Friday, June 01, 2001
Courtroom evidence in Fiji has revealed that George Speight planned to blow up banks, sink ships and kidnap the president as part of last year's attempted coup [press release at the People's Coalition Government site]. This same man proposes to run in the August elections. I'm wondering what his campaign posters will look like; with Pearl Harbor showing around the world at the moment, there may be some confusion.
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Now that you've stuffed yourselves to the gills with Papiloa's Place Perfect Toasted Sandwiches, I thought I'd share with you my second favourite Tongan recipe.
After a week at Papiloa's Place I moved into more modest digs for the rest of my Ph.D. fieldwork. Researchers in Nuku'alofa tend to stay either with host families or in cheap guest-houses to make their funding stretch further. Some that I'd met had recommended the Beach House, a weathered old place facing out to sea halfway along Hala Vuna. A room there cost about A$100 a week, breakfasts included.
The house was set back from the road, surrounded by lawns of broad-leafed tropical grass and propped up on short stilts to let the breeze drift underneath the floor. The verandahs had been enclosed to create rows of small rooms surrounding a large central dining room; mine was on the side closest to town. At the back of the house were the (cold) showers, and somewhere a kitchen; the laundry, where I handwashed my clothes every week, was in a separate shed.
The Beach House was run by Salote, a middle-aged woman named after Tonga's late Queen. Her elderly mother and young kids were also around, but none of them spoke much English, so it was with Salote that I mostly exchanged pleasantries. She wasn't really the exchanging-pleasantries type, though, or even given to smiling much, so such occasions were few.
During my six weeks in the Beach House I watched other guests come and go, making my stay an extended exercise in amateur tourist sociology. Most of them were young honeymooners on their way to the outer islands for a stint of lying on a beach, but now and then there would be someone more interesting. Like the young English couple who had been drifting around the world for months, and had that faraway look of travellers who have stopped seeing the details of any particular place and are instead seeing only patterns. She was amused by the expletive sounds of Tongan radio, full of the language's common prefix of 'faka'; he was a juggler, who kept Salote's kids entranced for hours.
Then there was Michael, the witty guitar-toting German school-teacher who had just come from a stay of some months on Pitcairn Island. Besides collecting passport stamps, he also collected what is possibly the most relevant of souvenirs for the inveterate traveller: air-sickness bags. On my return to Australia I sent him some for his collection.
We would all meet around the breakfast table, discussing our plans and sampling whatever Salote was serving up today. Most of it was standard European-style fare, aimed at tourists and drawn from a limited pantry of imported ingredients—beans on toast, omelettes, and so on. But one dish was new to me, and used locally-grown ingredients—again, tomatoes and onions. It's been a staple of my weekend breakfast repertoire ever since.
The Beach House Breakfast
Dice several tomatoes, fresh or canned, and slice one large or two medium brown onions. Fry together with a knob of butter until the onions soften, sweetening with a dessertspoon of raw sugar. When most of the liquid has reduced, add a teaspoon of cornflour or plain flour mixed into a small amount of cold water. Stir and cook until the sauce thickens. Spoon onto pieces of wholemeal toast and top with grated cheese and black pepper. Eat with a mixture of fond memories and wistful regret that the Beach House was demolished in the mid-1990s to make way for a new Chinese embassy.
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More links, so that I can clear out my bookmarks: Conan O'Brien's brilliant commencement speech to the Harvard Class of 2000. The Cyberpunk Project, with complete texts of seminal works [via The World According to Carp]. The scarily-accurate Adventures of Action Item [via Wombat File, which also features this enlightening insight into dictionary-making]. The I-wouldn't-know-how-accurate Booty Business [via The Null Device], which I mention here only because of its Madagascar references, honestly officer. And finally, Time's list of 40 sites you've (probably) never heard of [via Ed], which proves that I am not Time's idea of 'you' (and you probably aren't either): the IMDB? The Onion? Hot or Not? Sheesh.
