Remember the Seinfeld episode The Comeback? George is at a meeting and is scoffing some seafood and a co-worker snarks “Hey, George, the ocean called. It’s running out of fish!”1. Given the amount of fish and other ocean life we’ve consumed since starting the 2010 food routine (footine?) I’m expecting that comment directed at me any day now. Less surprising, I guess, is that the meatless day hasn’t escaped beyond Monday.
Meatless Monday
Last Monday did not catch me unprepared. Having checked the weather forecast over the weekend I’d already picked up a variety of mushrooms for a risotto. Determined to do it properly, I raced home from work and popped a pot on the stove for vegie stock. Stephanie Alexander suggests halving a tomato and an onion and bunging them in the oven until they’re “black”, which I did, albeit only to “brown”. While they were caramelising, I was sweating a bit more onion and some leek, then threw in a bunch of vegies rescued from the bottom of the fridge. The result was surprisingly nice, as was the risotto2.
Fresh Fish Thursday
The Ponytail, aka Neil Perry, came to the rescue on Thursday with his suggestion of a tomato, green olive and caper sauce to accompany snapper. Simple and gorgeous. I added some smashed kipflers that were fried off with sliced spring onions for a bit of zestiness, which I adapted from the Strodes’ Two’s Cooking3
No Booze February
One down, three to go.
I won’t be making this routine a habit. As soon as March hits, I’m having a glass of wine. It’s only been a week, so I can’t say “this is easy” because… it’s only been a week. Perhaps if I was feeling better and could trace the betterness to not drinking, I might consider taking it further, but I’m not, so I won’t. I was dreading going out for dinner and having to wave the wine list away, but Friday’s seafood feast at Esposito was not ruined by the lack of wine and I doubt that Wednesday’s Libertine bouillabaisse will be, either. Maybe it really is all about the food (and the company!).
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1. For a recap of the whole episode, Wikipedia has this article. It’s very detailed, but… convoluted.
2. Full disclosure: I thought the stock was so nice that I was actually dancing ’round the kitchen singing “I am the stock queen! I am the stock queen!”.
3.This book has been getting a bit of a workout. The recipes are straightforward and reliable and perfect for weeknights.
… and sometimes not.
Channel Seven’s new “food” show, touted as their response to the ratings bonanza reaped by Ten with Masterchef, is My Kitchen Rules. I think it might have been developed using the following equations:
- Come Dine With Me x 50 = $100,000 MKR prizemoney
- Come Dine With Me x 2 = 5 MKR couples
- Come Dine With Me x 2 = 60 MKR minutes
- Come Dine With Me – entertainment factor = MKR
After watching the first episode, I wasn’t inclined to persevere. On Tuesday, however, Reality Raver had her hands full with the Survivor finale, Biggest Loser and So You Think You Can Dance, so I watched it on her behalf. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten my severe personality flaw that means two episodes in a row leads to fatal commitment, so I think I’ll probably watch the rest of it.
Since starting the new routine, we’ve been eating a lot more fish than before. I’m attributing that to the fact that I’m spending more time browsing for recipes so I’m prepared for my Thursday and am fired up by all the options I’m uncovering.
Meatless Monday
For the first two weeks of this I was thinking ahead, with a number of alternatives to choose from. For some reason last Monday seemed to catch me by surprise (perhaps it was the public holiday on Tuesday? The back-to-work on Wednesday?) and I felt completely uninspired by the thought of having to shop on a non-market day. I put a call out online and Daniel came back with this suggestion for a simple soup.
Usually you’d make this soup with pork/chicken stock and put in slices of thinly sliced pork into it, but I reckon it would work just as well without it.
You’ll need vegetable stock, silken tofu, peas (frozen will do), seaweed, and 2 eggs.
Cut the tofu into small cubes. Heat up the stock until it’s boiling, then turn down to simmer. Put in seaweed and peas and let them cook through – you don’t want them green, you want them kind of dark green and mushy to bite. Then the tofu goes in and let that warm through in the soup. Finally, beat the eggs, and then slowly put in into the soup in a thin, steady stream. You want the egg to congeal into threads.
