Pod Death; a modern tragedy.

There's an album come out a couple of months ago called 'No Man's Woman'. It is 'an Australian male compilation, saluting the female perspective in rock & pop'. The idea came about because You Am I did a cover of a Patti Smith song and the idea of men covering a woman's song was thought remarkable enough to raise comment. (In fact, "House of the Rising Sun", a song covered by every British male group and quite a few American ones as well, is a woman's song. Most early Anglo-American music is 'women's songs', but that's a story for another day.) On the cd, Tex Perkins, inevitably, wonderfully, sings Helen Reddy's 'I Am Woman' accompanied by his comment that he's always felt he was a 'woman in the body of an ape', which, as K-Rudd would said, is too cute by half. And yet, I find it endearing. One of us is seriously special and I'm not game to call it.

Either way, it was reading the liner notes for the album that I realized that I was not alone in an everyday tragedy I suffered recently. In fact, it must be on the scale of zeitgeist by now. So, my everyday tragedy is this: I accidentally wiped my pod. So did one of the guys from The Vines. When they asked him why he choose the song he did for 'No Man's Woman' he said that he'd accidentally wiped his ipod and it meant that he had to go round borrowing and finding and buying albums so that he could build up his music library on another computer. In the process, he ended up hearing a whole load of new music, one song of which he'd liked so much that the band covered it on the album.

As with all death, my pod death (and his ipod death) lead to new life. Like The Vines, I ended up listening to a pod full of music that was new to me while I dug through my cupboards looking for my favourite cds that I bought and put on computer so many years ago I don't remember what the cover art looks like.

Gillian Welch's Soul Journey, Bernard Fanning's Tea and Sympathy, The Cat Empire's So Many Nights (which I took against the first time I heard it, but love now), solo John Lennon, Hijack Oscar and Dave Graney, At Speed's Ashtown Sessions, and particularly, Tex Perkins and Tim Rodgers' My Better Half, which, if I had no other reason, I would love just for the cover art. The album has been rightly criticised for its poor production values, but I don't mind that. I haven't heard an album as direct as this since I was 15 and heard Dylan's Another Side of Bob Dylan for the first time; an equally poorly produced album. My pod death was worth it for the song You Should See Her Now alone.

Well I Don't Know If I'd Go So Far As "Fascist", I Mean You're Not Actually Proposing a State-Enforced Ban On All Reduced-Fat Products...

...oh, you meant that rhetorically, didn't you?

BlueJ is one of the best cooks I have ever met. I used to do her ironing in exchange for her cooking dinner and, much as I hate ironing, I absolutely got the sweet end of the deal. In fairness, she has also cooked me dinner because I was poor, hungry, ill, sad, helped her move, because she needed someone to experiment on or just because. So, she's paid her dues and has every right to be a fascist, although she isn't. It is true that when she comes to power she genuinely will ban all reduced-fat products, but at the moment what she is talking about isn't fascism, it's the pursuit of a way of life that's all about people who 'sing songs, spin stories, love, laugh and drink wine'. It's about the understanding that sheer pleasure in life is a virtue as well as a profoundly practical thing. It's about generosity to others and ourselves, the staff of life metaphorically and literally. For her, not surprisingly, reduced-fat food stands metonimically for the opposite.

And I utterly agree, except that, without being in the least 'Skinny Jean' about it, I just like reduced fat milk and cheese better than the full fat version.

Food fascist?

This issue of Observer Food Monthly contains fifty of Nigel Slater's most popular recipes. In his introduction he says that while recipes were mostly chosen because they are either his favourites or those most requested by readers, one or two are included because they were unclear when originally published. One of the clarifications is a recipe for cheesecake which failed to specify full-fat mascarpone, and results in cake soup if low fat cheese is used. Personally, I'd think that anyone attempting to make cheesecake with low-fat cheese deserves everything they get.

Lest We Forget

... and yet every year ANZAC Day is an exercise in forgetting. We remember it as the newly federated Australia's first military campaign and we remember how proud young Australian boys were to serve. We remember that they lied about their age in order to sign up. And we remember that over 10,000 ANZACs died at Gallipoli, not to mention the casualties of other nationalities. It is only human to remember and honour their sacrifice and above all to say that they did not die in vain.

But, historically, they did die in vain. What we don't remember about Gallipoli is that it was a futile campaign, orchestrated by Winston Churchill; it is no wonder that after this, in WWII, he felt he could commandeer Australian troops against the express orders of the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin. Although we talk about this as our nation's first war, Australia had in fact sent troops to the Boer War as well. We don't regard this as such an important event because Australia was unfederated and its troops were very much Britain's troops.
So there is a terrible irony in our valourization of ANZAC Day; by sending troops to a war which had nothing to do with us we weren't breaking past patterns and asserting our Nationhood, we were confirming that we were still at Britain's beck and call, still willing to put Britain's interests ahead of the lives of young Australians.

