Stomachs on legs are proud to present

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.

Nothing like good yoghurt.

I could actually wax rhapsodic about the slight differences in mouth-feel and creaminess of different yoghurts. (Oh yeah, I sort of already did).

Every country has its own twists on what makes a wonderful yoghurt. In 2004 when Japanese table tennis icon Ai-chan threw a temper tantrum at the Olympics because the yoghurt didn't taste like back home, it didn't seem total diva behaviour. A thick, high fat Greek milk-product texture could be unsettling if you were used to light yet solid and wobbly Japanese 'Bulgarian' yoghurt. Yoghurt can be any slightly sour milk product, at any point between liquid and fatty or gelatinous. Yoghurt drinks are popular here in Germany: I'm fond of this stuff called 'Schweden Milch' (in Swedish: 'filmjölk') which is creamy and slightly fizzy in your mouth. Apparently the high-sucrose Korean frozen yoghurt chain Pinkberry is spreading faster than Starbucks in the States right now.

But don't assume it's good for you. The good bacteria can survive the freezing process, but there has to be a large enough number of them to survive being killed off in your gut. Apparently (according to a 2004 article by Severin Carrell in the Independent) most probiotic drinks, including Yakult and Danone Actimel, ignored recommendations by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Health Organisation to print the number of live bacteria each bottle contains. Some university in Reading is doing a study to see which products deliver on their advertising promises.

My favourite in NZ, Cyclops coffee-flavour, is available in every supermarket. To me it is one of those ultimate junk-food treats. The high fat content of the yoghurt and the perfectly sour creaminess are a mind-blowing combo with the sweet, slightly bitter, gelatinous texture provided by the layer of coffee gloop.
Sour-bitter-fatty-sweet: genius combo.

It's the kind of thing where you're thinking 'This is so bad for me' as your spoon-to-mouth movements become steadily more robotic and increase in frequency.

I got home at 9 pm tonight and went to borrow a cup of milk from my neighbour/ landlord/ co-supervisor/ dept convenor/ professor and he invited me to eat his strange pork chop with pumpkin concoction that he had cooked

And so I had a glass of wine and ate and then drank some more and ate junk food that his 14 year old son had left around the place....

Cheese Balls

And we chatted and I was told him about Hock, my husband, and how lovely he is and that when people meet him they tend to rethink their opinion of me in a good way

and my landlord/ prof/ supervisor said

"You mean he's the yoghurt to your curry"

And I giggled for a long time and said "yes"

Here's the deal: like with plant varieties, globalization of taste is leading to the reduction in the genetic variability of yoghurt cultures. Ever wondered why different kinds of laban and labneh taste differently? and why yoghurt in Europe (yaourt in France) tastes differently from the laban from Lebanon? and why suddenly the taste of factory-made laban has changed and is now less acidic? and why the yoghurt (laban) from the village tastes differently, and is more acidic than the shop-bought laban? It's all in the culture. In villages and in some homes in beirut (although much less now) people make laban at home using a starter culture called "rawbeh" from the previous laban batch, or from the neighbour's laban. Over time, this culture becomes specific to people and to environments, and produces a typical taste that varies from home to home and from village to village. This is the essence of food biodiversity. Enter corporations and industries: They identified strains with "desirable qualities" and commercialized them. The danger: Most yoghurt is made from the same culture, with similar taste: bye bye diversity of tastes, now we all eat the same thing. And it is so much easier for corporations to make only one "taste" while varying other ingredients like colors and sugar content, and to drop the "special" yoghurts (which were the run of the mill originally). But the corporations and the industry are not solely responsible for that: consumers who accept without questioning or demanding something else, share part of this blame, although it is understandable that they should prefer the cheapest, mass-produced product that is dumped on them instead of looking for that "special taste". People are too busy making a living and trying to make ends meet to go "discern" from shop to shop. Policies are needed for that, strong food policies promoting food biodiversity.

link

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.