The soup, a dish of Chinese broccoli or similar vegetable, and a bowl of rice, and you’ll be happy.
Let me know how you go if you give it a go.
This appealed to me straight away, however I was too lazy to make some vegie stock (I know! How lazy can a person be?) so I decided to use some red miso paste. Thinking about miso put me in a slightly more Japanesey frame of mind, so I picked up some enokitake when I popped into Minh Phat for the tofu. In the end, I skipped the eggs for a couple of reasons. For a start, I figured that the miso, tofu and enokitake provided enough protein and the eggs might be a richness too far. I was also unsure of how the eggs would affect the miso – I love the way miso soup separates and develops little grainy clouds and thought the eggs might bind it a bit too much. No scientific basis for this fear, but I decided to skip them anyway.
It was good to give the rice cooker another workout and the soup served over the rice was a really satisfying – and super simple – meal.
So, it’s January 26, which is celebrated with a public holiday across the country for Kim Hughes’1 Australia Day. As seems traditional for this time of year, the media has been trying to reinvigorate that most important discussion dealing with identity and inclusion: what is Australia’s “national dish”?
birthday
I can’t be arsed talking about the flaws in the idea of a “national dish”. The idea of promoting a single dish, or ingredient, as evoking this country is ridiculous. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy talking about food. I do! Preferably while eating it. It’s just that I want to eat what I want to eat without considering whether it’s a statement of national identification or not.
No, what I really feel coming on is a short rant about the opposition of some to the fact that Kraft has recently gained Halal certification for Vegemite. In the “news” story about this, the Herald-Sun planted its flag with the headline “Vegemite becomes politically correct“, because obviously Kraft was thinking in PC terms rather than in terms of expanding its customer base. Professional prat Family Council of Victoria secretary Bill Muehlenberg is firmly in the they-done-it-to-be-PC camp:
Why do we have to keep bending over backwards to please minority groups? There are only 300,000 Muslims in Australia out of 22 million people, which is a very small percentage. Of course, there’s a case for making allowances for different cultures, but aren’t we getting a bit carried away with political correctness here? It’s ridiculous.
“Bending over backwards”? From what I can understand, Vegemite has always fitted within halal guidelines, but it hasn’t been certified as such, so conscientious muslims have had to make a judgement on whether they should eat it or not2. Kraft hasn’t changed the recipe, they’ve just had it confirmed that Vegemite is halal and have added a small icon to indicate to those interested that it is. That should fit firmly into Bill’s definition of “making allowances”, shouldn’t it? It’s not New Coke; hell, it’s not even iSnack 2.0.
Since when does allowing everyone to enjoy something have any impact on the original product-lover’s affection for it? How does enabling people’s access to something frequently touted as “a national icon” lead to Islamisation? Shouldn’t we be thrilled that people whose communities are marginally more recently settled here than “ours” are willing to embrace a product that many find challenging?
No, clearly some people are so insecure in their own identity as Australian that they can’t bear the idea of non-(what, exactly? Descendants of convicts? Ten pound Poms? Snowy Mountain scheme veterans?)AussiesTM stealing their icon. How will they stand out as just like all the other Contikitourists true blue if… everybody’s carrying a tube of the black stuff in their carry-on?
Well, they’ll probably stand out because they’ll be the ones being dickheads on a Turkish peninsula around the end of April, but just in case, there’s a petition. Yes – somebody wants the bloody gubmint to stop this creeping Islamisation “through legislation if necessary”.
Because nothing says “young and free” like demanding legislation against allowing people to make informed choices.
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2. I think this is one of the best things I’ve seen on the interwebs – a forum from last year where Australian Muslims discuss whether or not they should be eating Vegemite. I like the fact that #2 feels confident to swear a certain allegiance to the yeasty goodness, but #5 is the comment that really rocks (and gave me my post title, with an added emphasis, ‘cos the brewers’ discards don’t discriminate).
