it can involve a strong vocal projection akin to a yodel, the sound is intended to travel long distances so it can irritate the really far away neighbours. On Saturday afternoon I cooked Karelian pies* with Tuuletar, a Finnish band who demonstrated the yoik
The Man is a little hard of hearing - I can't get him to hear me if he's more than a couple of metres away from me - unless I yoik
in other news...
I've been commissioned to make a coffin cover - it's not the traditional sort of coffin and has a very particular shape.
Today I downloaded the dimensions and started building a dummy coffin so I can construct a well fitted garment
a band of Balkan-music-playing-Belgians wish to make frites - the correct way
Taste the World starts with a series of quests, today I must venture into the a part of the city devoid of homes, beard trimming workshops, and artisan bread shops. I drive my trusty steed deep into the land of wholesale fruit markets, timber yards, metal welders and ... the edible oil depot to collect 20kg of beef dripping
I park alongside a fleet of lorries, buzz a wonky doorbell and am let into the sort of reception area that shouts at you that the entire workforce is male
Scraps of discarded bits of paper decorate the carpet, I wait for a man in wellington boots to process my order, I pay, he disappears then returns with my box of dripping
are you using it to make casts?
today I learn that sculptural casting is a common use for beef dripping
*Taste The World is a kitchen on a stage, musicians come here cook (or direct me to cook) and talk about what they eat back home - click tags beneath this post for previous on this event
at the other end of the arena - a man with a buggy got them rounded up and driven over to our stage, they spilled off the buggy and ran around laughing and kissing us all, there were at least fifty ten people if you counted all the seeing double that was going on.
Meanwhile in front of the stage the audience had been sampling the wine provided by our sponsor and were already pretty happy but they roared with approval to see a cascade of stoned people arriving on and around the stage giggling and dancing. Their music was fantastic but they weren't up to slicing vegetables - several audience members were pulled onto the stage to help including a girl called Trixie wearing a very short white fairy outfit and crimson hair .
Trixie was able to chop cabbage, twist open bottles of vinegar and fry plantain while band members fell at her feet and grinned at her.
The woman in the Haitian band was the danciest and had many many silk patterned scarves tied around her waist which she dispensed liberally along with perfume and many kisses - my scarf is blue stripey with flowers and a rude fruity smell, apparently it contains a lot of voodoo so I have put it in a nice box for safety
looking around the market area there was a table piled with old costume jewellery which I picked through and found some earrings to go with my favourite daisy necklace (which I was wearing as you can see from this picture taken near the best food stand)
The jewellery seller sidled up, looked at me and then at the earrings I'd chosen and said approvingly
Ah yes, I can see that you're a fan of early plastic
Other things
I've been told that it's difficult to follow or comment here unless you sign up to the all-seeing-eye that is Google. If you are not a spammer or purveyor of porn or dodgy inheritances and feel inclined to send me a cyber wave feel free to do so via lululabonne(at)gmail.com - my profile page connects to this address too.
I live near Turkish supermarkets and various sorts of hippy shops and imagined these to be the least of my problems but it appears that Bristol is experiencing a World Leaf Shortage (and I needneedneed them for WOMAD see my post from two days ago)
I returned home leafless to meet the new electrician who arrived before I'd had time to clean the grease off the broken kitchen light that I hoped he could fix
at peak panic a chum appeared and we both busily phoned potential vine-leaf vendors while watching time running out on shop-opening hours
at the latest moment a leaf supplier was discovered and the person with a bike had to cycle to the other side of the city to buy pickled foliage while I washed my embarrassing light fitting and made tea for the electrician
tear up dry raw pieces of kale leaf without any stem, rub them over LIGHTLY with nice oil and lay the pieces out on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt and bake in a moderate oven for about 5 minutes. When you remove them from the oven you must EAT THEM INSTANTLY they are delicious for precisely 30 seconds ... at 31 seconds they are foul
This year's big challenge has been to find a ewe's cheese like one used in Romania to make a rustic dish called Shut-up-and-swallow. I am also looking for live clams, garden eggs and several shades of yellow/green plantain
three years ago Babylon Circus made this film about their experience of Taste the World
*if you click the 'womad' tag below all previous posts on this annual extravaganza will appear
about how Cambodia in the '60s was the funkiest kingdom on the planet, how it was so groovy and loved pop music and sex and fun until the Khmer Rouge arrived and killed nearly everyone.
