Well, people, the 2011 blogging year is drawing to a close for me. Long story short, I’ve decided that due to work commitments this will be my last post for 2011 – but I will be back, all engines running, the first Monday in January to keep on sharing my thoughts and ramblings with y’all.
I suppose, then, that it’s appropriate to reflect on 2011 as a year. The more I speak to people, the more I realise that 2011 has been…well, if 2011 were a student, and I was talking to her parents at Parent Teacher Night, I’d probably say something along the lines of:
‘While I’ve really enjoyed having 2011 in my class, certain aspects of her behaviour have been…challenging. Problematic. Disruptive. Hurtful to me and the other students. Why can’t 2011 just leave me alone? I don’t understand!! I want my classroom back!!!!!!! I want my life back!!!!!!!!!’ (exits, sobbing, to the staffroom).
I’m not alone in feeling this way about 2011. Everyone I have been speaking to about this in the last few weeks has been looking forward to putting this year to bed and welcoming a new one. Change has seemed to be a pretty major element of what people in my life, and what I, have had happen in 2011. The kicker is, it’s not been easy or exciting change. Believe it or not, I normally like change. Shake it up, baby, turn and face the strain. What’s made this year’s changes that my crew and I have experienced non-easy and non-exciting is that they’ve been hard changes, changes that required leaps into the dark, naked without a parachute. Changes that, for some, involved painful choices to separate from significant others. Changes that involved for others giving up on some dreams. Or moving houses and lives, or just taking on a whole lot of hard hard hard work with the end in sight but a long way off. My year included all those things, and TWO bouts of the worst food poisoning I’ve ever had in my life, within a month of each other. If I’d have known what was ahead of me, gastro wise, in 2011, I would not have laughed so hard in the food poisoning scene in Briedsmaids. Just saying.
What I’ve learnt from 2011, other than sushi is always a seriously bad idea, is that people are made of pretty tough stuff. Because, in spite of 2011’s better attempts to break our spirits and run amok, we are all still here, still talking, still living, still believing in each other, and, most importantly, still hoping for a brighter 2012.
It’s in this spirit of hoping for a brighter 2012 that I’m sharing with you my wishlist for 2012. I stole this idea from Kitty Gilfeather, who, rather than making new years resolutions, writes a wishlist of what she hopes for in 2012. It takes away the threat of failure implied by resolutions, and instead replaces them with the warm, happy glow of anticipation. Here’s what I’m working with so far:
• Read more good books.
• Wear matching underwear at all times.
• Buy a fabulous thing for my apartment each season (I’m thinking my summer purchase might be a cowhide rug for le boudoir– thoughts?).
• Kick corporate wardrobe butt.
• Update my CV every 6 months to reflect awesomeness.
• Keep fresh flowers at my desk.
• Listen to albums in full, rather than skipping to singles.
And, most importantly, I feel:
• Drink mojitos, with lots and lots of ice, on my balcony, watching thunderstorms.
So bye for now, lovelies, and see you in 2012. Which, might I just say, already looks pretty swell.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Recipes That Keep On Giving: Fusion Dahl
Fusion cooking, a blending of two culturally diverse cuisines, was an early noughties fad. Like many fads, the concept was good, the execution problematic, and the adoption by plebs too high to sustain lasting chic. See leggings, chai, flares and boho anything.
However, when fusion works, you find yourself in a land of culinary world peace, ebony and ivory living in perfect harmony on your plate. Or, in the case of the recipe I’m about to share with you, Anglo stodge and Indian spice combining in one of the best, cheapest and easiest dinners going.
The quickest way to take you on this journey is to get you to do the following. Imagine a full English breakfast. Imagine a bowl of dahl. Imagine if we merged the two. What would you get? East meets West. Stodge meets Spice. Fusion dahl.
The basic concept of replacing the beans component of a full English breakfast with lentil dahl was one that A Bite To Eat, a Canberra institution, trialled a number of years ago. (A full English, for the uninitiated, consists of bacon, sausage, egg, beans, toast, and some sort of fried vegetable, usually tomato, mushroom, or spinach, or all three. In my opinion, a full English is not a patch on a full Scottish, the latter being superior on account of the sheer amount and type of sausage on offer, but let’s leave that simmering ethnic tension for another post). On an evening when I was at the buy-the-two-cents-a-tin-cheaper-tin-of-tomatoes end of a pay cycle, I decided to turn my favourite poor-girl supper of red lentil dahl into an experimental cross cultural peasent feast, by adding crispy bacon, sausage, egg and toast. And that’s when I blew my mind.
