gods make their own importance

On Gastronomy

2012-01-31T16:23:00.004+01:00

There is something

that makes us tell each other about our grandmother,

and her hands, that did not measure but felt

the weight of the flour, the butter, the milk,

and her cake,

that did not just taste of vanilla and almonds,

but of her larder, her house, her apron, her smile.

There is something

that makes us talk at the table

about life and business and love and TV.

Somehow, the words come easier

over the rim of our plates.

There is something

that makes the memory of home

rise up with the steam of boiled potatoes

and makes us see the world

in a dish of curry.

There is something

that makes us exchange secrets like trading cards

about the chef whose hands are lighter than air,

the butcher that tips the scales in our favour,

the restaurant that seems like a place in our heart,

and the greengrocer whose peaches melt on our tongue

like a piece of sunshine.

There is something

that fills us with pride

as a lonely cherry tomato glows a soft red

among the few green leaves

in the small pot of earth on our balcony.

That gives us joy

as we bring a steaming dish

to the table surrounded

with the smiling faces of our friends.

That makes us wonder

to have in our mouth

the taste of a place, a time, a person

translated through the labour

of the vine, the sun and the earth.

We bring to the table what we have wrought from the gifts of the earth

and ask the honour of friends and of strangers

to share with us

the pleasure of the meal.

Please. Sit down. Be my guest. I drink to your health.

This is for you. And may you enjoy it.

Buon Appetito.

Langhe Walk of Fame

2011-04-07T11:16:00.002+02:00

...well, drive really.

Goodbye Gruel! I will miss you.

2011-03-28T01:39:00.007+02:00

I left Ireland at the very moment the economic bubble burst. I arrived in Italy on the Friday, and when I logged onto the internet the following Monday, I was astonished to read the headlines of the day: two banks collapsed, Waterford Crystal imploded. I felt like an action movie hero on a hanging bridge running towards the end as the bridge is falling apart behind him, making it to the edge with one last desperate jump. The news reaching me from the island over the two years that I have been away have varied from gloomy to outrageous, from grim to grotesque. Therefore I found it quite odd to observe on my few visits since that the bars seem full, as do the shops. Maybe people are spending their last cash, or old habits die hard, because the problem is undeniable: one day a shop is full and the next it is boarded up and gone. There are plenty of closed premises now, their shuttered shopfronts like pockmarks on the colourful face of the street. Silent and ugly, reminding everybody of the disaster engulfing the country. Denial is less and less an option.
The death of an enterprise may be sudden. It was a surprise for me to hear recently that one of my favourite restaurants in Dublin had given up, after I had eaten there only a few weeks before. It must have been there over ten years. It was not only one of my favourite eateries, it was also a constant in my Dublin life. I remember going there with my friends when we were still undergraduates, and it was a special treat to eat out at all. The meals would invariably finish with the chocolate brownie and ice cream, although sometimes shared, out of financial or caloric frugality.
Later, my flatmate and I were working long hours in a restaurant ourselves, nearly every day of the week. We lived right in the city centre, owned no television, and rarely had time to shop and cook, but we didn’t mind. The city was our home, its restaurants our dining room and cinema seats our sofa. And Gruel would be there for a warm glow on a wet November evening, its mashed potatoes making you forget your rain-soaked feet the way you do when you get home.
I took my staff there for Christmas dinner too, twice, from different restaurants. The veal shin and mashed potatoes were a popular choice on those occasions, as I remember. Although served in individual plates, it is the type of dish that reminds you of a family meal, a celebration of good food and each other’s company.
And I met friends there to talk, the eating-out occasions that are really just an excuse to sit across a table from each other and talk about anything and everything under the sun. The simple menu and straightforward service in Gruel meant that there were few distractions and time-wasting on the logistics, and besides, more often than not I would happily go for my favourite, the Bangers and Mash. As if in soft focus, I remember vaguely that the menu did change over the years, some tired dishes removed, some new ones added, but the Bangers remained, to my great satisfaction. Two pork sausages with herbs and just enough pepper to not be overpowering. Their portly grey green-speckled shapes would be resting on a nest of purple onion jam atop a creamy-yellow cushion of steaming mashed potatoes. The silky onion jam and the velvety mash luxuriously enveloped every bite of the succulent sausage. Around you, the waiters bustled to seat some more fellow diners who patiently waited at the brightly lit deli counter for one of the small mismatched tables to free up.
I have read since that the owners decided to close Gruel and its more sophisticated sister next door, the Mermaid Café, because the loss of trade due after the crash meant they could no longer afford their rent, still at pre-recession levels. A sum that had grown from IR£15,000 in 1996 (about €19,000) for the Mermaid Café alone to €190,000 for the two adjoining premises by 2010 (Irish Times, January 2011). Even allowing that I have calculated this at the 2002 exchange rate, and have no idea how to figure in inflation, this seems a fantastically steep price rise. Don’t get me wrong: they certainly were not the only ones thrown off the mad carousel at the end of the wild joyride that was the Celtic Tiger. Just one shop I personally will miss.
Thanks for all the good times!

