Carrot Top

Imagine a large high-ceilinged kitchen on an old country estate, in Germany or perhaps Austria. Someplace like that. An enormous table sits as an island in the center of the room, but flanked by no chairs. The kitchen is warm - there are people in the room doing various tasks yet the table dominates the scene. Here, is where the strudel is made. (If you listen carefully, you might even hear the cook practicing her yodelling for the upcoming County Fair ) Huge sheets of dough are stretched to an infinitesimal thinness to provide a cozy wrap for good things to eat. Flour flies through the air as the dough is petted and patted, teased into transparency. What will fill it? Apples, maybe. Cabbage? Cheese. . .cherries? .................................................... It's more likely that today we will pull out a package of filo dough from the freezer to make our own strudels, or blend a batch of cream cheese pastry for yet the "other strudel". What sorts of strudels do you make? Do you make both sweet and savory strudels? Which one is your all-time favorite? Studel is definitely worth a yodel or two, don't you think?

Probably the recipe did not include chocolate. I've never seen one with it in it, though it seems that somewhere one might exist. . ."just because" . But you never know. You just never know in Scotland. And that's all I'll say.

Probably a recipe printed and used "today" would not. . .but the overlaps between some Arabic foods, some Mexican foods, and some Medieval foods are many. I generally write my own recipes, Pille. This one, I can taste in my mind and it tastes good. I'd probably use turkey, though, thinking a bit more about it. And brandy, good brandy in the sauce, burned off.

A good entree might be something like a bisteeya (spelling? that looks slightly wierd ) a chicken pie in flaky pastry - the chicken bound with a Medieval- ish sort of sauce, dense with undertones of tomato, cinnamon, chocolate, raisins, almond and onion. I realize that I've just stolen and mixed from three different cultures, but you get the idea, I hope.

I am glad you remain Genny because I've been wondering if you'd turned into that sporty cat on your avatar. Which would be nice too, but different. Are you serving chocolate drinks? Alcoholic chocolate drinks? Oooh. I would.

Who would have known that mentioning the Table of Your Dreams would open the gateways to your souls in such an endearing and startling manner?! And what beautiful tables they all are, too. Glorious dream tables. More, please. Confess your desires. It is good for whatever ails you. Plus it is highly entertaining.

Many do. English escapes this gender curse or pleasure (however one wants to look at it). Our eggplants are just eggplants. But in any language, it is a pleasure to read Adria on food and to consider the ways in which he shapes it.

I agree that litchees are one of the most spectacular fruits in the world but nevertheless there something about them, a bit of an underlayer almost of taste - that has hints of astringency and maybe even leaning towards a tannic sense. This slight undertone reminds me somewhat (on a much reduced level) of not-quite-ripe persimmon. (No, I've never consumed massive amounts. Thank goodness for both me and everyone else. ) I wonder if persimmon is also highly yang. Michael - I loved this post. But it *is* rather extrodinarily yang-ish, don't you think?

Today I bought the table of my grown-up dreams. A table to dine upon that is perfect, perfect, perfect! For me. Once before I thought I'd found the dining table of my dreams. It was many years ago - the table was glass and steel. It was elegant, big, rectangular. I did not ever "feel" for that table. There have been some other dining room tables bought over the years, because of moving here or there, but today I took the plunge and spent twice as much as I intended to on this table, because it seems to make me sigh with pleasure and contentment in even sitting at it without any food on it. Imagine, what food could do on a table like this. It is round, big and round. A round table makes me feel balanced and equitable. It is cherry wood, nice, rich, but not too dark - just sort of glowing with an internal warmth. A central base supports the table but it is not clunky or heavy-looking but merely architectural in a way. No legs to stumble onto. The chairs are made of the same wood - a simple uncluttered design, and, and they have arms to lie one's own arms upon while lingering at this beauteous table and they are cushioned, too - with soft subtly elegant fabric. I believe I have found the table of my grown-up dreams, and can not wait! to serve a meal upon it. What does the dining table of your own dreams look like? Do you have it, or have you seen it, or is it waiting somewhere in your imagination but not yet found?

Here is one that is corporate rather than municipal: Legal Sea Foods Fish Sculpture

Has anyone said butter?

I keep on trying to write something in response to all these wonderful entrees but every time I try, the words get sort of jumbled up. I guess the only thing that would be safe to say is that Mayhaw Man's submission looked exactly like a lizard-fish I caught one night fishing in the Florida Keys. No siree. You would not want to eat that thing, even if it was made into an etouffee. But I could live happily gazing upon that Oldenburg apple!

