Prick With A Fork

What happens when a Tiger Mother reads French Women Don’t Get Fat? Why, you wind up with a food-hating harridan by the name of Dara-Lynn Weiss who’s been micromanaging her daughter’s life ever since she found out the girl was “technically obese”:

She deprived her of dinner one night after learning that Bea had consumed “nearly 800 calories” of Brie, filet mignon, baguette and chocolate at a French Heritage Day event at school. She forbade participation in the school’s Pizza Fridays after the girl “admitted to adding a corn salad as a side dish one week.” She lost it at a Starbucks when an employee couldn’t tell her the exact number of calories in a kids’ hot chocolate: “I dramatically grabbed the drink out of my daughter’s hands, poured it into the garbage, and stormed out,” she reports. She fought audibly with her daughter over cake and cookies at parties.

What fun. I wish my kids had French Heritage Day at their school, but in Inner-West Sydney they just get hectored about injustice and recycling. Seriously, though, this sounds like exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with a kid with a weight problem: one can only imagine how much fun this woman must be to have around. Which may explain why the words “husband” and “father” appear nowhere in this account.

UPDATE: On further reflection, this also seems like a great way to give your kids a million complexes about food and everything else. I predict in twelve years Dara-Lynn drops out of Sarah Lawrence and elopes with a bass player. Also interesting is the conflation of thinness with virtue: “Fear of fat is about the menace of overall personal failure, of the inability to keep at bay all the forces of chaos and entropy that carry with them the ever present threat of downward mobility.”

This weird neo-Calvinism, where thinness is seen as being “elect” and fat is a sign of poverty is unique, to say the least, across history and cultures.

The other day Nick and I fell into conversation at the deli counter with another customer on the subject of meat, and specifically my plans to cook a goose at Christmas (yeah, I know, I plan ahead). This guy put us on to Red or White Butchers in Belmore, about twenty minutes down the road from Stately Prick Manor. I think we’ll be making a field trip just on the basis of the very playful website alone: dig how when you click on “species”, it takes you to animal heaven!

And the name? They’re not big Russian Revolution history buffs, but rather, they figured they’d name their outfit after “the first thing anyone asks you when you sit down to eat.”

As I say, I like their style.

Oh, and a big, big post on why vegetarians can go get stuffed like a capsicum* coming soon.

* That’s “red pepper” for all you North American readers.

New parents are never told how expensive children are, nor are they advised that there are bogeys hiding in the budget that go well beyond the foreseeable such as nappies, food, and school fees. Take birthday parties. There has not been a Saturday we’ve had the boys for weeks now where we haven’t had to ferry one or another of them off to a park, a bowling alley, or a “play centre” to celebrate some other kid’s birthday. This of course means gifts, which means another $50 a week just to hold the side and show that despite whatever your ex-wife may have said about you to the other mums, you’re really a decent and generous person.

Today was another such Saturday: After a quick swing by Kidstuff in Camperdown and dropping Mrs Prick off at the airport for her flight to Queensland, it was off to Five Dock to drop Number Two Son at a party for one of his mates. Which left me with two hungry boys and three hours to kill. And thus we found ourselves at New Shanghai Chinese in Ashfield on Liverpool Road in the heart of “Little Shanghai”. Like “Little Italys”, I’ve always been wary of urban Chinatowns, as they are generally unauthentic tourist traps. But I’ve also always had a thing for satellite Chinatowns, such as Flushing in Queens, NY. Ashfield is very much one of these sorts of places where new immigrants open authentic restaurants for their countrymen and intrepid locals.

Now I’ve always loved the xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, served up at the Din Tai Fung in the new Westfield complex, but I almost never go there any more as the food court is too frenetic. New Shanghai Chinese is frenetic too, but in a different way. We rocked up at late-lunch hour and had a table for three in under five minutes. Too bad the same would not prove true for our order.

The thing about this place is it appeared, at least this day, to be chronically understaffed with no front of house management to be seen. Thus everyone was taking orders, seating guests, bussing tables, the works. We were there for the soup dumplings, so we ordered a batch of steamed dumplings, another batch of fried, as well as some san choy bao and a plate of their “special” steamed oysters in XO sauce.

The san choy bao hit the table promptly, and was everything it should have been: crisp lettuce, rich and not-unpleasantly salty filling. The steamed xiao long bao were not far behind, and  were a huge hit with the boys. In fact, we should have ordered double:

Dad, there's soup in these soup dumplings!

Then, nothing. Other tables, from a pair of middle-aged Chinese to an ostentatiously inner-West mum with three daughters and a Maoist Red Guard hat, got their orders, paid, and left. We had to ask three times for our remaining food, and it was only on threat of leaving – remember, we had a kid to pick up, and leaving him stranded would have been a PR debacle – that our food appeared.

I had at this point vowed never to come back, but the fried dumplings were even better than the steamed. Blisteringly hot, the casing managed a chaud-froid effect of textures: soft on the top, crispy on the bottom. The broth, what I could taste of it, was rich. And the pork, far from being the sort of bland mystery meat one too often finds in such things was the best part, rich, flavourful, and piggy.

(The oysters, incidentally, were foul: rubbery, covered in what could only be identified as a jellyfish salad, and without a hint of XO. But nevermind.)

So what’s the verdict? Yeah, we’ll be back, but we’ll also explore some of the other options in the area. The bill was less than $50, which was amazing, but getting a quick feed is a very hit or miss affair.