Contemporary Mongolian Art at ITB fair, Berlin

2011-03-15T12:52:00.002+01:00

Dear dirty old town

2011-02-20T18:45:00.006+01:00

Dublin ist nicht unbedingt so, wie man sich Irland vorstellt. Mehr grau als grün, und statt des süßlichen Aromas der Torffeuer liegt hier eher der Gestank der Autoabgase und der stechende Geruch des gerösteten Malz von der Guinness-Brauerei in der Luft. Wie viele Hauptstädte hat diese kleine Großstadt am Rande Europas eine ganz eigene Atmosphäre, die sich vom Charakter des übrigen Landes unterscheidet. Das hat nicht nur mit der Einwohnerzahl zu tun, obwohl Dublin mit über 1 Million weit vor Cork, der nächstgrößeren Stadt der Republik mit ihren knapp 400 000 Bürgern liegt. Dublin, das ist Georgianische Architektur und Pferdemärkte, das sind Pubs, Kirchen und Theater, sowie ein ganz neuerdings leerstehendes Finanzzentrum in der Nähe des Hafens.
Ein Blick auf die Geschichte der Stadt, die auch die unruhige Geschichte der grünen Insel wiederspiegelt, erläutert ein wenig die widersprüchliche Mentalität Dublins. Die Stadt ist an einer großen natürlichen Bucht mit einem schiffbaren Fluss gelegen, und war von der normannischen Invasion im Jahre 1169 bis zur Unabhängigkeitserklärung der Irischen Republik 1919 kontinuierlich unter der direkten Herrschaft der machthungrigen Nachbarn aus dem Osten. Zumal die Überfahrt von Britannien zur Dubliner Bucht nur ein Katzensprung ist – bei gutem Wetter kann man von den Wicklow-Bergen südlich der Stadt die Hügel von Wales am Horizont ausmachen. Dublin zeigt den Einfluß der jahrhundertelangen Fremdherrschaft teils unverblümt, teils aber nur sichtbar wenn man die Geschichten dazu kennt, die heute noch bei einem Pint dunklen Biers in den holzgetäfelten, wenn auch nicht mehr verrauchten Pubs der Stadt erzählt werden. Die beiden großen Kathedralen mit ihren markanten Silhouetten sind nicht katholisch, sondern gehören der anglikanischen Church of Ireland. Trinity College, die älteste und ehrwürdigste Universität des Landes, deren neoklassizistische Gebäude auch an der Themse nicht fehl am Platz scheinen würden, ließ erst im späten 19. Jahrhundert Studenten aus der großen katholischen Mehrheit der Bevölkerung zu. Umgekehrt durften bis im Jahre 2007 in Croke Park, dem größten und modernsten Sportstadium des Landes, keine ‘fremden Sportarten’ wie Rugby, Cricket und Fußball gespielt werden, um der Kultur der verhassten englischen Besatzer auch in ihren letzten Überresten keine Ehre zu erweisen. Selbst als das bedeutete, dass die Nationalmannschaft der Republik Irland in den Vorrunden zur Fußballweltmeisterschaft 2002 auf einem peinlich unebenen Rasen spielen musste, in dessen tiefen Regenpfützen der Ball auch mal liegen blieb, mitten im Spiel.
In wenigen Jahren ist es 100 Jahre her, dass sich eine zusammengewürfelte Gruppe von Rebellen – angeführt von Lehrern, Dichtern und Intellektuellen – am Ostermontag in Dublin gegen die Herrschaft der englischen Krone auflehnte. Es dauerte allerdings ein Dreivierteljahrhundert, bis die kleine Republik eine wirtschaftliche Blütezeit erleben konnte, und damit auch tatsächliche konjunkturelle, kulturelle und moralische Emanzipation von dem starken Gravitationseinfluß des mächtigen Nachbarn. Die Studenten des Trinity College haben heutzutage nicht nur verschiedene Religionen, sondern auch verschiedene Hautfarben. In Croke Park hat die irische Rugby-Nationalmannschaft kürzlich ihr englisches Gegenstück begrüsst und mit anstandsloser Gastfreundschaft zur britischen Hymne applaudiert – um sie dann haushoch zu schlagen, zur großen Genugtuung der Iren. Und das alte Fußballstadium wurde inzwischen abgerissen und neuaufgebaut, was dem Erfolg Irlands in den Weltmeisterschaften aber noch nicht viel zugetragen hat. Dublin ist moderner geworden, bunter und weltoffener. Nach Malz riecht es aber – zum Glück – immer noch.

On a Sunday in February

2011-02-15T14:59:00.001+01:00

Spring economics

2011-02-10T15:14:00.003+01:00

Spring is a wonderful time. There is always that first day when you notice the warmth of the sun on your skin without the chilly bite of winter air snapping it away, and you feel invigorated, hopeful that another summer is coming.
It is an exhilarating thing to witness life reawakening in the slumbering fields and forests. But here in Piedmont spring plays another interesting game: it becomes the tattle-tale of the agricultural property market and wine business. It reveals the value of the vineyard properties at a glance. And here is how: In the summer and autumn, the hills of the Langhe are covered in the stripes of vinerows, and occasionally the dots of hazelnut bushes. Determining the type of vine by its leaves and young bunches of grapes is possible, but definitely something for experts. We can also establish the exposure of the vineyard by checking the direction of the compass with the help of the sun and a watch, but doing so for every vineyard will take the dedication of a 19th century explorer. Most of us amateurs will hardly bother, and so to us the hills remain an uncharted sea of vines. And winter is the great leveller, covering everything with its egalitarian blanket of snow.
But as Frost said, ‘spring is the mischief’ - in early spring, the Langhe look more like a checkerboard, patches of brown earth next to white ones still glazed with snow. You don’t even have to look at the compass to understand the simple logic that the patches where the snow melts first get the most sun. And the patches that get the most sun will have riper grapes, and all other things being equal, better wine. The brown patches of spring denote the more expensive vineyard properties. Don’t blame me for saying it, bigmouth spring got there before me.

Mending Wall (Robert Frost)

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbits out of hiding
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says: ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing one stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old stone-savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only, or the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying
And he likes having thought of it so well.
He says again: ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Marketing by Thesaurus?

2011-01-11T22:56:00.005+01:00

Perfume. It's the golden calf in marketing. You can invent everything about it and around it, since neither the name nor the branding strategy has to have anything to do with the contents of the bottle, in a strict sense. It's just a bit of alcohol and some smelly herbs and things anyway.

But the perfume market these days is huge, and it can be tricky to come up with yet another name conveying that this scent is indeed the essence of female attractiveness. So, says the Dior marketing manager in the brainstorm session, let's get down to brass tacks here: what IS the essence of female attractiveness? Something...captivating. Alluring. Spellbinding. Something...dangerous. Risky. I know: HYPNOTIC POISON.

Really?

Interesting fact: there is a website that publishes people's reviews of fragrances. The descriptions are even more poetic than your usual wine reviews (which have to deal with the profane consequence of getting drunk in the process, whereas perfume-sniffing is PURE ethereality...)

2010-12-17T10:47:00.001+01:00

Old wine in new wineskins

2010-11-17T14:03:00.004+01:00

In Andalusia, new ideas for sustainable development do not necessarily mean that things have changed.

