Foods and fruits to the belly

Eating too much

Get those spices and aromas wafting through the apartment block, the kind of entreaty you should expect from someone who enjoys your cooking when you do it right.

However, on the subject of food and eating, I was just braising some beef cuts and expressing the fear that once done, half of it would have been eaten before it landed in the next stage of cooking for a stew or something else.

Then, I remembered how on Twitter a friend talked of his wife getting a dozen succulent meat pies this morning and he has gone through 6 of them already, no one is any wiser of the fact until she returns and I can only wonder how the conversation would go.

Mangoes on the yellow

Brian had his aunt visiting with a big basket of fruits, his fear was wondering what would be the result of eating, sorry quaffing down 5 mangoes. I was waiting on this end to find out what lessons were learnt from this sudden penchant for gluttony. Unfortunately for me, he seems to think he should have more mangoes when in fact the colour of his effluent as he described it, might be from mangoes than vitamins.

Anyway, the beef is cooked, and I have had two or three bites, the battle of resistance begins if I must count myself more disciplined than the mango-eating meat pie-quaffing men. I know I can, I’m sure I would.

Kemi: Suya Master in London

Update from Kemi: Orders are currently only taken for parties, functions and special occasions; in due course when premises are acquired, retail orders will be serviced. 

Nostalgia of tastes

Now, I have had my share of suya to the point that I can consider myself a connoisseur. From the times over 2 decades ago that I will stop my taxi on Airport Road, Ikeja where suya chefs with almost other-worldly culinary expertise would wield knives like scimitars slicing the beef off the skewers and then cutting them to bits through their fingers with such ease you wondered how they ever returned home with their fingers intact.

Sprinkled with dried spice and some onions and wrapped in paper, your choice of beverage depending on your palate completed what could easily be the meal of kings.

Once I was tempted to have it in London but when I saw unthawed beef go from freezer to fire at the London August carnival I was back-tracking so fast, I could have fallen over backwards hitting my head in utter disbelief.

Suya I have tried in other places and they have been passable, manageable with me just an arm’s length away from a sick bag but for my strong constitution.

Reliving quality suya

Then I visited my cousin Kemi who apart from her many creative talents in the arts and fashion had like any serious foodie would do found out the reason why suya in England was nowhere near the experience of tasty heaven we used to have in Nigeria.

We have seen enough of the bastardisation of our foods to presumably suit what we think are Western tastes and in the process lost the essence of the originality of our foods, just as many ethnic foods in Europe taste nothing like the foods back where they originated – it is a travesty.

I was offered suya and nostalgia collided with reality on my taste-buds, for Kemi had produced the quality of suya that if there were such a title, she would well be a Suya Master, not necessarily with the knife-wielding dare-devilry but she’ll pass the authentic suya test with bonus points by reason of satisfaction.

Choices to order

The suya magic can be applied to beef, chicken, gizzards, tripe, goat meat or chicken hearts, the attention to process and product is exquisite with an order/delivery area of East London that should expand in time.

The business is growing and you can tantalise your taste-buds and salivate in expectation by joining the I Love Suya Facebook Group or Liking the MamaSuya page – the pictures are untouched and representative of what you will get – I present, Kemi – Suya Master Extraordinaire.

Place an order and know that you can delay returning to Nigeria for the taste of authentic suya.

Pink Slime: What you can eat may not be food

Raising the Yuck Factor

I cannot say I am one to be overtaken by food scares that fill our headlines from day to day but I do worry when the way our food is derived departs from as it were standard procedures to concoctions that make Frankenstein plasticine play.

In all honesty, I should be unconcerned with the uproar about “pink slime” because I never use minced beef in my cooking and rarely ever eat meals that have minced beef as part of the ingredients.

“Pink Slime” or to give its it more fanciful name - Lean Finely Textured Beef – plumbs the depths of sick-making yuck that could have you filling sick-bags with more than the contents of your stomach.

Taking science beyond food

As the story goes, some food industry genius thought after beef was cut off the bone there was still too much being discarded and he came up with the process of heating the beef trimmings in centrifuges to separate the fat from the meat, the exposing the product to ammonium gas to kill bacteria and this is mixed with ground beef in what Beef Products Inc. (hardly reminiscent of your dear grandma’s kitchen in name or purpose) might have called the triumph of economics and science over waste.

Reading this is stomach churning enough for my somewhat rigid constitution but what makes it alarming is the way the food industry has subsumed the regulators who trot out the idea that this whole thing is safe.

