Food for thought

Porco is a creature of habit – 25 years after he left secondary school, he still eats the same stuff for lunch almost every day. Fried chicken, sambal sotong and bean sprouts from a Malay rice stall. Same stuff, different stall. As Mr Ping (Kungfu Panda’s father – and yes, he is a bird so go figure) says “we are noodle folk, broth runs through our veins”. We are what we eat.

That said, I am not sure if I want my daily lunch to be my last supper. Porco has been reading a book about 50 chefs and what they want for their last meal. Foie gras figures a lot but then so does context. Where you eat, who you eat with and even the background music. Perhaps in this case, it’s a question of what you want being a function of who you are – so chefs have to eat what they have to cook so they end up liking what they have to cook. So much for work-life balance. I once met a chef who was appalled that I’d never had caviar and Krug – he felt I hadn’t lived and he had to remedy that immediately – never mind that I was 20 years old at the time. Context? You want context? You can’t handle context!

At some level, food is about being fed and probably the best meals you’ve ever had are the ones when you’ve needed or wanted food most. So for his last meal, Porco wants what he had after every swimming lesson when he was young (and cold, tired and very hungry) – pork porridge with a raw egg, some spring onions and coriander, a bit of pepper and soy sauce.

Love in a time of cholera

Well, not quite but the most visible symptoms of the swine flu non-pandemic have been paranoia and stupidity – on Wednesday (about a week after the threat level had been raised to orange) the landlord of the building where Porco works announced the commencement of screening for all tenants and visitors to the building on Friday. Yesterday, the threat level was reduced to yellow. No screening today – what a surprise. Last weekend at the public library, they took everyone’s address details but not their temperature – so they can find us if someone gets sick, but they don’t worry about preventing sick people from walking into the place, talk about pearls of wisdom before swine.

And another thing – the stuff looks treatable and apart from cases in Mexico, not many people are dying. I know there were a couple of deaths in the US but those looked like they were not getting treatment until it was too late. Is it something about the state of healthcare in Mexico? Or is it a question of – death, where is thy sting?

Porco’s brother – who has an advanced degree in epidemiology – thinks it is more about life and less about death. He thinks it’s about the way the animals we farm for food lives – pack them in and pump them full of antibiotics. Most of the time everything goes as planned and nothing happens. Once in a while, the drugs don’t work and the sickness gets to people. Like a bad case of agricultural terrorism, people need to be vigilant all the time but the pigs (or more specifically, the viruses) need only be lucky once in a while.

As the words of the Maori haka go – Ka Mate! Ka Ora!

Math and Physics

Porco has been thinking about the present financial crisis – some have blamed it on greed, others on ignorance. Porco thinks of it in terms of physics and metaphysics, plus a bit of relativity and even a little religion.

Let’s start with speed. Speed is the distance travelled over a given amount of time. The Basel Capital Accord is more than twenty years old – and a lot has happened in that twenty years in the financial markets. The central banks simply got left behind. It was a clever idea to divide assets into three – the good, the bad and the uglyPorco remembers addressing a meeting in 2001 with representatives from the G7 central banks and discussing CDO default models with them. Nothing has happened since then. 

The problem with speed is that it is also another name for velocity and that multiplied by mass gives momentum. Given enough momentum, anything – derivatives, financial instruments or space shuttles – can defy the laws of gravity or free itself from anything holding it back, even the rules of financial regulation, and launch into an orbit of indeterminate shape or duration. We are venturing into territory where no financial regulator has ever been, boldly or otherwise. Sometimes, that which has launched itself into space could come crashing back to earth, burning up upon re-entry.

Now Porco is no longer religious as he was in his youth but he is reminded about the bit in Revelation where the seven angels are given trumpets and then another angel joins them – so there were eight. The angels blow their trumpets and by the time the fifth angel sounds its trumpet, a star falls to earth and to him is given the key to the bottomless pit. Then the locusts arrive.

