炊きこみご飯 (Takikomi gohan)

 

In Japanese language class, I learned about a dish called "takikomi gohan." I found a vegetarian version and made something close to it. This recipe serves 2-3 and takes almost an hour to make (plus 3 hours prep time).

First soak 4-5 dried shiitake mushrooms in 450 ml water for at least 3 hours. (I could only find fresh shiitake, but it did create a stock of some kind.)

Wash 300 g sushi rice 3 or 4 times to get rid of most of the starch.

Mince an onion. Heat 2 tbsp oil in a high pan and fry the onion in it for 8 minutes. Cut 90 g carrot and 150 g smoked tofu into matchsticks. Slice the shiitake. Add all three to the pan. Stir-fry this a couple of minutes. Then add the water in which you soaked the shiitake, as well as 2 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tbsp sake, 1 tbsp mirin, and 1.5 tsp sugar. Bring the whole thing to a boil and simmer 3 minutes. Then use a sieve to drain only the liquid into a measuring cup. You should have at least 340 ml left, top it up with water if need be. (I had plenty more, 400 ml at least, and used all of it.)

Next, put the rice into a big, high pan, then pour the stock over it. Cover and leave alone (no fire) for 15 minutes to soak. Then add the veggies on top —don't stir!— and bring to the boil. This time, cover and simmer for 18 minutes on the lowest possible fire. After that, turn off the fire, but still leave it for another 15 minutes, without taking off the cover; no peeking!

What you're left with is lots of rice, which has soaked up the flavorful stock and the veggie flavors, mixed with delicious fried and soaked veg. If you're not meatless like me, you could also have used chicken breast instead of tofu.

Book review: "Glennkill - Ein Schafskrimi" by Leonie Swann

 

(Note: This book was published in English under the title "Three Bags Full." I read the Dutch translation.)

It wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I really started considering the animals we share this planet with, and their perception of the world. It's why a crow is my Mastodon profile pic, why none of my recipes have meat in them, and why I post a frog on the daily.

Ethical debates about animals typically revolve around the question of how intelligent they are compared to us, and whether they have what we call self-awareness, consciousness, a sense of morality and so on.

But ethics aside, there's the very simple fact that animals observe the world differently from us, in a way that we can't fathom. We'll never truly know how a pigeon, a badger or a sheep experiences the world. But we can try.

You could go the extreme route, as naturalist Charles Foster did, and live for a while as a badger or a fox, rummaging around in the forest, eating bugs and earthworms, and generally trying to be as badgering or as foxy as you can. 

Or you can do what German writer Leonie Swann did, and write a murder mystery in the Irish countryside, in which a flock of sheep are the sleuths. The result is a book that's funny, thoughtful and, if you're willing to read it that way, philosophical. (It's actually least satisfying as a mystery.)

Most of the book is presented from the perspective of the sheep. We learn that they have a hard time understanding the human perspective, and because we see the world through their eyes, the reader struggles, too. For example, the sheep can't read, so they describe letters by their shape, leaving us to reconstruct what they mean. In this way, the book forces us to take their perspective.

At the same time, their sheepness also affords them benefits: they can eavesdrop on conversations of unsuspecting humans. They can move around the scene of the crime, investigating, without raising any red flags. And they have all the time in the world to ruminate while ruminating.

In the end, the book is a real tour de force, giving us a glimpse into the minds of other beings.

The simplest pasta dish

 I really like the videos of YouTube's Anti-Chef, a guy who tries to reproduce dishes from classic cookbook authors like Julia Child or Michelin-star restaurant chefs. These recipes are often insanely complex and time-consuming, taking an entire day to cook. I like cooking, but not that much. And most of these dishes involve meat, which I've stopped eating. So what I'm saying is, I watch videos from this channel mostly for the entertainment, not for the instruction.

But today was an exception. This dish takes some time (1 hour plus), but it's just about the simplest recipe you can imagine, with the most basic ingredients. The result was great and well worth it.

First, boil a big batch of water. Cut a cross into the skin of 450g of Roma tomatoes, as ripe as you can find, then plunge them in the water for one minute.Take them out again, leave to cool, and then take off the skins. Cut each tomato into quarters, cut out the hard stems, and put them in a saucepan, along with juices. Cover and put on a medium fire for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, peel and halve an onion (don't shred it!) and measure 35g butter.

After the 10 minutes, blend the tomatoes (I used a hand blender to blend in the pan), add the butter and onion halves, and bring to the boil. Put on a very low fire and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 45 minutes.

