Monday, 23 May 2016

A garden in pictures

When I say my mom’s a gardener what I mean is that we eat late in the summer months. It means there's a good chance my hand luggage has a plant or two stuffed down the side wrapped in damp newspaper and that I get seed heads sent to me in the mail. It means I don't cut flowers probably because my mom doesn't cut flowers, and that I like making sticks into infrastructure most certainly because mom makes stick infrastructure.

When I planted my first garden I was a little nervous and spaced everything out like the mysterious runes and diagrams on the seed packets said to. Mom’s advice: ‘Everything just wants to live’.

When I say ‘my first garden’ what I mean is that time, three years ago, when I grew mainly greens and 3.5 sunflowers in a 1x1 box in a field that, for the longest time, was looked over by city planners and left to a group of alcoholics that would (mostly) leave you alone as well as a modern day mystic and follower of the ayahuasca church (possibly — no, probably — also an alcoholic) who once accused me of stealing his watering can (I didn’t). This field is now a construction site like it’s been for the last two years, destined for a new try at life as a carpark.

My next garden isn't so much mine as it's ours and this isn't just because it's squatted, which it is. These pictures are of her garden, not of ours.

Sunflowers, incidentally, seem to do very well in Amsterdam.

Movia Wines + Restaurant De Jong + Lux = magic * natural wine

It started at 6 so we figured we’d probably be out early. And anyway, or so I thought, it was a wine tasting (small sips, spit spit) and it would all be natural (wine that has been farmed according to organic or biodynamic principles plus minimum intervention thereafter… including, according to some diehards, no sulphite at bottling; a practice that has the effect of stabilising the otherwise very much still alive wine by stunning microbial reproduction, fermentation and all-round interaction as well as sanitising bottling equipment: sulphite’s antioxidant properties shield the wine from oxygen.) — so we’d be fine

— or at least, more fine than how we might feel after drinking, sorry tasting, the equivalent amount of conventional wine; wine that will almost invariably have had chemicals and sulphites added, noxious nasties that would have to be processed by our livers the next day as well as the alcohol. The lack of crap* in natural wine should make it, both theoretically and in many of my own experiences though certainly not all, less likely to leave you feeling bad the next day, precisely because there’s less crap to have to filter out. Obviously alcohol percentage, sugars, dehydration, levels of histamine (high in red wine), how much and how fast you drink are also influencing factors; and there are a lot of offhand soundbites being thrown around about the evils of sulphites as the major causer of hangovers, but for now, that’s what they are: unscientific soundbites.

And that’s where we’ll leave them. Hangover prevention is a bad reason to start drinking natural wine and if it’s yours, please don’t. Better reasons are: caring about the environment, supporting the farmers that care, additives in your food and if you think you’d be interested in trying something that’s alive, tastes it, and is therefore unlike anything else, certainly anything we label ‘wine’.

But the night itself?

A collection of observations on mostly mould

I grew up scraping mould off stuff. Not actively or anything: it’s not like I was handed a pot of something fuzzy and told to go play; but if, for instance, we wanted jam, we’d probably have to scrape off the mould first. That’s just how it was (is, actually) and we were fine with it. What made it funny was when guests wanted jam. What made it funniest was this one time we were playing a board game called Association or something where you have to give your teammates prompts via association, and an old friend of the family prompted ‘mould’ to her son (and teammate) who answered ‘PANTRY’.

See? Funny.

Where the US customs office would consider me a young-verging-on-old offender, I’d probably just call myself a mostly short-haired girl with a devil-may-care nonchalance when it comes to ticking the ‘nothing to declare’ box and a healthy disrespect for the FDA’s health concerns. Big men with big guns are not enough to stop us from rolling by with our bags full of whatever we’d emptied from the fridge packed in newspapers, and you can bet your $3,000 fine there’ll always be numerous newspapers wrapped around numerous cheeses (you can only import raw milk cheese into the U.S. if it’s been aged for more than 60 days. This makes the presence of a Mont d’Or or Tomme de Savoie in your suitcase both illegal and, more importantly, perfectly room temperature).

Another cheese memory is the time we ate a cheese my parents had been given when I was born. I was born in ’88 and we probably ate it four years ago. It was the best cheese I’ve ever eaten. I eat a lot of cheese.