Singapore Biennale 2008

So its theme is “wonder” – Webster’s dictionary (I know, I know … American) defines the word:

¹won·der

Pronunciation: \ˈwən-dər\

Function: noun

Etymology:

Middle English, from Old English wundor; akin to Old High German wuntar wonder

Date:

before 12th century

a cause of astonishment or admiration, the quality of exciting amazed admiration, rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious or new to one’s experience, or a feeling of doubt or uncertainty.

Hmmm, I wonder …

Capella

Porco has been a fan of Chef Gary for some time – this afternoon he outdid himself. Egg cocotte, salmon tartare, leek and potato soup with grilled scallop, beef tenderloin with breaded veal sweetbreads and chocolate mousse with mascarpone canelloni in dark cherry sauce. Dreamy. 

Pigs don’t fly

If only – Porco has been on his travails again before the holidays. Hong Kong, Korea and Mumbai. Worst part of it is the food on planes. Singapore Airlines food is terrible as is their wine.

In Hong Kong, managed a very quick lunch at Amber. Soothing decor if a little cramped. The food was tired and a trite too deconstructed. Poached prime rib was separated into various things to be served. I had a sip of the consomme but left it by the time I finished with the meat, it had gone cold. Highlight of Porco’s two weeks away was Konkan Cafe in Mumbai – superb food, airy interiors and sensible wine pairings. Crab, mutton and chicken – all delicately spiced and finely cooked. Chef Ananda Solomon is a genius.

Back home, Porco was sad to learn that Chef Dorin Schuster has returned to Bali – in fact, little did we realise at the time that the evening last year when he cooked Porco’s birthday dinner was his second last night in Singapore. Good thing he joined us for a glass of Pinot then – we will have to seek him out in Bali.

Fusion Delusion

You know thing have come to a head when someone has made an ice cream out of Chinese claypot rice, lap cheong and all. Pace Heston Blumental and the rest of the liquid nitrogen gang, I’m going to spend the rest of the evening with a copy of Alice Water’s Chez Panisse Cooking but therein lies another kitchen dilemna. Fresh, seasonal produce? Not in Singapore. At least we will have some good wan ton noodles to look forward to in Hong Kong tomorrow.

Wherever I lay my head

A couple of things happened over the weekend. Small things but they made me wonder – Mrs P almost knocked a cyclist over because he was cycling against the traffic on a one way street with no lights at 8 pm. When we got to the restaurant we found none of the wait staff spoke English so our Egyptian friend was struggling a little. Then because of the earlier incident, Mrs P understandably did not want to drive home so I drove – as I pulled out of the car park, two women ran across the drive way. Now the common theme is that all these incidents involved foreign workers and tourists in one way or another – as Emerson once wrote, you can never go home again. Time to emigrate. 

Six, Twelve

2007 Hits – Panorama restaurant (Mount Cook, NZ), Xbox 360, South Africa, The Prestige, Denis Min-Kim, White Shadows.

2007 Misses – After Dark by Haruki Murakami, Supreme Commander, Whampoa Club in Beijing, Long Road out of Eden by the Eagles.  

Wine review – here

2008 Resolutions – none

2008 Wishes – lose 10 lbs, Bouchard Finlayson, Hanami, A380, Tetsuya’s

A tale of many cities

Dickens is a god. Not God but a god. If you wanted describe a year, any year for that matter, in about a hundred or so words you could you could hardly do better than this.

For Porco, this has been a year of change. A year for seeing possibilities. A new job, a new home and a new stage in life. 2007 was also a year in airplanes – of hitherto undiscovered continents, the thrill of adventure  and the unmissable relief at the prospect of returning home.

The inner life has also been stretched and taken further than it has been for a long time. New facets, old friends and re-discovered virtues exercised. Time also for some indulgences to be exorcised – for there is now less time. We are older and no wiser. We are less patient and more easily tired. We now have responsibilities where we had none. We were forty. Now add one.