Prick With A Fork

Food, politics, and culture are three of the Prick’s great loves, so a story which hits the trifecta – such as Barack Obama’s youthful forays into dog-eating, and, more importantly, his bragging about it in a memoir written before he’d ever accomplished a damn thing – is, around these parts, a bit of manna from heaven .

Or as they say in the Oval Office, “Mastiff From Heaven”. Boom-tish.

About the only line of defense Obama’s people have managed to come up with in his defense is “youthful indiscretion”, and isn’t it unfair to attack the man for something he did as a child, unlike Mitt Romney strapping his dog to the top of the car when he was in his thirties? But the point is not just that he did it, but that he wrote about it, and what that says about the man. Even if he was a kid at the time, Obama’s dog-eating matters, and matters far more than whatever damn fool thing Mitt Romney did taking his pooch on vacation.

Here’s David P. Goldman, nailing a key issue: how the dog-eating is a symptom of Obama’s bigger problem, i.e., his visceral dislike, hatred, and resentment for America, something that was inculcated in the future president from a very young age. Writes Goldman:

What a careful reader will take away from Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father is not only that the president used to eat dog meat, but more importantly, that he identifies with dog-eaters. He wants us to understand that he is one of them. Obama’s most severe critics on the right think of Obama as a socialist, for example, Dinesh D’Souza, or Stanley Kurtz in his exhaustively-researched book Radical-in-Chief. Obama used to attend the annual “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York, which was a hard-core affair; I went to a couple of them, and they weren’t for the curious. But there is something far more visceral, more existential to the president’s dislike of the United States, and that arises from his early residence in the Third World, and his identification with the people of the Third World whose lives are disrupted by the creative destruction that America has unleashed…

It really isn’t unfair at all to bring Obama’s canine consumption to public attention. The president isn’t really one of us. He’s a dog-eater. He tells the story in his memoir to emphasize that viscerally, Obama identifies with the Third World of his upbringing more than with the America of his adulthood. It is our great misfortune to have a president who dislikes our country at this juncture in our history.

Absolutely, and “read the whole thing” as they say. Goldman’s point reminds me of the time when, back in 2008, I sat on a “Politics in the Pub” panel with former NSW Upper House member and fairly radical lefty Meredith Burgmann to discuss “the meaning Obama” or somesuch. She had just come back from a stint doorknocking for the Obama campaign in the dark heart of America somewhere and enthused to me, “Isn’t Obama wonderful? I mean, he’s not really American, is he!?” Not “not really American” in the crazy-birther sense of “not entitled to hold the presidency under the rules set down in the Constitution”, but in the polite-company, bien pensant sense of, “he’s not like those bovine Americans who waddle through Wal-Mart and buy guns and think Red Lobster is a decent restaurant.”

This whole sorry affair has me longing for the days of Bill Clinton, something I find myself increasingly doing lately. Somehow I preferred it when the phrase “a hard dog to keep on the porch” didn’t mean “trying to keep dinner from escaping”. Back then, if you heard that the president “liked a bit of tail”, it didn’t mean that the Secret Service was off on a covert mission to the DC Dog Pound, nor was the phrase “It doesn’t matter where you get your appetite so long as you eat at home” ever once uttered during the telecast of the Westminster Dog Show.

And looking back, who couldn’t love the guy?

In any case, if this whole episode manages to shut down one line of personal attack against Mitt Romney, well, too bad for the Democrats. But hey, they can always go after Mormon polygamy, right? Right?

So apparently Barack Obama has just come out against puppy mills. He prefers his dogs free range.

It’s not just shoddy economics reporting that is letting down the side at Fairfax. Their crime writing leaves a lot to be desired as well.

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Excuse this little foray into the dreary world of politics, economics, and the ABC … but I can’t help noting local lefty chart-blogger Greg Jericho‘s piece on the ABC’s Drum site in which he takes Tony Abbott to task for linking high levels of government debt with interest rates.

I expect that we will see the fanatically surplus-obsessed Julia Gillard criticised with as much ardour for making the same connection:

JULIA Gillard will today make a strong pitch to the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates, declaring the planned budget surplus helps give it room to move.

So we’re on Twitter now, @pwafork. Follow along, we’ll see how this goes.

Things you may have missed from the world of food, booze, and politics:

The New York Times is generally not worth the bits it is transmitted on, but in the Dining & Wine section this week Rosie Schaap has a lovely ode to “The Subversive Charm of Day Drinking” in which she sets out some ground rules:

Drinking in the day is an occasion unto itself, to be enjoyed on its own congenial terms. And there are terms. It shouldn’t lead to drinking all night. It can’t happen all the time. There is such a thing as starting too early. That said — we’re all adults here, aren’t we? — after lunch sounds about right. There’s still time before the rackety after-work crowd descends; the pace is calmer; and this is the best time to get to know your bartender. Whatever you’re drinking, you’re more likely to savor it.

Schaap is, it turns out, a great student of booze and belles lettres (and not in some clichéd “Updike on the Martini” sort of way, either), as this piece on WH Auden and cocktails reveals.

Over at Instapundit, Prof. Glenn Reynolds links to this story revealing that that Kobe steak you tucked into the other night was almost surely not the real deal. Not only that, everything you thought about the life of Kobe cattle, from the beer massages to the classical music, is wrong.

