Ba Guo Bu Yi

Attended: Michael, Lisa, Dougie, Mele and Sam

Mele

I can no longer objectively review Chinese food.
I ate one bite of the weird dish-the noodle thing.

Tastes even saltier than it looks.

I had a few bites of the house special fish in chilli, until a cut in my lip put an end to it.
The pork dish tasted too piggy.
Even the chicken tasted too much like chicken.
I ate quite a lot of the chocolate tartufo, an item I last saw on the menu of an Italian wedding in the 1980s . It tasted good because it wasn’t Chinese.

No doubt made by an ethnically stereotypical chef.

I am suffering what our friend Michael has termed ‘The Supersize Me’ effect.
I now have a psychological ‘revulsion’ response to Chinese food. After the jellyfish with raw chicken, congee with kidneys and liver, vegemite noodles and countless other weird dishes, I cannot face any further inedible parts of animals, which included Ba Guo Bu Yi's DUCK TONGUE dish and the broiled pig’s ears.
Come on, people, I was a vegetarian for eight years.

The worst sign of my malaise is the fact that I am actually relieved we are eating at the Talbot Hotel next week. No food reviewer in their right mind would think such a thing. The ‘Animal Graveyard’ culinary tour of Gouger Street needs to end for me.

I think I will be choosing weird vegetarian things from now on.

Sam

We expected bits of animals fried in flavoured sauces.
We did not expect a revelation.
We arrived early at Ba Guo Bu Yi and set about examining the menu of Sechuan Chinese dishes.

And some not so traditional ones.

One thing became abundantly clear: we both dread going to these restaurants.
Not the charming ennui-laden dread of the fabulously well-heeled: "Oh I'm just dreading another weekend in St Moritz. Yacht parties are so boring."

Instead, we are possessed of the very real and creeping dread you had when you were a kid getting an injection. The needle. The adults holding you down. You gotta get stuck. You gotta.
WE DON'T WANNA.
Each restaurant visit has been tainted by the knowledge that at some point, we're going to have to eat something that we'll probably find repulsive.

Maybe this was on the menu, maybe not. We don't even know any more.

We've had enough. We started this Epic Adventure to discover new dishes, new places and to open up the entirety of Gouger beyond the same two restaurants we always go to. Part of that means trying new things, things we wouldn't normally order. This, as you have seen, has devolved fairly briskly into an extended game of Truth or Dare.

So we're declaring an end to disgusting. Scoff if you must, but we have dined upon dread and found it not to our tastes. The '"weirdest thing on the menu" rule was invented to force us to order something we wouldn't normally try. Okay - fine - I'll be honest: it was basically a ploy to get me to stop ordering pork every single time.
That has worked.

But replacing it with something I'm going to try, dislike and pay for isn't really a very helpful or useful food review. Hilarious, I'll admit, but we're bored with it. We've done 'yuck'. We're bored with 'gross'. We are through with the 'every part of the animal' philosophy of urban dining. We ain't starving in the Yukon no more. We don't have to eat things that people only started eating in the first place because food was a privilege and flavour secondary.

Goodbye, jellyfish.
Goodbye, offal.
Goodbye, anything clipped off an animal and cooked in flavour sauce.
Helloooo new horizons.

And now to my review:

An utterly impressive restaurant. This is the reason we started this journey in the first place: to discover new things.

Deep Fried Pork Ribs with Salt and Sugar

Delicious! Tender, yet deep-fried and the salt/sugar combination is really the end of war and the beginning of peace on earth and love between all beings (except for pigs).

Chilli Fish Soup

We ordered this oily soup "mild" so that Mele could actually eat it. The bowl arrived teeming with fresh chopped chillis. The "mild" part happens when the waitress gets a slotted spoon and removes about half of the chillis. They really do cater for all pallets.

So, my friends, onlookers and double-darers. Go to Ba Guo Bu Yi. But don't order anything you really don't want, because you will end up sad and ridiculed for not eating badger's noses and jaguar's ear lobes or whatever it is they're serving.

Next stop: The Talbot Hotel

BBQ City

Yes, they gave us orange slices.

Attendant: Marc, Dan (all the way from Melbourne), Mele, Em, Trent, Dougie, Leah, Ben, Shaun, Rosie, Krista (all the way from London) and Sam

Special mention: Cristi - Double parked on Gouger Street on a funky-ass Friday freak-out to get some takeaway.

