This is a very simple salad of frisee (often called curly endive) and a warm dressing and a couple of poached eggs. It originally had bacon in it, but I don’t eat bacon so I just fried up a chopped shallot, whisked in a bit of mustard, thyme and vinegar, then sprinkled the finished thing with generous amounts of pimenton.  The important thing(s) are the poached eggs, and I’ve included pictures of how I poach my eggs here. It’s tasty. I love frisee, it is one of my favourite lettuces.

Salad for winter
Adapted from Mark Bittman. Serves 2

• A head of frisee, or baby curly endive
• 4 fresh eggs
• A shallot, chopped
• 2-3 tbsp olive oil
•  2-4 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• Leaves from a couple of thyme sprigs
• Pimenton (sweet paprika) for sprinkling

Wash and dry the frisee and put into a large salad bowl. Set aside. Put a large pan of salted water on to boil. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a fry pan and add the shallot, cooking until barely golden. Whisk in the vinegar, mustard and thyme and bring just to a boil, then pour over the frisee and toss thoroughly. Add a hefty sprinkle of pimenton and toss again. Divide between serving bowls.

Here is how I poach eggs: I bring that big pot of water to a brisk simmer. I like it when there are little bubbles climbing up the sides of the pan, like a newly poured glass of Coke. Then I add enough distilled white vinegar so I can smell the acid when I stick my nose right over the pan. I’d say a tablespoon, maybe two, but I just keep adding ’til I get that vinegar smell. Then, I crack the egg into a measuring cup…

And then quickly flip it into the pan of water.

I repeat for the second egg. I like to cook two eggs at a time. I turn the burner down as low, whack on the lid, as it will go and let the egg guys swim in there for  3-5 minutes until they look set. I cherish a runny yolk, so I err on the side of undercooked. I fish them out with my slotted egg draining spoon…

And then pop them on to the finished salad, adding a sprinkle of pimenton and salt and pepper for good measure. Eat immediately.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I like pasta because pasta is more about shape and form than flavour. The medium is the message, style before substance, form before function etc.  I like papardelle because it cooks up to big ole flappy flaps and it comes in angry-looking fists, and I like to allocate a fist per person. Actually, here, in my lazy whatever’s-in-the-fridge take on Heidi’s papardelle with spiced butter, it was one and a half fists per person. Heh. Fist.

Here’s the deal with this dinner: you take a mess of butter, cook some shallots in it, toss in most of your spice rack, set it aside, cook up your pasta flaps, toss in a vegetable, some nuts and as much butter as it takes. It is, surprisingly, not overwhelmingly rich. The butter doesn’t so much sauce the pasta as gild it, delivering a warm burst of spice, and while Heidi used new spring asparagus I used a single serve bag of Safeway rocket. I’m ambivalent about rocket: too often it’s piled on top of foods where it’s just plain unnecessary, but here the bitterness and faint crunch sets off the butter beautifully. It took minutes to make and was wonderful on a cold night. Do it.

Spiced butter papardelle
Adapted from 101 Cookbooks. Serves 2-3

• A quantity of papardelle (I always eyeball pasta quantities)
• 60g butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 3 shallots, finely chopped
• 1/4 tsp ginger
• 1/4 tsp sweet paprika
• 1/4 tsp ground coriander
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• Fat pinch cayenne
• Fat pinch turmeric
• Fat pinch red chilli flakes
• Handful of mint, roughly chopped
• Handful of parsley, roughly chopped
• A handful of hazelnuts, toasted in a dry pan and coarsely crushed (I used my housemate’s mortar and pestle and it was surprisingly easy. Could I be persuaded that mortars and pestles aren’t just a poseurish waste of time?)
• Couple of big handfuls of rocket

Melt together the butter and olive oil over medium-low heat, then cook the chopped shallots until soft and translucent and the butter is a little brown, around 10 minutes. Meanwhile, put on a big pan of salted water to boil.  Stir in the spices along with some salt and pepper and remove from heat.  Cook the pasta; drain the pasta; return pasta to cooking pan. Add the butter, a little at a time, tossing well after each addition until you think you’ve had enough. There will be leftover butter, and it is very, very useful. I’ve been using it in my scrambled eggs in the morning and feeling fancy. Toss in the herbs, nuts and rocket, giving it all a minute to slump and wilt a little. Serve immediately.

