A Lesson Is Learned

. . . but the damage is irreversible.

Sometimes, like crime, experimental meal-making doesn't pay.

Take, for example, the yogurt I ate for a snack last night.

We bought discounted yogurt last week. My wife and I both love yogurt. As we were learning to live together, my wife and I developed an understanding that when there's a food in the house we both like, we both get half of it. More than often, my half is gone, and my wife's half sits there, tempting me, and waiting for its expiration date to arrive.

Sometimes, I cave. I figure, if it's going to expire tomorrow, it's fair game.

It isn't.

As a result, I've been in plenty of monochrome single-tear-running-down-my-cheek-whilst-violin-music-sadly-plays moments watching food hit the garbage can because my wife was "saving it for later" just a week or two too long. I understand the merit of "saving it for later." I just think everyone would be a lot happier if my wife could come around to think of me as "saving the day" by eating food before it goes off. A pre-expiration date superhero. I could even get a cape and theme song.

But, back to last night's yogurt.

This particular yogurt sat in the fridge for about a week after we'd bought it discounted, so my wife got me to try it to see if it was still okay. It tasted fine to me. Her more-refined olfactory senses disagreed.

But I hate throwing out food. It really, really, really annoys me. So, I decided to find a way to make the only-slightly-off yogurt taste better.

The best yogurt I've ever had was lemon-flavored, so I added some lemon and honey. That didn't work. I enjoy honey lemon ginger tea, so I added some ginger powder to it. A lot of ginger powder. And I got my wife to taste it. She strongly encouraged me to throw it out.

Did I throw it out? No I did not.

Am I paying for it today? Yes I am. As is anyone who has to use the toilet after me.

I survived okay for 26 years before I was married. So why is it now that my wife's the only one of us who knows that you shouldn't eat expired dairy?

Sometimes, my wife jokingly asks me when I'll learn that she always knows what's best for me. Some days, I feel like that joke's not that funny.

I've probably read to much dystopic fiction

A good can opener is hard to find

As I was growing up, my family went through a lot of can openers. I've never felt such a sense of absolute defeat, for example, as I did in one particular instance, staring at an unopened can of Alphagheti surrounded by about half a dozen useless can openers I'd scavenged from various corners of the kitchen. As a child, I could feel my entire future slipping away from me. How could I be expected to make it in a world of unsurmountable challenges if my parents couldn't even supply me with the tools to open a can of soup?

I was pretty sure my mom bought all her can openers at the dollar store, so when I moved out of home, I bought the most expensive can opener I could find. It cost me somewhere around $30, and it broke the first time I used it.

Since that was around the time of Y2K paranoia, I began to worry for the future of humanity. What good will bunkers full of canned goods do if our can openers fail us? I'm reminded of the Twilight Zone episode about the guy at the end of the world who finally gets what he wants: an empty planet with all the books he could ever want, and then he breaks his glasses. (Personally, I don't see what the big deal was. Surely he could have found his way to any number of optometrist's to loot. Anyway, that guy would have had a lot more pressing concerns trying to survive in the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse.)

So when cans with pull-off tops showed up on the scene, I was able to face life with renewed hope and vigor.

But today, the unthinkable: the tab popped off my can while I attempted to open it. The tab failed me, and I was forced to resort to the unpredictable can opener. On the second can I opened, the tab worked, but I sliced my knuckle on the lid. In a true survival situation, I couldn't afford the risk of injury to my hands -- the tab system is convenient, but frankly, too dangerous.

Again, my world is shaken. 

So, if only to provide my readers with a sense of security about the future of our species, I've tracked down this video to demonstrate an alternative that looks both safe and easy. And I hope hope none of us get stuck in the bunker with that guy.

The Old Man and the Steak

I've always thought Earnest Hemmingway would be a very interesting dinner guest.

I don't think he'd be very interested in my stories, but I figure, he's really the sort of person you listen to, not be listened to by. You'd invite over a few other guys, and you'd all sit and listen to his many self-indulgent tales, and everyone would have a great time.

But what would you cook for Earnest Hemmingway?

When deciding on what to serve Hemmingway, I think you have to ask yourself, what would I want to eat for a later dinner seated on a dusty, old armchair in front of a blazing brick fireplace in a red, velvet dressing gown while stroking an affectionate seven-toed cat?

And you have your answer. Steak tips.

"Steak tips" are fried steak strips served over a bed of vegetables. Here's how I made mine. (If you will: some steak tips for steak tips. My wife's joke.)

Let's start with the sides. I wanted mashed potatoes, but for Hemmingway, I decided to man them up a little by mixing in some chopped green onion. This is what they call "champ" in Northern Ireland, a place which, to me, seems like it would have some pretty manly cuisine.