Thank you, Hiroyuki. What beautifully balanced dishes!

I found another Oldenburg - in Minneapolis: Skyline with Spoon ................................................ For some reason, I keep remembering a giant teacup somewhere. But of course that might just be from a Disney movie.

The city I live in has decided to implement a program of public art. Public art has a way of curiously and starkly giving representation of the place it lives in. The choice made by our city's leaders of what to spend some fairly good amount of money on - this choice that it has made to represent the city - is a series (some twenty of them, I believe - to be added on one by one as time goes by) of six foot tall plastic turkeys. Shiny plastic turkeys to keep them nice. Hokie Bird turkeys. The Hokie Bird is unlike any turkey I've ever seen in reality or in pictures. It is bald and fat, particularly in the tummy area. The tummy area is shown well, as the bird stands on its hind two feet, with its wings clasped in a grandfatherly way around the front of the distended tummy. (Pot belly, really.) Its chest is rather shallow though large and naked, and the visage of the turkey does not do much in terms of reassuring one that any intelligence at all resides there. These turkeys are to be all the same in shape and shininess - yet naturally as they are Art, they will be decorated (painted) differently so that everyone can admire the creativity that our city has to display as its public statement. The first one was installed last week in front of the Town Hall on Main Street, close to the street so that nobody driving through would possibly be able to miss this wonder of artsiness, this ode to our culture. It is painted as if it were tie-dyed or alternately graffiti'd, in bright conflicting colors. I would say "You really must see it!" but really, rather feel that instead, you probably should not if you value anything of beauty or indeed, have any aesthetic sense of things at all. If you were a stranger driving through our town, without any knowledge that this turkey was not meant to be eaten but rather was a symbol of some really big boys playing ball, you definitely would think we grew turkeys here - that we wanted you to admire, buy and eat our turkeys. And soon our town will be filled with a flock of lots of these birds. As for me, suddenly the idea of a nice roast turkey dinner has gone the way that the idea of wearing disposable paper dresses went in the late 1960's. Forgotten, and good riddance. .................................................................. Does the place you live have any food sculptures or any public art that represents food? If so, what is it?

But aside from that great food that only Mayhaw Man has the right to name, there are some others. Classics - that have stood the test of time. Olive oil. Anything in the allium family. Rice. Beans and Legumes. Bread. Green herbs and spring lettuces. Asparagus! Bananas, the entire spectrum from sweet to starchy. Potatoes. Cherries, apples, plums. Litchees would be worth their weight in gold. Tea, coffee (Starbucks is planning already for the day to occur). Beer, Wine and Spirits. Even the most vile-tasting sorts. Shrimp? Maybe. Chicken, too. And any pork at all.

Begins with an O.

Fascinating. And the book you link to seems to be yet another one I've got to get. The only food connection in anything I've read so far with these specific words (wabi, sabi, shibui) seems to be the aesthetic of the tea ceremony. Yet not so much the tea ceremony itself but one step removed. . .the aesthetic of it. The culture is so deeply rich in ritual - and the language does not seem to easily float between things such as design and food; or popular culture and food - as English does. That would seem to infer that there is a firmer sense of permanence in how one "thinks" about food - in Japanese. Would this lead to less sense of experimentation with the cookery in general? Would it lead to a deeper sense of internal connection with food in some way when thinking in Japanese? I'm beginning to "get" wabi and sabi and even wabi-sabi but shibui still seems to have different meanings and inferences but that might only be the shortness of my mind. Well. Whatever it is, I like it, anyway.

I wonder. . .but no. I'd rather deep-fry a pig's foot (previously braised in some luscious bath of spices and aromatics natch) than a tail.

And once again we return to "Buyer beware." And in this global marketplace the possible machinations seem so dense as to be sometimes insurmountable, as you note. Perhaps "buy local" is the key? Is that the only way to really be assured?

athinaeo's recipe is similar to the one I use, but with the addition of some diced tomatoes, raisins, and pignoli to the recipe. Layer thinly sliced lemons onto the top and drizzle with good olive oil before baking in a temperate oven.