Mele

Dear Readers,
I think this photo says it all:

My Soul is Crying

The look on my face was in no way exaggerated for this blog.
What’s worse than eating offal?
Eating it with Congee! 'Congee' is apparently the Chinese word for ‘porridge’ and translates to GRUEL in Mandarin! I am feeling like this blog is rapidly turning into ‘Stupid Westerner eats poor Chinese people’s food’. This is an extension of my wog food philosophy ‘Anglos making hick Italian food hip’. My Nonno refused to eat pizza because it is ‘poor people’s food’. My grandmother comes from Naples, the home of pizza. In this region, pizza is mostly bread with one or two meagre toppings. PIZZA IS THE RICE OF ITALY. Polenta is not something cool you get in a restaurant. It is CORN GRUEL that my Nonna serves covered in tasty napolitana sauce, to HIDE the gruel-like gruelness of the damn stuff. Olive oil dipped in bread is not a novelty, it is something that all my Anglo friends laughed at until they saw it in restaurants.
However, congee is so bad it can never be hip. I felt so sick I could hardly eat anything else at BBQ City. The Steamed Chicken Empress and Tea Duck are second to none, but BBQ City doesn’t have much else to offer other than barbeque, and if you order anything else, you are probably drunk or doing it as an experiment.
In which case, I award BBQ city 70/100 and blame myself for having to eat liver porridge. Thumbs up for the record 12 diners at the city! We love you all!

Sam

I, like Mele, also suspect that with our 'weirdest thing on the menu' rule, this blog may descend into the restaurant reviewing equivalent of "Dare/Double Dare/Physical Challenge!!!". But I'm sure that there will come a time when we have eaten everything.
Jellyfish is no longer weird. Fish'n'bacon is no longer weird.
Salty porridge with fresh pork liver and kidneys is now no longer weird.
Correction: it's still weird. But we're not eating it again.
If you think it's not weird, then you eat it.

AND THEY DID.
Brave, brave fools.

But I am being unkind in my appraisal of what is actually one of the tastiest restaurants we've been to yet.
It's cheap and the barbeque is spectacular. Ribs, duck and chicken served with a little minced spring onion sauce really is my favourite dish on The Epic so far.

Everybody scream YUM YUM

Everything else was fairly standard Chinese restaurant fare and nothing you wouldn't find in any crowded Chinese eatery. Observe:

The Hastily Ordered Fish and MSG

Still better than congee

The Chicken You Definitely Don't Remember Ordering With Yogurt Sauce

That congee is starting to look pretty good

The Vagina Dumplings

Traditional and erotic

Also excellent was the deep-fried eggplant which was so good it could almost have been meat. So that's your BBQ City menu: Triple Crown BBQ Plate, Deep-Fried Eggplant and no congee, ever. A quick word of advice: the BBQ City wait-staff have a reputation for vagueness which ranges from forgetful to outright surly. Our waitress this evening was quick and polite and even attempted steer me away from the offal porridge (and towards the preserved egg porridge). They were even discreet about asking us to leave so they could let other patrons have our huge corner of the City.

But we finally got the hint when they threw a teapot full of piss on the Lazy Susan.

Next stop: Ba Guo Bu Yi (I got it wrong last time - but we may have to hurry, as we left BBQ City the place was plastered with poster proclaiming "All Food 10% Off - The More You Eat, The More You Save!" I'm not worried.)

Pomo

Mele's mum dropped around a bucket of home-grown tomatoes last week. On the weekend we discovered that a few had gone rotten and the rest would probably follow if something wasn't done about the bucket of tomatoes.

A bucket of tomatoes is a weird kind of gift at this stage of our lives, when everything is measured by minutes and worried about for the lack of time.
I'll steal someone else's story to illustrate.

Sheila (not her real name) has a two year old daughter who loves The Wiggles. For Xmas, Sheila's sister wraps up two tickets to The Wiggly Ones and gives them to Sheila.
"Oh wow!" says Sheila. "Thank you! Wiggle-loving daughter will love this!"
"My pleasure!" replies Sheila's sister. "You two will have the best time!"
"Us two?"
Sheila's sister had never for a moment considered that the present would be about taking a Wiggle-loving two-year-old off her hands for the afternoon. She thought she was giving an experience, a memory, a genuine moment to bond between mother and daughter.
Sheila inspected the tickets. "Public transport is advised as Entertainment Centre parking is limited".
Sheila had instead been given about five hours of negotiating Adelaide public transport with an excitable two-year-old to and from a venue whose main feature by volume would be around ten thousand happy, screaming children.
Sheila was not excited.

