Entries in Food and Drink (3)

Tuesday
Sep012009

Mellow fruitfulness

See, I can't stop this now. My month is over and yet I continue to blog. Although I'm not forcing myself to go anywhere new anymore. Nonetheless, even going to the same old places, things have changed. Autumn is coming, can you feel it?

I went to my parents house today to pick plums from their tree. I feel there may be a plum clafoutis in the offing.

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On the way home, I spotted a protest outside the town hall. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but there were about the same number of police officers as protesters here.

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From a quick google, I think they're protesting about this story - that Barnet Council, with one of the highest council taxes in Britain, has decided to cut just under a million pounds from its sheltered housing budget this year. It's a good cause, one worth protesting.  For all that I think Hendon is nice, I do feel Barnet Council is in general useless. Perhaps they're just not doing a good job of informing me of all the wonderful services they provide, or maybe I'm just being stupid in not appreciating the parks and clean streets more, but whenever I encounter the Council they seem to be asking me for money to park in my own road, or cutting down the services I actually use (I'm looking at you, library opening-hours).

While I stopped to take this picture (parked safely at the side of the road) one of the police came over to see what I was doing. Or, as they put it, to "ask if I was OK". I was a bit puzzled by this, and by the - it seemed to me - rather excessive police presence for a small peaceful protest about care home wardens. Are they spending council tax on police standing around watching senior citizens instead of on care wardens to look after them?

Tuesday
Jun122007

Expectations

People keep saying to me (well, a couple of people): you should blog more often. And I say: about what? And they say: well, anything. And I say: isn't that likely to come out sounding rather trivial? And they roll their eyes and try to explain the point of blogs. I don't quite understand, but I'm trying. So, in that spirit:

Is it me or have things changed at Yo Sushi? I know it was never the height of food sophistication or the most authentic experience in town. Still, I seem to remember that when I first went (circa 2000) they did have people actually making sushi in the chefs area. Perhaps I've just overlaid my memory with other, better, sushi I've had since, but in my memory my first time at Yo included the flashing knives, the slabs of fish sliced thinly before my eyes, the swift and expert formation of rolls.

At the Yo I went to for lunch today, most of the staff seemed to be engaged in comparatively skill-free activities: taking pre-sliced sashimi from boxes and portioning it onto dishes, slicing cling-film wrapped pre-rolled futomaki into discs, counting out pre-made maki onto plates. Only one woman was actually making sushi, and she had to consult a copy of the menu to see what she was supposed to be making. Yo is increasingly seeming like the McDonalds of sushi.

Am I imagining it? Was it always like this, or has Yo's aggressive expansion created room for these economies of scale, depriving diners of the theatre of sushi-making? I always liked the conveyor belt, but I can't say I'm fond of this production line.

However, a thing that entirely exceeded my expectations for drama and theatre lately was the BBC's latest Classic Serial - No Name by Wilkie Collins. You can find it here for the next few days: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/classic_serial.shtml. It's just brilliant: funny and racey and exciting with one of those wonderful empowered Victorian heroines everyone loves since Tipping the Velvet. I predict that BBC TV execs will have been listening to it too, and No Name will be a BBC1 Christmas drama in two or three years time. 

Saturday
Apr012006

Take this matza, it is my body

As a Jewish person living in a Christian country, I'm fascinated by how the patterns of life of the two religions twist around each other, touching intimately at some points, then suddenly distant. While we're having Chanukah, a very minor festival, Christians are having their biggest celebration of the year. And yet, there are those eight days of feasting between Christmas and New Year, mirroring the eight days of Chanukah. At Sukkot, when we go outdoors, building huts in our gardens and decorating them with fruit, Christians bring the outdoors inside with harvest festival. Even the pattern of the week has a strange diagonal symmetry. At the start of the weekend, we sit around a table with our families and begin a meal by blessing the bread and wine. Towards the end of the weekend, Christians go to church and receive a ritualised version of this meal.

