Cookbook: Sweet-and-sour eggs the cheating way

Sometimes the hard-pressed miracle cook is in an awful hurry and needs to Impress Through Simplicity and Please Through Ease the fast way. You surely know the kind of situation… Hubby comes home unexpectedly at dinnertime – turns out that his secretary had another engagement with some young hulk – and demands FOOD on the table! Mama, drunk on ample sherry, decided to invite her entire bridge-club over for dinner, and would Daddi-O please oblige and feed the lot of cackling hens? A distant aunt, whom you never expected to see in the flesh again but from whom you still hope to inherit, suddenly rings the doorbell and does not have the good grace to leave before dinner or invite you to Maxim’s…

These are moments of panic, dear reader, and at such moments, one needs a Mittington Miracle Recipe, which gives instant results and allows for no needless critical objections as to What We Use or How We Use It. All that is wanted is an instant edible yummy result, so well camouflaged that the horrid ingredients it contains will never be recognized. My Sweet & Sour Eggs In-the-cheating-way, is a fine example of the kind of dish that will take you no longer than ten minutes to make and will save you from the above awkward fix…

So, go about it in this manner:

Boil 1 egg per person for 5 minutes. Fish them out of the boiling water with a spoon and drop them into very cold water (which makes peeling them so much easier later on). Let the eggs cool off for another 10 minutes, as you make the sauce in this here manner:

Put a saucepan onto a low fire. Drop in: 100 ml of tomato ketchup and 100 ml of fruit juice (orange, or tropical mix, or apricot, or whatever you happen to have in the house). Then add a spoonful of ginger jam, or ginger powder. Stir, mix, and let it get hot. Toss in a dash of powdered cloves, and a little salt. Mix a good spoonful of corn flour (preferably ‘Maizena’) with a little water, and pour it into the sauce. Bring to a boil and let it simmer for 20 seconds. Kill the fire (never let this brew boil too long… it might disintegrate!)

Now peel the eggs. Put them into a narrow, deep container. Pour the sauce in until the eggs are submerged. Sprinkle a little fresh or dry parsley on top, or – if you happen to have any – some fresh coriander leaves.

Serve while still warm, as you explain to your guests that this is an ancient Balinese recipe you only managed to pry lose with immense trouble and great bribes from a Batak witchdoctor. 

Repita A Revolução!!

Thirty-nine years ago today, dear reader, a most marvellous – and officially forbidden - song called Grandola, Vila Morena by honey-voiced José Zeca Afonso, rang out over all the Portuguese radio stations in the morning. This was the sign for the Portuguese army and the Portuguese people to rise against the Portuguese dictator Marcelo Caetano and his miserable regime, which kept the people in poverty and suppressed all protest with tear gas and the baton of the riot police.

It was the beginning of the Revolução dos Cravos, the ‘Carnation Revolution’. And what a splendid day that was! In the morning poor Portugal agonized under the boot of worm-eaten fascists; in the evening the beautiful land was free!

Today, yet another miserable regime, run by yet another Portuguese dictator and his cronies, is keeping the Portuguese people in poverty and suppresses all protest with tear gas and the riot police baton. Yes: I am speaking of good old First EU Commissar Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, of the Abominable Troika from Brussels and Frankfurt, and of their elected lackey Pedro Passos Coelho, the Portuguese Prime Minister, who does all he can to bleed his people so as to save the venomous €uro.

Never was the time more ripe for a repetition of the Glorious Revolution!

So all ye people of good will and honest faith… All you who know that things may be turned for the better if we hold together and tell them STOP, NOT ONE STEP FURTHER…! All you who wish the suffering Portuguese people well…. Turn up the volume button of your computer to the maximum; open the windows, the doors and your heart; go to THIS HERE LINK and Give The Signal !!!

Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira…!!

L’imagination au pouvoir!!

Viva o 25 de Abril!!

The Doors

Today a little Eye Candy from Old Al and the rest of the world, dear reader!