The country is damaged but recovering, 'Not Easy Rock n Roll' is the story of a roaring-woman who is becoming a star.
On Saturday this roaring-woman appeared on my kitchen-on-stage at WOMAD and showed me how to slice a box of ginger as-thin-as-eyelashes so that we could cook Angry Chicken together.
Yesterday it rained and rained but in our tent we visited India and Bhangra-danced the sun back, then to Columbia for sunny-day crab gratin. Finally to the bluesy desert-ty atmosphere of Tinariwen who I am in love with:
1: they are unbelievably handsome
2: they wear beautiful long robes and intense jewel-coloured scarves wrapped in the manner of Lawrence of Arabia.
3: they made an astonishingly good stew, this is how you make it
ask a Halal butcher to chop 10 lamb shoulders into big boney pieces
fry the meat hothothot till golden all over then add water to just cover the meat
add salt
after 3 hours of slow simmer take the meat from the lamb and shred, you will have one kilo (dry weight) of basmati rice just cooked, combine the lamb meat and some of the cooking liquid with the rice. It will be a mush - that's fine
Add pepper and either 500g of rancid goats butter or 250g of fresh butter plus 500g of grated strong mountain cheese like Comte.
everyone eat from the same pot and drink the remaining cooking liquid because it will make you strong. * I explain my role in this here, if you click the WOMAD tag underneath here, all my previous posts to do with this event come up
Yesterday I made Body Cakes (Kroppkakor) with a Swedish musician called Linnea Olsen.
here is the recipe
cook and mash floury potatoes then grate in an almost equal weight raw potatoes of a firmer character, add eggs and season then leave to sit while you sauté minced shallots in butter. Add chanterelles to the soft but not coloured shallots in the pan then a glass of white wine, when the wet has simmered away add salt, pepper, finely chopped parsley and ground allspice. get flour on your hands and make a tennis ball out of the potato dough, poke a hole in the middle and put in a spoonful of the chanterelle mixture, pinch the potato back over it. Have a pot of simmering water handy and lower the body cakes into the water when they bounce to the surface they are cooked.
Serve the cake on a lake of thin cream with a 'click' of butter on top and a spoonful of sugared raw lingonberries
The musicians send me their recipes and I take Bristol apart in my quest for food things like rotting fish sauce, raw lingonberries and meat of the buffalo. I also search out hardware such as 'one large cauldron', 'a spit and fire' and 'baking stones'.
Today I am filling my car with meat, this is one of the recipes for today with notes from the band:
Lecsó for 25 persons
12 slices of Hungarian
lard
6kg Hungarian yellow
paprika
12 Hungarian strong
paprika
8-10 Onion
10 garlic
30-40
pieces of tomato
1kg Hungarian sausage
For
the vegetarian part we just take out the lard and sausage and need sunflower
oil. We will bring the cauldron and the bread too, as we won’t have time to
cook any! Are we allowed to bring also Hungarian plum brandy! It’s not really
the same without it, it’s really part of the tradition!
A water bison is what yer wash yer face in Roger McGough
This year's Taste The World
was the usual voyage of discovery; new friends, new music, new food.
When a Canadian band requested bison meat I was a bit stumped, there doesn't seem to be enough room to raise bison
in the UK but we discovered a bison-owning lady near Sedgefield who
will post bison meat to you should you ever need some. Bison meat is
very lean, the Canadian boys' secret for BB perfection was to add beer
to the bison burger mix - it was excellent.