The landscape of Andalusia has a luscious texture. Swelling hills are covered with fields of grain, shimmering in the sun and swaying softly in the wind like rippling silk. More hills, dotted with olive trees, grey-green clusters in tidy rows. Patches of lighter green, vineyards, arranged in low bush-vines or strung along wires in parallel lines. A geometrical landscape, ordered, neat, cultivated.
To be cultivated is another way of saying to be civilized. A cultivated person has had to tame her impulses, work on her manners, and develop her education. Her habits have in fact been ‘cultivated’. But the word betrays much older roots: for the ancient Romans and Greeks, to be civilized meant to cultivate. Every member of the civitas, or society, was also a landowner and thus cultivator of the land and its products. Unlike the barbarian who hunted for his fare, the citizen cultivated much of his own food and ate what he produced in his fields and gardens. Not only that, but the most valued of his crops were exactly those that needed further processing, further input of human skill and knowledge, before they could be consumed. These were, first and foremost, grain, grapes and olives. Thus, bread, wine and olive oil became more than just the staples of the classical kitchen. They were seen as the very embodiment of culture and civilisation in the Mediterranean basin.

In some ways, little has changed. In 2008, four countries of the Mediterranean area made an application to UNESCO to adopt the ‘Mediterranean Diet’ into their list of World Cultural Heritage. Spain was one of them, along with Italy, Greece and Morocco. The UNESCO project of World Heritage includes natural as well as cultural and tangible as well as intangible assets, such as language, dances, music, or craft traditions. As such, the Mediterranean Diet, described by its proponents as not just a list of products, but a holistic notion of traditional food production and consumption, would easily fit the requirements. The initiative is meant to endorse traditional practices, revitalize rural areas, promote sustainable production and encourage healthy eating, especially in the face of dramatic increases in obesity rates in the sponsoring countries.
These are laudable goals, and one should hope they could be realised. But it is worth looking a little underneath this noble surface. The question is: who benefits, economically? Money does make the world go round, for all our claims to moral righteousness. The fulfilment of the request by the UNESCO would certainly mean a boost to the food-producing sectors in the region, particularly those involved in the production of the ‘ancient staples’. Incidentally, or rather not, the food-producing sector in these countries is one of the largest of their respective economies. In a way, the recognition of the Mediterranean Diet as a protected entity of product and production makes this the first über-PDO, the first inter-regional Protection of Denominated Origin. This may be an unintended consequence for some of the more noble-minded proponents of the initiative, but it is certainly to be expected. It is another such coincidence that the Mediterranean Diet, for all its variations within the region, always agrees on the centrality of olive oil, and the application has been made by the three countries leading in worldwide olive oil production.

This initiative is symptomatic for our times. Modern wealth is not so much based on the possession of primary resources anymore. For all food products, the production chain consists of a minimum of four steps: production of raw materials, processing, distribution and sales/marketing. Processing does not have to mean industrial processing; it can be as traditional as making cheese, and as simple as putting lettuces into a box for the farmers’ market. The highest value is added at the last step of the chain, sales and marketing. That is why trademarks have become so significant in the business world. And what is a Geographical Indication, a PDO, if not a kind of trademark?
It is a pity that well-meant efforts are often hijacked or appropriated by the very forces that they were supposed to counteract. For instance, few people would oppose the idea of sustainable development in its fundamental principles. But sustainable development is not simply achieved with the paying of fair prices to producers, which ought to be a given for anyone with a certain moral rectitude. Sustainability in the context of development implies several things. It means on the one hand being mindful of the environment and natural resources - not dirtying our own nest. But it also means a development that is sustained, that is ongoing and more effective than a once-off shot in the arm. Development becomes sustainable when it is decoupled from outside assistance, as in form of aid or subsidies for example. It needs to become self-supporting, and autonomous. Autonomy translates as the ability to act independently, to be able to react to new situations, such as fluctuations in the market or rising oil prices. The more control one has over all the steps of production, the more able one is to respond to changes in the market. It is therefore an essential element for real sustainable development to empower rural communities and small-scale producers to be in control over all aspects of the production chain, particularly over the final one, which, as already stated, provides the highest returns. Do not just teach a man how to fish, but also how to market and sell his fish for the best price.

Andalusia has undergone considerable economic development in the last years, and some of it is indeed self-sustaining. But many of the old structures remain. Take the case of LA Organic, a company that calls itself ‘Spain’s premier extra-virgin olive oil producer’, based in Ronda, in the province of Málaga. The company is a prime example of old wealth in new guise. The company was founded in 2004 by a wealthy businessman from Madrid, Pedro Gomez de Baeza, who understood the market opportunities in the food sector, and especially in the growing niche of organic products. The organic declaration is a label which has gained significantly in importance, and so also in value. Rightly or not, consumers today attach a higher value to a product declared ‘organic’, whether it is for health or ethical or other reasons. This allows the product to be sold in a higher price bracket.
In another clever move, the company has inserted itself in a part of the food market which is almost entirely governed by symbolic choices: condiments. Beside the olive oil production, it has expanded into other sauces and seasonings, such as vinegars, mustards and salts. As a further step, the move towards teas, coffees and chocolates is planned. All these items have something in common: the lack of necessity. These products do not have much nutritional value; there is no real need to use them. Apart from salt - however, there is little ‘need’ to use black lava salt or pink mountain salt from the Andes, as offered by LA Organic. The absence of necessity means that there is no maximum price. Unlike bread or milk or pasta, these are not staples that would incur a negative reaction from the consumers if priced too highly. They are the accessories of the food world, luxury items with the prime function to validate the taste and purchasing power of the owner. The higher the price, the better.

