How to make delicious Masala Potatoes

Masala potatoes are a dish I’m making a lot these days to accompany a curry I take to work for lunch. I had to cut bread out of my diet, and needed something starchy, but not too starchy to keep me awake during the afternoon. These are basically just ghee, spices, and par-boiled spuds, so they’re an easy something to whip up on sunday night before the week starts.

So, you’ll need:

• some parboiled small or new season spuds
• a couple of tablespoons of ghee (or just plain old butter if it’s all you have)
• tbsp of tumeric
• 2-3cm of ginger
• tbsp-ish of cumin seeds
• 1/2 tsp of chilli powder, or a couple of fresh chillis
• a pinch of asafoetida

From here it’s easy

 

How to make delicious crunchy muesli

This recipe isn’t in the Aussie cookbook, but is something we make pretty regularly here. The idea was initially to save a little money, but over time it’s mostly become about making a meal that isn’t jam-packed full of sugar. Plus, oats! What’s not to like.

You’ll need:

Oats, maybe four cups

Dried fruits, pretty much whatever you’re into (and won’t break the bank)

Dried coconut

Seeds; pumpkin, sesame, sunflower. You get the picture

Vegetable oil

A sweetener. We use a golden syrup, but you could use honey (if it wasn’t so damn expensive), or malt. Even brown sugar could do.

So this recipe is pretty straightforward. Toast the oats in the oven, toast the seeds on the stovetop, and chop the fruits. Here we go.

 

How to make “Beggar’s chicken”

And here in the first of the ‘How to cook from an 80s cookbook’ series is Beggar’s chicken. To be honest I’m surprised they didn’t call this something dodgy, but there you go. Apparently PC was alive an well as early as the mid-80s. And so we begin:

This is one of the renowed dishes of the Orient. The chicken was originally wrapped in lotus leaves, then in clay, then thrown into a hot fire. Supply chopsticks for four lucky people.

You’ll need:

1.5kg chicken

3 shallots (I used a small onion, which was probably a mistake)

2.5cm piece green ginger

1 tsp sugar

3 tbsps soy sauce

2 tbsps dry sherry

1 tbsp water

1/4 tsp five spice powder

2 extra tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsps oil

extra oil

1kg cooking salt (!!)

4 cups plain flour

1 1/2 cups water (approx)

The recipe itself is pretty simple, the first thing to do is to mix all the dough, then stuff the chicken with the surprisingly limited amount of spices, wrap the whole shebang in foil and dough, and cook that thing for a total of FOUR HOURS. You’ll need to pay attention to that last bit.

 

Changing Newlands Manor – Master Bedroom

I thought I’d take the easier of the two options and renovate the Master Bedroom. Of course I was wrong and this was by far the more difficult room.

The problem I’m addressing is that the walls of Newlands Manor are concrete, so in Winter they soak up a lot of the heat we put into the bedrooms, and the air becomes *very* cold at night. In addition the old pasterboard on the walls was damaged after 60 years of use, and we needed to replace it. So, in comes me with my trusty hammer and chisel.

The first task was to carefully remove all of the covers off the windows and doors, and to lift off the skirting boards. These are made of very old rimu (a native timber now protected) and are very brittle, so it was quite a long and careful job. Then, I demolished the old fibreboard cornices. I’d seen a professional cabinet-maker unable to take these off cleanly, so didn’t worry about that myself, just dragged them down.

 

Once I’d exposed the studs and dwangs I carefully looked them over for rot or borer. They weren’t in bad order, and were pretty well-laid out. They looked to be a rough-sawn hardwood of some variety, as the house-building plans had requested, and they seem to have lasted well since construction in 1951. Once everything was exposed and cleaned, I put in some polyester/fibreglass insulation.

Our main hope is that the insulation slows the heat loss to a minimum. This will help keep these rooms drier as well.

Next, I put up the first of the new panels. I was originally planning to use pine. Someone suggested cedar, and while I was looking into it I discovered an Indonesian wood called meranti. This was a pretty expensive option though, coming in at around $NZ85 a sheet. Pine retails at around $NZ60, and I needed at least a dozen sheets. While looking for a cheaper source I had a conversation with the guys at Mitre10 Mega in Petone about a wood they have there called Okoume. I went home a googled it (to be sure it wasn’t manufactured from Panda bones or something…), and discovered that it is a popular marine ply from West Africa. And only slightly threatened. Furthermore, it has a finely-grained texture and a very light salmon colour. Even better, I think it cost around the same or less than the pine! Win.

Pretty soon I was throwing up panels.

Before you know it I had all the panels up, rimu batons cut to size and nailed up, the old rimu skirting boards put back on, and some rimu cornices I made up installed. The lighting adds nicely to the marine feel of the room. This week we’ve a sparky coming in to check the wiring, install a ceiling light etc.