Back to the bucket of tomatoes. A handful of garden-fresh tomatoes can be stored in the fridge and eaten slowly on bread or in salads. An entire bucket needs to have something done to it - most productively, sauce. This involves a serious time commitment: you can't just chop them up and throw them in with some herbs. They have been grown with love and care and must be treated as such. The skins need to be removed. This is laborious but worth it. Other ingrediants need to be sourced, chopped, diced and monitored. Cooking time, stirring, tasting, seasoning, cooling and freezing. Making a bucket of tomatoes into an admittedly smaller bucket of sauce takes time. The bucket of tomatoes is no longer a gift. Like the Wiggles tickets, it is the removal of time from something else: housework, homework, sleeping, sitting on the couch, playing with Charlie, laundry, gardening. Pick your chore/entertainment, now postpone or cancel it.
Not such a great gift now, eh? It's like when the tomatoes arrived, out went two hours of study, a mown lawn or chasing Charlie around growling "Oi!".

Or is it?

Because the bucket of tomatoes takes you away from all of that. The bucket of tomatoes is a job to do, but not just for yourself, for your family, for that sense of culture and heritage that it brings. Peeling each tomato, you're a tomato closer to feeding the family in the future and even honouring the work in the past. On a cold winter's night, Mele will come home tired and have that momentary 'starving family' panic alleviated when she pulls out the tub of frozen sauce from the freezer.
'These are from Nonna's garden.' She will remember and it will be better than just the plain old 'Tom sauce 7/2/11' label.
These tomatoes are sweet. These tomatoes mean something a bit more than food. They're not a drain on time, but a historical use of it. They are a reminder that your hands work along with your heart and your stomach and all together they produce something which combines and affects all three.

And they smell great too.

Thanks, Nonna.

Ladies, turn away now

Figure this out:

Background: 23 months ago I started my first full-time job. Ongoing, secure future, benefits, super, the lot.
Downside?
It's an office job. I spend 8 hours a day sitting on my arse. When I get home I spend most of that time sitting down, studying.
Then Charlie turned up.
No time for the gym, no time for extended jogs - exercise is a very low priority, because now I think in terms of time. Constantly balancing the hours I spend away from Charlie and Mele with the hours I can possibly spend with them.
Summed up: I would rather spend the two hours after work before Charlie goes to bed with him than pounding the streets in search of fitness. And that's exactly what I do.
I haven't exercised regularly for two years. Hockey sort of counts, but it was once or twice a week and it's over now.

Problem: Just before I started the job I was riding 10kms a day or jogging. I weighed 82 kgs. Fast forward through 23 exercise-free months and how much do you think I weigh now?

Have a guess.

Go on.

Got your number?

Wrong.


I now weigh 72kgs.


How the fuck does that happen?

I think I know, but I will reveal the answers in the next post after we've had a few guesses from the floor...

***
UPDATE: Or maybe I'll just save my breath.

Thoughts

1. If I had to choose between scrabbling around with my fingers, trying to extract the tissue that had dropped flat to the bottom of the box and killing a puppy, there'd be a lot less dog poo in the world.

2. No food could ever taste as good as freshly-cooked chips and gravy smell on a cold winter morning spent doing errands at uni.

3. Katter has exactly what Abbott and Gillard (sorry, Julia) don't: personality and passion. I'm not sure he isn't a dangerous lunatic, but at least he gets excited. I'm fairly convinced that Rudd and Gillard use the same teleprompter
that
only
shows
one
word
at
a
time.

Sensitive, educated, obsmervant

Franzy (to student hired to do envelope stuffing): Okay, so, if you want a coffee or anything, the kitchen is just there.
Student: Thank you.
Franzy: No problem. I'm about to make a pot of coffee, would you like some?
Student: No, thank you.
Franzy: Tea? We have tea too.
Student: No, no thank you.
Franzy: Water? Milk? Anything you like. Please help yourself.
Student: Thank you, I'm fine.
Franzy: Okay - let me know if you need anything.

Fifteen seconds later.

Helpful colleague: Did you know that Ramadan started yesterday?
Franzy: Sure thing.
Helpful colleague: Did you notice that student's hijab?
Franzy: Huh.

I would be so proud if I turned out like my dad.

You know it makes sense

And now, the lady you've all been waiting for, it's the Howard Stern of Franzy's Writing, Mele. Today she returns with her own brand of smack-down placed squarely upon the culinary quagmire that is Bribie Island and, we suspect, greater Queensland in general. So, without further ado ...

