Ex-Tabula Rasa
I'm just an English bloke who lives in Canada after marrying a Canadian lady he met while living in Japan. Yeah, that old cliché.
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Posts tagged food
Fig and mascarpone focaccia bread, fresh out of the oven. Insert sound of angels singing from on high here.
My wife made vanilla-glazed donuts this weekend. I have two in my bag right now.
I’d usually insert some kind of humorous recognition of your inevitable jealousy at this point but that would delay my ability to eat the fucking hell out of these delicious fucking home-made donuts in my bag.
You may recall a couple of weeks ago I decided to write some invented meal/dish names on our kitchen blackboards and my wife took it upon herself to create one of them. And lo, Strawberry Oops was born.
I decided to have another go at the dish invention business this weekend, and hopefully Mrs Fuiru will be able to make something else from my list. This week the dishes were:
1: Bastardised Potato
2: Chickensanity
3: Chocolate Moussaka
4: Soupe de Fin du Monde (End of the World Soup)
5: Chutney Houston
I really hope she makes Chutney Houston.
Fruit babies
One thing I’ve come to learn about pregnancy is that there is a tendency for information resources to express your unborn baby’s size in terms of comparable fruit. Six weeks ago our child was the size of a grape. Three weeks ago, a lime. Last week, a lemon. Right now apparently my wife is carrying an apple inside her. The only reprieve from all this fruit was when, between the sizes of a lime and a lemon, our baby was “about as big as a medium shrimp.”
Thankfully for the less culinary-minded among us, many of these sites link to pictures of the foodstuffs we are now trying to measure in our head. Just in case we are becoming overly obsessed with whether my wife’s womb is currently harboring a Cox’s Orange Pippin, a Washed Russet or - God forbid! - a Nonnetit Bastard, there it is, removing all doubt: A Honeycrisp. Goodness.
I never really thought about measurement in this way before. Normally, if something is below a certain size, it’s enough to express it in inches, centimetres, feet or metres. You don’t usually go for the comparable objects unless you’ve got something above a certain size. Being British, I’m used to being told that something is “about the size of three double-decker buses” or has the area of “twelve football pitches.” I’m sure other nations have their own standards of comparative measurement; Giant Buddha Statues in the Temple of Nara, for example, or Donnie Wahlburgs.
The problem I have now is that preparing meals is becoming rather a traumatic experience. It’s fine and dandy to tell me that my offspring is currently the size of a lime, but try taking that image out of my head when it comes time to garnish the Pad Thai for dinner. Standing over the cutting board, knife in hand, small green fruit in front of me, I look like Brad Pitt at the end of Se7en when Morgan Freeman’s trying to talk him out of shooting Kevin Spacey. Do I really enjoy citrus fruit enough to cut what is essentially my own child into segments?
God help me if I’m asked to help with a fruit salad any time soon. I’ll probably start rocking back and forth in the foetal position on the kitchen floor, gibbering to myself and sobbing.
In a way, though, I remain curious each week as to what size my baby will be. It’s less out of interest in the development of my child, and more about what food he/she will now resemble. Will they ever be the size of a pomelo? Durian? Would the makers of the sites ever suggest that my child resembles an Ugli fruit? Would they dare? And should there ever be another week with no fruit for suitable comparable size, will they go back to the crustacean route? Will my baby ever be a langoustine?
My wife made chocolate peanut butter and jelly pillow cookies at the weekend. Holy fucking shit on a bollock sandwich, they’re amazing.
The best part of yesterday was the part when my wife came into the kitchen while I was studying and said, “Phil, you’re going to hate me for this…”
“Oh no, what is it?”
“Well, I need to take a photo of the cookies for my blog…”
“Uh huh…”
“And I want to show the filling, so I need you to take a bite out of a cookie and let me take photos of it. And then eat the rest of the cookie.”
“You unspeakable monster.”
Basically, it’s a video in which a woman is eating a “Milk Seafood” cup noodle (no comment) in a snowy forest (as you do) and a man with cheese for a head and a man with a pepper grinder for a head approach from behind some trees and the woman screams and the two men somehow repeatedly laser finger cheese and pepper into her cup noodle while going “Chi-chi -chi-chi” and “pe-pe-pe-pe” in a musical fashion while she keeps screaming and they repeat this several times and then they implore her to eat some of her cup noodles, which she does despite her fear (possibly because she’s afraid they’ll kill her if she doesn’t comply), and then she realises it tastes even better for their intervention and they agree with her and in the time it took you to read this you could have probably watched the thing.
Pumpkin Biscotti with White Chocolate and Ginger.
What was that sound I just heard? Didn’t you hear it? Oh, weird. It sounded like someone salivating due to the appearance of delicious baked goods appearing on their computer screen.
Our Thanksgiving dessert for people who don’t like pumpkin pie: Pumpkin Angel Food Cake with Salted Cinnamon Caramel.
It may or may not surprise you to learn that a lot of the people present pretended to not like pumpkin pie last weekend.
Click through for recipe.
The best meatballs I’ve ever had. Mario Batali’s pork and turkey giant meatballs of Ohmygodtheytasteevenbetterthenextdayinasandwich amazingness.
