Stomachs on legs are proud to present

I can't help getting sucked into Muji on my few but every visit to Tokyo.




And can't stop worshiping bouncy udon with the just-right garnish and dipping sauce.


It's a texture-pleasure.

I am not sure why sanuki-style udon is not winning the world recognition, yet, like sushi. I gobbled sushi too but didn't dare taking pictures when I was sat at the counter facing the serious sushi man. If I had blond hair, maybe I would have felt foreign enough to do so...

Take away lessons include:

1. Don't forget the herring.
2. Bass drum = partytime.

Afternoon tea: The Kinks from Brian Jones on Vimeo.

"Sore was I from the crack of an enemy's hose,
And the horrible sound of tomato

Ketchup
Soup and puree
Don't get left behind ...

So I stood with a knot in my stomach,
And I gazed at that terrible sight
Of two youngsters concealed in a barrel,
Sucking monkberry moon delight"

US Army Ranger Master Sgt. Mark Morgan: six tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq; ranked number three in the world as pastry chef. From the Peninsula Warrior:

“I’m not as good as I used to be – it’s been 10 years,” the Bronze Star recipient said, referring to the past decade that he served in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He deployed twice to Iraq and four times to Afghanistan in support of Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom.

But it can be said that he must have left quite the lasting impression among those in the culinary circuits, because he previously competed in the WACS Culinary World Cup in 1998, 2000 and 2004 as a member of the Army’s culinary arts team. Morgan continues to remain in touch with ACF coaches and managers.

“Networking (is) probably the reason for the ‘name drop,’” he said.

His peanut butter ganache earned him third place among 55 pastry chefs. Morgan also prepared four desserts, which together, were called “Pumpkin and Spice”. They included a spiced pumpkin custard; walnut cake inside a coconut blossom; red currant compote; and a cinnamon beignet on poached pumpkin petals, a trio of cranberry, and honey, yogurt and pumpkin sorbet with a pumpkin-thyme essence.

The pleasures and calorific terrors of Christmas eating here in Germany are truly hard to resist (I was encouraged at my Iyengar class yesterday to see that even the most dedicated of yogis had developed seasonal paunches).

As usual, December has been a month of heavy eating for me, but our work Christmas party two days ago was the cherry on the cake. Three colleagues arrived from Munich with a whole sack full of pretzels from cult bakery Hofpfisterei and boiled up a pot of Bavarian weisswurst with sweet mustard.

Then, a couple hours later, we all set off from the office by foot, through the snow, for an evening at a local organic cooking school which holds classes throughout the festive season. The classes are more of an exercise in group bonding & eating than anything, though they do give you some pointers on chopping red cabbage. For minimum stress, they take care of putting the goose in the oven a couple of hours before your group arrives, so you can concentrate mostly on getting drunk.

Knocking out out comfort food classics with workmates was a good time, even though we usually have very different tastes: some people watch their diet, others eat cake every day, some love putrid french cheese, others can't stand any cheese apart from the stuff on pizza, & one is an orange food phobic except when it comes to Fanta. German comfort food brings everyone together.



We were fitted with aprons, served wine or rosewater bubbly and a toasted coconut and lentil soup as a starter, then set to work peeling parsnips, chopping a massive pot full of red cabbage, and mixing ground almonds with rosewater & honey for chocolate-coated marzipan bonbons, at three different workstations (one for salad, and seitan for the vegetarians, one for hot side dishes, and one for dessert).



Within a short space of time, fingers stained purple from the cabbage, we were feasting on the goose with psychedelic-hued 'rotkohl' in a buttery-textured apple juice and spice reduction, potato-parsnip-horseradish mash topped with crunchy candied pumpkin seeds, and a warm 'chutney' made of chopped chestnuts with rosemary and organic store-bought marmalade. Followed by the dark chocolate marzipan bon bons and a frozen parfait that our dessert team had made just a couple of hours earlier from whipped soya cream and crumbled spicy 'lebkuchen' gingerbread pieces.

To me, it seemed the soya cream didn't leave the same sour, sick sensation in the stomach that large amounts of regular cream tend to. So I felt it was my duty to indulge in multiple servings, each one doused with a spicy warm plum compote.
I'm sure I've never eaten so many ostensibly wholesome calories at one sitting.
But you know what they say. Gluttony only comes once a year.


Denis sorting 'postelein' leaves for the salad.



Erik the chestnut-preppin' weapon.


'Bonbonbaklat', said Jens.


