The Goblin Shark. Its liver may account for up to a fourth of its weight. Found in deep sea but rare enough that little is really known about it other than its good looks.
An arresting image but no information about the type.
The Greenland Shark. Largest specimen ever caught was over 1000 kilograms. The flesh is poisonous.
So I might not want to be in the water but would love to be at this underwater restaurant in the Maldives.
I’ll be in Barcelona in a few days, and may in fact, ascend this wonder.
The package:
Opened:
From the land of intricate etiquette, cherry blossoms, budo, living treasures, sand gardens and ikebana. Of course.
The headline is slightly misleading in that the eater approach to conservation works better for plants than for small animal populations but overall worth considering. Strange to think that if left alone, many of these species will die out. Of course, on an existential note, what does it mean to be only because you are edible.
And now Gordon Ramsay and Ricky Gervais
From Timothy Hallinan’s Thailand-set novel A Nail Through the Heart
“Twenty or so years ago, in one of the first invasions by a Western brand name, Nescafé shouldered aside the much more labor-intensive processes by which the Thais made some of the world’s best coffee, replacing taste with convenience.”
“But Rose [who is Thai] grew up with Nescafé. She adores it, hot, tepid or iced. He has seen her eat a teaspoon of it, dry. … [Rafferty] takes a sip, rolls it around in his mouth like red wine, and revises his opinion. It’s an interesting drink if you don’t insist that it’s coffee.”
I suppose that might work..I do remember when down in Mexico and then later in other coffee growing lands being puzzled about the ubiquity of Nescafe.
This wonderful little gem from someone who is not entirely up on the current (or is it just North American) slang.
Cats and Dogs - One man’s pet is another man’s meal. Ghana’s Volta Region is the place to eat pussy (tastes like chicken) In Nigeria dog meat which is roasted like beef is also belived to improve your sex life.
- Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger:
In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.
“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”
and
The Poor Eat Mud
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.
“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”
- The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis, we have another part of the story.
Commodity speculation spread long ago from standard products like oil and gold to anything edible and available for trade on the Chicago Futures Exchange. These days there are futures contracts for everything from wheat to oranges to pork bellies. The futures market is a traditional tool for farmers to sell their harvests ahead of time. In a futures contract, quantities, prices and delivery dates are fixed, sometimes even before crops have been planted. Futures contracts allow farmers and grain wholesalers a measure of protection against adverse weather conditions and excessive price fluctuations. They can also help a farmer plan how much to plant for a given year.
The Chicago Board of Trade is the nerve center for global futures contracts.
But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage.
Greg Warner has worked in the grain wholesaling business for more than two decades. His office sits a block away from the Chicago Futures Exchange. He’s an analyst with the firm AgResource, and he says what is happening now in the wheat market is unprecedented.
“What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers — mainly farmers and silo operators,” he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, “keep climbing up and up.”
He’s calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called “soft red winter wheat.”
Wagner is stunned by such developments. He sees them as evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.
Capitalism is literally consuming itself.
WEASEL COFFEE
UNIQUE VIETNAMESE COFFEE
EATEN and REGURGITATED BY A WEASEL
RICH CHOCOLATEY FLAVOUR!
This coffee is first eaten by Weasels which then regurgitate it, no one knows why they do this but it is then collected by locals in remote forest areas and then cleaned and roasted.
It has a unique rich chocolatey flavour and is best served as an espresso with a dash of condensed milk, just as they do in Vietnam.
CIVET COFFEE
THE RAREST COFFEE IN EXISTENCE
UNIQUE DELICATE FLAVOUR AFTER FERMENTATION IN THE CIVET’S DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
ONLY 500 KG’S OF THIS COFFEE ARE FOUND EACH YEAR
This is the rarest and definately most extraordinary coffee in the world! This coffee has been selected for us by Paradoxurus Hermaphroditis. Better know as the Common Palm Civet Cat. It prowls the Sumatran coffee plantations at night, choosing to eat only the finest, ripest cherries. The stones (which eventually form coffee beans) are then collected by cleaning through the droppings by the natives who collect it.
