Stomachs on legs are proud to present

"we should try one michelin star place while we are here" I said unpacking my suitcase in our tiny hotel room in Paris

Hock proceeds to rattle of a litany of choices and possibilities together with a description of the chef's culinary style as well as stating the impossibility of getting a booking at almost all but Joel Rubuchon's which does not take bookings.

"Ok well what is the number of the first one?" Arpege?" He quotes the number telling me there is no way we will get a table for lunch at the last minute.

I call. They have a table. Tomorrow 1 pm. Hock goes into a quiet stupor. His eye lids flutter while the reality settles. He blushes.

I've been debating what to call this blog post over in my head for a while now, I was thinking about calling it Mae Hong Son, The Other Provence, or Cooking with the Stars.

Let me explain. A couple of weekends ago I headed to Mae Hong Son for the weekend, where my long suffering beloved was taking a week long bromance with Thai food aficionados Austin Bush and Andy of Pok Pok fame. I got to stay for a single weekend, during which it mostly rained. So we decided to stay in and cook. We went to the markets and bought a huge array of not-so-exotic mushrooms other required ingredients for making gaeng hed.



I insisted on buying stink beans.



We also got the ingredients for Burmese pickled tea leaf salad and picked up some larb kuat, larb dip and grilled chicken on the way home.



Cooking got under way.




Some people would and do spend a fair sum of money to cook food with AB and Andy, instead I got bossy and insisted that someone invent a new yummy dish involving stink beans. Andy delivered big time with a dish of stink beans with kapi and mushrooms



Our other favourite Thai food expert was unable to attend the gathering as he was busy in Bangkok promoting his new fish sauce brand Mega Chef and couldn't make it to MHS, he was however present in fishy spirit.



We sat down to an astoundingly good meal





In an outdoor dining room located next to this picturesque rice field



Mae Hong Son is truly beautiful and I wish that I had gotten to spend more time there. Initially my plan was to finish writing my PhD up in MHS but this plan was scrapped after hard words from my supervisor and the realisation that job hunting from the sticks probably wasn't the smartest idea I've ever had. Nonetheless I plan to go back. It's not quite Provence however, as it was apparently described to my friend in New York by a hi so Thai acquaintance, but if fish sauce is your balsamic, stink beans your broad beans and larb dip your beef tartar, it could well be even better.

is possibly my favourite Indonesian dish



It's a complete and healthy meal in one. This one had boiled egg, blanched kangkong and bean sprouts, rice cakes, potato, crispy green beans, tempeh, tofu and a lightly kaffir flavoured peanut sauce. Other Indonesian dishes tend to rely heavily on the presence of tasty sambals to "beef" up the flavour. And while I love sambals, if the sambals on offer are not good your whole meal is jeopardised. Of course you can also add sambal to this.

WHO attributes approximately 3 million deaths a year from such diseases to inadequate fruit and vegetable
intake — a risk factor almost as deadly as tobacco use or unsafe sex.

It is noted that the average per capita availability of fruits and vegetables in Bangladesh and Cambodia are among the lowest in Asia. Among the developed countries, New Zealand has the highest per capita availability of fruits and vegetables. From those stats I'm willing to take a wild guess and say that New Zealand probably has a higher proportion of vegans and vegetarians too.

(sorry i can't remember where I read this, so source not attributed as yet)

"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)

I've been quiet on the blog lately, by my standards I suppose. Thesis deadlines.

But today I post, today Hock sent me a pdf of a honours thesis about American BBQ. Entitled "Why Barbecue Matters in the South" it appears to be written by someone called Anoop Desai as his honours thesis in American Studies. The pdf was wrongly labelled bbqphd.pdf.

Having been grappling with a very long chapter of my thesis now and being thoroughly sick of the sight of it, the topic and of everything I study my surly response was

"it's not a PhD its an honours thesis. The guy from the PhD workshop I attended the other day said that he considers one chapter of a PhD the equivalent to an honours dissertation. Looking at this, I feel like he is right. This is 60 pages. Mine is 300. Fuck, its not a PhD its just BBQ"

so now I go back to staring at my chapter about horticultural development in Cambodia......southern bbq... pft

Romanescu Cauliflower ...who wooda thunk it.

From the simple cauli to the currency market.. they can all get mixed up in the Fibonacci sequence.

Is there a math equation for this though?

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?