A range of international collaborators were invited to join the project of LA Organic. All of them are experts in the final part of the production chain, the marketing and promotion sector. Among them, Michel Rolland, who has made a career out of adding value to a food product. As a travelling consultant enologist, he advises winemakers all over the world on the style of wine that will be a guaranteed sell, according to current market trends, which are often influenced by his friend Robert Parker, the American wine critic. Another of the ‘prestigious experts’ is Philippe Starck, a well-known architect and designer, who has, as is repeatedly pointed out in the company literature, provided the design for the olive oil containers of the company, ‘the perfect way to establish this delicious olive oil as a sought-after luxury ingredient’. Other collaborators are cited as sales and marketing experts, or ‘olive oil experts’, who are involved in the actual production of the oil only insofar as they taste and assess it. The company literature makes a point of disclosing its priorities, as it says: ‘LA Organic invested in professional gastronomes, food professionals to drive the project, its products and brand to a different level of food origins, food education, luxury brand positioning and distribution networks.’ In reference to the actual producers, the literature merely states: ‘…the farmers who pass Lobillo’s stringent assessment are proud to participate in such a prestigious project, and embrace with enthusiasm LA’s very strict farming and productions recommendations.’
On its website, LA Organic claims to be improving local infrastructure and increasing small-scale traditional food production. The fact is though that this is a group of outside investors, bringing outside expertise, skills and money to the region, drawn in by what they themselves call ‘the momentary trend in organic agriculture’. The farmers have gained little, except a momentary income, may it even be somewhat more generous than selling to large industrial producers with no presumptions for a clean and green image. The control over most of the operation, and the ownership of the most valuable product and most profitable part of the production chain, lies firmly and unchangedly in the hands of the privileged. Fair pay it may be, empowerment it is not.

The decision on the candidature of the Mediterranean Diet for the UNESCO list of World Cultural Heritage will be published in September 2009*. The initiative has many supporters, mainly founded on the hope that it will herald a change to the deteriorating eating habits in the region, and help to safeguard traditional lifestyles that have developed over centuries in harmony with local environments. But there is a danger in relying too much on the UNESCO approval to achieve these aims. A mere change in symbolism will not be enough to transform the underlying structures of economy and society, and bring lasting change to the olive farmers of Andalusia.

* I wrote this in June 2009.

Bones at the Late Night Bakery - Ferrara

2010-11-13T15:29:00.002+01:00

A matter of decency

2010-10-01T01:03:00.004+02:00

Last Saturday, one thousand people were fed for free in the centre of Turin. They didn’t eat loaves and fishes, and it wasn’t a miracle either. These thousand people ate for free, because they ate food that nobody wanted anymore. Their dinner – a tomato-and-bread soup, roasted peppers and a portion of sweet pudding – was entirely made from food that had been discarded by markets and supermarkets: overripe tomatoes, yesterday’s bread, peppers that were looking a bit tired, milk on its sell-by date.
The saying insists that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and there certainly is not. Who paid for this dinner? How was it paid for? The same way that the always shiny spotless apples, gleaming day after day from the supermarket baskets, are paid for; the same way the always ample use-by dates on the products we buy are paid for: mark-up. Knowing that they will discard a certain amount of their produce unbought, unused, and unspoiled, the shops will mark up, or cut costs in purchasing.
The event in Turin was meant to highlight the fact that good resources are being thrown away. But not resources, actually: food. There is – or should be – something sacred about food, in the good old meaning of deserving respect. We ought to respect food, as it is literally a matter of life and death. In German, one word for ‘food’ is Lebensmittel, or means of life. Treating food as a mere resource, or commodity, removes that aspect of recognition and respect. Our means of life are reduced to economic units that are acquired and discarded at will for the sake of the bottom line. This leads to the grotesque scenarios that the event in Turin wanted to put on the pillory, the daily waste and destruction of perfectly edible food, by the container load.
Three people spoke before dinner, all of whom have been pointing the finger to this appalling situation for a while already. The first was Andrea Segrè, professor of agronomy at the University of Bologna and initiator of the Last Minute Market, a project that aims to take care of the surplus products that the distribution behemoths are not flexible enough to deal with in any other way than just throwing them away. The Last Minute Market tries to catch this surplus before it becomes waste, and bring it back into the commercial cycle, giving it to someone who can use or sell it. The second speaker was Tristram Stuart, a British writer and activist who has been campaigning against food waste ever since an early stint as a pig-farming entrepreneur made him consider the very subjective meaning of ‘waste’ and ‘raw material’. Last to speak was Carlo Petrini, founder and president of the Slow Food movement and passionate crusader for an old-fashioned respect for our food.

There was a range of the usual suspects at the event: the left-leaning students, the righteous middle-aged ladies, the activist socialites, the seasoned counterculture veterans with the (by now greying) dreadlocks; also some people simply curious about what it might taste like (general verdict: yummy). So far, so goody-two-shoes. But the organisers showed an integrity that is sometimes lacking when well-off gourmets are slumming it with the simple dishes of their peasant forefathers. Many diners were certainly relishing the exotic titillation of eating the leftovers of others, and of being served in a long line from a large plastic bucket, but among them there was a handful of those for whom leftovers and hand-me-downs are the daily bread, if they are lucky enough to have it. The ones carrying worn-out plastic bags and wearing ill-fitting shoes, who more than likely had not been inside the elegant Teatro Carignano to listen to the speeches before dinner; a few of them at least were busy asking passers-by for a bit of their spare change. Inviting them to dinner was a decent thing to do. Logical, if you think about it. But in all the free dinners I have had, even here in Piedmont, that was a first.

Falsche Schmorgurke - (Braised watermelon rind with German flavours)

2010-08-22T16:26:00.002+02:00

This is the recipe for a very yummy dish.
The flavour combination – mustard, dill, cream, vinegar (from the capers) – comes from the North of Germany. The idea for this recipe comes from a combination of different recipes for Schmorgurke, or braised cucumber, which is a common dish in North-Eastern Germany, where they make famous cucumber pickles.

But I think I’m the first to use it for watermelon rind!

I have a bit of an obsession with watermelon rind at the moment. This is the white part of the melon, which has a consistency very much like cucumber (especially the firmer varieties used for braising). Until about a month ago, I didn’t even know that part was edible, but then (looking for chutney recipes) I came across some recipes for pickled watermelon rind, which is apparently something people do in the Southern USA. Intrigued, I kept looking, and I learned that in India, for example, the watermelon rind is used as a vegetable in curries etc. But since I haven’t really any experience with making curries, I thought I try out a flavour profile my palate might recognise.

I love the idea of being able to throw away less, and be able to use things as much as possible, especially when it concerns food. I wholeheartedly support this idea, and try to take care of my own household accordingly, and I’m pleased to find that I am saving money too – plus I enjoy the challenge of creatively dealing with leftovers and ‘surplus material’.
This however has not even been a challenge but super-easy, and really tasty.