It was my mom that introduced me to the idea of eating raw egg with raw meat at a pretty young age. Now I’m of age, if I’m also hungover, I want Japanese. Always sukiyaki, a dish where you dip raw slices of wagyu beef into a broth and then raw egg yolk. The otherwise stern waitress smiles approvingly when we ask to have it with egg. Japanese customers get it standard.

Raw milk is another ‘issue’ as I understand it, but not if the animals are healthy and allowed to roam and graze. It will also leave you spoiled for taste and unsatisfied when all you have to wash down your cardboard cereal is pasteurised milk. I recently made yoghurt from milk that we tapped raw from a tank and have the best intentions not to ever buy yoghurt again. However we all know that this is the same material they used to pave the way to hell and at the very least I will be introducing my water kefir babies to their milk cousins. Read: probably replacing (even if only until its summer sun cocktail time) because at one point one gets worried about the amount of sugar one is drinking when one is drinking water kefir.

The other day I got into an argument with someone because they were looking at the due date on a bag of carrots. This is not the way to live your life.

Chardonnay-schmardonnay: "La Bulle à Zéro", Gilles et Catherine Vergé

"La Bulle à Zéro" by Gilles and Catherine Vergé is a chardonnay raised by wolves are not my words but I wish they were because they’re true and better than mine. What I had: running barefoot, dancing leaves and flying kites by which I mean to say, a joy.

Tasting notes:

Breezy salt air licked off a rock-salinity, beer yeasts and earth bound walnuts with a whiff of whiskey apple cider air. Owl-eyes oxidised open a la Jura but we’re in Burgundy (Viré) plus:

B U B B L E S

!!!!!!

//

Gilles and Catherine Vergé
"La Bulle à Zero"

Chardonnay

Viré, Burgundy

Fraud, food and natural wine

The article coincided with the week I happened to spend 100% more time on a farm than I usually do so it got me thinking. The reason I was on farms was to source (sounds better, really just buying) ingredients for our latest sit-down supper, the menu for which we’d promised would be entirely noord-centred and — (that word again) — sourced. No small feat during the dregs of winter but we did it and it was great. What exactly we did/made I’ll save for another story; but for now, it was all about kraut.

When I read it, the first thing I thought about was how impatient I’d been when required to wait 40 minutes while a lady on one of these farms counted out and calculated the cost of as many cheeses. She was operating at the speed of slow that makes you appreciate that little-spoken alternative use of the countryside: the pace of city life is just not for everyone (and mind you, we’re talking Amsterdam here). I don’t feel ashamed saying it: I had better things to do in that time, but the article made me laugh at the thought. Turns out this was a small price to pay for the (incidentally, excellent) cheeses we bought. At least they were what we thought they were.

Not so, it turns out, for many many more things than I thought (if I’ve ever really thought), says the article. So much not so, that in early 2015 the UK set up the National Food Crime Unit to fight food fraud; one, policy makers hope, that will one day be as good as the Dutch equivalent.

Via a process that uses rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry, scientists can test if what the food in front of them says it is, it really is. Be it a piece of cod or flakes of dried oregano (last year a UK institute found that 25 per cent of the samples supplied from supermarkets and online retailers contained substances other than oregano), the bottom line is that where there’s money, there’s crime, and where there’s big money, there’s big crime. Financial consulting firm PwC estimates that global trade in food fraud is worth around $40 billion a year.

But more on the things the authorities are finding another time. For now, what I’d like to write about is what we’re putting in wine.

Fraud you say? Well, ish even though, technically, no. What wine makers put in to wine is legal. Not listing what they’ve put in on the label is also legal. And yet, people would probably be shocked to see the ingredients in a bottle of wine. Wine growers know that they would be shocked. Does’t this smack a teeny weeny bit, even if not exactly then something quite like, fraud?

We're making an entirely noord-sourced kraut and it's not entirely a gimmick

The idea was in equal parts meant to make things simple and to shut me up. Not to use the broken record saying but I sounded like a broken record — nowhere to eat once you’re out of Amsterdam, your best bet of eating something honest is to have a herring, why are we eating tomatoes that don’t taste anything like tomatoes, and how is it that the further from Amsterdam you go (sorry, it’s my point of reference), the plates transform from being round to rectangular? I suppose that this might be considered a peculiarity worth laughing about in a less grave situation but as it’s to do with dinner, the situation is very grave indeed.