Culture Shocked II

Okay, I’m still whinging about the Bribie Island food…but two out of three butchers don’t stock veal chops on a regular basis (if indeed, at all.)

‘Why don’t you have them?’ I exclaimed to butcher number two, after having driven across the entire island in my quest for them.

‘Er, there’s just not enough demand for them, love.’

I can understand foie de grais being off the menu, but veal chops? What is everybody doing here? Are they dry-frying lamb chops and serving them up like rubber, like my grandma does? I guess the older demographic are still boiling their vegies to beautiful shades of grey and cringing at the very idea of seasonings other than salt and pepper (What else is there, other than that? Oh, parsley—served on the side of your plate in the grand tradition of 1982.)

I was amazed to find the veal chops in the Big Supermarket Chain of all places. Not the greatest quality admittedly, but they tasted pretty good after cooking for two hours in a French-inspired sauce of streaky bacon, red wine, mushrooms and thyme.

My biggest whinge, however, is reserved for seafood. We live on an island and see fishing boats cruising up the passage all day long. We see huge container ships floating against the horizon. We see all kinds of activities aquatic, yet the only seafood that is fresh, cheap and readily available are the sand whiting we manage to catch ourselves. The only regular supplier of fish is—you guessed it—the Big Supermarket Chain, and I have bought seafood from there three times. Twice the fish was so off and inedible that Franzy and I were forced to throw it straight out. The third time I bought salmon I had to buy the wrong cut of fish because the type that I wanted was a red gelatinous quivering mass reduced to $29.00 a kilo When salmon is no longer orange it isn’t worth 29 cents, let alone $29.00.

In all seriousness, I have made a huge effort to explore other options. I drove to a fish market that was actually a restaurant that sold overpriced prawns and crabs on the side. There’s a seafood takeout around the corner that does the same thing, but its salmon was as flamingly red as the one at the Big Supermarket Chain. The only other fish shop on the strip has been designated a no go area, with good reason:

‘Excuse me, can I have my calamari grilled instead of fried?’ I asked upon my one and only visit. I was ready and eager to taste my first serving of Bribie Island seafood, and I’d figured what better place than the takeout shop less than 50 metres by the sea?

‘Oh, you want it grilled?’ replied the incredibly young girl out the counter. ‘I’ll just go see if the cook can do it.’

I stood there flabbergasted.

What seafood cook refuses to grill calamari, and insists of deep frying it every time? Why is everything the shop other than fish fillets deep fried?

A moment later the cook emerged from the back. ‘You want it grilled?’ she asks, looking confused.

A horrible realisation sets in. She’s not refusing to do it—she doesn’t know how.

I don’t tell her what I really want, which is calamari lightly dusted in flour, Greek style, which is still unhealthy and fried but less gluggy and oil soaked than the thickly coated Queensland alternative.

‘I’ve seen that on TV… I’ve never actually done it, but I’ll give it a go.’

She gives it a go. The calamari I get back is rubbery and tastes vaguely chemical. It has the power make any Greek person convulse and die on the spot.

One of the problems with Bribie Island is definitely the fact that all takeout food is homogenised and whitened. Perhaps I am conscious of the fact that I am part of an Ethnic minority, as well as being part of the Australian stereotype (European family/English and Scot family) and I’m oversensitive to this issue. But what I can’t help but notice that none of the takeout places here acknowledge their cultural identity. In fact, they downplay it for their customer base.

In South Australia, there are Greek seafood shops that sell Greek style seafood, and they have Greek names. The Chinese restaurants have names like Ying Chow and Ky Chow—they’re not called anything in English. Italian cafes selling Mediterranean type fare have Italian names too (although Italian cafes are generally awful, and don’t sell much traditional fare, only mainstream crap that actual Italians don’t eat and barely recognise...even in SA there’s only one Italian café worth its salt, and it exists in a completely Italian neighbourhood that’s segregated from the city itself).

But here on the island, a lot of places have weeded out the ethnic words and stigma. Franzy’s workplace is the worst offender of the lot. It is based on a European style of eating, is largely alfresco and has a lot of watered-down Italian foods on offer that don’t have Italian names. It has gotten rid of all the things that make Italian cafes good—chinotto, home made gelati, antipasto with meats like cappocolo, cannoli, stand-up-a-spoon-in-its-own-thickness-coffee, etc. Fair enough, there’s not the base or demand for such stuff, but why pretend what they offer it isn’t actually Italian food?