Kopi Luwak as it is known, is considered to be the world’s finest coffee by Native Sumatrans. This coffee has an Intense but delicate flavour and no aftertaste, which is unique in coffee. This flavour is due to the fact that the coffee has been partially fermented by passing through the system of the Civet. Only about 500 KG’s of this coffee are found each year.
Puked up or crapped out; they both sound so good. Who knew there so many variations to yum!!
Go to Why the Great British Breakfast is a Killer at the TimesOnline for a wonderful example of vitriolic writing and response:
From the article:
The fried English breakfast was conceived during the Industrial Revolution (probably) as a form of fast fuel for a working class that actually worked. They ate 3,000 calories in the morning, then they burnt 3,000 calories by lunchtime. Or died when the mine collapsed. But you don’t burn 3,000 calories driving a forklift truck, or answering the phone at Argos, or fiddling your disability benefit. The work dies, but the breakfast lives on. Result: obesity crisis. (Knowing this, and fearing the backlash, Little Chef recently moved to slim down “Fat Charlie”, the obese chef who features in its logo, but nothing came of it - presumably because the porky little scrote just wouldn’t stop eating.)
And from a response to the article:
The Times restaurant critic has a masterful way with words and a witty turn of phrase, but strip away the etymological pyrotechnics and what do you have? Preaching, that’s what - and preaching of the worst sort: as practised by the nanny-state control freaks currently turning this country into a joyless puritan hellhole run by cyclists who knit their own tofu, where a glass of wine is a unit and lighting a fag risks summary execution for killing babies.
After smoking and drinking, it was obviously only a matter of time before the health gestapo turned their jackboots on us innocent lardbuckets. A tax on fat? Yeah, right, that’ll work. Just like it does with alcohol and tobacco. We’ll have ferryloads of white vans coming over from Calais laden with butter, cream, eggs and cheese to be sold by dodgy blokes with plastic carrier bags outside Whitechapel Tube station (“Pssst, squire, want a half pound of Normandy unsalted, only a quid?”).
What I didn’t expect was that a man who eats for a living would recommend porridge, a vile, gelatinous slurry made from a crop that civilised people feed only to their animals, eaten chiefly by 18th-century crofters thrown off their land by the English and unable to afford proper food. As for one’s palate being clean and mellow in the morning, speak for yourself, mate. After a night on the lash my mouth is like the bottom of a baby’s pram, and I can rarely taste anything before noon.
Now why do we have to wander over there to get these kind of spirited and brilliantly evocative spats? Lovely stuff!
“You read Rolling Stone and you don’t see rock stars curse like this,” said the chef ,Tom Colicchio, the lead judge of “Top Chef.” “And it’s recent, too. It’s something you’ve seen just in the past year.”
Worth reading, all about keeping the bleeper busy for the ratings to stay high. Ramsay is so known for his tirades that it was news a while back that he could calmly show you how to stove top a steak without losing it. He passed for normal, and that was news.
Being vegetarian-inclined is like a sorority pledge claiming that they still believe in their virginity and sobriety even after having a drunken tryst with Todd, the Sigma Kappa who got them into the mixer at no charge. It’s a nice thought that may let folks sleep easier at night. But let’s be clear - there’s already a word for someone who is ‘vegetarian-inclined’. It’s called an “omnivore” and it represents 96.8% of the rest of the country.
This one is fun because it led to quite the little comment flurry rightly castigating the writer for not acknowledging that there was a world of difference between someone who ate meat once a month and someone who ate it a few times a day.
These are solid cocktails; other unusual creations manifest themselves in this adventure from the Wandering Eater.
My own favourite of Nicholas Lambert’s meatscapes. Had run across these somewhere before and seeing a couple of them on Slashfood reminded me.
So is this why we don’t see Babe around much anymore?
Time to put down the books for a moment and ponder these developments in the wonderful world of bacon and bacon related foods.
1. First of all via ChezPim, I saw a review and comments regarding London’s Fat Duck restaurant and thought the tasting menu rather interesting. And also evidence that the new molecular cuisine, while fascinating, will likely remain rarified if only on the basis of the price of admission to delights.
