Fish death shade circle

Prestigious fish is still hunted - we wait for what comes out. The best fish is fish which you don’t really know what species of fish it is - but you can see what sort of flesh it has, more or less. I am always jealous of desert-island fiction (right, mainly Lost) because they get to spear fish and just eat them. Also, the Life of Pi, because he gets to drink raw turtle blood with no moral issues.

The waterfront in Istanbul - I didn’t know what the name of these were – they were white fish. I have a particular experience, I suppose, because I don’t know much about the names of anything, particularly fish. The hunters along the bridge put these ones in a bucket, and they kept shrimps separate. Baby sturgeon were set aside with water in ice cream tubs, for laying...(which is cool)

There are sort of grill-boats along the waterfront below the fishermen that serve up the fish, butterflied and in a crusty bread with lettuce, tomato and raw onions. They cost 2TL, there is only one thing to order, the guys are very fast and very good at staying upright. People flick the driest bits of crust over into the water when they have finished, for the growing baby fishies, which is nice. I saw one woman come specifically to dump a whole bagful of stale bread – the water near the edge is fairly scummy. Imagine if the pigeons that eat your Greggs crumbs were caught (in wire traps set by young boys saving up their 2d a beak for a bag o’ ferret squall), glazed and splayed on hotplates by the street vendors in Trafalgar Square; identifiable by the feet glued skyward on their distinctive black umbrellas. Pigeon thighs skewered with roast fig, hot potatoes, and paper cones with chestnuts, and malt vinegar with pulp. Instead of, erm...

Perhaps I romanticise. When you get your fried fish in bread, in Istanbul, you can sit on a little stool under a shade. There are lots and lots of people, everyone shares. On the table is a salt shaker which loads of salt comes out of (just let it happen, these salt-hole people knew what they were doing) and a pop bottle with a hole in the lid, full of lemon juice. You put this all over your sandwich. Many also bring over a little pot of pickles from a nearby pickle stand, and munch the both alternately.

The water motion through everything, the death of the fish, the crude perfection of the condiments, the much needed shade, the stillness in crowds...this was idyll, three times in..two days? I forgot. I was quite alone.

what happened while I ate this kebab is more interesting than kebab

So this guy came up while I was eating this, outdoors, by myself – the shade was the pretext for him coming over. Its cool, its fine, whatever, but sometimes crazy people come and talk to me (all the time – why me?!) so when he started speaking I was already thinking of a good excuse for leaving.

Well 2 hours later, I was still not sure if this guy was crazy or not, but he certainly earnt his 2 hours with his totally amazing conversation (possibly lies). This guy was around 60 years of age – an American, with little hair, and a heavy build, with light shades. His name was Michael. Mike.

Ok, here’s his story. This was Mike’s seventh or eighth time in Istanbul, over a period of around 20 years. He had been coming back each time to oversee the same project – a project which he played a critical role in orchestrating, a semi-secret project which was nearing the stage at which it would be released to the media (this was to be his last trip) and, in Michael’s oft-repeated phrase...change the way people think, about...everything.

The project was - the excavation of the Ark. It turns out that Mike had a couple of personal attributes that placed him uniquely well to discover these remains. Firstly, he was an all-out evangelical Christian – he really believed the Ark had been real, in some sense, and this mattered to him. Secondly, he was a high-school teacher of ancient languages, and almost as a hobby, had studied the holy books in several original scripts. Thirdly, before becoming a teacher, he had been a military cartographer.

It turns out that he was reading a passage about the final resting place of Noah’s Ark, which I wish I could remember the reference for. Anyway, as Mike was acquainted with cartological things, it suddenly dawned on him that the description –which discussed the grounding of the ark as simultaneous to the appearance of certain peaks – described an altitude, as the waters lowered. Already common theory established that the ark was likely to be found on Mount Ararat – so he began going for long hikes, in circles, around the mountain at that height. It took him a few trips, and he didn’t really know what he was looking for, but one day, the path gave way and he uncovered some really old carved wood in the permafrozen earth. Wood which he recognised as covered in proto-sumerian hieroglyphs.