Besides the champ, I wanted more vegetables on the side. I like a lot of vegetables, but for Hemmingway, we're going to have to disguise the fact that they're just plain old veggies. So, in a frying pan, I roasted some peanuts in oil for a few minutes, and added some chopped carrots and green beans. When the carrots and beans were cooked, I added some soy and peanut butter -- not a lot, just enough to give the veggies a dark glaze. I'd say this sauce made regular carrots and beans about 75% more manly.

When you're chopping vegetables, it's okay to experiment with shape. I really like it when the size of the different vegetables is fairly uniform, so here's how I cut carrots to match green beans:

Now for the steak tips.

First, get some cheap steak, and slice it into strips. Fry that up on a nonstick pan (it's going to be very hard to clean on a regular pan), and as it's just finished browning, add some brown sugar and sweet chili sauce, enough to coat the meat generously. Let that blacken in the pan.

Separately, fry up some onion, sliced mushrooms and red pepper/capsicum. If you really want to bring out the flavour of the red pepper, roast it in the oven. It's a bit more effort, but you will definitely notice the difference. It's well worth it.Just slice the pepper into strips, and let it roast at about 200C until it the tips start turning black -- maybe 10 minutes. Also, make sure you fry the onion until it's almost done before you add the mushrooms. Onions take a lot longer to cook.

When the onion, mushrooms and red peppers are cooked, you're ready to dish up. Just make a layer of this fried veg mixture and lay the steak strips on top, and add a sprinkle of shredded cheese. Steak tips look great on a plate with your peanut-veggie fry and champ on the side. Try it out! It's going to be awesome.

Anyway, I hope Hemmingway's impressed.

How do they know what Tasty Wheat really tasted like?

"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction . . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal." 
—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations


It's easy to think of fast food, and its pre-packaged home variety brethren, as "postmodern food." But the fact is, we know all that stuff is just "food." That is, maybe I can eat at McDonald's tonight, and it will actually fill my stomach. It's even fun to pretend that I'm actually eating food. But in order for it to be truly postmodern, it has to transcend "food" and become Food -- something I take seriously as a meal. 


Take the "college student" archetype. Movies about college students teach us that, when we are in college, we are to abandon all the food traditions taught to us by our parents and live off a steady died of ramen noodles and microwaved KD. But we don't take those eating habits seriously. We know it's a joke. We do it because it's funny, not because we think those foods will somehow magically provide us with all our required nutrients just because we're in college. "Look, everyone, I'm eating 'food.'"


Maybe in the 50's, you could have lived off a diet of charcoal-barbecued red meat and thought it was good for you. But now with all the nutrition-mongers constantly barraging us with their doctrine of food stoicism, is it even possible to eat postmodern food? That is, can "food" ever Truly become Food?


Yes it can. Sort of. Even here, it's not really the food that's postmodern. Just the flavour.


Sometimes it seems we live with postmodern flavour all the time. Like, who decided what purple candy would taste like? Still, we all know there's "grape" and there's Grape. 


But what about purple? 


Because of grape-flavoured candy, I'm pretty sure I know what Purple Really tastes like.


And what about history? Does an orange now taste like what an orange tasted like in 1810, or has the history of hybridization made it something totally different? There's no way of knowing. The only option is to accept an orange as an orange. What may have been real at one time doesn't matter, because this is what I have available to me now. It's a Real Orange, because that's all there is. 


We know that all the fast food and packaged snack food in our society is unhealthy, and is no replacement for real food. At least, I hope we all know that. Because of this, it's not really postmodern food. "New" foods are only really postmodern when they take on the same definition their precursors carried. 


If you ever overhear a kid refer to a Big Mac as a "carrot," give me a call.

Where's the Pao?

I forgot to try something in my kung pao chicken: something spicy. What's kung pao chicken without the pao?

Traditional kung pao uses dried hot peppers. I even had some hot peppers! Why didn't I use them?

Fortunately, there are some leftovers I can add a few peppers to. A hot sauce would probably work fine as well.

So here's my revised kung pao? chicken theory:

1. Chicken Cubes
2. Sauce with some form of peanut flavour
3. Some pao! (like hot peppers)
4. Serve over rice in a way that could be described as asian-ish



One last thought.

According to Wikipedia, "Kung Pao" was considered a politically incorrect term for the dish during the cultural revolution, because it was named after a general whose title was Gong Bao. So, it was renamed to the less imaginative fast-fried chicken cubes, but you did have the choice of also calling it chicken cubes with seared chiles (of course, China wasn't the last nation to employ food newspeak).

