revival

I walked through a carpet of purple flowers this morning. It's been raining since last night and the winds blew down half the flowers on the trees.

So this is my new project/ revitalized dormant project: to cook properly.

It started yesterday, really. I made mayonnaise from scratch, using a hand whisk. And it was good. See there's this site with pictures of food that link you to individual blogs. One of the pictures brought me to a blog where the author had made mayonnaise. I had everything the recipe called for at hand, time to kill, and besides, I'd wanted to make mayonnaise for yonks now. It had always intimidated me though - stories of the mixture curdling and separating put me off. I don't like the prospect of failure.

But this, this seemed easy. And it was! Piece of cake. I only had Cobram Estate's EV olive oil in the cupboard so the mayo has a strong bite to it; peppery and fruity. It is also really thick. Like pudding. Could have thinned it out but I got a kick out of seeing it jiggle. My mayo has character. Hah.

A third of it got turned into aioli, the rest was unadulterated. Dolloped onto smoked ham and sandwiched between toast for dinner. Yum. Now I've got to use it up within a week but that shouldn't be hard. Now I've got to try making hollandaise to go with poached eggs (picked up a little metal egg poacher in Melbourne. It is shaped like an old-fashioned bathtub with legs. Only it has holes in the bottom so it can't hold water. And a stem. Adorable)

Today's project is undetermined.


I'm re-loving my macchinetta

I have way too much time on my hands

Pollan is making me seriously think about food for a change (as opposed to what exactly I'm not sure).

New project: Industrial vs organic chicken
Pollan's book is roughly divided into 3 sections; industrial, organic (which has two subdivisions), and personal, each of which traces the paths of produce produced through each system. Industrial follows corn because it's the keystone of American industrial agriculture. Corn - beef, corn - HFCS, cornstarch, dexterin, -glycerides, and other molecular derivatives of corn mass. Thirteen out of the 38 ingredients that go into a Chicken Mcnugget are corn-derived. Yeah, 38. I digress.

What was my point? Oh right, industrial/ organic chicken. So the premise of this experiment is the 'chicken-ness' of say, a Chicken McNugget. Does it really taste like chicken with its 38 ingredients, including natural chicken? I'm not sure. In my memories Chicken McNuggets seems like chicken, although the dominant flavour is the crust of the thing and it's McDonald-ness (no better word, not going to bother trying to find it either). You know that particular flavour or aroma McDonalds food has. The texture of the thing certainly isn't chicken - which isn't surprising considering the 38 things that go into it. The chicken meat that has gone into a Chicken McNugget has been processed and disfigured to the point of no longer resembling it's source. That's my hypothesis.

So I'm going to make a side by side comparison of Chicken McNuggets with a piece of organic, free-range if possible grilled/ pan fried chicken (although these veracity of the labels attached to such a chicken in the supermarket may be misleading, I've got no other source so that chicken will have to do as 'authentic chicken')

And yes, this is an attempt at distracting myself from the boredom and loneliness so I don't give in and call any of them. hah.

Next time, I will only write after having coffee. So incoherent.