Rumble

Restaraunt in La Paz, both real and unreal

2008-07-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

So we went to a ‘surrealist’ restaurant in La Paz. I don’t know what they thought was surreal about it; I think it must have been the wacky combinations of coca and spaghetti, or llama and tortellini…and so on. I had a 3 peppercorn beef steak. Fresh peppercorns, insanely good. But surreal? There were a couple of Dali prints up.

I feel I could do better…Firstly, all the waiters could enter the room from a cupboard, where there would be a hidden door. No! There would be several hidden doors! And the waiters would be under strict instruction never to acknowledge that they were using different ones, or even an understanding of the concept ‘entrance’. The glasses would all be those ones with a layer of colourful fluid sealed in, so that it looks like everyone should be spilling their drinks, when they aren’t. The windows would have devices on the outside so that it appears as if it is raining – they would often be out of synch.

The waiters would have leeway to improvise, and be encouraged to take psychotropic drugs. There would be a selection of wine glasses full of jelly, which they could pretend to spill on someone’s lap at some point during the night. There would, of course, be a team of acrobats secured to an upside-down table on the ceiling. A selection of food would look like other food – this is common. What you ordered would be what you actually got, although shaped to look exactly like something else, but sometimes it would be something alive, eating the salad, which is trained to scream loudly but not move from the plate. Ever.

The chairs and tables would have computer-controlled pistons and would change their heights very very slowly. The ‘ice cream’ would be made out of some substance with a boiling point well below room temperature, so that it would disappear soon after serving. Similar things would happen to the cutlery – the spoon, in particular, would have dissolving ridges so that after dipping it into soup just once, it would become a fork. All replacement spoons would be the same, until the customer was near tears – at which point, as soon as a distraction can be caused (by a light bulb inflating) the soup would be secretly stolen, and they would be asked ‘what soup?’

Very typical pan-andean fare. Doing more with less.

2008-06-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

'Fare' - a wonderful word for food. It suggests fuel - function without too much science, overtones of medieval, hinting at hard bread and a hunk of cheese in a knapsack, all there will be until Mordor...

Anyway, this is the type of thing you should expect to come across if eating at normal eateries in an Andean country like Bolivia or Peru. Everything is from the carbohydrate food group, with the possible (as in this case) addition of a fried egg. That means three or four out of of banana/plantain, potato (often some boiled, some fried and some dried), rice, pasta and bread. This sounds dull - and it is - but get used to it and your over-indulged tastebuds learn to relax. Note with interest that they could just give you a plate of rice but they don't, instead using the different types of carbohydrate to add a variety to the meal which you might not notice at first but which is cheap, and more nutritious than a wholly monotonous diet.
Notable in this particular meal is the fact that the rice (excellently cooked) has been moulded into the shape of a Chrismas tree! What a delight!

Berris Charnley, anchovy lamb

2008-02-13T03:02:00.000-08:00

Hey so this is a recipe sent to me by my old philosophy tutor, Berris in response to this very blog.

Here it is:

...get yourself a nice leg of lamb and stab the fucker 12 times ont top with a pairing knife, using ur little finger work a sprig of rosemary, a clove of garlic and a whole anchovey into each of the slits. catch up all the anchoveys, garlic and rosmary you've got left and cream them into an ounce (ish) of butter, smeer that over the top of the joint. put it in a big pan with potatoes and parsnips = and half a bottle of white wine (or enough not to cover the roots but enough to make a big old gravy) roast it high, then roast it low to finish.

I had good feelings about this recipe because I know the power that anchovies have.

'Working in' some rosemary garlic and anchovy sounds easy, but its not.

Lidl, Lobster, Language

2007-11-30T04:42:00.000-08:00

If you don't know, Lidl is the still point around which the world turns.

It is a ludicrously cheap supermarket, but one that manages to come up with the goods much better than that vacant monkey cage, Netto, which calls itself a budget option but in reality just sells the lowest value things like air biscuits and greasy pop and hopes you won't notice the scurvy in your fit- like rapturous throes of stinginess.

