Do like Data does and bake me something

January 22, 2005

Yesterday Data baked a strawberry jam muffin declaring to her mother that she no longer wants to be a chef, but a chocolatier! This is probably because when Data was 3, way back in 1997, her mother’s nickname for her was “Data Chocolata”. Or maybe there’s another reason.

Data, who now answers to the name Jasmijn, sent this lovely muffin (which I tucked into before I could get the camera out) with her mother to the History of Web Design hosted by the Piet Zwart Academie, the Institute of Network Cultures and the Stedelijk Museum and which took place amidst the grand views of Amsterdam’s Club 11.

One of the speakers, Peter Lunenfeld showed us a slide of Paris, a Barbie-like doll designed in Silicon Valley to appeal to 10 and 11 yr. old girls - and whose profession was web designer! I won’t elaborate further in this culinary weblog about this conference devoted to looking backwards and forwards but I did adore running into old friends.

And Data’s muffin was excellent with my tea. Bedankt Lieve Data, perhaps in 10 years time when the web has evolved into something else entirely you will have become Data Chocolata La Chocolatiere!
(Please read more… )

debra at 15:06 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us

Brain Food

January 20, 2005

This terribly sad but well written book by Mark Kurlansky is a gripping history from the perspective of the cod. Kurlansky tells how fishing for this gadiform has deeply affected the wealth and development of many nations and technologies. I’m thinking the Flounder by Gunther Grass that I read back in the day but even more I’m thinking Fish Story, the mega-artwork by Allan Sekula, about the ’sweatshop called the Pacific’. (Sekula’s visual history Fish Story was part of the the last Documenta XI in Kassel. One photograph in particular gave me goosebumps. You see a ship painter giving the Exxon Valdez a new name…fishy stuff.)

It turns out that cod in the form of stokvis (wind dried cod) turned out to be some good thinking-man’s protein for the Norsemen. That extra portable brain-power enabled them to encounter New Foundland in 1000, where they also encountered the Beothuk People who had already discovered it and were not enamoured with the idea of sharing their space with the pink and hairy people from across the puddle.

Basques added salt to the stokvis recipe to make salt cod increasing the quality of the preservation and enabling Basque fishermen to to travel even farther - to the mouth of the St. Lawrence river. When explorer Jacques Cartier got there raring to claim his ‘discovery’ he encountered almost a thousand Basque fishing vessels. And a bunch of angry native Beothuk people getting pissy about the incessant attention.

Cod is inextricably tied to land (to dry it) and salt (to preserve it) and Salt is in fact the title of another one of Kurlansky’s wonderful books.

debra at 20:54 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us

Keeping one’s vows

January 19, 2005

Remember in October when I had just bought Roxanne Klein’s R A W and I reported how it made me homesick for Laurel’s Kitchen? And then upon rereading Laurel’s Kitchen I made a vow to ‘take cashew cheese seriously’ from now on?

Well, I have been taking cashew cheese making very seriously indeed, and I believe I have improved upon the Good Ladies’ recipes. Pictured above are some of the steps in this easy process (from l to r: placing the blended cashew butter in a cheese cloth, cheese cloth hanging in the window, cheese cloth dripping with cashew milk and dark winter sky).