The Making of ... (4 of 4)

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My wife asked for her face to be cut off. She's shy. Which is a shame because you miss seeing her eyes sparkling with success as she surveys the completed set.

The Making of ... (3 of 4)

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It may have disgusting, but it was edible.

The Making of ... (2 of 4)

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My daughter helps out on the epic shoots. Recently she has been a sock puppet monster for an upcoming storyline. She's also keen to make her own Playmobil comics, and has created backgrounds for them herself.

Character Development TEN (7 of 7)

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Apart from being a little too shiny, I think the chocolate yogurt dairy food worked well as a fecal substitute.

A new episode starts tomorrow.

Character Development TEN (6 of 7)

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Food and Playmobil go together like ... we'll, they don't really go together. But it's still fun.

Character Development TEN (5 of 7)

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Chocolate dairy product, ahoy!

It's just as well Playmobil are plastic and easy to wipe clean.

The oddest thing about this photo-shoot ... we bought a six-pack of Calci-Yum Chocolate Dairy Food to use for the special effects. Two of the six pots did not contain Chocolate yogurt. Instead they contain some white goop that tasted revolting (my wife described it as "sweet mucus"). I'm guessing the automated machine failed to put the chocolate stuff into the pots. A more savvy consumer would have returned the revolting substance to the supermarket for a refund.

So while I can recommend Calci-Yum Chocolate Dairy Food as a great substance to stand in for sewer crap, I cannot endorse it as a food product.

Character Development NINE (1 of 7)

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Ah, anchovies.

My favourite pizza to make at the moment is a potato and anchovy pizza. It sounds weird, but is really tasty. You slice the potato really thin and lay the slices out on the pizza base (we use a store bought Turkish flat bread, but any base will do) so they just overlap and cover the base. Some rosemary and black pepper over the top, a trickle of good olive oil, and a few anchovies laid out on top. Finally some shavings of Parmesan cheese and it's ready to go into the oven.

The saltiness of the anchovies and the crispy potatoes really work together.

As an added bonus it is highly unlikely anyone else will want a piece.

Mmmmmm.

Impressions from a few days in wine country

• 'wine country' is a phrase that defines more and more of New Zealand. Soon every square inch will be devoted to grapes, olives or avocados.
  
• BBQing in a thunderstorm was a crazy idea.
  
• BBQing in three thunderstorms was just pure stubbornness. It was summer dammit. We were going to have a BBQ every night no matter what.
  
• a horse-drawn carriage ride is a great way to go from winery to winery.
  
• A ukulele is fun to travel with. Takes almost no room, and isn't too loud.
  
• The Imperial March from Star Wars sounds beautifully wrong on a ukulele.
  
• Any place you stay in that gives you a dozen fresh eggs everyday is a great institution.
  
• I cook eggs in a large variety of ways, but the best is the soft-boiled.
  
• I don't want to have eggs for breakfast for a while. Too many eggs ... yummy, yummy, free-range eggs ...
  
• The sun is not my friend.
  

Lurking in the Ham Bush

Beware the Ham Bush!

Here's an edible elephant my darling wife constructed one day to encourage the wee girl to eat her lunch. That's kiwifruit grass, an olive eye, Marmite mouth and eyebrow, and a bread body with ham skin.

The wee girl quickly brought the hapless creature down with a well aimed fork, then skinned it alive before devouring the beast until only a bread skeleton remained.

Nog Blog

Low-fat Eggnog

4 egg yolks
4 egg whites
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups low-fat milk
1 cup rum, brandy, whiskey or bourbon
Nutmeg to garnish

Use half of the sugar to beat with the egg whites. Slowly add the sugar once the whites start to firm a bit, and keep beating until the whites have nice firm peaks and a glossy sheen. Place aside.

Use the other half of the sugar to beat with the egg yolks. Really have at them with an electric beater until it changes consistency. Work those yolks hard.

Add the milk and the spirit to the beaten yolks and stir. Then add the egg whites and gently whisk.

Serve with some sprinkled nutmeg.

Hey Presto, it's Xmas time. You can tell because you're plastered. Merry Hic-mas!

Run !!

There's a saying I've heard a number of times in various movies and TV shows.

"It's got a taste for human flesh."

This is usually followed by warnings about how the creature/beast/boy raised by wolves/whatever will never stop now that's it has this taste for the sweet succulence of human meat.

I have a problem with this. They say human meat tastes like chicken and I've seen chickens being feed to animals on TV and even at zoos.

If human flesh really does taste like chicken then what the hell are they doing giving these animals a taste for it?

The problem is that the moment these creatures get a bite of a human they stop seeing us as wonderful suppliers of chicken and start looking at us walking plucked chickens ready to eat.

Jelly Shaped Person

My wife was forced by her work to travel to Auckland recently. I say 'forced' advisedly, as she never goes there of her own free will.

