Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Fruit growers whose crops haven't been destroyed by fire are now worried their harvest won't be picked.
General manager of Fruit Growers Victoria, John Wilson, saysthat at Stanley in the state's north-east, growers have ripe fruit that needs to get to market.
"We've had reports that we can't get pickers into the area because of road blockages or debris on the roads, and at the moment we need to get people up there to pick some raspberries."
And in New South Wales and Victoria, farmers are worried the news that many crops are heat-stressed will keep workers away.
In New South Wales, labourers are needed to plough in ruined vegetables, cut burnt flowers and pick damaged fruit in orchards.
Victoria is facing a similar problem, as sunburnt fruit still has to be picked because of orchard hygiene policies.
Grower associations say they'll need plenty of harvest labour this season.

Source: ABC

Growers are requesting that Australian consumers accept lower fruit standards this season.

The land is scorched, the fruit is burnt, koalas are thirsty and I'm sunburnt even though I put on sunscreen, lay under an umbrella and wore a sarong last weekend in Sydney. And just as everyone and everything is feeling a bit singed, the temperature drops. In Canberra tonight its 9 degrees and I have on wooly socks and a cardigan......WTF

Things - Cooking with High Voltage Electricity from Bre Pettis on Vimeo.

Thanks Mandevu!!!! Cheese and grapes....hmmm, high voltage fondue?

Aka gooseberries.

I just photographed them because I think they look nice.

Here is a good salad to make with them (or any other round, interesting berry.... usually blue berries or kiwi berries).
It's a salad that works on the days when you really really don't feel like salad.

Exciting Coleslaw

Wash & chop: two handfuls of basil leaves, a couple of spring onions, a couple of baby bok-choi, a few handfuls of a dark green leafy vegetable (e.g. spinach, lamb's mache/feldsalat) and either red cabbage, or another Asian green like Mizuna/mustard greens.

Dice an avocado in small cubes. Finely chop a small hunk of ginger.

Mix all of the above together with a handful of cherry tomatoes, a decent sprinkling of black sesame seeds, and a tablespoon each of soy sauce/tamari and olive oil. Then scatter your round berries on top. (I think round is good because they are usually not too sweet and the symmetry with the tomatoes is pleasing). And serve.

Please remind me if I already posted this recipe. I have some mild version of Alzheimers so you never know.

Damn it to hell. Yesterday I went to the local Rewe supermarkt with our camera, to capture a billboard that had been spray-painted, but ironically, it was pasted over with the poster above. That fool in the photo has had a cooking show on TV for ages. He's about as far from 'anarchie' as you can get.

The one I wanted to photograph, was an advertisement for discounted nectarines. The slogan was originally something like 'Sun in your heart, savings in your head.' But it had been defaced to read 'Sun in your heart, anarchy in your head.'
Then over the picture of nectarines they sprayed 'consumerism kills'.

I loved it, and I agree that discount fruit are at the centre of our troubles as a society.

Maybe this also has something to do with the name of a German band I really like, called the 'die Goldenen Zitronen' (the Golden Lemons).

From Johann Hari in The Independent:

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon – in five, 10 or 30 years – the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world – and where they are leading us.

Welcome to peak banana, at least, for rich people. What much of the coverage of the latest round of coverage of Panama Disease (Black Sigatoka) ignores is that most of the world doesn't eat the bananas worst affected: the creamy yellow, sweet Cavendish bananas grown as vast monocultures for export to the West. From the American Phytopathological Society:

Although it is viewed as only a dessert or an addition to breakfast cereal in most developed countries, it is actually a very important agricultural product. After rice, wheat and milk, it is the fourth most valuable food. In export, it ranks fourth among all agricultural commodities and is the most significant of all fruits, with world trade totaling $2.5 billion annually. Yet, only 10% of the annual global output of 86 million tons enters international commerce. Much of the remaining harvest is consumed by poor subsistence farmers in tropical Africa, America and Asia.

The good news for people not eating a sweet banana, black sigatoka-resistant varieties seem like a viable substitute. The news from "Post-harvest characteristics of black Sigatoka resistant banana, cooking banana and plantain hybrids" seems to suggest that they resistant strains don't fare too badly when cooked and a minor positive is that the resistant hybrids seem to cook quicker, meaning less fuel will need to be used to prepare them. The human taste-testing does however seem quite limited.

"Many chefs, bored by the precisely defined tasks that often characterize their work at restaurants or catering operations, carve fruits and vegetables as a creative release."

As seen in last week's New York Times - Saxton Freymann, with the help of a bag of googly eyes, makes fruit look Anne Geddes-worthy. Try emailing these pictures to your parents.

