Give Yisrael Katz’s Job To A Grownup

There are many and varied explanations for the continuing Israel-Palestine conflict. A story on France 24 this morning reveals, however, that the major barrier to peace is actually stunningly simple: Israel is run by school children.

As the story reveals, The Israeli Transport Ministry has decided to no longer display road signs in languages other than Hebrew (currently they are in English, Hebrew and Arabic). The reason? According to Transport Minister Yisrael Katz its because Palestinian maps don’t always use Israeli names for towns within Israel.

Setting aside the fact that countries all over the world do this all the time — according to the French, the Chinese capital is “Pékin” — Katz’s sheer pettiness is extraordinary. Are we now set to hear him explain the wall’s diversion from the ‘67 border as one giant game of “don’t step on the cracks”? Or the latest “targeted assassination” as involving stolen lunch money?

Get this guy out of office and give his job to a grownup.

Figs, Goat’s Cheese, and Proscuitto

I walked out of work in a foul mood this evening. And it mostly remained foul until I saw these figs. I ate at least two on the way home then drank a beer while I stuffed them with goat’s cheese and wrapped them in prosciutto. A couple of minutes in the oven and then on a plate with a little doucette lettuce. Perfect dinner for a balmy summer evening.

Quails and Saturday Afternoons.

I love cooking at home on Saturday afternoons. Particularly in summer when the kitchen is sunny and the herbs on my kitchen windowsill are going nuts. It is even a little too hot today and the shutters are closed to stop the basil from keeling over. Walking to the markets in the morning to find something I feel like cooking, then coming home, putting on This American Life, and mucking about with food.

I have been getting pretty excited about quails lately. I was in Australia at the start of the year and staying with the fantastic sommelier Ben Knight — you should visit his website and ask him ridiculous questions about wine. He’ll love it. This recipe was his idea.

1. brush the quails with oil and balsamic
2. put them in a really hot oven (about 210) for 5 minutes then turn it down to about 100 for another 20 (brush them again about halfway through)
3. wait until they have cooled a little then pull the meat off the bones
4. sweat some shallots in butter then add a can of tomatoes and cook it down until they are all pulpy
5. add the meat
6. meanwhile, make a simple jus: put a cup each of chicken stock and red wine in a pan and reduce it really hard until there is about half as much and it is all red and sticky
7. make some fresh pasta
8. mix everything together with a few handfuls of flat leaf parsley and a bit of finely chopped raw garlic
9. eat

The pasta we made here is just cut simply. Ben Knight again suggests rolling out your pasta and then cutting it into irregular shapes. The big flaps of pasta hold lots more quail.

The pasta recipe I use is from Michel Roux. I’ll write about it next time.

US Faces Resentment. Apparently.

I’m thinking about starting a regular round-up of newspaper headlines that state the bleeding obvious. Here are a few for starters:

New York Times: U.S. Faces Resentment in Afghan Region

Salon: Rush Limbaugh is still a big fat idiot

The Age: Kidman still among Hollywood’s top earners

How to eat a giant snail. Now that is a headline that makes me want to read on.

Bolton Goes Further Off The Rails

Former US ambassador to the UN, John R. Bolton was absolutely on fire in the Washington Post this week. Given his track record as a crazy person, comments like the one posted below might not be that shocking. What I find unbelievable, however, is that the GOP can’t wheel anyone more presentable out of the asylum to speak on their behalf.

Israel’s decision of whether to use military force against Tehran’s nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever [...] with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not

Even getting Bolton to shave off his mustache would be a start.

Palin is a Narcissist, Possibly God

Todd S. Purdum has a long article in the current Vanity Fair on Sarah Palin. Full of good bits but the following paragraph, for me, best brings back memories of the time when she was McCain’s running mate. Regardless of the veracity of Purdum’s remarks, the sheer outlandishness of it all, the extent to which she is so obviously a “nut job” (to quote McCain himself, apparently) makes me, in an admittedly sick sorta way, look forward to 2012, when she might run, just so we can watch the Republican party make a massive fool of itself all over again.