She brought back with her some plane food for our wee girl, who treats the overly packaged treats from the skies with the kind of reverence associated with cargo cults.

"Ooooh, plane food, plane food!"

Today's plane food was a Lolly mix. "Sweet Tooth: Enjoy our Kiwi lolly favourites" it proclaimed. By mix they meant a whole two types of candy; Milk Bottles and Jelly Babies.

Milk bottles, a bottle shaped treat that tastes a little like sweetened off milk, took a bit of explaining.

"When Mummy was a girl milk came in bottles ..."

This was greeted with some degree of skepticism.

However, it was the jelly babies that were the most perplexing of the two mixed candies, as the packet called them a "Jelly Shaped Person".

I'll admit that this moniker does suit me. I am, to a degree, a jelly shaped person. However, the jelly babies cut a rather trimmer figure than I do. It was a realistic body shape. The kind that would not lead to body image problems in the minds of children who were exposed to them. There were not Barbie Shaped Jelly People, or even Fashion Model Shaped Jelly People. They were, in fact, People Shaped Jelly Shaped People.

Or if you prefer, People Shaped Jellies.

I see nothing!

For me, Hogan's Heroes will always be linked with Fish & Chips. Not the TV programs, Fish and Chips, but rather the meal. When I was a kid Hogan's Heroes was televised on a the same night of the week that my family ate Fish & Chips. So whenever I see Col. Klink, Sgt Schultz, or Hogan himself in reruns I can actually smell and taste greasy battered fish and steaming hot salty chips.

Hogan's Heroes was a very repetitive show. The plots tended to be very similar from episode to episode. But it was fun, well acted for a comedy show, and had lines you could recite in the schoolyard to your friends over and over.

It was a fantasy. Prisoners of war helping the Allied cause by spying and sabotaging the Germans. Far-fetched fun, that seemed to go on longer that the war itself. (There's a theme ... tv shows about wars that lasted longer than the actual war they were set in.)

Yet it turns out it wasn't a fantasy. There really were POWs who spied on their captors. There really were hidden transmitters and receivers (in baseballs, for example). There were even secret departments, MI-9 and MIS-X, dedicated to finding new ways of using POWs to aid the war effort; devising letter writing codes, smuggling in cameras, and so on. There were playing cards with secret maps, compasses inside hollow hairbrushes, magnetized razor blades that pointed north, hollow buttons, and much more.

The whole thing was kept very secret, even after the war, as using POWs in such ways was a direct breach of the Geneva Conventions. Even in 1990, when someone finally broke the silence the Pentagon wanted to suppress the story, because it endangered future POWs, and cast deep shadows on the past.

POWs are, under "the rules of war", considered safe, special, immune, and out of play. Spies, on the other hand can be shot out of hand. By confusing the two the Allies were risking the lives of thousands of their own men.

The POWs risked a firing squad if caught spying, the higher ups risked being war criminals, and they also risked upsetting the international agreements on how POWs were treated. If it had become common knowledge that the US and UK routinely operated POWs as spies then the whole raft of Geneva Conventions might have been ignored by all concerned, not just in World War Two, but in later conflicts.

Even basic humanitarian aid, such as the famous Red Cross parcels, was endangered by these departments, as the Allies set up dozens of fake Aid Agencies to ferry their illegal contraband to the prisoners. The Allies always made a big deal about the neutrality of the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups, and publicly maintained that they never used them covertly. While the Red Cross may have been above board, many of the groups it turns out were not. In fact, their sole purpose was to ferry in contraband.

All this contrasts nicely with the recent controversy about labeling captured 'terrorists' as not POWs but 'enemy combatants'. Words are powerful. Now I'm going to associate fish and chips with the Geneva Conventions .... Mmmmmm, tasty, tasty articles.

Busy, busy, busy

A frantic week of child-rearing, working, writing, online shopping, and cooking. Which has seen me fail to find time to post anything.

Started my xmas shopping, which is always a bonus in August.

A children's story poured out of me over the last couple of days, but there'll be a lot of editing and tweaking to get it right.

I cooked cajun blackened fish last night (with assorted veges), and rogan josh for tonight (I can smell it slow-cooking as I type, and it's making me hungry).

I had some webpage work this week, which was a little frustrating, but I hope to finish it this weekend if I get some alone-time.

Our wee boy has decided that he's not going to sleep during the day anymore, which has made it much harder for me to get anything done. The good news is that he is sleeping through at night in longer stretches ... so I can now at least think clearly about all the stuff I don't have time to do.

More food that looks like animals

We saw this idea in a book once, and had to try it ourselves.

Hard-boiled egg bodies, with olive features held there by toothpicks.

Were the cocktail umbrellas too much?

Suddenly, out of the long grass ...