Songkran or Thai New Year in Thailand equals five fun filled days of extreme heat, water fights and general tom foolery

Songkran in Canberra however is a much more sober affair, which involves cold weather, some dodgy food stalls with some not so tasty hoy tod, chanting monks and the ubiquitous fruit carving


Hoy Tod

It may come as no great surprise to know that the Thai food in Canberra sucks.

Amongst the worst is Lemongrass in Civic which I had the displeasure of having to dine at last Friday. The "larb" was just watery minced beef with no herbs, the "pad thai" (I didn't order it) was sickly sweet and the "curry" well....anyway
The restaurant was packed....full of white Australians seemingly enjoying their "Thai food"


So, on Sunday I cooked a fairly disastrous Thai meal out of sheer desperation. It still wasn't as bad as Lemongrass. I did what I normally do in Thailand, same pastes, same ingredients but it just didn't even come close flavour wise. I put it down to ingredients. They just don't taste the same here.

Anyway, my most pined for Thai dish is at the moment is mango sticky rice. You can't get a good version here because you really need fresh coconuts.


Photo: Stolen Courtesy of Google Images

but anyway, as I sit in my lonely little room in Canberra, head down bum up....on my ipod came Ohio Players Sweet Sticky Thing



and, well, I wanna go home

The one thing that is in nobody's interest to say is this: fruit just doesn't provide that much nutrition in the first place. If you believe the nutrition industry, every week produces some new superfood, often a fruit: blueberries, pomegranates, acai berries. The fact is that fruit consists of water, sugars (normally about 10%), some vitamin C, and some potassium (thought to be good for controlling blood pressure). And that's kind of it. Pineapple, for example, has only got about 10mg of vitamin C per 100g (which means a 80g standard portion would only have about 12% of RDA) and is mainly water and sugar. In a typical supermarket fruit medley of 150-200g, at least 15g will be sugar, and the other major constituent water. If it's a citrus medley, there will be about 40mg per 100g of vitamin C, if not, there will be about 10-20mg.

"It's a myth that fruit is packed full of vitamins and minerals," says Tom Sanders, who is director of the Nutritional Sciences Division at King's College London. "The foods packed full of micronutrients are grains, seeds and nuts, the peas and things." Bagged salad? "It's mainly water. Dark green vegetables are a good source of some vitamins, such as vitamin A and folate, but lettuce hasn't got much going for it at all. The really sad thing is that we don't eat enough vegetables, such as cabbage, spinach and broccoli."

In May, the Observer reported that dietitians have become so worried about claims being made for so-called superfoods that they convened a debate on the subject at the Science Museum. It may be claimed that particular exotic berries boost IQ, energy and immunity, but the only science even vaguely backing this up is that they contain folic acid, which does boost brainpower, but is present in many foods. The antioxidants in pomegranate juice, which supposedly fight diseases as different as cancer and arthritis, actually only last in the body for an hour. Wheatgrass, that standby of the trendy juicebar, is said to be rich in detoxifying chlorophyll, but every green vegetable and leaf in the world contains cholorophyll - which is not, in fact, absorbable by our bodies.

"The term 'superfoods' is at best meaningless and at worst harmful," Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London, told the paper. "There are so many wrong ideas about superfoods that I don't know where best to begin to dismantle the whole concept."

The added irony, in the topsy-turvy world of supermarkets, is that rich desserts often cost very little, while fruit, especially organic, fairtrade, and prepared fruit, is marked up. At the Sainsbury's where I got my lunch, I could have had four 100g creme brulees for 44p, two tiramisu for 98p, and six chocolate mousses for 69p - or a grand total of 11.5p each, making those Pink Lady slices, gram for gram, four times more expensive. We are, more or less willingly, paying through the nose for a particularly 21st-century version of virtue. "You're made to feel worthy, and therefore you're made to pay a premium for it," says Sanders. "Supermarkets have a lot to answer for in the obesity debate."

"The way you've got to look at fruit is that it's better to eat fruit than biscuits, cakes and puddings, because there's very little energy value in it and it's not fattening," he says. "A bit of sugar gives you a lift and takes the pangs of hunger away. But it's not full of all sorts of other nutrients as well. That's a myth"

Link to Guardian Article

Yummier than he looks

If you go to most major supermarkets in Bangkok there is often a dried fruit section with an enourmous selection of really delicious dried fruits, below is a selection. There are some interesting fruits and even the standard fruits do not taste the same way that you would expect as a westerner. For instance, the dried prunes are a bit crunchy and have maintained much of their sour plum flavour. The stalls are (wo)manned exclusively by Muslim women. I haven't quite figured out why this is, but somehow they seem to have cornered the dried fruit market in Thailand.

Is there some well known Southeast Asian division of labour that so far has completely passed me by? Like "oh yeah, didn't you know the Thai grow the rice, the Chinese sell the rice and the Muslims dry the fruit" ????

