Mazi Mas
John Newton and
I had a terrific meal at the 5th Mazi Mas Sydneydinner. It's a team of four women who work with partner
organisations to support women refugees and asylum seekers get experience and
training in hospitality.
Our meal was a combo of
Persian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan and was absolutely delicious with highlights
for me being Ghormeh Sabzim a Persian stew of lamb and fenugreek leaves, Gow
Maluwa, a Sri Lankan dish of cabbage sautéed in unroasted spices (mainly
coriander) and fresh green chillies, and handmade squishy and crunchy gaz i.e.
Persian nougat. Mind you, the Kachay Qeemay Kay Kabab's were also right up
there with these, as was the Persian saffron ice cream which accompanied the
nougat (both pictured above), and the Chicken Karahi and the Kashke Bademjan
(roasted eggplant with walnut and whey).
It was great to chat with the
women as they brought our courses to the table about the food, their experience
in Mazi Mas and what their plans are - not all of which involved taking up
commercial cooking as a career.
Check out their website mazimas.com.au
We plan on going again J
Food, Interrupted
‘The problem with food is we care too much. Take the example of Diane, a 48-year-old office manager who took
part in a study of eating habits in 2010. She believed food was entirely about
pleasure and imagination, a matter of “what I like and what I fancy,” she told
an interviewer. She obsessed over the variables that might interfere with her
enjoyment—as a gourmet might critique the texture of a sous vide chicken breast
or frown at the seasoning of a broth. The temperature of her food was
particularly important. Diane invited the researchers to a café nearby so they
could see her navigate the menu, or rather navigate its dearth of appetizing
options. When dinner was served, she ate rapidly but didn’t finish. She would
only eat a cooked meal, she explained, when it was still piping hot. So
Diane was a picky eater.’
I’m going to make a big call here and say that to call Diane ‘a picky
eater’ and to suggest, as the content of this review does, that it was all to
do with her food upbringing, is to leave serious questions of Diane’s mental
health unexplored. I look forward to reading Bee Wilson’s new book ‘First Bite’
having enjoyed ‘Consider the Fork’, but I hope it is more substantial than this
review suggests.
Gut Thinking
On the other hand, Diane may also be suffering from a particularly barren
gut microbiome that is leading her to choose only foods her gut microbes want
to eat.
‘But we now know the gut itself, and also the microbes inside it,
manipulate what we crave, painting a much more complex picture of the forces
that determine the way we see food.’
An excellent article that continues my fascination as life in and on
Planet Paul. Chloe Lambert writing in New Scientist 21 November 2015.
I have a pdf copy of the article if you are interested.
In search of Ibn
Battuta’s melon
From John Newton:
‘Paul – Aramco world is an online magazine published by the no doubt
wicked Saudi Arabian crude oil company. Nevertheless the magazine is magnificent
and this issue contains a wonderful story called Ibn Battuta's Melon. Not sure
if it's possible to separate the story from the rest of the mag, but scroll
down to it.’
Indeed a quite wonderful article on the search for said melon in places
with too few vowels in their names. I so want to try qovun qoqi, dry rolled melon studded with
black raisins. And all praise to the melon vendor woken at 3am to produce the
most likely candidate...me, I’d have had some harsh words for the local who
thought it important enough to wake me from a hard earned sleep to satisfy some
crazed foodie’s craving for a melon, no matter how famous it was.
Chinese food and the
joy of inauthentic cooking
‘While many of his professional peers may hope to “transport” their diners
to some obscure corner of Asia, Talde writes, his food, inspired by taquerias,
gyro shops, diners, burger spots, and Chinese takeout, “is meant to remind you
that you’re home, in that strange and awesome country where we live.”
Thanks to Alison Vincent for directing me to this smile making poke in the
eye of authenticity which as we know is a flawed and ultimately useless
concept...we do, don’t we? One of my
fave lines in Shakespeare is from King Lear when Edmund declares ‘Now Gods,
stand up for bastards’. I am happy to stand up
for bastard foods even when they go horribly wrong for out of them have
come such treats in Sri Lankan cuisine as my dad’s lamb should smore and my
mum’s Milo wattalappam J
A woman is making
bread with yeast from her vagina and live blogging it
‘For most women, a bout of thrush
usually results in a couple of days of insatiable itchiness and a trip to the
chemist.But one woman, feminist blogger Zoe Stavri, rose to the occasion (as
any good baker does) and used her excess yeast to, ah, make a loaf of bread. You
know what they say? When life gives you thrush, make sourdough.’
I’m pretty sure that’s not what my women friends would say. I haven’t
followed this story further; I kinda feel weirdly prurient though my interest
is in hearing how the bread turns out [Sure, they say, and you used to read
Playboy for Gore Vidal’s essays on US politics]. If anyone out there has been
following it, I would be pleased to hear an update. There was some discussion along
the lines of ‘yeasts ain’t yeasts, Sol’. Can anyone throw light on that
question?
The myth of ‘easy
cooking’
‘Food editors are, for the record, acutely aware that their (mostly
female) readers want sophisticated meals but feel that the complex recipes
offered by chefs are incompatible with their harried lifestyles. So, they make
efforts to simplify and streamline, without ever admitting the one thing that
cooks really need to hear: that real “easy” cooking, if that’s what you’re
after, is far too simple to sustain a magazine and cookbook industry. It relies
on foods that can be purchased at a single point of sale and involves a bare
minimum of ingredients and a small repertoire of techniques. It leans heavily
on things your mom taught you. There are no garnishes of thyme leaves in simple
weeknight dinners, and no appetizer salads. Homemade breakfast smoothies are many
things, but they are not an “easy” alternative to one of those squeezable
yogurt things that you can eat with no hands in the car.’
The argument isn’t new, but it’s wittily made. What interested me tho was
that I read it at the same time as I read a critique of ‘smart’ homes - those ones where fridges talk to you and so
on – which argued quite cogently that homes are really being made ‘smarter’ for
men as what domestic labour is left will still generally fall to women (in the
heteronormative household, that is) - http://bit.ly/1lAWI50
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