Brilliant Thai salad dressing to zing your tastebuds

PHOTO TO COME

This is for my friend Louise who loves this tangy salad with its taste explosion of garlic, chilli, the sourness of the limes, and umami of the sesame, but has forgotten the recipe. She's a vegetarian and the last time I made it for her I forgot to leave out the fish sauce so we had to wash off her salad under the cold tap.

Sorry, hon. This is for you.

Thai Salad Dressing

DRESSING
Lime juice — 2 limes
Sesame oil — use an equal amount with lime juice
Crushed chilli seeds — 1 teaspoon
Fish sauce — 1 or 2 tablespoons to taste
Salt — half a level teaspoon (I use low sodium salt)
Crushed garlic — 2 cloves
English mustard — half teaspoon
Honey/sugar — optional

SALAD
Mango — cut into batons
Nasturtium leaves and flowers to decorate
* Green, red peppers — cut into full-length strips
* Cos lettuce leaves torn into three
* Small red onion or two sliced finely into rings
Watercress
Mange tout
Baby sweetcorn halved lengthways
Bean sprouts — fresh and washed thoroughly (prone to salmonella)
Sunflower seeds — a tablespoon or two
* Mint leaves — lots, don't skimp
* Coriander — lots, the whole packet

Mix up the dressing ingredients together.

For the best result, soak the mango batons in the salad dressing beforehand while you prepare the salad.

The salad ingredients are interchangeable and optional depending on what's available. The core salad you need are the lettuce, peppers, red onion, mint and coriander (asterisked).

Pour the dressing over the salad, toss and serve immediately.

Carnivores can add broken up fish sticks, chicken pieces or grilled bacon bits.

Man bites dog: China's dog-meat festival challenged

It's good to see Chinese people challenging the culinary habits of the Yulin dog meat festival and rescuing animals destined for the pot. Not only brutal but a health hazard, most of the estimated 10,000 animals killed in appalling conditions are strays and abductees, so who knows what diseases they're carrying?

Apart from concern about the fate of man's best friend in Guanxi province, we should also worry about the state of the human beings doing the killing and consuming. Dogs are not as intelligent as pigs (so there goes our bacon sandwich) but their sociability is a lot more obvious ... unless you own a cute Vietnamese pot-bellied pig or raised a Babe from piglethood.

Personally, I wouldn't eat any animal that ate other animals, especially considering what we know about kuru or bovine spongeiform encephalitis (BSE) which Britain gifted to the world.

It requires a heart of stone to ignore their pain, so what damage are people doing to themselves? It's not quite as mad as the bloodfest of the Faroe Islands, where pilot whales are slaughtered in huge numbers by men, women and children apparently in the grip of some sort of blood-lust trance, but the degree of insensitivity towards sensate creatures — whether it be fox hunting, hare coursing or skinning dogs, sometimes alive — makes you wonder what's happening to their inner health.

The (very) few people I've met who happily eat dog and cat have invariably been cold fish themselves.

Dining on dogs is better than humans starving. Back in the bad old days when entire communities died from hunger, eating dogs and other furry creatures including cats and rats was understandable. But famine is no longer a threat and dogmeat is an expensive luxury, considerably dearer than chicken, pork, beef, fish and duck.

The consumption of tiger penis, rhino horn, monkey brains or shark fins are wasteful destructive barbarities we can do without. But before you comfort yourself that we're more civilised, how about the super-wealthy devouring people's lives while enriching themselves? Or US Republican candidate Charlie Fuqua calling for rebellious children to be executed? Or killing innocents by drone attack in order to get at one alleged terrorist, at the rate of fifty to 1?

Barbarism is everywhere — it just manifests differently.

Fin for all the family

World's most expensive everything for the rich: £1000 coq au vin

Are the rich buying these thousand-quid meals with the tax they'll be saving when the top rate drops from 50 per cent? Or with their gargantuan bonuses?

I've been banging on about obscene conspicuous consumption for a while now, especially during the increasing attacks on the poor in the midst of a triple-dip recession. We've had squillion quid burgers and today I read about the £1,000 coq au vin for champion cocks. Glad to see the Guardian commenting on the trend for world's most expensive food marketing ploys.

There's something particularly degenerate about the need for the super-rich to rub it in like this when they should be paying their fair share of taxes. Remember, there is no recession for the top 1 per cent.