Occasionally
an artist has the sort of agent that will say 'oh yes my musician loves
cooking he'd love to cook on stage,' I am sent a popular regional
recipe and the musician has no idea what he has been signed up to. The Poulet Directeur General
recipe was one of those; a very handsome Blick Bassey arrived at the
kitchen stage on Sunday morning, told the audience that, as he has 7
sisters at home and no men are allowed anywhere near the kitchen, he had
no idea how to make this dish. Therefore I must cook and Blick must
play his guitar.
That turned out
surprisingly well and there were lots of great
moments during the event. The highlight of the weekend was a band called Nuba Nour, they belong to a tribe of
Nubian people who lost their land to the Aswan Dam project and are
effectively permanently homeless. There's a better video of them here
They cooked a fantastic lamb and okra recipe full of secret ingredients
but gum mastic was essential to getting the texture right, during the
cooking there was a lot of dancing going on, I managed to get this
little clip.
Minced Bison
20 kilos of Gruyére
2 kilos of salted cod
Pink biscuits from Reims
3 kilos smoked sausage
1 kilo 'good quality flower'
'30 graines de djansan'
Some of the items still on my shopping list. I'm having problems with that last one which is for a Cameroonian dish called Poulet Directeur Général - please let me know if you know what this spice might be.
This, of course, is all in aid of the annual gourmetfest or 'Taste the World', part of the WOMAD festival and I shall be reporting back on it next week.
Meanwhile I have fallen in love with these boys, they live in Switzerland where they have a chili farm and will be making a chili fondue with me on Friday.
Find a large brick of tea and crumble part of it into a pot of boiling water, add toasted millet.
Keep the tea at a steady simmer and place slices of cold mutton fat, some cheese that is like unsalted Feta and a cheese that is like a very hard Parmesan in the drinking vessels.
After half an hour of boiling add salted rancid butter and mares milk - a bit at a time until it tastes right then pour into the tea bowls.
This is the scene when the cooking is nearly finished, a drinking tune is being played and strong alcohol is being passed around the audience they must flick three drops from the cup into the sky before drinking the rest in one go.
Tstsegmaa tests the mutton dumplings and Chinggel is putting the finishing touches to the tea.
I'm hoping that I’ll have time to borrow a human this weekend.
Getting home from the Azores three weeks later than planned meant that I’ve had to cram the start of a new building project and catching up with five-weeks worth of office stuff into three and a half days before heading off to work at WOMAD for the weekend.
I love everything about WOMAD festivals except the camping, tents make my face go funny and I can never sleep in the things, however, if I want to do this job I have no choice and I love this job. Miss Whiplash lent me her little red tent for easy popability and I arrived early to pop it up in what seemed to be an advantageous place - near some rather posh-looking tents. I then went off to go and do some preparation for the weekend and came back a few hours later to see that the posh-looking tents have been assigned – I checked the tags on the tents to either side of mine.
I checked them out on Youtube, I don't think it'll be so bad - here’s one of them
BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting some of the music from WOMAD.
This is Mariam Hassan and Manuel Dominguez, her producer explaining about a stew that they are making, it really should be made with camel - but I couldn’t find any camel meat so she has made do with lamb.
I was standing backstage fascinated by their tattooed feet
Mariam is from the Western Sahara but Morocco has occupied this land since 1976 and the Moroccan security forces continue to treat the Sahrawis extremely badly, Mariam has found asylum in Spain but many of her compatriots have been stuck in Algerian refugee camps for 33 years now.
Morocco has built a wall across the territory it is laying claim to in the Western Sahara and Spain has in turn built a wall to keep out the asylum seekers
This review of a talk given last month by Wendy Brown discusses the astonishing number of walls that are going up all over the world.
I packed up the Taste the World tent last night after Andy White, assisted by professional toast-maker John Leckie assembled and served a spectacular Rock ‘n’ Roll Breakfast.