But Lidl- they have aspirations. You can imagine them sleuthing around the world for bargains, sourcing from bankrupt cherry canning operations and money launderers that use pre- packaged omelettes as a front. All sorts of unusual products and lots of strange languages on the packaging.

Untranslated labels in general correlate strongly with low cost, with the obvious aberration of those in Italian- which is done on purpose to make you think you are getting one over on the Italians who meant to hoard whatever it is for themselves. (The same fuzzy logic just doesn't work for countries that we don't have a vague conviction are guarding godlike culinary secrets). Anyway you can gauge the cut of Lidl's gib from one of their current offers which is a whole lobster for just £5. Here it is!

It is frozen, and opaquely packaged so there is no real way of seeing what it is like, apart from a perfectly smooth tube about 10" long. Now I know lobsters are not perfectly smooth- I am quite sure they are pretty bumpy, so I have been hoping this is just caused by frozen water, because the alternative is that this is lobster in the same sense that 'crab sticks' are really crab- in other words, I have bought a large tube of expensive mushed up sea protein.

This has been in my freezer for a couple of weeks now- today I had a friend over who would appreciate it, so today is the day. I defrost it, we open it; it is definitely a whole and real animal. A bit smaller than I would expect, as almost half the length of the packet was taken up by the claws which were arranged in a diving position over its head. It is red rather than a fresh grey, which I guess is to do with the freezing process. The same happens to frozen prawns so I don't know why I would expect any different. The movies I suppose.

We cook according to the guidelines, boiling furiously for 5 minutes. We make a garlic sauce. Then sit down on battered sofas to eat the most studenty lobster ever eaten, off our knees in lieu of table and off the same plate in lieu of plates. It takes a bit of bravery to get started, but we egg each other on....

Sigh. All that, and it is almost entirely hollow! I wouldn't mind if it was tough and tasteless, as long as there was something there to pretend with. For potential guests to pretend with! As it were, we got maybe 2 small bites each out of it and enough garlic butter to make us feel a bit sick.

It is as if this is just the shell of a lobster, which it shed like a snake. Do lobsters do that? If no one has checked I think it might be a good idea. My meat probably crawled out and is now enjoying its big luxurious shell in a cushy restaurant tank somewhere, cackling. Don't count your chickens, Mr. Lobster...

*The image above is photoshopped, but that is my friend, and that is the crustacean in question

Pub, munchies, no decent food in the house

2007-11-20T04:35:00.000-08:00

Bosh:

Eating with scissors

2007-11-12T10:57:00.000-08:00

Who thinks spaghetti is a nemesis best countered by turning it against a spoon on the end of your fork?

Well- you're well mannered, but wrong. The solution so simple I can't believe people don't do it all the time. I feel like urban legend cosmonauts using a pencil;

1 - Just get your fork full, let it all hang down as far as you like. This is a new carefree you.
2 - Jam it in your mouth, remove fork.
3 - Chop off the excess with scissors.

There is still some slurping involved, but not enough for the spaghetti to whip around and flick stuff everywhere. So next time you have a posh do to go to...

Next; pizza. This should be easy to cut; its so thin! But it is this quality of compressive elasticity which lends it such irritating resilience, coupled with the fact that normally when cutting things up on a plate, we use a lot of 'ripping' motion without really noticing. You can't do this with a pizza because it takes up a whole plate.

Everything else that is flat you cut with scissors! I suggest in the strongest possible terms that you do the same with pizza.

In sum, if it is thin and flexible; scissors are better.

Anaerobic respiration pickling

2007-11-07T10:44:00.000-08:00

Thanks to some guy from the internet, I am going to preserve some of my chilies by anaerobic respiration pickling, which is something like fermentation. All you do is submerge them in a weak brine for a while and they sort of create their own acidity in the form of lactic acid.

Incidentally, I seem to remember, anaerobic respiration is what happens when you sprint and have to create energy for your muscles without enough oxygen- in a sense they burn because they are being pickled.

Anyway, I'll update you on this in about 3 weeks when the fermentation is over and I can seal it.