I will however contend that just because the processing of food is safe does not mean it is fit for purpose; the safety of processing must not just be demonstrated but it must be seen to not to take the Yuck Factor to the point of chronic emesis.

These unnatural things

Indeed, one must commend Jamie Oliver [1] for exposing this atrocious travesty that takes the nutritious and edible out of food leaving it just barely amenable to mastication with our digestive systems struggling to derive any nutrients before the muck is passed out our bodies made more susceptible to unknown attacks having not evolved to the chemistry necessary to process this stuff.

It is bad enough to learn that beef is treated with carbon monoxide [2] to prevent its natural browning due to rancidity or to note the rise of Frankenstein Sugars [3], but nothing prepared me for when I read that beef from a cow apparently suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy [4] (BSE) or “Mad Cow’s Disease” ended up in 8 states and the Island of Guam [5].

What is real?

There is no reason to touch the topic of Mechanically Recovered Meat [6] if you have not filled three sick bags already, but when you realise that sausages and chicken nuggets from conveyor-belt mass-market and cheap outlets do not lend themselves to traditional methods your begin to wonder what else is sacred about our food.

This is not to say that there is no need to find ways to improve quality and yield for food products be they plant or animal derived but the tampering with natural processes to do with colour, texture, taste and unnatural derivations has to be more tightly regulated and probably stopped, besides, with the certificates of food-worthiness given by food agencies we are left to better trust our instincts than allow for these compromised agencies in cahoots with the Food Industrial Complex to certify products stray dogs might well sniff at.

Debunking Myths

According to Snopes.com [7], McDonald’s stopped using mechanically recovered meat in Chicken McNuggets in 2003. When I feel better, I might be tempted to try it again.

Sources

[1] BBC News - Could 'pink slime' be rebranded?

[2] Akin Akintayo: The beauty of the dead cow

[3] Akin Akintayo: The rise of the Frankenstein Sugars

[4] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[5] Akin Akintayo: Cult of the Mad Cow

[6] Mechanically separated meat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[7] snopes.com: Pink Slime and Mechanically Separated Chicken

Castell to the carnivore's rescue again

To beef me up

I got off the train after a long hour's journey from Apeldoorn at Amsterdam and wondered if I wanted to return home to the kitchen or eat out of another kitchen.

The latter appealed to me between having a decent Italian which was not easy to get to, maybe returning to Castell where I am a carnivore par excellence, so it was Castell.

A restaurant where the ambience is mellow, the lights are low, the seating is bar-cum-living room and the music is easy. Just at the door, like any decent restaurant should, my coat was taken, my hat to the stand and my cane kept but there was no seating at the bar.

I plumb for a corner where I found I could either be facing the wall or facing the crowd, sometimes, even though I love my own company, it is not a love to be cherished when you are out – I felt both alone and lonely at one time – new discovery, I am a social animal, I feed off the company of people even if I do not interact with them.

Slow down the snails

My entrée was slow food, escargots when alive were slow, awash with garlic butter and herbs with the callipers to hold the shells as you prised out the snails with a special fork – it was interesting to see another patron later on switching the roles of the callipers and the fork, amusing, I thought.

Usually, I have the Dutch fat arse steak but I was persuaded to try the Black Angus variety with the choice of sirloin or prime, went for the sirloin medium rare – my appetite was in over-drive as I sipped from a glass of the house deep red.

Soon afterwards, there was a free space at the bar and I took residence within a social setting waiting for le plat principal to appear – it did and should have arrived with a jacket potato when the waiter realised I might have been served the wrong end, I would not have noticed but before I stuck my knife in it my Black Angus was served.

Et tu Brute?

I half gulped it down, I was that famished, but I think it is a classic piece of dining to have an 8” Sabatier to stab and cut the meat as I listened to Sam Cooke, Anita Baker, Oleta Adams, Micheal Jackson, Dolly Parton – the list of mellow that segued into easy listening just made it all the more worthwhile.

Now, a knife that threatening could do much damage in the wrong hands, it should be kept low and close to the meat as some other patron had it high in a most uncouth manner, I had to deign from the character role of Julius Caesar as Brutus allowed for the first cut to be the deepest – some people are in need of kindergarten refresher courses on how to handle cutlery at the table.

The dessert was butterscotch ice cream which only confirmed to me that my dream of having a six-pack late spring in Gran Canaria might well remain a dream.

