Recipe & Realization – Overly Elaborate Breakfast January 29, 2010
Posted by Weng in Epicureanism, Food.Tags: bachelor chow, basil, breakfast, cooking, eggs, Masterchef, pancetta, Tobie Puttock, tomato
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I awoke far too early this morning. In fact, it was a morning, as opposed to early afternoon and just in time for Oprah. So I figured it’d be as good a time as any to attempt to execute a test-run of a recipe I found in a cookbook that I borrowed from my local library. Seriously, libraries are awesome places. Not only do they have a small mountain of cookbooks that I can borrow for 3 weeks, have my way with and return without investing like $50 on, but they also have CDs and DVDs!
Ever feel like illegally downloading music but feel bad about the legalities of it? Well, you should. Artists are struggling to be able to afford their sex, drugs and rock & roll these days, and it’s all your fault. You bastard.
The library’s already bought the CD though so don’t feel too bad about copying that. Piracy is bad. I don’t condone or support piracy in any way, except for by LEGALLY BUYING PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN DVDS AND WATCHING MOVIES, LEGALLY AND OTHER LEGAL THINGS, I also legally drink rum, that’s a piraty-and-legal thing to do, please-don’t-sue-me. (This may possibly be the first true piece of IBM in IBMv5)
Anyway, after that entirely uninteresting distraction, the goal for this morning was to execute: Eggs baked in tomatoes with crisp pancetta, basil and soldiers. (Tobie Puttock, Italian Local, p9)
The glossy professional food-tography example of said recipe
Essentially, it’s an Italian twist on your typical continental breakfast of bacon, eggs and tomato. You’ve got your pancetta – practically Italian bacon, and an egg baked in tomato with slatherings of olive oil and basil, because it’s Italian and it therefore needs slatherings, and specifically slatherings, of olive oil.
It’s not exactly a particularly difficult meal to execute, unlike anything on MasterChef, there’s only ever really one “process” going on at a time and a fair amount of waiting around, but regardless, it’s experience either way. You essentially need to cut the top off of the tomato, scoop out the insides then turn it upside down to ‘dry’ for about 15 minutes. Then you get to slather a little paste of olive oil, basil and Salt-N-Pepa here and we’re in effect.
The recipe kind of specificed fresh basil, but (as I wrote about earlier) Woolworths is decidedly shit and I had to go with dried, so that in itself was one difference already.
Tomatoes post-slaterization, wrapped in pancetta.
Then this is where it all got shot down in flames and went to proverbial hell. In my sleep-deprived state/hunger, I strayed from the guiding light eminating from the recipe-torchlight of Tobie Puttock. I was then meant to put the tomato and pancetta in the over for 15 minutes or so, THEN take it out and put the egg in and return it to the oven for another 5 or so.
Instead, I skipped a step and chucked the egg in the tomato straight away. And in that single mistake-y action, a puppy probably died somewhere and my timing was completely and utterly shot.
If you think about it from a quasi-analytical point of view, a tomato that has olive oil in it and has been in the oven at 180 for 15 minutes will be VERY hot internally. In fact, the oil probably would also most likely be bubbling. Bubbling oil + egg = fried egg = rather-quick-cooking.
Instead, the egg probably just SAT in the olive oil and the still-cold tomato and had to slowly heat through. What should have taken 5 minutes for the egg to cook took closer to like… 15-20 minutes and it probably didn’t turn out EXACTLY like it should have.
In fact, one thing I notice whenever I cook is a constant sense of imperfection and incontentness. Everyone eating your food thinks it’s perfectly fine and dandy, and it arguably was a fine (fine as in acceptable, not as in fine wine or fine dining) breakfast of bacon, egg and tomato. But the problem is, when you’re the creator yourself, you can just spot SO many minor niggling issues with it and spend the entire meal thinking about what went wrong and how to do it better next time.
Average cook, even worse Food-tographer - the best shot out of a totally shit bunch.
Realizations: Arguably, anything you do in life is a learning experience, cooking is no different. So, what have I learnt from today’s exercise?
- Read the fricken’ recipe. It cost Poh the title of MasterChef when she cocked up her Chocolate Half-Pipe, though she’s moved on to bigger and better things on the ABC with her own COOKING SHOW, where’s Julie now!?
- Dried herbs are just wrong. They’re often absolutely nothing compared to their fresh counter-parts. I really should invest in a multi-layered tower-pot and start up my own mini-herb-garden in my spare time (which I have an awful lot of at the moment)
- Basil seems to go decently with eggs, possibly even better with a little bit mixed in with scrambled eggs and it may also be the ingredient in pesto which seems to nauseate me.
- I need to actually add more Salt (Pepa can be ignored slightly) to somehow counter-act the potentially nauseatingly ick ‘sweetness’ of basil combined with that of the tomato. You can’t solely rely on the bacon to do that.
I actually have no idea about half the features on my digital camera, and I'm a really shit food-tographer.
This Episode of Weng’s Bachelor Chow is brought to you by: The number π and the word slathering.
Bachelor Chow is filmed in front of a live studio audience.
Fresh Food Fallacies – A Harrowing Tale of Woe January 26, 2010
Posted by Weng in Food, Me Complaining About Things, Rants.Tags: cooking, general asian stinginess, money, tightarse, vegetables, Woolworths, zen
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I’m the kind of person who cycles through dream goals like a radio station cycles through songs. Specifically, a “Hit Music” radio station that plays the four same songs at least twice every hour.
