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

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

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

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.

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.

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 Age: All beefs aside, meat rant spared the chop

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