Halfway down the Danube

The Meat Pie Fear Index

While I was up in Copperbelt, I had to wait for an hour while a colleague finished a meeting.

The meeting was at a District Commissioner's Office -- sort of a combined courthouse and town hall, a low rambling building with various offices.  I wandered around a bit looking at things -- there was a trial in session, very well attended, interesting -- looked at the jacaranda trees for a bit (jacarandas are very cool, I love their seed pods) then wandered across the street to a cafe. 

Hot, flies, one big old fan trying to keep the air moving -- but, hell, there was a fan.  And water to wash your hands with before eating.  (The staple starch of Zambia's diet is corn mush, and you always eat it with your hands, so you wash your hands first.)  I ordered a vegetable sambosa and a tonic water (not for the quinine, I just think it's very quenching in hot weather).  Whoops, no vegetable sambosas left.  Meat pie?  Oh... all right.

I ate the meat pie.  I ate it with some trepidation, but hell -- I was hungry.

Later it occurred to me that I would never, ever have done this in the DRC.  And so was born the Meat Pie Fear Index!

"You are in a roadside cafe in a rural area.  You are hungry.  The only food available is a fried meat pie."

0 -- purchase and eat the meat pie without an instant's hesitation [Germany, Sweden]

1 -- purchase the meat pie, pause for a moment, shrug and eat it [Britain, France]

2 -- stare at the meat pie, think "God knows what's in that" and then "well, I'm pretty hungry", purchase the meat pie, give it a cursory examination, eat it.  [Serbia]

3 -- stare at the meat pie, think "it's probably crawling with parasites", dither for a minute until you realize you're blocking the line, sigh inwardly, purchase meat pie.  Stare at it on plate for a moment, turn it over and examine carefully.  Take a small bite and chew.  Take another small bite and chew.  Wash down with tonic water in the vague hope that the quinine will do something or other.  Over next half day, monitor self for signs of mysterious sudden internal disruptions.  All that said, eat the whole pie, because you were hungry.  [Zambia]

4 -- stare at meat pie, shake head, walk away.  Go hungry.  [Uganda]

5 -- do not enter cafe in the first place.   [DRC]

I'm not sure what this actually measures, but no doubt it will come to me.

 

For the husband

  Husband, look what I found at the REWE today:

And also, Cherry Garcia. I took them both, and then discovered they have a whole section with a (admittedly limited) selection of flavors.  My initial reaction was to stock up (old reflex from living in second and other world countries).  But it seems we don't need to worry.  Don't ask me what I paid for them, though!  Hideously expensive is one word for it.

The Cherry Garcia will wait for you to come back home.  The Cookie Dough... I'm not so sure.

It seems I might be able to send you out after B&J's after all!

(This is an old joke.  The first month or two of my first pregnancy we spent in DC -- and I sent Doug out for B&J almost every night.  That stopped once we moved abroad into countries sorely lacking in B&J's. It has always been a major complaint during pregnancies.  But not anymore!  Yay!)

Brandy blogging: Korbel versus Ararat

Doug will be leaving Armenia shortly, so I thought it would be appropriate to toast his stay with an Armenian brandy taste test. In the near corner, we have Wisconsin's favorite brandy, Korbel:

And in the far corner, straight from Admiral Isakov Avenue, we have Armenia's Ararat:

How do they compare?

Comiendo los alimentos en la madre patria

Somebody ... probably my mother ... once described Spanish food as “letting the ingredients speak for themselves.”

“Hearty peasant food,” Amma says.  “Solid presentations of uncommon meats.  Satisfying to the stomach, but not so much to the tongue.” 

I wouldn’t call it bland, exactly.  But comida andaluza does, I think, explain the Philippines.  The Philippines got the full force of a cuisine that liked to “let the ingredients speak for themselves,” only without the ingredients.  Philippine food is, perhaps, Andalucian food before the conquest of Mexico brought the ingredients to the peninsula.   

Or not.  It’s a hypothesis, anyway. 

Anyway, Spanish cuisine is just plain food — alimentos — more than a “cuisine.”  Maybe I’m just too used to it, having grown up on a faintly Americanized version of the stuff.  Meat-heavy fried food with very light seasoning. 

Overcooked venison is actually pretty good once you get used to it, and I’ve already mentioned croquetas.   

Plus, tapas are fun, although much better in America (or Catalunya, for that matter) where the substance comes from Mexico and Southeast Asia but the style is español.

Day 27: The dream we all dream of.

A gift from La Loca:

Pomegranate Tuesday

  Ever eat a pomegranate?

They're tasty, and good for you, and sort of fun to eat.  But at the same time they're kind of a pain in the ass.  You eat it by plucking out the seeds, a few at a time, and eating the sweet drops of flesh around them.  (The "arils", to be technical.)  Since an average pomegranate contains several hundred seeds, this takes a while.  If you try to speed things up, you'll crush the arils and get juice all over your hands and probably your clothing too. 

In which case you'll be sorry, because pomegranate juice is a bitch: it stains fast, deep, and for good.  It's rich in tannins, right?  That's what gives the fruit its interesting, astringent flavor.  So, imagine spilling a mixture of grape juice and strong tea on your new  Brooks Brothers shirt.  That's right -- it's never, ever coming out.

So you can eat a pomegranate quickly, or safely, but never both.  Basically it's a fruit for people with lots of time on their hands.  Or nudists.