No Rest for the Rugged
July 13, 2004
There you are, a pre Iron Age chef and you want to whip up a fine bouillon for tonight’s f�ete. It’s easy as pie… read on.
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debra at 10:42 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
If it Bleeds, it Leads
July 12, 2004
That’s was one of the more memorable lines in Michael Moore’s, ‘Bowling for Columbine’. Moore is speaking to a TV producer, asking him to explain why there are so many fear evoking images on the US nightly news. The TV producer replies self-evidently, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’.
I thought the line was a fitting title to the next few entries of Culiblog in which I will document a workshop that I followed at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht this last February. Onno Faller led a workshop titled, ‘Cooking as Genre’ the last two days of which were devoted to a little dead wild boar. Above you see Natasha and a handsome bald bloke, BOTH VEGETARIANS, skinning the poor dead beast.
Although I have killed hundreds of animals for food and skinned them and prepared them, I never find this an easy task. I find myself gritting my teeth as I remove their jackets. I am not repulsed, but I feel sad for the animal, I feel the extreme tension of the killing and of a death that I initiated by wanting to eat the animal. Every animal, even a lobster, fights for its life as we would do. And it never ceases to amaze me that once the animal is skinned, it becomes just a piece of meat to me and my mind switches to the matter of the marinade.
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debra at 13:28 | Comments (5) | post to del.icio.us
Hangover Helper
We only wanted to go dancing.
And of course pollute ourselves and then sweat it out on a dancefloor in a very slutty way. We wanted to smoke and breathe deeply, to sweat. The goddess of Shake Yer Bootie unfortunately had other designs for the evening and our simple plan fell through. You can’t dance just anywhere. Sometimes that special sleazy ambience is essential to the formula. In the ‘consolation bar’ we sat to drink one more ‘last one’. Above my head hung fake old-fashioned enamel advertisements for Guiness stout that asserted, ‘Guiness gives strength’. Vitamine B complex, iron, excellent. I guess the moral of the story is that a person just doesn’t always need a whole hell of a lot of strength. This morning I was waxing existential when I remembered, ‘BREAKFAST!’ And I remembered it twice. This is my second breakfast.
Fried eggs with ‘cheese in a can’, the Turkish sheep cheese rounds in brine sold in cans here. Salty, crumbly, meltable, beautiful to the beholder, delicious. Thank Gawd for breakfast.
debra at 12:57 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