It’s still early days, but the new programme seems to be going well. Better still, it feels as though it could be easy to maintain.
Meatless Mondays
Week two and the weather had gone from hot-damn-hot to warming-stews within a matter of days. My options for our second meat-free day were therefore not restricted by a need to limit oven and stove use. Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible has a range of spicy goodies, but I wanted something one-pot and not coconutty. This led me to re-discover Jane and Jeremy Strode’s Two’s Cooking and I opted for the sweet potato and lentil soup.
The Tiger rice cooker has been idle lately and I’ve been craving rice. I adapted the recipe as suggested to turn the soup into a stew to serve over rice, and I also added some chickpeas to add a bit of variety. This also extended the meatlessness into Tuesday, as there were delicious leftovers to be had.
Fresh Fish Thursdays
As I’ve said before, Lifestyle Food tends to be white noise here. This works out well sometimes, as it did on Wednesday when I caught an episode of The Cook and the Chef. Simon cooked a fish curry and a roasted barramundi. The curry looked tasty, but it was the simple barra dish that caught my eye. The Vic Market fishmongers were well stocked with barra, so that’s what we had – easy and delicious!
No booze weeknights
I’m managing the alcohol free weeknights, although I feel as though a glass of Laurent-Perrier at Pearl with my duck curry followed by a chardonnay was cheating a little bit. Thanks to the twitterfolk who reassured me that lunch was not a night (but, seriously Daniel, your suggestion that “night” was “dark” almost defeated my best intentions!). It’s also easier when it’s not roasting hot. Hopefully February will be as cool as the BOM is predicting, because afternoon G&Ts are hard to resist.
Workout Tuesdays
C was in Sydney on Tuesday night, so I missed my workout (okay, so what I really missed was my Kopitiam Mamak roti and nasi kandar). I made it to the gym on Thursday before the market and I’m wondering whether I’ll make that a regular part of the routine – it was so easy! The early morning crowd had gone by 9.15 and by the time I got to the market, shopping was a breeze.
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Side benefits of the new routines:
- Using the cookbook library
- Better planning, therefore shopping more efficiently (budget and time)
- It’s extending into the rest of the week (that is, the set days are minimums and are making it easier to be in a fish/veg frame of mind for the rest of the week)
- Leftovers! (Not so much with the fish, of course)
Over the long summer break it can be easy to fritter the weeks away if there is no actual “holiday” planned. I’ve let this happen in the past, only to find that the weeks of inactivity have failed to recharge my energy for the year ahead. As mentioned in recent posts, I’ve tried to learn some lessons from previous break-failures by making the most of a time many people envy. Getting away is key to the “holiday experience”, but not always possible. The last trip was fairly recent – September – and the next one will be long – over a month – but is still far in the future which is why I decided to take advantage of cheap airfares and head up to Sydney for a couple of days.
While I was away, I caught up with Reality Raver for dinners, drinks and sweet treats and Reemski for a spectacular burger. (It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to anyone that, in 48 hours, I ate at eight places and drank at four bars.) Really, the perfect break!
… is the celebrities.
This is the only explanation I can come up with for the fact that I have the latest series building up on my IQ but, having seen two episodes, I’m not motivated to watch it. The format is the same as the normal show, which I love. The judges are the same; they are as shouty as in the non-celeb version and make the same annoyingly stereotypical assumptions (She’s a mum! She’ll cook good puddings! She owns a farm! She’ll understand food! She has a big personality! She must throw amazing dinner parties! She’s from the North! She’ll cook gutsy food!) that are often disappointingly proved accurate. The challenges are consistent and designed to test a range of skills. So why can’t I be bothered watching it?
The celebrities are quite possibly household names in the UK, but their low international star wattage1 proves that the key to the success of Masterchef is that the contestants are passionate and (generally) knowledgeable about food. Perhaps all the foodie celebs are holding out for a slot on “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here” where they can demonstrate their skills preparing kangaroo penis.