Something about the combination of salty spicy dahl, salty meaty bacon and sausage, gooey egg, crisp toast, and sweet butter speaks of the best of multiple culinary worlds. Indeed, it was the dish I cooked, in a fit of Rule (Modern, Multicultural) Britannia, to eat whilst watching the royal wedding earlier this year. It has been on high rotation ever since.
Last night, I played with the formula some more. Conscious of the looming Christmas meatfest (and sugar fest, and grog fest, and general fest fest), I decided to replace the sausages with green veg, the toast with mashed home grown parsnips from PapaK’s garden, and loose the egg altogether. The result was incredible, all the more so for being a virtuous cousin to the nutritionally cheeky salt and carb overload of the original.
Recipes for the cheeky and the virtuous are supplied below. Pick according to need.
Cheeky Fusion Dahl
Serves 2 hungry people
1 cup red lentils, soaked in hot water
Butter, oil, for frying
3 cloves crushed garlic
2cm knob ginger, grated
Teaspoon garam marsala
Teaspoon tumeric
1 teaspoon massell vegetable stock powder
1 teaspoon massell chicken stock power
Hot water
6 Rashes bacon, rind trimmed
6 sausages
4 slices toast
2 eggs
Heat oil and butter in a medium saucepan until butter is frothy. Fry garlic and ginger, with a pinch of salt, until softened. Add spices, stir till aromatic. Drain lentils and add to pan, turning down heat to prevent catching. Sprinkle over stock powder, cover with hot water, and simmer over low heat until lentils are tender and dahl is at a dahl like consistency (if I were Nigella, I’d ladle in a couple of innuendos here, but I’m not, so I’ll go tautological instead).
While dahl is simmering, cook bacon and sausages until crispy, keep warm on a plate in the oven. Fry eggs in bacon and sausage pan, at the same time toast your toast until toasted (tautology, again!).
Assemble as you see fit. My preference is: toast, buttered, topped with steaming mound of dahl, topped with runny-yolked fried egg, sausage to the side, bacon balanced delicately on top. And a sprig of coriander, for a token bow to greenery.
Virtuous fusion dahl
One quantity of dahl, as above
Good handful of parsnips, peeled, chopped roughly
Butter, pepper, salt
Green vegetables for two (I like kale and French beans)
4 rashers bacon
Make dahl as above, but place parsnips in a pot with water and set over high heat as soon as you start the dahl. Cook parsnips until tender. Drain, add a knob of butter to the pan, along with salt and pepper to taste, and mash until smooth. This improves if allowed to sit for five minutes. Cook bacon, as above, and toss your greens off in the bacon fat immediately before serving.
Again, preferences for assemblage vary, but I like a mountain of parsnip, foothills of greens, a volcanic flow of dahl on top and some precariously balanced bacon.
Of course, you could veganise this concept, if that’s your thing, by replacing the egg, bacon and sausage component with crispy fried tofu cubes, avocado, or oven baked mushrooms. Vegetarians can substitute haloumi for the bacon, or jut throw on some extra eggs. Whatever you do, it’ll be a brilliant, spicy, stodgy harmony.
However, when fusion works, you find yourself in a land of culinary world peace, ebony and ivory living in perfect harmony on your plate. Or, in the case of the recipe I’m about to share with you, Anglo stodge and Indian spice combining in one of the best, cheapest and easiest dinners going.
The quickest way to take you on this journey is to get you to do the following. Imagine a full English breakfast. Imagine a bowl of dahl. Imagine if we merged the two. What would you get? East meets West. Stodge meets Spice. Fusion dahl.
