The plinth of righteousness

Serious sporting commitments will prevent me from drinking myself over to the wrong side of iniquity this weekend. Although I’m sure my major organs are going to benefit from a certain level of abstemiousness, it’s kind of a shame because I just made a bumper batch of gazpacho to see us through the weekend. Cold homemade gazpacho is one of the best hangover cures I know. Loads of vitamin C, thanks to the tomatoes, loads of salt, thanks to my heavy hand, bread pre-masticated by the blender, olive oil for the gods, raw garlic and onions to ward off the demons, cucumber for bright eyes, vinegar just in case.
As a bonus, it’s also good with vodka (not pictured) and probably gin if things get really dire. I, however, will be endeavouring to drink my way to virtue rather than consciousness via this jug of gazpacho.

And then there’s the bowl of cured sardines in the fridge – white wine vinegar, garlic, pepper, bay and thick sardine fillets, slippery at the skin, still bone-crunchy in the flesh – it seems wasteful to eat them purely for sustenance, such are their restorative powers. I don't believe in echinacaea or St John's Wort (scandal) but I will stand or fall on the medicinal qualities of fresh gazpacho and home-cured sardines.

Emperor’s New Clothes

This is either a post about the world changing or about things staying just the same.

On the side of fuzzy familiarity is the breakfast scene. Just Fran Kelly and I, no waiters harbouring nuptial intent hovering about, an opened bottle of Glenlivet in my line of sight, cockatoos squawking, lots of laaa di daaah morning light reflecting off the water and lighting up the buildings across the , comforting low-level domestic squalor, a few cockroaches and yesterday’s paper.

Flicking through the foodie section in order to work out where I need to eat dinner to fit in, I happened upon an article about Kopi Luwak. A cup of coffee for $50?* It must be good. So I read all the way through an article about what is apparently a legitimate contendor for Next Big Thing in the coffee world, kopi luwak beans. Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?, you eagerly inquire.

Kopi Luwak is made from coffee beans that have been eaten and excreted bu the
Asian palm civet, or luwak, a mongoose-like mammal native to the jungles of
South-East Asia. The flesh of the coffee cherry is digested, but the bean
passes through intact and is deposited in piles of scat that are collected by
hand from the jungle floor.

Now my head has been spinning since I returned to Sydney: I’ve been running around like a dervish, sleeping insufficiently, moving boxes and boggling a bit at it all. I might still be able to squeeze a drop of credibility from the excuse that I’m jetlagged ergo confused. All the same, it sounds rather like another hideous joke is being played upon the gourmets. Civets are more closely related to cats but they look like big rats. What we’re talking about here is coffee that has been shat out by a rodent after its digestive system has corroded the fruit. I pride myself on an open-mind and a broad palate. The consumption of post-intestinal coffee beans is, however, a step too far. Enough’s enough.

What did confuse me was that the article was written in such a po-faced manner that I couldn’t quite tell whether the author was taking it seriously or not. Is an article about kopi luwak beans a great prank designed to put the food porn (ah, vice, so nice) into ironic perspective? Or is written to appeal to status hungry Sydneysiders looking to impress their friends and clients with a crazily expensive tipple that doubles as a talking point. Either way, coffee whose first filtration has been through the digestive system of a civet is not on my list for 2008.

* If it costs $50 for a 250mL cup, kopi luwak is more expensive than Glenlivet, most Granges, brachetto, all but the best balsamics and extra-virgin olios, and most snake oils.

Ceci n’est pas une fraise

It looks like a fraise. When you squash twenty of these into a punnet they bruise and leach just enough juice to sort of smell like a strawberry. But when you cut them open, the white, pithy heart of the subject is revealed. This is not as it should be. The heart of a strawberry – the most frequently referenced fruit in highbrow erotic fiction, I’m told – should throb scarlet and smell of wet sun. Whizzed up with one of these, a smoothie might turn an anaemic shade of pink; chopped up with ripe orange fruits, these made a pretty weak claim to a place in my fruit salad this morning. Otherwise, they’re useless pieces of aerated matter, ripened too fast, stored in a too chilly environment and bumped and bruised to buggery. Balsamic, caster sugar, Pernod, they’d be wasted trying to salvage these. These were cheap strawberries, they’re not organic, and my hazy memories of Riverina and Corsican strawberry picking tell me that the season hits its peak in mid-summer. Mental note, etc.

I purchased these oh-so inadequate groundberries yesterday but this morning’s disappointment does not constitute the first relearnt Lesson of the day. No, after rushing home from yoga, the first relearnt Lesson I learnt on this day, the 19th of February, was never to believe a word any removalist says about arrival times. I rushed through Bondi Junction, ur-lieu of fantasy consumption, without even a glance at the new surfaces which have made last year’s old this year’s mesmerising new. I’m reading through some of Ballard’s novels from the early 70s and trying to draw together a set of ideas on shopping centres to write a paper or a short story or somesuch. I could have done research at sashay pace. Instead, I pierced my post-yoga calm and zipped home with barely a sniff to smell the berries. And for what? A phone call telling me there’s been a bit of a problem in the yard. Sigh. If I had a zoom lens, I’d take a photograph of the dog lolling on my neighbour’s balcony, the size and shape of an imaginary shaggy lion to cheer myself up. Oh well, I'm borrowing another neighbour's wireless connection to post this blog and that seems to be doing the trick.

And so I wait for the arrival of a bed and the long-awaited consummation of a plan to make my bed and lie in it. This particular enactment of the scene will have to unroll without any bedbound and languorous mastication of strawberries. Alas.