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1. I suspect that their fame might even be limited in their home country. Half of the contestants I saw over two episodes were described thus: a former newsreader, a former newspaper editor and a former TV host.
Perhaps it’s the excitement of the new decade1, but I seem to have started this year with the idea of setting up a suite of food- and drink-related routines2. If I’m honest, the real motivation is to establish some easy-to-stick-to habits that I’ll be able to continue when work starts up again. All too often I fall into the pattern of responding to the “do you need anything?” text with “yep – dinner” and it’s nothing more than laziness and a lack of planning.
A couple of these are not new: we have attempted alcohol-free weeknights before without a great deal of long-term success, but I figure that it might work in the context of the other plans. So far, it’s working out, however resisting the call of the gin and tonic in last night’s conditions was difficult. Frozen grapes and Calippos just don’t cut it after a while. Trying to persevere with an after-work gym session (clearly my penchant for alliteration would be greatly satisfied if we could have fish on Fridays and a workout on Wednesdays, but that’s inconvenient) was almost derailed with the surprise closure for “renovation” and menu makeover of An An. Fortunately Old Town Kopitiam has opened their Mamak place at QV and I need little encouragement to go there on a regular basis, so it looks as though this will stay on track.
As a way of planning some variety into the diet, we’ve instigated Fresh Fish Thursdays. The day might change during the year depending on when I’m working and able to coordinate market visits, but I’m quite looking forward to dusting off some of our less-used cookbooks and exploring ways with fish. Last Thursday was the first of the fish days and I was reasonably pleased with the results (pan fried John Dory), however it did expose a weakness in our kitchenware which Myer and it’s 35% off Fissler cookware has rectified. It’s also exposed a deficiency in my knowledge of sustainable seafood and I’ve been surprised that Fisheries and Wildlife (or whatever they’re called now) don’t produce an easy-reference sheet to aid shoppers. Still searching for one, but I am fairly confident that the JD doesn’t make the cut.
The other new element to the routine is Meatless Mondays. I came across this idea at Penny’s blog. The summer curry just seemed so lovely that I was inspired to dedicate a day a week to leaving meat off the menu, and Mondays seemed as good a day as any – possibly the best day – to slot it in. Of course, yesterday I couldn’t face having any sort of heating element on in the flat, so I was agonising over what to make – as a kick off dish I wanted it to be impressive, not something minus meat – when Reemski posted this amazing Panzanella recipe. I did some tweaking to avoid using the oven and to accommodate ingredients I had on hand or could get from the IGA3, but the result was amazing. The perfect summer evening meal and a brilliant start to this new custom.
I wasn’t organised enough to start this in the first week of January, so this will be the first full week of the new programme. I’m hoping that it’s simple, yet varied, enough to become established.
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1. Please don’t tell me that the new decade doesn’t start until 2011. I’ve heard this; I understand the reasoning – I just prefer to keep my numbers together. Otherwise, using this logic, didn’t I squander a year where I could have still been enjoying my 30s?
2. I guess these could also be seen as rules, but then I’d be tempted to break them. I figure that by calling them routines I’ll see them as more benign. Time will tell.
3. I bought roasted capsicum from the deli and added some black tomatoes to the almost-past-ripe vine tomatoes I had in the fridge. There was also some leftover lemon thyme and rocket from the weekend so I added a bit of both and subbed some stale Turkish bread for the sourdough. Oh, and used Raspberry vinegar for a bit of a tang in the dressing.
If it’s cricket season, it must also be the season of annoying ads repeated at the end of every second over. KFC is usually responsible for the most grating of these, but there’s been enough written and said about their most recent PR debacle1.
No, the ad that’s annoying me most this season is the one for Nintendo DS. You’ve seen it: a gormless youth spends his summer playing with his hand-held game. His mother looks a tad concerned – shouldn’t he be out enjoying his youth instead of shut indoors with an electronic game? – but, whatcha gonna do? He’s a teenager.