So far in my life, I’ve wanted to be an Australian Idol (despite having no singing talent), a standup comedian, an actor, a mixed-martial artist (despite having a shit knee, general unfitness and minimal martial arts experience) and a chef, specifically of the Master or Iron varieties.
Perhaps of all these dreams, this one is the most feasible and probably the only one I’ve ever attempted to make any inroads towards achieving. It kind of helps that cooking is kind of a universal, handy skill too that I’ll need to learn lest I spend the rest of my life living off crappy Chinese take-away rueing my inability to whip anything together.
You can look at cooking as a very Zen-like concept, it’s not about the destination, but the journey to get there (or something like that). Don’t think about the finished product, think about the journey. It’s not about how fast you get there, or what’s waiting on the other side, it’s the Climb.
In other words, you only get out, what you put in. Quality > Quantity and what not.
Zen: Works for gardens or garden salads!
So, when trying to pick up some decent fruit and vegetables, you’d think a sort of logical place to start would be “The Fresh Food People”, no? Picking up some whilst on my trip to get milk and a copy of Who Weekly/Dolly/Cosmo/Girlfriend? You’d be wrong.
I’ve had the misfortune of making two treks to Woolworths in the past week or so. The first time I was intent on buying a few basic grocery things for a Key Lime Pie I intended to make (which may in itself form some kind of mini-entry later down the track). As I waltzed past the deli section, I saw some haloumi cheese. I love haloumi cheese and the fact it doesn’ t actually melt at conventional grilling temperatures. It maintains it’s solid form and is just amazing in SO many ways.
I was inspired, I was now making a salad.
I ventured back into the vegetable section, scoping out something to bring me inspiration. There was a punnet of mini-Roma tomatoes that just screamed “CONSUME ME! I’M SMALL AND SWEET AND AMAZING IN SO MANY WAYS” (specifically in that tone of ALL CAPS AND SCREAMING)
My eye was caught by some Cos Lettuce, supposedly, according to Woolworths, “Great for Caesar Salads”. Any classic barbecue salad needs SOME greenery and grilled haloumi is sort of a crouton-like substance. Insta-purchase? Shit no.
ALL their lettuce, where it was of the Cos or classic Iceberg variety were wilted and browning like a salady equivalent of an ancient, flabby sunbather at a nude beach. The onions were equally mediocre, with one passable, decent looking red onion. The rose among the thorns, the one hot female at Wai-Con amongst a million fat Cloud Strifes cosplayers. Luckily, it was all I needed.
I left the shop feeling distinctly underwhelmed by whatever they had and subsequently went to an Asian fruit and veg store in the same shopping center. They also had Cos Lettuce at the same price, they key difference was that it actually LOOKED semi-fresh. The capsicum followed the same trend of just being ‘not-shit’. It was almost universally a higher quality of produce at a similar price.
Random Whiteys and Miley Cyrus - They want to be Asian Uber-Shopkeeps too.
I ventured into Woolworths again today, mainly because I needed an excuse to go into the city center itself (so I could go play Street Fighter 4, I don’t think I’ve written a blog not about fighting games at all), in search of some tomatoes so I could attempt to replicate a fascinating breakfast recipe I saw in a cookbook I borrowed. The tomatoes were supposedly on ‘special’ for $5 a kilo. They were more bruised than a talentless boxer, totally unable to dodge a punch, but with a mountain of “heart”. Some were even so old and rotten there were clear signs of mould and flies. But I’d come this far, I settled on the least-shit tomatoes.
Deep down inside, my inner Asian berated me, viciously. It cost me $4.05 for 6 tomatoes (the least bad ones). 0.813 of a kilo. Only yesterday, I was at the Canningvale Markets at a different Asian-run vegetable shop. For that same price of FOUR DORRA, I could have gotten a TEN KILOGRAM CRATE OF TOMATOES! ALL OF WHICH LOOKED BETTER THAN THE SIX PATHETIC TOMATOES I PAID $4 FOR.
I was vetoed by my father who quite rightly said that we couldn’t possibly use up 10 kilograms of tomatoes but how does that make any sense at all? I can pay about 40 cents a kilo (in bulk, mind) for some decent tomatoes versus paying 1250% more for tomatoes that are far far shitter?
Woolworths – “The Fresh Food PEOPLE“
So essentially, we’ve ruled that their food is dubious and not exactly fresh, but “The Food People” a reasonable slogan, yes? I mean people work there, they DO sell food. Totally valid.
Totally valid until you reach the checkout of the Perth City Woolworths store. About 70% of the checkouts are now gone, replaced with security guards and self-checkout machines. You zap your own barcodes, weigh and your own vegetables, it’s practically entirely automatted. Then at the end, like a parking ticket machine, you enter some notes into a slot to pay and coins get dispensed in a little slot.
Makes sense economically, why bother paying a surly, hormonal 16 year old who serves customers with an air of self-loathing and I-hate-the-world-and-everything-in-it when you can get your customers to do it for you for themselves with only a one-off injection of Capital?
As if supermarkets weren’t soul-less enough as is, now they’re even removing the human aspect involved. You can now simply waltz in within your own world – iPod blaring out whatever you choose to listen to, ignoring everyone else in it. You then pay a machine, and walk out. No forced “How are you today’s” and canned conversations. Nothing. The first step down a Slippery Slope.
Woolworths – “The Food“
