Tummyrumble

Man tager vad man haver...: Spicy christmas ham with a taste of Asia

Yes, that's Swedish. "Man tager vad man haver" is Swedish for "You take what you've got" and it is a quote usually attributed to Cajsa Warg (in Swedish), a Swedish chef famous in the 18th century for collecting recipes and producing bestselling cookery books. She didn't say it though, it's a myth. That quote is from a joke about her, and since there is some truth to everything I guess she was skilled at making do with what she had lying around.

Which is what I did for lunch today. Lunch. This when you are alone boring meal that just has to be done to get you through the day. Nothing in the cupboard, nothing in the fridge, so inspired by "What I cooked last night" and a discussion on completely failed food experiments I set about creating something entirely unique. Would it be eatable? Would I at all survive (well, I did after all manage to write this...)? More importantly, would I ever dare tell anyone about it?

Mustard fruit chutney, inspired by Salt Yard

There is this restaurant on Goodge Street called Salt Yard where I went with some friends a few months back and had a most excellent tapas experience (for reviews, check out this post, especially the link to thepassionatecook). You can tell that the owners love what they do. How? From the perfect selection of items on the menu and ingredients, and the love and care put into preparation and presentation raising the taste of everything a notch. Food is weird like that.

Piece de la resistance that night was a platter with a fantastic selection of cheese, served with a chutney. Now, if you come here somewhat regularly, you probably realised by now that I have a slight fascination for all things mustard. No surprise then that I had to ask the waiter how they made this chutney, labelled as "mustard fruit chutney" on the menu.

I love coming home finding a bar napkin in my pocket with a recipe scribbled on it.

This is he recipe for mustard fruit chutney I found based on what the waiter at Salt Yard told me and some creative googling for instructions, and it tastes very much like what we were served that night.

Christmas lunch down by the river

Today I was treated to the best food experience I have had in London (if not ever). My friend C called me this morning, inviting me to a late lunch meeting with J and K at the famous River Café.

Not knowing much about the place before hand, other than it having been awarded one Michelin star and that Jamie Oliver started out there, I of course got really happy to get the chance to find out more about the restaurant and their apparently fabulous Italian cooking. Since J used to work there I did expect to be clued in on more about the history of the River Café, details on food and wine typical for the restaurant and of course receiving nothing but stellar service...

Always good going out with a knowledgeable guide, especially if he is on first name basis with most of the restaurant staff.

More things mustard: Pear Mostarda

Debbie over at the blog "words to eat by" today writes about what sounds like a very delicious condiment: Mostarda di pere. Pear Mostarda. Yes, that is slices of pear that has been preserved in a syrup mixed with mustard oil...

Oh. My. God. This is crazy good stuff, my friends. S and I wolfed down our snack, moaning with pleasure and licking our fingers, and raced back into the kitchen for another round, this time with the addition of a little cracked black pepper. Even better! The sweetness of the pears, the heat of the mustard, the pungent saltiness of the cheese, the chewy, oily bread… Sigh. I don’t mind if I never leave the apartment again, as long as we’ve got mostarda, bread, parmesan, and black pepper.

Something I feel I must try and find. Tomorrow's mission for Borough market perhaps. She provided a link to a web site called Zingerman's, looks like an interesting place.

URL: ZIngerman's - order food over the web
URL: Mostarda di Pere described at words to eat by

Will spam save our integrity?

When the new Big Brother directive outlining how to monitor all 300 million  EU citizens to make sure we don't share files, commit adultery, avoid our taxes or try to ilegally go from one country to another (come on, dear members of parliament, who are you trying to fool here) comes into effect two years from now (the time it takes for a directive to be turned into local law) we will all be spied upon by those we have elected to serve and protect us.

We will all need new tools to communicate, design new protocols for those tools and focus the efforts on inventing means to protect senders and receivers of calls. In order to protect our own privacy and integrity, we will inevitably also provide new means for the terorists to communicate.

Today I read a brilliant little piece on a mailing list I am a member of, written by Hadmut Danisch on a cryptography list:

An important component of such protection methods is noise. Plenty of noise. Something to hide in, to cover, to overload recording of call details. We should think about and research how to produce noise.

We already have some noise. Its called spam.

Some of you might know that I am one of the early days fighters against spam. I tried to eliminate as much spam as possible.

But now, there could be a positive aspect about spam, virus mails, and other mass mails. Maybe it could become an advantage to receive a million mails per day from any senders. Maybe that is what is needed to hide my personal e-mails. Maybe that's the answer I have to give when someone blames me to have received e-mail from the wrong person: "I have no idea what you are talking about. I received about 150,000 virus and spam e-mails that day from arbitrary addresses, and didn't read a single one of them. I have just deleted them." When designing measures against spam, we should take this into consideration.

Think about it. Will spam become the digital darkness? When I was a kid I used to be scared of the dark. Who knew what horros were hiding out there, lurking in the corner of my limited vision, waiting for me to close my eyes so it could sneak up to me and shout in my ear that I really should get those latest Viagra pills, help someone get money out of an African country or save significant dollars on health aid bills!

Mother always kept telling me though that the darkness is my friend. If it is dark, and I can't see, noone else can see either. Darkness hides you, darkness is like Frodo's elven tunic, an invisibility cloak protecting you from Evil. Upon which I of coure thought "Right, ever heard of IR goggles or radar?"

Stil, there is a lot of noise out there. And distinguishing one sets of ones and zeros from another is hard, the semi failure of my spam protection filters prove that to me every day (but gorram it I am happy to have them in place or it would have been even worse).

Besides, it doesn't really matter if the spam can be distinguished from "real" emails or not, as long as the numbers of "people" sending me email every day is such a ridiculous figure that noone will be able to tell which of those communications actually was a valid one.

Hmm. Spam being a good thing. Fancy that. Or... Let's settle for merely Not Such A Bad Thing after all, I refuse to call what I have detested for so long good.

URL: Whole text by Hadmut Danisch and discussion
URL: My previous post on the whole joke of a new law, the Big Brother Bill