Ice Shaving Guatemala

2007-09-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

In a world where form and beauty and truth were prime, if origin counted as equal to product, all Slush Puppies would be made like this.

A young calm-faced Guatemalan mother stands in front of the cathedral, rotating a lump of clear ice the size of her head in her cast-iron ice shaving device. Curls flake off and snow into a cup, spoonfuls of honey and neon candied fruit (swarming with wasps) are applied and sink in as ink. The ice, clearly, was mined from a glacier far into the mountains and transported here by llama trains, wrapped in sealskin and insulated by the cleanest fleece, patrolled fiercely by the ice-miners’ dogs – all of them with one green eye and one blue, they say they can know the future – and exchanged for meat, for salt, and for religion.

Barrrrrbacoa, Palenque, Yucatan

2007-09-11T09:45:00.000-07:00

The food with the most awesome name in the world is common around the Yucatan Peninsula. When ordering, expect not to be understood unless you say the word in the mindset of a boxing commentator announcing the HEAVY WEIGHT CHAMPIOOON OF THE WOOORLD! It must be pronounced in a way that you might just expect a 'ding ding' after you order. Otherwise they really don't understand you.

Barbacoa is a generic word, essentially meaning slow-cooked meat, traditionally steamed as a pit roast.

First lobster, spineless

2007-09-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

After explaining to the chef of a nice and quiet little restaurant that we were, to put it mildly, incredibly tight fisted, she kindly offered us the cheapest thing she could whip up (off menu) - rice and beans with a fried egg. Nothing wrong with that, we thought.

Except there seemed to be a guy whose job it was to hang out and casually suggest expensive optional extras. We said no thanks to the 'traditional pre-rice-and-beans custom' of a mojito, thinking ourselves quite tough little travellers.

But we gave into his suggestion that since they had one lobster tail left, we could have it at half price. After all, how often do you get to eat lobster in Cuba? It was our last night.

I loved it. I think perhaps the main reason it is so revered is that as well as having that delicate shellfish taste the sheer volume of the meat makes it all the more satisfying- there is less figuring your way around all the unpleasant bits that come with invertebrate territory. So much pluckable sweet, soft, white muscle.

Fiat cafe, Cuba

2007-09-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

We stopped for a dinner of cheap spaghetti at an unusually brightly lit, extremely glassy little restaurant, with an extremely faithful adherence to a colour scheme of royal blue and white.

Hang on.

Every inch of this place is branded by Fiat! There are blue racing stripes over the whitewashed walls, little logos on the tables and pictures of old cars framed undramatically on the walls.

Why would a car company own a cafe? Is this the equivalent of the Coca- Cola adverts in the rest of Latin America which are so conspicuously absent in Cuba? Do they also sell cars here? Is this supposed to be cheese? What is going on?!

Stinginess in Cuba, 1 peso eats

2007-09-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

We are now in Cuba, where the political situation certainly impacts the food available in several noticeable ways:

1- The unofficial economy is not. I see no street vendors, no gloriously colourful markets, no hawking of strange foods. A reminder that tower blocks are not the only face of capitalism.
2- Even the official shops that are allowed really aren't brimming with choice. This is an island in a way which not many places are any more.
3- A lot of stuff is very expensive for tourists; not unrelated to the fact that there are fairly clearly delineated places for them to be, and a separate currency.

I want to make it clear that I am not being a sourpuss. There are real world reasons for this situation that override anyone's need for a nice bouncy sandwich. But overall, pretty much all the food we have had in restaurants has been like school dinners. So we have decided to take a fuel- centric attitude to food while we are here, to skip the (relatively) high prices and generally just revel in being stingy. Here are our discoveries:

Cheap option 1 - Actually, there are a couple of places on the seafront (no no, think oil slick and anti- erosion concrete) that will serve a pretty rubbish mozzarella pizza for a peso or two. It may not be amazing, but cheese and bread is never inedible. And they don't seem to mind you drinking your own bottled water.

Cheap option 2 - Petrol stations seem to have a standard range of microwavable goodies that are equally cheap at a couple of Pesos Convertibles, and they don't bat an eye at serving foreigners.