And it’s just as well she doesn’t interfere with his obsessive gameplay because in the last scene of the ad we see her, pencil in hand and brow furrowed, trying to nut out a problem with what looks like a supermarket receipt. Son happens along, glances at the receipt and says, immediately, “they’ve overcharged you $20!”. Mother looks fondly at him and realises that the DS maths game he’s been playing has sharpened his mind.
Now, seriously. If a shop overcharges you they don’t record that on the receipt, do they? Or are we to believe that there was a serious glitch in the computer system which rounded up each item on the bill to a total of exactly $20 overcharged, and this boy genius – thanks to his DS brain workouts – was able to mentally tot that up in a couple of seconds?
Anybody who sees this ad, buys the idea that it promotes cognitive clarity and therefore gets one for themselves or their offspring needs to be removed from the gene pool. Otherwise the coming generations are all going to be as smart as Olivia Newton John.
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1. Although I’d love to see the reaction if our American friends caught a glimpse of last year’s ads. You remember them – shots of players in their garish 20-20 getup with “humourous” voiceovers implying that… EVEN ON THE CRICKET FIELD THESE GUYS COULDN’T GET ENOUGH FRIED CHICKEN! That wasn’t the point of the controversy, though, I hear you say. Well, it might have been, if they’d got a look at this:
So, Ricky Ponting’s just assuming that Andrew Symonds wants KFC because he’s black? Or, worse, an American audience might think he’s a white guy done up like an olde timey minstrel. Pass me my smelling salts.
Do not be alarmed by the portentous title – it’s much less a manifesto than an exercise in alliteration.
As mentioned at the end of the last post, resolutions are not really my thing, although I do have some plans for the year ahead. One of those is to relax more, which can only be achieved if I recognise the fact that “relaxing” is not the same as being merely slothful; lazing about does not necessarily equal relaxation. When Daniel noted in a comment on the handwriting post that he was attempting not to multi-task, it really struck a chord. There’s rarely a time when I don’t have the computer on with email open, a few tabs in a browser and Tweetdeck buzzing every few minutes (seconds, sometimes). The TV is often on in the background, even when I’m reading. If I’m actually watching a program, I’ll rarely see it through without having read – and probably responded – to an SMS or online message that comes through. If I’m on the phone, I might be sweeping the floor, wiping down benches, putting washing away.
The monotasking plan is for January, at this stage. While I have time on my hands, it’s a habit rather than a necessity to do more than one thing at a time. So, what does “one thing at a time” mean?
At the moment, I’m writing a blog post. That’s all I’m doing. That’s the only thing open on my desktop. When I’ve finished this, I’m going to check my email. Once I’ve done that, I’m going to log out of it – there’s no need for me to have it open at all times.
This might be antithetical to the idea of Twitter, but I’m going to try not having my notifications enabled in Tweetdeck. This means that I won’t be responding immediately to tweets, or opening up links as soon as they come through, unless I’m actually focussing on catching up it.
I’m going to try only having one tab open when browsing the internet. I’ve fallen into the habit of opening links and then not knowing what relevance the article/web-page/LOLcat has once I finally get to it, or who I should thank for the enlightenment or belly laugh. The same goes for when I’m going through my RSS reader. There’s no need to open five articles at a time – if I want to read one, I’ll read it.
When I’m watching TV, I’m going to turn my computer off1. When I’m not watching TV, I’m turning the TV off2. When I’m on the phone, that’s what I’ll be doing. No sweeping, unpacking the dishwasher, clearing the pantry.
When I’m reading a book, I’ll be reading a book. No other distractions3.
I’m hoping that in doing this I’ll be more focussed on what I’m doing, when I’m doing it. That instead of putzing about all day getting through a Google reader backlog, I’ll read what interests me, discard what doesn’t, and have time to go for a swim, get to the market, read my book and have a crack at some of the DVDs I had set aside for the holidays.
I’m hoping that, come February, I won’t have holiday regret.
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1. Unless I’m blogging the show, of course.
2. That goes for when I’m cooking, too. Unless there’s cricket. Cricket doesn’t count.