Watermelon rinds are just what their name implies. Next time you have watermelon, save the white bits. You need to cut off all the red part (which will just get mushy, and anyway, you’ll have eaten most of it!) and the green skin, which cuts off easy with a sharp knife or good potato peeler. I hear some people eat that too, but for the moment, I discard it.
The watermelon rind keeps for a few days in the fridge without problems. I usually put it in a plastic box with lid, without water or anything, and it was still good after four days. It tends to wilt a bit, very similar to cucumber. If you put it in water, the cells will swell up and it gets mushy, so rather don’t do that.

I have already tried out a watermelon rind pickle, with vinegar, honey, cinnamon, ginger, raisins, lemon juice and some cloves, and it was quite popular at a recent picknick. My friend who actually does have some Asian cooking capacities (understatement, she cooks very well) also came up with a watermelon rind salad with soy sauce dressing and toasted sesame seeds. But here now is the German contribution to the wonderful world of watermelon rind recipes.

Braised watermelon rind, German-style
The recipe makes 4 portions. I recommend it with boiled potatoes, but rice will work too.
The rind of a 5kg watermelon (makes about 600g) – cut into small chunks (about an inch long, ½ inch wide, or 2cm x1cm)
Tomatoes – I used 2 large ones, as big as a fist, or 5-6 small ones – cut roughly (if you mind the skins, feel free to peel them first)

Butter –for frying
Onion –a small white one – chopped finely
Belly bacon – 75-100g – chopped
White wine – a dash
Vegetable broth – a cup (not too strong)
Salt – a pinch
Mustard – 2 Tablespoons (or to taste) – use the kind you like, Dijon/ mild one is good
Dill – 2 teaspoons
Capers – in vinegar – 1-2 teaspoons
Cream – single cream, 150-200ml (1 small cup) – the cream really ties it together. Use less if you like, but do use some, you won’t regret it.

What to do:
Slowly fry the bacon and onion in the butter, until translucent (medium heat). Add the watermelon rind. Fry a bit, with the lid on, then put a dash of white wine in to start the braising. Braise a bit, keeping the lid on (don’t let the liquid disappear; in case of emergency, add a bit of the broth already or a little bit of water), until the watermelon rind starts to turn translucent. Add the tomatoes and a pinch of salt, braise a bit until the tomatoes go soft and start to give off their juice. Then add the vegetable broth, mustard, dill and capers. Let it stew on low heat for a while (up to 10 minutes). In this time, the watermelon rind will go translucent and soft, and the flavours blend nicely. Add the cream at the end, stir, stew for another minute or two, then it’s ready!
Serve in deep dishes on chunks of boiled potatoes, or rice.

Something to drink with it? A light blonde beer will always go. I had white wine: a Chilean gewürztraminer, light-bodied and fresh – the floral notes actually played off very well with the fragrant notes of the dill and mustard.

At Oxford. Of course.

2010-07-13T20:55:00.002+02:00

and why wouldn't you

2010-06-20T12:45:00.003+02:00

Rebellion

2010-04-14T22:49:00.001+02:00

F.I.A.T.

2010-03-20T19:26:00.002+01:00

Turin is the city of FIAT, so it is not a surprise that these cars are very common around here. But there are differences. Take the Cinquecento, the original as well as the snazzy new version: that is a car for the city dweller, the urbanite, the cosmopolitan, the yuppie, the one who is quite aware of the chicness of his car, the cute little button. There are cinquecento aficionado clubs. On certain Sundays, they meet up and drive around in a long file, happily quacking away as they pass through town, like proud little ducklings on their first outing. Favourite colours: powder blue (retro!), mother-of-pearl and cherry red.
There are quite a few FIAT Puntos around as well, but there is little to be said about them. They are the car of the suburbs, the family with 2.4 children or whatever the average here in Italy is, the one with the ample space in the back for Saturday shopping trips to the supermarkets or IKEA. Practical, sensible, useful, booooring. Preferred colour: concrete grey and pigeon blue.
The ones that make me laugh though are the old Pandas. Remember them? The egg-box shaped ones with the slim wheels and the moped engine, or so it sounds like. They are the preferred car of the country folk, especially the older generation. They are what people here in the countryside use instead of a Zimmerframe. You see the old ladies slowly rolling up to the curb outside the bakery – I’m not even sure they turn the motor on all the time, this place is so hilly anyway. The old men on the other hand, the ones with the hunter’s caps and padded vests, use their Pandas to zoom at top speed (25km/h) on the paths that run in between vegetable fields in the plain beneath the town. The trunk of their cars (colour: white, rust brown or navy blue with mud splatterings) are usually full of stacked plastic baskets with bright green lettuce or spinach fresh from the fields. Most of them have a sticker of St. Christopher or Padre Pio on the windshield (I guess that’s easier than to have it embroidered on their padded vests), and a rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror…

I'm jamming...