Let me tell you a little about what the Ark turns out to be like. It is not a boat. Rather, the ark is a long cuboid – like a big shipping container, made of thick wood. Inside – and it had not yet been opened, but rather only scanned with electrics and things – were thousands of compartments of different sizes. These were the compartments were the animals spent the flood. Mike suspected that God had cleverly put all the creatures within into some sort of stasis – rather than the typical pooey roary oinkey picture we learn from school (and 2012). He had a typically anglo-techno explanation (a catholic would have accepted the mystery) about how God would have done this – something about silica – but it basically got around the food and poo problem. Now I could believe something like this had been found – I could believe that someone had once embalmed and stored species in a wooden ceremonial coffin to save them from a prophesised disaster, and that this could be the origin of the Noah story. But while I might expect bones, shells to be inside, Mike was quite clear – he was expecting empty compartments. The turtles had to have walked free, to populate the earth.

The whole operation was being bankrolled by the Turkish government and influential friends in the US military had also secured funds (perhaps the most plausible part of the story). It was all being done in a silver sheet heated tent, carefully melting the steep frozen edge of the mountain. Mike claimed the news was going to be broken in a few months. I never emailed the guy. Maybe I should.

I don’t think he was a compulsive lier. Rather I think he was a compulsive doer, of crazy things.

FIRST OF ALL

Is it really necessary to put an electronic tag on a £3 block of mild cheddar?



Second of all; would anyone microwave 700g of cheese in the packet?

Soup 'en' Jazz

Once when we went to Amsterdam, we had soup from a special soup shop. It was still daytime, it was still warm, it was very delicious. Later we would sit by a canal, of course, and watch the city pass for hours and the sun set early, paralysed by fear unless the loitering ducks got ‘too flappy’ when we walked past. But for now everything was fine.

At that soup shop I bought a very interesting cookbook entitled ‘Soup en Jazz’, which has their keynote recipes for 10 soups, but which is also accompanied by a CD which has a designated track for each soup, which you must play when you are eating.

3 years passed. The ‘Soup en Jazz’ project looked like it might go the same way as Bolivian Monopoly and Rain Chime. But a serendipitous glut of beetroot came along last week, and we made borscht. You can visit Sebastian Gampert at his myspace, but his Borscht track is not available. I have asked him to put it up. A fitting track I thought, as it fits nicely into the part of the day occupied by sitting down to have a steaming bowl of soup. But it is in no way Eastern-European, which would have been disappointingly obvious anyway. I have not listened to the other tracks as I am saving them for future soup.

Transient Form, Marmite

Very recently Linz dropped a jar of Marmite on the kitchen floor. The glassy sound was absorbed by the goop within, of course, but its decisive crack was chilling, like a skull, dulled in flesh, against the lowest concrete step. We knew what had happened (the worst), when we heard that sound. Absolutely FASCINATINGLY, however, the jar, which was shattered into a million pieces, did not lose its form as it was glued together by its cannonball of sap. So we could lift it up, whole and put it in a bowl, and watch it collapse slowly over a period of half an hour. 

I wish I had had the foresight to take this picture earlier.

 

Sometimes, I wish I still smoked...

Like this time, in Istanbul.

I was sitting around on the waterfront in this ancient city, letting the air and the heat digest a good meal on my behalf. One of these golden cigarettes would have helped a lot.

Restaraunt in La Paz, both real and unreal

So we went to a ‘surrealist’ restaurant in La Paz. I don’t know what they thought was surreal about it; I think it must have been the wacky combinations of coca and spaghetti, or llama and tortellini…and so on. I had a 3 peppercorn beef steak. Fresh peppercorns, insanely good. But surreal? There were a couple of Dali prints up.

I feel I could do better…Firstly, all the waiters could enter the room from a cupboard, where there would be a hidden door. No! There would be several hidden doors! And the waiters would be under strict instruction never to acknowledge that they were using different ones, or even an understanding of the concept ‘entrance’. The glasses would all be those ones with a layer of colourful fluid sealed in, so that it looks like everyone should be spilling their drinks, when they aren’t. The windows would have devices on the outside so that it appears as if it is raining – they would often be out of synch.

