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Let’s test this sucker…

If you grew up in Australia or England during the last fifty years, your mother probably owned and used a Kenwood Chef mixer. I remember podding peas with the special pea-hulling attachment when I was a kid. There was an attachment for almost anything.

The Kenwood Chef went on sale in 1950. It was the first home food processor, and was designed to take much of the physical labour out of cooking. Ken Wood had been an RAF engineer: he built the Chef to be a serious piece of machinery. It became an emblem of modernity, one of the original labour-saving devices. It was designed to make cooking faster and easier, to help women get out of the kitchen to pursue their own interests. The Kenwood Chef made the world a palpably better place.

I’d coveted a Kenwood Chef of my own for a long time. I finally got lucky at the Coburg Trash ‘n’ Treasure and picked one up for only fifty bucks. It’s a classic model A701, probably older than I am, and still looks quite new. It’s got the white Pyrex bowl and the K beater, but no other accessories (although they’re easy enough to get on eBay). Next I need to find a mincing attachment: the goal is to try making my own sausages (I live a real wild life).

Kenwood UK offers manuals for its products in PDF format for free download, even for the old Chefs. Which is great: few companies bother providing online information about heritage products (SEGA being another).

The manual for the A701 can be downloaded here. It’s a big file–about 23Mb–but it’s worth the download, even if you don’t own a vintage Chef, because it includes the recipe book that came with the mixer. It’s a good and varied selection of recipes and, given the prominence and popularity of the Kenwood Chef, of considerable historical interest.

Technorati Tags: Australia, cooking, culture, gadget, Kenwood, kitchen, mixer

Maybe two years ago, I was shopping with my friend Julie and she dragged me into the sports section of a K-Mart to check out the gym balls. I’d never seen the like before: sure, I’d ridden on those big rubber inflatable balls with faces and horns on them, when I was a kid. But I hadn’t been keeping up with home exercise fads. I thought ‘Pilates’ was pronounced the same as ‘pirates’.

Julie had decided she was in the market for a gym ball, but I kind of ridiculed her out of the purchase. The sales droid tried to up-sell her to the Reebok model, which was three times the price of the generic model but it had a Reebok sticker on it and featured ‘anti-burst technology’. When he told us that I burst out laughing. Then I saw a workout video starring Gay Gasper and became hysterical. The droid got annoyed at me and we left, empty-handed.

Fast forward to, I don’t know, a month or two ago, when my physiotherapist recommended I get a gym ball for myself. Once upon a time, not so long ago, I would have forbidden any exercise device from entering my home. But this was not the most humiliating advice that I have been given since I injured my back. The most humiliating advice was to purchase a tennis ball to sit on and wriggle when the muscles in my right buttock became particularly tense. And yes, I bought a tennis ball.

The tennis ball only cost me sixty cents. A gym ball was going to cost a lot more, even if I got the cheap pro-burst model. Luckily, a friend had a hand-me-down gym ball (an impulse purchase? A passed-by fad?) which she handed down to me. Guess what? It’s got the Reebok sticker on it.

So I lie on my back and lay my legs on top of the ball and do various exercises with the thing. I think it has worked: I can feel the hard muscles in my abdomen, beneath the layer of flab, like the flesh of an over-ripe peach covering the hard stone in the centre. Or a bean bag with a block of concrete in the middle.

The problem with hand-me-downs is they don’t always come with all the pieces. In my case, I’ve got the ball but I don’t have the pump (or, for that matter, the video). And the ball’s gotten hellasaggy. If I try to sit on it I wind up sitting in it.

Here’s the problem: the ball doesn’t have a valve, just a hole with a little plastic plug. Nothing to put your lips to. Nothing to fit a bicycle pump to, or to attach to a compressor. I’m going to have to go find a ball pump. Which is a bloody scam.

And damn me if there isn’t an aftermarket for gym ball pumps. I favour the ‘Blaster Hi-Speed Power Pump’ from Yoga-Mad®, which looks exactly the same as all the other pumps I’ve seen online except, I imagine, it’s got a different sticker on it. And maybe racing stripes. Broom broom!

Or I’m going to have to go to a sporting gear shop, saggy ball under one arm, and ask them very nicely if they’ll blow it up for me.

Oh man.

Technorati Tags: exercise, health, injury, Pilates, spine

Sorry I’ve been so quiet. It’s not that I’m completely slack. I’m just not in A-1 condition.

