Stomachs on legs are proud to present

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.

Fuji is a Thai-owned chain restaurant serving Japanese food in Thailand.

It's supposed to be the archetype of the Japanese food as Thais like it.

I had a grilled mackerel set meal sometime last year, and it left me with no impression, so I didn't go back,,,, until recently.

In between my trips to the mountains recently, I just had one night stay in the city.

After rushing through running errands, I ended up in a shopping mall, and it was a dinner time. I was too tired to be creative. So, I just went into Fuji and ordered a tendon set and hot green tea.

It was, actually, pretty good.


Nicely trimmed shrimp tails, not so instant-tasting miso soup with enoki mushrooms and tofu, no sugar in green tea, and nice onion tempura.

But of course, I had been eating the country Thai food for a week right before I went to Fuji, so it might have factored in that my pickiness for Japanese food was very low, in favor of Fuji.

One funky thing was it came with kimchi, which is spicy Korean pickle, not Japanese style tsukemono. I guess ready-made kimchi in jars are much easier than maintaining Japanese nukazuke, which is a particular pickle usually accompanies tempura in Japan. That's okay, ready-made kimchi is probably much better than bad nukazuke. Fast-fermented fake tuskemono's are one of those things not worthy of eating.

Another funkiness: travel thermo mug used as a hot green tea server.

Of course those mugs are not made to pour the content out, so you make a little mess on the table. I like it that it keeps the tea warm though.


With the upgraded impression of Fuji, I went there again at a later date.

This time, I ordered a Fuji bento set with tempura and chawan-mushi.

Not as good as tendon. I think it was too meaty overall for me.

Good: shrimp tempura, grated daikon raddish in tempura dipping sauce (important details), ginkgo nuts in chawan-mushi, inari-zushi, ito-konnyaku, enoki mushroom and tofu miso soup.

Not so good: imitation fake crab in sushi rolls (why can't they just use cucumbers if the cost is the issue?), bread crumb fried mackerel, cold chicken teriyaki, salmon tempura, Thai-style overly sweet "salad cream", artificially colored kamaboko in chawan-mushi.

Thai style: takoyaki was an odd addition to bento... it's like squeezing in a mini hot dog into a dinner plate.


They have a New Year gift promotion which goes: "this coming year of oxen, we are presenting the Neko (cat) set," for those spending more than 1,000 baht until January 5.

Yes it's kind of cute...and Akemashite Omedetou (A Happy New Year, in Japanese) is spelt correct... but... why a Neko set for a year of oxen??

It might make my hobby to go to Fuji from time to time to find a little oddness here and there.

Have a Happy New Year of oxen, 2009!

I read Phil's post on the SBS blog about Bellota Iberico ham, so thought I should post this Bellota ham shot for posterity.

I actually think Iberico ham is kind of over-rated when you consider the range of meats available to man kind: give me head sausage any day.

We were in Barcelona recently to work at Sonar Festival, and this place was the feeding-our-faces highlight, discovered by accident in the Born area where we were staying, at midnight.
So we went there for lunch on the day that we were leaving, as well. Because we are - in a word - pigs.

It's called Set de Born, and if you are interested in sampling a range of Spanish cured meats, I really recommend you check it out and ham it up 'til you drop. There's a veritable waterfall of cured meats hanging behind the counter.

We had some of the ham above later, on the plane, sandwiched in airport croissants, and it elevated that dry and sad pastry into a whole new stratosphere.
Or maybe it was the aeroplane that did that.



After you've been in Barcelona for a few days, you get a bit sick of Iberico ham. Once you've been eating it every day, in little baguettes, you don't really care if it's the expensive version or not.

That's when you start to crave a different type of thin sliced meat.

Voila, the wild boar's head sausage, above. Sliced very thinly, it reminded me of a little bit of fine Italian mortadella (because of the pistachios I guess) but had a distinct meatiness. No spam vibe. Delicious cheeky goodness!



Mmmm... the 'patatas bravas', a typical Catalonian tapas dish, which I believe is normally served with a tomato sauce (according to 'The New Spanish Table'). These just-cooked, juicy waxy potato slices are slopped in this delicious garlicky salad cream. Not exactly diet food. I like how the Spanish consume like a litre of olive oil per day, with meat, potatoes, tomatoes, paprika, seafood and bread. It doesn't get much more Columbus' new world than that. I am slightly nervous about spending a couple of months there later in the year though. Maybe I can start to get in training for it by drinking a glass of olive oil each morning while standing on my head.