The floorboards in the photo below are also rimu, and as you can see they come up a nice colour. We’re hoping the rimu I installed comes up as nicely, and we’ll likely polyurethane the floors so they can be exposed without scratching. The okoume we’re thinking we want to tint to a light gold/orange to complement the rimu.

Here’s another corner of the room along with a window stool that was a casualty of the renovation, as was the right window cover. Thankfully that was it for major stuff-ups.

We’re planning to strip the window frames back to bare wood, so the poor damaged stool will likely we swept up in it, and I might have to replace all the covers on this window because the new cover to the right and the old covers are different depths!

And here’s a shot with some furniture and the curtains.

It makes me think that the interior decorating can’t come soon enough. The walls need the depth that a decent stain will give to make them look less industrial.

All in all the whole shebang came in reasonable but not cheap, and we saved a huge amount in builder’s fees. Took me a week of getting out of bed at 7am, and working till the light failed (I will admit to pausing to watch a few sci-fi films!), but I got it done.

Oh, and in my spare time that week I built a fence.

 

Foodblog Reboot.

A recent post on Public Address had someone comment that they thought I should be putting up foodie posts to the new blog Russell is setting up. Well, for reasons, I’m unlikely to be invited, but I mentioned that I might be encouraged to start posting here again in the old “How to” series of cooking.

And because serendipity is what it is, this morning at David White on Able Smith St Second Chef uncovered this:

This is the cover of a cookbook we once owned in Mount Maungaui. I remember frequently opening it and wishing we had the means to afford half the things this book said we could make. The How-To series is in point of fact modelled on the pictures contained in this book, and much of my cooking history has been an effort to learn how to make recipes I remember drooling over. And yes, this does count as Food Prn.

And so now, because I am older, wiser, and more financially able, I will proceed to cook every single recipe in this book, and post them for you right here – a la Julie and Julia.

So you’d best be prepared for exotic dishes from the mid-1980s including:

“Chinese Fish”

“Sates’

“Rum-Caramel Pineapple”

and “Chips”.

Strap yourself in!

 

The Iron Heel, Jack London

I came to The Iron Heel from a list of “Dystopian Fiction” I found on the interweb, a list also including such classics as 1984 and A Handmaiden’s Tale. It was interesting then to later discover that The Iron Heel is cited as an influence on Orwell, because the similarity in the authoritarian nations that emerge in London’s alternate-history USA and the industrialised world of Oceania is obvious, despite the two authorities being respectively Fascist and Communist.

The similarity in the nature of the authoritarianism depicted by London and Orwell reinforces for me the ease with which any imaginer can foresee their own system of government slipping into a future distinguished most strongly by control, with the machinery of this control only differentiated by favoured contemporary political philosophies. The potential to garner authority (and its exercise by an oligarchy or plutocracy) imagined by these authors is also exhibited the recently-read Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987).

Of course, it is nothing new to claim that all dystopia are marked by authority-masquerading-as-utopia. What is interesting to me is the manner in which dystopia is so readily imagined to emerge as a consequence of contemporary events, and the suggestion that the here and now may, by virtue of being the opposite of that dreaded  future, in fact be the utopia we have long sought. This is especially the case when reading other contemporary fiction such as Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003, which I’m currently in the middle of) and by Marcel Theroux, Far North (2009), where the marvels of the C20th and early C21st are remembered as halcyon days.

The placement of utopia in the here and now, instead of placing it as a future to serve in contrast to a dystopia we need fear, a heaven and hell, is an idea in which I have become increasingly interested. In a manner of speaking, we do currently live in London’s  “wonder-city of Asgard”, and our capitalists do operate an oligarchy in which a great many wonders are possible. It was strange therefore to be reading The Iron Heel as the Occupy Movement began to unfold across the US, and to see the authorities in Oakland begin to come down on protest. Part of me wondered if what London calls ‘standing on faces’ might not have continued and expanded had there been a different President in the White House.

While The Iron Heel degrades into a fantasy of class-, or caste-based warfare, the initial exposition of the failures of capitalism are very interesting, presenting as they do a critique of an economy in which monopoly and resource exploitation are rife, and in which competition to smother smaller players is both necessary and acceptable. While reading of absorption of the petite bourgeoisie by the corporations I was easily able to see the expansion of the mega-malls across the US, and the migration of the small-business-owner into minimum-wage jobs, and in the transformation of farmers to serfs I was reminded of the growth of gigantic monoculture industrial farming.

So does this mean that I think the US is slipping into authoritarianism, with London writing a vague script to a gathering revolution? No more than I think 1984 is likely. As it is The Iron Heel sits alongside the great dystopian works as a reminder of the paths on which no rational humanist would want to find themself. Moreover, what The Iron Heel and 1984 have in common is an imagined world in which resource-exploitation continues to be feasible. If you contrast those worlds to more recent works such as the aforementioned Oryx and Crake, Far North, or even Bruce Sterling The Caryatids (2009), all of which feature the collapse of the nation-state system under stress from resource shortages and environmental change, things start to get a little more real.

