Food
A Little Pizza History Is Made
I’ll have a 3 cheese, hold the Soylent Green & Anchovies, please…
From Geekologie:
Wonder Pizza USA is developing a vending machine that cooks and serves 9″ whole pizzas in just under 2 minutes. Each machine can have up to three different kinds of pizzas available at a time, although I’m curious as to what kind of quality you’d get from a vending machine. I suspect you’d be better off eating pizza you found in a dumpster and washing it down with urine.
Bloody industrial designers – why is it they can design a coin-operated apparatus that makes instant pizza, but not a vending machine that can make a decent cup of tea?
Pancake Day!
Those of us who take notice of such things will know that today is Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday, known as Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day in Britain.
Pancake Day or ‘Shrove Tuesday’ (the Tuesday which falls 41 days before Easter) is the eve of the Lenten fast. On this day in earlier times all Christians made their compulsory confessions or ‘shrifts’ from which the name ‘Shrove Tuesday’ derives, and took their last opportunity to eat up all the rich foods prohibited during Lent. Thus all eggs, butter and fat remaining in the house were made into pancakes, hence the festival’s usual nickname of Pancake Day.
So make haste! Today’s your last chance to make merry before being shriven on Ash Wednesday prior to the long 40 day trial of Lent.
Well, it is if you believe in certain invisible sky-beings, anyhow.
When I was a child it was the the signal for an endless round of church services, with Monday and Wednesday morning and evening services added to the usual choir practices, weddings, early eucharists, matins and evensongs. All that tedium plus giving up something you like as a reminder of Christs’s suffering in the wilderness too. What a way to screw up a child. But I can’t complain: I did it for the singing and it’s given a me an appreciation of music, art and the mellifluosity of 17th century language that has enriched my life even though inspired by sky-fairy worship. Of course I’m now just another atheist, which is the real achivement of the Church of England, to have produced generations of moderate atheists with an appreciation for the arts.
But I digress.
The best things about the whole Lent thing really is that it’s a harbinger of spring and good food: today pancakes, on Good Friday hot cross buns, at Easter roast lamb with all the new spring vegetable trimmings. These little seasonal cultural celebrations give shape to a dismal time of year, when all is gray and endlessly tedious. So today, despite my atheism I’ll be gorging on pancakes with lemon and sugar. For morale, you know.
English pancakes are of the classic crepe variety and very easy to make:
Whisk a medium size egg into about a a quarter-litre of milk in a medium sized bowl, and whisk in plain (ie with no raising agent in it) flour by dessertspoonfuls, plus a small pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vegetable or sunflower oil, until the mixture’s free of lumps and is the consistency of single cream. Cover it with a plate or clingfilm and set it in the fridge for at least an hour before needed. (Whisking in the oil helps the pancakes not stick, and setting aside in a cold place gives time for the starch in the flour to swell, making for a lighter and less raw-flour tasting pancake.)
When ready to eat, quarter a couple of nice juicy lemons and some caster sugar, take the mix from the fridge and if it looks too thick whisk in a little more milk or water. Fire up a good heavy frying pan, preferably cast-iron and well-seasoned but nonstick if you’re nervous, on a moderate to high heat. It’s hot enough when a drop of water sizzles right away to nothing. Swirl round enough vegetable or sunflower oil to cover the base of the pan and put it back on the heat: when you see a slight blue haze, use a ladle to pour on just enough batter to cover the bottom of the pan. Give it a good swirl till it’s even and there are no thick spots and cook till the top side becomes opaque and bubbles can be seen.
Linky, Linky
Mineralia:
Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.
How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:
Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.
Animalia:
3 cat videos –
Hot cat on turtle action!
The cat that likes to floss
Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed
Vegetalia:
Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)
These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.
They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.
Marginalia:
Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.
James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.
Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.
Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.
Read more UK, Politics, Oil,IraqCats, Cake,Big Brother, Fashion,. Sex scandals.