2010-03-08T21:30:00.002+01:00

A few Sundays ago, I made my first jam. Orange marmalade to be precise, from untreated Sicilian blood oranges. It took me a few hours, and I had to wash the kitchen floor and myself afterwards because everything got a bit sticky, but I did it. That evening I was sitting on my couch just looking at those glorious five jam jars with their orange-red filling. Proud as if I’d laid an egg.
Since then, I’ve made my own apple sauce and taralli (sort of pretzels), and there’s a box of orange peel in my freezer waiting to be candied. I am a bit surprised myself by my recent domestic adventures. But there is a reason behind all this. What inspired me to the jam-making…well, actually, that’s the point. I was not inspired, I was pushed. By 10kg of beautiful Sicilian oranges sitting in my hallway. My colleague’s brother has an orchard somewhere at the south-eastern corner of Sicily, and she organised a delivery of oranges up to Piemonte, for a good price, but you had to take 10kg minimum. What are you going to do with so many oranges? Marmalade, that’s what. Because you don’t want a single one of them go to waste.
So between my stinginess (prudence, ahem), and the appeal of these plump fragrant beauties, I ended up one rainy Sunday afternoon peeling, juicing and chopping oranges. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but from my 5 lessons of food technology last year, I figured that plenty of heat and sugar should do the trick. In fact, my jam stood its ground quite well in an independent test – we had a marmalade face-off at work...the entire office had taken home 10kg of oranges each! My boss was a bit upset when I told him that I had just chucked ‘however much sugar I had in the cupboard’ into my spontaneous mix of juice, flesh and peel and boiled it ‘until it seemed ok’. Apparently, he spent some hours painstakingly removing every last bit of pith and skin from the orange flesh, and measuring sugar to the exact gram count. His marmalade was lovely though, smooth and subtle. Mine is more like a chunky Marsala-laced fruit explosion.
I also realized something – making jam or preserves did not start because people had nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon. It began as a race against nature. As a way to preserve (!) food from spoiling. And also as a way to balance the abundance of one season with the scarcity of another.
Food preservation is in fact a way of household management, or home economics. The economics of the home used to be structured very differently then what we know. If you are not producing any of your own food, than your home is governed by an economics of demand: you purchase what you need and want, in the quantities that you need or want. I am not implying any extravagant or wasteful behaviour, but what we usually have to ‘manage’ in terms of food preservation is the short-term storage of perishable ingredients and leftovers. Which we put in the fridge. Or possibly the freezer. Done. The responsibility of managing large amounts of perishable goods is left to the trader (or processor, if they aren’t just raw ingredients). More than that, it is their responsibility to keep up supplies – we expect our traders to offer a steady supply of food under regular circumstances.
Making jam, preserves, ham, sausages, cheese…all these are born out of an economic system based on supply. You have an abundance of easily perishable food at one point in time, and you have to figure out a way to use it, or process it for later use. Anyone with an apple tree in the garden will know what I am talking about. In a time before refrigeration, the available methods for preservation were salting, smoking, fermenting, pickling and preserving with sugar or alcohol, plus maybe the odd minor other one (the Incas knew how to freeze-dry potatoes!). These all generally take a bit more skill than just opening the fridge door…you are outwitting nature, for a short while anyway. Snatching a short victory from the implacable advances of decay. A glorious moment indeed, for me and my five jars of jam.

I like the way they think

2010-02-24T21:18:00.004+01:00

I have been searching quite a bit for recipes online lately, both on German and English-speaking sites. Some are very casual, other disciplined and well-organised. There are some for the well-seasoned housewives, some for yuppies with mock kitchens, some for the health-obsessed and some for the semi-professional über-achievers.
But I am sure that today was the first time I saw one that listed as a recipe category Aphrodisiacs.

Nice one.

Here is the link - all in Italian though.

Felice Casorati - Portrait of the Engineer Gino Beria

2010-02-06T18:48:00.003+01:00

This painting hangs in the Galleria dell'Arte Moderna in Turin. It's from 1924, and to me, it seems a perfect embodiment of this space and time. This was the time when FIAT in Turin was in its heyday, attracting workers from all over the country with its new factory and latest technologies. Like in many other modern industrial towns, the factories became the beating heart of the city; city life started to run according to the clockwork of the factory sirens and shift worker traffic. This was the time of modernism in art, literature, film and music, which took up the rhythms and aesthetics of the machines and industry.
It is a sign of the new aesthetic that the focus of the portrait is not someone from the old elites of warriors, kings or priests. It is rather a priest of the new religion of technology and progress, an engineer.

In the current exhibition of the Galleria, this painting hangs in a room with several other portraits, most of these of venerable gentlemen of some description, framed in heavy gold frames. I like the contrast.

McItaly - polemics, propaganda, PDO cheese

2010-02-02T22:52:00.000+01:00

A topic that is all over the news this week is the collaboration between McDonald’s and the Italian government in the promotion
of a new McDonald’s product called the ‘McItaly’. This sandwich will be made and sold in Italy with exclusively Italian ingredients, amongst which several ‘PDO’ products, such as Asiago cheese, Bresaola della Valtellina and artichokes from Lazio. The Italian government is not just silently condoning this product, but actively involved in its promotion – the Italian minister for agriculture, Luca Zaia, launched the new product clad in a McDonald’s plastic apron.
This venture has sparked commentary all over the international press as well as on private sites on the internet. Many of the private notes or comments on articles have, as so often, quickly deteriorated into mutual mudslinging and accusations of racism, all over the question whether the number of fast food chains in a country is a sign of moral or cultural degeneracy. Interestingly, an article by Matthew Fort in the Guardian with particularly blunt criticism of the project has apparently received a letter in response from Minister Zaia himself, in his turn strongly opinionated – and slightly off-topic, describing the Italian government as “modern Jesuits, trying to ‘convert the infidels’ of the left, who have never dirtied their hands working in the fields”.
The letter contains various such colourful polemical statements, which I think are simply what we call an Armutszeugnis in German: a testimony of your (intellectual) poverty, and not worth getting into. However, one comment of the minister reveals something that is at the real heart of the matter, or rather the bottom line. He wrote: “McItaly will bring to the Italian farmers three million and 448 thousand Euros of additional income per month.”
This is put as the one of the main reasons for the Italian government to support this motion, especially in this ‘time of crisis’. However, this is a complete fallacy, if not to say lie. Let's not pretend that this money, even if it is generated, is in any way being distributed amongst all Italian farmers or any idyllic notion like that. In Italy, like in most other modern industrialised countries, there are small-scale farmers and large-scale farmers. And like everywhere else, the large-scale farmers are well-connected to the system of mass distribution (like supermarkets or also fast-food chains), and will therefore be more able and likely to benefit/ profit from this venture. Most small-scale food producers are not part of the system, because they cannot provide food of unvarying quantity and unvarying characteristics on this scale, as is fundamentally required by the mass food distribution/ industry, or they couldn't use it in their processing lines; that's the very basis of mass production.
Do not make the mistake to think that PDO products, products of certified and protected origin or quality, are necessarily produced by small-scale/ idiosyncratic/ artisanal producers. Two examples: Parma ham and Parmesan cheese (the real thing, Parmigiano-Reggiano). Of course you will find some small producers that cure 40 hams a year, or cooperatives that produce a few hundred wheels of Parmigiano. But many of the producers of these products are seriously big, processing hundreds of pig legs or thousands of litres of milk every day.There is nothing in the PDO regulations that talks about scale, they talk about processing methods and origin of ingredients (P.S. the legs of the pigs used in Parma ham, real certified Parma ham, can come from any of 11 Italian regions; that's the official legal stipulation of Prosciutto di Parma PDO).
It was one of those large-scale producers of Parmigiano - legitimate PDO producer and member of the consorzio of Parmigiano-Reggiano - that last year went into a business agreement with McDonald's and sold them a few thousand wheels of cheese.
In case you did not know this, last winter, McDonald's in Italy featured a burger with Parmigiano-Reggiano PDO on it, and later in the year, one with PDO Speck from Alto Adige.
That was quite a controversial move by that Parmigiano producer, and certainly not everybody in the consorzio (which is an association to jointly promote their products, most DOP products have one) agreed with the sort of publicity it generated.
Be that as it may, my point is that ONE producer made money from that move, and a large one too, or how could he have provided McDonald's with so much cheese? And the same will happen with the McItaly - the ones who will benefit and profit from Zaia's €3 million will be a handful of industrial-scale food producers.
For the small producer, this won't change a thing.
And apart from claims about (un)healthiness or also (non)tastiness of McDonald's food, which is every individual's choice, the biggest problem with fast food chains of any type, and in fact mass distributors of any type is that they require an economy of scale which I think is detrimental to many things, from diversity (bio-diversity but also diversity of tastes for example) to things like the environmental damage produced by large-scale farming. Take for example the massive production of methane, one of the most harmful greenhouse gases, by cows. Cow farts were never a problem as long as there were a few cows roaming about on green meadows, but take a few hundred of them crowded into a mucky corral, fed on industrially processed cattle feed...this is at the heart of what is wrong with fast food chains like McDonald’s, and why this move of the Italian government is either blind or very cynical.