The basic concept of replacing the beans component of a full English breakfast with lentil dahl was one that A Bite To Eat, a Canberra institution, trialled a number of years ago. (A full English, for the uninitiated, consists of bacon, sausage, egg, beans, toast, and some sort of fried vegetable, usually tomato, mushroom, or spinach, or all three. In my opinion, a full English is not a patch on a full Scottish, the latter being superior on account of the sheer amount and type of sausage on offer, but let’s leave that simmering ethnic tension for another post). On an evening when I was at the buy-the-two-cents-a-tin-cheaper-tin-of-tomatoes end of a pay cycle, I decided to turn my favourite poor-girl supper of red lentil dahl into an experimental cross cultural peasent feast, by adding crispy bacon, sausage, egg and toast. And that’s when I blew my mind.
Something about the combination of salty spicy dahl, salty meaty bacon and sausage, gooey egg, crisp toast, and sweet butter speaks of the best of multiple culinary worlds. Indeed, it was the dish I cooked, in a fit of Rule (Modern, Multicultural) Britannia, to eat whilst watching the royal wedding earlier this year. It has been on high rotation ever since.
Last night, I played with the formula some more. Conscious of the looming Christmas meatfest (and sugar fest, and grog fest, and general fest fest), I decided to replace the sausages with green veg, the toast with mashed home grown parsnips from PapaK’s garden, and loose the egg altogether. The result was incredible, all the more so for being a virtuous cousin to the nutritionally cheeky salt and carb overload of the original.
Recipes for the cheeky and the virtuous are supplied below. Pick according to need.
Cheeky Fusion Dahl
Serves 2 hungry people
1 cup red lentils, soaked in hot water
Butter, oil, for frying
3 cloves crushed garlic
2cm knob ginger, grated
Teaspoon garam marsala
Teaspoon tumeric
1 teaspoon massell vegetable stock powder
1 teaspoon massell chicken stock power
Hot water
6 Rashes bacon, rind trimmed
6 sausages
4 slices toast
2 eggs
Heat oil and butter in a medium saucepan until butter is frothy. Fry garlic and ginger, with a pinch of salt, until softened. Add spices, stir till aromatic. Drain lentils and add to pan, turning down heat to prevent catching. Sprinkle over stock powder, cover with hot water, and simmer over low heat until lentils are tender and dahl is at a dahl like consistency (if I were Nigella, I’d ladle in a couple of innuendos here, but I’m not, so I’ll go tautological instead).
While dahl is simmering, cook bacon and sausages until crispy, keep warm on a plate in the oven. Fry eggs in bacon and sausage pan, at the same time toast your toast until toasted (tautology, again!).
Assemble as you see fit. My preference is: toast, buttered, topped with steaming mound of dahl, topped with runny-yolked fried egg, sausage to the side, bacon balanced delicately on top. And a sprig of coriander, for a token bow to greenery.
Virtuous fusion dahl
One quantity of dahl, as above
Good handful of parsnips, peeled, chopped roughly
Butter, pepper, salt
Green vegetables for two (I like kale and French beans)
4 rashers bacon
Make dahl as above, but place parsnips in a pot with water and set over high heat as soon as you start the dahl. Cook parsnips until tender. Drain, add a knob of butter to the pan, along with salt and pepper to taste, and mash until smooth. This improves if allowed to sit for five minutes. Cook bacon, as above, and toss your greens off in the bacon fat immediately before serving.
Again, preferences for assemblage vary, but I like a mountain of parsnip, foothills of greens, a volcanic flow of dahl on top and some precariously balanced bacon.
Of course, you could veganise this concept, if that’s your thing, by replacing the egg, bacon and sausage component with crispy fried tofu cubes, avocado, or oven baked mushrooms. Vegetarians can substitute haloumi for the bacon, or jut throw on some extra eggs. Whatever you do, it’ll be a brilliant, spicy, stodgy harmony.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Summer of Steinbeck, Or, Why I Miss My English Major
Summer 2011-12 is the Summer of Steinbeck. There, I’ve declared it. Five days and two books in, it’s proving to be a most enjoyable venture.
In my hazy undergraduate days, I was both an English and a Sociology major at the ANU. If we’re judging purely by pleasure, I think I enjoyed my English courses slightly more than my Sociology courses, although I think that had something to do with the exceptionally good company offered by my English classmates (hello Clementine Kemp and Kitty Gilfeather). As I’ve gone on to do Honors and a PhD in Sociology, I clearly enjoy the challenge that Sociology presents, but English was, and remains, my first academic love. Whilst Sociology and I are happily, contentedly, farting-in-front-of-each-other married, I can’t help but miss my first tortured love, and yearn for the simpler days of reading big books and thinking big thoughts.
