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.