Anyway, if it was such a big deal, why didn't they just rename it to Kung Mao?

Kung Pao? Chicken

I'm pretty sure what I made for dinner tonight tastes like authentic Kung Pao chicken about as much as George Lucas scriptwriting lessons are worth.

So this is my Kung Pao? Chicken. Notice that if you use the question mark in speech, it doesn't actually sound like the recipe may be less than genuine. It just sounds like you're trying to fake a Chinese accent. So you're not lying when you make the dinner announcement, and everyone's impressed.

My Kung Pao? Chicken Theory is this:
1. Chicken Cubes
2. Sauce with some form of peanut flavour
3. Serve over rice in a way that could be described as asian-ish

Alright, here's what I did.

I bought some chicken, one day before it's expiry date was up, for 66% off, and roasted it immediately. To roast it, I just put it in a small roasting pan with some fresh ginger sliced into matchsticks, onion wedges and sliced lemon. The lemon, ginger and onions make the gravy taste so fresh. If I make it again, I'll also add mint flakes. I baked all that for about an hour, then popped the whole thing in the fridge to use for tomorrow's dinner.

I wanted roast potatoes on the side, so the next day, I coated some cubed potatoes in oil and some of the chicken gravy, and baked them for about 40 minutes at 200 C.

For the kung pao? chicken, I fried up some slided shallots (green onion) with 2 red peppers (capsicum), adding the roast chicken from the night before, cubed, after a few minutes. It should be noted that if you want authentic kung pao chicken, you're supposed to fry cubed chicken quickly from an uncooked state.

For the sauce, I just used the gravy from the roast, with its enhanced lemon ginger flavour. I kept the onion and ginger in the sauce, but removed the lemon slices. To this, I added a few shakes of rice vinnegar, a few shakes of soy sauce (I'd say about two tablespoons of each). I also added a great big spoonful of chunky peanut butter.

I wasn't totally convinced this combination of flavours would be that great. Just in case it didn't turn out, I put some shredded cheese and sliced shallots on top of the baked potatoes, and popped them back in the oven for the cheese to melt. My wife's happy with anything with cheese, so I figured even if the chicken was terrible, she'd still be impressed with the overall meal.

Fortunately, my worst fears went unrealised. The lemon, ginger and peanut butter went very well together, and nothing but good reviews from my wife. I suppose I should note, though, that she finished all her potatoes, and saved her leftover chicken "for later."

All around, it's a simple meal with a fun name, fresh flavour, and bright colour.

Try it out, tell me how it goes.

The Bunya Nut Episode

When it comes to stuff that can kill you, Aussies just have to do everything bigger.

Take the bunya pine. The cones it drops are like a foot in diameter, and you probably don't want one's 45 meter drop to end with your head. Those spikes on it are really sharp, too! So I made sure to "keep my bloody eyes open," as was suggested to me, as I went looking for some bunya nuts to cook.

Cones are plentiful enough, scattered around the base of the tree. If you pull apart the fallen cones, each segment contains a nut a little bigger than your thumb nail, the same way you can find pine nuts in large pine cones. Australians don't usually eat bunya nuts, but my wife had always wanted to try them, so we took an afternoon to experiment. 

If you're curious, Aussie kids don't, my wife assures me, have bunya cone fights.

Taking a few suggestions from the internet, we tried a few different ways of cooking them. One Aussie chef suggested that the whole cone be boiled, and the all the nuts inside would steam. A second author wrote that pine nuts should be roasted over a barbecue. We tried both ways.

The cones pull apart in scales

Each "scale" contains a nut. This one's not ripe enough to eat!

Ripe bunya nuts roasting on the barby. Where's the shrimp?

We found roasting produced a much more palatable flavour and texture. Bunya nuts taste a lot like pine nuts, even though, technically, a bunya pine isn't really a pine tree. The nut's texture is very starchy, kind of like a half-cooked potato. I suspect this could be because of three possibilities: 1) That's the way they are, 2) we didn't cook them long enough, or 3) the cones dropped before they were ripe. 

Peeling the cooked nuts

Ready to eat! The dark yellow ones are boiled,
and the lighter two are roasted.

I did find out that Australian aboriginal people traditionally bury the cones in mud to allow the nuts' starches to break down into sugars before they cooked them. That makes a lot of sense. Bunya nuts don't taste bad, but I think they'd be best as a flavour you add to something, not a stand-alone food.

Overall, I enjoyed the uniqueness of the bunya nut cooking experience, but I'm not about to sneak a handful for a midnight snack. Which is probably for the best since, apparently, they have small amounts of cyanide . . .