Posts by Russell Brown
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Oh lord. Now I have to pick two winners from all this awesomeness.
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Hard News: A Capital Great Blend (update), in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The talking part of the evening will be a racy debate
This wasn’t how it was pitched :-)
Did I say "racy"? I meant "constitutional".
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I would just like to say that my promise to bring the Great Blend to Christchurch some time ago weighs heavily on me.
As you may recall, we had to scratch the original plan after the Feb 22 earthquake, and a couple of proposals haven't been able to proceed since then. I have not forgotten you, people of Christchurch.
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Should've put this in the post. The Dan Aux remix of Lorde's 'Tennis Court'.
Very cool.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Nora Leggs,
I think I'm gonna make it ...
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Hard News: Friday Music: Keep Warm With Music, in reply to Tim Welch,
I'm certainly loving what Pretty Lights, Derek Smith is doing. His Country Roads remix is earworm gold.
The video is really worth watching. Having developed a style through the traditional means of crate-digging and sampling, he's spent two and a half years in a process of overseeing the creation of his own breaks with musicians and then actually pressing them to vinyl before working with them.
The idea of telling great musicians to follow their instincts and build a groove to be later shaped into a song is discussed in David Byrne's brilliant book How Music Works. It's what's behind the best Talking Heads records, and Derek Vincent Smith has taken it in another direction. I have great admiration for his creative ethic.
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Meanwhile, merrily made pizza dough and left it to rise earlier -- only noticing when I tidied up that I'd used the old, three-months-out-of-date yeast.
Giving it every chance by leaving it in a pre-warmed oven to rise. Say a little prayer for me ...
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Richard Ram,
Green Seasoning
I like the look of that.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I’m afraid the credit goes to slave labour there.
Damn, I hadn't actually been aware of that. But EU subsidies are also a factor. Useful Australian story on the issue:
Such economies of scale trim costs, but Italy's tomato industry has two key competitive advantages: cheap, sometimes illegal, migrant labour and European Union subsidies. For 20 years, Italy has relied on field workers from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and India. The Rome office of Doctors Without Borders has documented the plight of the migrants in several reports, the last in 2008. They describe a workforce vulnerable to violence and intimidation, living in extreme poverty in disused buildings with no toilets or access to healthcare. According to The Ecologist magazine, which visited Italy's Basilicata region last year, the workers were paid between $25 and $38 a day.
"The stories coming out of the Napoli region where they grow tomatoes are just appalling," says Mildura chef Stefano de Pieri, just back from three months in Italy. People, he says, care about where their coffee comes from but not, it seems, their tomatoes.
An experienced Australian importer, who declined to be named, told The Sunday Age the worker exploitation was "very heavy in the past" and the industry was now more accountable. Conserve Italia, makers of the internationally popular Cirio brand, imported to Australia by Conga Foods, has guaranteed all its production is ethical, while Coles and Woolworths say their home brand suppliers must also comply with ethical supply chain requirements. (The Australian industry is not entirely innocent: migrants, mostly Asian or Indian, are used at harvest, and while the farmers pay a contractor about $22 an hour for each worker, they admit they have no idea how much each worker is paid.)
The European Union has protected the processed tomato industry with subsidies since 1978. Annual payments to farmers and canneries peaked mid last decade at $493 million but are now slowly falling. For every dollar an Italian farmer makes, the EU puts another 41¢ in their pocket, which means they can sell to canneries more cheaply than an Australian farmer. As the subsidies decline, the farmers are asking the canneries for higher prices. This year they got a 26 per cent price increase, which means, finally, they get the same price as Australian farmers: roughly equal to about 4¢ per 400 gram can.
It would be nice to know which brands to avoid on ethical grounds.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to giovanni tiso,
There is no need to pre-cook the garlic and tomato. J Oliver is just trying to complicate your life.
True, but I tend to make huge pots of tomato sauce and freeze them in portions, so mine's ready-cooked anyway.
Can I just say that I am very, very happy for the Italian tomato industry to keep on dumping its tomato products on the New Zealand market for as long as it likes? Good passata, $2 a bottle! Chopped tomatoes, $1 a can!
Actually, passata's useful beyond Italian dishes.
Curry hack: fry onions and garlic, add fresh-ground spices, stir for a bit, add passata, stir some more, and then bring your curry sauce up to the required volume by adding boiling water while stirring. Comes up really nicely.