I suppose it makes sense. Christianity, after all, was created by Jews and it's no surprise that they took their patterns of life with them. That's a rather Jewish way of looking at it. Christians might say that the Jewish way of life simply prefigured the true and final revelations of the second Testament. This disagreement is where we come to grief, of course, so I'll pass over it quickly. It amounts to the same thing - the origins of Christianity mean that it is tightly wound around Judaism, Jewish belief, Jewish practice.

We're approaching the part of the calendar where, for me anyway, the simultaneous alignment and misalignment becomes most acute: Passover. Seder night is emotional blotting paper at the best of times - a powerful all-sense experience, it accumulates associations and memories like no other part of the year. (I suspect Christians feel the same about Christmas - another half-twist of the calendar.) Every approaching Passover reminds me of those that have gone before: the tantrums and door-slamming of my teenage years, the year when, a few weeks before finals, I put my hand on the hot electric hob, the year I spent without my family.

The experience of being an Orthodox Jew gives me a strange kind of empathy for Jesus and his disciples. I disagree with them about very many important issues but still, their lives were recognisably like mine. Thinking about Passover like this makes me wonder if the last supper really was the last, or if it just felt like that, if the power of Seder night made all the other meals that came afterwards seem utterly redundant. I suppose, as an Orthodox Jew I should add the suffix "that is, if Jesus really existed at all", but it seems mealy-mouthed. Crucifixion and resurrection do nothing for me spiritually, but the lives depicted in that second Testament seem pretty convincing. And I imagine that if you'd seen your friend tortured to death, the last Seder night you'd spent in his company would engulf all other memory.

All of this is really a preamble to saying that I find, right now, that Christian life is mirroring my own in another of those strange distorting-glass ways. For Christians, it's Lent. For me, it's the countdown to Passover, which means that I'm doing much the same sort of thing. I took a look at my cupboards and freezer after Purim and realised that, if I was going to make any room in my kitchen for the Pesach, non-chametz food, I would have to get rid of a lot of what was already there. And, if I didn't want to throw it away, I'd really have to make a concerted effort to eat it and, more importantly, not buy any more.

And it's been pretty successful. Apart from fresh fruit and vegetables, I've bought almost no groceries in the past three weeks (a moment of madness in Harrods food hall aside). I've been using things up, baking bread with my stocks of flour, creating soups from my frozen veggies, finding interesting things to do with quarter-packs of barley and polenta. It feels marvellously parsimonius and, because I enjoy cooking, has also been good fun, like a permanent Ready Steady Cook challenge. I imagine that Lent has the same kind of satisfaction in denial.

At the same time, I've also been reading a wonderful book: Not Buying It, an account of the year the author spent buying only the bare essentials of life (she discusses in some detail how she decided what they were, and then repeatedly second-guessed herself). It's full of insight into the consumer world we live in - every few pages she says something which makes me put the book down and think about it before continuing. She talks about the way that shopping gives us the momentary "dream of wealth". We love being in shops because we look around at all these beautiful objects and experience the potential that they could all be ours. Until we make a decision, a purchase, in a sense they are all ours. We buy on a high, imagining that we can take that experience home with us, and so the dream of wealth ends up making us poorer.

But the author, Judith Levine doesn't just preach abstinence from commerce. A year of living without buying anything but necessities gives her an acute consciousness of what she's missing out on too. She says: "maybe the freedom to desire itself - the font of personal fulfillment, creativity, and democracy, to name just a few good things - is a necessity, too." Total abstinence is no more of a solution than buying into the consumerist dream that happiness lies just one more purchase away.

I don't say that religious periods of abstinence are a solution to this problem. But it seems to me that there's some sense in having a time of year when you simply appreciate what you already have, the number of possibilities already afforded you. So, tonight I'm trying to work out what I could do with a tin of tomatoes, some salami, a butternut squash and a package of rice noodles. It's not exactly a moment of spiritual clarity, but it beats going to the supermarket.