EatingAsia again

Really the most mouth-watering food writing AND food photography (surely this complex vice needs a name… gustopr0n?). Today’s episode, on a Hokkienese Hideaway in Kuala Lumpur, is paradigmatic, no doubt about it. Just drink in the poetry:

Her wide, stubby yam strips go all sticky-chewy in a dark soy-soused stir-fry with cabbage, pork, and shrimp. White cabbage, Chinese celery, and pork cracklins add crunch, but the overriding flavor here is a wonderful char from the high-fired wok…

That last phrase is the chorus of a foodie chantefable that I aspire to write someday.

Ghosts

My continuing immersion in the seemingly-bottomless project of scanning negatives from former lives probably sensitizes me to ruminations on the past. This bit, the opening sentences of John Lahr’s review of J.M. Barrie and Tom Stoppard plays seems to have been written with my own obsessions in mind:

Can we agree that we’re all haunted? The ghost world is part of our world. We carry within us the good and the bad, the spoken and the unspoken imperatives of our missing loved ones. As children, we are dreamed up by our parents; as adults, when our parents die we dream them up in turn. Conversations rarely stop at the grave.
(New Yorker March 5 2007 pg 92)

Many of the people in the ghost-images I’m rediscovering are lost in the present (that is, I’ve lost track of them –they probably sail on, and now and again I’m able to reconnect with their current incarnations), but they’re certainly as real to me now, seen via Photoshop and Flickr, as they were then. Maybe even realer.

links for 2007-03-01

I did not know that

Jess Nevins at No Fear of the Future takes us through various historical Lords of the Grain and lands with both feet on Gustav Vasa, and (in a tale that diverges into lutefisk, takes in the surprising [albeit alleged] origins of Madame du Barry’s passion for chocolate, and Diderot’s bon mot that “the potato is righly held responsible for flatulence. But what is flatulence to the vigorous organs of peasants and workers?”) links to a Swedish cuisine summary that includes this delightful factoid:

In one year people all over the world in 40 countries buy 60 000 tons crisp bread. Sweden is the biggest consumer and every Swede consumes 4 kilos of crisp bread every year.

I’m one of the addicts of knäckebröd, plowing through a few cases of the stuff every year (a case of Siljans has 14 units, each with 6 rounds). Great all by itself, even better with cheese or smoked salmon…