Yeah, I’ve been a little preoccupied. But it feels so nice to come back home to my own little, poorly maintained, shaggy around the edges blog top post things I’ve made lately.

This kale tart is technically a mistake, but a delicious mistake. Heidi called for turnip greens, and I thought I’d just substitute a bunch of whatever green looked good at the markets. When I folded everything together I knew I’d made a mistake, that this wouldn’t be the smooth, silken tart Heidi made.  That said, kale loves to be baked in any form, and this was still delicious.

 Kale tart

Adapted from 101 Cookbooks. Serves 4.  

• Bunch of kale, stems removed
• Clove of garlic
• 2 eggs and 1 yolk
• 3/4 cup cream
• 1/4 cup vegetable stock
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• Handful of grated parmesan

For shell:

•  2 cups flour - I like to use wholemeal
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1/2 cup cold water
• 1 tbsp lemon juice or cider vinegar

First, make the shell. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Combine salt and flour in a bowl, then drizzle in the olive oil. Work in well with a fork - you’re after a lot of clumps. Drizzle in the water, mixing after each addition, until the mixture clumps. Turn onto a floured counter and knead once or twice to form a round mass, then roll out and line a tart tin. Press into the corners, then trim excess. Prick the bottom of the tart a few times with a fork. Line with baking paper and fill with pastry weights or dry beans.  Bake for 10 minutes, then remove the paper and weights and let it crisp up for 5.

Meanwhile, rinse the kale well and roughly chop it. Heat a slug of olive oil in a large pan and toss in the kale and crushed garlic clove. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5-10 minutes until wilted and cooked. Drain, then either transfer to a food processor or chop more finely than I did above. If you’re doing it by hand whisk together eggs and yolk, cream, stock and mustard in a bowl, then fold in the kale. If you’re doing it in a food processor just drizzle all those in with the motor running. Tip filling into tart shell, sprinkle with parmesan, and bake for around 30 minutes until the centre is set.

I do, however, see the point of cramming as much chocolate as physically possible into bread. I love you, David Lebovitz.

This bread was 110% worth it, and quite easy. I will add one caveat, though. My loaf turned out delicious but dense and quite crumbly, to the point where it was next to impossible to cut a solid slice. David suggests to another reader with a similar problem that the cause might be overbaking, but I suspect it’s underworking the dough. The dough is very soft and sticky, more like cake batter than bread dough, making it impossible to turn out and knead normally. David used a mixer with a dough hook to work the dough, and suggests readers sans mixer can stir with a wooden spoon for five minutes, but that’s just impractical. Instead, when I make this again I shall knead the dough with my hands inside the bowl for a good 10 minutes before setting the dough aside. Which is a big sacrifice for me, since I hate using my hands when I cook as I’m squeamish about getting foodstuffs under my nails, another indication I’ve failed as a food douche.

 Also: this is the only picture I’ve been able to upload. Wordpress, or my server, or the internet, or something is making it literally impossible to upload images and I don’t know why. Please forgive me. Imagine a loaf of bread, only made of chocolate.

Chocolate bread
Via David Lebovitz. Makes one 23cm loaf.

• 3/4 cup milk
• A packet of dry yeast
• 6 tbsp sugar
• 55g butter
• 175g chocolate, either chips (I found great ones) or a block chopped
• An egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 tsp instant coffee if you have it in the house
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder, Dutch-process by preference
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts of your choice - I went with walnuts

Heat the milk to tepid in a saucepan, then decant to your largest bowl. Whisk in a tablespoon of sugar, then sprinkle the yeast over the surface. Set aside somewhere warm to soften.