 

Review – Never Let Me Go

With its main premise the inhumanity of mankind to man, Never Let Me Go is perhaps the most prescient scifi I can remember seeing since The Road. Sharing with that story a bleakness of human spirit, Never Let Me Go is the tale of three clones bred for their organs by a near-past Great Britain.

The story begins with the children growing up together  in a stately home that looks and functions much like a boarding school in any Western country. Of course, this is no ordinary school, but instead a place where the children are kept in peak condition, in much the same manner as are well-treated free range animals. And it is this that makes the story so horrifying. These are of course human children, but humans intended as nothing more than mobile organ banks. Accentuating this horror is the knowledge that man’s inhumanity has created such injustice throughout history, be it in the greed that created slavery, the malice that worked Jews to death, or the myths of superiority that saw British invade and slaughter thousands of Australians.

A society where clones are bred for purpose is so likely, the setting so familiar, and the drive for self-preservation so hard-coded within each of us that such as place as these children grow, and learn, and love before they are dissected to extend the lives of their gerontologic masters could be occurring right now.

It’s a compelling film, an extraordinary example of the social critique scifi should actually serve, and one I heartily commend.

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper – FIN

SOLO

Curtains open on a small flat. To stage right is a door leading to outside. To stage left is a door leading to a bedroom. Between the two runs a kitchenette with stove and oven, a sink, small cupboards. A fridge stands next to the bedroom door. Above the kitchenette is a double window with net curtains. In stage front is a couch facing towards audience. A small coffee table is positioned in front of couch.

Scene One:

 

The Spirit Level, ii

I’m nine and we’re sitting at the living room table she made a year or so back. It was a full dining room table but she cut down the legs, sanded it back. I remember gouging it with a fork handle in a fit of pique, a childish anger vented at some one thing she must have been proud of.

I’m looking at the empty grooves now, and asking,

“Is this tea?”

“Be quiet and eat.”

“But it’s just weetbix.”

“The benefit isn’t till tomorrow, so eat up.”

“But it’s breakfast isn’t it?”

“Just eat up.”

It’s a story I tell for years, of the superimposition of hunger by ‘our situation’. In retrospect it’s the one thing I associate with benefit dependency, the constant hunger, not only for basic nutrition, but for the many small things others take for granted you lack. The small luxuries and the simple things you cannot afford. A hunger for invaluables like comfort, security, certainty.

You see these things among people you consider rich, and you crave them. You hoard small objects, the cast offs of the better offs, and you think yourself lucky to have snatched such prizes.

I remember being perhaps 10, or 11, and sitting on the floor of the dining room reading Australian Womens Weekly Cookbook, a glossy A4 softcover filled with large pictures of simple foods. Brandy snaps. Yorkshire pudding. The pages were something I would treasure, the details of the recipes something I would pore over, a series of simple how-to pictures I must have subconsciously replicated here on this very blog. I would look at these foods and yearn for the ingredients, the know-how. But to practice we would need more than what we had. And what we had wasn’t enough.

So where are the choices in that? We were making the right life choices. We were frugal as our station demanded. We made the most of what we had. But still we ate cereal for dinner while our neighbours’ cat ate gravy beef.

What is it about dependency that means you must suffer in silence the ire of those who consider themselves your betters?

I sit now in comfort, folded in the bounty of the middle classes, and I look back to those days as a hazy memory, and I’m thankful to be free of then. I can sit now and listen to people run down the poor to someone the feel is a social equal, and while I no longer feel myself an interloper, I sometimes feel I have abandoned my past, that I have turned my back on what it was to be both hungry and undeserving.

Until I see the ire acted out again, as if by rote, an endless script of hate and condescension.

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

The story wasn’t over really. That boy is still in the field, and he still has explaining to do.

Although the death of my father is a significant event, it was something I was unaware of until my early 20s. Before then was another tale of sorrow, one which was of course intimately tied to the events following that death, but which must be properly considered another chapter.

However, since completing that first chapter a great many things have come to preoccupy my time, concurrent to which has been a vastly greater ease of sleeping. I am not, it seems, compelled to sit late at night and summon forth the ghosts of the past.

Searching within for the reason for the departure of that complusion I remembered writing Solo, a work I wanted to put together as a play in the time before Chef Du Plunge. I had been living by myself in a basement flat in Mt Cook, and had made the most of the isolation to tell a tale you will of course see woven into the first chapter of this work.

I’ve extracted the play from a folder within a folder on a drive I use to store those old things, and will tidy it up over the weekend.

Perhaps we can finally give that child the piece he deserves.