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Take-Home Foods

Food & Drink, Travels

As someone who’s traveled quite a bit, this article struck a chord with me:

A recent Reddit discussion has highlighted how trips abroad are capable of permanently changing a traveller’s diet, with commenters revealing foreign dishes they had on their travels that they now can’t stop eating. 

The list includes acai from Brazil*, Morocco’s cinnamon-dusted oranges, onigiri (Japanese rice balls), pasteis de nata (milk custard tart) from Portugal, ajvar (a red pepper paste) from the Balkans and even spaghetti carbonara  from Italy — which is quite different from the stuff you’ll get at Olive Garden, trust me.   (There’s other less-salutary stuff like haggis and buffalo wings on their list, but whatever.)

*can someone tell me the difference between acai and blueberries?

One of the foods on the Reddit list struck home for me:  French baguette and butter — which, having sampled it in Paris, made me refuse to eat American shelf bread ever again. Seriously.  Who would have thought that simple bread and butter would be an exquisite meal all by itself?  (Well, anyone who’s ever tasted the real stuff.)  It’s one of the few dishes which I prefer eating with unsalted butter, because the bread becomes unutterably sweeter.

That Portuguese tart (not Sarah Hoyt) is very familiar to me as the Afrikaans melk tert (they’re almost identical, and the Seffricans have even made a cream liqueur based on its taste).  The only difference is that the Porros use puff pastry instead of pie crust pastry.  Hmmmm… now that’s a thought.

I”m going to try the Moroccan oranges this weekend after I’ve done the Friday shopping (no oranges in the house), but with three different sugars as an experiment to see which tastes best.  (Light brown, Demarara or 10x mixed with the cinnamon, in case you’re wondering.)

I’ll also try making ajvar,  which sounds like hummus mixed with ground spicy red peppers, but I’ll use South African Peppadew spicy peppers because they are spectacular.

There are a couple that I’ve encountered on my travels which I wish were staples Over Here.

One of my all-time favorite imported meals happens to be poutines, from Canuckistan, but only one place around here makes them properly (the Holy Grail pub in Plano).  I must have eaten poutines at least twice a day when driving back from Montreal to Detroit, along with Tim Horton’s coffee to wash them down.

Another is Viennese Sachertorte which, having had some in meine schones Wien, would kill me if I could find it here because aaaaargh it’s luvverly.

Over Here, we’d call it “death by chocolate”, because it really is.

There are a few others, but I think they would be best enjoyed in their home countries (e.g. pisco sours in Chile and Welsh rarebit in Britishland).  Of Wadworth 6X and Greggs sausage rolls we will not speak.

And so, Gentle Readers:  tell me about your favorite furrin dishes, in Comments.

Alliances And Such

Politics

I see that the French government has collapsed, for what seems the umpteenth time.  Coming hard on the heels of the German government’s problems, there is of course a common thread:  both were coalition governments, where two (of the many) political parties — some with diametrically-opposed platforms — decided to create an alliance to govern the country.  Both, of course, were doomed to fail, especially, as in the case with the Frogs, that the opposition party, the much-reviled Front National (or National Front, in English) was almost as large as either of the two melded parties, so the non-confidence vote brought by the FN needed only the support of one of the coalition parties to topple the government.  (The fact that the coalition, cobbled together simply to prevent the FN from assuming power, was always doomed to fail except in the minds of the idiots with the anti-FN mindset.)

I’ve often spoken with Americans who think that our two-party system is flawed, in that each party is often riven by various key issues which actually find favor with a small (or large) proportion of the other one.  Abortion, for example, is one such issue:  where there may be a small minority of pro-abortion politicians in the Republican Party whose ideology thereof is closer to a majority of abortion supporters over on the Evil Side of the room.  The problem, of course, is that these are generally single issues, around which it would be impossible to form, say, a Pro-Abortion Party to be pitted against an Anti-Abortion Party.  Ditto the Greens, ditto guns, ditto Trump, etc. etc.

Honestly, while our current two-party system is not ideal, it sure is better than the European multi-party.  Small, contained chaos around single issues is, I think, far preferable to the systemic instability of a multi-party system, almost without regard to the relative merits of their various  positions.

I should also point out that a fragmented polity is generally vulnerable to external threats or danger — witness the chaos of the French Third Republic in the 1930s, which in no small part enabled France’s crushing defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940.  (A sizeable proportion of Frenchmen, and their parties, actually welcomed the prospect of a strong national government on the lines of Hitler’s Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, simply because they were sick of dealing with the decades-long chaos of multi-party politics and weakness.)

In passing, imagine there was a single-issue party named, oh, the Anyone But Trump Party in our polity (composed of both Democrats and Republicans), and toss that into the standard Democrat/Republican mix.

Ugh.  If you can see only chaos resulting from that little political soup, then you’ll understand the European situation.

Layers And Layers

Morons & Idiots

It should have been a speed bump, but there was no grammar involved.  See if you can spot the absolute howler in the caption to the pic below, as it appeared in the Daily Mail:

Hint:  there’s photographic proof of what the guy actually wrote on his armband, you fucking morons, yet you not only misread it, but gave it a completely different meaning.

Where did I put my flamethrower?

I should point out that Breitbart got it right:

English Premier League Star Who Wrote ‘I Love Jesus’ on LGBTQ Armband Breaks Silence

Clearly, they actually looked at the pic before writing the headline… unlike the Mail  idiots.

Shocker

Gummint

Oh, this is rich:

A paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily.

Of course, Elon Musk (the man who is aiming to fix this kind of shit) has the truth of it:

If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel [i.e. the folks who have to be there — K.], the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%!

Furthermore:

Sen. Joni Ernst’s audits are finding as many as 23[%] to 68[%] of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay.  Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office and one “temporary” teleworker collected higher locality pay for nearly a decade.

Yup;  nothing like claiming D.C. cost-of-living support whilst living in W. Virginia, is there?  Or, as Harris Rigby puts it:

Get paid for big city expenses, live in the cheap suburbs, pocket the difference.

My thoughts on the above:

Hey, it’s not firing squads. (Which would have been my solution.)

Bad Taste

Men & Women

Worst headline of the year:

FFS, was this “poll” even necessary?  I mean, I’m as lewd as the next guy, and a lot more lewd than most, and even I was offended by it.

And no, there’s no link.  You want to find it, go look for yourself at the Daily Mail.