The waiters would have leeway to improvise, and be encouraged to take psychotropic drugs. There would be a selection of wine glasses full of jelly, which they could pretend to spill on someone’s lap at some point during the night. There would, of course, be a team of acrobats secured to an upside-down table on the ceiling. A selection of food would look like other food – this is common. What you ordered would be what you actually got, although shaped to look exactly like something else, but sometimes it would be something alive, eating the salad, which is trained to scream loudly but not move from the plate. Ever.

The chairs and tables would have computer-controlled pistons and would change their heights very very slowly. The ‘ice cream’ would be made out of some substance with a boiling point well below room temperature, so that it would disappear soon after serving. Similar things would happen to the cutlery – the spoon, in particular, would have dissolving ridges so that after dipping it into soup just once, it would become a fork. All replacement spoons would be the same, until the customer was near tears – at which point, as soon as a distraction can be caused (by a light bulb inflating) the soup would be secretly stolen, and they would be asked ‘what soup?’

Very typical pan-andean fare. Doing more with less.

'Fare' - a wonderful word for food. It suggests fuel - function without too much science, overtones of medieval, hinting at hard bread and a hunk of cheese in a knapsack, all there will be until Mordor...

Anyway, this is the type of thing you should expect to come across if eating at normal eateries in an Andean country like Bolivia or Peru. Everything is from the carbohydrate food group, with the possible (as in this case) addition of a fried egg. That means three or four out of of banana/plantain, potato (often some boiled, some fried and some dried), rice, pasta and bread. This sounds dull - and it is - but get used to it and your over-indulged tastebuds learn to relax. Note with interest that they could just give you a plate of rice but they don't, instead using the different types of carbohydrate to add a variety to the meal which you might not notice at first but which is cheap, and more nutritious than a wholly monotonous diet.
Notable in this particular meal is the fact that the rice (excellently cooked) has been moulded into the shape of a Chrismas tree! What a delight!

Anchovy lamb

Hey so this is a recipe sent to me by my old philosophy tutor, Berris in response to this very blog.

Here it is:

...get yourself a nice leg of lamb and stab the fucker 12 times ont top with a pairing knife, using ur little finger work a sprig of rosemary, a clove of garlic and a whole anchovey into each of the slits. catch up all the anchoveys, garlic and rosmary you've got left and cream them into an ounce (ish) of butter, smeer that over the top of the joint. put it in a big pan with potatoes and parsnips = and half a bottle of white wine (or enough not to cover the roots but enough to make a big old gravy) roast it high, then roast it low to finish.

I had good feelings about this recipe because I know the power that anchovies have.

'Working in' some rosemary garlic and anchovy sounds easy, but its not.

Lidl, Lobster, Language

If you don't know, Lidl is the still point around which the world turns.

It is a ludicrously cheap supermarket, but one that manages to come up with the goods much better than that vacant monkey cage, Netto, which calls itself a budget option but in reality just sells the lowest value things like air biscuits and greasy pop and hopes you won't notice the scurvy in your fit- like rapturous throes of stinginess.

But Lidl- they have aspirations. You can imagine them sleuthing around the world for bargains, sourcing from bankrupt cherry canning operations and money launderers that use pre- packaged omelettes as a front. All sorts of unusual products and lots of strange languages on the packaging.

Untranslated labels in general correlate strongly with low cost, with the obvious aberration of those in Italian- which is done on purpose to make you think you are getting one over on the Italians who meant to hoard whatever it is for themselves. (The same fuzzy logic just doesn't work for countries that we don't have a vague conviction are guarding godlike culinary secrets). Anyway you can gauge the cut of Lidl's gib from one of their current offers which is a whole lobster for just £5. Here it is!

It is frozen, and opaquely packaged so there is no real way of seeing what it is like, apart from a perfectly smooth tube about 10" long. Now I know lobsters are not perfectly smooth- I am quite sure they are pretty bumpy, so I have been hoping this is just caused by frozen water, because the alternative is that this is lobster in the same sense that 'crab sticks' are really crab- in other words, I have bought a large tube of expensive mushed up sea protein.

