Compost

First some fun.

The pic above is from a stall in the Campo di fiori  where there were several of these quite entrancing bouquets mixing chilies with fruit and flowers.

And then there's this:
http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/food-recipes/dessert/a35046/spinning-cake-video/
 
Food and Words presents Magnus Nillson
‘Join Magnus Nilsson for an evening of food stories that provide a glimpse into the mind of this creative chef, his writing, the Nordic region, and the cycle of life at his restaurant Fäviken Magasinet in Sweden. In Australia to launch his latest book, The Nordic Cookbook (Phaidon Press), Magnus will recount his adventures and the making of the book, with Barbara Sweeney from Food & Words. The Nordic Cookbook draws on the history and culture of the region to present a guide to Nordic home cooking.’
Looking forward to this with great interest. Of the six chefs in the Netflix Chef’s Table series, he was one I particularly liked.
http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/?u=18379082669eb4fa2fd48f147&id=bde027b001&e=9b96885df3
 
Where are all the women chefs?
‘But today, in the food industry and in the restaurant industry, I think the male approach dominates and the female one is overlooked. In a lot of kitchens, food is treated as a problem to be solved, something to dominate—something that has to give up its secrets. Kitchens are turned into laboratories, filled with tools and weapons: vacuum packers, sous-vides, probes, and all the other stuff. Sometimes the instinctive part gets lost. It almost makes me weep to be told that to confit a duck leg in plastic underwater is just as good as to confit in duck fat. The loving, nurturing side of the trade, the instinctive side—and, I would say, the feminine side—is being forgotten.’

Nothing like kicking off a newsletter with a controversial proposition. I generally have a problem with gender essentialism so have problems with this article. I think of the many male chefs who don’t approach food as a to be solved and who also love and produce ‘ the food that women love: regional, instinctive cooking that is not being celebrated in the top-fifty lists’. And are there no women chefs who approach food as ‘something that has to give up its secrets’? I think there are way more structural and systemic and just plain mysogynist reasons for the absence of women chefs. Arnold herself points to one significant barrier: ‘Children, as we all know, take your world, your love, and, in my case, they took my food. It took quite a few years once I came away from looking after small children to find my courage again.
 
Anyone know examples where it is the male partner who takes on the responsibility of the children while the woman chef continues her career?
 
http://luckypeach.com/where-are-all-the-women-chefs/
 
This “Proudly Feminist” Restaurant Is Run Entirely By Asylum Seeker Women
‘There are nine asylum seekers running the show tonight. Helping the two lead chefs with food prep, making drinks, and providing service on the floor are women from countries all over the world, including Uganda, Rwanda, Iran, Burundi, Fiji and Nigeria. “One of the great things about this program is that they’re not just reproducing their own cuisines, everyone involved gets to learn the recipes from different cultures and backgrounds” Lloyd tells me.
 
Being a long time supporter of initiatives like this where food and hospitality provide opportunities for cross-cultural support I’ve signed up to get news of upcoming Mazi Mas events like the one described.  http://mazimas.com.au/
I will post notices of events via Compost and my FB page.
 
http://bzfd.it/1jn2s1b
 
Felafel Nation. Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel. Yael Raviv
 ‘When people discuss food in Israel, their debates ask politically charged questions: Who has the right to falafel? Whose hummus is better? But Yael Raviv’s Falafel Nation moves beyond the simply territorial to divulge the role food plays in the Jewish nation. She ponders the power struggles, moral dilemmas, and religious and ideological affiliations of the different ethnic groups that make up the “Jewish State” and how they relate to the gastronomy of the region. How do we interpret the recent upsurge in the Israeli culinary scene—the transition from ideological asceticism to the current deluge of fine restaurants, gourmet stores, and related publications and media?’
 
I’ve been reading a few articles about the questions posed in this abstract of this book so I am very much looking forward to getting it as I am to reading this chapter John Newton sent me https://www.academia.edu/14992595/Jewish_Meals_in_Antiquity
 
Also planning on rocking up to the launch of Palestine Fair Trade Australia https://www.facebook.com/events/405694319620548/
 
And then there’s this http://bit.ly/1MAFVp5
 
The Surreal Thrill of Moscow Dining
‘Their dishes resembled edible Magritte canvases, like a branch covered with glistening red berries that turned out to be made of chicken liver. A mystery broth alternated sour black-currant-filled dumplings with foie-gras-filled sweeter ones. A quantity of bark was set aflame. One dish arrived atop a birch stump that was later opened to reveal another dish inside it. When my friend and I complimented their cooking, the Berzutskys pressed their hands to their hearts and nodded gravely, like opera singers at a curtain call. ​​‘
 
And in the local grocery store the shelves are empty and somewhere bulldozers are pushing mountains of imported cheapo canned goods into vast trenches in Siberia.
 
http://bit.ly/1VTCiEU
 
Pete Evans given award which recognises ‘quackery’
"Is Evans genuine? I don't know. Check out the lengthy disclaimer on his Facebook page to see how he protects himself from his own pronouncements. But he is certainly influential, and he has a wide following, so when he pushes something of highly dubious quality or scientific evidence, then it has to be a worry. It's all the quackery he promotes, some of it dangerous quackery."
 
Duck, Pete!

http://bit.ly/1XbMoOK
 
Foodhacking
 I read a pretty tiresome article about his in the latest ish of Gastronomica. The article describes it as:
‘Food hacker projects use open soource and participatory – but also artistic and performative- methods of research, prototyping, and work, which are close to the emergent field of interactive food design studies. [Hah! I bet you didn’t know THAT existed either!]...The results vary from very practical low-cost DIY remote irrigation systems for urban gardens, incubators for fermentation, food printers and other automatization and standardization solutions, to highly idiosyncratic projects around molecular gastronomy, experimental food items such as oylent, experimental dinners and various food hackathons exploring the sepculative futures of food and other niche iterests.’ Food Hackers: Political and Metphysical Gastronomes in the Hackerspaces. Deinsa Kera, Zack Denfield, and Catherine Kramer, Gastronomica, 15:2 Summer 2015.
 
The article describes a particular hack that left me unimpressed with its insularity and its need to have volumes of theory to authenticate it.
 
Here however are two things that I suppose are food hacks that I came soon after reading the article.
 
Lure Cafe
“The project does not criticise, foodies per se, but simply highlights food as one platform on which millenials have chosen to fulfil their needs for social belonging and validation”
 
Gulty as charged J Ta Colin Sherringham for the link.
 
http://luraprovidence.com/
 
Help Tony the Tiger
‘Last week, someone uploaded a YouTube commercial purporting to be a the first in a series of ten new Frosted Flakes ads to the account Tony Is Back! As their story goes, Tony The Tiger is trying to help the now-grown up kids who starred in his commercials 30 years ago. In the first video, Tony shows up to help an aging sex worker named Candy. It’s dark as hell.’
 
Warning, the content of the videos is confronting and may well strike you as either in bad taste or irresponsible or indeed reprehensible.
 
http://tonyisback.com/
 
Writing a Bad Review on TripAdvisor, Urban Spoon Could Land You  in Court
‘Law graduate Julian Tully was told last week by an Adelaide pizzeria owner he would face legal action if a review of his business which compared it to the plague, and provided “the worst service and experience”, was not removed from TripAdvisor by the end of the month..’
 
Who knew a pizzeria would bother worrying about what TripAdvisor would have to say.
  
http://bit.ly/1M6n5pf