Playing with Your Food
We’re still sort of figuring out what we’re doing with the recipe blog (or the Five Heroines are trying to figure out what I’m doing) and we should have been more emphatic about this to begin with, which is to say I should have been. Sorry. But the idea is supposed to be that recipes are still initially posted to the main blog, here, Days in the Life, not the recipe blog, even if you want to respond to or gallop on from an old recipe you found there. If you want to cite an old recipe as inspiration, that’s fine. It’ll send us all back to the old recipe too.* Having them all come here first is chiefly for my convenience, I admit, but the bulk of the work of this blog does still fall on me** and I can use all the convenience I get. And I don’t want to miss anything. It also gives me a (brief) opportunity to use a new recipe as part of a post, although the Five Heroines are so disgracefully on top of this that recipes go up in PWYF while I’m still reading the ingredients list and wondering what the funny noise under the kitchen table is.*** I may indeed go so far as to post any comments I make over there here too, mainly as a time thing again: I don’t have time to write any more comments, unless I get some extra use out of them.† So, anyway, post here, please, and then the Five Heroines will copy it and hang it next door.
And I was going to talk about scrambled eggs, which is a Perfect Food, but I think I’ll save it till tomorrow. I will, however, note: http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/recipe/0,,2265305,00.html#article_continue
How is the rest of the world, or anyway the rest of the world as demonstrated by this blog’s readers, on Delia (Smith)? She’s god, over here, or rather the Great Mum Goddess. She taught the UK to cook–several decades ago now, I think, before cooking from scratch turned into the latest fashion accessory.†† If there hadn’t been a Delia there might not have been a Nigella (Lawson), a Jamie (Oliver), a Hugh (Fearnley-Whittingstall: no, really), all of whom are huge over here (and for all of whom I have varying amounts of use). But her latest is called How to Cheat at Cooking, and since I haven’t read it I’m not allowed to have any opinion, but–mmmMMMmmph–I’m not going to read it because I’m not the least interested in cooking from tins. Lazy SlutTM is all about streamlining, sure, but I still go to the greengrocer and the butcher, not the canned goods shelves at the local monstermarket.
And:
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2279712,00.html#article_continue
How to Cook without Recipes by Glynn Christian, which sounds like it might be very interesting–even if I think I could have gone through life quite happily without knowing that pineapple and black pepper have a strong affinity–and which is almost what a lot of us here do already, but he lost me pretty comprehensively with this line: ‘. . . Umami [a perhaps somewhat controversial fifth taste after sweet, sour, bitter and salt] is the rich, stock-like taste that makes it better to be human than bovine or leonine or anything else: it is mankind’s ultimate reward, and perhaps his objective, for getting out of the trees, because umami makes roasted meats more delicious than raw.’ There are so many things wrong with this statement it’s hard to know where to begin. With the ‘mankind’ and ‘his’, perhaps, since I’m way too old and have lived through far too many decades of embattled feminism to put up with this any more: ‘humankind’ and ‘our’ would have worked perfectly well here. And I’d probably let the inaccuracy of ‘getting out of trees’ pass if I weren’t already bristling to twice my size. But one of the standard ways of obtaining the ‘umami’ flavour, from the culture that gave us the word, is miso, which is fermented soybeans (or rice or barley). And even those of us who eat meat may, in fact, like it raw.††† Back before the latest 1,000,000 health scares about one thing or another I used to get through a lot of steak tartare.‡ Which brings me to my culminating condemnation which is, so, as one might say, you meathead, what about vegetarians? Are they still in trees because they haven’t discovered the rapture of dead roast flesh?
* * *
* I’m really cross I forgot to mention, the other night, while gambolling among the apricots, that Susan of Athens’ apple pie recipe contains apricots.
** Well duh. Also, speaking of duh, I will grandly declare that at least a tiny, fractional part of my extreme idiocy concerning computers and the net is because I haven’t got time to settle down and figure it out from first principles. Well, third or fourth principles, helpfully channelled through some soothing filter like Computers for Dummies. Blog entries are words: I can do those.^ I’ve had kind of a bad day doing blog admin, and I’m feeling even more incapable than usual.
^ Speaking of the themes of Days in the Life:
- (a) lack of TIME
- (b) techno moronity
- (c) footnotes
That about covers it. (d) Subgroups are headed with the category Hellhounds. As I sit here I can hear them mulling over new villainies.
*** A beta version new villainy being tested to failure.
† For example, someone was worrying that her egg white was refusing to beat stiff for the cream-cheese sauce for my Hot Water Gingerbread.^ You don’t need meringue-quality egg white for the cream cheese sauce: the weight of the cream cheese is going to overwhelm all those fragile little air bubbles anyway. You want what lightness and volume you can get, but don’t fret yourself. AJLR, very properly, says that any speck of fat or protein will stop egg whites from beating up well, and recommends applying a slice of lemon on your instruments of destruction before use. Yeep. I’ve only ever used a paper towel–or, if you’re feeling environmentally friendly, a supremely clean^ dish towel–to wipe everything stringently till the varnish^^ starts coming off. Slices of lemon require prior planning: you have to have a lemon on hand. Then you have to cut it: which means washing the knife and the chopping board afterward.^^^ No, no, no, I’m not starting a new trademarked domestic science philosophy called Lazy Slut Ethics for nothing.+
^ Which, if you’re too environmental, you don’t have. I rang the washing machine man a few days ago because I’m tired of tiny flecks of dirt on all my clean clothing, especially the ones that aren’t dirt-coloured to begin with, which is most of them. It would be impractical to have a second washing machine for muddy jeans, All Stars, and dog towels. The washing machine man said there was nothing wrong with my washing machine, that the problem was that I washed at too low a temperature with wimpy detergent. Sigh. Oh yes and when’s the last time I ran it empty on boil? I may have to learn to buy lemons regularly.
^ And if you’re cooking in, on or with anything varnished, I recommend you step slowly away from the Chippendale sideboard, and go sign yourself up for the nearest outreach class in remedial water boiling and essential wooden spoon brandishment.
^^ We are assuming the possession of Basic Knife Skills, and that there will be no blood. Trust me, egg whites don’t like blood at all.
+ http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=28705 Hmmm. I wish it gave you a sample recipe in the excerpt. Oh, and I’ve just Lost All Control and ordered an OP copy of Peg Bracken’s seminal I Hate to Cookbook. I’ll let you know.
†† I mean, thank god. Thank the Great Mum Goddess. The UK came to it late enough. As someone who moved over here quite clear in her determination not to live a life of mushy peas and phosphorescent kippers^ I am very grateful that Delia had had her first best seller by then.
^ I like kippers. But not the ones that glow in the dark.
††† Kipling’s story The Mark of the Beast has always seriously scared the begeezus out of me.
‡ The basis of the name is the legend that nomadic Tatar people of the Central Asian steppes did not have time to cook and thus placed meat underneath their horses’ saddles.[citation needed] The meat would be tenderised by the end of the journey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak_tartare
EWWWWWW. -Ed.