Cheap option 3 - MASSIVE bread. We got this from a shop that sold pop, newspapers etc. It looked very filling at 1 peso, but on closer inspection proved to be several hundreds of years old. It was mummified rather than rotten however, and would be be edible if you either have the use of a funnel to collect the cloud of crumbs that it becomes upon any attempt to pierce its carapace, or you are willing to mash it up with some water into a slimy but intact dough.

More stinginess tips coming!

Isla mujeres

2007-09-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

On our first night on Isla Mujeres we had a dark and breezy meal in a restaurant by the sea and the waiter brought us all the torches because we were the only people in the whole world. Sandy and very romantic.

I don’t even remember what we ate. Sigh.

Chichen Itza

2007-09-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

The new 7th Wonder of the World is a big tourist- puller, and the first place I have seen 'nachos with cheese' for sale. It costs 35 pesos! Maybe that is why you never see it. Hmm... maybe not.

Our cheap eats were instead found down the road from the entrance; opposite two coach- friendly restaurants in a little shop. We got a can of refried beans and a couple of packs of crisps. Nice little lunch- and always a good backup plan for the backpacker flitting into expensive zones. Just remember to always take a spoon with you like I do, even though this one was so cheap it bends against the resistance of a mush with any viscosity at all.

Unidentified fruit #3

2007-09-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

These little buggers look like baddies in a Gremlins movie, or miniature plesiosaur eggs. Despite their squishy appearance though, they are rock solid, and took some cutting.

The lady on the stall assured me that they were very edible, but to consume them I should chop up and boil thoroughly; the resulting watery juice was the really good stuff and the fleshy mush left over wouldn't be worth the chew.

She also told me that it was very good for the stomach, to get rid of any bad stuff in your gut, which after a second of consideration sounds pretty ominous even if she wasn't chuckling to her friends.

I followed instructions. It was about half an hour of boiling before anything really came out, and I did over an hour to make the most of them. Then let it cool in a glass.

SO SOUR! Six tablespoons of sugar later, still sour, but drinkable. I think this is mainly a medicinal- use plant.

Making tortillas, Bonsai Carlos

2007-09-03T06:06:00.000-07:00

Some time ago in Papantla I bought my very own tortilla press from a market. Great idea I'm sure seeing as it is made from cast iron and we have 3 weeks of backpacking left to do. These are the liberties you can take when you pack light, i.e. carry lots.

So I have been pottering around with it in this hostel kitchen in Merida. We bought some (wheat) flour from the shop. This is a matter of some controversy- we like the wheat flour ones better, and they are quite common further west, but we are entering a more maize- loyal zone now (and 'loyal' really isn't too strong a word) so my choice elicited some grumbling from the man who helped me make them, Bonsai Carlos ("Sabes bonsai? Me encaaanta las bonsais. Tengo como setenta plantas en mi casa! Vengan!") who considers it an insidious import, or substandard at the least.

To use the press you must put your dough (flour and water) between two sheets of plastic, probably from an old bag, then squeeze it with the vice. He showed me the 'authentic Mayan' way of doing it too, which is to grip the dough in one hand between the flats of your fingers and your palm, fingers together, then use your other hand to squeeze your tortilla-holding hand. As you squash it, the idea is to rotate it and flatten it out.

I think tortillas originally must have been really quite small and thick- not like the pancakes things we often have today, and his choice of when to say it 'its ready' affirmed this. Even the ones me made in the press we couldn't get that thin- the elasticity of the wheat meant they actually refattened about 20% (can you have percentages of fatness?) as soon as you took the pressure off.

We fried our fat little tortillas dry, one by one and ate them with a can of refried beans and an ad hoc chile blanco salsa. A nice meal.

Free breakfast, mud, toast

2007-09-03T05:56:00.000-07:00

Never ever even consider a 'free breakfast' to be a selling point in your choice between Latin American hostels. It is never more than 1 cup of bad coffee (does the job) and 2 pieces of tiny cold toast. If there is anything else in the toss up, go with that instead.