Don't we tend to forgot that pumpkins are actually vine? Having used to see those fat pumpkins lying around on the ground and all that.

I sort of did until I encountered this funky one climbing up on the tree the other day in the mountains of Thailand.


Watch your head when walking in the woods.

Here's my five cents attempting to spice up this blog a bit with my not so spicy beige food review.


It's easy to go vegetarian in Chiang Mai, thanks to several veggie-friendly places like Pun Pun and Khun Churn.


Unlike Pun Pun that closes around 6:30pm, Khun Churn is open from breakfast through dinner, and is conveniently located off the popular Nimanhamin Road.


While their dinner offerings are still of great value, most entrees within 60-80 baht range, their best value is the lunch buffet. The price went up from 65 baht two years ago to 80 baht as of today, but is still a good value.


For the price of 80 baht a person, they offer all-you-can-eat buffet featuring a big salad section with three dressings to choose from, a big jar of brown rice, boiled veggies with Thai dips, three-four different kinds of spicy and non-spicy soups, four-five pan-fried entrees, kanom jiin or khao soi, Thai dessert, and all-you-can-drink herbal beverage. You can eat as much as or as little as you want, which is also the great thing about the buffet.


The place is vastly popular with a mix of Thai and non-Thai crowds. Like my friend szephing says, it is indeed a Chiang Mai staple. You can check out some of their dinner entree pictures on szephing's blog. All my pictures here are from lunch buffet.

For a restaurant of this scale, we can't expect everything to be organic,,, as a matter of fact once I inquired where their veggies are coming from sometime ago, they told me it's from talat muang mai, the Chaing Mai's biggest vegetable market, most of them conventionally grown in bulk. But they do sell what they claim to be organically grown oranges, so, at least they are aware of those things.


If you prefer to go vegan, you have to watch out a bit here, because this place is rather มังสะวิรัติ (mang sa wi rat) that eggs are sometimes included in the dish, and not strictly เจ (jae). Indeed you have so many choices and you can always ask the friendly staff if you want to make sure.

You'll be welcomed by this sign.
They only refer to beverage and meat in both Thai and English, but their pictogram also suggests smoking and dogs are not welcomed either... I wonder if the dogs are part of the meat and smoking part of the beverage? Just kidding.


Khun Churn
Soi 17 (they moved from their old location at Soi 7), Nimanhamin Road
Lunch buffet from 11am to 2:30pm
Dinner 5-10pm
Closed every 16th of the month

Last night we decided to have a Christmas dinner with our friends Demi & Carmen before they went to visit their families in the countryside.

I found a bunch of recipes on websites (something I rarely do - I prefer the analog world of cookbooks), and Carmen heated up some apple wine from a quirky old commune called Matsch & Brei ('smash & mash'), where they grow the apple trees in the traditional German permaculture style. The reason she heated it and added cinnamon and cloves, was due to her experience serving it to a family in Chicago, whose reaction was that it tasted like vomit. It is sort of watery, sour and dry, but I found that served this way I enjoyed it.

While meat, mashed potatoes, mint sauce and gravy might be the backbone of a kiwi christmas, having lived in Germany for a few years, this kind of solid repast isn't especially celebratory to me anymore. Plus I'm not necessarily a huge fan of traditional roasted meats: give me simmered, sautéed, smoked, braised or barbecued any day. It's great to have such hearty pub-food at the Brauhaus from time to time, but to feel like I'm making real seasonal celebrational dishes, I want something that doesn't feel like everyday fare: something with buttery spiciness, creaminess, apples and oranges. Preferably arranged in huge piles.

With the recipes gleaned from sites like Epicurious and the Fork in the Road blog, we did an all-vege menu: with two of us cooking the whole thing took probably an hour and a half.



1) Potato gratin with strips of poblano chile. This was realllly good. For those of us not living in places where fresh poblanos are readily accessible, you can quite easily buy little tins of rajas (poblano strips) from Mexican import companies. We used a 250 g tin.

2)Broccoli with wine, citrus zest & garlic
. This was the only dish that didn't make me break out in 'ooh's and 'aaah's, but the slight bitterness and the citrus zest added a lot to the overall Christmas vibes of the table. Marks for effort.

3) Savoy cabbage coleslaw with creamy mustard-apple vinaigrette & walnuts. Refreshing and crunchy, I really enjoyed this, though Germans who like their kraut-salat a bit softer could prepare it the day before serving.



