The fortnight in food

Posted on 9 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Time for a break from all this contemporary related stuff and back into the kitchen…when I created the Food category, I had visions of contributing to it at least once a week – monthly is probably closer to it, which is kinda strange as Carmen is away at the moment and I am spending a lot more time in the kitchen.

Last night I had forgotten to defrost any meat for dinner so did a quick Google for something simple and fishy, settling on a fish loaf which wasn’t much more than a couple of eggs, a tin of fish, herbs, milk and breadcrumbs. You can’t get much simpler than that and it came out pretty good. Next time round though, I think that I could make it better by either replacing the breadcrumbs with cooked rice and/or adding a topping of mashed potato and kumara on a layer of peas with significant quantities of grated cheese on top.

The rain over the last fortnight has kept the temperatures down and last week I really felt like something spicy to warm me up a bit. I found through the power of Google, a South African mince and potato dish with loads of herbs and spices, including apricot jam and chutney for extra flavour. It made a surprising quantity + was very filling with rice so it lasted three nights, evolving into a stir-fry rice dish on the third night with any other leftovers in the fridge. Definitely a keeper.

I do a lot with sausage when I am on my own because they are cheap, simple and don’t (normally) involve much mess – also because you can do some much with the humble sausie…fried with veges and greens, the meat in a salad sandwich, curried with beans and rice, roasted with veges…I like to buy a big bag, syphon off some for now and toss the rest in the freezer for those times when planning has left a bit to be desired or when it is simply juts late and I’m hungry…I did do roast beef three weeks ago but while it came out OK – and lasted four days – the coord skills for when to toss in the veges still has me stumped – there’s at least one more left in the freezer so will have to study up some more before I have a crack at it.

Not too much on desserts because I’m more of a savoury than a sweet tooth. I do a mean self-saucing butterscotch pudding but it’s kinda boring when I am on my own so the only dessert I have had recently has been a Fruju from the freezer, although if fresh fruit counts, I have been known to finish off dinner with an apple or a banana…

The twins are here for the weekend so that will keep me on my toes – it’s real easy to work out their preferences at the table: if it’s on the floor, it’s off the list!!

Masterchef – the Aussie Way

Posted on 28 November 2009 by SJPONeill

It was quite sad really, the final crescendo of Aussie Masterchef last night…we’ve been fans of the UK original since we got a home where we could get to from work by 5-30…at first we hated the Aussie version but it really grows on you. UK Masterchef is very traditional and (Fulda) Gapist – all about the food – we could never keep track let alone identify with the people, although the food was our initial attraction – and a direct linear progression to the finals.

The Aussie version, on the other hand, is all about ‘the people’, although at first it did kinda come across like Julia Childs (well, it did have its own Julia and Julie!)meets Big Brother…the finale only screened here last night – onya Julie for taking out the First Aussie Masterchef!! I think she deserved every bit of it last night and managed to delivered a cliffhanger that hung onto the the last dish in the competition…I missed the previous couple of eliminations in the final week and was amazed to find Julie in the finals – nothing about her skills but I thought that the pressure would have been too much for her over Chris and Poh.

The Aussies took a simple linear concept and turned it upside down, shook it all about, introduced uncertainty and complexity, mixed with a good measure of apparent chaos – sound familiar? And all about the ‘the people’ too – not just those in the MasterChef house, but also all those out there supporting it – and they were: apparently the finale episode was the third most watched TV event in Australia this decade. That the focus was on the people was all too clear when Justine was eliminated and tough guy judge Greg Mehigan had to turn away and wipe his eyes – and who didn’t have a little lump in their throat when top chef, Matt Moran, turned up on Justine’s doorstep the night she was eliminated and offered her a mentorship…

Well done, Aussies – now we’ll have to see how the Kiwi version plates up…

Images of Owhango

Posted on 3 November 2009 by SJPONeill

This is Owhango, a small town near the Central Plateau of New Zealand’s North Island. This is the main road, State Highway 4.

