Tag: food and drink

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Nature Other

Bomb-sniffing flowers

Scientists in Denmark, the US and Canada have all been working on producing a genetically-engineered plant whose flowers will come up red instead of white in the presence of underground explosives. The idea, of course, is that you can use them to to test for the presence of landmines by dropping the seeds from the air and seeing what colour the flowers are when they come up.

Apart from the benefits if the technology works (and the rampant symbolism), this is the kind of project that the genetic engineers needed to come up with at the start of the technology to help sell it to the public. It would take a very hard person, however suspicious they were of science, to oppose a cheap new mine-detection technology.

Instead, of course, despite all the publicity about how GM products were going to end third-world hunger, reinvigorate medicine and who knows what else, the first major products were herbicide-resistent crops, allowing farmers to use even more toxic chemicals in the quest for ever-more intensive crop production. Personally I think that most of the opposition to GM food is incoherent, illogical and based entirely on prejudice, but I still can’t feel very positive about Round-up Ready soybeans.

via Metafilter; photo from and presumably © missouriplants.com

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Menu drollery

An Indian takeaway menu put through my door had this:

Biryanis
This elaborate form of cooking involves baking layers of meat or vegetables such that the flavours and aromas enthuse the rice; enhanced with saffron and spices.

Which reminded me of a couple of phonetic attempts at English from a menu in Spain. Since I can speak, read or write no languages other than my own, I always feel a bit embarrassed finding amusement in other people’s broken English, but these are just fabulous:

Fraid in bredcams praws

Could mits

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Figgy Dowdy, Sussex Pond Pudding and English food

I got back to England to find, appropriately enough, that some food blogs, English or otherwise, celebrated St George’s Day (Apr 23rd) by cooking English puddings, cakes, biscuits and other sugariness.

Why British food has such a bad reputation, and whether it’s deserved, is a question for another day. One kind of British food that has always been easy to defend is the baking; and one of the nice things about it is that it seems to be a genuinely popular tradition. Despite the good work done by Tea Shoppes in the Lake District, to a large extent, the cake-making tradition of Bakewell tarts, fruit cakes, tea cakes, spice cakes, lemon drizzle cakes, oatmeal biscuits [etc etc] is passed on through local charity cake sales and coffee mornings. I almost feel moved to make some parkin. Mmmm, parkin.

Another British tradition that is perhaps less lively is the steamed suet pudding. And yes, that is indeed a dessert made with beef fat and steamed. With central heating, we just don’t have the same appetite for piles of calorific stodge any more. But excitingly, two food bloggers tried particularly noteworthy steamed puddings: Sussex Pond Pudding (which I’ve wanted to try for some time) and Figgy-dowdy (particularly vital reading for fans of the Patrick O’Brian novels). Both of those bloggers do a far better job of explaining the dishes than I could.

A round-up of other entries can be found at Becks & Posh.

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Me Other

Sevilla

Seville! City of tiny platesful of food!

The food has indeed been yummy. Garlic prawns, morcilla (the local version of black pudding), scrambled eggs with garlic shoots and ham, etc etc. I haven’t been getting my 5 servings of fruit and vegetable a day, mind you. Even if you count bread and breadsticklets as seperate vegetables. The trouble is, you order a half portion of ham or prawns or something and they bring loads of bread with it, and that’s pretty much a reasonable meal. Being Easter, it’s also the city of men in pointy hats. With, on the one hand, men in loafers, neat blue jeans, smart shirts, cashmere jumpers tied around their shoulders and designer sunglasses, and on the other, long parades of people in penitential hoods marching through the streets, it feels a bit like turning up to a party and realising no one told you the dresscode was ’80s or KKK’.

I can’t quite get around the sheer number of people taking part in the parades. Each one seems to have hundreds of participants, in pointy hoods carrying candles, in floppy hoods carrying crosses, a few carrying incense or the main figures of Christ or the Virgin, and a largish band to play dirges and thump drums. Since each church in Seville has a parade, and there are a lot of churches in Seville, it must represent a significant proportion of the city population every year. I’m sure the degree of real religious feeling varies – it seems like it’s as much an expression of local tradition now as a display of penitence – but a lot of it must be heartfelt. It gives me the creeps rather. An upbringing in a country where people who deny the literal truth of the resurrection get chosen as bishops is no preparation for mass displays of fervour.

On Maundy Thursday, lots of women appeared wearing mantillas. And dark glasses.

Trivia of the day: one of the statues of the Virgin is called the Macarena, after the area of Seville where the church is, many Seville women get named Macarena after the Virgin; the cheesy pop classic is named after one of these women.

If you’re ever in Seville, I’d definitely recommend the Real Alcazar, the Islamic/Renaissance palace started by the Almohads, and continued both in the Moorish and classical styles by the Spanish kings after the reconquest. It has large and rather lovely gardens which are almost as good as the palace itself. It’s a kind of second-rate version of Alhambra, but Alhambra sets such a high standard that second-rate is pretty good. I’ve always loved the idea of a house built around a central courtyard, but of course in Britain you wouldn’t be building a shady oasis, you’d be building a dingy hole that, at best, spent much of the year acting as a windbreak.

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Nature Other

Government ‘harassment’

I came across an animal liberation website which stated that “government harassment of activists has continued to increase this year”. Harassment in this case seemed to mainly consist of people being convicted of arson, criminal damage, blackmail and so on. Describing that as ‘harassment’ just seems so… whiny. Sometimes it’s right to decide that you know better than the law, and that the claims of morality are more important. But if you’re going to knowingly break the law in support of what you believe is a noble cause, you can hardly claim ‘harassment’ when the criminal justice system does its thing.

I also find the focus on animal testing peculiar since, for me, the hundreds of milions of chickens raised intensively every year are a much bigger animal welfare issue than the two or three million animals used in testing.

FWIW: I support suitably regulated animal testing and eat meat, but I do try and only buy organically-raised chicken and pork.

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Salsa di Speck

I made spaghetti with a speck sauce today. Speck is a kind of Germano-Italian lightly smoked dry-cured ham. Similar to prosciutto, but the smoking just gives it a slightly different flavour.

Anyway, the recipe was from Gastronomy of Italy by Anna del Conte, a book I would generally recommend. Not that I’ve tried any of the competition.

Cut the speck into strips. Saute it in some butter for a few minutes, then add some ground saffron and black pepper, stir for a mintue or so, and add a splash of white wine. When the wine has almost boiled away, add a little cream, bring to the boil, and take off the heat.

When the pasta is cooked, add to the pan with the sauce, stir-fry it for a minute to heat it up and mix it through, add a generous amount of parmesan, and serve.

The ham, parmesan and cream make it rather carbonara-ish, but using speck instead of pancetta and the addition of the saffron just make it a bit different and a touch more sophisticated. Yummy.