Now make your pasta for 2. In my case, I made gnocchi, which take only 1 minute of boiling time, but you can use any pasta you like. Just make sure the pasta is timed to be finished together with the sauce. Then just drain the pasta, divide over 2 plates, remove the halved onion from the saucepan, and evenly divide the sauce over the 2 plates. Grate some Parmesan over it and you're done!

The truth about lies

This WaPo article has online tongues wagging about why the Washington Post says things like "falsely claims" and "misstatements" in reference to some things that Trump has said. The things he says are lies, the argument goes, and saying anything else is going easy on The Donald.

The truth of the matter is that things are not that simple. And here's a story to illustrate the problem.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Dubya stated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as an argument for invading the country. At the same time, Saddam Hussein made public statements that Iraq did not, in fact, have WMDs. What was true, and who was lying?

First, as we all know, Iraq did not have WMDs. But does that mean Hussein was not a liar, and Bush was? To answer these two seemingly obvious questions, let's delve into the difference between misstatements and lies.

A misstatement means nothing more than that the thing someone says is false. By that measure, it was Hussein who made a misstatement. But was it also a lie?

A lie is a statement that the speaker believes to be false, but that the speaker pretends is true. A lie is a very basic act of deception, an outward denial of an inward belief. However, what you say does not need to be false for it to be a lie. That is, not every lie is a misstatement.

Here's an example: imagine you're at work, while your spouse is at home. A friend calls you to invite you and your spouse to their birthday party, but you don't feel like going. So you invent an excuse and say, "I'm afraid we can't make it; my spouse has COVID." You hang up, and your spouse calls you to say they have COVID. In this case, what you said was true (you did not make a misstatement), but because you didn't know it was true, you were still lying.

Similarly, in our story, it's possible that Hussein was lying, but still telling the truth. The reasoning is as follows: he asked his nuclear scientists how things were going with his WMD program. Because he was a brutal dictator, those scientists were afraid to tell him the truth, and instead told him it was going great, and that they had a stockpile ready to go. As a result, Hussein falsely believed that he had WMDs, which means that his statement was a lie (even though it was true).

Now here's the cherry on the cake: there's a good chance that this entire story is itself a lie. The Americans, always eager to portray Hussein in the worst light possible, may have concocted this story to make him out to be a liar.

And what about Bush? Did he tell a lie when he claimed Iraq had WMDs? That's a difficult question to answer. You'd need to know if Bush actually believed what some people were telling him, or if he disbelieved it and said it anyway. And to know that, you'd need to be able to read Bush's mind, or access things he said or wrote down in private that would clarify that he was, in fact, lying.

Coming back to Trump, there's overwhelming evidence that Trump is an inveterate liar. There are countless cases of Trump not just making misstatements, but also telling outright lies. The perfect example of this is him losing the election. You could argue that in the first few days after the elections, Trump genuinely believed he hadn't lost. But his persistence in that belief, despite everyone around him saying the opposite, and his repeated, pigheaded and illegitimate attempts to make it true, prove it to be a lie.

However, it doesn't follow that anything that comes out of Trump's mouth is a lie, even if what he says is demonstrably false. The crucial fact is not the truth of falsehood of what he says, but his belief as to the truth or falsehood. I suspect that this is why WaPo is very cautious in calling Trump a liar.

What you may not know about Geert Wilders

Both at home and abroad, Geert Wilders, the leader and sole member of the populist PVV party, which won a quarter of the vote in the Dutch elections of 22 November 2023, has been much debated. Some have claimed that his policy proposals have redefined the Dutch political landscape. That much is true. Others have said that his frank, outspoken views of Islam have forced traditional left-wing parties to reexamine their core tenets. That is true as well. Yet others have rightly pointed out his uncanny ability to dominate political debate in the media, whether the topic is the complex problems caused by immigration from North Africa and Eastern Europe, or the uncertain future of the European Union.

But among all the essays, opinion pieces and debates, many of his critics, not to mention his supporters, seem to have overlooked one very elementary aspect of Geert Wilders. This is an aspect that I feel is crucial if we are to complete the nuanced and multifaceted portrait that we have all made of him. And that is the fact that he’s a despicable asshole.