Menu
Coco Pops & Kalua
Granola with Strawberries Flambéed in Irish Whiskey
Champagne with Marmite Soldiers.
with a side order of beer
John had said that he would make Eggs Benedict, but then decided that he wasn’t up to making a hollandaise sauce Andy:but you’ve produced Radiohead John:making Hollandaise is much more difficult than producing Radiohead
My work done, there was still time to go and see more musicbefore the end of the festival, all the food left had to be thrown out or given away, there were 4kgs of lamb in the fridge with no takers, so I divided the meat between my shopper and my handbag and took with me to go and meet Miss Whiplash who was watching Roy Ayers at the other end of the arena - I was halted in my tracks by music from this band*
and got no further. I saw no more of the Whiplash but she sent a text to say that Roy was totally amazing and she was running after his tour bus to see if she could have his babies.
I did see/hear a lot of great music, The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are raw pulsating sex on 18 legs, if there’s a show coming near you - see them.
I bought Antikrisis after seeing this and I’ve been playing it non-stop since I got home.
* Sorry about rubbish sound but it's as near as I can find to what I heard from Ba Cissoko a man currently being touted as Africa's Jimi Hendrix.
In Real Life I’m a cook, these days I take short cooking jobs and fit them around the work going on at the production house. In my early cooking days I catered for pop stars and I still do quite lot of work with children, but it tends to be non-musical events. I am therefore, really excited, about my job this weekend at WOMAD, a music festival set in a vast parkland strewn with people performing songs and dancing, I'm especially looking forward to seeing these people.
One of the performance tents has a stage set with a kitchen – artists, who are also performing on the larger stages, come here and cook something for the public who come to watch the spectacle - it’s like Food Art with music.
My role in all this? I am The Girl Who Shops; I get sent details of what the musicians want to make, I buy the ingredients, make sure they have enough of the right sorts of pots, and when the cooking gets going I might end up stirring a sauce while they toss pancakes.
My shopping list includes ‘crumbs of salt cod’, chorizo, smoked ham and ‘moong divide', the Food Events start with Cuban Chicken on Friday and end with a rock ‘n’ roll breakfast on Sunday evening (Kalua and Coco pops and a demonstration of the sort of meals you can make inside a hotel kettle).
the musicians often send accompanying notes, placing their choice of dish in context. Many WOMAD performers are in some way exiled from their homeland, Mariam Hassan is currently resident in Spain, she will be making a lamb dish from the Sahara, to finish she will serve 3 different sorts of tea, the first will be As Bitter as Life, the second will be As Sweet as Love and the third will be As Soft as Death.
You end up committing yourself to what you are left with Robert Wyatt
I don’t know what I want; I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Gerhard Richter
A man should swallow a toad every morning to be certain of not encountering anything more disgusting in the course of the day. Nicholas de Chamfort
Math Notes
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The prime factorization of 255987 is 33 × 19 × 499. That’s not very
interesting. But when this is expressed in binary, it reads:
111110011111110011 = 1111 ...
Brock, Barn.
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Two rural words, one common and one not, both with interesting etymologies
I hadn’t known. 1) brock ‘(male) badger’: From Middle English brok, from
Old Eng...
Listening to Noise
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As decibel levels continue to rise, threatening human existence we turn to
two listening experts for help. George Prochnik and George Foy both
investigat...
Unknown Unknowns. An Introduction to Mysteries
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The show addresses a series of themes including: gravity as “the greatest
designer”, extraterrestrial architecture, deep space mysteries, future body
modif...
Almost never losing
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My whole life is about winning.
I don’t lose often.
I have a great relationship with the Mexican people.
All of the women on *The Apprentice*
flirted w...
This is Mariam Hassan and Manuel Dominguez, her producer explaining about a stew that they are making, it really should be made with camel - but I couldn’t find any camel meat so she has made do with lamb.
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