I hurt myself more than a year ago (no single incident sticks out in my memory), and being an Anglo-Saxon male I put up with the pain for months before Kate finally forced me to see a doctor. The doctor sent me to hospital to have a CAT scan (a story in itself). And this is what they wrote:

CT lumbosacral spine

Clinical notes: Evaluate for left L3 sciatica

Technique: High resolution multislice axial images were obtained from the thoracolumbar junction to mid S1 with additional reconstructed angled images through all lumbar discs.

Findings:

L5/S1:

A moderate sized focal paracentral disc herniation is noted, marginally eccentric to the right with considerable compression on the thecal sac. There appears to be lateral recess stenosis present on each side with minor posterolateral marginal osteophytes. The spinal canal is significantly compromised by the disc protusion with superimposed mild congenital central spinal canal narrowing.

L4/5:

Minor broadbased disc bulging slightly indents the anterior thecal sac without evidence of focal disc herniation or central spinal canal stenosis.

L3/4:

A small left lateral disc protrusion extends into the neural foramen with mild displacement on the adjacent left L3 nerve root. Calcification in the adjacent soft tissue is consistent with left posterolateral marginal osteophyte.

L1/2 and L2/3:

No abnormality.

Conclusion:
1. Small left lateral disc protrusion at L3/4 extending into the neural foramen with mild compression on the adjacent left L3 nerve root. Adjacent calcification is consistent with a small left posterolateral marginal osteophyte rather than indicating a small bony avulsion injury.
2. L5/S1: Small to moderate-sized focal right paracentral disc herniation/disc extrusion considerably compromising the spinal canal.

In other words, my shit’s fucked up.

If I stand in one place for a couple of minutes I start feeling severe pain down my right leg. I can walk short distances, and I can lie on my stomach comfortably, but there’s some level of constant background pain whatever I do. I can sit on a hard chair, but not on a couch. I can bend down just fine, but I can’t carry anything.

I take 300mg of tramadol hydrochloride a day (an opioid) and 15mg of meloxicam (a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory), which help me manage the pain. Not that I feel medicated: I only notice the effect they have when I don’t take them. Then I remember…

What you’d call my lifestyle has changed. I am limited in what I can accomplish in a day. My sleep is pretty disturbed, and mornings can be rough. I can’t get very far (driving or sitting in a car for any length of time is painful as well). The pills don’t mix well with booze, so I’ve become a teetotaller. I’ve tried to cut down my hobbies to things I can do while lying on my belly.

I started seeing a physiotherapist at the Collingwood Health Centre, which has helped a lot. I was a ball of knotted muscles before, from trying to support myself without putting strain on my back. And I’ve learned to interpret the pain messages that I receive–a lot of what I feel is referred pain, particularly in my right leg and calf. I’ve even been going to the gym, to strengthen the muscles in my stomach wall to help support myself better.

But things seem to have reached an impasse. I’ve stopped improving, and I’m still barely functional. So I’m booking in to see an orthopod. The next step, I’ve been told, will probably be to have cortisone injections in my spine. And if that doesn’t fix it, there’ll likely be an operation in which the offending bits are whipped out and then they fuse the remaining bits together. I’ll end up just that little bit shorter.

I view the world a little differently now. My horizons have contracted, and objects that I once could pick up or move aside have become permanent obstacles. I need to be moving almost constantly, like a shark: standing still for long enough to shower is about as much as I can stand. Cueing, whether at a bank or at a supermarket, is a hellish torture.

I’ve been told that it will take at least another year for my back to heal, if it’s going to heal unassisted. The waiting lists for surgery are at least that long (unless, of course, things get worse…).

So it’s going to be a long haul, for everyone concerned.

Technorati Tags: health, injury, medical, spine

It’s official: Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for STRAIGHT PEOPLE relative to GAY PEOPLE

I saw some show on cable on one of the entertainment networks, a day in the life of-type thing. The subject was Jack Black of Tenacious D fame.

I’m a fan of his work, so I watched it. Between appointments he would go to a McDonald’s drive-thru for nourishment. At one point he assembled what he called the ‘McSurf ‘n’ Turf’–he put the contents of a Filet O’ Fish inside a Big Mac and added some fries. I was impressed, enough to reproduce the burger for myself. It was kind of bland: there really isn’t a great difference in the flavour of anything that comes out of a McDonald’s drive-thru.

Anyhow, I mention this because Jack Black has been spending more time in the kitchen. His latest: the Dorito Burrito, with video.