Meanwhile, melt together 85g of the chocolate and the butter in a small heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water, then set aside to cool. Whisk together the cocoa powder and flour in another bowl. Whisk the  instant coffee, remaining sugar, salt and the egg into the milk and yeast mixture. Sternly stir in half the cocoa powder and flour mixture, followed by half the butter and chocolate, then remaining flour mixture and chocolate mixture. Stir with a wooden spoon to form a stiff batter, then get in there with your hands and knead in the bowl for 5-10 minutes to get the gluten strands going. Cover the bowl and set aside to rise for 2 hours.

When it’s had its time stir in the remaining chocolate and the nuts, being sure to spend some time folding the mixture over on itself for a good minute or so. Oil a 23cm loaf tin, then press in the dough. Set aside somewhere warm to rise. When it’s still got 10 minutes to go preheat the oven to 175 degrees C.

Bake for 35-40 minutes until the loaf sounds hollowish when tapped. Cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes before turning out.

(image ganked from Stumptuous)

Reflection on feminine comportment and body movement in other physical activities reveals that these are also frequently characterized, much as in the throwing case, by a failure to make use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities.

- Iris Marion Young

I don’t want to bury the lede: I’m going to argue that participating in sport, or just plain old fashioned exercise, can be considered a feminist act. Nay, should. I’m going to start with two primal scenes, that lodged a bee in my bonnet about women and the gym. First: when I was an undergrad some friends asked me out to lunch, but I declined as I had a previous date with my gym bros. One of my friends said she was concerned, as I was perfectly thin and didn’t need to use the gym. Second: at a recent powerlifting competition I had a long conversation with a couple, both lifters, about what amount of muscle was ‘appropriate’ for a women. One of the female competitors, a former bodybuilder, was not ‘appropriate.’

I mention these moments for two reasons. First, I had a moment many fat acceptance activists would be familiar with, a sense of deep rage at the expectation that I should curtail my size so as not to exceed the bounds of what is ‘appropriate’ for a woman. Second, I realised just how interwoven gym use is with weight loss and appearance for women. Both are problems that can be addressed, I think, by finding a sport, an exercise, hell, just something that makes you feel strong and alive and fronting up often and with gusto. I’m focusing on strength here because, while I’ve participated in a few sports in my post-high school neo-jock phase (boxing and fencing, mostly), it’s a strength sport that’s turned me into a real physical activity evangelist, and also because strength training, muscle and the concept of strength itself occupy an ambivalent place in many womens’ bodily practices. So here is why I reckon invading the gym, the playing field, the pool, whatever your activity of choice is, is a feminist act.

1.    Muscular Women
The Queen of Internet Muscle, Stumptuous, recently posted a link through her twitter to this online symposium on womens’ strength training (registration required), which I’m very disappointed to have missed back in March.  Included was this report by Leigh Peele on womens’ perceptions’ of bulkiness.  I encounter far too many uninventive ‘[risk group]’s perception of [issue]’ studies, so my eyes normally glaze over at such reports, but this one really caught my attention, as I’d never really considered what it is that women mean when they use the word ‘bulky.’

Truth be told I have little patience for such concerns, that strength training or weights might develop unwanted bulk, which is unfair for two reasons.  First, at 160cm and 54kg, my size and ‘bulkiness’ has never been an issue for me, socially or personally. I’ve never had the experience of a body that takes up more space than its supposed to.  Second, its counterproductive to make a rigid distinction between good, politically reflexive bodily practices and bad ‘unenlightened’ ones.  I would love to draw a line in the sand and say training for the pure, ecstatic pleasure of it, for the new bodily capacities and possibilities it can open up is good and training to change the body’s appearance is bad, but this is just counterproductive, and also diminishes the efforts of those for whom weight loss or appearance are a major motivation.  Still, Leigh Peele’s entry is unsettling, inasmuch as it reveals just how low the threshold for ‘bulk’ is if women like Jessica Biel are deemed ‘too bulky.’