Lost in translation

I’m still not sure what this dessert is called and I doubt I’ll ever know how to spell it.
For a while, I thought it was called manaloo and then my co-traveller Ingrid told me it was called malayoo. Something like that. Whatever it’s called, it’s amazingly good: milk that’s been boiled with cardamon, sugar and orange peel, beaten up with cream, rosewater and pistachios to a texture midway between cappuccino foam and icecream. Apparently it’s a Varanasi special.
Ingrid and I were escorted to this street stall by our friends Raju (in the pic) and Sunil, who assured us that of all the malayoo vendors in Varanasi, this one was the best. The malayoo and some truly amazing lassi were ladled out of bigger vats and buckets into small clay pots.
When empty, the pots got tossed to the gutter and the stall puppies licked the shards clean.

Priorities

A chai stall: kettle, saucepan, glasses, strainer, biscuits. Instant satisfaction.
Most street chai comes in tiny throwaway clay cups but this stall, located somewhere in the Varanasi old city, served such great chai that I offer it as the type irrespective of the atypical glassware. The best chai I drank in Varanasi, and probably in India was at Ashish Café just off Assi Ghat. Ashish might be the loveliest man in Varanasi, a smiling man who cooks delicious food very slowly and serves it on his verandah; his chai is heavy with fresh ginger and served as an excellent antidote to the cold I contracted whilst in town. There’s plenty of air pollution everywhere in India so it’s not beyond my imagination why one might wear a facemask to filter out the gunk. Still, tourists in Calcutta, Bodhgaya and Varanasi prancing around, their respiratory systems protected by clean white masks, did not strike me as particularly dignified or sensitive. It was only when my nose and eyes had been streaming for a couple of days that I realised what a great service the masks might have been.

Ashish’s gingery chai has eased my cold and kept me walking up and down the ghats. ‘Burning is learning,’ a young chap told me on my first day in Varanasi. This line runs through my head each time I walk past the burning ghats where bodies are being constantly cremated. I can’t quite bring myself to watch the duration of a burning (three to four hours, I’m told) or even a funeral, I just rush on by. If burning is learning, I think I’ve learnt that I’m a little uncomfortable with death rites as a tourist spectacle. If the numbers of foreigners hanging out to watch the burnings are any indication, I may not be siding with majority opinion on this one.

I’ve had to get used to it though as I need to pass Harishchandra Ghat, a burning ghat, to reach Mansarowar Ghat from where I’m staying. The Lotus Lounge is located at Mansarowar and I’ve been able to satisfy my dumpling cravings there. I was initially a little reluctant to patronise the Lotus, it being so obviously a retreat for foreigners from the Ganges-side trials. Everybody wants to pretend they’re being intrepid and doing it like the locals and places like the Lotus – with a shiny pink and green and white balcony over the Ganges, clean low tables, a snazzy, well designed sign painted all over town, menus in proofread English and, each time I’ve visited, an Indian-free clientele – don’t really help to sustain the illusions. On the plus side, the food is cheap and delicious, the cushions are comfortable, and there is a happy absence of marauding children. Sitting on the balcony, I couldn’t help thinking of the Lotus in Potts Point and, had I a 2011 resident on hand, I would have offered for discussion the contention that the Lotus of Mansarowar Ghat is Varanasi’s answer to the Lotus of Challis Ave: really rather lovely once one has discarded the notion that one should be languishing in slightly seamier surroundings. The PP Lotus may have charming wallpaper and a bewilderingly lengthy cocktail menu but it doesn’t have the dumplings offered on the shores of the Holy River. Up there on the balcony, one more dazzling success was registered for the Tibetan veg momo, the dumpling of 2008, as far as I am concerned.
Stuffed with a gooey, garlicky mix of softened veges, steamed and lightly fried like gyoza, these dumplings are a stunning riposte to any existential angst. Is life worth living? With dumplings like this, most certainly, yes. Any doubts can be quelled with reference to the sauce. Someone has taken handfuls of garlic, chilli and tomato (raw), thrown them in a blender with a dose of salt and pressed pulverise. From my rheumy perspective, this sauce embodies the qualities some people seek in a guru: healing powers, charisma, certainty, sex appeal. I have always been easily lead.

Alas, I fear that whilst I live within reach of such delicacies, my spiritual well-being will lag. I have been to two Buddhist holy sites in the last week, Bodhgaya and Sarnath, and have been sleeping in one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. Whatever it is that is in the air in these sacred places, it has given me a cold and I find myself, as ever, bound to earthly cravings.

Hail the Dumpling!

A friend of mine proclaimed 2001 the Year of the Dumpling on the first dawn of that very year. Early in the morning after the year before, steamed dumplings struck the assembly as extraordinary entities: delicious misshapen orbs, miraculous in their very manifestation and the rapidity of their transition from freezer to steamer to plate to belly. As it has turned out, 2001 wasn’t the Year of the Dumpling, rather, its first dawn marked the beginning of the Decade of the Dumpling. It may even happen that we happy beings are living our lives in the Century of the Dumpling.

Anyway. I love dumplings: I can’t remember ever being seriously let down by dumplings. A little bit of stodginess, over-frying, under-steaming, gloopy filling, chewy pastry, none of these misdemeanours ever defeat the goodness of the dumpling experience. The Global Dumpling League admits a broad range of foodstuffs into the category of dumpling: something carbohydrate-y wrapped around something else and steamed, boiled, or fried. Gyoza, ravioli, frozen Chinatown dumplings, pelmeni, gowgees, dumplings homemade with Laura, samosas, dim sum, won ton, Chinese Noodle House and Silk Road fried dumplings, Mavis’ golden syrup dumplings, tortellini…all these take their place in the pantheon of dumplings.