Note: PDO = protected denomination of origin: EU classification for regional foods
The purpose of the law is to protect the reputation of the regional foods and eliminate the unfair competition and misleading of consumers by non-genuine products, which may be of inferior quality or of different flavour.

Link to the Guardian article with the letter of the minister in the comments

Vouvray, veal shins and a cat – Le Baratin, Paris

2010-02-01T22:55:00.000+01:00

You won’t find this little bistro unless you’re looking for it. With a map. And some confidence in your orientational abilities, because when you come up the métro stairs and into the open air, the scene is a little different than what you’re used to from the more central areas of Paris. The people jostling past you on their way to work don’t seem to shop at the glitzy galeries of the Rue de Lafayette. The narrow streets are bumpy, there’s litter blowing in the wind, and the houses look a little unkempt. It just goes to show that location isn’t always everything. Good food and wine on the other hand, well, for some of us…
Le Baratin is a small place, the size of a large living room, but they have managed to squeeze about ten tables into the space, plus a bar counter. The decoration is sparse, a few paintings, photographs and a wine map of France. Simple wooden tables and chairs on a multi-coloured tile floor. Three blackboards over the bar display what’s on offer: the two larger ones list the wines, a smaller one the menu. One price, for a choice of a couple of starters and two main course options: on the day we went there, it was braised oxtail or veal shins with tripe and white beans. For the dessert, you’ll have to ask the waiter. For vegetarian dishes as well. And if you see something darting under the next table out of the corner of your eye, relax! That’s just the cat. When things have quieted down after lunch, she will come out and doze on the wooden bench, if she’s not hovering in front of the kitchen door, trying to charm the chef into giving her something of whatever it is that smells so good.
This little bistro seems untouched by, or rather unconcerned with trends and fashion. The dishes are hearty and traditional, using as they are meat parts that are not the prime cuts, like the shins, the tail and the stomach. It is a proof for the skill of the cook that out of these ‘lesser’ ingredients she can create dishes that are somehow elegant, although substantial and not ashamed of featuring bone, cartilage and fat. The elegance I guess comes from the texture of the dishes, especially the meat that is sliding right off the bone disintegrating into tender flakes, but also from the accomplished blend of flavours, the silky base of onions, carrots and white beans, the succulent meat of the veal shins and the hint of visceral* aroma from the soft strips of tripe.

Also the wine was excellent. We had a sparkling Vouvray from the Loire, a dry sparkling white made from the Chenin Blanc grape. At the Loire, Chenin Blanc is often made into still dry white or also sweet wines; it lends itself well to noble rot. As a sparkling wine, it is fantastic. Chenin Blanc has crisp fruit aromas like granny smith and gooseberry, but also and crucially, it has a very light tanginess, like rhubarb or grapefruit or even fresh parsley (for my German friends: Waldmeister). I think this slight herbal note has a similar effect as hops in beer: it anchors the flavour, settles it, and doesn’t let it get to your head so easily. It also made the wine match up well with the no-nonsense flavours of the veal shin and tripe dish.

In conclusion, if you like food and you’re in Paris, go eat at Le Baratin.
3, rue Jouye-Rouve (rue de Belleville), 20e arrondissement, 75020 Paris, +33-01-43-49-39-70 (rustic or not, ye need to book, it’s not like I discovered them or anything)

* I sort of made this concept up just now, the ‘visceral aroma’. Visceral means relating to the guts. And how to otherwise describe the flavour of tripe? It has a unique flavour, a tripeness, so to speak, but it also has something in common with other offal or organ meat, the same way that there is a ‘game’ flavour common to most wild animal meat. Hence, for offal meat, I propose the common descriptor ‘visceral’.