4) Buttery green beans with ginger & roasted, salted crushed cashews. Simply: DOPE.

5) Little baby jesus cake. Obviously, the main reason I wanted to make this was because of the name. It's a lighter version of sticky date pudding: there's three tablespoons of butter in the cake itself, with two more (and a half cup of cream) in the sauce. I baked it in a flan/quiche dish so it took less time to cook than the recipe says, about 30 minutes: count on the full recipe serving eight people, otherwise you will end up eating it for breakfast with a hint of regret, as I did. Easy to whip it up while your guests are festively huddling around the computer after the main course, looking at sneakers online.



Serve dessert warm, straight out of the oven, with butter & brown sugar sauce, persimmon and greek yoghurt. Complimented by Pegovino grenache/syrah and a sentimental 80s flick like When Harry Met Sally.
I found that Meg Ryan goes over quite well when you're on your third serving of Baby Jesus.

So now that I am settled into Canberra to finally knock my thesis over (two chapters to go and then it will be Dr. Maytel to you), I've started a summer vege garden in my back yard.

To date I have planted, lettuce, rocket, mizuna, basil, Thai basil, lemon grass, Vietnamese mint, common-all garden mint (from seed even), artichokes, Italian parsley, strawberries, bok choy, silver beet, tomatoes, cucumber, chillies, garlic chives, eggplant, squash. This adds to what my landlord/co-supervisor/next door neighbour/ department professor planted, which consists of sage, chives, English parsley, marjoram, oregano, thyme, lemon thyme, rosemary, habeneros, capsicum, bay, lemon.


Note: Photo was taken last year in the beginning stages of vegetable garden establishment. Current garden is far more impressive but I am without a camera.

I had a search online to see if there were any good online Canberra gardening blogs, but all I found was a vaguely racist discussion board that had this advice on corriander.

Coriander is a pain to grow. Doesn’t like the cold, but the minute it warms up, it bolts ot seed! I hear that crafty asian gardeners just keep planting seeds every week or so, to have new plants coming on to replace the one that just went to seed. They are like ferns, they like light, food and water

Link. Emphasis added.

I'm yet to get crafty with my coriander, but I've been trying to let only a few heads bolt to seed on the chives and sage. I've always loved vege gardening (as Hock can attest, even when I was a party girl in my twenties I grew my own tomatoes) but I've yet to cultivate my innate asian craftiness (no my Chinese father nor any of my ancestors were ever market gardeners). So if anyone has any recommendations for good gardening sites or blogs for Canberra, lettuce know!!!

Oh dear. This is very close to where Hock and I live....it seems even vege shopping is hazardous in Bangkok these days. Typical to the crap reporting of the Nation however, the below article doesn't tell you anything further about what exactly the vendors grievances against the Port Authority are, nor who likely suspects are? If anyone one knows more detail please tell


13 injured in explosion near Klong Toey market

An explosion occurred at a Bangkok intersection where vendors of the Klong Toey Market were rallying, injuring 13 of them, two severely.

Police quoted witness as saying a bag was dropped from the flyover over the Ratchada-Rama IV Intersection, causing the explosion at 1 am Friday. Bomb disposal officers have yet to determine the type of the bomb.

Some 1,000 vendors have been staging a protest at the intersection since Tuesday afternoon against the Port Authority of Thailand and Legal Co. The vendors protested against what they claimed to be unfair treatment against vendors at the Klong Toey market.

The injured protesters were rushed to the Kluay Nam Thai and Chulalongkorn hospitals.

Two of them were severely injured. They are Yakob Lohmoh, 51, and Penthiwawan Kaewsuk, 37.

Sujittra Damrongsiri, 52, a protester, said she saw a man on a motorcycle dropped a plastic bag onto the tent where the protesters were resting and an explosion occurred shortly.

Pol Lt Col Prapassorn Chartprom, deputy commander of the Tha Rua police station, quoted witnesses as saying that the bag did not explode immediately but it exploded about five seconds after it landed on the tent's r

Mofongo was introduced to me by my pen pal and fellow PhD freak Andy aka Mandevu.