I just discovered a most fascinating site on that Facebook network you all know about. It is THIS ONE about door handles, knockers, letter boxes, locks and cast iron hinges (of all usually most uninspiring subjects). I guess only those of you who are subscribed to that Social Medium can possibly open this link. But for the rest of you, I will add a few of my own, rather prosaic, samples of the same subject...

Golden Quotebook: Roger Cohen on being called Cohen...

When my father was about to emigrate from South Africa to England in the 1950s, a friend of the family suggested that a change of name was in order because it would be unwise to pursue his career in Britain while called “Cohen.”

My Dad, a young doctor, said he would think it over. A few days later he announced to the friend that he had decided to make the change.

“To what?” she asked with satisfaction.

“Einstein,” he deadpanned.

[Roger Cohen, A Jew in England, IHT 30 November 2009]

Get your money and your children out of Europe!

Recommanded article of the day:

If you have a little patience, and are not too afraid of economics, read this here article about 'Europe's Monks and Zealots' by good old Ambrose to learn why you should get your money and your children out of Europe before it is too late.

And MORE Theft !!!

Thank you, Mr Timothy Holt-Wilson for bringing to my attention yet one more shameless theft of a priceless Alfred B Mittington find, to wit:

The fact is that I ought to have patented my felicitous jeu-de-mots in time (i.e. many decades ago), and I would now be rich in royalties and embarrassingly generous damages allotted by the courts. But Alfred B Mittington is an idealist, dear reader. Although some witty dunce with a very high opinion of himself once said that only a blockhead would ever write for anything except money, this is of course untrue of the Real Artist. The Veritable Wordmonger, like myself, writes only to seduce the Muse and please his public. Not for heaps of filthy lucre which he then lays out in gin and tobacco as he scribbles funny dictionaries that nobody ever asked for.

May your thieveries eat out the liver of your karma, O ye shameless rogues! 

How! I have spoken. Alfred B Mittington.

PS In a comment which I have since forcefully deleted from this MY blog, yet another funny fellow dared to doubt the authenticity of my brilliant find. 'Are you sure that you came up with it first, Mr know-it-all Mittington?' were more or less the words this illiterate baboon dared to entrust to the pixels. Well I am, ye scoundrel, if only because I first coined the phrase in the context of the Iron Duke, i.e. good old Arthus Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, in a 1934 article of incomparable insights called 'Tally-Ho in Talavera' (see my Collected Works, vol. xxxiv, p. 456-498). Wanna argue with that, you suggestive foulmouthed fool??

Patio de los Leones

Yesterday, as I innocently strolled down the hill to the village praza for my daily constitutional and chess game, I was asked by a toothless old farmer of the name of Eufemio Almeida Souto (who grows turnips for the pigs and an occasional cannabis plant for passing tourists on the plot of our former graveyard) what precisely I found so very revolting in this one 'charming picture' of the fountain which I posted April 7 ult.

Ah yes, dear reader... The kind of folk that read one's blog....!!

Now, it is hard to explain to one who has never visited the Bilbao Guggenheim, what KITSCH really is. So I will let my pictures speak more than the thousand words I could easily scribble upon the subject, and let all of you (e tu, Eufemio!!) compare and decide for your own worthy selves.

The snapshot I published last Sunday is this one:

Which happens to be a sickeningly white plaster imitation of the famous Patio de los Leones in the Alhambra Nazarí Palace of Granada, run up - at considerable cost to the tax-payer, no doubt - in a tiny public square of the tiny little municipality of Camariñas, on the north coast of Galicia. 

The original looks like this:

And if anybody still fails to see the difference, then I propose that he or she refrain forever after from making ANY statement whatsoever concerning art, beauty, good taste, elegance or the bullfight (which, as we all know, is just as artistic as a Mozart concierto or a Rembrandt painting, according to its aficionados, most sophisticated people that they are...) 

Oh, and talking of bovines: let me share with you my incomparable antiquarian's lore, and explain to you that it is far from certain that the animals depicted here were indeed originally meant as lions. All sorts of other beasts have been proposed by knowledgeable folk, such as bears and dogs and horses. However, there is a fine chance that in reality, the whole set-up goes back to the so-called Molten Sea in front of the Temple of Solomon, in which case the twelve beasts would originally have been twelve bulls. As in this here picture. 