On the streets of Kolkatta, I discovered a new variant: the Tibetan momo. Momo are small dumplings stuffed with spicy, super-garlicky vegetables and served with a chilli sauce. The street stalls in Kolkatta served five dumplings with a dollop of chilli sauce and a little bowl of peppery soup sprinkled with shallots for 10 rupees (about AU$0.30). Momo are ubiquitous in Bodhgaya as there is a huge population of Tibetan refugees here.
These may not look like anything special but they were dynamite: the best momo I’ve yet tasted. They exploded with hot golden curry veges – I love it when garlic is treated as a vegetable! I could hear the salsa in the centre being prepared as I waited – dice, dice, dice – raw onion, garlic, tomato and chilli in equal proportions. I think if I ate salsa like this every day, my immune system would be a stronghold with Death Star defenses. Mutton dumplings are also on offer but I haven’t tried them for several reasons: I’m wafting through a vego phase; I’m convinced that meat is the cause of all food poisoning; Indian mutton is goat.

I’m committed to eating plenty of momo before quitting North India in the hope of figuring out what’s in the filling. Are there any Tibetan restaurants in Sydney?

Traffic report

Spending half an hour outdoors in Delhi induces a coughing fit; an hour in an auto-rickshaw in Chennai traffic left me choked up for the rest of the day. The pollution in Calcutta is different, somewhat less onerous as far as the respiratory system but still the daily harbinger of a thick, unglamorous sheen of cuticular filth. I thought I’d arrived in Calcutta on an overcast day. The sky was silvery grey and, out of the glare of direct sunlight, walking wasn’t uncomfortable. A few days later, I realise that the perpetual gloom is composed of polluting gases and that the heaviness in the air is not that which precedes a storm, but the filtered fallout from those celestial pachyderms.

Vast anarchic columns of vehicles belch out ominously dark fumes: yellow Hindu Ambassador taxis, autorickshaws, rickety old lorries, brightly painted buses, Enfield motorbikes, all swerving and weaving Stravinsky style. There are cooking fires and makeshift waste incinerators on every street and piles of rubbish and building materials throw up dust at the slightest provocation. My feet are sticky with grime from walking around the city for hours today. I managed to dodge the piles of ordure and dubious looking puddles but even so, the air down there clings to my feet more tenaciously than it does to my arms and face and neck. It’s quite amazing. Still, when I arrive back in my hotel room and slough bucketloads of dirt off my exposed skin, I can breathe easily enough.

In spite of the grime, I’m quite taken with Calcutta, quite sorry that I’ll be jumping on the overnight train to Gaya tonight. It’s the first big Indian city I’ve visited which it’s possible to wander around and experience at street level. So for hours these last few days, I’ve been tramping up and down avenues lined with enormous dilapidated colonial buildings.

The pedestrian experience of Calcutta’s architectural record of monumental imperial aspiration, its decline and transformation is tiring, not least because of the effort of figuring out how the hell to respond to the extremely visible grinding poverty. I’ve been confronted by various manifestations of poverty and inequality around the world but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a concentration of people living dreadfully tough lives on the street. Walking and driving past slums is one thing but walking over and through people’s lives as they sleep and wash and shit on the streets is quite another. Pushed into my path by their parents, children grab my sleeve and sing out ‘Madame, Madame, ten rupee’ again and again as they follow me along the path. Often, my motives in giving them coins have less to do with charity and more to do with irritation and embarrassment. Who knows where the money goes? I’m sure the right-headed would chastise me for responding to persistence rather than need. Each time I give money to a beggar, another equally needy person pops up and stakes their claim.

Anyway, anyway, it’s always enough already with the liberal guilt, n’est-ce pas. Back to the views, back to me. Keeping clear of the traffic, staying out of puddles, declining invitations into shops selling men’s underwear, deciding who to follow across the road, not getting lost, trying to imagine the transformations within and without these extraordinary buildings over the last couple of hundred years, it’s all hungry work. Fortunately, Calcutta street food is delectable and thus far I haven’t been struck with the gutrot.

The ubiquitous snack is the roll, Calcutta’s answer to the felafel, I guess. Fresh flat bread is cooked on a griddle, sometimes with egg, and rolled up with onion, chilli sauce, lime juice, spicy paneer or veges or chicken. They’re fantastic. I’ve made a solid commitment to the roll and the best I’ve found is at Kusum’s. Follow this sign a few metres down a little lane off Park St at the Maidan end, just before Oxford Books. Order a paneer roll and you will encounter happiness. I was by far the most conspicuous customer on my visits and so couldn’t quite bring myself to take a photograph.

How do you ladoo?

This is an everyday Chennai streetscape. The fact that it is dominated by a large sweet shop advertising ghee and honey sweets is no coincidence. Invitations to gorge oneself on outrageous sweets are everywhere. I don’t normally define myself as a sweet-tooth but I’m changing hats here. My saving grace might be that my memory has reached saturation point for new food names and I can’t actually seem to remember the names of the tastiest treats. Still, pointing and smiling seems to produce good results and fill a paper box with delicacies for about the same price that paper bags were filled with mixed lollies back in my sunstruck Riverina jeunesse. Wherever I find to live for the duration of my Sydney sojourn, I’m thinking that Maya sweets will seem like a long way away and, at the same time, not too far at all.

Monomanual monomania

Try as I might to shove the punt down into the backwaters of memory, the process whereby I learnt to eat with a knife and fork has not been quite washed away from my conscious mind. A high premium was placed on manners at the family table; maladroit as I am, correct use of utensils was a lesson it took me a long time to pass. Now, however, I’m quite comfortable with cutlery. Knives, forks, spoons, I can use them all. A little too well, perhaps. Here in India, I’m discovering that after my long and arduous struggle against instinct, I’ve forgotten how to eat with my hands. Pleased as my parents would have been with this breakthrough, it’s causing me some problems in restaurants where there is simply no cutlery to be had.