Mandevu is a bit quiet on the blog front these days as he's also writing his thesis

One fortunate evening in Brooklyn Andy and his lovely wife Michelle (an ER doctor at a hospital in Brooklyn) took us out to a restaurant in their hood for some good old down to earth Dominican eats at El Gran Castillo De Jagua....during which Andy proclaimed his love of mofongo



Mofongo is mashed plantains with garlic and bacon

Mofongo with a side of fried plantains


It's pretty good, imagine mashed potatos with garlic and bacon but with a hint of banana flavour and there you have it. Here is a recipe I found but I cannot vouch for "authenticity" (it says Dominican mofongo...but who knows they could be lying?)

Mofongo Appreciator


We also had king fish in tomato sauce



and soup of the day - tripe



Plus chicken and beans and bread and there was some salad in there too, far too much food and the bill a mere $37.00 USD plus tips. A feast that could have fed another three to four South Koreans or five to six North Koreans to put it in McCain terms.


This place is right at the "Seventh Avenue" stop on the Q subway line.
Take the Brooklyn-bound Q train, and get off at the "7th Avenue" stop, and go up the right-hand stairway after you pass through the turnstyle, you'll be right next to the place (and smelling the meat already!). Easy to
find. Even if you went up the left-hand stairwell, you'd see the place right across the road.

In honour of our latest member, Nong A here is a post about a restaurant in Chanthaburi.....the province from which her family hails.


People always say that Chanthaburi is yummy.....and I believe them. Not that I have ever done a serious eating tour of the town but on our way to Trat recently we stopped for a quick lunch at Dream Thai restaurant, near the bus stop.

We had wing bean salad, fluffy fried cat fish with green mango salad. A really yummy crab, crab egg and coconut dip with crudite



And, I accidently ordered two soups, one chicken and cardamon soup and another prawn with that Thai vegetable that looks like a pumpkin flower...... I've heard it referred to as ivy gourd leaves but I don't know what the Thai name is. No matter, they were both good and got the thumbs up from all dining participants.


I told Nong A and she informs me that that restaurant is just a a basic truck stop cafe, nothing special. But it was in my book delicious.

I hope that in future I can refine my palate further in Chanthaburi with Nong A's guidance.

Getting back to the hyper explosive topic of the social life of vegans the New Zealand Herald writes

A recent survey found vegans prefer partners who steer clear of meat or any animal products, vastly cutting the number of potential dates.

A University of Canterbury "Cruelty-Free Consumption in New Zealand" survey labelled people who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegans as "vegansexuals".

One vegansexual in the survey said: "I would not want to be intimate with someone whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance. Non-vegetarian bodies smell different to me - they are, after all, sustained through carcasses - the murdered flesh of others."

The Northern Advocate scoured Northland for vegans and found a Kaitaia woman who was indeed struggling to find love.

"Apart from veganism I do have very high standards, but being a vegan has a lot to do with why I'm single," she said.

The divorced woman said she was being pursued by a meat-eating admirer but wasn't keen - especially as he once threatened to eat her pet pig.

"I know it's quite rare for vegans to date meat-eaters because being a vegan is about having a strong set of principles. I personally wouldn't want to get physical or make love with someone that had hurt or had a part in hurting an animal," she said.

"I cannot bear the thought of pain being inflicted on animals that have emotions."

Vegans are stricter than the average vegetarian, choosing not to consume, use or wear any products made of animals or containing animal byproducts. Banned products include eggs, milk, leather shoes, furs and even honey.

Safe animal welfare campaigner Hans Kriek is happily married to fellow vegan Nichola.

"When choosing a partner you tend to choose someone with the same set of values as you and being a vegan is a clear life choice. If you're a committed vegan it would be pretty hard to feel comfortable and adapt to living with a meat-eater," he said.

But Edward van Son, who lives at a vegan retreat in Victoria Valley, south of Kaitaia, said he had never had trouble finding love. Mr van Son said the girls who moved in his social circles tended not to be the types who ate only burgers.

"I find people who are into health, are creative and artistic, usually take an interest in healthy eating."

He also offered another reason for preferring vegans: "They definitely taste a lot better."

link

The last quote kinda grosses me out the most, and makes me wonder about all the linkages between sex and consumption, granted animals that only eat vegetables taste better, that's why dog has never tempted me, but is it really necessary to extend this taste perception to sex....does vegan muff really taste better.....blind taste test anyone....eeeeewwwwwwww

It's too early for Halloween, but since Maytel cued vomiting...

It seems like more than a few people think pumpkins are great vomiting subjects.




Below is another favorite of mine, also lost the source, somebody emailed it to me a long time ago.


Happy pre-Halloween!