Yannick's brother Sven has 3 michelin stars. Yannick doesn't eat a lot, but he's pretty good at cutting cabbage.


Genesis of rotkohl.




Christmas is coming, the Goose is getting fat (me too).


Lebkuchen parfait penitence.

Seriously. That's the name of the song, "ចង់ស្រក់ទឹកមាត់."

A medieval festival at a schoolyard in Bonn



Parents who long to save their children from the perils of computer gaming, bad German rap and supermarket curry-ketchup can do worse than to visit regional Medieval festivals, where wholesome activities abound: from carving wooden daggers to weaving and paper making.

Food-wise, naturally there are the German staples of cake and currywurst, but there's also 'flammkuchen' roasted alsace flatbread with onions and bacon, and roasted wild boar - authentically unsalted, served from a dirty plank - and an activity of making campfire bread wrapped on sticks, which isn't typically medieval but keeps your little dragon-slayers silent and morose for 20 minutes or so.

Parents can enjoy wearing dead animals strapped to their belts, smoking fags next to the fake gallows and reminiscing about the days when German criminals were tortured with methods that resembled food preparation: hot oil, boiling and roasting. When gothic fonts were totally de rigeur, and sin was something to be wallowed in. What could be more wholesome than that?

A stodgy rendition of chestnut rice

Saturday
Boom - in between a batch of sweet potato oven fries and a soup, our oven went kaput. Ironically, it's the only appliance in the kitchen wired up by a qualified electrician. Yes, an electrician who works in the warehouse of a music distribution company and moonlights as a hip hop promoter, but totally qualified, he assured us...
We sometimes get electric shocks off our dishwasher too, so maybe it's time to get a professional electrician over. Thank god I have house shoes with rubber soles.
I'm sad that we may have to part with the brown 70s AEG porcelain-top oven that we got for 60 euros on ebay.

Maybe it's cold cuts and cheeses with bread for dinner the next 2 weeks - how very German.

Sunday

I turn the house upside down looking for the Singaporean cookbook that came with our Panasonic rice cooker, but can't find it. I'm sure it's possible to cook a whole fish in that thing.
I do find the user-manual, which has basic instructions for using the rice cooker to steam food or bake cakes. I'm thinking a Mexican pineapple upside down cake cooked in a rice cooker could be elegant.
We have some frozen Korean dumplings. Fill the rice cooker with luke warm water, put dumplings in on plastic steamer insert, and set the steam function for ten minutes. A few minutes later and there's no sign or sound of the water heating.
We boil the jug and add boiling water to the ricecooker, and steam starts coming through the vent. And continues long enough to cook the dumplings. Success!

Monday

A simple spread with tomatoes from our colleague Wulf's balcony, and good Manufactum sourdough. Nothing beats the enchanting slimy stringiness of buffalo mozzarella.



Tuesday

Seems like a good idea to test drive the rice cooker with other grains, so it's time to try a wholegrain barley pilaf. The word 'pilaf' brings to mind '80s cooking magazines - and wholegrain barley is probably considered pig food in many parts of the world - but this dish was a very refined sort of pig food. Hearty, speckled with pine nuts and sprinkled with pecorino, complimented by a side of grilled eggplant done on the George Foreman grill.

If you close the lid in between adding ingredients to trap heat, you can definitely get a gentle simmer on and sauté ingredients to build up the flavour in your rice-cooker stew. You don't need much oil since the heat is low and the moisture is trapped. Of course, it helps if the recipe contains lots of umami components like red wine, mushrooms and a touch of curry powder... Although the rice cooker couldn't achieve a high enough heat to 'toast' the grains beforehand, it didn't affect the quality of the dish.

Note: there are some rice cooker recipes on the net for browning whole legs of lamb (presumably in big-ass industrial sized cookers), but it's very dubious that you could get the heat high enough to do so. The rice cooker is better for slow simmering and flavoursome hodge-podges.





Wednesday

I contemplate the eggs in the fridge and wonder if there's a way to microwave them. Better instead to cook some veg on our beat-up old George Foreman grill...hmmm, or maybe not. The George Foreman grill gave us a few good years of service, but chose to kark it tonight. Extraneous electrical appliances are all destined for the dust heap in the end...I'm all about manual egg-beaters and bicycle-powered dishwasher from now on.