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It's 2001. Did someone mention flying cars?
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Thursday, May 31, 2001
Coldplay's Parachutes reviewed by yours truly at Records Ad Nauseam [mirrored here].
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Ahh, stuff it, I'm sick of writing enigmatic posts and maintaining a dignified silence. ('I vant to be aloooone.') Yes, there is news I can't discuss here yet, but that will change by the weekend. Meanwhile, let's talk about something more important: toasted cheese sandwiches.
A recipe in last week's Age brought back memories of my favourite toasted-sandwich recipe of all time, especially when I finally got around to trying it yesterday. Their version (I'm paraphrasing somewhat): butter two slices of white bread; make a sandwich of cheese and other toastworthy fillings, with the buttered sides out; pan-fry over a low heat, turning once, so that the butter melts and fries the bread into a deliciously light and crispy lattice of brown and yellow, simultaneously warming-through and slightly melting the cheese into a semi-soft blob of dairy goodness.
Mmm-mmm. Particularly satisfying because it includes, not (a) cheese or (b) toastedness, but (c) fried bread, which is ambrosia of the first order.
I loved fried bread when I was a kid. Dad would sometimes make it for us for Saturday breakfasts, dropping a slice of bread into the left-over bacon fat in the frying pan and toasting it into a grey-brown slab of saturated nectar. It was especially welcome when we were away camping, when regular toast was always a little too charred from the fire and came pronged with fork holes. We would munch our crispy slices out in the open air of the Tasmanian west coast, the sea in our nostrils and cc of fat gurgling into our aortas, and all would seem right with the world.
Then came the health-conscious '80s, when Mum and Dad stopped draining the excess animal fat into the white-enamelled dripping pot and started cooking everything in the merest hint of new-fangled canola oil. The fried bread calendar started looking emptier and emptier. By the time I was cooking for myself the thought of rendering down those slippery white rinds into a sizzling pool of flavour had been consigned to the mental toy-box of childhood, to languish alongside such inspired notions as mixing styrofoam and turpentine to make toxic blue-green plasticine.
It took a trip to Tonga to revive my interest. In 1993 I spent a week at Papiloa's Place, a hotel on the edge of Nuku'alofa run by Tonga's first popularly-elected female MP. Papiloa wore sunglasses, sharp white outfits, and the regal air favoured by middle-aged Polynesian women of status. Whether this inspired her chef to redouble his toasted-sandwich-making efforts I don't know, but something had obviously prompted him to spend hours perfecting his art.
Consider the potential blind alleys that await the toasted-sandwich maker. The first: that he or she will simply take an ordinary sandwich and toast it, usually under a griller. While this is a favourite method of school children who have forgotten to eat their packed lunches, it can result in an uneven outer surface, depending on whether the bread was spread evenly with margarine or unevenly with chunky slabs of cold butter straight from the fridge. The latter, pressed firmly onto the slice with the knife, seriously compresses and upsets the underlying bread topography, causing no end of structural problems at the toasting stage.
A second possibility, remote, but which must be allowed for, would be to toast two slices of bread and make a sandwich out of them. We shall not let it detain us any longer.
Third is the use of a toasted-sandwich maker. Just as the word 'computer' has gone from meaning a person who computes to a machine that does the same (only faster), so 'toasted-sandwich maker' has gone from a person skilled in the noble arts of sandwich entoastment to a small electronic device that squashes two slices of soft bread and a spoonful of baked beans into an envelope of granite-encased lava. The result is, of course, a 'jaffle', not a 'toasted sandwich', the two being entirely different branches of the sandwich family-tree. They may share 98 percent of their DNA, but that still leaves the jaffle as the chimpanzee to the toasted sandwich's Homo sapiens—worthwhile in its own right, particularly when filled with bananas, but definitely not the same thing.
