Food – Page 43 – Robot Claw

Spaghetti a la Supertaster

September 9, 2015

Over five years ago I introduced the world to my personal spaghetti recipe. Since then I’m sure you’ve all been wishing I’d given more detail and today I’m happy to oblige!

I present therefore the step-by-step pictorial recipe for my delicious version of spaghetti bolognaise!

Start by cutting about 1/3rd of a yellow onion into small pieces.

Sweat the onion in a light sprinkle of oil. If it gets clear (or even worse brown) you’ve gone too far!! You’ll want to put a big pot of water on high heat now as well for the pasta.

Add half a pound of 93% ground beef.

Stir it up with the onions, and cook on medium heat until it looks like this:

Have a nibble at this point. If it’s delicious and meaty you’re on the right track!

Next you want to add a single beef stock cube and stir it in. Let it simmer for a minute or so and taste it again. Unless you’ve ruined it, it should taste a bit like Vegemite now.

The water should be boiling now, so put in a decent portion of spaghetti. The exact amount is up to you, but you’ll want to have enough so you won’t be sad but not so much you’ll get fat! Leave the spaghetti cooking and return to the meat.

Open a small tin of tomato paste and remove a small amount. There are two important notes here: the paste has to be unflavoured, and you need to add less than you expect! It’s more for colour than flavour!

Stir it in well until it looks like this:

And last but not least, add a pinch of salt, ideally from a Rilakkuma shaker:

Now cover it and let simmer on low heat while the spaghetti finished cooking. It will look like this once it’s al dente:

Everything is ready! The recipe is enough for two portions, so plate half the meat and pasta with style…

And enjoy with an adult beverage:

This is an easy to prepare meal with a refined and manly taste. The delicate blend of salty and salty tastes is sublime to those with the unique palette of a supertaster and I’m sure if you give it a try you’ll enjoy it as much as I do 🙂

Summer In Berlin

July 27, 2015

I’m been experiencing the ennui of one not on an overseas vacation, so it’s time to remedy the situation. Therefore, with great pomp and ceremony, later this week we will be going to Germany!

This is of course no sudden decision. This trip has been in the late-planning stages for some weeks, the early-planning stages for a couple of years and the distant-planning stages for a lifetime. I do of course have Teutonic blood in my veins, and it’s time to return to das Vaterland and reclaim my throne!

But this is no solo trip! I will be traveling with a company of four others: Kristin, Bernard, Jim and Alois. Starting and ending in Frankfurt, we’re going to do the whole country in style together – from castles to beer-houses – wearing our German last names (yes, even Jim) with pride. Here’s our route:

Very little is planned! We’ve booked out hotels and our trains, as well as a coach trip to Castle Neuschwanstein (in the picture above), but the rest of the adventure is an open book. I suspect there’ll be a lot of this though:

I estimate there will be about 24 hours in total of rail and coach transport during our two week trip. To keep morale high as we ride the rails, I have prepared a ‘German Travel Quiz’ for Bernard. 25 fiendish trivia questions in five topics await him! He only has to score 60% per topic to win up to five prizes, but if he loses he will forsake his ‘escrow prize’ (in other words, I’ll keep it). If he gets at least 60% on every quiz he will win the ultimate prize, but if he fails even once he’s going to give me his handheld computer from the 1980s. Maybe. We’ll see 🙂

This promises to be a memorable and epic vacation. Needless to say you can – and should – follow our travels here on this very blog!

Food Competition

April 7, 2015

When Bernard and I were younger, we were very competitive about food. This has developed in me a bit of a streak that continues to this day, and truth-be-told KLS has even picked up on it a bit. Today I’ll share the horrible history that led to this.

Ah, raisin toast! That beloved breakfast bread of Oz! Every time I visit I buy this stuff because it’s delicious, and I’ve loved it since I was a child. Bernard did too (and mum and dad), and in our house a loaf of this would disappear very quickly – even in a single day. This became problematic, and after too many trips back to the kitchen to toast two more pieces only to find the bag empty one started to consider other options.

The first solution was a bigger toaster. I recall we had one that toasted 4 slices at once. A perfect solution you may think: every member of the family could have one delicious warm slice simultaneously! Alas, the truth was simply that B and I were eating 4-slices-at-a-time and making the loaf disappear even faster.

So the next solution was to buy more of it. Specifically two loaves. One for me and one for him. I actually recall this happening more than once, and coveting mine so no pilferers could steal my bread! I used to hide it away so I wouldn’t feel pressured to eat it all at once. Such was the competition for raisin toast in our home.

Chips were another problem area in the early (pre-teen) years. The family would buy a bag to share but it would disappear very quickly. This led to binge eating – if I didn’t take two massive handfuls now next time the bowl came to me there may be none left! It was alarming how quickly B and I would pac-man away a family sized bag.

Of course we solved this by buying bags for each of us. These would actually be stored in different parts of the cupboard to prevent thievery. In time our tastes diverted – I bought salt and vinegar, he bought chicken – so it became easier to know who owned what. Sadly the seeds of gluttony had been planted, and even then both of us easily ate an entire bag in one sitting (often on bread, as we ate a loaf-load of chip sandwiches).

In the years just before I left Oz B had moved onto a refined diet of CC’s (basically Doritos) and Coke. He used to hide the CC’s in his room, as if he thought I couldn’t find them there 🙂

The most amazing food competition occurred at dinner time. We both loved ‘oven fries’, especially the McCains shoestring type called ‘Superfries’. Needless to say when cooking them for dinner, we’d put the entire bag onto an oven rack every time. There would be squabbles about the division of the fries once ready though, and neither of would be satisfied if the other got more.

Incredibly – and I honestly can hardly believe this is true as I type it – this led to a system we developed to ensure fairness. One of us would divide the fries onto two plates, and the other would choose. This put the burden on the divider to make the portions as equal as possible lest they miss out. Such fry-democracy! Our house was nothing if not progressive!

However this itself led to a dark turn of events. The mania between B and myself for food equity led to – and I swear on Yossie’s shiny silver coat that this is true – us dividing the fries absolutely equally by counting them. I kid you not! I recall quite vividly portioning the fries out on two plates one fry at a time to ensure they were as equal as possible. I would even consider the length of individual fries (I wouldn’t put a long one on one plate with a short one on the other). I know this is madness, but this was serious business to me and B!

Even today this continues, albeit in a reduced form. In January B gave me the hairy eyeball when he thought I was taking more than my allotted portion of chips from the dinner table when we got takeaway. And at Chinese he always insists on getting two fried rices rather than sharing one. And as I said, KLS has picked up the habit, and every time we get Mr Subb guards her nuggets maniacally from my thieving hands.

Old habits die hard I guess.