Still, the life of a cow in Kobe still ends more gracefully than those of the dogs President Barack Obama used to eat in Indonesia:

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

The Twitter hashtag #ObamaDogRecipes is darkly entertaining (“Pugs in a Blanket”, “Chicken Poodle Soup” and “Salukiyaki” give an, ahem, flavour of things). This also puts that whole story about Mitt Romney and the dog on the roof of the car very much into perspective.

Finally, and closer to home, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott may not eat dog, but that doesn’t stop local gay activists from treating him like one, interrupting a quiet meal in a cafe to make a stink about same-sex marriage. Prick With A Fork looks forward to going to many gay weddings one day – for one thing, the receptions are sure to kick ass – but this is not the way to make that happen. No class, guys.

Prick With a Fork has always been about news, views, and restaurant reviews, but lately the latter has taken back seat to the former.

Never fear: Plenty of biting (ha!) criticism on deck, including a trip to Rick Stein’s place in Mollymook, the cluelessness of Italian restaurateurs in Sydney’s Little Italy, and cheap and cheerful Korean in the city.

Everyone has stories of people doing stupid, weird, or ridiculous things in traffic, but driving along Crystal Street, Petersham, the other day, this woman caught my eye:

I couldn’t capture it on the phone, but from where I sat that bowl appeared to contain a massive pile of Oriental noodles and broth. The bowl was ceramic, so she’d clearly brought it from home. And note that she came prepared with both a spoon and a fork to feed her on her way. Well done, multi-tasking driver!

Photo via SeriousEats.com

New York City’s Eleven Madison Park is probably Mrs Prick and mine’s favourite restaurant in the entire world; the meal we had there a couple of years ago was nearly a religious experience and re-calibrated much of what we thought about the experience of food. So it’s a treat to see Serious Eats offer a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Chef Daniel Humm’s signature lavender and honey duck. It’s the sort of thing I’d love to attempt at home, but I’m not sure how the rest of the family would feel about my leaving a dead duck hanging in the pantry for ten days as recommended in the recipe.

It is also nice to see that, in comparing this slideshow to the recipe in the gorgeous Eleven Madison Park cookbook, nothing is left out in the manual for home chefs, nothing is dumbed down. (The one quibble I have with the book is that Humm’s sea urchin cappucino didn’t make it in, but I’ve managed to re-create it in the past with reasonable success).

I once had a chat with a working chef running a modernist cuisine workshop we participated in who told me that a lot of chefs leave out key steps or introduce errors to protect their creations from showing up on other restaurants’ menus; he said that Heston Blumenthal is among the worst offenders on this score, though understandably so. This was something I had long suspected, and for years I have played “spot the error” (photos are a good clue as to what’s missing in the text) with new cookbooks. The worst example of this – and it may very well have been a legitimate typo, given the quantum of the mistake and the relatively pedestrian nature of the dish – I have ever run across was in Gordon “Fookin'” Ramsay’s Sunday Lunch, where the sweary chef calls for a whopping 500 grams of fookin’ puff pastry to cover a mere 750 grams of fookin’ beef fillet. Fookin’ hell.

When we moved into the inner-west, I knew that a fair number of our neighbours – lovely folk that they are, except for the Jew-haters now largely dispatched from Council – would be of the peace, love, and mung beans variety.  So it didn’t come as any surprise this morning to see that when the Sunday Telegraph were looking for some hippy-dippy Earth-mother type who’s breast feeding her kid until he gets his first job as an assistant producer on a Radio National cultural show, they just went down the road to Dulwich Hill:

Melissa MacLean, 41, from Dulwich Hill … is still happily breastfeeding her three-and-a-half-year-old son Chet.

“He only feeds once at night before he goes to bed,” she said. “It helps him sleep and it helps him reconnect with me at the end of the day. I think it is very good for his immune system as well.”

She says she has discussed stopping it with her son, but at the moment plans to continue for at least another six months: “I am having conversations with my son about it. I am just going to see what happens.

“Everyone has been positive – I haven’t really had any negative comments. People do what they think is best for their family. It’s a personal choice and if it’s working then why not?”

Hang on – she’s discussing it with her son? Apologies if this seems judgmental, but what the hell? When a child can form and articulate a position on the question, “Would you like to suckle at mummy’s tit?” I think you have the answer to whether or not it is a good idea. And doesn’t this kid have teeth?

In cloaking her own insecurities in the mantle of “personal choice”, MacLean is supported by Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik (you may also remember her as Milhouse Van Houten crush-object Blossom) who has used her acting credentials to write a book about “attachment parenting” (a.k.a. the “hovering hippie” school of smother-mothering). Though flipping to the Telegraph’s Sunday competitor, the Sun Herald, we read differently:

A paper published in a peer-reviewed journal suggests that four months may be a more appropriate age.

Australia’s infant feeding guidelines, prepared for all mothers by the National Health and Medical Research Council, a government agency, recommend exclusive breastfeeding for six months followed by the introduction of solids.

The guidelines are currently under review, and the agency said that it will stick with the six-month recommendation once they are finalised this year. This is despite immunologists here and overseas suggesting that the introduction of solids at four months may help protect children against food allergies and coeliac disease.

So much for the “immune system” argument – and one wonders where “attachment parents” come down on immunisation, though the phrase “personal choice” again likely looms large. This is one case, however, where I’m happy to let the science be settled.

In any case, young Chet and his ilk shouldn’t be on the breast. They should be taking cocaine. Because that’s what middle-class Australians do.