This has been in my freezer for a couple of weeks now- today I had a friend over who would appreciate it, so today is the day. I defrost it, we open it; it is definitely a whole and real animal. A bit smaller than I would expect, as almost half the length of the packet was taken up by the claws which were arranged in a diving position over its head. It is red rather than a fresh grey, which I guess is to do with the freezing process. The same happens to frozen prawns so I don't know why I would expect any different. The movies I suppose.

We cook according to the guidelines, boiling furiously for 5 minutes. We make a garlic sauce. Then sit down on battered sofas to eat the most studenty lobster ever eaten, off our knees in lieu of table and off the same plate in lieu of plates. It takes a bit of bravery to get started, but we egg each other on....

Sigh. All that, and it is almost entirely hollow! I wouldn't mind if it was tough and tasteless, as long as there was something there to pretend with. For potential guests to pretend with! As it were, we got maybe 2 small bites each out of it and enough garlic butter to make us feel a bit sick.

It is as if this is just the shell of a lobster, which it shed like a snake. Do lobsters do that? If no one has checked I think it might be a good idea. My meat probably crawled out and is now enjoying its big luxurious shell in a cushy restaurant tank somewhere, cackling. Don't count your chickens, Mr. Lobster...

*The image above is photoshopped, but that is my friend, and that is the crustacean in question

Pub, munchies, no decent food in the house

Bosh:

Eating with scissors

Who thinks spaghetti is a nemesis best countered by turning it against a spoon on the end of your fork?

Well- you're well mannered, but wrong. The solution so simple I can't believe people don't do it all the time. I feel like urban legend cosmonauts using a pencil;

1 - Just get your fork full, let it all hang down as far as you like. This is a new carefree you.
2 - Jam it in your mouth, remove fork.
3 - Chop off the excess with scissors.

There is still some slurping involved, but not enough for the spaghetti to whip around and flick stuff everywhere. So next time you have a posh do to go to...

Next; pizza. This should be easy to cut; its so thin! But it is this quality of compressive elasticity which lends it such irritating resilience, coupled with the fact that normally when cutting things up on a plate, we use a lot of 'ripping' motion without really noticing. You can't do this with a pizza because it takes up a whole plate.

Everything else that is flat you cut with scissors! I suggest in the strongest possible terms that you do the same with pizza.

In sum, if it is thin and flexible; scissors are better.

Anaerobic respiration pickling

Thanks to some guy from the internet, I am going to preserve some of my chilies by anaerobic respiration pickling, which is something like fermentation. All you do is submerge them in a weak brine for a while and they sort of create their own acidity in the form of lactic acid.

Incidentally, I seem to remember, anaerobic respiration is what happens when you sprint and have to create energy for your muscles without enough oxygen- in a sense they burn because they are being pickled.

Anyway, I'll update you on this in about 3 weeks when the fermentation is over and I can seal it.

Ice Shaving Guatemala

In a world where form and beauty and truth were prime, if origin counted as equal to product, all Slush Puppies would be made like this.

A young calm-faced Guatemalan mother stands in front of the cathedral, rotating a lump of clear ice the size of her head in her cast-iron ice shaving device. Curls flake off and snow into a cup, spoonfuls of honey and neon candied fruit (swarming with wasps) are applied and sink in as ink. The ice, clearly, was mined from a glacier far into the mountains and transported here by llama trains, wrapped in sealskin and insulated by the cleanest fleece, patrolled fiercely by the ice-miners’ dogs – all of them with one green eye and one blue, they say they can know the future – and exchanged for meat, for salt, and for religion.

Barrrrrbacoa, Palenque, Yucatan

The food with the most awesome name in the world is common around the Yucatan Peninsula. When ordering, expect not to be understood unless you say the word in the mindset of a boxing commentator announcing the HEAVY WEIGHT CHAMPIOOON OF THE WOOORLD! It must be pronounced in a way that you might just expect a 'ding ding' after you order. Otherwise they really don't understand you.

Barbacoa is a generic word, essentially meaning slow-cooked meat, traditionally steamed as a pit roast.

