crazybrave

A bit of a disappointing bookfair, all told. Came home with some gypsy music and a Johnny Cash compilation, some American history and a couple of novels. Nothing on last year’s haul.

Before I went, I had read about Ampersand Duck’s ability to resist buying a volume of verse titled “She Vomits like a Lady”, so I kept an eye out for some special items that I found quite resistible. And yes, “She Vomits … ” was still there the next day.

As was “Three Goats on a Bender”. A very handsome volume, for sure, but unlikely to sustain one’s interest. Especially since it was in the expensive room.

Shocking photo, I know. Doesn’t do her justice. It says: “Your one and only Mrs Mills! I was Queen Victoria’s Chambermaid and other piano favourites” Unlikely, I thought.

Fucking pan pipes. Not even the llama likes ‘em.

Very tempted by this, especially as the sign that sharpie is pointing to says “Bed and Breakfast. Served with pleasure!” But no.

The thing that was hardest not to take home was this bumper sticker I found in the car park:

I would have had to buy that. Probably a couple, so I could send one to Bad News Hughes, who I found originally through Burnt Karma.

(And while I’m on the linkfest here, Sorrow at Sill’s Bend is a good new read and you can catch up on Freeway 9 while Jo has a rest.)

If you were Mexican-Turkish and hungry, this would make you a good huevos rancheros egg on toast. I have gone a bit liberal on the “toast” part, after Jeanne and anthony suggested last month that any “carbohydrate based foodstuff subjected to the application of heat” would probably do. But it’s a real egg.

(Yes, I’m working on the photography, thank you.)

The corn pancake is adapted from a recipe in the Adey Family cookbook “Fresh from the Garden” (now out of print; they used to run the Darling Mills restaurant in Sydney, and grew much of the food they served, so it’s a very good book for veggie gardeners). The salsa is an avocado cut into chunks, and dressed with smashed garlic, lime juice and a red chilli. Yes, I had noticed it’s just like guacamole, but for some reason it’s much nicer in pieces.

The beans are adapted from a Claudia Roden recipe. Roden’s “The Book of Jewish Food” is a thing of amazing beauty which anyone interested in their belly should read. Then, like me, you might be inspired by Claudia’s references to hunt out the amazing “Life is with people“, a fat ethnography of life in the shetl, the Jewish enclaves in Eastern European towns before WW2. I doubt that you will be as lucky as me, and find it on the table at the Lifeline bookfair for $5 five minutes before it closed, but you should buy it anyway. (Yep, fellow Canberrans the bookfair is on again this weekend. Yay!)

For the beans:

Soak 1 cup of kidney beans overnight and then cook them in a jiffy in your pressure cooker, until cooked thoroughly but not mushy. (If you don’t have a pressure cooker, you can just ignore them on the stove while you do something else, or get a simmer mat. You could use canned beans, but they just don’t taste as good. If you can be bothered cooking Turkish peasant food, you might as well do it properly.) Fry a large sliced onion in olive oil and add 3 cloves of finely chopped garlic when golden. After a moment, add the beans and a can of Italian tomatoes. Add a pinch of sugar to taste and a generous pinch of chili or hot paprika. Or one each of smoked paprika and chili, which is my favourite. Add beans and up to two cups of water. Cover it up and cook slowly the day before you want to have a nice breakfast. In the morning, just warm it add most of a bunch of finely chopped dill.

For the pancakes:

Boil 3 ears of corn, and cut the kernels off. Pop in the food processor with 3 small eggs or 2 large ones and about 3/4 cup flour. The batter looks quite heavy, but you can stir through a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt if you like. Cut the kernels off another ear of corn, and dry roast them in a cast iron frypan until starting to blacken and smoke. Stir into the blended mixture. The batter can rest for a while. Cook pancakes in a hot lightly oiled non-stick pan until brownish. You can make 4 big ones with this much batter, and they are quite thick, not crepe-y or tortilla-y at all. More like toast, in fact. Heh.

Serve warm beans with with a fried egg (start high, turn down to nothing, cover, wait), bacon and avocado on top of a nice warm corn pancake.

This month’s egg was brought to you by Stanley, a white leghorn who gets to scratch in the dirt and eat good stuff. (And who craps everywhere, obviously.)

This month’s round-up is at the passionate cook

My mate byrd knows his way around a spraycan, and has now found his way around a blog. Check out nibbling at the architecture

Ampersand Duck’s car, a byrd work in progress, is here.

If the Bowling Club has a policy of not serving a spirit without a mixer, do not allow your friend Ross to persuade them that pouring half a dozen shots of Cuervo Gold into a jug of beer qualifies as a mixed drink.

If this should occur, and Ross is charged $23.60 for this jug of “mixed drink”, do not follow his instruction to capitalise on the bar staff’s obvious lack of mathematical ability or business sense and purchase another jug of “mixed drink” immediately.

If you do this, you will not win the 80′s trivia competition. Dean will win because one of his team jumped on a table and dropped his pants during the air guitar physical challenge. They doubled their points again after the dirty dancing physical challenge, won by two men pashing while holding jugs of beer. Dean will wave goodbye from outside. He will be looking in the window laughing his guts out because you are singing karaoke. You will be singing “Don’t go breaking my heart”. You will be Elton John. The crowd will go wild, but it will all be downhill from there.

After several more hours carousing you will get on your bike to ride home and fall off about 400 times before locking it up and hailing a cab. This will be a long process.

When you wake up in the morning, you will have a swollen left knee, a very sore right elbow, a tequila hangover and no trace of dignity.

Remember, Zoe, that this is the short version of your misadventures.

Why don’t female bloggers ask for feedback from readers? I can’t remember off the top of my head any women doing so. If they do, it’s nowhere near as prevalent as it is with male bloggers.

Mark Bahnisch has just had a stab, as has Currency Lad (who should fix his goddam feed already), and I think I remember recent requests from Nic White and Martin Pike.

Ladies? Gentlemen?

Clarification: Sorry, bit unclear here. What I was wondering about is whether there is a difference between male and female bloggers in this respect, not what anyone thinks of crazybrave. I kinda assume that if you keep coming you like it and if not, you’ll go elsewhere.