The little sausages that look like chorizos, I have the name written down at home, will amend this post later. They were damn good.

The spinach and orange salad had black truffle stuff around the outside and a shot glass of some type of yoghurt curd with pine nuts in the middle of the plate.

Does the above picture turn you on?

Healthy food seems to have a bad rap amongst serious eaters. The best restaurants are geared towards decadance and escapism; the most popular cookbooks tend to revolve around 'comfort food' presented with 'honest' English wit and oodles of butter and pastry. We like to eat fatty food in front of a fire, like, yeah, but what's so clever or new about that?

If it isn't trying to imitate full-fat/refined-carb dishes (I did recently try to make a wholegrain Roman-style carbonara - it wasn't good), food that is created with thoughts of health and environmental impact in mind can also be beautiful to look at and delicious.

Although my tastes were developed through working in cafes and restaurants as a teenager (delicious versions of classic kiwi tucker at Eva Dixon's Cafe, Italian food at Mondo Cucina, and then several different Japanese restaurants), my first ever cookbook was from the Moosewood restaurant series, so I guess I was indoctrinated early. Some of their dishes remain among my favourites, like black eyed peas sauted with garlic and balsamic and spinach. There is something very rewarding about triumphing over the nastier excesses of industrial food production, about choosing to vary your diet with meals based around non-meat protein sources, about working with unrefined grains: it makes you feel closer to the earth and less wasteful since you are eating more of the plant. And healthy food is, like, healthier for you ay.

Really good healthy cuisine (not sure what else to call it) - which shouldn't always be but tends to be vegan or vegetarian - makes simple flavourings like lemon and ginger do olympic feats of taste. It makes vegetables seem like precious and delightful creations (no small feat in itself) and it often involves a bit more preparation and marination. I guess that sense of care and connection to the kitchen and to the produce is what the slow-food movement is trying to trademark.

It's easy to write it off as a need to feel virtuous through food choices, but I actually think, in the same way that following a traditional Japanese recipe can bring a tactile and aesthetic enjoyment - and a sort of spiritual connection to the tradition of that meal - so too can the deployment of healthy recipes in a tradition going back to those early Californian hippies. Is it really a bad thing to get more of a buzz from making zucchini-date-honey muffins than from baking a sticky steamed pudding with flour rubbed in suet, where the buzz is derived from its being 'so English' and the taste so rich and decadent?

I would rather be pseudo-virtuous than an outright glutton.

And in the end, I'm left wondering, why do I feel like I have to justify myself for wanting to eat delicious food that's actually good for me? Why is being healthy so uncool?

I was very happy the other day when a box of books arrived which we posted back from Toronto. It contained two different editions of the signature cookbook of a Toronto chain of salad/juice/ rice-bowl restaurants named Fresh by Juice for Life.

The three branches of this restaurant are quite a phenomenon. The newer edition of the cookbook bears a recommendation on the cover from Jeffrey Steingarten-approved Toronto chef Susur Lee (something twee along the lines of "Feeds the mind body and soul. It's the future."). And, rather like the celebrity-named sandwiches at your local deli, Susur created a signature juice there. Something to do with beets and raspberries.

Like so many good spots in Toronto, it is done out in an easy-to-wash, pleasant but generic cafe style with plastic washable cups that doesn't exactly scream serious restaurant, and being voted Best Vegetarian Restaurant in Toronto numerous times wouldn't necessarily seem like a huge recommendation either. But along with the plastic cups they have smart wait staff and table service, and it's quite fascinating to see all three branches of a place that goes beyond basic fare like juices and vege burgers, to spicy Sri Lankan noodles and Peruvian-maca/sprouted-flax/hemp-seed shakes, so packed every single day, not just with yoga mums but suits and the occasional group of indie rock teens.

I guess the key factors in the success of Fresh are: the food really gets your taste buds tingling, it's stomach filling, and it's pretty affordable. And presented nicely, too.

The way the cookbook is written doesn't do much to mitigate the cliched image of vegetarians as narcissistic health-freaks: why does every such cookbook have a thousand photos of the chef in question grinning in an unnerving manner as if to say "read my healthiness in the glow of my teeth....aren't I puuuuuuurrty"? (I'm reminded of a raw food cookbook I once saw which had photos of this long-haired blonde guy jumping around in the surf)

And neurotic sounding paragraphs like this are rather amusing/unnerving, too:

"Whereas in the first book I managed to maintain healthy eating habits through the entire writing process, this time I munched on potato chips, sweets and chocolate soy ice cream and drank gallons of ginger ale and hot chocolate...I did however manage to resist the temptation to fuel my writing with caffeine for fear of causing irreparable harm to my marriage!"
Like, wow!

