in Italian sausage, the filling is very wet when it goes into the casing,” he said. “So when it cooks, it’s juicy. That liquid that comes out when you cut it? That’s pork stock!”"

Another chef interviewed, Mr Psilakis, was fond of the same trick I had discovered in my trusty Orange Page japanese food periodical: using breadcrumbs soaked in milk. Except that in his recipe he squeezes out the excess milk, whilst the Orange Page recipe just dumps the milk in with the mince.

Orange Page took it another wet step further: not only do you include milk but after sealing the big, fat burger balls in the pan you steam them at a low heat for 10 minutes, upping the moisture value and creating an incredible burger! (or however you want to call it).

So I shall now share this recipe with you, dear reader, along with a similarly genius milk-based salad dressing which is SO awesome I urge you to try it today. Milk is the new maldon sea salt.

PS: For the vegetarians, here is a link to a very easy vege burger
demo by the New York Times popular food writer 'The Minimalist' - and here is his good tofu burger recipe
.

(I am curious to read The Minimalist's meat-based burger piece. It's not free to view anymore - only available to purchase... how elitist...but nevermind... I am sure the following recipe easily matches or outdoes his recipe. Yes I am that confident.)

Note: this Japanese-style burger has a very simple yet perfect flavour. That's sort of the point. If you require a more macho burger try Jamie Oliver's milk-free roasted Botham Burger
which can also be successfully grilled if formed in smaller patties.

FUKKURA HAMBURGERS
(serves two)

Beef mince - 300-400g
1/2 an onion diced finely
1 egg
a slice of bread (white or brown)
2-4 generous tablespoons of milk
Salt & pepper

Crumble, finely chop or pulse the bread so that you have 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs. How fine they are is not too important. (I generally just roughly chop some medium-coarse brown bread but most Japanese cooks use fine white panko crumbs).
Cover the breadcrumbs with milk (I don't measure but I think I use a fair bit more than 2 tbsp - really just enough milk so all breadcrumbs are soggy and soaking but not swimming in milk. As we have heard, 'the wetter the better').

Mix all the above ingredients (with about 1/2 tsp salt and as much ground pepper as you like) in a bowl, gently crumbling the mince and blending into a mush so that the white fatty flecks in the mince largely disappear and it is a mostly-uniform pinkish shade.

Make two large patties by dividing the mixture and palming each mass back and forth gently between your hands a few times. If you need to redistribute some meat, glue it onto the other ball as gently as possible. The aim is not to compact the meat too much.

Heat 1 tbsp oil at medium heat and cook the patties for about 1 minute on one side. When superficially browned, flip them over, reduce the heat to low, cover with a well fitting lid and steam the burgers for 10-12 minutes. When you are satisfied the burgers are done (most Japanese cooks wouldn't want them to be pink in the middle) and the juices don't run pink when a fork or chopstick is inserted, remove lid, turn the heat up to high and cook for another 30 seconds to one minute.

Serve topped with one of the following:

- KIMCHEESE: finely chop 40 g white kimchi and mix with 30 g grated cheese and 2 tsp sake. Add a-top the burgers before the final one minute of cooking with lid ON.

- ONE SCRAMBLED EGG AND KETCHUP: just what it says, artfully squiggling the ketchup. Egg should be plain egg, no milk added.

- CLASSIC STYLE: make a glaze using 2 tbsp ketchup and chinese-style sauce (or try Korean BBQ sauce, ketchup, salt, pepper and a tiny bit of powdered vege stock). A mostarda glaze could also be good! Or some kind of premade beef demiglace.

- MILD FRESH SALSA: very finely chop a de-seeded tomato, a quarter cucumber, and a quarter red onion. To let the meat flavour shine you might like to tone down the onion by salting it and letting it sit for a minute or two, and then rinse. Mix together with 1/2 tbsp rice vinegar and generous salt & pepper. This salsa is also improved with some capers and/or chopped anchovy, but again this may overwhelm the burger... try to think in the Japanese way where the dish shouldn't be overwhelmed by crazy sauces. Maybe it's better to just have some nice crunchy cornichon pickles on the side!



Serve with the following kick ass salad (adapted from the recipe book '15分らくうまおかず', or 'easy main dishes to go with rice prepared within 15 minutes'). Original recipe asks for watercress which would be great (watercress rules) but I replaced with rocket and it was also excellent with the soy-ish lime-spiked light creamy dressing.
Who knew a dressing without pepper could be so beguiling?