Trendsetters

2010-01-14T22:45:00.000+01:00

Police Special

2009-11-11T09:28:00.000+01:00

Autumn in Piemonte

2009-11-11T09:21:00.001+01:00

If you go for a walk in the woods one of these crisp Piemontese autumn mornings, you may meet a man carrying a wicker basket. In it, a few small mushrooms on a bed of fern. ‘Oh,’ you will say, ‘not so lucky today?’ – ‘No,’ he will answer, with a rueful look into his basket. ‘Not much luck today. Or maybe I just don’t know where to look.’ And, with a slight shrug of the shoulders, he will say: ‘Maybe this wood is not good for mushrooms. Good luck to you though.’
But if you were to come to the house of this man in these days, you will find him sitting at his kitchen table, carefully cleaning porcini mushrooms the size of his fist. He will be surrounded by several wicker baskets, full of glorious nut-brown and stone-grey specimens, resting on their bed of fresh green fern. They will be everywhere, these mushrooms: the vegetable drawers of the fridge overflowing with them, in baskets and on newspaper nests scattered through the kitchen. And the man will explain to you, with a gentle smile and a young boy’s glint in his eyes: a mushroom hunter never tells his secrets. Never divulges his best spots, where the porcini sprout in heavy bunches under the red and brown autumn leaves. Any mushroom hunter in Piemonte will put his best finds under the bed of fern, as he is walking through the woods. If you meet anyone on an autumn morning in Piemonte, they will swear that there has never a good mushroom been found in these woods in living human memory.
But if you sit at a kitchen table in Piemonte in these days, a man, cleaning his mushrooms with a sharp little knife, shaping their bottoms into neat diamond facets, will glow with pride about his rich harvest. And you will be invited to eat with him and enjoy the bounty of autumn. Maybe you will eat the mushrooms raw, thin slivers scattered over a plate of carne cruda, finely sliced raw beef, drizzled with olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.
Maybe you will eat the mushrooms in a sauce, with salsiccia di Bra, juicy veal and pork sausage, so tender and fresh it can be eaten raw. The sausage will be stewed with the porcini and a few tomatoes from the man’s garden, the last summer tomatoes, so sweet that there is not even need to add any sugar to the sauce. You will eat the sauce with homemade pasta, tagliatelle or tagliolini, even finer strips of pasta. And the man will argue with his cousin, who has just stopped in from his afternoon cycle for a glass of water, and to see how the mushroom harvest is going this year. The cousin will say that he prefers his tagliatelle wide, the better to pick up the sauce, and the man’s son will agree with the cousin, saying that the best pasta are in fact the maltagliati, ‘badly cut ones’, strips of all different lengths and sizes as may happen when you make your own pasta; because with maltagliati, every bite is different. The man won’t argue much, because he is a peaceful man, and quiet, but he is sure of it: the tagliolini are the best, finely cut and even, because that’s how his wife makes them.
And his wife will make mushroom sauce for the pasta that Sunday, and the next day maybe a risotto, with chunks of his porcini dotting the plate of creamy rice. A large part of the mushrooms she won’t be able to use straight away, so she will cut them in thin slices, soak them in egg and dust them with flour. Then she will freeze them, prepared like this, so they are ready for frying straight from the freezer.
And you will be urged to take some of the mushrooms home with you – there are so many! Have some, please! – wrapped in newspaper or a paper bag, not to break their stately shapes. As you hold the bag, ready to say good-bye in the setting sun, the man will insist you also take some of his tomatoes, and a couple of spiky red and yellow pomegranates, and a bunch of the grapes he has left over from making wine, freisa or barbera or nebbiolo, purple and sugary-sweet. And you will feel rich and fortunate and blessed, like this man, on a golden October day in Piemonte.
But if you meet this man in the woods, he will be an unlucky man, none of the fortunes of autumn for him. And don’t even ask the truffle hunters. They are just out walking their dogs.

Parma, Via d'Azeglio

2009-10-24T14:47:00.000+02:00

Supper Table Talk

2009-10-18T23:43:00.000+02:00

His mother shows me where the dishwashing tablets are kept: “In case you’re ever here when I’m not and you want to turn on the dishwasher.” It’s the third time we meet. I didn’t speak to her son in months.
Her eyes are just like her son's. A gentle melting brown. They have the same look – it is kind and soft and at the same time goes right through me, looking straight to the back of my heart. The blue of my eyes, steel sometimes, is like water or air, parting with no resistance.
She has been looking at me like this since the first recognition at dinner, the week before: “You’ve been here before – you’re back.”
Yes, I’m back. And as I walk up the stairs on Sunday night for a quiet supper, I say “good evening” and she only says “good evening”, but a quick smile steals over her eyes before she can hide it. She knows her son. Stubborn and impetuous, and wry from years of living alone. She watches me as I talk with him about the television, the programme, the presenter. Supper table talk, comfortable talk. It’s a Sunday night. Quiet. He brought a girl home for Sunday night. She won’t say a word.

Ireland Supporter

2009-10-17T13:10:00.000+02:00

Small Town Blues

2009-10-15T13:39:00.000+02:00

I wonder if Thoreau ever had any regrets. Week 6 at Walden: Dear Diary. Whose idea was this anyway, moving into a fecking log cabin in the woods? It was all well and good a few weeks ago, when the weather was still nice, and I was grateful for the cool shade in the hut, and the little breeze rustling through the leaves and cooling my sweaty brow.
Well, my brows are nice and cool now, thank you very much, and I could really do without that breeze coming through the cracks in the walls in the morning. Cold enough as it is. Plus, I’m so sick of living on potatoes and cabbage. Am I Irish or what? Ah, a nice roast now, with gravy and fresh bread with yellow butter! And a bowl of buttered peas with mint. And a heavy red wine to wash it all down!
I don’t sleep much either these days. For one, it’s bloody cold, and then the ducks or whatever they are make an awful racket at sunrise. Not that I could afford to sleep long anyway. I spend a lot of my time just gathering and chopping firewood, so I can at least have some hot gruel and a few hours huddling by the fire each day, trying to uncramp my body which is all stiff and sore from all that heavy labour. Ah, but to be sitting by a well-stoked fire-place in my robe and slippers, with a pipe and a good book, and a man-servant bringing a brandy and a cup of hot chocolate! I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. Next time though, I’ll be doing it in the South of Italy, and not in New England in the winter!

Fundamental Considerations

2009-09-10T22:24:00.000+02:00

I was hesitant to ever start a blog. If it was going to be a food blog, I thought I'd probably have to call it Kitchen Killjoy.
What can I say. I’m a serious person. I have been brought up to look at anything frivolous with a raised eyebrow. The sort of look that will make people see the cholesterol in their juicy grilled sausage, and the burning rainforest in their paper napkin.
What can I do. It’s an affliction.
Just envision the blog: link after link of environmental disaster stories and newly extinct former food sources, political doomsday reports, failed business projects and cynical comments on the rising tide of human stupidity. All tied together with descriptions of misshapen pasta, burnt sauces, and all the other things I did not actually manage to cook myself. I should probably add a diet journal, just to round things off.
Kitchen Killjoy – All you really did not want to read about. Or: Kitchen Killjoy – yes, you too are doomed...

Biodynamic!

2009-09-07T01:04:00.000+02:00

In Cinque Terre, a horn with manure

is expected to furnish the cure

for impoverished soil,

and diminish the toil.

You believe it? I'm not so sure.