And so you see, dear reader (et tu, Eufemius!): civilization marches on forever! From Jerusalem in 1000 BCE, to Granada in 1400 AD, to Camariñas in the year 2009...

O Tempora... O Mores...

PS Oh, incidentally: I think I know where the Camariñas town hall ordered that excellent copy of the  Patio de los Leones fountain. Check out this fine company which will sell you a truthful 'facsimile' for a mere 39 €uros 64 !!!

THEFT !!!!

The Cheek!!! The brazen, barefaced, devilish shamelessness!!! Them roguish good-for-nothing boy-'n-the-Hood spray-paint-splashers of miserable IQ and worse morals STOLE A FIND OF ALFRED B. MITTINGTON and re-published it without due reference !!

Alfred B. Mittington's revenge will be horrible !! That I promise you!!

(Does anybody know where this happens to be, so that I may ask my good friend the First Chairman of the North Korean Communist Workers Party Kim Jong-un to re-direct one of his infallible nuclear missiles so as to hit this most despicable municipality??)

'Cher Is Dead' ???

Oh, this is a good one!! A REAL good one!! I’m sure most of my readers of Taste and Sophistication have missed it (because not all of us are cursed with two godchildren who are avid and fanatical Twitterers) but only yesterday occurred one of the very best, the most marvellous, splendid, gorgeous, magnificent social media foul-ups that this old yours truly ever witnessed!

As all of you are surely aware (I was too, oh yes I was…) every ‘Twitter-string’ comes provided with a so-called ‘hashtag’. That’s like the title of a series, with a ‘sharp’ sign ( # ) in front, so that you know what the interconnected airheads are twittering about and what kind of stuff you may encounter if you decide to set out and read it all… (1)

Now yesterday morning, as the news of The Iron Lady’s demise broke, one of them airheads attached to his twitter-text the following hashtag:

#nowthatcherisdead

by which hashtag said hash-head meant to communicate to the world that Lady Margaret Thatcher, long-time Tory leader and Prime Minister of Great Britain, had been called to greener pastures (which said hash-head surely imagined as interminable acres planted with prime quality cannabis, but that’s beside the point here…)

Unfortunately, several of the folks who received this Twitter message (a.k.a. Tweet) understood this differently. They did not read

# now Thatcher is dead

but

            # now that Cher is dead

And guess what?? The Entire Global Sonny & Cher Fanclub (most of whom hate bonny Sonny with a vengeance by the by) went bonkers and bananas and berserk and wrote, sent, replied, retwittered and expanded a veritable tsunami of desperate, weeping, sad and suicidal Tweets enough to fill the entire Library of Congress with once again as many words as it contains at present over the passing of their favourite and much admitted Queen of Camp…

Really, dear readers, this world of ours is coming to an end! For in this our Twitter universe, Beauty lies with the Beast, the Lion with the Lamb, and the Brilliant with the merely very Buxom…

O Tempora, O Muertos!

(1) And why, I wonder would it be called that way except that those who manage to write it find their inspiration, Nomen Est Omen style, in the use and abuse of certain substances…??)

Mrs Thatcher's Epitaph

Iron Lady

Rust in Peace

Talk about bad taste....

Oh dear... I have no words to describe this one...

Cookbook: Ukrainian Lamb Soup

I am not too fond of lamb, dear reader. Or better said: I am extremely fond of lamb, but I am horridly repelled by the notion of eating a poor little animal which has been slaughtered after only a few weeks of miserable existence in a pitch dark pen.

Therefore: much as I am the proud owner of the secret recipe for the world famous Leg of Lamb ‘Che Guevara’, and although I learned to roast lamb chops nearly as well as that one brilliant 6 foot 7 Bantu chef of the Tangala Wildlife Park, just north of Graskop, RSA, I usually abstain from all forms of under-aged mutton.