The First World War, a war of disasters and unimaginable casualties, achieved nothing except the creation of the resentment which allowed Hitler to come to power in Germany and the onset of the Second World War. Worse, perhaps, it was fought for nothing. It was begun by the assassination of an aristocrat for reasons to do with the regional history of Eastern Europe, and the rest of the world was dragged in by virtue of treaties. Each new country obliged to join by their treaties, forced their allies to commit to war too and then theirs, until the World was at war.

So, historically, the ANZACs died in vain. We have a duty now to change that. The Australian Government under Billy Hughes allowed Australian boys, too young to know better and fired with the kind of misplaced patriotism the WWI soldier and poet Wilfred Owen called 'the old lie' to die, not to protect our way of life, but to ensure their standing with the British. Later Sir Robert Menzies put Australian troops entirely at Churchill's disposal in hopes of being given a seat in Churchill's war cabinet. The Australian Parliament at the time was horrified enough to throw him out on that basis, and his successor, Curtin, realizing the recklessness of the British attitude towards Australian troops, threw our lot in with the Americans. During Vietnam, Menzies, once again PM, again introduced conscription in order to be able to provide troops to support America in such an unpopular war. His successor, Harold Holt, whose slogan was "All the way with LBJ", once again put our troops utterly in the hands of American President Lyndon B. Johnson. And most recently, John Howard, in the image of his hero Menzies, committed Australian troops to American causes which have made the world less safe and have greatly increased the threat of terrorism to Australia, apparently for the glory of being termed a 'man of steel' by George W. Bush.

The lesson of ANZAC day, the thing the ANZAC deaths should teach us never to forget, is that the lives of young Australians should never be spent by their government except in direst need, and solely in our own national interest, not to impress our allies as though we were their poor cousins. It's a day which, of all days, should remind us of how terrible war is and how cautious we should be in committed ourselves to it.
This is the only patriotic way to honour the ANZACs and their sacrifice.

An extraordinarily good way with chicory

This is a story that illustrates two great truths about cooking, firstly, that often it will go wrong and more importantly, that fabulous alchemy that a really great recipe displays - of simple ingredients simply prepared that produce something ridiculously tasty.

So, I was feeling vaguely fishy this week but a combination of sheer laziness and circumstance meant that Aldi was going to be the extent of my market place. Which left me with two rather sad looking trout to do something with. To be frank the trout was not a success, I decided to bake it with lemon and dill and to serve with an old stand-by of mine, a variation of the creme fraiche-citrus-herb theme. Take it from me, don't serve even really crappy trout with creme fraiche. Were I to do it again I'ld keep the dill and capers and incorporate them into a dressing based either on vinegar or lemon but the fish needs something sharp and clean rather than anything in any way luscious. So the star of my meal bombed but salvation occurred in the form of the side I was eating with it, the chicory (which I'm in possession of because it was it was the last packet left in Superquinn and was reduced to Eur1.40, oh sweet serendipitous chance).

To make really amazing chicory:

Chicory
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil (decent if you have it)
Unsuccessful fish sauce:
Creme fraiche
Lemon Juice
Capers
Salt and pepper

1)Loosen the creme fraiche with the lemon juice to a thick pouring consistency and then add more salt and pepper than you think you're likely to need.
2)Add 1 tsp of capers for every two (heaped) of creme fraiche, you could chop them if you fancy but I can't say I was bothered.
3)Remove a half inch at the root of each chicory and cut length-ways in half.
4)Drizzle each half with the oil, season enthusiastically and pour a couple of teaspoons of the creme fraiche mixture on top.
5)Put under a very hot grill for about five minutes until the creme fraiche has browned and the edges of the chicory are blackening very slightly.

And you come out the other end with pure magic.

Through one of those vaguely ominous but almost certainly meaningless motifs, strawberries and fish frequently occur in my life together. In this case the strawberries arrived on the scene through the agency of a two for one honey-trap offer in Superquinn. So I finished my decadent, dilettante little repast with a deeply drinkable sparkling rose (Aldi Eur8.99 - worth every red cent) while polishing off half a pound of surprisingly good strawberries (which will almost certainly give me hives, mais c'est la vie). The presence of the bottle of wine will quite probably mean that I will wake up tomorrow to the presence of rather a lot of fishy dishes. If there is any sense no mind justice in the world, some day someone, who considers that washing dishes in return for being well fed to be a good deal, will marry me. But only those who consider chickpeas 'real food' and don't sermonise people for consuming perfectly reasonable quantities of bloody good single malt need apply.