I shall return to my other, less explicable Bribie Island food dilemma: the seafood. Why isn’t seafood cheaper here than in SA? Gordon ‘F@#* Me’ Ramsay is always belting on about restaurants using cheap and fresh local produce, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Everything is expensive—at least as expensive as SA, if not more, and only prawns are slightly cheaper. Why sand whiting is expensive even though the passage is full of it I don’t know. Franzy has this theory that big supermarket chain gets all its stuff from a big supplier and none of it is local anyway. I think there’s a grain of truth there myself.

Food issues aside, I am glad to be living on Bribie at the moment. There have been a few cold days and nippy nights, but there’s been plenty of sunshiny warm days that my skin has rejoiced in. I love Queensland winter—if we had the money, I’d live here in winter and in SA in summer. I love the sunsets and the mountains and the lagoon. I love the trees and forests that grow right down to the sandy beach. I love picking up wild passionfruit and feeling smug because the Big Supermarket Chain sells them for a dollar each, even though they grow wild all over the place.

I’ve decided that Bribie, for all its food transgressions and dare I say it—heresies—has got a lot of little old ladies who I’m sure make absolutely fabulous cakes and scones and other Country Women’s Association type delights, so I’ve been inspired. The other day I went out and bought the Women’s Weekly Cake cookbook, a rolling pin, a set of scales and about 19 different types of flour/baking agents in the effort to make my first sticky date pudding ever. It took me ages but it turned out perfect thanks to the Weekly’s triple-tested-for-your-success formula. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess. I’m also going to try and convince Franzy that we really should go to the Fishing Association’s Guide to Fishing on Bribie seminar. It looks like we’re going to need it.

***

GTH - Points go to Adam Y for his excellent theory on how Telstra makes its money (seeing as it can't be for customer service). Honourable mentions to Kath and River, but no points, ladies. I was looking for someone connecting helpful Franzy with the Samaritan who left change on the parking meter for me on a recent trip to Brisbane.

Irony at its most beautiful is terrifying

On our ill-fated and extremely expensive trip to Queensland I bought a couple of t-shirts from the famous Eumundi Markets. They weren't bought for style (although they did come in a delightful shade of blue) so much as for their value to society. Mine declares, in large capital letters "MEAT IS MURDER", then below, in a smaller tasteful italic lower case, "Delicious, tasty murder". The double takes I get while wearing it are wonderfully heart-warming. Especially from vegetarians. And I always know exactly who they are - the expressions of comradely admiration they beam upon me after reading the first line always melt into impotent humourless scowling when they have finished reading the second. As you can imagine, a man who dines on pig-nipple sauce is apt to find this as satisfying as the sound of crunchy cracklin' fresh from the spit.

The other t-shirt I gave to my father, for it was infinitely more appropriate.
What does his have on it?
Well, I'm not just talking about them for nothing - I have an anecdote to recount of Dad's trip to the market this morning:
He sets off, dressed in a stylish suede jacket and underneath it, his t-shirt.
He's going to meet a friend for coffee and to do some shopping, but he turns up early and his friend isn't at Lucia's yet. No problem, thinks Dad, and he decides to go to the health food store first - get himself some bran. He makes his way to the health food store and circles its aisles a few times to find the bran bin because there are no staff around to point it out for him - they're probably out the back thinking up ways to combat that wicked "Delicious, tasty murder" t-shirt. At last he finds the bran bin, scoops himself a few scoops and straightens up to discover a young man standing right next to him. The young man is dressed in long denim shorts, pulled up socks, t-shirt and peaked cap.
"CnIvvrrlkwhtyrt-shirt?" mumbles the young man.
"What?" asks Dad.
"Can I see your t-shirt?" he asks again, pointing at Dad's t-shirt, which is partially obscured by his jacket.
"Oh," says Dad. "Sure."



The guy's jaw drops. He's speechless. He coughs.
"He gave his blood for you!" exclaims the guy.
"No he didn't,' replies Dad, glancing around the store.
"He did!" retorts the young man. "He gave his blood for you!"
"No. He didn't," says Dad, calmly wondering how Chuck Norris would best employ a bran scoop in this situation. "It'll be okay, just increase your medication."
With that, the antisartorial evangelist turns heel and flees the health food store, proving that
A) Religion in the wrong hands is a scary thing, and
B) Jesus does not respond to t-shirts.

***
GTH - The points go to River for her multitude of goodbyes. Not for actually saying goodbye because it's the internet and no one actually leaves, least of all me, but for relating it back to my earlier post about languages. I'm sure I said that flattery would score points somewhere.