Owhango Market Day 006

Owhango has been a bit sad in the last month since the pub closed. A typical story these days: out of town owner, purchased it with a mega-mortgage and charged mega-rent to cover the mega-mortgage; the business couldn’t sustain the mega-rent and so now there’s half a dozen or so less jobs in Owhango, no pub and no fish’n’chips…the next closest pub is National Park one way or Taumarunui the other but there’s no taxis or Dial-a-driver…welcome to the country…

Owhango Market Day 008

This is State Highway 4, looking the other way towards Taumarunui. It’s a busy day – market day…

Owhango Market Day 007

We popped down for a look, even though we aren’t really locals yet: we’ve only been here for five years. I thought I might get some ‘what’s around the area’ pics for the Chalet website I’m building as my experiment in marketing this summer to supplement its site on Bookabach…and you never know what might turn up at the market…

Owhango Market Day 005

Normally you can drive through Owhango and see no one but on the first Sunday of each month, it’s market day…

Owhango Market Day 003

…and the population explodes…

Owhango Market Day 002

…I can never resist a sausage sizzle but managed to stay away from the fresh cheese and wild venison salami tasting…I really liked the slat hammock in the background and think I will invest in one next month (the same stall also had children’s rope ladders but Carmen wouldn’t let me get a couple for the twins – I guess they’ll have to stick with ripping up their sheets to getaway for now)

Owhango Market Day 001

…it could be typical small town anywhere…

Owhango Market Day 004

After a good hour or so browsing, we had a coffee in the sun at Out of the Fog – it is a damn shame that it is only open on weekends now – again, welcome to life in the country…

It struck me as we sat in the sun and chattered with the locals how much small towns are alike anywhere and how intrusive WE would consider an occupying force that did not speak our language, did not understand our culture and thundered through town at speed in its armoured vehicles…even if the local police officer had stopped for a sausage, some conversations would have slowed, some people might have slipped back into the shadows…how incongruous and invasive we would consider it to have soldiers in their reflective shades, bulky body armour and guns at OUR market…would we talk with them or look away til they left. Would WE be more receptive to someone who lived amongst us, understood who WE are and how WE think, who know what WE value and hold dear…? You’re a smart guy, MAJ Jim Gant…

View from a roof

Posted on 25 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…we have guests in the Chalet at the moment, indirectly the cause of my drenching on Thursday morning; being the top host that I am, I had gone to set the fire prior to their arrival so it would be cosy inside. I couldn’t get the damn thing to burn not even after half a pack of Lucifers and bringing some guaranteed dry wood over from the Lodge – the air would have turned blue if the room hadn’t been full of smoke already. We’d only had the chimney swept a couple of months ago so I was not impressed and with the crap weather there was no way I was going up to check out the flue in any detail.

With the return of decent weather (finally) over the weekend, I made myself the ACC poster boy yesterday and hopped up to see what the story was and discovered some enterprising sparrow had managed to cram 8 inches thick of pine needles down the flue – and it was crammed: I had to chip it all out with a screwdriver…

View from a roof 009 This is not a journey I intend making too frequently so I made the most of taking a few pics from this vantage point…it’s always difficult to get good shots of the Lodge due to the bush and this isn’t one of the better ones…not until Lotto Day when we can go fully down the Alternate energy path and tell the Lines Company to get their crappy lines and poles off our property!!

View from a roof 001

Once that happens it will be a major improvement all the way round. The TV aerial on the far side needs to go as well – it has been years since it has done anything but rattle in the wind – the only reason that it is still there is that it is a long way up (and down) on that side of the Lodge…the spa area on the far right is about to get a major ‘tough love’ pruning effort as it is just a little too encroached by scenic beauty at the moment. The two windows are the spare room on the right and the bunkroom on the left. In the next round of renovations, the bunkroom will become the study/library, and the current study/library will become another bedroom on the sunny side. The mega-renovations planned for some time will lift the roof from a point around the top right corner of the spare room window to enable the installation of en suites and walk-in areas – the extra head room will also allow a proper rear staircase with a mid-level landing…