The proliferation of breads on Indian menus is making more and more sense. Roti, chapatti, naan, paratha, even pappadums, they all help to scoop up rice and curry. Eating rice and curry without bread in a public place is still pretty much beyond me, I must confess. The thing is, not only are you deprived of a knife and fork when you tackle your thali, your left hand should also stay off the table. Try tearing a piece of naan big enough to use as a scoop with one hand. It is a very difficult business. Using it then to grab and sop up slippery pieces of curry is still more challenging.

This is where the dhosa comes in. Pancakes are far more malleable than bread and the dhosa arrives already wrapped around the filling. A good dhosa is soft and crisp and thus easy to tear and manoeuvre. Last night I managed simultaneously to devour a masala dhosa one-handed and to chat to the mother and daughter who sat down opposite me in matching pink saris about engineering courses in Australian universities. The masala dhosa was a gorgeous dish, eyeball and tastebud-wise but as, alas, the photo didn’t work out I’ll note that it was served on a banana leaf, stuffed with spicy yellow mashed potato, accompanied by a little bowl of sambar and a dollop each of coconut pickle and unidentified green goodness. The meal was made only more delectable by the fact that I was able to eat almost all of it with my left hand on my lap, proud as a spoon-enabled four year old.

I selected my dhosa-house on the recommendation of my Madras correspondent’s father (both, sadly, out of Chennai now) and his appraisal that it was a very clean place. Rightly so. I’d add that it is also cheap and delicious and further, that pomegranate juice, that extraordinarily restorative beverage, is on the menu. If you are in T.Nagar, Chennai and just happen to be walking down Bazullah Street, go to Sangeetha’s and don’t expect a fork.

The Prawn of a New Era

Arch and buckle, o, fractured temporal plane. We’re back in Kerala, last week. Life slowed down amazingly there.

Wait for an hour and a half at the Baywatch restaurant on Cherai beach, and this is what you get. Tiger prawns as big as kittens, split and rubbed with oily garlic and spiced and grilled. Marvellous and messy with the sea rolling away just behind us. The only time I’ve ever otherwise seen prawns this big is at Doyle’s at the Sydney Fish Markets, one of my favourite places in the world. The tiger prawns stuffed with chutney ingredients and pine nuts have been on the menu there for donkey’s years; unlike the spicy grilled prawns at the Baywatch, they are a dish I’d advise nobody to order. The consumption of prawn heads has recently been a theme of both my reading and correspondence. Delicacy these may be, I’ve been lead to understand; the sisters Pike nevertheless left the prawn heads untouched.

While we’re on the subject of Keralan cuisine, cooks there use coconut oil rather than ghee as their fat of choice. I, however, was rubbed with spiced ghee and put into a steam cupboard to cook whilst in Kerala. Ayurvedic healing takes you to some strange places. The strangest place I’ve found myself in quite some time is sitting locked in a nineteenth century style steam cabinet with only my head poking out, wearing a cotton loincloth, dripping with aromatic, therapeutic ghee. True story.

The titular allusion to new eras provides a flimsy pretext for a reference to a new era in French presidential romance. I’m behind the times and I’m shocked. I just found out that Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni have become encoupled in a maelstrom of love. It’s way too late for l’esprit de l’escalier. I’m shocked. I know that I’ve intoned loudly in the past that the private lives of public figure should not be the topic of hysterical response and scrutiny. Still, smiling, nip, tuck, slash, burn, all in the name of progress sharks like Sarkozy and quasi-bohemian guitar strumming supermodel heiresses like Bruni should not even be allowed to meet. Je n’aurais jamais cru…

Habesha tucker

All of the photos I took of Ethiopian food look pretty unappetising: piles of oily stodge splotched onto a sheet of grey-ish carbohydrate. I mean, on appearances, and without recommendation, would anybody in their right mind really want to eat this?The pancake-like rolls are injera, a kind of bread made from the grain tef, the only harvested seed which houses a naturally occuring yeast. Injera is thus like a combination between a crepe and a slice of sourdough bread. It's great stuff. My friend Myriam - the Eritrean posing as an Ethiopian expat - told me the marriageability of women is judged on the quality of their injera, how thin it is and the frequency of the little crumpetty bubbles on the surface. The tef is usually bought unground at markets like this one in Lalibella. Everyone goes to a local grindery to get their tef and coffee ground up.
The sauces are just piled in the middle of the communal dish of injera. Standard are tibs, pieces of lamb fried up in butter with green pepper, garlic and onion. My favourite was the shiro, a stodgy paste made from ground up chickpeas and berberi and butter, with or without meat and lamb juices as befitted the fasting season. Not a particularly visually appealing dish, but very very good. The ground meat in this photo is cooked kitfo, mince which is rubbed through with spices, cooked and served with a local spinachy vegetable and curds. I vastly prefered the raw kitfo, spiced diced meat served with a little bowl of dipping spices, although this option, it must be said, was one which diced a little too intimately with gastrological (as opposed to gastronomical) catastrophe.

This vast plate of food served three people. All eating is performed cutlery free, using the right hand to tear off bits of injera and scoop up the sauces. Once you've ordered shiro, in particular, you've tapped into an unending supply. If the injera stocks are low, new rolls will appear on the plate. If the shiro is drying up, ladlefuls will be dolloped onto your plate. It's a system which worked for me. And as a bonus, Ethiopian coffee is fabulous, not just the beans, but the coffee itself. The Italians only occupied Ethiopia for a brutal five years but they left loads of coffee machines as part of their legacy. Shots of sharp dark espresso with or without leche were available everywhere, a very good thing, in my opinion.

On my encounter, Ethiopian food does have the variety that characterises other faabuous cuisines. There's a stock of about ten dishes which appear on every menu with, at least in my experience, not a whole lot of regional variation. The palette of ingredients is pretty limited but this constraint produces extremely good food. If I hadn't just arrived in the land of a thousand spices, I'd be a bit sad to have left Ethiopian food behind.