Extraneous or not, it's now a choice between microwave and rice cooker if we want to have a hot meal. We choose the latter, and adapt a pumpkin curry recipe from Mira Mehta's 'Hajimete No Ryoori: Healthy Way to Indian Cooking'. It works really well in the rice cooker if you close the lid and let stew for 5 minutes when the recipe asks for stir frying, or cooking gently for that matter. It's one of those dishes which creates a magical chemistry between seemingly simple ingredients: the whole house is filled with a tantalising pumpkin-cinnamon scent from the vapours escaping the rice cooker vent. Highly recommended.

Mira Mehta's Pumpkin Curry - serves 4
1 kg butternut peeled & cut into bite size chunks
1 large tomato chopped
1 green chilli finely chopped
1 dried red chilli
3 cm cinnamon stick
3/4 tsp turmeric, 1 tsp coriander powder, 1 tsp cumin powder, 1/2 tsp chilli powder
3/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp oil
coriander leaves for garnish

1. add oil to pan or rice cooker, when hot add red chilli & cinnamon stick - as soon as they become fragrant, add the tomato & cook gently for a minute or two. Add the green chilli, turmeric, coriander powder, cumin and chili powder and stirfry 2-3 min.
3. Add pumpkin, stir, marinate for a minute or so then add salt & 2 cups water.
4. Cover or close lid, turn heat to low. Cook circa 20 min (or one white-rice-setting cycle) until pumpkin is tender. Serve & garnish with coriander (or not..).




Thursday
Hiroko Shimbo's book The Japanese Kitchen has a lot of great rice cooker recipes: rice with oysters, rice with beef, burdock and porcini, etc. We decide to go for the classic chestnut rice - but it doesn't turn out perfectly, even though I spend what feels like 30min washing the short grain rice beforehand. Maybe the brand of rice was sub par, maybe the fancy canned french chestnuts weren't strong enough in flavour. Next time we'll try the dish with brown rice (for its sturdy flavour and sturdily shaped grains) and roast some of the fresh chestnuts that have just come into season.


Friday
Carbs galore. Craving a more hearty sort of rice dish, we try out the brown rice & tea porridge (genmai chagayu) from the website Just Hungry. Cooked in roasted bancha tea using the rice cooker's 'slow cook/porridge' setting, dotted with tasty lentils, dusted with furikake flavour sprinkles, and accompanied with salad and a soft-boiled egg, it is a satisfyingly simple brothy autumn dish, but due to brown rice being a little TOO impervious to mushiness, it doesn't really achieve the proper gloopy okayu texture until it's reheated the next morning.



Saturday

Our new ebay stovetop and oven arrive, but oops - we somehow manage to smash the door of the oven into a million tiny pieces...Apparently you are not supposed to lift it up by the handle on the front.
Sandwiches for dinner, anyone?

Above, Lemon Candy (Chara's j-pop is no doubt an acquired taste). Below, an arguably more tasteful song, ostensibly about Lemon Yoghourt.

The author of the below song, Caribou aka Manitoba, played at Barcelona's Sonar festival earlier this year. He is a trained mathematician and looked a treat in salmon coloured socks. We took him & his band to dinner after the show, and his charming Silverlake-based flexitarian bass-player had no choice but to dig into an endless round of ham shavings and rare beef slivers. We wondered if the restaurant would serve blood ice cream for dessert. Barcelona might be my favourite place on earth.

Many people think your brain controls your fat. We promote the idea that your fat controls your brain.

From the Huffington Post "Your Fat Cells Control Your Brain" ------ arghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Does this mean my fat actually wrote my doctorate? Should I just get the University registrar to hand the degree directly over to my ass?

Move over Sukiyaki Song. Nuff respect to Jetdaisuke for combining two of my favourite things, yakitori and electro, with his ode to liver on a stick.

Jetdaisuke's youtube channel includes reviews of yoghurt, icepacks, pink cherry blossom-flavoured curries and diary-style snippets of drinking temple beer or barbecuing tuna eyes.
But his real strength lies in his synthesiser reviews. Highlights include his filmed first impressions of the Otomatone and the Microkorg XL, on which the above Yakitori song was composed.
Personally I find his curry reviews a little too out-of-the-box, using the familiar "oishii!" money shot formula, as seen on TV. Whereas his passion for wacky presets and assorted elecronic nerd gear is much less, shall we say, filtered.

"Is he eating an apple?":



Review of kanji/animal toys with gum inside:



Kelp curry: "You can discern a slight kombu/kelp colour, can't you."