See through teas

It was close to 10 and I could not be having coffee at that time of the day, I asked for tea. Serving tea in the Netherlands is nothing like the English would like. Ideally, one should be asked if one takes milk in the tea which should be served in chinaware because one really cannot have milky tea in a clear glass as one would have with other kinds of non-lactate infusions.

In short, I had my Earl Grey tea without milk even as one person tried to persuade me that I could do whatever I liked, well, one might be given to bouts of private lasciviousness but there is still place for proper conduct – my Englishness does at times constrain me.

It was another good evening at Castells until an insatiable craving compels me to make a beeline to a place so well appointed to the eating of the cow, the bull, the sheep, the pig and sometimes the chicken – chicken? Oven on 175 degrees and clock to 45 minutes – surely, I can roast my own chicken. Bliss!

The cravings of an omnivore - Castell Amsterdam

A life beefed up

The weather was nice enough to persuade me to go out for a walk of sorts. As I got into town, I suddenly had a craving for some meat, a steak, something succulent, juicy and palatable.

Oh! The omnivore in me was tending to the carnivorous than the herbivorous. I just cannot comprehend veganism or the tendency to ignore our predisposition for meat and vegetables for a life of trying to chew the cud unsuccessfully, we are neither bovine nor canine – I know what I want and our bodies are crafted by creation, nature, nurture or evolution, if you may, to handle meat well.

The craving had to be satisfied well away from all the Amsterdam tourist fare; so, none of those restaurant chains of conveyor-belt food pretending to serve Argentinean steaks or some other fancifully named stuff.

For our delectable pleasure

I needed a place where the ceremony of sacrificing a member of the bovine species on the altar of the satisfaction of the homo sapiens sapiens' palate was fulfilled from the sacred cow in the right condition to when it landed on the plate.

Probably only 2 places in Amsterdam offer that quality of service with an attention to presentation that is so different and quite authentic.

Cafe de Klos on Kerkstraat near the junction with Leidsestraat, reputed to serve the best spare ribs in the land and Castell on Lijnbaansgracht not too far from Leidseplein.

Not all my dentition is mine, so I am not so much a fan of spare ribs because it carries great buccal cavity risks that I have already succumbed to, too many times already.

At Castell

So, I walked further down to Castell where I was warmly greeted and set in my seat at the bar where there was ample table space for a meal.

Castell exudes a rustic atmosphere, dark as if lit by a log fire, the setting is cosy and the music is mellow.

It is unpretentious as the lobster soup gets served with splashes of Courvoisier without the uncouth hedonism of bling-laden hip-hop genuflection, it is not a case of trying to arrive but a simple question of good taste.

Medium is not rare

As far as my tastes are concerned, I have come a long way from West African cooked beef that was nigh on leather to when I demanded that my steak be cremated and brought back as ashes through when I sent my steak back 5 times in a French restaurant in Paris because it was still pink on the inside.

I can never have it blue but medium rare is just right for my tastes, the flavour of beef is just right when the juices are not completely cooked out of the meat as if one were autoclaving food.

A knife to the plank

I chose the Dutch fat arse steak (see menu); I suppose that means rump steak whilst I downed a glass of the house red nibbling on white bread with garlic butter. I was not keen on a jacket potato and opted for a salad.

The steak arrived on a wooden cutting board and for cutlery, I had a fork and definitely not a sissy serrated steak knife but a decent French Sabatier 8” chef’s knife – it could well have killed the cow if it were Halal-prepared.

My craving was fully satisfied as I carved into the steak and having cut off the excess fat, diced portions to chew, sometimes interspersing that would mouthfuls of salad, preferring the garlic and herbs sauce to the curry thing.

With the most appreciative approval

Every other omnivore in sight just nodded in approval after their first bite and were effusive with praise at the end – new-comers were persuaded of anything the connoisseurs said was good. One could say there were more regulars there than first-timers, but once you've had a steak at Castell, you probably would be back with friends.

At the end, after the tips and the pleasantries, if only there was a way to thank the cow or the bull for being so delicious, we are yet to genetically modify beef for life and death – not in my lifetime.

It's a barking barbecue

Hello Doggie

I probably read this twice, the first time, it looked quite humourous but by the second read, I almost despaired at the light-hearted way a serious issue had been depicted.

The writer obvious has a good feel for Nigerian parlance, the Pidgin English, the jargon and the sayings which convey truth like no other expression can.