AVOCADO-EGG-ROCKET SALAD WITH MILK-SOY-KYUPI DRESSING
(serves 2 people) (307 kcal per person)

2 eggs boiled 6-7 minutes, peeled and chopped in large non-uniform chunks.
1 avocado peeled and chopped in chunks (original recipe asks for 2cm cubes but that sounds too fussy)
4 handfuls of rocket/rucola/arugula or watercress
Lime or lemon
1 tsp soy sauce
2 tbsp milk
2 tbsp japanese kyupi mayo

Arrange the greens in 2 bowls and scatter the avocado over top. Squeeze lime or lemon juice generously over the avocado pieces.

Mix together the mayo, milk and soy (we use a handheld milk frothing device to get it blended well and ever-so-slightly foamy, but a fork should be fine!).
Scatter the egg pieces over the salad and pour the milky soy mayo dressing over top of everything.



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MORE ABOUT BURGERS
Typical Japanese-style hamburger presentations:




Burger in a box?




spew-like kinoko sauce (that's kiNOko as in mushroom):




from one extreme:




to the next:




this looks delicious to me - does that make me a pervert?




This Mosburger hybrid also looks damn good:




Horror burger:

The Spanish enjoy "The Running of the Bulls"

The British enjoy the rolling of the cheese

Double Gloucester that is.

The Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake set to Bryan Ferry A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall






Why throw yourself down a stupidly steep hill? To win the cheese of course




The current title holder



And of course the "ladies" winner New Zealander Jemima Bullock

What other country would have an annual cheese rolling contest?

Perpetual anglophiles New Zealand of course....cuppa tea anyone?



Not quite Bryan Ferry


Don't they look like they are having fun, how twee.

For those of you that don't read boing boing

Here is a link that they recommend checking out, follow it to a most excellent slide show of photos taken by Peter Menzel. Collaborating with Faith D'Aluisio to which they wrote Hungry Planet: What the world eats looks like a good read.

The interview with Deborah Koons Garcia, writer and director of The Future of Food is a uesful starter for understanding some of the monumental issues and decisions been made about our food system, often without most people's knowledge of participation. Although it centres on the USA, with globalised food, the buck obviously doesn't stop there. It's worth knowing if you don't already. Some of the topics covered include political control of companies over food chains and regulation systems, the problem of cross-polination and gene mutations, possible health impacts, environmental impacts, and so on

And, yes some farmers are now being sued for patent infringement for the fact that genes have accidently (or not so accidently) cross-polinated with plants on their fields....not mentioned is the fact that one way companies have tried to avoid cross-polination is through incorporating the terminator gene in plants so they cannot reproduce. However, there is no evidence to say the terminator gene won't cross polinate with other plants rendering parts of the natural environment sterile....if you care about food, you should care about this

Anyway, she introduces a novel idea for bringing down organic food costs - buy raw ingredients and cook...."cooking is the new shopping"....as a friend of mine says "consumerism is so last century", I'm just waiting to see a papparzzi picture of Paris Hilton making jam.

Not that there is uniformity within the bio/organic movement, there is still healthy debate

This debate between Michael Pollen, writer of Omnivore's Dialemma and John Mackey CEO of Wholefoods illustrates some of the issues still to be addressed over what type of bio/ organic system exactly is better


Lastly here is a non-GMO product list for your next trip to the supermarket

Unfortunately, Australia seems to be taking the US's lead (again).

"Australia's Chief Scientist, Brian Peacock, in a speech to a conference two weeks ago, called opponents of GM "unprincipled minorities … self-serving organic farmers and ill-informed environmental activists".

Advice from the Age for Australians and New Zealanders and other unprincipled minorities

"Ever squirm at those reality shows featuring innocent souls forced to snack down on plates of crunchy bugs? The sweet kids' favourite used to be tinted pink with the innocuous "beet red" colouring, but the recipe has been changed to contain "colour (120)". That 120 is cochineal, also known as carmine, and is derived from the dried bodies of pregnant scale insects (the yummy sounding Dactylopius coccus costa). What's even more misleading is that 120 is usually referred to as a "natural colour" - the logic being that insects are "natural". And, apparently, snack-a-licious".


Melbourne Age sums up how to avoid meat in the age of industrial food

More on the scale insect...hmmmmm, scale insect

Another good meal we had in Singapore was here. It's on Hok Lam St.



They serve an excellent bowl of Teo Chew (Chaozho in Mandarin or Chiuchow in Cantonese) beef noodles.



The noodles are somewhat similar to a bowl of pho bo but much much richer with a far more deep fragrant herbal broth, my guess is probably more cinnamon, more star anise and probably some shaoxing wine.

