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If I may, I’d like to return to an earlier posting on a phenomenon I’ve called Lifestyle Magazine Living. You know what I’m talking about here, you read a glossy magazine, and you see the highly stylised food and before you know it, you’re buying quail eggs and goiji berries without any firm idea on how to use them. Whilst I won’t comment on how many quail eggs it takes to make a good omelette, I would like to focus on the recipes that pepper our weekend newspapers and magazines – and the sort of people that cut them out to use.
Whilst I can salute the resourcefulness of spicing up the daily diet in this way, I’ve never really understood cutting them out. When last I tried, the recipe disappeared before I could attempt cooking it – surely that necessitates leaving the recipes in the newspaper from whence they came? And then the light globe clicked on above my head.
What if I made my own cook book?
One exercise book: $0.59
Craft glue: $1.49
Cancelling my subscription to Good Food Magazines, $500 – I realise the answer to this question should be ‘priceless’ but it’s my blog and I can do with it what I want.
As with anything in society, some rules apply to the making of a cook book. Given I have a short attention span, its probably a good thing there are only two rules and they are as follows; you must test the recipe out at least once before committing it to paper and, secondly, avoid pasting in the supplied photographs because your food will never look the same. Follow these rules and you’ll never buy another cook book again.
Of course, you will have to hide the book for fear that you’ll expose yourself as the biggest cheapskate in the world… but that’s another problem.
Is it possible for a man to have odd cravings for food? Not a man with a pregnant wife but a regular bloke with no child raising commitments anywhere on the horizon.
I am lucky enough to have a large fresh market/deli nearby and I love walking the aisles – secretly hoping to sample a bit of this or a lick of that if I spy a half-opened bag or packet. Today I walked past the deli and had to fight myself from jumping the counter to get to the chorizo that was frying up back there. Marketing being what it is, I bought 500g of chorizo and hoped to recreate that bouquet at home.
My deli is also a wholesaler to local restaurants and was selling those ice cream creations synonymous with pizza joints; you know the type, coconut sorbet served in a half coconut shell and Baci-like chocolate creations. And as if the Gods of odd-food combinations were smiling on me, they were on sale. I stocked up, never knowing when I may own a pizzeria of my own. It may have been the appetising smell of the chorizo cooking nearby, but as I filled my trolley with cheap iced deliciousness I couldn’t help but wonder what the two would be like combined.
I’m not sure about you but when I finish shopping, I always like to pick at things in the car on the way home. There’s something fantastic about being surrounded by so much fresh produce that brings out my primeval hunting skills and whilst a red light ran its course, I’d found a loaf of sourdough and began munching. But there was a more urgent craving riding just below the surface, something that couldn’t be satiated between pedestrian crossings. I knew I needed the security of my one-bedroom apartment before I could acknowledge the heady excitement building inside of me.
Home
Drag the shopping upstairs
Shut the door behind me and rush to the kitchen
Embarrassingly, I couldn’t wait to cook the chorizo, instead dipping the raw sausage in the enticingly melted chocolate gelato. Just before you start judging me, can I recommend you go spend an hour in your local fast food “restaurant”? You’ll see hundreds of 10 year olds dipping their fries in the milkshake, and surely that’s the same thing? Actually, mine’s the healthy option here.
Leave me alone, I’m eating well. By comparison
In the same way that I am no closer to discovering the erstwhile recipe that forced me to buy cumin, I remain at a loss of what to do with said 27g of cumin.
Is it a tasty addition to the morning cappuccino? No.
May we mix it in with the wine-stage of making risotto? Apparently not.
I scour the two cook books I own with a dedication not found in someone that has a job, hoping to find a use for my cumin. And then I hit on a brainwave: my old mate Google will lend a hand.
Here’s a tip for you, typing in cumin will not automatically turn up thousands of recipes that utilise this most versatile of ingredients. Oh no my friends. Type in cumin and the good folk at Google will ask did you mean cuming and throw up about a billion pages featuring statements that would make Pamela Anderson blush.
Given my previously stated lack of employment, I have no connection at home so I had ventured into an internet café which happens to be run by the local church – which also happened to monitor website use at their café as, I assume, is their right to do so. The nano-second I hit enter on my seemingly innocent Google search , a little old man with a suitably embarrassed gait made his way over to me and suggested that I was in the wrong place. You’ve got to admire his tenacity in weeding out the unsavoury characters from his humble establishment. And whilst we’re admiring, let’s celebrate the agility of a man clearly in his late 80s.
Maybe his secret is a daily spoon-full of cumin?
I never thought I’d be the kind of person to do it. I’ve witnessed weekly rituals of snide scissor work destroying my local cafe Sunday papers and quite frankly, I thought these people were odd. Whilst I can’t pinpoint the exact moment, I recently found myself with scissors hovering menacingly over an article on cooking eggplant.
Glancing around the house to ensure privacy (what luck, I live alone), my scissor-work was swift and those three tantalising recipes were mine. After deciding what would be my first attempt at lifestyle magazine living the next step was assembling the ingredients – and didn’t I feel quite the hunter and gatherer waltzing the aisles of the market, on the hunt for exotic tastes like ‘cumin’ and ‘paprika
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