Bokbier, Breakfasts and Bullying Bastards
Sorry, haven’t blogged since Friday, the result of having gone with Martin to the Bokbier Festival at the beautiful Beurs Van Berlage on the Dam to meet some very nice SFnal friends of his over from Scotland. I wasn’t able to drink, which rather negated the whole point of going to a beer festival; and as an unwilling teetotaller’s not good company and because I didn’t want to cramp anyone’s drinking style I skipped out early, just as things were getting convivial. But not soon enough, it appears, because the next day I was as sick as a dog.
The smell as I walked into the main hall where the pumps were should have given me a clue – concentrated yeast, fermented hops, collected man-farts, stale cigarette and dope-smoke plus a general pervading miasma of pent-up testosterone. Given that many Dutchmen are about 6 foot 5 or even taller and I’m only 5 foot, I was just at the right height to get it right in the nose. Blegh.
Since people come from all over to the Bokbier festival there must’ve been some nasty well-travelled bacteria from several continents mixed up in that lot. As at the moment I’m still horribly underweight and my immune system is still shot to shit from surgery, blam, I caught something vile. Spent last night throwing up and feeling like a wet rag. I hope it’s not the first flu of the season.
Anyhow as a result of that this morning I needed s some serious sustenance and Martin had the remains of a hangover to cure. A proper breakfast seemed in order. When I say proper breakfast, I mean a full on English breakfast – bacon, eggs, mushrooms, fried bread and beans – which is exactly what we had. Now I feel much restored.
I personally consider what we ate this morning to be the absolute bare-bones English breakfast, though your mileage may vary. There are loads of variations; optional are black pudding, white pudding, sausages, tomatoes (tinned or grilled fresh ones, both things I can’t abide), kidneys (lamb usually) and kippers or other some other smoked fish. All this to be accompanied with toast, butter and jam, marmalade ( there are various competing schools of thought on which kind) or honey (though I like Marmite, all that yummy zinc, mmm) and to be followed by proper porridge (not instant oatmeal) with proper golden syrup and cream. None of your namby-pamby dry cereals or poncy muesli. Then there are regional variations like haslet instead of black pudding and the legendary Ulster fry with soda bread and then there’s various types of Scots pancakes and griddle scones too…
Hard to believe so many people once started the day with even a small selection of that lot – and it used to be fried in lard. We only ever have a fried breakfast at home now and then these days and even so it’s all grilled but the eggs. Those are fried in only a tiny amount of extra virgin olive oil and I can’t eat those anyway so my breakfast’s virtually fat free. Away is different though- hotel breakfasts don’t count. There’s nothing like coming down to a big B&B breakfast that you haven’t had to cook yourself and everyone knows food you didn’t cook yourself has no calories ( just like holiday food, or at Christmas or birthday chocolates).
Anyway, why all this preamble about breakfast, you wonder? Because it’s Sunday and because for once you may have time to read something a bit longer than the avaerage blogpost I heartily recommend Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone 8-page piece on the criminal Congress, published last week but ideal for a relaxed Sunday, though you may not be so relaxed when you’ve read it.
My banging on about breakfast is by way of encouraging people to put a good lining in their stomach to protect against the inevitable explosion of bile that will follow on reading this article, which lays out in very plain terms the sheer dumbassed ineptitude, small-minded viciousness and greed of Congressional Republicans, Taibbi shows exactly how, in simple steps, process of government has been perverted and twisted by the Republican Party to make the US an effective one-party soft dictatorship, and by whom. An excellent bit of reporting. Taibbi’s not scared to use invective where necessary, though he’s never over-the-top; if anything his muted use of insult gives his words that much more power, considering how much vituperation he could have heaped on these host-killing lampreys.
Hah. You thought you’d escaped the politics with all the talk of bacon and eggs. No such luck.
Read more: Food blogging, English breakfast , Amsterdam, Bokbier, US Politics, Congress