Raw octopus spunk impregnates woman's mouth

Aargh! Official: octopussy is safer than octocock. Tiny octopuddies implant themselves in a woman's delicate mucous membrane when ejaculated during a sushi meal. Sex and food, my favourite combo. True and gruesome, fugu fish now has a rival in culinary Russian Roulette. And I thought liver flukes were all you had to worry about.

Watch out for high speed octosperm. " ... a spermatophore is similar to a cup of semen."

Here's the bit you need to read from the report in The Daily Mail (don't knock it til you try it!).

'Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva [gums] were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa.
'On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.' ... According to Science 2.0, a spermatophore is similar to a cup of semen.
The website says: 'Each spermatophore includes an ejaculatory apparatus, which can expel the sperm mass quite forcefully, and a cement body for attachment.'

So many questions: what would have happened if they'd come to full term? Where's the Church on this? What would you name them? Could you sign them up for Eton?

All the tea in China: the return of the East India Company

Was it something I said?

When a friend received a tea-tasting invitation from the East India Company, based in one of the swankier streets of London's West End, we did indeed do a double-take. But, hey, a tea tasting? I've never been to one of those, so last night off we trundled in the spirit of "once a philosopher, twice a pervert".

Entering the ornate orientalised doors under a sign that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime certainly sent a frisson of dread running though me. Why on earth would anyone wish to revive the name of a company reviled for its role in some of the most vicious imperialism ever seen on the planet? China and India occupied, exploited, oppressed — only recently emerging from centuries of ravishment by foreign powers and now no longer lying back and thinking of England.

Oh well, perhaps enough historical time had elapsed to allow an innocent Disneyfication of one of the most (in)famous business enterprises ever. Who can begrudge a wily entrepreneur a short cut to branding their store?

Hi Ching, one of my trés elegant companions, who knows a thing or two about cha, thought the striking black and red lacquer to be an amusing pastiche, although "S", my friend with the invitation, suspected it was the real thing.

The event was laid on to promote the first flush crop of Darjeeling, on sale for £30 per packet. To get us into the mood, sweet young ladies served us tea-based cocktails flavoured with fruit cordials, while salesmen (all male but one) schmoozed the guests. The list included hibiscus and mimosa, but today we sampled poppy, ginger and orange blossom. I was sufficiently impressed with the orange blossom (a deliciously delicate taste, mixed over ice with white tea) to request that an assistant put aside a bottle and a packet of the same white tea for purchase once the tills were open.

Perhaps this is where communications were delivered a fatal salvo from a gunboat up their collective Yangtze. I had the temerity to ask the price. The cordial was marked at a reasonable £7.90, but I wanted to know how much the tea would be. It took four different assistants to let me know that it would be £15 for a tin. More than this Clipper tea-bag gal would normally shell out, but acceptable as a treat. Maybe their alarmed expressions when faced with this sort of enquiry should have alerted me. Were they aspiring to the exclusivity of Louis Vuitton just round the corner, whose shops forbid you to buy more than one of their £3,000 bags per blue moon? Did they really believe that if you have to ask, you can't afford it? In this age of the Big Society? Shouldn't their clients be charged more tax in order to disabuse them of this delusion? I mean, it's only a shop.

I'd imagined serving up orange blossom cocktails in the garden for mates whose tastebuds hadn't yet been wrecked by curry, fags and beer. But, sadly, it wasn't to be.

Following a minor glitch that seemed to frazzle our hosts' nerves beyond what was entirely necessary, the PowerPoint presentation commenced. The talk which followed gradually confirmed "S"'s hunch about this being the real deal rather than a pastiche. A history of the East India Company was littered with "we", as if this store was a continuation of the megacorporation which received its Royal Charter from Elizabeth I in 1600 but was dissolved in 1874. The company's role in the Opium Wars and the espionage involved in extracting the technology and Camellia Sinensis plants from China was glossed over while we were told about the red-headed Scots botanist who could "pass as a Chinaman". Well done. Three great clunking insults in one tiny sentence.

To say that the expert, when he took the mic, was tense would be an understatement. At the end of his contribution — not the most exciting or informative five minutes I've ever stood through — we were served the Darjeeling first flush tea and the floor was opened up for questions. An older manager in a light suit called, a tad desperately, for our participation in the Q&A. Having read several articles, including ones by George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, on making the perfect cuppa, I asked one that has always seemed to stymie the experts: should you make tea with water at boiling point or below? "Either," came the rather unhelpful reply. Hi Ching then asked what material our expert recommended for the pot: glass, clay or china? "Either", we heard for a second time.