Fish for Dinner again…

Dinner last night was a bit of a mixed bag….fish again because Carmen had the same ‘let’s have fish‘ flash as I on Friday and had picked up some snapper on her way back from Te Kuiti…I found a recipe in the Healthy Food Guide book and semi-modified that to suit. I say ‘semi’ because I didn’t actually adjust it as much as I should have; in fact, apart from halving the quantity of fish and pan-baking instead of oven baking it, I kept all the quantities of spices etc the same. As the twins would say ‘uh-oh’…I served it up with a good serving of tabouli but, man oh man, it was hot!! Too hot for the taste of the fish to really come through. I have some issues with the recipe and wonder if the HFG team actually made it before they published it as the picture in the book just looked like normal baked fish (clean and white) when the marinade is actually very dark. I wondering perhaps if they have skipped out a key ingredient like some form of cream to take the marinade from a paste to something that will actually be enough to cover the fillets AND be poured over the fillets – even using twice the quantities there was barely enough to paste over each fillet…

In Other News

I was checking the blogstats with morning and noticed an incoming link from an unfamiliar site – thinking perhaps I had made a break-through in the blogspace I clicked on it. While it was beyond me to find any connection between it and The World…, M|O|N|G|K|O|L was a fascinating and diverse read; Memoirs of Saigon brought back many memories of my brief time in Vietnam a decade ago, in particular the bubbling friendliness and hospitality of the people of south Vietnam – I don’t think the writers of the Lonely Planet on Vietnam had ever visited the place, or certainly gone any further than the bars of downtown Saigon. My deepest regret is that I did not purchase the painting I saw in a gallery in Saigon: using just four colours, the brown of the rivers, the orange of the dust, the bright green of the foliage and the blue of the sky, it encapsulated my first image of Vietnam as we made our approach into Tan Son Nhut. I was saddened by Cambodia: A Country For Sale – at the time I was in Vietnam, it was still relatively untouched by the depredations of the big corporates and multinationals. One of the reasons that I am not sure I want to return is that in ten years all this may have changed and I don’t want my memories tainted by sights of such a beautiful nation going the same way as so many others…Coming Anarchy this morning has a graphic image of that way….

The Strategist has also picked up on the ‘Always Blow on the Pie‘ story – if you haven’t had a look already, please do…Peter’s latest post regards ‘modern slavery‘: I am less than sympathetic…these people choose to have these lifestyles and it reads to me that greed (in the form of £200k bonuses) is the primary motivator. If you can’t stand the heat…but before jumping out of the pan and emigrating to New Zealand…(to be continued)…

Cheeseburger Gothic has the next of JB’s insights into the perils and pitfalls of being a writer: anyone with aspirations of writing even casually should track both these posts and the ones on a similar theme by Steven Pressfield. Having collected a lot of DIY writing material of varying standards and usefulness over the years, I can recommend both as key resources for budding or even experienced writers…

B-4

I have been fairly consistent in my stated aim of doing some minor work on the B-4 each night. It has turning out to be a rewarding and fun build: although relatively simple in construction, each sub-assembly looks delightfully complex. I’m working on the assumption that it should be able to be assembled almost fully before painting so except for some minor fiddly bits I will put on last – to save me refixing them last after snapping them off with careless handling – I am building it pretty much out of the box…progress so far:

B-4 203mm build 001

Things that go well together…

Posted on 24 October 2009 by SJPONeill

Bert and Ernie…

Fred and Ginger…

Fish and Filo

I’ve been hanging out to try a fish and filo package for a while and thought that I would surprise Carmen with dinner when she got home last night. Lessons Learned:

Where it says use three sheets of filo, use three sheets of filo. Otherwise your herbed cheese filling will melt through the pastry and require an urgent transfer from flat oven tray to over dish to prevent spillover into the depths of the oven.

When folding filo packages, fold the ends in first and THEN roll. This tidily secures the ends and is less likely to crack the filo. Place the filling on one edge not in the middle of the sheet – this makes it easier to roll.

When making a leek sauce to be served under the filo packages, go over on the leek – what looks like heaps on the chopping board becomes barely enough for two once cooked up with herbs, pine nuts and cream. More is less, way more is enough…

The parsnip/turnip/carrot/kumara puree served in a scooped out potato half was a good idea but execution needs work. Baking these in tinfoil seemed like a good idea at the time but I can’t remember why now – it probably would have worked if I had literally spiced it up a bit – a better way would have been a straight bake sans foil. This would also have meant the spud cooking time would = filo cooking time.