As a public service to the boombox collecting community, I’ve scanned a copy of the manual that came with my glorious Diamond-brand disco box.

You can download the manual in PDF format here.

I went, as is my wont, to the Preston market on Saturday, to stock up on meat, to freeze in sensible portions in separate plastic Glad-Wrap bags, for barbecuing in the near future. I got two kilograms of barbecue sausages and three kilograms of chump lamb chops…

Well, I almost lost the chops. After I told one butcher that I wanted a couple of kilograms of the chump chops he went to grab a plastic bag to put them in. Meanwhile, another customer told another butcher at the stall that he wanted the whole tray that was on display. That butcher grabbed the tray, my butcher returned, and I was in the kind of situation where you’re supposed to assert yourself, and say: ‘They’re my chops. I was here first.’ But the other guy was much bigger than me, so I just tried to look sad…

The other guy got the tray, but the butcher said to me: ‘Wait. I’ll get you some more’, and toddled off. I was upset because I wanted those chops: I’d seen them, I’d compared them to all the other chops on offer, and they were the best I’d seen for sale at the more than a dozen different butchers offering lamb chops at the market.

It all ended happily: the butcher went off and cut me three kilograms of chump which looked as fine as the ones I’d seen and only charged me twenty bucks for them, the going price for the two kilograms I’d wanted. But while I was waiting for him to come back I looked for something for lunch the next day.

Kate and I had been a bit short of money recently, so the other week I had bought two aged eye fillet steaks to have for lunch. An eye fillet is only a small cut, but it’s very flavourful, and with some steamed vegetables makes for a decent meal. An eye fillet steak is a budget-minded treat: a really good bit of beef for only a couple of bucks (if you know where to shop, of course).

There was a couple of very nice looking eye fillets on the tray. Normally I wouldn’t make a big deal of it, but since I was being stuffed around a bit, I got the butcher to pull the tray out from behind the counter and I pointed out the two steaks I wanted.

I chose them because they had consistent marbling and were both quite similar in size and colour, with no thick streaks of fat that would fail to dissolve when the meat was cooked. and no visible flaws: two perfect little treats.

We ate them the next day. We cooked them on the barbecue along with some asparagus, mushrooms. sweet potato slices and eggplant drizzled with olive oil. And they were fucking lovely: there are few things in life as pleasurable as the taste of really good beef, and each had cost less than a Big Mac.

And I remembered something Vlado told me. He said to me: ‘Beef is the Australian diamond, but too many Australians don’t appreciate it.’

I’d always thought it was a strained analogy, but then it hit me. This was exactly what Vlado was talking about: polished little Australian diamonds.

Vic Bergeron is one of my cooking heroes, up there with Len Deighton, Peter-Russell Clarke and Don Dunstan. He’s best known for inventing the Mai Tai cocktail and for his Trader Vic’s restaurants.

He was a pioneer of nouveau Polynesian cuisine and tiki culture. Frequently dismissed as a lowbrow purveyor of novelty and exotica (nowadays he’d be lauded for his fusion cooking style), he played up to the image in life and in his writings:

‘So if you’re going to be a purist and stick just to exactly the way the book says and never try anything else, why don’t you just go shoot yourself?’

His books are fun, laugh-aloud reads, aimed directly at a male audience. The Trader Vic’s Helluva Man’s Cookbook begins with a chapter on cooking meat. Later on he writes: ‘If you don’t eat vegetables, you’ll die. So you might as well cook ‘em so they taste good and then enjoy them’.

Here’s Trader Vic’s recipe for Hawaiian ham and eggs, in his own words:

Hawaiian Ham and Eggs

I’ve put this recipe into every cookbook I’ve written, I guess; it’s such a great dish! Here is the story.

My dad was an old French-Canadian and a helluva cook. On Sunday mornings before he opened his little grocery store, he’d make breakfast for us–my mom, my brother, and me. Sometimes it’d be fried bananas and pineapple with ham and eggs.

Here’s how he’d do it for each serving. He’d start with a heavy skillet and medium heat. First, he’d fry a slice of canned pineapple in a little butter, and take it out and put it on a warm platter. Then he’d split a banana lengthwise, and he’d fry that in the same pan with lots more butter. That made juice, and the pineapple had made juice. So he’d fry the banana pretty thoroughly until nicely browned, and then flip it out smoothly onto the platter. Then he’d add more butter, and fry a thick center ham slice in that and then put the ham on the platter. When he had the ham fried, there was a lot more juice in the pan, and then he’d add more butter. Then he’d put eggs in there to fry, and it was just like poaching eggs in butter and juice. Season them with salt and pepper if you need to, and put them on the platter. That’s the best ham and eggs I’ve ever tasted.