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”

Hitchens on The Latest Nixon Tapes

Entertaining article by Christopher Hitchens in Slate today on the latest fetid batch of Nixon tapes to be released. The following is the best bit…

The continuing problem, for those consensus builders who think that the fortunes of the GOP can only be revived by an appeal to the “center” and the “middle ground,” is that the most scandalous and villainous Republican president of modern times and his “realist” foreign-policy co-conspirator built their appeal in precisely this way. Fate, and the declassification process, have decreed that we will be supplied with ever-more nauseating reminders of this at intervals of about a year until everybody who can remember the one-time hero of “moderate Republicanism” and the silent majority of middle America has gone to a place where not even Billy Graham can bother them anymore.

When Too Much Torture Is Barely Enough

The BBC reported this week that the Argentine armed forces may have tortured their own soldiers during the Falklands War. The BBC was reporting on an investigation of eighty cases of abuse of conscripts by their officers, including murder and causing death by starvation.

I guess that when Kissinger and the CIA were helping Videla’s Junta prosecute their Dirty War, they forgot to mention that it is normal practice to torture the other guys.

Oooops.

Tomato Chutney

I made tomato chutney this afternoon. I used to make it quite regularly but once a huge jar smashed everywhere and picking shards of glass and kilos of chutney out of everything in the fridge put me off it for ages. This time I put it in an old Illy coffee tin, just to be sure. The recipe is a cut out from an old Australian Vogue. I don’t know how closely I followed it though, Melvyn Bragg was talking about the Sunni — Shia split on BBC Radio 4 and I ended up not paying enough attention to either chutney or history.

500g all sorts of mixed up tomatoes, diced

225g diced shallots

1 apple, peeled and cored

1 tbsp grain mustard

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

lump of ginger, grated

150g sultanas

100g white sugar

300ml malt vinegar

salt and pepper

• Simmer all the ingredients (but only half the vinegar) for about 30 minutes, stirring regularly
• Add the rest of the vinegar and keep simmering and stirring for another 30 or 40 minutes
• Place in a sterile jar/tin/whatever
• Eat it later (I think it tastes best after a few weeks)

Radishes

There are some combinations of food that seem far greater than the sum of their parts. That is not to say I don’t like radishes, or bread, or butter, or salt alone. Only that together they are something magic. I like to chill the radishes in iced water then slice them thinly. Best is with some good sourdough and the Normandy butter that comes with big salt crystals in it. Sigh.

Cool Borscht On A Hot Day

When I first began writing this blog I wanted it to be about two things that interest me: food and politics. After writing a few posts about politics, however, I began to feel it would be incongruous to all of a sudden begin writing about food and eating. So I never did. And I’ve been mulling how to resolve the problem ever since. I don’t think there really is a neat solution, except perhaps to have two blogs, and I don’t really have the energy for that. So, incongruous as it may be, from today this blog is going to be the food and politics mash-up I always wanted it to be.

And I’m going to begin with borscht.

I love beetroot. I love its earthy flavours and the startling red colour it lends to everything it touches. How such a delicious thing came to be called Beta Vulgaris I do not know. The excellent Harold McGee suggests that Theophrastus was eating them raw in 300 BC but that the fat red variety wasn’t really common until the 16th Century, before going on to recount, in his hilariously dry manner, that “the red pigment is usually decolorized by high stomach acidity and reaction with iron in the large intestine, but people sometimes excrete the intact pigment, a startling but harmless event.”

Indeed.

I’ve never made borscht before. I tried learning Russian once, an experiment which failed miserably when my teacher realised I was more interested in learning how to cook her grandmother’s recipes than I really was in conjugating verbs. She had a go at teaching me how to make piroshki but I never learnt the secret of her borscht. So I didn’t even try it until the excellent Lucy Azibert forced me to buy A Platter of Figs and a hot day sent me looking for recipes for cold soup. The following is the (much abridged) recipe by David Tanis from that book,  modelled, so he says, after that at Barney Greengrass on New York’s Upper West Side.