First lobster, spineless

After explaining to the chef of a nice and quiet little restaurant that we were, to put it mildly, incredibly tight fisted, she kindly offered us the cheapest thing she could whip up (off menu) - rice and beans with a fried egg. Nothing wrong with that, we thought.

Except there seemed to be a guy whose job it was to hang out and casually suggest expensive optional extras. We said no thanks to the 'traditional pre-rice-and-beans custom' of a mojito, thinking ourselves quite tough little travellers.

But we gave into his suggestion that since they had one lobster tail left, we could have it at half price. After all, how often do you get to eat lobster in Cuba? It was our last night.

I loved it. I think perhaps the main reason it is so revered is that as well as having that delicate shellfish taste the sheer volume of the meat makes it all the more satisfying- there is less figuring your way around all the unpleasant bits that come with invertebrate territory. So much pluckable sweet, soft, white muscle.

Fiat cafe, Cuba

We stopped for a dinner of cheap spaghetti at an unusually brightly lit, extremely glassy little restaurant, with an extremely faithful adherence to a colour scheme of royal blue and white.

Hang on.

Every inch of this place is branded by Fiat! There are blue racing stripes over the whitewashed walls, little logos on the tables and pictures of old cars framed undramatically on the walls.

Why would a car company own a cafe? Is this the equivalent of the Coca- Cola adverts in the rest of Latin America which are so conspicuously absent in Cuba? Do they also sell cars here? Is this supposed to be cheese? What is going on?!

Stinginess in Cuba, 1 peso eats

We are now in Cuba, where the political situation certainly impacts the food available in several noticeable ways:

1- The unofficial economy is not. I see no street vendors, no gloriously colourful markets, no hawking of strange foods. A reminder that tower blocks are not the only face of capitalism.
2- Even the official shops that are allowed really aren't brimming with choice. This is an island in a way which not many places are any more.
3- A lot of stuff is very expensive for tourists; not unrelated to the fact that there are fairly clearly delineated places for them to be, and a separate currency.

I want to make it clear that I am not being a sourpuss. There are real world reasons for this situation that override anyone's need for a nice bouncy sandwich. But overall, pretty much all the food we have had in restaurants has been like school dinners. So we have decided to take a fuel- centric attitude to food while we are here, to skip the (relatively) high prices and generally just revel in being stingy. Here are our discoveries:

Cheap option 1 - Actually, there are a couple of places on the seafront (no no, think oil slick and anti- erosion concrete) that will serve a pretty rubbish mozzarella pizza for a peso or two. It may not be amazing, but cheese and bread is never inedible. And they don't seem to mind you drinking your own bottled water.

Cheap option 2 - Petrol stations seem to have a standard range of microwavable goodies that are equally cheap at a couple of Pesos Convertibles, and they don't bat an eye at serving foreigners.

Cheap option 3 - MASSIVE bread. We got this from a shop that sold pop, newspapers etc. It looked very filling at 1 peso, but on closer inspection proved to be several hundreds of years old. It was mummified rather than rotten however, and would be be edible if you either have the use of a funnel to collect the cloud of crumbs that it becomes upon any attempt to pierce its carapace, or you are willing to mash it up with some water into a slimy but intact dough.

More stinginess tips coming!

Isla mujeres

On our first night on Isla Mujeres we had a dark and breezy meal in a restaurant by the sea and the waiter brought us all the torches because we were the only people in the whole world. Sandy and very romantic.

I don’t even remember what we ate. Sigh.

Chichen Itza

The new 7th Wonder of the World is a big tourist- puller, and the first place I have seen 'nachos with cheese' for sale. It costs 35 pesos! Maybe that is why you never see it. Hmm... maybe not.

Our cheap eats were instead found down the road from the entrance; opposite two coach- friendly restaurants in a little shop. We got a can of refried beans and a couple of packs of crisps. Nice little lunch- and always a good backup plan for the backpacker flitting into expensive zones. Just remember to always take a spoon with you like I do, even though this one was so cheap it bends against the resistance of a mush with any viscosity at all.