How come there’s been no PR whizz whizzy enough to market stampot as a, if not national dish, then at least a very important one, present at all occasions you'd invite your family to instead of all of us just sort of knowing it is in private? Why, after 4 winters of stampot weather, do I know of only two places that make an excellent one (any tips?); one of which is the furthest north you can get even hellbent, in Groningen? Same goes for sauerkraut: where’s that at? If I want to eat kraut outside the dark cave in which I store my frustration I have to go to a surinamese restaurant where the tradeoff is that the staff think I’m a heathen for ordering the menu-permanent (thank all my gods) dish of zoutvlees and kraut with a roti. I’d say it was embarrassing but I can’t grasp the magnitude of my mistake I'm that much part heathen. I just know that while I’m defending my actions they’re rolling their eyeballs.

So why, suggests Alex, don’t we make a kraut sourced entirely from things grown in Amsterdam Noord? More, I believe, for the fact he’s the sort of person who likes to make everything into a game rather than the type to seize the (PR) opportunity to elevate sauerkraut into some locally-sourced half god hovering in the space between the farm and your table. Not that I’d put it past him.

Uh because people probably don’t really like kraut?

Worst is the best

I, like the rest of the Boeing 787, was salivating. You know how it goes: you’ve been staring at nothing for 4 hours, maybe less, probably much less, when ‘nothing’ all of a sudden becomes some horrendous film like Mad Max which the (by the looks of it) newly engaged couple sitting in 23 A and B are watching in the seats in front of you, and which you therefore can’t help but also watch. Through the gap.

Ok, so the movies I end up watching through The Gap aren’t generally the ones I’d watch at home, and Mad Max is actually a very bad example because it’s not something I’d watch anywhere; but every once and a while something ok comes along, which, even if not good, is at least something which awakens enough of desire in me to press eject on your controller-cum-telephone thing (has anyone ever seen anyone telephone from an airplane?) and tune in to the beginning.

Which is how I started watching Chef. And how I, probably like all the rest of the people that have watched Chef, became mildly obsessed — ok, no, ‘obsessed’ is too strong a word; let’s say ‘personally involved’ — in the eating of Cuban sandwiches.

And with all good eating comes appreciation. In this case, a staunch appreciation for all the Cuban sandwiches this side of Miami done right. ‘Right’ requiring the frying of both sides of each piece of bread so they’re golden brown, soon to be brown-brown (a commonly known secret is mayonnaise). ‘Right’ requiring the correct amount of hours to have passed the pork shoulder by, first as it’s brined (a full 12 according to some recipes), then as it soaks in marinade (2 should be enough), and the last 3 as it’s slowly roasted. Then there are, of course, the pickles you need to get it right, and to which I dedicate a next-level appreciation all their own; the cheese (‘Swiss Cheese’ — as in the stuff with holes in, not from Switzerland — I know what you’re thinking but just this once, ok? because this is an American thing, not a continental thing, but if it were up to me, I’d use Cheddar), that nuclear-yellow mustard (absolutely no real mustard allowed) and let us not forget the napkins. Obviously a good Cuban sandwich requires many napkins.

So it was a good sign that we had to go through a lot of napkins when we shared our Cuban at Worst. And as bad as it sounds — and, ok, it does sound bad, no one really likes to share — it was, in fact, a good thing that we were sharing. Because then we still had room to for the weissworst with a cauliflower puree and coleslaw (something I rarely trust anyone but my mom to get right but now that group’s been bumped up to two, the second being Worst), and three fully loaded (buckwheat) crepes stretched around chunks of sweet, roasted squash, spinach and cheese. All done, I can tell you, exactly right.

Photo by Sophia van den Hoek. Also published on Unfolded.

I don't put on dinners to make speeches

I don’t put on dinners because I want to make speeches. I hate making speeches. Even talking. Publicly that is, I don’t mind talking to the person next to me, though I find I’m a better talker (i.e., I talk) when the number of people next to me isn’t much more than three.