The taste of lamb, however, is an altogether different story. It is something which I crave for almost every day. It is something which I dream of, with my eyes open and closed… Oh yes: I could become a shepherd in the noxious, arid wastes of La Provence, driven stark mad by loneliness and ample absinth like my ancestor Van Ghog, merely so as to partake daily of the riches I produce with the perfectly clean conscience of the ignorant toddler… This, of course, is not to be (at my age), so I had to find another solution. And it will not surprise the regular readers of this blog that Alfred B Mittington, once he set out and attacked a problem, vanquished, overcame and conquered it, as he always has.

So there. I found a recipe which gives you all the taste of lamb, while using only an extremely small slice of meat. It’s all a matter of the alchemy of the ingredients. This Secret Formula comes – strange to say – from Kiev, and was taken to these Lusitanian shores, then to the lower slopes of the valley I live in, and finally from there into my cookbook, by my dear friend Igor Velikov, father of the two errant children with whom I still have an ax to grind concerning that little matter of Hair Mayonnaise (Yukyukyuk!)

So here goes…

Igor Velikov’s Ukrainian Curry Rice Lamb Soup

Take two pans out of the cupboard and fill them both with fresh clean water.

Boil some 20 grams of rice per person in the smaller one.

Add to the bigger one (of about 1 to 1.5 l of water) the following ingredients: a small piece of lamb (preferably on the bone), a small clove of garlic, half a small onion (in one piece), a twig of rosemary and a couple of bay leaves. Bring to a boil, cover, lower the flame and let this simmer for however long it takes for the meat to drop off the bone. An hour ought to do it.

Fish all the ingredients out of the broth and select the meat. Throw the rest away. Add half a beef cube, one spoonful of quality vinegar, and a good spoonful of curry powder to the broth. Cut up the meat and return it to the pan.

When dinner time arrives, bring the soup to a boil again. Get out the plates. Put a spoonful of rice into each plate, and pour the soup over it. Serve as you say a prayer for the soul of the poor little lamb that died for your delight.

NEWSREEL

Oh, incidentally, talking about sheep: did I tell you my compatriots the French are stark raving mad??? Read here.

Work & Justice !!

Dear reader, it has been seven days since I posted my last J’Accuse. That is a long time. But please understand me. I have not been silent so long because I am lazy. Truly: I have tried. I typed away frantically on the old Blickensderfer, as if my life depended upon it. But nothing useful came out. Nothing that I dared to post.

I confess that I am tired. Tired of writing against the European Union. Tired of pointing out what is obvious, and crystal clear. So I’m giving up. If it still isn’t self-evident to you that the European Union is what it is: a Coup d’État by bureaucrats and civil servants, who wish to rule to their heart’s delight without constitutional limitations, and who will sacrifice anything and anybody to their own interest and goals, then you are an oaf who is wilfully blind and deserves no better than to dance to the tune of the Rompuys, Barrosos, Dijsselbloems, Rehns and Draghis.

What Europe needs today – and here I mean our beloved continent and its worthy people, not the Eurogues and Eurobbers who have sneakily arrogated to themselves the hallowed name and concept of Europe – is Work and Justice. No more than that. Work for its people so that they may feed their families. Justice for the criminals who got us here… I.e. the gambling bankers, corrupt politicians, and nearly every scoundrel who works for and gets his loot from the European Union in Brussels, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and elsewhere. And remember: you will not be given such Work and Justice by the Brussels Cleptocracy, unless it is convenient to their own plans, schemes and desires. 

That is, ultimately, the last word that needs to be spoken on the matter. The only thing that any man or woman of average intelligence must realize.

So there. I will stop. Alfred B Mittington will no longer write his daily dithyrambe against evil. It would either be feeding pearl to the swine, or nourishing those who are already well-fed. I will concentrate, from here on, on more pleasant matters. Mayonnaise. Art. Jokes. Anecdotes. Literature. And, why, yes, even sex!

And if you wish to know how Europe is doing, well… read this by oldAmbrose, and shudder!