Muscular women occupy an ambivalent place in feminine representational regimes, a place where the 80s hardbody stands alongside action heroines like Linda Hamilton and Demi More in ‘GI Jane,’ lesbian serial killers (for instance, the prison guards and girlfriend in the video for ‘Telephone’) and fetishized freaks, such as Kim Chizevsky in ‘The Cell’ (warning: clip not necessarily NSFW, but definitely on the weird side).  The muscular woman is also an object of suspicion.  I vividly remember, for instance, the camera suspiciously following female Chinese swimmers competing in a summer olympics during the 90s, their broad shoulders apparently evidence of drug use.  And lets not forget the cruel case of Caster Semenya, who was ‘found out’ as another unreal non-woman, and how her magnificently muscled sprinters’ body was used as evidence of her guilt.  In each case the muscular woman is an exception, a worked-upon aberration.  Even such a sensitive feminist scholar as Susan Bordo cannot see the muscular woman, in this case the bodybuilder, as anything other than an overgrown anorectic, enfolding the muscular woman’s bodily practice into the familiar narrative of the eating disordered woman.  ‘As for the anorectic,’ Bordo argues, ‘who literally cannot see her body as anything other than her inner reality dictates… so for the body-builder a purely mental conception comes to have dominance over her life… Dictation to nature of one’s own design for the body is the central goal for the body-builder, as it is for the anorectic.’ (152, if you’re interested).

I’m not arguing that appearances aren’t important, but I do think we need to find a different way to think about, talk about and, yes, valorize these bodily practices, one that opens up new possibilities for women, and new politics about the body.

2.    What can a body do?
People don’t believe me when I say I like powerlifting because it feels good, because it looks like it shouldn’t. Most people haven’t had the experience of lifting heavy, and assume that it must be painful, or frightening, or both.  But it’s not like you immediately begin deadlifting 200kg; you start small, and gradually build up, and the rate at which your strength improves, if you’re learning correct form and have support and coaching, is intoxicating. What once felt impossible is now light and easy; you think less; you experience the wonderful clarity of finding your limit. Yes, I said clarity, and I mean it. When you’re lifting something at or near your physical limit, a continually moving point, you can’t think about anything else other than what you’re doing. You are, to use a hackneyed phrase, in the moment, continuous with what you’re doing, totally focused on the movement of the bar and your body. And failure, when you hit that limit, doesn’t hurt, and it isn’t frightening. You should have a spotter to make sure you don’t get hurt, and it simply means that you can’t lift any more. Lifting heavy is a peak physical experience, and it changes the way you see yourself and your body.

That’s just my experience of one sport; there are countless other stories from other gyms and other sports. This is what I want us to talk about when we talk about sport and exercise, these profound, sustaining moments where we uncover capacities we didn’t realise we had, and it’s these experiences that I want to foreground when talking about sport and exercise as feminist practices - as moments of intense, pleasurable peak experience, practices that build communities, and, yes, that create health. I want a feminist ethic that valorizes these moments of experimentation, of asking what can these bodies do.

3.    Marginal Muscle
In discussions of health-giving exercise, strength training and other muscular sports barely warrant a mention, particularly in government recommendations for exercise.  There could be a number of reasons for this, not least material factors like the need for equipment (though, as Stumputous proves, not as much equipment as you think) and effective coaching, but these could be easily overcome, or it could be because of perceptions that strength training is the domain of bodybuilders, football players and doofy gym bros. Which I mention to introduce another important element of this athletic feminist ethic I’m gesturing to: the difficult question of health.

To crudely caricature a number of very important feminist interventions into health, health is politically contested along two axes and directions.  First, health is a continuously contested normative category, a site for the exercise of power, where those who charge themselves with administration (in many senses) of health decide who, and what, is healthy.  Secondly, health is an imperative, a hail which we’re called to respond to. I mention this to respond to concerns that the category of ‘health’ does violence to particular excluded groups and people. These are important concerns and important arguments, but I don’t want to abandon this category of ‘health.’ I want to move away from a moral imperative of the maximised body to an ethics of potential and capacity.

This is very personal for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I have  chronic, at times disabling arthritis, which I manage with heavy medication and exercise.  It’s no exaggeration to say that if I didn’t regularly engage in heavy weights I would be nowhere near as mobile as I am now.  I’ve found, through experience, that weights help with pain and mobility even when I’m supposed to (according to my rheumatologist) avoid physical activity, such as during a flare.