I know, I know, people just assume you’re going to do a good job. They want you to do a good job. In fact they’ve probably got their fingers, toes and eyes crossed hoping that you’re gonna do a good job, that you won’t fuck up. No one likes a fuck up, especially if the one fucking up is doing the talk. That’s just awkward.

Once I was given a book called How to bluff your way through public speaking. And I’ve been told that being on stage talking is one of the few moments in your life where you control everything. Plus there’s always what Steven Spielberg said, namely that people will sit through 20 minutes of anything. But this is a) next level advice and b) assumes you like control. It also assumes you’ve passed the bluffing stage and have 19 more minutes to go. It assumes you’ve read the book. And I haven’t.

You’d think you’d be able to talk about something you made up. You’d think you’d be able to talk about something you want to do. Well, maybe you can. Certainly everyone speaking at TED can. But I can’t. I can hardly squeak out that tonight’s menu will be and say toe-curlingly excruciating things like ‘We cooked you some nice food’. Nice food?!

Yes, I said that.

I don’t know if buying the same book twice (ok, multiple times) ‘cus I found another with a better cover is any better, different or worse than originally buying the book for it’s cover but I do it so it whatever. I have definitely also bought wine solely for its label and while that sinks in know this: even though these days I care too much about what I’m drinking actually tastes like to go all in for awesome alliteration, when you’re in a safe place, a good label can be a good place to start.

For instance when you’re in a natural wine bar and don’t speak the language (Italian) and are one of those people (me) who think you’ll somehow offend the person whose language you don’t speak less by speaking as little as possible and leave all communication to someone more civilised than you. So I pointed to the label I recognised from somewhere and asked my boyfriend to ask the nice looking man at the bar whether he could tell us anything about it.

He told us it was a Prosecco made in the old-world way called Prosecco Col Fondo and also that the grapes were hand-picked, fermented with indigenous yeasts, skin macerated (25 days) and the wine left on the lees for 5 months before bottling. Then he shook it up, told us his name’s Ernesto and that he made it.

The lesson? If you judge a wine by its label you might still be drinking hours later with the guy who made it.

Tasting notes:

The 280 slm looks like smoggy sun. Tastes like morning sun drying dew off daises. There’s straw and wood smoke and fresh bread yeast and sitting slightly buzzed on a fence with your scarf on eating apples in fall.

“280slm” 2015

Costadilà

Glera + Verdiso + Bianchetta Trevigiana, + Perera

Treviso, Italy

25 days skin maceration

Imported by Vleck

The Extra Supper

Blood orange water kefir with artichoke and juniper berries

Ribboned raw zucchini salad with parsley, mint and red onion

III

Ras el hanout butter-roasted kleine kipjes in chef hats with goose fat potatoes and roasted spring onions

Moon pizzas

Blood orange upside down cake with grated cardamon cream

Just as I was taking pictures the oven was delivered. The oven didn't fit inside. We knew this for certain when we'd taken off the door. And then the second door. So we cooked and plated outside, dressed very much for inside. After that I didn't take any more pictures. But we did make a 3D invitation.

Click for the (three) photos I did take.

The oranges weren't orange enough

The oranges weren’t orange enough and the not-perfectly-green apples had already been purged. The tomatoes were, for the day, to be considered vegetables because it was obvious the vegetables needed a dash of red so that they could be identified as vegetables and not just kale, which is how it looked now, because kale sends the wrong message or at least not exactly the right one, this is primetime TV after all, possibly not the biggest demographic of kale eaters; and speaking of kale, could you replace that box over there? 5-hours or is it now 8 at any rate lots later and it’s no longer looking its best and everything needs to at least seem the best of everything because god-dammit this is what we're being paid to do.

Later on all the bread had to be thrown away.

But only once we’d moved everything back to where it had been after moving it all so it looked just like it did but different. But then, who even remembered what it looked like before?

And the whole time no one even blinked an eyelid because everyone was a professional and a very professional one at that and they were shooting a 30-second commercial and 30 seconds is hardly enough time to blink in anyway. (I just timed myself and I seem to blink every 4-seconds).

Illustration from Pen & Palate.