After a longeur, I continued Hi Ching's theme and asked if they thought clay or bone china cups were best, as if I actually gave a damn. "Depends on what you can afford," sneered the man in the light suit. Mustering maximum hauteur, I growled sweetly, "Assuming one can afford both, which is best: bone china or clay?" Apparently there is no difference, but presumably "either" is better than the tiny paper cups being used today.

Then my friend Tim asked the Milk Question: in the cup first or added after the tea? Tim is white with a posh accent. For some strange reason that escapes me, he received a more detailed and jovial response which could be summarised as, "Either", but at least they made the effort. Seems the idea of putting milk into the cup first arose only with the use of thin porcelain purely in order to prevent it cracking under the sudden temperature change.

Finally, the young ladies served up a fabulous array of chocolates but "S" and I decided to make our getaway while Hi Ching was questioned by a guest who evidently considered him better qualified to talk tea than the staff.

Oh, and that orange blossom and white tea order? Couldn't afford it, could I?

Anna Chen presents The Steampunk Opium Wars at the National Maritime Museum 16 February 2012.

Anna Chen will be hosting an evening at the National Maritime Museum on Thursday 9th February 2012 to mark the opening of the museum's Traders Gallery which will include a section on the Opium Wars. She has featured the subjects of tea, chinoiserie and the Opium Wars in her programmes for BBC Radio 4, Chinese In Britain, and Chopsticks At Dawn.

Greed is gruesome: Madam Miaow gets supersized

I'm just a girl who can't say no. No, not a popular breakaway hit from the musical Oklahoma, but a dawning realisation that I like to indulge. Which can lead to a peculiar leftist angst as my ascetic consideration for the planet and the holy temple of my bod does battle with my inner gannet.

A glutton for everything except punishment, I like to wolf down things that are bad for me. I recently stayed in the arty seaside resort of St Ives and found myself conducting a Supersize Me experiment as I relinquished my usual balanced diet for the regional Cornish produce of pasties, clotted cream and scones, clotted cream ice-cream with clotted cream and the local cider brew. I would have snaffled one of the marauding seagulls as well had I caught one with a nice ready-made stuffing of pasty and ice-cream purloined from unsuspecting tourists. It was only after two weeks when my skin turned to parchment and my eyes sprouted bags like luggage that I snapped out of it and into a mini-detox.

At these moments I'm more gorge than gorgeous. Take burgers, f'rinstance. Bad for the planet, bad for me, but every so often when the moon is full, I need my cholesterol indulgence. Okay, it may be largely connective tissue, fat and cancerous tumours, but mashed up with a dollop of ketchup or "relish", it slips down a treat, barely hitting the sides.

That's how I came down with dysentary as a kid, on the grand tour of China with a stopover in Karachi. "Drink bottled water, wash the fruit and DON'T EAT THE MEAT!" warned my mother. Hah! Mothers, what do they know? So I'm waiting for the taxi to take us to the airport when I spy a burger stall and come over all tunnel-visioned seeing nothing but the patty glistening in the 100 degree noonday sun. I'm halfway through when it occurs to me that this may not be the sensible thing to do and, sho 'nuff, a week later, I find myself convalescing in a Beijing hospital, the details of which I shall spare my sensitive readers.

And this summer, I did it again! In Scarborough for a concert, I dived off with the sound techie's partner for seaside fun on the beach, partaking of the seafood which included big fat oysters. One oyster tasted different. Not bad, but different. Ignoring everything I have been told about shellfish I still ate it with all my alarm bells screaming at once. Just as well I didn't feed it to the seagull lurking at my feet, as I was tempted to do ... he would only have flown off, exploding his guts all over the tourists, and that is so not a good look. In any case, he sensed something was wrong and waddled off. Animal instincts? Yes, please.

So that's why I spent 24 hours purging myself of toxins (don't ask!) before the gig. Not such a hot thang now, was I? Green in consumption habits, good. Green in face, doubleplusungood.

First published in New Internationalist magazine.

Ode To A Detox On Returning From St Ives: poem

RIGHT!!! Self-imposed boot-camp for me. Cutting out or down on salt, sugar, no alcohol (except for Dunkerton's cider on special occasions), no preserved meat full of nitrates, and less meat, anyway. Less wheat bread and pasta. More fruit including berries and grapefruit, salad, veg. Drink lots of water and green tea.

And this is why. Like my diet, it's a work in progress (or regress).