Presentation needed work but it tasted primo.

Score:

Fish and filo 6/10

Leek and pine nuts 7/10

Potato halves with vegetable puree 4/10

Total: 17/30 which is still more than half!!!!

Afghanistan and TET

I’ve really bitten over this comment on Steven Pressfield’s One Tribe At A Time thread. [PDF: The “How” of Tribal Engagment – Steven Pressfield] My first reaction to Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement Teams (TET – possibly an unfortunate acronym, remembering another COIN war) was ‘…yep, here we go again – more taking lessons from other wars and blindly hammering them into the round hole of the current war in Afghanistan…‘ Right up to the point, where the stated aim for the Afghan campaign was reaffirmed as creating an environment that could not be reoccupied by Al-Qaeda and its ilk. Against that objective in an essentially tribal culture like Afghanistan, the TET concept makes way more sense than free fire zones, big guns and high tech:

It is debatable whether the ‘clear zones of fire’ (free fire zones from another war?) or technological advantages are major contributors to a successful conclusion to this campaign (an Afghanistan that can not be reoccupied by AQ or its like?) At best the technology is an enabler for the initiatives that may lead to success; free fire zones, IMHO, are a legacy from conventional (Fulda Gap) mindsets and do not meet the spirit of proportionality, discrimination and precision required for countering irregular threats in a complex environment. It is these that may be more suited for “..low conflict area which is in relatively pro-government hands…” and NOT for an environment like Afghanistan where ‘everyone’ (outside the cities) has traditionally been armed – the only real way to discriminate between good guys, bad guys, fence-sitters and genuine non-combatants (who may still be armed) is up close and personal. This why, over the last week or so, I have gone from mild opposition to the TET concept to a firm advocate. After eight years of high-tech and big guns (which have proven of limited utility in other low level wars), it is time to get back to first principles:

ditch any coalition partners are can’t/won’t step up to the plate, and/or won’t comply with the theatre strategy. This is not peacekeeping where the number of different flags waving in the wind outside the theatre HQ is a reportable metric: this is war fighting with no time for passengers or social members.

Confirm the campaign objectives; identify the lines of operation to achieve those objectives; and then implement the tactical operations necessary to progress those lines. This isn’t COIN/CIT-specific – it must be 101 material from just about any military school in the Western world.

Implement the best Information Operations campaign on the planet to seize the new high ground – Al-Jazeera will fight you for it.

It’s all very easy to pick holes in concepts like Tribal Engagement Teams and that’s how I started. BUT it is even easier to pick holes in the current strategy where we once again seem to be winning all the battles and losing the two wars (in-theatre and home front).”

The crux of a successful lessons is analysing and validating observations, issues and lessons (OIL – yes, it really is all about OIL) against your current context – not trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole with your forehead. We saw this when the ‘experts’ all trumpeted the absolute need to implement a Malayan Emergency-style COIN campaign in Iraq. The fact this campaign’ success was due to a number of unique demographic and geographic factors that definitely are not duplicated in Iraq was lost on the ‘experts’. They also overlooked that while the official end of the Emergency was in 1960, it was not until 1988 that the last of the Communist Terrorists (CT) surrendered to Malaysian authorities.

In my ever so humble opinion, I think that Jim Gant has analysed the current situation and campaign objectives in Afghanistan, developed a model and then validated it against that analysis. I doubt there are many other who could same that they have done the same, certainly not those from the big guns and high tech schools of thought…what was that about lessons from other wars…?

The stupid German hire car…

Posted on 13 October 2009 by SJPONeill

I’ve finally got all my pictures from the UK trip sorted out and uploaded from the camera – I am amazed that so small a chip can hold the better part of 900+ pictures: a fair cry from my first big overseas excursion when I had to lug dozens of rolls of film around with me.