Is there an Ethiopian restaurant in Sydney? And can one eat Shan food in Sydney? Just wondering...

Abyssinia Samoa*

Wow, I wrote the below a fortnight ago when I arrived in Addis. I wasn't able to post it and it's been languishing in the draft box since. The locals I met in Addis turned out to be charlatans looking to find a Western wife for their friend. I almost saw a Teddy Afro show in Bahir Dar but the King cancelled. I didn't get sick of injera and only got halfway sick eating local food. I've been astonished by the churches and monasteries of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. I've sat on lots of buses. I've read loads and loads of books. I've travelled with some fascinating folks. The chronology of this blog has been entirely convoluted but I nonetheless make the gesture of posting a photo of the 'valley that leads to the Blue Nile,' one of the first spectacular Ethio-vistas I saw.

And so it begins.
*
No sooner had I arrived in Addis Ababa than I was sitting in a living room in Bole, being indoctrinated into the church of Teddy Afro, the king of contemporary Ethiopian music, and being quizzed on my itinerary. Even with the case of mistaken identity which led to this hospitality had been cleared up, I was a welcome guest. Fitsum, the guy who picked me up from the airport, has this friend called Anteneh. Anteneh knows everyone in Addis, including and Australian guy called Jeff. Jeff had heard that a 30 year old Australian woman was arriving in Addis to teach English and thought it could be me. Jeff, of course, is a Sydneysider and the hyperactive tendrils of this grapevine reminded me of sunny Sydney. So there I sat, bags in hand, drinking St George's beer and getting a crash course in Ethio pop culture. Friendly city.

Somehow, I got twisted up and carried away by the grapevine. Before I knew it, I was hours out of Addis in a spectacular rocky valley at an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery dedicated to St Tekle Haymanot, one of the most sacred saints of the Ethiopian church. In the thirteenth century, St Tekle Haymanot prayed standing up in a cave for 22 years before he lost a leg. Angels interceded and provided him with six wings in order to stay upright and he stayed in prayer in the cave for a further 7 years. Sainthood seems to go cheaper these days. Not only did I see his tomb, I stood in the cave, desperately trying to hide my impiety and ignorance from the pilgrims thronging around. My guide had studied for the Ethiopian Orthodox priesthood for 12 years before turning to the path of Rastafarianism and my travel companion was a devout Orthodox woman who attended Catholic mass everyday. Somehow, trying to keep my balance walking up a hill slippery with holy water dripping from Tekle Haymanot's cave, I found myself becoming the mouthpiece and defender of both Buddhism and Protestantism, atheism being far too risque a doctrine for anyone to mention, let alone propound. Talk about interpollation. This was just one of the intensely odd moments which peppered my day.

(Later. This is the church of Tekle Haymanot, built in the sixties but on a site which has housed a monastery since the thirteenth century. Little about the service has changed since then.)

I've been in Ethiopia for less than 48 hours and am completely sold on the food. Without question it is the best food I've eaten in Africa, leaving the Swahili masalas about which I was trying so hard to enthuse far behind. Ethiopian food is spicy and buttery and uses loads of garlic, ginger and chilli: of course I'm a fan. Because of the complicated fasting rules of the Orthodox church which, amongst many other things, forbid eating animal products before mass on certain days of the week and during the fasting season, there is loads of fantastic veggie food on offer too. The carb which staples the Ethio diet to the table is called injera, a very light, slightly sour, yeasty pancake made from ground tef, a supergrain which grows only in Ethiopia. Every dish gets served on top of a pile of injera which is then torn apart and used to scoop up the sauces. Everyone at the table eats from the same dish and extra injera magically arrives as soon as supplies run low. Even though it resembles grey dirty dishcloths at first glance, I am completely prepared to eat injera with every meal until I leave.

Apart from the fact that I won't be able to post any bright and shiny photos, all bodes tremendously well for the next few weeks here in Ethiopia. I'm traveling to Bahir Dar, the source of the Blue Nile, Gonder, Lalibella and maybe Axum. Hundreds of kilometres of dusty road stretch out before me, starting at 3.30am tomorrow morning. I've got Murakami and Trollope and Kundera in my pockets: things are looking good.

* Important Pike Family Heritage Pun. Possibly to be attributed to the Great Australian Classic, Let Stalk Strine by the ineffable Affbeck Lauder.

Ugandan starches

I couldn’t honestly say that Uganda offers the first-time visitor a dazzling array of culinary pleasures. It does, however, offer a stomach settling variety of starches to accompany main meals. Indeed, the starches – for to talk of carbs would be misleading – the starches can swamp the main meals, as this bean curry + accompaniments illustrates.In Masindi, on the way back from Murchison Falls National Park, I had lunch with, inter alia, a Swedish woman and her Tanzanian husband who had been living in Uganda for the last few months. I let them guide me through my two dollar lunch (passion-juice not pictured). To be honest, I had expected less of the bean curry in terms of taste and more in terms of volume. As it happened, the bean curry was the best part of the meal, a faaaabulous success: fresh beans cooked up in the same spicy tomato sauce as the goat curry, the fish curry and the beef curry. It looks like bad baked beans, one of the few things I won’t eat, and tastes, happily, much better. The orangey red stuff is chilli sauce, a lifesaver.
The starches, however, are the object of interest here. Obviously it’s rice sitting in the centre so I’ll start my identification with the gritty greens in the right-hand corner. My local contacts weren’t able to identify the greens, instead choosing to place them as a distant relative of the silverbeet. Distant, yes, but a green vegetable nonetheless and therefore good.