However I must say that every single recipe in the two Fresh cookbooks have been a complete success so far, from a mango-tofu-peanut salad to a spicy citrus-infused Cuban chickpea soup. Our recent purchase of a nice Kitchen Aid blender allows us to replicate some of Fresh's great smoothies, like a coconut-chai thing and a warm date & oat infusion which really does have the promised calming effect.

And somewhat endearingly, there is a dish called Wrapper's Delight,
"named after Jennifer's favourite song from the 1970s", and a drink named after Iron Maiden.

The best thing about books like these is how dramatically you increase your salad repertoire, but the recipes for sweet potato pie, dosas and strawberry-lavendar muffins don't go astray either.

Here's an excellent light, creamy, garlicky dressing that's best served with salad leaves, roasted vegetables and a scoop of hummus.

CREAMY SUNFLOWER DRESSING
from ReFresh by Ruth Tal & Jennifer Hudson

2/3 cup raw sunflower seeds
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup grapefruit juice
3 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 cup filtered water

Combine ingredients in a blender or food processor. Process until thick, frothy and smooth.
(This dressing should be good for 4 - 6 salads, and keeps well in the fridge for 4 or 5 days)

I really wish there was a branch of Fresh in Cologne. Right next door to the gourmet burger joint and yakitori bar which don't exist either. Once again, thank god for recipe books.

PS: the spinach in the picture below looks wilted because it was briefly blanched in hot water. Yessir.

Last week my sister, Greg, Tui and I made like the locals and tried out one of those disposable picnic BBQs in the park around the corner, under the TV Tower. I had thought that these were a German speciality, but when looking for a web page about them saw 6 packs advertised at Woolworths in the UK, so clearly I was wrong.

To use anything disposable seems so '80s, but wow, so handy.

Disposable grills are not the only method around here - the Germans are enthusiastic grillers and have all manner of contraptions. Still not sure whether it's entirely legal to grill out in public like that, but it's not stopping anyone. The grassy slope near the large pond known as the Aachener Weier is literally a cloud of BBQ (and pot) smoke on summery evenings, while it's still light. Oftentimes I have gone for a walk around there and been amused at old guys sitting on park benches with a little aluminium foil BBQ tray at their feet, sizzling away, right next to the dusty track around the pond. A takeaway BBQ seems to be pretty handy when you are young and German and can just bicycle past a supermarket, grab a few wurstchen and a grill and away you go.

I'm not sure if we lit ours correctly. We took out the cardboard that seperated charcoal and the wire grill. Rachel thought that it might have been a specially flammable cardboard designed to help the flame spread evenly in those crucial first minutes.

Still, the charcoal burned long and hot (at least in places) and we managed to get our tofu weiners satisfactorily blistered on the outside. The red onion was not so successful, but it always takes an outrageous amount of time to cook it to the point where I like it.

The salad was the best thing, made at home.
-Feldsalat
a.k.a lamb's lettuce or mache
-red cabbage
-a tin of a brand of tuna that has only recently been labelled as 'not certified bio' at the local biomarkt (there was no sustainably farmed tuna available to buy... please accept my apologies)
-mixed sprouts (mung beans and so forth)
- a small amount of crumbled feta
- a couple of cooked beetroot chopped
- couple of tomatoes chopped
- 2 small carrots grated
- a couple spring onions finely chopped
- some parsely
- a sweet potato chopped then roasted with chilli flakes and a little sesame oil & butter
- dressing of a little Japanese mayo, red wine vinegar, olive oil and seasoning

We drank red wine from the bottle, and finished with watermelon.

Crab cakes.













Hamburgers (thank you Maytel).













Fried cheese (yummy 2 am snack).







Fried chicken with mayo.











What the fuck!

It's my first post here, so perhaps I'll start by way of introduction. I'm an English journalist living in
south east London and I'll be writing about things that move my tastebuds and toes. For example,
freestyle cookery (the joy when it goes right, the culinary pain of wastefoods like parsnip noodle soup);
how tea tastes different when drunk from different receptacles and how to learn to love the foods you
hate.

Where some of us crave the occasional tinned spaghetti on toast, I occasionally corned beef sandwiches on
plastic white bread, slathered in salad cream. Mostly however, I prefer proper food – but that's the power
of nature over nurture, right?