Not Longan...and it's in season in Thailand right now. It's mainly grown in the south of Thailand. And I thought I had tried all there was in terms of Thai fruits. How wrong I was.....

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"

Most kiwi kids of my generation (1970/ 1980s) grew up with a fairly ubiquitous set of childhood memories. These were of course the goldens years prior to the neoliberal reforms of Rogernomics,and the prying open of New Zealand to the whims of global capitalism. They were the good old days of state proectionism and monopolies, of Keynsian welfarism, and where it seems childhood memories too, were standard issue.

One familiar memory to most is feijoa season in April. Pronounced by New Zealanders as "fee-jo-ah" despite it's South American origins, (it is a guava) most of the kids I knew had a feijoa tree or two in their back yard and we would gorge ourselves most of the season on free feijoas. No one bought feijoas. You left all but the perfect ones to rot on the ground (much to the disgruntlement of talk back radio listeners in the South Island, who would moan on about how spoilt North Islanders were especially Aucklanders at any and every opportunity). But in the North Island where warmer weather prevailed free feijoas were like a birth right.



I miss feijoas. When I first left New Zealand and moved to Melbourne, I was disapppointed to discover that instead of free flowing feijoas, they were instead considered an exotic and luxury fruit sold for $2 a piece. Today the humble New Zealand feijoa (New Zealand is the world's largest feijoa exporter) is now fast becoming a novelty item on the menus of celebrity chefs around the world. Thomas Keller has a feijoa sorbet on his menu. Hock is paying USD $2.70 per feijoa to have them on his menu.

Knowing how impressionable New Zealanders can be (I am one afterall), it is perhaps unsurprising then that despite the fact that feijoas still grow in many New Zealand backyards for free, upscale dining establishments in Auckland are adding this once humble fruit to their dessert menus, and charging for it too.

A while ago my friend told me a story of being in an Auckland restaurant where he ordered the feijoa crumble.

"It's fee-yo-aa" said the waiter stressing the spanish pronounciation of the "j", not "fee-jo-aah".

New Zealand ever more self conscious within the bold new globalised world, has not lost it's propensity for cultural cringe and longing for international sophistication.....despite bringing feijoas to the world

Heesus Christ

Yesterday I had to go to the mall to get new lenses for my glasses. I had to wait an hour for the lenses, so I went to the food hall and had lunch. I sat and ate a bowl of noodles at a little bench and watched a stall worker cut a cucumber.

Her cucumber cutting skills were prodigious. She carefully peeled the cucumbers, then chopped them perfectly in half, long ways. Then she proceeded to chop the ends and diascard them and then she got to work on dicing perfect cubes.

This got me to thinking about the guy I saw on the boat we took in Phuket to the Similan Islands who perfectly cut a watermelon on a speed boat in rough conditions. He had a technique of chopping that amounted to a perfect pile of appropriately portioned watermelon pieces with just enough rind for holding the melon piece. He also managed to do it without a chopping board while wielding a big knife.

I also thought about a story my friend told me about when she lived in a village for 2 weeks in Cambodia. One day she was chopping a mango and making mango hedgehogs....as below...

Controversial Mango Hedgehog


The villagers all came and stood around her and watched and laughed at her, teasing her about the way she cut a mango. It seems that in that village there is only one way to cut a mango correctly and everyone knows it. You peel it first and then slice of the fruit flesh into shards. You do not make a hedgehog.

When Hock first arrived in Cambodia he had an extremely difficult time convincing all his new staff not to carve the fruit and vegetables into elaborate shapes such as flowers and birds. It took many months for Hock to drum out their propensity for making carrot birds and tomato flowers.


So I was sitting there watching the girl cut the cucumber and although I don't want to make any gross generalisations, I thought, "man, what's up with Asians and fruit and vegetable chopping?"










http://takashi64.hp.infoseek.co.jp/page009.html

3 am

In Bed

Eau de vie

Vieille Prune

Lorentz

Tres drunk

Sokapeap la'aw

In keeping with the easter theme, not that I mean to bum you all out, but I found this blog on the morbid topic of the last suppers requested by those about to be executed by the government of the United States of America

Dead Man Eating posts their name, their date of expiry and their last supper

Tellingly food favourites of America's southern black population overwhelmingly dominates the menus: fried chicken appears to be most requested

Fried chicken eaters watch your back, the American government wants to kill you

If I have a choice I think I would go with fried chicken too plus:

dimsum dumplings (high quality hand made)
a couple of bluff oysters and a scallop or two
and enourmous pile of fresh Santa Barbara uni (sea urchin/ sea egg)
some Tattinger reserve champagne
a piece of vogels and a tamarillo