The Australian: Viewers demand chop for lamb ad

The Age: All beefs aside, meat rant spared the chop

And, a bit more clever, the Age again: Kekovich lambasting to stay on air

I got a phone call today from a producer at Media Watch about a little threatened legal action I recently received. Let’s just say that someone didn’t much care for what was written about them on the SA Culture site, and as the publisher I would be liable if it went to court.

Anyway, the matter was mostly sorted out, which is what I told the Media Watch producer. But I’d be in touch if there were any more problems.

He offered to have their lawyers look into the matter for me. He said that they were quite used to dealing with threats of defamation suits, and that he didn’t imagine I had any lawyers on hand myself. I thanked him for the offer.

I was left with a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling, really: it’s nice to know there’s someone looking out for you.

Meat and Livestock Australia are running a new, aggressive advertising campaign, claiming that not eating lamb on Australia Day 2005 would be un-Australian. You can see the ads here and you can get posters here (notice that the posters target burger and pizza shops, not kebab joints…).

I’m not sure if they’re in good taste, but BMF, the ad company handling the lamb account, have been doing some good stuff, my favourite being the ads I first saw on the wall of a butcher at the Preston Market, which said: ‘Friends don’t let friends become vegetarians’.

They’re certainly better than the weird Australian Pork ads you see around, featuring a bosomy blonde called Suzie wearing a bright pink lycra top and with tag-lines like: ‘Go on, you’d love a bit of pork’, seemingly pitched directly at the cannibal crowd.

Myself, I’d be barbecuing a few mid-loin chops on January 26, but I’m being dragged off to the countryside. Maybe I’ll pick up a kabob on the way back.

I had a physiotherapy appointment this afternoon. To get there I caught a tram down Smith Street.

A couple of young men got on the tram, tourists from the country or from an outer suburb where the trams don’t run: the experience seemed a novelty to them. Melbourne has the largest tram system in the English-speaking world (I read that somewhere), and probably the southern hemisphere as well, meaning very little. Everybody loves the trams. But the ticket system is appalling.

Both men validated their tickets by sticking them in one of the several little green ticket boxes that run the length of the tram. One of the men’s tickets didn’t come back out.

One of the other passengers was clearly a public transport worker of some kind: he had the little Yarra Trams logo on his work-shirt and he was listening to a walkie-talkie.

The guy said to him: ‘The box ate my ticket.’

The tram guy got up and looked at the box, then he started waving his arse at it. I couldn’t see quite what he was doing, but it looked like he was trying to use a key or something attached to the back of belt to open the box.

The tram, meanwhile, continued along its route. When the tram stopped at a red light I watched the tram guy walk to the front of the tram and say something to the driver. Then the lights went out and the air conditioning stopped humming. Then everything started up again. Then the ticket popped up out of the box.

The passengers who had been paying attention started laughing. The driver had restarted the entire tram to get the ticket to come out.

We were asked to bring turkey to Kate’s family Christmas. I think they expected us to turn up with one of those pressed turkey rolls, but not being the kind of person to do things by half-measures…

I’d already experimented with beer-butt chicken (you’ll find recipes online pretty easily), and I’m telling you friend, once you’ve had butt you’ll never go back. The next, seemingly logical step, was to try and prepare a turkey the same way.

First things first: the beer can. We went to Dan Murphy’s and looked around the imported beer section for over-sized beer cans. A warning: don’t use a draught can with a compressed nitrogen widget inside, like a Guinness can. You might end up with a lot of turkey all everywhere. We went with a 650ml Sapporo Draught can, which fit perfectly.

Next we got the turkey. Kate asked our local butcher for a smaller bird, because it needed to fit in the oven in an upright position. When we picked it up it was still a little icy inside, but that was fine because I was intending to brine the bird myself. The butcher, it later turned out, had a proper brining machine: probably best to ask ahead.

Always brine your turkey: it’ll be moister and more tasty and take a little less time to cook. Turkey breast meat, in particular, dries out very easily. You can brine chooks as well, but it’s not so important.

So we washed the turkey thoroughly, then put it in a large soup pot (a bucket would work) and filled the pot with about eight litres of cold water, just enough to cover the bird. Then we added 500g of salt (about two cups) and 250g of brown sugar and stirred it all around.