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ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE POUNDS FROM 1ST MARCH 2008 |
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Joselito ham |
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Almond fluid gel, cherry, chamomile |
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Artichokes, vanilla mayonnaise and “Manni” olive oil |
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Black pudding “made to order”, pickling brine and spiced juices |
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| HOT AND ICED TEA (2005) |
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| MRS MARSHALL’S MARGARET CORNET |
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| PINE SHERBET FOUNTAIN (PRE-HIT) |
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blackcurrant and green peppercorn jelly |
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| PARSNIP CEREAL |
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| (2006) Pain perdu, tea jelly |
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WHISK(E)Y WINE GUMS |
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| PETITS FOURS |
| Mandarin aerated chocolate, Violet tartlet, Carrot and orange lolly |
2. Via HungryMagazine we have Bacon Almond Maple Brittle.
3. Via IdeasInFood we have Candied Bacon and Charred Jalapeno
I did not grow up eating candied bacon at cocktail parties. I missed out. Candied bacon is one of those treats that is best consumed in the kitchen with no one watching. If you prefer to eat candied bacon in a public forum, you will miss out on glories of licking your fingers after each bite as the bacon fat mingles with the caramelized sugar and the salt begs for another sip of beer. Anyway, I got my introduction to candied bacon late in life and have spent many opportunities making up for this fact. One day, I was merely messing around in the kitchen, a habit which has been quite beneficial to my culinary developments. Well, I had some cooked bacon lying around left over from breakfast and my mind began to wonder. I put a pan on the stove and began making a caramel. As the caramel began to darken I thought of jalapenos and placed some on the grill. When the caramel was just shy of burnt, I added the bacon and soy sauce and cooked the mixture to combine the flavors. Afterwards, I took the seeds from the grilled jalapenos and added them to the base which I then pureed, strained and balanced with lime juice and rice vinegar. My mind wanders often and I am thankful for that.
(I have to admit I do not find this picture appetizing in the slightest.)
4. Via SeriousEats reporting from Nigella Express: Brandied Bacony Chicken
1 chicken (about 2 1/2 to 3 pounds)
2 strips bacon
1/4 cup brandy
1. Heat the oven to 425°F. Meanwhile, in a small skillet over medium heat, cook the bacon until it’s crisp and the pan is full of rendered bacon fat.
2. Remove pan from heat, and place the bacon right into the bird’s cavity. Place chicken in a roasting pan, breast side up.
3. Pour brandy into still-hot skillet with the bacon fat; let bubble for a minute, then pour mixture over chicken.
4. Roast 45 minutes, making sure the juices run clear between leg and body. Let rest 10 minutes before carving.
(This one sounds like a winner, the chicken, the vodka I’m not so sure about.)
5. Bacon Vodka
Couple of interesting foodie items today:
From Chez Pim, a great new food blog discovery for me, a tale of possibly the worst dinner ever, though still a feast for the eyes. Make sure to scroll through the full gallery of pictures.
The chef, a brain surgeon by day, and obviously an anal retentive by night, has developed an edible microfilm that looks somewhat like saran wrap and apparently does not taste too much better, and has contrived to wrap absolutely everything in it.
And from kottke.org I was referred to this page of foods that were not available in Europe in the Middle Ages. Like potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, vanilla and more. Its was meant to be a guide for those trying for a historically authentic meal but just to think about it is amusing enough.
And then there is SmittenMitten:
It is a Caramel Walnut Upside Down Banana Cake, and there is now purpose to my life.
And finally via Hungry Mag, we have the Biggest Wiener in Chicago
And a hilarious write-up:
As promised here are my snaps of a ginormous wiener. While Sunday brunching with Best Gay Friend I happened to glance from our restaurant perch located at 900 North Michigan Avenue and shout:
“…My Gawd! That is one BIG wiener down there!”
Our waiter raced to the windows.
And the first comment on that blog posting is: Now if only it had a Scottish accent.