(In my darker PhD moments, I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d broken the mould of bright, bookish, sensitive girl and studied something wild and crazy like dentistry. I could be brining oral hygiene to the masses right now. A tempting thought, as I’m oral hygiene’s biggest cheerleader …but I digress.)
The thing I specifically miss about my English major is the discipline of reading, not just for fun, but with purpose and with a desire to understand something beyond just the story. Although I am a voracious reader (it’s the best way to pass the extra hours that insomnia gives you), I have allowed myself to become soft and slack over the last few years, when I’ve been reading solely for fast pleasure and not the deep satisfaction of reading a text that demands more from you.
So it’s in this spirit of wanting a more deeply satisfying reading experience that I’ve set myself the challenge of reading or re-reading all of Steinbeck this summer. John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors, and, fittingly, one of the first ‘serious’ writers I fell hard for. Steinbeck wrote a lot, which is partly why I’ve chosen him for this summer’s project – I needed a writer with a big enough titles list to keep me amused all summer long, and prevent my attention from straying to other, simpler, literary pleasures.
I began with The Grapes of Wrath, arguably Steinbeck’s most famous novel, and well worth a read. I won’t spoil for those of you who haven’t yet read it, but the ending makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Last night, I finished The Wayward Bus, which I hadn’t heard of until Veronica Silver suggested it and kindly loaned me her copy. I loved it, and was highly impressed by Steinbeck’s descriptions of clothing and make up in The Wayward Bus – I’d never had Johnny boy pegged as a writer of women and women’s secret mirror rituals. Today, on the bus to work, I began Travels With Charley, another loan from Veronica Silver, and am planning on tracking down In Dubois Battle later this week. Already, I’m taken back to those first heady days of my English major, deeply satisfied yet yearning for more.
In my hazy undergraduate days, I was both an English and a Sociology major at the ANU. If we’re judging purely by pleasure, I think I enjoyed my English courses slightly more than my Sociology courses, although I think that had something to do with the exceptionally good company offered by my English classmates (hello Clementine Kemp and Kitty Gilfeather). As I’ve gone on to do Honors and a PhD in Sociology, I clearly enjoy the challenge that Sociology presents, but English was, and remains, my first academic love. Whilst Sociology and I are happily, contentedly, farting-in-front-of-each-other married, I can’t help but miss my first tortured love, and yearn for the simpler days of reading big books and thinking big thoughts.
(In my darker PhD moments, I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d broken the mould of bright, bookish, sensitive girl and studied something wild and crazy like dentistry. I could be brining oral hygiene to the masses right now. A tempting thought, as I’m oral hygiene’s biggest cheerleader …but I digress.)
The thing I specifically miss about my English major is the discipline of reading, not just for fun, but with purpose and with a desire to understand something beyond just the story. Although I am a voracious reader (it’s the best way to pass the extra hours that insomnia gives you), I have allowed myself to become soft and slack over the last few years, when I’ve been reading solely for fast pleasure and not the deep satisfaction of reading a text that demands more from you.
So it’s in this spirit of wanting a more deeply satisfying reading experience that I’ve set myself the challenge of reading or re-reading all of Steinbeck this summer. John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors, and, fittingly, one of the first ‘serious’ writers I fell hard for. Steinbeck wrote a lot, which is partly why I’ve chosen him for this summer’s project – I needed a writer with a big enough titles list to keep me amused all summer long, and prevent my attention from straying to other, simpler, literary pleasures.
I began with The Grapes of Wrath, arguably Steinbeck’s most famous novel, and well worth a read. I won’t spoil for those of you who haven’t yet read it, but the ending makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Last night, I finished The Wayward Bus, which I hadn’t heard of until Veronica Silver suggested it and kindly loaned me her copy. I loved it, and was highly impressed by Steinbeck’s descriptions of clothing and make up in The Wayward Bus – I’d never had Johnny boy pegged as a writer of women and women’s secret mirror rituals. Today, on the bus to work, I began Travels With Charley, another loan from Veronica Silver, and am planning on tracking down In Dubois Battle later this week. Already, I’m taken back to those first heady days of my English major, deeply satisfied yet yearning for more.
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