Moving clockwise from the greens we hit the posho first. Posho is stiff porridge-y kinda substance made from ground maize. In Tanzania and Kenya it’s called ugali and in all three countries, it’s a dietary staple. At best, it’s heavy and bland. At worst, it’s the stodge at the centre of every single meal. Posho isn’t offensive to the tastebuds, I suppose, but it’s not a dish for which I’m clamouring to find the recipe.

From posho to the yellow stuff in the corner, matoke, another staple that isn’t exactly inedible, but that you probably wouldn’t eat unless you really had to. Matoke is made from cooked, mashed plantains and is vastly improved by salt and chilli sauce. Lots and lots of beer helps too, I guess.

Jump over the rice and you hit grilled, boiled sweet potato, crumbling all over the plate. Not awful, but avoidable in an ideal world. Boiled cassava, on the other hand, is something that I find pretty awful. Anyone remember Perkin’s Paste? If Perkin’s Paste was a vegetable dish, that dish would be boiled cassava. Better to boil the cassava to buggery and make tapioca from the starch, I say.

It makes me feel like a timid mazungu, but of all the starches gathered hereabove, the most familiar wins the prize.
Rice?
Rice Really is Quite Nice!
Twice?
Rice is Very Very Nice!

The heart of the matter

I’m in Arusha, the heart of Africa, equidistant from Cairo and Capetown, if not from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The Rwanda Genocide Commission is located here and if it miraculously takes me less than eight hours to book a plane ticket and a bus ticket and change some money, I understand that I am welcome to witness the proceedings unfold. It’s about ten degrees cooler than it was in Dar Es Salaam, Mount Meru looms in an unimposing fashion and most of the ATMs in town are out of cash.

I wasn’t 100% certain that I was onto a winner when I emailed the Everest Chinese Restaurant and Inn in Arusha to see if they had a room. Happily, the Everest is a gem, half-polished, tis true, but a gem nonetheless. I don’t believe I’ve stayed in an inn on this trip but I am obviously in favour of the concept of food and lodging, particularly of the cheap and charming variety. The spry proprietor dashes around in loud waistcoats and his daughters chat on the sly. And the restaurant, the restaurant is an honest-to-goodness Chinese restaurant! The closest I’ve come to Chinese food since leaving Australia is the raviolis grillés in Paris.

(Sidenote. Raviolis grillés are fried dumplings available at the millions of traiteurs chinois in Paris. They all taste the same, full of pork and ginger and shallots, they’re all served with the same iridescent red chilli sauce, they’re generally heavy, reheated and a bit gluggy but they are WONDERFUL, an unsung guilty junkfood pleasure of the City of Lights and an antidote to any amount of pastis, vin rouge or Cointreau.)

So yes, Chinese food. It has been too long. You might be reading this with easy access to sizzling chicken with ginger and chilli and so not be able to share the excitement that a just replenished scarcity induces.
This is not the best Chinese food I’ve eaten – no BBQ King (Sigh. Same décor though.), no Billy Kwong, no Marigold, no Fu Manchu, no Shanghai Dreams – but, even with the in my view highly unorthodox addition of cucumber to the hotplate, still pretty damn sizzling good. I dreamed of yum cha and handmade noodles and Peking duck and steamed oysters with ginger and shallots and black vinegar. I’m still debating the rights and wrongs of an all-dumpling dinner tonight. There’s great, cheap seafood on the coast and lots of lifesaving Indian restaurants around but otherwise, Tanzanian food hasn’t really knocked my socks off. As a result, I have begun to develop some quite specific cravings, including:

1. Very, very cold champagne, sauvignon blanc and/or cocktails and the right people to drink them with.
2. Bread and cheese. Same old, same old. Soft white baguette with Camembert, a ripe Tome or a randy, rindy goat (St Maur?) or a dark rye with Roquefort would be a nice start.
3. Non-threatening salad with non-radioactive dressing.
4. Olives that haven’t been chemically treated.
5. Sashimi. Lots of sashimi. Again, sashimi of the non-gastroenterologically threatening variety.
   

Obviously, this is an abridged list. I am not confident that any of these desires will be fulfilled in the short term. What’s a fulfilled desire but a force expended anyway? Tomorrow I’ll board a big air-conditioned coffin of a bus and quit Arusha for Kampala. I’m still not entirely sure how long the bus trip will last. Recent advice is hedged between seventeen and twenty five hours. Hello, swollen ankles and woozy brain. As I’m leaving Tanzania so soon, now is the time to append the following...

Lesser known facts about Tanzania!

1. Food is universally under-salted.
2. Table salt shakers are invariably blocked and require a fork-driven intervention in order to remedy #1.
3. Tanzania’s roads are better than Kenya’s.
4. Mexican soaps dubbed into English are really popular telly fare.
5. The African Queen was shot in Tanzania.
6. The trees are full of nests and the skies full of birds.

Juice wars

I was flabbergasted by pomegranate juice in Istanbul. The squeeze didn’t stop there.

a) Seedy
There are many things I am missing about Sydney, well, Australia, at the moment. One of the less obvious is Spring Valley Orange and Passionfruit Juice. It’s worthy of capitalisation, this daily juice, this emergency repair fluid, and has wrenched me out of many a physiological and psychological pit. And then there are the liddle facts.