We were trying to get our four-year old girl to have some lunch today, when I made the mistake of being flippant.

Mum: "What do you want for lunch?"

Girl: "A bowl of things."
(This is code for a bunch of biscuits and other non-nutritional food together in a small bowl).

Mum: "Not for lunch. How about a sandwich?"

Girl: "Noooo."

Dad: "An apple?"

Mum: " A banana?"

Girl: "A bowl of things."

Dad: "How about a small giraffe for lunch?"

Girl: "A small giraffe! A small giraffe!"

This is the resulting lunch. A bread, ham, cheese and marmite giraffe, fresh from the hunt. The girl promptly skinned the ham and cheese from her prey's bread carcass and played with the "naked giraffe" for a while before finally putting it out of its misery.

After the cup is over

I like taking photos of things. In this case the inside of coffee cups. I sometimes make myself a large latte in a bowl, which my wife dismisses as girlie coffee. I liked the way the blurry 'coffeescape' turned out. If I ever record some ambient bass tunes I'll use this as a cover image.



The second one I called Drinking Saturn. A masturbatory name for what is just coffee residue, but there you go.

In what little spare time I have when my brain is functioning I've been finishing up another Straitjacket Ninja script, and working on two other things. One of which I hope to stick up on this blog. So until I get that done my blog posts may be a little thin on the ground.

Half-baked

The continuing food theme on my blog may have to come to an end soon. But before it does, here's my recipe for Baked Beans. The secret is a good glassful of red wine in the mix ... another in the hand doesn't hurt.

This is comfort food for my wife, and avoids all the junk they stick into commercial cans of baked beans ... namely the sugar, colouring, and additives.

Baked Beans
Onion, diced
1 can of chopped tomatoes
2 cans of cannelloni (or butter) beans
Paprika, 1 tbsp (I use a nice smoked variety)
Oregano, 1/2 tbsp
Other herbs, 1/2 tbsp (such as mixed, or basil, or parsley)
Worcestershire sauce, a couple of dashes (optional)
Red wine, a glassful for the sauce, the rest for you.
Olive oil for sauteing
Honey, a teaspoon (optional)

Dice the onion and saute in a small or oil or butter ... you can add a little honey to the onion as it cooks, just to add a little sweetness to the whole recipe. Then add the tomatoes, beans and wine. Also add the herbs, the most important of which is the paprika. Feel free to add more of that to your taste. Add the Worcestershire sauce if you are using it, then simmer the whole mixture on a low heat for at least an hour, stirring occasionally.

This is best eaten the next day, which is why I make such a large amount. Often it survives half a week of lunches and breakfasts until all gone. Toast, poached eggs, or whatever else you fancy also makes it last.

Don't judge a meal by its cover

I was looking for some information on food today and stumbled across this website ... http://www.fancyfastfood.com/

The basic concept of the site is summed up by its tagline: It's Still Bad For You -- But See How Good It Can Look. The creators take a common US fast food meal and deconstruct it, then reconstruct it to look like actual food. As they put it; "extreme makeovers of actual fast food items purchased at popular fast food restaurants.”

Their most famous creation is the gourmet version of the Big Mac, Coke and Fries, pictured here.

Serving Sack

Watched a great doco on AJP Taylor today while my wee boy sucked down a bottle of food. Amazing narrative historian. It put me in a history kind of mood, so we made Posset Sack tonight for dessert. It's a runny alcoholic custard ... a traditional egg nog sort of thing. The web is full of recipes, although our variant has a bit more of a punch than some. We aim for historical accuracy only in the loosest sense.

Posset Sack
500ml trim milk (we are on a diet, you could use cream)
300ml port (or sherry or any fortified wine)
4 egg yolks
2 egg whites
cinnamon and nutmeg
1 tbsp honey (or sugar if you prefer)

Heat the milk and spices until it comes to the boil, then simmer. Don't burn the milk as it's hell to wash clean.
In a separate pot heat the port and melt in the honey. The more you heat the port, the less alcoholic the end result will be. So a light heat is recommended.
Whisk together the egg yolks and whites ... take the milk of the heat, and slowly add to the spiced milk, stirring all the while.
Place the mixture back on a gentle heat for a couple of minutes, stir.
Remove the milk mixture from the heat again and slowly add the port mixture while stirring.
Place back on a low heat and stir gently until the mixture thickens.
Serve.
Serves 2-6, depending on how greedy you are. Or just 1 if you are really greedy. Or maybe 12 if they don't really want much. I think 18 would be the limit ... beyond that and you wouldn't really get a taste. Hic!

This also gave me a chance to stick up a Sad Sack cartoon. For some reason that eludes me I had a small collection of Sad Sack comics when I was a kid. I have no idea how I got them, but I devoured them all the same. Strangely enough, I never entertained a stint in the armed forces.