Sontag Blogettes

Things I love about being a meat eater: I arrived home after hockey this week to a house gushing with the taste-bud aching smells of Mele's family pasta sauce recipe. I can reveal for purposes of this story that she puts osso bucco and pork spare ribs in there. I can also reveal for the purposes of this story that Mele had a face like a kid with a mouthful of Brussels sprouts.
"Come with me!" she cried, the moment I stepped through the door. "I've got something I have to show you!"
She dragged me into the kitchen and pointed to the chopping board. On it was a small piece of white gristle. "What do you think that is?" she asked. The gristle was a piece of skin carved from the edge of one of the pork spare ribs. On the piece of skin was a small raised nodule.
"A wart?" I guessed.
"It's a nipple!" she moaned. "I want to die!"
I tried to talk her into the fact that nipples tend to have boobs under them, but she insisted that it was neither wart nor beauty spot. It probably was a nipple. I love eating meat. I've reached a stage in my life where I'll eat or at least try anything that's put in front of me and the thought of seared, dripping blue-cooked steak reclining on a plate in front of me fills me with the animal hungers.

At least it wasn't a tattoo.

***

A blog ye muste alle reade: I've only just discovered Myninjacockle's The Loaded Blog and it's the only non-comic site that I've felt compelled to go back and trawl through every single post because each one is an excellent little vignette. The author has either had a lot of practise blogging and discovering what works and what doesn't and what holds an audience, or is one of those talented arseholes who gets it right without even trying. Sceptical? I present for your delectation Exhibit A and, if that's too highbrow, Exhibit B.

***

Blurry photos: I've tried to defend my penchant for blurry photos in the past, but I'm beginning to accept that it's probably one of those things that will be appreciated only when I'm dust in the dirt. Or never. People love dat focus stuff yes suh.
However, being how this is my blog and they're my photos, I can do whatever the hell I like. Moify and Ms Moify-To-Be's engagement party was last night and I took a whole bunch of real blurry ones - YEAH!


I hope it is many years before they get around to drinking the wine we gave them because I wrote on the label "All best for your beautiful journey together". Hopefully they decide to drink all their engagement wine in one hit and get to ours last so they don't have wonder too much about why a man who claims to be a writer thought that omitting a "the" would be poetic.

***

A photo from the archives: For reasons that will become clear in a future blog, I was digging around some old travel photos from a ski-trip to New Zealand. The following photo was taken after probably the worst night's sleep that either Triton or I have ever had. We got a cabin in the woods somewhere and rugged up for cold night. We weren't too worried because we had a double-barrelled bar heater. At two am, the bar heater died. At 2:15am we both woke up with the feeling that we were both going to die. We considered writing a last will and testament but movement was mostly out of the question. Let the record also show that even with the spectre of death from hypothermia looming large we did not declare prison rules and share a sleeping bag.

The next morning we shouted at the manager and were given no refund for our Night of Icy Doom. There was nothing left to do but go to Glenorchy and sit in the sunlight while drinking pitchers of coffee and dining on a cubic foot of baked beans, nine-egg omelettes and half a pig each, nipples and all.
This is the photo I took of the frost shadows outside the Glenorchy Bar and Restaurant.

Franzy's Law #3

If your cookbooks don't have food stains in them, then you probably aren't doing it right.

***

I was in a book shop yesterday and saw Maggie Beer's foray into the cooking bible market Maggie's Food. It looks delightful and has an embroided cover and the recipes are divided into the seasons and there are whole sections on loquats and rabbit. It costs $125 and is around three inches thick. It looks as though it would be more at home on a lectern than bench top. Heck, it is a bench top. Only you wouldn't cook on a padded, porous bench top because it would soak up whatever you spilled into it. Same with Maggie's Food. It is such a beautiful object that you would hesitate before getting anywhere near anything sticky or decomposable. It is truly a tome to be treasured ... but not cooked with. If you were cooking your artichokes with waxy potatoes from the thing it would be a true pain in the arse to keep running out to the seminary to check how much verjuice to use.

So, get your cookbooks dirty, I say! Stand them up with the cutting board and let the sweet stains of chopped herbs and fragrant fresh blood splash the pages! Make the food your bookmarks! 'Have I cooked this before? Aha! The transparency of peanut oil! I remember now! It was delicious!'
And so forth.

Cookbooks should be designed like bathtime books, made of bendable durable plastic. But then they'd be too easy to wipe clean again ... hmm ...