Anyway, fresh strained passionfruit juice surpasses the SV Orange and Pash by several degrees. It’s usually a combination of yellow and black passionfruit (one of which is sweeter), slightly sweetened and chilled. It’s embarrassingly cheap and divinely wonderful. I attempted to drink my body weight in passion juice (yes, sorry) on Lamu, being concerned that I might never sup the nectar again. Happily I find passion juice to be widely available all the way down the East African coast.
I drank this one at Buni Café in Zanzibar. My Peace Corps contact told me that in many parts of Tanzania, passion juice is the only available fresh juice. It is an excellent substitute for Spring Valley. Now I need to find a stand in for Darrell Lea liquorice.

b) Slimy
I like avocados almost as much as I like passionfruit. My fierce love for fresh avocado with any combination of lemon/lime/Tabasco/garlic/tomato/onion/toast/chilli/wasabi mayonnaise/soy is only undermined by my furious loathing for any kind of cooked or over-processed avocado. The avocado which regularly appears in the vegetable tempura bowl at Don Don on Oxford St is a blight on the good name of that fine institution. I have no hestitation about shifting to the imperative here: Avocados should be cut in half, chopped, or mashed. Avocados shouldn’t be put anywhere near heat and they shouldn’t be put in a juicer.

Avocado juice is advertised on most juice menus I’ve seen since arriving in Africa. I’ve not experienced an iota of curiosity about avocado juice. Avocados shouldn’t be put in a juicer and that’s that.

I’m staying at a guesthouse in Zanzibar which provides breakfast. Breakfast starts with a plate of fruit and a glass of fresh juice. Yesterday a glass of pale green juice was placed before me. Um, what is it, I asked somewhat timorously. Avocado juice with lime, madame. Everything OK? Yes, yes, yes.
On the grounds that any principle worth rattling on about warrants testing, I decided to swallow my doubts and taste the juice. My prudence was possibly addled by the earliness of the hour. Icy crystals of very sweet lime juice baffled my expectations as to the texture of avocado juice. This glassful was very sweet, a little bit slimy, quite creamy, and not particularly flavoursome. If I’d been told that it was soursop or custard apple juice, I might have been able to drink the whole glassful. Somehow though, the knowledge that it was avocado juice acted upon my swallowing reflexes and I barely got through half a glass. I see no reason to vary the dictum: Avocados (wonderful fruit that they are) should never be put in a juicer.

By way of conclusion, to vindicate the triumph of one juice over another, here’s a sunset more passionfruit than avocado.The rubbish on the beach is clearly a reminder that we live in a fallen world, a world in which avocados are put in juicers, a world in which neither fresh passion juice nor Spring Valley juices are universally available.

Spice Grrl

Although I more frequently eschew organised group activities in favour of low rent Garbo posturing, there was no way I was going to miss out on a spice tour of Zanzibar. Having previously had no idea where most spices come from, I am now a walking repository of superficial knowledge on the cultivation of kitchen spices. On encountering clove trees and such like for the first time, I got over-excited and took it upon myself to taste all these spices in their fresh, unripe, unprocessed and unwashed state. I am pleased to announce that I am suffering no ill effects from such foolhardy spontaneity. Following is an extremely abridged field report.

Cinnamon
I had inferred that the term cinnamon bark wasn’t a figurative one; Michael Ondaatje’s beautiful poem, ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’ had prodded this inference along and added to my arsenal of cinnamon related fact that the bark was procured by means of peeling. This unprepossessing tree is a cinnamon tree. Peel away some bark, and voilà: cinnamon. The bark just regenerates on each peeling. Presumably a skilled peeler can coax fragrant quills from the trees with facility.

Cardamom
Cardamom pods and seeds and powders aren’t just vital spices, they are orchid by-products! Apparently too they are a cure for seasickness. My voyage to Zanzibar from Dar Es Salaam, aboard the dubiously named Flying Horse, was calm enough but I am pocketing a handful of pods for the return trip.

Vanilla
Vanilla pods, vanilla beans, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, another noble orchidaceous by-product. The pods in the photo are not yet fully grown, ripe only with possibility. The half dried beans for sale elsewhere fairly oozed a sticky mass of seeds and a tremendous thick perfume like no version of vanilla I’ve previously encountered. My hands and head plump with vanilla, I swooned and entertained visions of vanilla quinces and crème anglaise and a bottle of Absolut infested with vanilla beans and all sorts of custard until pragmatism, of course, intervened and I realised the pointlessness of trailing a stash of vanilla pods across the continent with me. It’s not like I’m travelling with a whisk or anything. I note that I did not dally long with the notion of vanilla essence.

Clove
Where do cloves come from? Clove trees! The clove tree! Thrilled am I to discover that such a species exists.
Unripe cloves look just like ripe, undried cloves and taste not dissimilar either.

Nutmeg
Without nutmeg, where would spinach, and, for that matter, scrambled eggs, be?

Once upon a time the Anarchist’s Cookbook instructed the hopeful to smoke nutmeg for fun. This was possibly irresponsible information but no more so than the bomb-making instructions. My Zanzibar sources tell me that high-octane nutmeg tea is effective an aphrodisiac when served to women and as a sedative when served to men. So there you go.

Good old multipurpose nutmeg is the pip of a fruit which looks like a pale plum and hangs abundantly from enormous trees like these. The pips only take five days to dry! If my sample dries as it should, I am sure it will bring me great luck to carry a nutmeg with me, along with my first of spring chestnut charm, collected in Milan.

I am chuffed almost beyond measure to have peered at these spices in situ. Without vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, and cloves, my quality of life would be markedly lower.

Suffering for my art

I’m not often enough offered the choice between crab and lobster, let alone fresh crab and lobster. On Lamu, the island which in retrospect is taking on the characteristics of an opium dream, crabs and lobsters were abundant and many of them scurried their way into fisherman’s pots and from thence onto the menu. For some reason, crabs and spiders are over-represented in the literature of hallucination. Gerard de Nerval might have conducted a lobster around Paris on a leash in the name of Surrealism but lobsters don’t seem otherwise to feature in literary trip-outs. Dicing with my future nightmares it might have been, I nevertheless chose the crab.