Somehow, Papiloa's chef avoided these false paths and stumbled across the one true way to toasted sandwich Nirvana. In a remarkable case of parallel evolution, he independently invented the same method as the Age's columnist: putting the butter on the outside. He avoided the frying-pan, instead turning his sandwiches under the griller for a less glazed effect, but the result was comparable: the first taste to hit your tongue was the saturated saltiness of pure full-cream butter.
But it was the filling that made it. Tonga, being stuck out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, has a limited range of endemic foodstuffs—fish, coconuts, taro (roots and leaves), chickens, and small squealing piglets—but has supplemented these with some of the best the West has to offer: corned beef, corned lamb, Tang®, watermelons, tomatoes, and onions.
Luckily for us, our toast-master avoided all but the last two. He combined chopped fresh tomatoes and chopped spring onions (or scallions if you're American, or shallots if you're Australian) with grated cheese and black pepper to make a filling that, when combined with a glorious fried-bread exterior, made for the toasted sandwich experience of a lifetime. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you:
The Papiloa's Place Perfect Toasted Cheese Sandwich
Cut two medium slices from a fresh white, sourdough or wholemeal loaf. Spread each slice evenly and generously with salted butter. Grate a mild or tasty cheese and mix with finely-diced fresh ripe tomato, chopped spring onions (scallions/shallots), and cracked black pepper. Spoon thickly onto the unbuttered side of one of the bread slices, top with the other slice with the butter on the outside, and place under a medium grill. Toast until the butter has melted, the bread has browned, and the cheese has started to melt; turn and toast the other side. Consume. Close your eyes and think of a brilliant blue sea, church bells on Sunday, and the sleepy streets of Nuku'alofa.
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Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Bill at Wombat File has noticed that I've noticed, and has commented on my thoughts of last Friday:
I feel like I'm blogging just for myself sometimes... but I want or need it to be something other than a journal or a diary... not (I hope) for 'glory', but because the act itself, articulating something, anything, seems worthwhile. Yet the doubt, the basic 'this is just meaningless yattering, a subroutine of Vanity 1.0' is always there.
Ah yes; the Doubt. That feeling that you've slipped into babbling mode, that you're running on empty, that you don't have anything worthwhile to say... that feeling that seems to hit me every two or three months. Some people deal with it by shutting up for a week or two and then carrying on as before. I've dealt with it in the past by changing gear and heading down a side-alley, as long-time readers will be all too aware.
This time around I'm shutting up and tinkering with the decor while I sit here playing Schrödinger's Cheshire Cat, suspended between a smile and nothingness.
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Monday, May 28, 2001
Alice at Strange Brew doesn't post much, but when she serves up cups like Jesus the Monster Truck and this little gem, who's complaining:
I've been concerned about Portugal lately. Have you heard from Portugal? Neither have I. When's the last time anybody heard from them? I wonder if everything's going okay over there... maybe someone should call Spain and ask them to take a peek next door, just to be sure. (Call me paranoid, but I keep picturing Portugal lying there with a broken hip, unable to move, you know?)
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The Face on Mars Trail Map: 'Rating.... easy at start and midsection, with some very steep sections. Take plenty of water and oxygen.'
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Computer scientist David Gelernter has been hanging out at Feed for the past week, talking about his proposals for new operating systems. Sounds like his 'lifestreams' concept is almost ready for prime-time, which should bring a welcome shake-up to the old desktop metaphor.
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I was, of course, being tongue-in-cheek about Neale 'hiding behind a broken URL'. Mentions of 'brutal' attacks, cowardice, and him never having existed should also be taken with several kilograms of salt. Still, when I'm indirectly accused of talking rubbish, them's fightin' words!
The amusing thing is that anyone who runs a reflective series called 'Wetlog Remembers', keeps links-blogging after his widely-announced retirement in a 'mini-wetlog' that's only accessible via the archives, and hijacks a MetaFilter thread for his own amusement and then adds to it for months without anyone noticing is definitely 'blogging for himself' in my book. And that's fine.
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©2001 Rory Ewins