curry hands (by h. chiurciu)

i love curry, so i like to add it to whatever. like eggs, or soup, or risotto, or noodles.

whenever i use it, my hands smell like curry all day long, no matter how much i wash them.

i keep smelling yummy food on my fingers all day long. and it makes me happy!, more often than not.

what about you?

do you like when your hands smell like your favorite spice?

what is your favorite aromatic spice? is it garlic, pepper, cinnamon?

how does it affect your fooding?

(i love cinnamon also, but i'm allergic to it. so i have to use with lots of precaution.)

doomsday meals (by h. chiurciu)

Tonight I speak of Apocalypse Food.

I've always thought of writing here about this specific kind of kitchen disaster, but never really got the time or the inspiration for doing so. Well, time has come.

From times to times, when I'm cooking for myself, things go wrong in a very peculiar way. The food I make comes out tasting like the end of the world. It has something to do with the classic teenfood freedom, as any other mistake has.

But when when I say that a food tastes like Apocalypse, I'm not talking about a simple accident; I'm talking about some less-than-right choices I make, specially when not in the best mood for cooking or missing the best-suited ingredients for something. Not sure if because of my fowl mood and desperate hunger, but most of times it turns out eatable - sadly, I must say.

The most easily recognisable characteristic that all my Apocalypse dishes share is the chaotic combination of strong-tasted ingredients ("a waste of tastes", like my friend Labaki once told me). These are usually anything that lasts for longer than a week on the fridge - basically condiments, conserves and sausage-like meats (sometimes a barely-edible cheese). All that and absolutely no sense nor sensibility.

For tonight's nightmare, as an example, I fried one thinly sliced onion and lots of chopped sausage on butter. The idea was to make a dry-sauce for my instant noodles so, as I didn't want to open a whole can of pilled tomatoes, I added some dijon mustard and lots of catchup to it. With a sip of water, it became a dangerously looking orange goo.

But that was not enough, oh no! There was something missing, I felt. So, I broke an egg on top of the goo and let it cook by itself, without stirring it. When the noodles were done, I just topped them with this mess. And then I ate it.

Everything about it felt wrong: the sweetness of the catchup and the over-dosed sausages completely obliterated the soft-yolk taste; the color and texture were a total abomination; finally, below all this there was a pile of INSTANT NOODLE.

This is what I call Apocalypse Food.

Fast, easy and awful.

Just like the end of the world.

Russian coffee habit

just a quick note: yesterday I met a russian couple. The russian boyfriend had lived in Brazil for 4 years in his teen's Era. But he did not remember our Coffee.

They said they were severly disappointed by Brazilian Coffee Habits: Too much sugar, Too much Milk, less-Hot-than-needed. (I told him putting milk on it was only one of the varieties possible - but, hey, here i am, denegrating milk once again.)

They enjoyed our brazilian beer Paulistania, blond und dunkel, and we had some bottles. But when it was time for coffee, they just said : nyet.

Notea

How happy we are! Those Englishmen enjoy only one family of Tea, that is, that black-tea family. No doubt Black Tea is a Superb Tea, but… would you look to ‘agriao’ and call it ‘vegetable’? I would not. I state this because of my recent reading of George Orwell’s short and funny article “A Nice Cup of Tea”. You can read it by clicking on the very title written on the last sentence.

Eventhough Orwell’s deceased already, I make my stand on discussing with him a few points, being myself a tealover since my kid’s Era:

“Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.”

You can re-read my third sentence in this article to know what I think about this narrow-minded statement. I’m not fond of fruitish and flowerish teas, such as strawberry (nowadays there is even strawberry+chocolate...), chamomille, pekan, etc., but it makes me sad to think that maybe Orwell and Englishmen nowadays know nothing about the marvellous Mate tea, which I am very fond of, or, say, relaxations that come from Peppermint.

That goes to my second point: the Milk.

“Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea”, says Orwell.

I say: should one put any Milk at all? Orwell has much to say about the nonsense of adding sugarcubes on tea, for it ruins the original taste – agreed agreed agreed agreed – but how come Milk does not ruins it also? I think its common, as in for Mate, to put some of it (in my belief, I think it’s manly a Carioca thing, don’t know why), but... gee wiz, I don’t like it at all.

I had a recent teasasterous experience with Milk, for the night I read the article I decided to mix some of it on my Mate. It may sound nonsensical, but it tasted as if a rubber balloon had been melted down and blent to the tea. Much of the herbal and burnt-down taste of the Mate – that is, the teay taste of it – was gone.

And last but not least: I cannot find myself agreeing with all his spiffiness about the pots and instruments. Especially writing this in TeenFood, I believe one should not be restrained to “not making tea without the uses of a ceramic pot”. Go ahead and enjoy your tea as you should and can and would!

That said, I find Orwell’s article most enjoyable. Maybe it is just my problem that I’m not fit for the english-style drinking.

Plat du jour: oeuf poché



This food is not teen and comes directly from... Denmark!

Well, it is a french recipe, i know, but my egg-poché-meister is half dannish, half french. This is for you, Johannes Siverstsen, from who i took all my knowledge*.

The ingredients:
egg
water


The method:
make the water boil;
break the egg into a cup;
put the egg inside;
wait;
take it out;
eat.


The tips:
- have your eggs into the fridge, so that they are colder and easier to work with;
- use the cup to throw the egg into the water the smoothest possible: put it closest, half underwater maybe, and spin it slowly;
- control the boilness of the water: don't put the fire to high, it is going to break your egg in some ghostpieces of white thing;
- just tooth the yellow part of the egg when you are sure it is time to eat it!

The addons:
my poché tonight goes with "french" (portuguese) bread with cream chesse and copa (an expensive salami). my salt flower (from guérande!) is over, so i decided not to use any salt: do like me, exchange your salt by a good olive oil: it is very well exchangeable in almost any case.

do your fill combination! when i mean it is not teen food, maybe trying to shield myself from the tradition, i mean it only depend on us to do teen food!

(one last nasty photo for you :) )



*in fact, this is not true at all: once, i was in the veryfarland, in the countryside, my grandpas farm. i had nothing to do, so i decided to take a look at the books in the shelf. i found a very interesting book, called "Claudias book of the modern woman - kitchen"; i read it, and found 3 egg-poché recipes: the traditional one, something i don't remember, and the "twisted" one... well, have in mind that if you are a modern woman, you are able to make a big waterspout into the pan with some spoon just before throwing the egg inside and let it spin... this, my lords, is really freak food.

Mauricio de Sousa put Monica's Gang for cooking. In fact, the characters were the inspiration for the new kids menu restaurant Paris 6 (west of São Paulo), which is filled with suggestions for snacks, salads and desserts for the kids.

On the menu - illustrated with drawings by Monica, Chives and Magali, and historic sights of Paris - there is a basket of cheese bread and butter ($ 5), minichickens stuffed with french fries ($ 16), and escondidinho minissalsicha of chicken with mashed potatoes and white rice ($ 19).

For dessert, fruit popsicles ($ 7) or cream ($ 9) and ice cream crepe with Nutella ($ 14). Children can also have fun, over lunch or dinner, coloring pictures of Monica's Gang - and also give exposure to some pictures of the characters, decorated with French motifs.



(After googletranslator and http://guia.folha.com.br/crianca/ult10047u945970.shtml)

Everyday i make some coffee. And everyday, my coffee is different. I give "same conditions", and the providence gives me different coffee.

Todays coffee is worse.

But thats ok! In fact, that is what is magical in kitchen. There is no "same conditions".

To think in real kitchen, this teeny one, is to think in a non-repetition (perfection?) kitchen.