You should refrigerate the whole thing for at least eight hours, but it wouldn’t fit in the fridge, so I just left it in a cool place, put a bit of ice in every so often, and occasionally moved the bird around.

We left the bird to brine overnight, about fifteen hours all up. Christmas Day we got up about seven and took the bird out of the brine and washed it thoroughly, inside and out, then dried it with paper towels. I made up a baste from olive oil, lots of crushed garlic, thyme, pepper and some dark soy sauce, which was liberally applied inside and out. If we were preparing seasoning or vegetables to go with the bird we would have dealt with them then. It’s much better to cook the seasoning separate to the bird rather than inside the cavity: it’ll make the cooking time shorter, which makes it’s less likely that the bird will dry out, and breadcrumbs are a fantastic medium for the various nasty bacteria which may still be on and in the uncooked bird.

The other important thing to do is to separate the flesh of the breast from the meat: again, this helps keep the flesh moist. Just use your fingers to pull the skin loose and you’ll have a handy pocket to stuff some more seasonings into: we used garlic and some preserved lemon that Kate’s mother had given us the previous Christmas. Ordinary slices of lemon, or slices of orange, would be fine.

Time for the beer. We drank about a quarter of the can, then put a few cloves of crushed garlic in the can, then lubricated the outside with olive oil. This is the tricky part.

We had a large enamel roasting pan handy. Kate lifted up the bird and held it vertically, neck upwards, while I inserted the can inside the body cavity, right up the clacker (from the Latin cloaca, meaning sewer). Then Kate lowered the bird onto the roasting pan, where it sat looking quite comfortable and very, very comical.

While it was there I poured honey over the whole bird. This is one of the advantages of the beer butt method: the entire bird is constantly exposed. You don’t have to turn it to ensure it’s cooking consistently, and everything browns much more nicely. The honey makes a good glaze: don’t panic if it blackens a bit.

We bound the bird very loosely, just to keep the limbs in contact with the body, to keep them from drying out, and then we stuck an oven-proof thermometer into the inner thigh of the turkey. I have to say, right now, that if you’re roasting any decent-sized piece of meat without using a thermometer, you’re a fool. I don’t care how good you think you are at judging the readiness of a piece of meat, you’re never going to be as good at it as an actual measuring instrument. You’re either going to undercook it, which in the case of turkey is quite dangerous (Salmonella and E.Coli being major hazards), or you’re going to overcook it and it’s going to end up dry. Use a thermometer: when the turkey has reached 82ºC it’s done; take it out of the oven.

You can spend lots of money on a thermometer, probably. There’s digital thermometers and so on…I’m happy with the three buck Avanti thermometer I picked up at at catering store. It even has a little chart on the backing plate, showing the temperatures to which different meats should be cooked. I much prefer an in-oven thermometer–less mucking about. I use a thermometer for anything larger than a steak.

We preheated the oven to about 260ºC. Once the turkey was in the oven we turned it down to 180ºC. It took a bit under two hours to cook. We removed the can from the bird’s clacker and lay the bird down in the pan and covered it all with aluminium foil. There was a reasonable amount of juices in the pan, maybe not as much as you’d expect…a lot of the pan juices seemed to have ended up in the beer can, so we brought it along as well.

We drove out to Bayswater, to where Kate’s parents live. I nursed the beer can the entire half-hour drive. Kate’s father had recently been diagnosed as a celiac and I didn’t have any kind of gluten-free flour substitute at home, so we made the gravy there. We took the turkey out of the pan and put it on a serving dish, then heated up the pan over a hotplate. I poured in a little red wine to deglaze the pan remnants and added some gluten-free flour (always be careful not to add too much flour–that’s not where the flavour is) and started stirring, then I added some of the liquid from the beer can. I realise I skipped the step where you remove some of the excess fat, but there really didn’t seem to be that much…maybe it had been dissolved by the alcohol in the beer, or it had all ended up back in the can. I kept pouring more of the liquid from the can into the gravy and it just kept getting better: while we’d chosen the can simply for it’s size, the slightly metallic, dry taste of the Sapporo Draught made for a really fine complex-tasting gravy. I finally just emptied the whole can into the pan, which was nice, really, because I don’t like wasting food.

That’s the end of the story.

Gerald’s cover letter. Page one of the dream. Page two of the dream. The entire thing in PDF format.