Anyway, this is the stupid German hire car that we had:

CLAW 09 - Stupid German Hire Car

We picked it up from Avis at Heathrow who were nice enough to hunt down a detailed UK roadmap for us (lesson: they don’t provide this automatically anymore) and then promptly dropped the ball by giving us the wrong directions out of the airport – if the guy on the security gate hadn’t set us right we’d still be doing laps of the Concorde…

Things we liked about the stupid German hire car:

[This section deliberately left blank]

Things we hated about the stupid German hire car:

It was called a Passat – a stupid name with no sense of coolness at all..

It was manual – not the car’s fault but we’ll blame it for this accident of birth anyway – what a pain in the bum to drive around narrow twisting Brit roads and towns.

Reverse was down and forward from first – if you shift too energetically into first while stationary, you could find yourself in reverse, much to the consternation of people queued behind us at the lights.

It would take anything to from 2 to 17 nudges on the unlock button on the ‘key’ to unlock all the doors.

I say ‘key’ with squiggly things around it because it wasn’t really a key at all: just a chunk of plastic and chrome that fitted into a hole in the dash. We think this is EU fallout out from the car-keying incident (it was Norris, dummies!!) on Coro St a couple of months ago (in NZ; probably a decade ago in the rest of the Coro watching world) where the over-efficient Germans are trying to avoid any such recurrences of such trauma (it’s all fun and games til someone loses a spleen).

To start the car, you just push the ‘key’ in while depressing the clutch at the same time but if you stall it (see comment above about stupid manual German hire cars) to can’t restart it by just pushing in the clutch and pushing the ‘key’ home again…nope, too simple – you actually have to pop it most of the way out and THEN push it all the way home again…that’s not a pain – yeah right…sorry, all you folk backed up behind us on the roundabout – it’s just the Germans getting payback for that Sea Lion thing….This sort of thing probably seemed like a good idea for when the Russians broke through at interesting places like Kursk but for a family sedan…nuh…

There’s no handbrake…just a button on the dash – works brill for setting the brake and makes a cool whirr-clunk sound but…to release the brake you have to push in the brake pedal while pushing the brake button; not only is there no whirr-clunk sound but you need to have three feet if you want to do a hill start. We had to limit our travels to flat places only.

The manual was over an inch thick – no wonder it was still sealed in the original plastic. This might have told us about the cruise control that we didn’t find until the last day…

The Peace Prize and the Olympics

Word on the street is that Obama won the prize (hardly seems worth capitalising it nowadays) because Europeans like him. They like him because he at least goes through the motions of communicating with them – while still doing what he wants anyway. I suppose they should be grateful as well that he engineered the 2016 Olympics going to Rio and not to some EU city that would be forever broke afterwards. After all the grief that Venezuela has been giving the US recently (but didn’t they get dealt to so well in John Birmingham’s Without Warning??), I’m surprised that it didn’t go to Caracas – that would certainly have put them in their place and then some. The Olympic city is fast becoming a economic kiss of death for many nations and I really have to wonder if Obama’s ‘failure’ to secure the Games for Chicago was not actually a masterstroke that Machiavelli would be proud of – it’s unlikely that Brazil will be throwing its weight around too much once it sees the bill…It would actually be quite nice if the Olympics went back to the original concept of sporting excellence instead of the municipal oneupmanship it has become…

Food Blogging

Have been thinking about the food blogging thing I mentioned yesterday and think I will do this from tonight where dinner consists of all the leftovers in the fridge mixed up in a big bowl and turned into rissoles (flash name for patties), consumed between slices of homemade sourdough bread (an accident with the mix last night but tastes great) with fresh tomatoes and sliced cheese – there would have been beetroot and lettuce except I forgot the beetroot til it was too late and parley was the closest thing in the fridge tonight to greens…

From a more organised kitchen we had a great lunch at Out Of The Fog in Owhango (it’s on GoogleEarth) on Sunday (unfortunately it is now only open on the weekends – probably a reflection on the Central Plateau job market) – very fast and friendly service: I had hardly finished the front page of the paper when my snack arrived and they do a great Chai Latte too (but not as good as my homemade ones)…the Owhango Pub has just closed up so Out Of The Fog is now it for refreshment between Raurimu and Manunui…