Incidentally, why are loaves (as in, proper loaves) of bread in the rest of the world so tiny? It seems to be a very British thing to have a big loaf of bread which you can make many decent sandwiches out of. Most countries have a choice between their native crusty or floppy, flat, tiny, thin or long bread (which are often lovely, but not very sandwich- apt) and an intensely processed homogenized loaf which is barely big enough to accommodate one circle of salami.

Amnesiac truck cave nonsense

2007-08-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

Tonight (well it's the next day I'm backdating) we went out in Veracruz; bit of a party town, that's what it is.

Anyway, having left (ahem) the club early without the girls, I found myself outside our hotel, dejected and frankly rather pissed off in what seemed like a night that was still young and ripe for the plucking. It didn't seem to phase me that it was tipping it down, about 2.30 and as far as I could see, all the company I was going to find were naval heroes. Made of bronze.

So I went on an adventure to find some action. At some point I must have sheltered under a truck:
Notice the drips.

Next I do know I found a stand selling some food. There were lights and steam and people... I don't know what I ate, only that green and red were involved, and it was good. There was a plastic sheet drawn out from the stand onto a wall for shelter, and a couple of chairs.

What I do know is I spent about an hour there and made all these friends with my Drunk Spanish (the true international language), and that I have really a lot of affection for them all. Like an amnesiac who still remembers his wife, but not her name:
With the other pictures I count around 10 people there altogether. Best ambiguous street food I ever had.

Rellenos de chile

2007-08-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

'Stuffed chillies'. These are a speciality of Xalapa* so we thought we had better try them out. If you go the market is a good place to get them. Quite different to what I was expecting- I thought the peppers would be stuffed with soft cheese and things- I think that is something I got from tapas. Anyway, not at a ALL.

It is quite a mild chilli- the woman selling them said they used to have hotter ones, but demand and current fashions tended towards the mild. That was unexpected.

The way you do it is make an incision in some slightly cooked, fresh chilli peppers, then fill it with a pre made and soft mixture of minced meat and vegetables. Then you get your 10 year old son Carlos to whip about 30 egg whites to a hard peak (so it wouldn't fall out if you turned the bowl over). When it is ready you dip the chillies in. The egg foam should coat them like fondue. Then deep fry it for about 5 minutes, until golden brown (like everything- that is always the colour you cook things to! So boring).

The result is a tasty snack, that is perhaps a bit greasy, but pretty good. I think it would go better with a bit of a hotter pepper- jalapeño or up would be good. If you make it I would recommend putting something with a pretty strong flavour in the stuffing as there is a lot of low flavour stuff around it.

*Or Jalapa- this is where jalapeños are from!

Unidentified fruit #2

2007-08-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

We are in Veracruz, and have eaten this which struck my eye back in Xalapa- at a glance it looks like some sort of cheap plastic toy. It about 15cm long, with a smooth and rubbery neon pink skin that has a few greenish flaps- like larger versions of the ones you find on each diamond of a pineapple:
When I asked what it was like they said "like a kiwi" which seemed implausible, but I get what they mean now!

The flesh below the skin is edible in its entirety; this fruit has the architecture of a Cadbury's Creme Egg. It is made for scooping- it is solid enough not to slosh out, and can be carved with precision. Yet it is unbelievably juicy- the seeds you can see are not even a blip on the textural radar. It is not jelly like. There are no fibrous bits to get stuck in your teeth.

The taste is sweet, but not very sweet. In fact, pretty much like a kiwi, except with slightly heavier banana overtones. The size pretty much trumps kiwi too, and the colour beats the colour of practically every other food I know.

Earlier I said that there were no fruits left in the world that were worthy of discovery. I fully take that back. With optimism. This is great.

Coconut on the beach, with chilli and lime? Yes

2007-08-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

TUXPAN

Making babies cry, kittens and sweetcorn cake

2007-08-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

Carlos the 1 year old in the house in Tuxpan likes to try things; he has an expectant, open mouthed thing he does to indicate he wants a taster. Fair play to him- he especially likes table. But he learnt a very important lesson today; he really doesn't like chunks of lime. I shouldn't laugh, but I did anyway.