Yes, dog meat is a delicacy that has made it from what we in Western Nigeria considered an Eastern aberration to the Federal Capital - Abuja, where the chef de cuisine adds international flavour as a South African who 32 years ago began a 2-year apprenticeship for what has become a livelihood.

Mercifully, it would appear the dog meat is barbecued rather than put into some soup or stew where every meal that contains meat would become suspect.

Claims that sell

One can expect where certain foods make many cringe, extra-ordinary claims would be made to justify and entice others into the act of eating the pet. What better lure can there be for a virile black man than to say that dog meat is an aphrodisiac?

The image of being able to hump like a crazed rabbit even in the absence of a mate with whom to express and dramatize ones prowess would not take away from the hopes of the possibilities.

As if that is not enough, others claim that dog meat has medicinal qualities.

Now, anyone reading this might think there are dog farms where the dogs are reared as free range, corn fed dogs allowing for the Sunday dinner of mouthwatering Pedigree - full of hormones and other beneficial healthy food products rather than some rabid lame stray that dared to bark and could not run off when the dog-napper walked by.

Cow saved by dog

Even more seriously, the advent of the dog on the flesh menu only indicates that the more common livestock which requires more attention as a financial venture and food supply is scarce or priced out of reach of the common man.

My Western sensibilities leave me a bit biased and prejudiced against this development, I once had a dog called Scot named after the dog in the Janet and John children's books and much later in life, we took care of a dog called Winnie, once I took her for a walk and the many who saw her said nice dog licking their lips, she was never let out of the compound after that.

But like the lady at the African Shop at Amsterdam Central Station said when I told her of this situation, "In the West, the dog eats with his master and in Africa the dog is eaten by his master." Even I cannot add much more to that or the story that appears on the BBC.

The beauty of the dead cow

Sick-bagging fast food

I could only hold my head in my hands this morning as I listened to the Anderson Copper 360° programme on CNN.

Many of my friends note my utter disdain expressed with vehemence when the idea of ordering fast-food come up.

Ever since over 13 years ago I observed the odd-one out round on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You where three of the most dastardly sick-making and gut-wrenching things like a nematode worm, raw sewage and back legs of a mouse were allegedly found in fast food – I have been completely and utterly off that stuff.

Some episodes on television mark you – big time.

Besides that, I can cook, I like to cook and I do try as often as possible to cook for myself and also for friends.

In some cases, I have to tone down the spices for my European guests whose palate might be complete singed with hot pepper tastes that our African ladies might as well use as eye salve – Just kidding!

Tomato mummies

When I returned to Europe years ago, the first thing that struck me when I got a can of chopped tomatoes was the Best Before date which was about 3 years hence. I lost count of the E-numbers as it looked like the manufacturers were in cahoots with the mummifiers of Ancient Egypt.

Fine, everyone looked like they were going about their business kept and preserved as lively mummies, more excitable than zombies but less so natural.

So, imagine my amazement when I found that they had been tampering with the colour of egg yolks by giving chickens a particular kind of feed containing Lutien.

The farm in your local grocery

Somehow, customers prefer yellow skinned chicken to white skinned chicken – that is the problem; many of these customers probably think you pluck eggs from garden plants.

Aesthetic quality trumps natural quality every time as convenience, availability and cost no matter how unscrupulously provided, lure and entice customers who are so removed from nature that nothing is really what it seems anymore.

This is not a time to explore the amount of colour that goes into food stuff nowadays.

Beauty of the dead cow

However, back to my inspiration for this piece, red meat is just not what it seems anymore; the meat is treated with carbon monoxide to keep the redness that usually disappears in 5 days maximum for up to 40 days.

Basically, we lose one of the common indicators for observing if packaged meat is available or off.

Colour, smell, sliminess, taste and sell-by date as the commentary goes are the options you have to check the quality for edible consumption of beef.

The colouring also masks the workings of pathogenic bacteria - but that would be hidden in some study that gets reveals when the lawyers are ready for court.

As usual when the food agencies collude in this “Customer Irrelevant”-“Industry Fillip” activity, they offer us a lesson in semantics.

Carbon monoxide is considered a colour fixative not a colour additive – take me for an idiot and I’ll be a fool for anyone.

As for the harmfulness of carbon monoxide, which binds too easily with haemoglobin in the blood than oxygen can get access to keep you alive, especially if you work in a mine or have un-serviced gas heating – they say – we have nothing to fear.

Once again we move from the curse of the mad cow to the beauty of the dead cow – history is about to repeat itself – do not say, you’ve heard this before.