Tuna eyes on the grill:

"...daft assumptions underlie the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's famous claim that livestock are responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, a higher proportion than transport. Fairlie shows that it made a number of basic mistakes. It attributes all deforestation that culminates in cattle ranching in the Amazon to cattle: in reality it is mostly driven by land speculation and logging. It muddles up one-off emissions from deforestation with ongoing pollution. It makes similar boobs in its nitrous oxide and methane accounts, confusing gross and net production. (Conversely, the organisation greatly underestimates fossil fuel consumption by intensive farming: its report seems to have been informed by a powerful bias against extensive livestock keeping.)

Overall, Fairlie estimates that farmed animals produce about 10% of the world's emissions: still too much, but a good deal less than transport. He also shows that many vegetable oils have a bigger footprint than animal fats, and reminds us that even vegan farming necessitates the large-scale killing or ecological exclusion of animals: in this case pests. On the other hand, he slaughters the claims made by some livestock farmers about the soil carbon they can lock away."

Read more here

and here

Just a little something to help you sleep better at night......I just read this on the New Agriculturalist site....

To meet growing demand, FAO estimates that food production will have to increase 70 per cent by 2050....demand for food is rising two per cent per year - a combination of continuing population growth and increasing demand by growing middle class appetites for livestock products - while food production lags at one per cent per annum. However, with expanding megacities and industries demanding much increased share of water, with oil production past its peak, and cities and leisure facilities expanding over fertile land, farmers are faced with producing more with less. The promise of further scientific advances through genetic modification have yet to be fulfilled, and will have to offer (and quickly) plants that grow with less water, on less fertile soils, and cope with rising temperatures that compromise seed-setting in rice and other cereals.

Then I stumbled upon this gallery of world war two posters.....which seemed to aptly fit with the whole doomy mood of my internets readings today

Kook to Cook

So we have been living in Auckland since March when our plans to move back to Asia crumbled along side Thailand's aspirations towards democracy.

We are still working on "Plan B".

It's not so bad. The winter here is very mild. I go jogging around Mission Bay on sunny days and think that life is on the whole pretty good.

However, I am experiencing extreme, cross-Tasman national level food envy.

Let me explain. You know how when you go to a restaurant and order the wrong thing and wished you had ordered what your friend ordered and spend the rest of the evening eyeing up their plate? Well it's like that but on a national level.

I once thought that Canberra was at the ass end of all agro-food supply chains. How wrong I was. I've decided that New Zealand now takes that dubious title. Being an major agro-exporter to the world and extremely proud of its local food culture, I know that any New Zealander would argue that I am wrong until they are blue in the face. To which I would respond with a big fat "whateva". Yes we export a whole lotta milk powder...ngeah!

And I can say that because I am a bourgeois female – vanguard of the 21st century – the new working class male (Make way for a whole new type of chauvanism people!!! Possibly involving unbleached tampons) . I also think that most notable food critics and chefs agree with me. I've noticed in the local food press that journalists love to ask visiting food dignitaries such as Rick Stein and others what they think of New Zealand food. The overwhelming response that I have noticed is a slightly uncomfortable shifting in one's seat followed by the very diplomatic comment "it has come a long way from where it was before".

Which isn't really that far. Quite frankly I think the food here, the quality and the variety can be pretty second rate. Given the very small size of the local population, their limited spending power and generally unadventurous palates, top quality, interesting produce does not make much of a showing on most supermarket shelves or farmer's market tables (back in April, I was outraged on a fishing trip to Leigh that the local fishery there does not do any public sales and exports all of its catch directly overseas).

In the meantime, I have been endlessly taunted by Australian cooking shows. MasterChef Australia, SBS's Luke Nguyen's Vietnam and Food Safari have been goading me on cable tv. I have a serious case of Australian food envy. Sitting here in the living room eating yet more kumera, broccoli and chicken, I'm amazed to learn that the Maltese community of Australia is large enough that they make their own Gbejniet. Luke casually mentions that you can buy most varieties of mango and Vietnamese herbs in Australia now and I grimace (not in NZ tho). And to add insult to injury, histrionic Masterchef contestants get to cook with massive pieces of truffles (I asked for a truffle for my birthday but the NZ truffle crop rotted in the floods this season and of course no one imports them because NZer are just too poor to buy them, meanwhile Canberra had a bumper crop).

I love New Zealand, it will always be home. It will always be my birth place. But an unfortunate part of being a New Zealander is feeling like the poor and envious sibling of Australia. To bring it back to the intimate scale of a dining table. It's like always going out to dinner with the same friend who is richer, luckier, more worldly, interesting and louder than you and always gets the better meal...every single time.