Again, I want to acknowledge that it is much easier for me to enter into certain spaces than it is for others.  It’s easier for me to talk cavalierly about gaining size when my size is not an issue for me. The point is that <i>all</i> bodies have potential, wonderful potential, exciting possibilities to be explored. I was talking to a friend about this ridiculous, overblown entry, and he said it reminded him of a famous quote from Deleuze, where he says:

The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody.

Now if you’ll excuse me it’s time to stop thinking and hit the gym.

The combination of leek, dill and gruyere is mind blowingly great. Like macaroni cheese with green bits. Do it.

Leek casserole, sans tuna
Adapted from the Bitten Word. Serves 4-6.

• Two small or one large leek, halved, rinsed thoroughly, and sliced
• Fat handful of dill, coarsely chopped
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp flour
• 80g gruyere, grated
• 2 cups milk
• Fat pinch of nutmeg
• 200g pasta or short egg noodles (I used regular pasta as I couldn’t find short egg noodles)
• A handful of potato chips, crushed, if you aren’t a pussy like me

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Put the pasta on to boil. Melt the butter in a large, heavy pan over medium-low heat and add the leeks. Cook, covered, prodding occasionally, for about 8-10 minutes, until softened and fragrant but not dark. Increase the heat and stir in the flour and cook for a minute or two until it no longer tastes floury. Reduce heat again and stir in the milk, a little at a time, allowing the flour to absorb the milk with each addition. Cook sauce til its thick and creamy, then toss in the gruyere, dill, nutmeg and a little salt and pepper. Drain the pasta and stir into the sauce, then tip into a baking dish. Finish with crushed potato chips if you’re using them. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until a little brown and golden and perfect looking. Eat in front of the heater.

Let me back up. I’ve been a vegetarian for fifteen years now. For reference, I started when I was twelve, and I haven’t stopped since. I’ve had extensive bloodwork to investigate my arthritis, and my levels of every vitamin and mineral except vitamin D are completely normal, and vitamin D comes from the sunlight I strenuously avoid.  If you’re reading this and thinking no, I tried being a vegetarian and I got totally sick because I am a delicate and unique snowflake and I need meat, then I am calling bullshit on you. If you got sick during your tenure as a vegetarian it’s because you did it wrong, and it is incredibly easy to do right. How do you do vegetarianism right? You eat a lot of different things, you eat often, and you quit your complaining.

I’m cranky because I’ve had a few encounters with anti-vegetarian and vegan sentiment, and I’m fed enough to want to declare to the whole internet that cheap jokes about sickly vegetarians are childish, and I am not the only one. I went to a comedy festival event on Monday where no fewer than three comics had a go at vegetarians and vegans, making lame jokes about ruined immune systems and lethargy and weakness, and I was wishing some vegan strongman would come in and throw a giant sweet potato at each shitty comic.

To be honest, the biggest reason for me remaining vegetarian so long was a teenage desire to prove it’s not a phase. After ten years I realised it wasn’t a phase, but I had no real desire to eat meat when I was healthy and energetic and ate better than most meat eaters I know. I love food, and I wouldn’t deprive myself, and there is a world of great food without meat.

So grow up, haters, and eat some goddamned kale, just as my cat does.

Pan fried gnocchi and kale
Serves two. Via 101 Cookbooks.

• A bunch of kale
• A packet of gnocchi
• A garlic clove, smashed
• Parmesan, if you eat it.

Remove the stems from the kale and slice finely. Put into a colander and wash very well. Heat a slug of olive oil in a large pan over medium-high heat and add the gnocchi in a single layer. Turn once, when appropriately browned and crusty.  Turn in the kale and garlic and cook, 4-5 minutes, until the kale reduces a little and tastes cooked. Add salt and pepper. Serve with parmesan, if you eat it, not that I’d judge if you didn’t.