700g beets

8 cups of water

2 cloves of garlic

2 plump shallots

1 bay leaf

1 tsp coriander seeds

2 or 3 cloves

1/2 tsp cayenne

1 tbsp sugar

2 tsp red wine vinegar

1 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper

1 cup yoghurt

chopped dill

• Peel and slice the beets and add them with the garlic shallots, bay leaf, coriander, cloves, cayenne, sugar, vinegar, olive oil and a good spoon of salt to a large pot.
• Cover with water, bring to the boil then simmer for about 15-20 minutes.

• Add some black pepper and puree with a blender.
• Strain into a bowl and refrigerate until cool.
• Before serving, whisk in the yoghurt.
• Garnish with a little dill.

The perfect thing on a hot mid-summer afternoon.

Homelessness: Also Just Like Camping

Further to this morning’s post, I’m thinking we need to follow Berlusconi’s example and start looking on the bright side of many more issues. So I’m starting a list to help remind us of how great a place the world really is. Suggestions welcome.

• Homelessness: just like camping
• Detention without trial: time to think
• Climate change: a tropical holiday on your doorstep
• Darfur: no rich white people will be harmed
• Waterboarding: a bit like swimming
• Sub-prime morgage crisis: just like camping
• Malaria: no rich white people will be harmed

Red Cross Puts Downer On Earthquake/Torture Fun

Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, this week toured camps set up for survivors of Monday’s Italian earthquake. Ever the optimist, Berlusconi suggested that those in the camps “have everything they need, they have medical care [and] hot food” before going on to recommend that “they should see it like a weekend of camping.”

I just can’t help but be glad that we’ve got Berlusconi and a bunch of random celebrities on hand to let us know how great life really is. Only last week, of course, Miss Universe was reminding us (and any watching inmates) that Guantanamo Bay is actually “a loooot of fun!”

If only the Red Cross weren’t such spoilsports!

Growing Threats

US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, today declared war on the combined might of Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics by signalling his intention to cut expensive programmes, including many that form part of the Army’s Future Combat Systems and missile defence.

In doing so, he inevitably incurred the wrath of many in Congress. And it took Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) only twenty-four minutes to write to Obama, arguing that Gates’s proposed cuts in missile defense “could undermine our emerging missile defense capabilities to protect the United States against a growing threat.”

I’ve got to agree with them really. Because those Senators do face a growing threat. Not from North Korea of course who, despite claiming that their satellite was in orbit and “transmitting revolutionary songs as it circled the Earth” seem to have failed for the moment to pose much of a threat to anyone but its own citizens. The real “growing threat”, of course, is from Kyl, Inhofe and Lieberman’s constituents, and their attachment to a healthy diet of government pork.

The only bright side to Gore losing in 2000 is that it kept an idiot like Lieberman out of Observatory Circle.

Less Butter Can Lead To Genocide

The Guardian this morning reports on “Britain’s biggest single killer.” A “deadly” threat that is “putting … lives at serious risk.” Is it terrorism? Climate change? Gun violence? No. Despite rhetoric worthy of a tabloid discussion of immigration, it seems all The Guardian is shrieking about is butter. And, more specifically, a nefarious plot by cold blooded celebrity chefs—Nigella, Gordon and the rest—to poison us all with this ghastly secretion of the devil.

Not that I don’t agree. As Alexandre Dumas rightly noted, “Werther made butter poetical. It was while watching Charlotte buttering bread … that he was overcome by that fatal passion which ended with a pistol shot.”

But while Werther clearly demonstrates that butter can sometimes lead to murder, the well-meaning imbeciles of the “Fat Panel” (for whom The Guardian has recently become chief fanboy and cheerleader) forget something equally important.

Hermann Goering once remarked that, “guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” That’s right. While the Fat Panel and its lapdog are keen to remind us that keeping butter in can lead to murder, they forget that leaving it out can (in extreme cases) lead to genocide.