Teo Chew cuisine is renoun as a herbal almost medicinal version of Cantonese food. Other famous Teo Chew dishes include a herbal pork anise stew, a great steamed fish in herbal ginger broth with wolf berries and chinese prunes, and dishes such as what is known in Thailand as goong woosen, frangrant glass noodle and prawn claypot, goose feet noodles and fried oyster omelette. Teo Chew people hail from Northeast Guangdong, they are the original rice smugglers and triads (yes the original gangstas) of China and make up the majority of the Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia, thus most of Southeast Asia now has regional variations of Teo Chew dishes, I'm thinking of Thailand's Khai Paloo and Singapore's Ba Ku Teh. Thailand also has a beef noodle dish that is similar to above said noodles, but it's sweeter and they put Thai basil in it.

My Thai/ Chinese side of the family are Teo Chew, that's how come I know this shit.

Anyway, if your interested in learning more wiki has some info although I'm not sure about the fruit carving comment, this is prevalent everywhere in asia, not specific to Teo Chew people

This one is for the tiny man.

I have been on the look out for yummy goodies to fill the chiller at home with, as we have the infamous T man (if you are not familiar with his work check out his latest installation here) coming to our city soon and there is much planning to be done.

Although the way the general dietary practices of most Bangkok Thais are going I think this might be considered an all ages snack by most living here.

I made this the other day and not only does it have a great name, it tastes great. If I was in NZ I would add sweet little pipis and cockles at the last minute. Or you could replace the fish with mussels, or throw in heaps of seafood to make a kind of mexican boullibase or make a casserole version with chicken...

Snapper Veracruz

- 2 snapper fillets large (serves around 3 - 4)
- juice of a lime
- tblspoon vegetable oil
- 1 onion
- 3 cloves of garlic
- can of tinned toms
- 200 gms green olives (pitted and sliced roughly)
- 2 tbsp capers
- 2 large pickled jalapenos sliced
- fist full of flat leaf parsley
- 1 tsp dried oregeno
- few sprigs of thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- stick of cinamon
- 3 cloves
- 1 cup of fish or chicken stock


Marinade fish in lime juice and rub with a teaspoon of salt for about 1 hour.

Later...

sautee onions, garlic til soft then toms - cook for 15

add remaining ingredients except fish and simmer another 15

add fish and cover and simmer/ steam for 10 mins

serve with bread and potatos and tings

nB extra jalapenos can be added

Following on from DJ Han Baby's culinary brilliance, behold 'my mexican lunch' bought to you by The Brunettes front babe Heather Mansfield. Who wants to throw tv's out the hotel window when you could watch it while eating this - 5 stars to H-Bomb!

In Singapore I recently had my first Indian mango...and what a revelation it was too.

Indian mangoes are squishy, sweet and delicately fragrant....they have a certain...perfume taste to them which makes them ten times a more exotic mango than your common all garden Southeast Asian mango, which are nice and mangoey but do not possess the same floral undertones as the Indian mango....overall I highly recommend Indian mangoes, they have lifted my enthusiasm for tropical fruits once again, just at the point when I thought there was little else to discover.



Another favourite fruit sampled in Singapore was durian, although Phil describes it "like eating vanilla custard in a latrine". I tend to think that people that say this have not had a perfect durian in season. I agree that out of season they can taste a bit like this, but in season they are like a warm sweet avocado with what I can only describe as a certain nyum nyum -ieness.

The smell that most people complain of is imperceptible to me. I am, it appears durian proof. So I bought one on the street in Singapore. I was all excited until Hock reminded me that I could not take it back to the hotel, in a taxi or on the train. So I opted to eat it on the street.

As I stood there nibbling on large fleshy soft chunks of durian a group of Indian women wandered past and peered inside my polystyrene container and I overheard one proclaim just within earshot


"oh I didn't know that they could eat that"

If you haven't acquainted yourself already with the prodigious talents of Cambodia's most famous food blogger and fast rising star food writer Phil (who also happens to be a Gut Feelings team member) then I suggest you do so now and begin with his recent review of Melbourne's only Khmer restaurant Bopha Devi

Phil writes

"In Cambodia, Princess Bopha Devi is best known for being the former King Sihanouk’s wayward daughter. Educated as a ballerina in France, the princess emulated the other princes by taking a succession of beautiful lovers but unlike the princes, this was much to the dismay of Sihanouk who once labelled her a “whore”. It makes for an interesting choice of name for a restaurant: Cambodians would more likely associate Bopha Devi with Sihanouk’s comments or her more recent political career as Minister for Culture. If the food had been better, I’d rant about the clash of feminism, modernity and tradition that the name embodies, and the difficulties of reconciling a modern education with the demands of Cambodian royal life. But it wasn’t.


Not only does Phil possess a highly evolved style of diction as displayed in his ever so eloquent equivication of a restaurant to one of dubious sexual mores, he can also single handedly increase the internet traffic on Gut Feelings tenfold in a day by a simple referral.

Ta Phil

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.