Seven other wedding guests and I stayed in a sprawling and magnificent pile of a house called Bustani Square: white stucco walls, pink leopardskin cushions and bougainvillea everywhere. Three wonderful men called Justin, Anderson and Alfred looked after most of our needs. When fishermen knocked at the door with buckets full of flamboyant, irascible, delicious crabs, they were kind enough to cook them for us. A photo of buttery picked crab meat with lime and garlic isn’t going to look like anything but it tasted fantastic.

I’ve spent a great deal of time attempting to throw off the Protestant superstition that easy living must be followed by a period of long suffering. Just in case, I remind myself of the vast sufferings and deprivations I have already endured in my short life. I deserved to eat all the crab I ate on Lamu, down to the last last claw and cracker. Perhaps there is such a thing as earthly justice.

Furthermore, Mark and Warren and I broke the cycle of being waited upon by buying big fresh crabs from a local and cooking them up ourselves with lime and salt. This chap tasted sweeter than any promise of redemption.

Shuck and Awe

In the Paradise of my imaginings, oysters are eaten everyday.

After a wedding on Lamu, leftover wedding guests drink leftover Prosseco and eat oysters on rooftop terraces at sunset. Locally grown macadamia nuts hover in the background for the uninitiated.

Small, creamy, sharp oysters are prised off the mangroves at low tide and carried in wet hemp sacks to your door for a ridiculously small sum. It's not all easy: these aren’t cultivated oysters and, tenacious delicacies that they are, it requires some effort to coax them out of the shell. The upside to this unrefined oyster business? For the first time in my life I experienced a quadruple headed oyster, – count the glistening beds of flesh amongst the rocks below – better than a double yolker any day of the week.Although I am generally at my most parochial on the topic of oysters (Sydney Rock Oysters are the Best Oysters in the World), the Lamu oyster experience was exceptionally good.

Turkish hangovers

My mind might have been utterly thrown from its castings by the goings on in Shella but I haven’t been able to forget the gastro-spectacular that was Istanbul. Before I reflect on a megadose of sun and coast and boat, on nuptials and guests and donkeys, I think I need to post a final and non-conclusive set of abridged highlights of Istanbul.

1. Variations on the theme of eggplant and lamb
Not one day passed during which either Andy, Rebekah, myself or indeed all three of us did not order a meal whose key components were eggplant and lamb. Speared eggplant and lamb shishkebabs, spicy lamb meatballs on eggplant puree, lamb and veggies wrapped in eggplant, sizzling lamb with eggplant…the trajectory of these dishes was from superlative to superlative along a course plotted by lemon, tomato, garlic, yoghurt, parsley, olive oil and chilli. If I were to put forward a candidate for best savoury dish in Istanbul, it would be the sizzling meatballs chez Rumeli served on a very hot cast iron plate with eggplant, tomato and yoghurt. Unfortunately, no photo exists of this extraordinary plate: the steam bursting forth fogged up the lens of my camera and I was not able to wait.

2. Baklava
Many eastern Mediterranean cultures claim baklava as their own, the regional furore over the genesis of a sweet dish being comparable to the ongoing trans-Tasman hostilities regarding cultural ownership of the pavlova. Such parochialism, I spurn, indeed I find that myths of origins can be overlooked with the assistance of sufficient syrup and crushed nuts and honey. During our glittering ascent into the sublime, baklava will be served as an inflight snack.

3. POMEGRANATE JUICE
If you’d asked me last week, last month, last year, I would have told you that I was too old and jaded and weary and worldly and boozy to be genuinely moved by fruit juice. Then I came to Istanbul and started drinking pomegranate juice, tart blood and gold pleasure.
The glorious juices of this fruit - this fruit that moonlights as a jewel - are pressed in the streets and do splendid things for a hangover. I’ve noticed that most of the jewellery that I seem to be wearing these days is pomegranate influenced. This can only be a good thing. After ten days in bright white Lamu sun, I am fancying myself a little on the pomegranate side too, complexion wise.

And yet, and yet, of Istanbul there’s so much more: domed ceilings and ceremonial columns and mosaics and the skyline at night and meze and the fishermen and Iznik ceramics and running into old friends on the street and apple tea and bazaar life and hammam hammam hammamdullahlah…

Figgery pokery

Let me tell you what was wrong with this dish.
1. The blackcurrant sorbet accelerated the hardening of the figgy caramel in which the caramelised figs were wallowing, resulting in a large amount of inaccessible caramel.
2. It wasn’t served on pistachio coloured plates.
3. The plate upon which it was served wasn’t edible.
4. The menu proclaimed that the dish would be served with cream and it was not.

Apart from these quibbles, these figs were the best sweet things I’ve eaten in a mighty long time. I say this having just left Turkish delight heartland, having recently scoffed all manner of nutty, syrupy pastries. Hot caramelised obscenely figgy figs with a caramel made from honey, fig syrup and butter is the stuff of culinary fantasy. The dollop of sharp and acidic sorbet, surprisingly, made the whole dish even better, cutting through the sweetness of the figs and meddling with the texture of the caramel. And the nuts! Perfectly placed walnuts, delightfully crushed pistachios!

If it were possible to eat these figs in the bath, it would also be dangerous to so do, so intensely and deliriously pleasurable were they for the eating. Negotiating traffic afterwards was difficult. In fact, having eaten these figs and thus eliminated the prospect of rational discourse, the only realistic follow-up option was to go to a Turkish bath. Andy sauntered off to the men’s baths, I to the women’s. I lay on a hot marble platform and try to gaze at the sky through the star-shaped perforations in the dome above me. I was thwarted by recollections of the figs. I bathed and steamed, a woman scrubbed many months of grime from my body; I steamed and bathed a little more and all of a sudden it was time for dinner. This blog is testimony that I have survived to tell the tale.