You know what’s the best, you guys? Sunday night broadcast television in Australia. It’s been so long since I’ve sat down in front of honest-to-goodness scheduled bust out the clicker and Chocolate Wheatens broadcast TV, and it’s rather soothing. There’s Juliana Margulies’ very nice hair doing something legal, then Hugh Laurie as Sherlock Holmes in ‘House,’ which has gone downhill since they took away his drug problem. The only thing that would make it perfect would be a good, old fashioned ep of ‘SVU’ to round out the evening, but until then I go to bed on a Sunday at 10.30, all snug and contented and ready for the week.

I’ve taken to eating brussels sprouts with sriracha, ginger and cashews on Sunday nights, and you should, too.

Sunday Sprouts
Via The Bitten Word. Serves me.

• 1/4 cup cashews. The lovely boys at the Bitten Word chopped theirs; I am a lazy cow and did not
• Roughly 225 g brussels sprouts, halved and shredded
• 1 or so tsps sriracha (I went a little less than this for I am chilli wuss)
• Half a thumb-sized knob of ginger, grated
• Squeeze of lemon

Heat a splash of olive oil in a frypan over mediumish heat. Add the ginger and prod it for a minute or two until it smells good, then add the cashews and prod a bit more. Add the brussels sprouts and sriracha, increase the head to high, and cook until brussels sprouts are softened and a little wilted, about four minutes.

Tip into your chosen TV eatin’ bowl, hit with lemon juice and salt and pepper, then eat while pondering what hair products they use to get Juliana Margulies’ hair so bouncy.

These honey and hazelnut biscuits did exactly that. They are wheaty and warm, layered, complex, creamy with vanilla and barely crushed hazelnuts, not much to look at but completely, remarkably delicious. They keep well. Take two and call me in the morning.

Honey and Hazelnut Wheat Biscuits
Adapted from an elderly Margaret Fulton cookbook I brought home from an op shop long ago. Makes ~ two dozen

• 125g hazelnuts
• 125g butter, softened
• 2/3 cup honey
• 3/4 cup raw sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup wheatgerm
• 2 cups wholemal flour
• 1 cup plain flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• Fat pinch salt

Toast hazelnuts in a very hot oven on a baking papered tray for 10-15 minutes, until the kitchen smells like all things good. Tip hot hazelnuts into a clean tea towel. Fold the towel over, then rub off the skins. Put the nuts into a heavy bag - I used a zip loc - and vent your anger with a rolling pin until they are coarsely crushed. Reduce heat to 180 degrees C.

Cream together butter, honey and sugar.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time, followed by the vanilla. In a separate, smaller bowl, whisk together the flours, wheatgerm and salt, then fold the dry ingredients into the butter and sugar and eggs. Fold in the nuts.

Scoop teaspoon-sized balls of dough out - I use my cookie scoop - and quickly roll between your palms to neaten them. Arrange, a dozen at a time, on a baking papered tray. Flatten a little with a fork dipped in water. Bake for 10-12 minutes until lightly golden but still soft. Cool on a rack. Have a sit down.

Seriously, you guys, I’m so over writing about food right now. Let’s just eat pancakes.

Pancakes
Via Deborah Madison. Amounts given make enough for four; I usually halve the quantities and freeze leftovers. Yep, you can freeze pancakes, just wrap tightly in plastic wrap while still warm, then zap (wrapped) in the microwave for a minute or two.

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 - 3 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
• 2 eggs
• 3 tbsp butter, melted
• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 1 tsp vanilla

Whisk together dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients. Combine both with a fork to form a faintly lumpy batter. If the batter is too thick, thin down with additional buttermilk or water.

Heat a fry pan over medium heat, and grease with a spray of oil. The first pancake will be ruined as you attempt to get the heat right, but you’ll get to eat it straight away so that’s a bonus. I use a spring-type ice cream scoop to scoop out my batter in roughly 1/4 cup quantities, and I recommend it. Pour out your first pancake, and wait until bubbles form, then burst, on the surface before flipping. Flip, and wait 10-20 seconds, until the pancake puffs slightly, to remove. Transfer cooked pancakes to a plate tented with foil in a low oven.

I like to serve mine with a punnet of hulled, quartered strawberries macerated in a splash of balsamic vinegar and a little sugar.