So today we had pan de elote for the second stage of our mid evening after supper snack. Jess had made a special plea for this so I was intrigued. Basically these are the ingredients:

sweetcorn, de cobbed, about 2 1/2 handfulls
a stick of butter
a tin of condensed milk
bicarbonate of soda (tablespoonish)
about 2 eggs

You put these in a blender- shuckashugglaghusha- and then pour into a cake tin. Bake for 30- 40 minutes. Until it looks and feels like a cake.

The result is a nice firm spongey type thing that is moist throughout. It's almost like madeira actually. The sweetness is subtle- as it just comes from the condensed milk and sweetcorn.

I recommend having it with a water- based hot chocolate. If you use tinned sweetcorn drain it for about an hour before- not sure how all that extra moisture would work out.

Go on! Its only waffer thin!

2007-08-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Currently staying with this lovely Mexican family who grow oranges for a living near Tuxpan and I think I am about to burst. I fear for my life and am actually quite tired of talking about food.

Empanadas, enchiladas, a whole boiled chicken ripped up with jalapeños in sandwiches, gorditas, fresh prawns from the lake, molotes.... There are so many avocados growing in the garden we can hardly keep up with the windfall between 8 of us.

Part of lunch today was a common Mexican favourite- pozole. This is a thin, opaque, hot soup with a big lump of pork, chili, radishes and lots of red. You dribble chopped lettuce or cabbage on it once it is in the bowl. Deelish.

The weather here in Tuxpan- in the rainy season at least- is like living in a mouth, and once you've got litres of hot chili- laden soup inside you the gentle, steady oozing just becomes a free for all sweat session. I think once you embrace the sweatiness it gets easier, so kudos to the soup. Refreshing.

Pigs ear bitch.

2007-08-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Today we are in Papantla; perhaps the vanilla capital of the continent, if not the world. But that's all economics. Today I want to talk about breakfast.

We had a hot hot tamale, which is basically a maize mass of unpredictable clodginess, steamed in leaves and flavoured with- well whatever, and sold out of buckets which they have been carefully packed into to keep them warm. In this case, it was nice and sloppy (how I like it) and flavoured with a surprisingly hot tomato sauce and a pigs ear! I consider that value added. Linz wimped out of the whole thing but I do think it added a good meaty tone to the mix.

But yeah while we where eating it near the vendor some Mexican lady came up to us. Uppity auld thing; as closely as I can remember this is what she said...

"You look like civilised people- you shouldn't be eating this muck! It's not for our type. Look at me, how do you think I'm so thin? I drink lots of aguas de fruta!! You don't want to be like those fat, ugly bastards who work in the market. We civilised people know this kind of food is not for us. What do you think you're doing?!"

Not a smirk. Watabitch.

A comparative study of Cornish pastys in Latin America

2007-08-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

In Mexico City Norte Bus Station there is a little stand that sells "Pachuca Cornish Pastes".

This is a reference to the Mexican town of Pachuca, which has some sort of relationship with Cornwall, and thus I suppose the pasty. I don't think it's a coincidence that it is also a mining town- everyone knows that the point of a pasty is to stop soot and grime getting on the tasty food. I guess that's why they have it in Mexico City bus stations.

This story has other branches- I am reminded of the very popular salteña which they have in La Paz, Bolivia (it also came over for all the miners). These are made from a kind of short pastry, and are overflowing with a treasure- laden sweet salty meaty sauce, full of vegetables boiled eggs etc. Everyone stands around the stalls in the morning, first taking a little bite, then sluuurping out the juice before chomping them down. Unlike with this Mexican version the Bolivians make absolutely no reference to its origins, and are very proud of it as a distinctively South American dish, which to be fair they have made all their own. They are delicious.

Unlike my Mexican Pachuca Cornwall 'chorizo' flavour paste which was awful and about a week old.

Top: Pachuca Cornish Paste. Bottom: salteñas