Can we truly make sense of this man if we disregard the elephant in the room: the persuasive evidence that Wilder is a big steaming turd, consisting of crude, rude, self-aggrandizing megalomania? Surprisingly, even his biographers, who have delved into almost every aspect of his life, from the mysteries surrounding his financial backers to his my-way-or-the-highway flavor of in-party politics, have failed to remark that Wilders is a bottom-feeding windbag, a demagogue, all talk and zero substance, always happy to infuriate without contributing to society in a meaningful way. He appeals to people's basest instincts, bringing out the worst in people, for no other reason that he himself is scum, a depraved, heartless rat of a man, with neither integrity nor principles.

Since no-one else had taken the effort to point out this basic fact about him, I felt the need to make this known, in case some less astute observers had failed to realize this. If, in sharing this insight, I have stated the obvious, I hereby offer my heartfelt apologies.

Fondant potatoes

 I'm always looking for new ways to make potatoes. This one is fun to make, fun to look at, and the result was great --much better than I expected. I made this as a side dish with some redfish from the oven, which worked perfectly together.

Mine didn't look as nice as these, but they tasted awesome.

To start, you need to create a bunch of roughly cylindrical pieces of potato, all the same height (about 5cm/2in) and similar width (that of a medium potato):

• To achieve the same height, create one piece, then use it to "measure" the height of all the other pieces. 
• To achieve the same width, use potatoes that are roughly the same thickness. (I ended up having to halve some cylinders.) If you want to get real fancy (and wasteful), get yourself a round cookie cutter shape to make little towers of perfectly identical widths.

Keep doing this until you have enough potatoes for the amount of people who will be eating this.

Submerge all the towers in a bowl of water for 5 minutes to get rid of the starch, then remove and dry with kitchen paper. Heat a good amount of neutral oil (I used sunflower oil) in a big ovenproof skillet, then place the potato towers upright in the pan. Season and fry on a medium-high fire for a good 6–10 minutes to make the bottoms crispy brown (mine veered toward black). 

Meanwhile, start boiling a good amount of stock, about 250 ml/1 cup. I made veg stock with 1/3 of a stock cube.

When the towers' bottoms are brown, turn them upside down, season again and do the same for the other ends.

Start preheating the oven at 425 F / 220C.

When the towers are brown on both ends, turn down the heat. Tilt your skillet and use a piece of kitchen paper held with tongs to get rid of (most of) the oil. 

Add a good 30g (about 2 tbsp) of butter, along with some aromatics. I used crushed unpeeled garlic cloves and some branches of thyme. When the butter is melted, use a spoon to baste the tops of the towers a bit. The butter will start to brown quickly --when it does, add the stock. Wait for things to settle down, then place the skillet in the oven, and leave it there for 30 minutes.

When you take it out, the stock will be gone. Take the potato towers out and pour the buttery sauce over it.

Nameless vegetarian oven dish #1

 I'm following the Frische Rezepte YouTube channel, and it rarely names its recipes. The titles are just things like "I cook this EVERY DAY!" which, you know, is not a dish. Also, no you don't.

This feeds 3-4 people, without any sides or other food alongside it.

This turned out simple but nice. It does need 50 minutes in the oven, so beware of that. Here's the recipe written out, with some minor adjustments I made.

A red bell pepper

2 big tomatoes

150g feta

500g potatoes

1 small onion

3 cloves garlic

Olive oil

Big bunch of parsley

Lots of dill

3 eggs

200 ml milk (I used full-fat)

2 tbsp vegetable oil

100g flour

10g baking powder

100g cheese (I bought a bag of pre-grated cheese that I knew could go in the oven)

50g mayo

50g yogurt (I used 10% fat)

Shred the onion and 2 garlic cloves. In a tablespoon of olive oil, fry these 5 minutes. Meanwhile, dice the bell pepper, the tomatoes and the feta. Throw them in a big bowl. Grate the potatoes on a coarse grater, squeeze the water out of the grated potatoes, then add them to the bowl. Also add the fried onion and garlic. Chop the parsley and half of the dill and add them. Add salt, mix well.

Preheat the oven to 180C.

In another big bowl, beat the eggs and add the milk, vegetable oil, flour and baking powder. Mix to create a batter-type liquid.

Grate the cheese if it's not grated.

Coat the inside of a baking dish with olive oil. Dump in the potato-veg mix. Pour over the batter. Scatter over the grated cheese. Put in the oven and bake for 50 minutes.

Just before taking it out of the oven, make a little sauce to have with it: mix the mayo and yogurt. Mince or press the third garlic clove and add it. Chop the other half of the till and add it. Mix well.