Although not as much as these guys

But I have been cooking up a middle eastern desert storm lately

Last Friday I made this seriously labour intensive but very yummy chicken, mint, burghul and yoghurt soup with chili cumin sauce



Recipe from Gourmet Traveller but adapted by me

Chicken Stock
- a chicken carcass, a whole chicken or 2 chicken breasts or whatever
- onions say 2 chop in half skin on, it doesn't matter too much at this point
- celery stalks
- half a head of garlic
- 1 - 2 chilis halved lengthways
- 1 cinamon quill
- 1 - 2 cloves
- 1/2 a lemon
- water

Make stock or you can just get premade chicken stock and a flavour with the lemon, garlic, cinamon and cloves and chili and then poach a couple of breasts in the stock by bringing it up to boil adding the breast, put on a heavy lid, take off the heat and leave the breasts to cook for say 40 mins...
If making stock from scratch remember to start from cold water and wash chicken well to get a nice clear stock.

Once chicken is cooked shred it and put aside. Strain the stock if it is a bit scumy.

Now make the chili sauce
30 gms of dried chilis deseeded and then hydrated in water (be careful and don't touch your eyes or anything when doing this)
Pulse the hydrated chilis with 3 cloves of garlic, 1/2 cup of olive oil, 1 tsp each of ground corriander seed and cumin and a big pinch of salt.

Assemblage of Soup
Pulse/ Blitz 2 tbspns/ big gulp of olive oil, 1 onion, 2 cloves of garlic and 2 tspns of dried mint (or fresh) into a paste
Soak 100 gms of burghul (cracked wheat) in water until soft
Combine 500 gms of plain yoghurt, 1 beaten egg and 1 tbspn of cornflour in a little bowl
Fry onion paste until fragrant 5 mins or so and add stock (around 4 - 5 cups of stock) bring to the boil then simmer
Once simmering add your yoghurt mixture slowly while stirring and let simmer for 10 mins (do not boil)
Add burghul, salt to taste, squeeze of lemon juice and shredded chicken
Garnish with shredded fresh mint and some thinly sliced chili (optional)


Then Abla Amad's lamb shanks with chickpeas and rice



Recipe - inspired by Abla made tastier by me

Soak 1/2 cup of chickpeas overnight
In a heavey based pot fry lamb shanks until brown on the outside
Add some onion, leek and garlic (1 onion, a leek or more and a good amount of garlic 4 cloves perhaps) and fry until soft
Cover with some chicken stock and add chickpeas, bring to the boil and then simmer on low heat for 1 - 2 hours
Add rice maybe 1 - 2 cups depending on how many people you want to feed, add salt, 1 teaspoon of ground cumin, 1/2 tspn fresh ground pepper and 1/2 tsp of allspice (plus a bit more)
With the lid on continue to simmer until rice is cooked
Stir through some butter (optional)
Serve with yoghurt and the chili sauce you made for the soup

You can add carrots at the onion stage and lentils at the rice stage also


Later on this week I made zucchini fritters from recipe in newly acquired Greg Malouf's Saha book accompanied by babaganoush, tabouleh and humus.



And then I also made some felafels to freeze as quick study dinners. I can give you the recipes if you like

My job would be easier if I could get hold of an Ol'eb Felafeler - a felafel maker in plain English.

I had a look around on the web for one and found this gold felafel maker - for the arab who has everything



If this is too flashy for your liking you can instead go to the Jerusalem Depot online and pick up a plain stainless steel one, along with a pair of "down with the people" rootsy Biblical Sandals - it all adds to the authenticity you know. Although you probably couldn't wear them when making felafels if you owned the souless monster that is the Felafel Robot, safety factor aside, mass produced felafels and biblical sandals just don't go together .

*

A much favoured childhood tv series of my formative years was about a bunch of underloved escapee vegetables - The Munch Bunch. Although I may be overstating the impact I like to think that my adult appreciation for veggies and my heartfelt sympathy for clingwrapped mushrooms and lemons and onions (don't cry little olly onion, I'll get you out) could be in some way traced to this cartoon series and their anthropomophic vegetables.

Although the name was transformed in my teens as slang term for the mentally challenged class at school (yes kids are mean). And then as a euphemism for lesbians in the early 1990s. Much to my horror, when I went to find pics for this post I discovered that the name is now in the hands of multinational corporation Nestle, who has somehow acquired the trademark rights and is using it to promote their yoghurt line in some countries . Apparently, in 1998 there was some sort of Munch Bunch yoghurt tie in series for television that flopped...and so yes the Munch Bunch too has been sold out, is there no end to the corporate domination of our food chains and heritages????

Anyways, I haven't been able to find any videos on youtube since it has been blocked in Thailand again but for those unfamiliar with the Munch Bunch, wiki provides the basic narrative

* I have no idea why the orange was mexican