Interesting answers. The first I read of shibui, which generated this question in my mind, was this: "[. . .] the way of shibui, the design principle that urges a gardener to leave two or three bright, fall-colored leaves behind on an otherwise immaculate surface of raked lawn." Images of food that would be plated in this way came to my mind. The tension of imbalance - an liveliness of sorts - that creates a focus of interest that the mere rigid form of perfect balance does not. To extend it into another realm with food, one might think of the unexpected flavor held in a certain ingredient that sparks a dish - something that surprises yet intrigues, removes itself yet blends and supports the whole. In a brief web-search, I found references mostly to design. And was also fascinated by the fact that these words used to be used separately, yet are more often used together now (wabi and sabi). The two meanings of shibui (really there seem to be three?) startled me also. For no good reason except that one of the meanings seems full of a deeper intent than the other two hold that it surprised me. It came to me to wonder, if in Japanese, the words used to specifically describe one thing in one specific vocation were shifted over into use for other vocations. In English, we are very free and easy-going with our words - they wander all over the place and are re-shaped often for different uses. tokyogurumegal notes that shibui is now used to describe a cool person - so maybe this is done in Japanese to some extent. But still, I wonder if the language that is used to describe food and dining is as mutant or as fickle or as flexible as it is in English (particularly American English). It seems that this would have some bearing on how one in a culture "thought" or "felt" about food and the things that surround it.

The same questions were running through my mind last night as my arms struggled to lift some of these things into the pan to brown for arroz con pollo. Yeah, lots of white meat - but who cares? Dinner took longer to make, the portion sizes were too large (so I took out the cleaver and simply made the pieces smaller, but some aesthetic value was disdained in doing so), and there was something just plain spooky about the sizes of these things. Bigger is not always better. But here, they were not on sale Sandy. Three of these half breasts went for close to nine dollars.

Ah! Anne will have to find her own source of strength, then. (I do remember seeing some children's cookbook on Anne Of Green Gables where she seemed to be eating teacakes and such, so I *did* wonder. . . ) Rice does go better with pork than the oats that were running through my mind, indeed. Deep-fried rice bundles with soy-braised pork centers, anyone? Yours in deep-fried bliss, Lo Bak Dou

Your testimony as to the way those animals were treated again raises the question of different operations handling animals in different ways, Toasted. And it would be good to hear more about this if there is more to hear, if there *is* any finally solid reasonably acceptable way of knowing the percentages on how different places do things differently. Aside from the fact that I often give voice to my thoughts in a flippant manner, this is of course nothing to be taken flippantly. My own family owns a chicken farm and a lab that develops antibiotics and other drugs specifically for poultry, so yes, I've been around chickens. Cows. . .I lived for four years in a rural area where raising beef was the source of most of the income of the folk that lived in that area. . .and while yes - I did see some examples of what you described with what might be considered unneccesary roughness to the animals (mostly at the livestock market), most farmers, including the one whose land nestled right up onto mine so that the fields connected, the barns were visible and within hearing range - did not exhibit anything except the fondest sort of care for their livestock. Again, the best thing to do in my mind is to each educate ourselves as much as possible. One of the problems in finding reliable sources of information, of course, is the unreliability of some of the studies undertaken. Unless one knows a subject well enough to really know how to question it correctly, one can end up misinformed by studies. An example of this (again, somewhat in this area of livestock/animal husbandry/ animal rights/what we should eat or not) is something I saw myself several years ago. A questionnaire was sent out to the elementary school children here in the town I live in - a university town, filled to the brim and overflowing with personnages with degrees of all sorts of higher educations. The study asked questions with the intent to define what children thought about "animal rights". It asked questions like: "Is it right to kill a deer for food?" and so on. There were fifty questions of this sort. My son was given the questionnaire to fill out - and naturally I saw it. I asked him how his friends were answering the questions - how they felt about this (as they did discuss this at school). I then asked him how his friends from where we lived before (the rural farming area) would have answered the questions. He sort of hooted with laughter. "They would have answered completely differently, Mom" was his answer to that one. A week or so later, I called the scholars that had administered this test, who all were doing research at the university. Upon asking them if they thought this test showed a good, fair, even sampling of the population's opinion - they said "Yes, of course it does." When asked if they were going to make a note on these results (which were going to be published) that the sampling they took was based upon a population of children who were basically suburban townies from families with college-level education and a certain income level (and that this study did not include the responses of the rural children less than an hour away living in vastly different circumstances) they said "No." There *will* be different "takes" on this question of "should we eat foie gras", for different reasons. Finally, though - I personally can not equate animal husbandry to human slavery. And in my house, truly, it is me who is slave to my cat and to any stray animal who happens to be in my path. And I daren't ever wish that they would go to the grocery store to buy something for me to eat - because really, I do not think they would.