Ode To A Detox On Returning From St Ives

I thought I'd grow old like Lauren Bacall
Elegant, willowy, tall
Tight arse, tons of class
An enigma on a pedestal

Once slender and tasty
In a thin thong and pasties
The pasties are now Cornish pasties
And I can't thing the thame thong without crying.
My legendary six-pack is now a six-pack of cider
My overactive mandibles leave love handles
The size of trees
I love my food
But my food hates me
Treacherous, it deposits clues
In my jelly belly
(it's a jelly belly, it's a jelly belly, it's a jelly belly, it's a jelly belly)
I tried sleeping with the fishes
Even they didn't fancy me
They flashed their fins and went upscale
And threw me out of the sea

A whale washed up,
A chubby angel after the Fall,
I roll across the land, a shapeless fog,
Devouring all in an epic trawl
I wish the fog was a pea-souper
Cause I could scoff that an' all
Scarf the lot like a hog.
Nom, nom, nom.
No! This lardy bard should recall
Lauren Bacall was no butterball

Fat threatens to settle in folds
The make-up thickens
Like clotting cream,
Like two inches of plasticene
Like fossil strata from the palioscene
My bags are now luggage
My breasts are baggage
In body angst overdrive
My reflection is savage
I will rivet closed my gaping maws
My beak snaps shut
My greedy paws
Gathering greenery
My jaws chewing up the scenery
Filling the hole inside me
Coz I recognise the metaphors
Grimly I scan the vision before me
And understand why no-one adores me
I do not enthrall like Lauren Bacall
Tons of flaws, open pores
I'm growing old like Diana Dors

Anna Chen — September 2010

Live performance from Anna here

Melamine found in US infant formula

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it will allow trace amounts of melamine in infant formula. Earlier this week, the agency said it found the industrial chemical in at least one brand of formula sold in the U.S.

More here ...

When melamine was found in Chinese milk we all recognised this for the scandal it was. Profits should never come before the welfare of human beings especially in a nation that purports to have socialist aspirations. Chinese authorities have accordingly fallen on the perpetrators and punishment is likely to be harsh.

One disturbing byproduct of this affair was that it reinforced a widespread assumption in the West that it was somehow peculiar to the genetic make-up of the Chinese which renders us all super-villainous money-grubbing sadists. Race trumped class yet again.

The scandal of melamine found in Chinese milk now goes global as the toxic chemical that wrecks your kidneys has not only been detected in American infant formula but the US food authorities are allowing the toxin to stay in “trace” amounts.

How big is a “trace”? Would you accept a “trace” of faecal matter in your food?

One of the culprits here is our old friend, Nestlé. Not content with promoting the use of formula feed over superior breast milk in the Third World, like every other business chasing profits, the corporation moves closer to home as capitalism contracts and more markets have to be found.

And what about the acrylamides that coat your breakfast cereals?

Brecht once asked who was the bigger criminal: the bank robber or the bank? I’d ask, who is the bigger criminal: the individual killer or the corporation that markets this stuff to millions?

Madam Miaow says ... Call me mistress of the bleedin’ obvious, but greed knows no genetics.




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Melamine found in US infant formula

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it will allow trace amounts of melamine in infant formula. Earlier this week, the agency said it found the industrial chemical in at least one brand of formula sold in the U.S.

More here ...

When melamine was found in Chinese milk we all recognised this for the scandal it was. Profits should never come before the welfare of human beings especially in a nation that purports to have socialist aspirations. Chinese authorities have accordingly fallen on the perpetrators and punishment is likely to be harsh.

One disturbing byproduct of this affair was that it reinforced a widespread assumption in the West that it was somehow peculiar to the genetic make-up of the Chinese which renders us all super-villainous money-grubbing sadists. Race trumped class yet again.

The scandal of melamine found in Chinese milk now goes global as the toxic chemical that wrecks your kidneys has not only been detected in American infant formula but the US food authorities are allowing the toxin to stay in “trace” amounts.

How big is a “trace”? Would you accept a “trace” of faecal matter in your food?

One of the culprits here is our old friend, Nestlé. Not content with promoting the use of formula feed over superior breast milk in the Third World, like every other business chasing profits, the corporation moves closer to home as capitalism contracts and more markets have to be found.

And what about the acrylamides that coat your breakfast cereals?

Brecht once asked who was the bigger criminal: the bank robber or the bank? I’d ask, who is the bigger criminal: the individual killer or the corporation that markets this stuff to millions?

Madam Miaow says ... Call me mistress of the bleedin’ obvious, but greed knows no genetics.




Bookmark this on Delicious