How do you like your eggs? Free-range? Organic? Fried? Scrambled? How about poached in pee:

Ahhh, Spring.

Some of us mark the season of renewal by cleaning our homes from top to bottom. Others add pastels to their wardrobe. In the Eastern Chinese city of Dongyang, they eat “virgin boy eggs” — hard-boiled eggs marinated and simmered in urine, according to Reuters.

Residents praise the local delicacy for its ability to prevent colds, increase circulation and boost vitality.

“These eggs cooked in urine are fragrant,” said Ge Yaohua, 51, who owns one of the more popular “virgin boy eggs” stalls. “Our family has them for every meal. In Dongyang, every family likes eating them.”

Vendors collect buckets of boy’s urine from from local schools and homes in order to make the unusual broth.

The eggs are soaked in the urine and then heated over a stove. Then they are taken out of the shells and put back in the urine to simmer.

When some Asian restaurateur tries to introduce this delicacy in Sydney only to be shut down by the health police, I’m going to be very torn indeed. My three boys love exotic cooking projects, but just … no.

More posts coming soon, but in the meantime if you pick up the new Spectator Australia (Labor’s Queensland debacle is on the cover) you can read my musings on the great fraud that is Earth Hour — including a serendipitous shout-out to new friend of the site, Boy on a Bike.

They haven’t put it on-line yet, but when you buy the Australian edition you also get all the content from the magazine’s British cousins back in England, who’ve recently launched a very clever ad campaign:

Some subeditor at the Herald has taken political correctness to new heights in today’s “Good Living” supplement:

I’m sure Beijing Duck would be delicious washed down with a couple of Mumbai Sapphire martinis.

Over in Pakistan, health officials have solved the pesky problem of drinkers not knowing their limits: mandatory pre-commitment. According to this London Telegraph report on the last brewery in the country, “If you are non-Muslim Pakistani in Punjab and have a permit, you are allowed to buy six bottles of whisky or one case of beer per month.”

The Murree Brewery’s sales figures suggest there are quite a few more non-Muslims than one would expect in the Punjab, however: “Given that the company produces some 820 million half-litre bottles of beer, whisky, vodka, brandy and other alcoholic drinks per annum – and that those minorities make up less than five per cent of Pakistan’s 170 million people, those Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Parsees and pagan animists would have to be consuming more than 90 bottles per person per year, man, woman and child.”

While I applaud the enterprising booze merchants of Rawalpindi, I’m a bit worried that this story might give Western Puritans such as New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg (who, legend has it, was once only moved to plow the snow from the streets when he found out locals were having fun romping in it) and our own Australian health bureaucrats and lobbyists a few more ideas about how to stand in the way of a good time.

I’ve long thought that there was something creepy about the urban gardening movement: I love fresh food, but I’m happy to leave the growing to the experts. Back-to-the-land urban hippies often discover that Mother Nature, far from being warm, cuddly and loving, is in fact a tempermental bitch.

Even when it works out, the sheer irrationality of it leaves me gobsmacked. I’m not just talking about the fact that growing anything more than a few tomato vines or some rosemary (which I still manage to kill, somehow) in an urban precinct is about as inefficient a use of land as can be imagined: this isn’t Stalingrad, Army Group South isn’t at the door, and there are plenty of farmers’ markets and organic shops if that’s how your taste runs.

And then there’s the commie-culty vibe, as detailed by the Sydney Morning Herald today:

JEWELS BOWERING started growing food a couple of years ago to feed her two sons “as naturally as possible”. Now, depending on the season, you’ll find crops ranging from tomatoes to Madagascar beans and snowpeas to pawpaw – as well as three much-loved chickens – in the modest patch outside her Bondi home.

Ms Bowering has joined forces with more than 150 backyard “farmers” in the Waverley area through a project called Grow It Local. Gardeners register their patches at the Grow It Local website and Facebook page and share tips, tricks, seeds and cuttings.

On Saturday, many will donate produce for a community feast prepared by the chefs at popular Bronte restaurant Three Blue Ducks. Sixty lucky Waverley gardeners will then receive a “golden ticket” to attend the free dinner the following day.

Sorry, did I say Stalingrad before? This sounds more like Stalinism. Yes, it’s voluntary, but if I get this straight Three Blue Ducks gets a pile of free food (and free press), a lucky nomenklatura gets a great feed, and the rest of these eastern suburbs kulaks get nothing for their labour save for the knowledge they helped feed their little local food revolution?

On a side note, what is it with the names of the people who appear in these SMH  thumb-suckers? “Jewels” , not Jewel? A kid named Tenzin? It reminds me of another article they did a few months ago about a local inner-west school that opened with the immortal line, “When year 2 student Finnigan Hercus grows up, he wants to be a Lego designer. His little sister, Phoebe-Bijou, wants to be a doctor or, failing that, a ballet dancer.”

Ironically, these are the same people who laugh at “bogan names”.* I await the day the Chaser goes handing out citations for what ought to be referred to as “Newtown names”.

Readers should look forward to more efforts to turn the clock back to Year Zero in the Herald as its parent company’s one-third owned subsidiary, Earth Hour Limited, gears up to don the hairshirt again this Saturday.

* Well, so do I. But my children haven’t been saddled with a lifetime being called “Finnigan Hercus”.

Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote a great piece for Vanity Fair in which he set out to break as many laws of petit Javert and New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg as possible: sitting on a milk crate, taking his feet off the pedals of his bike, feeding pigeons, the list goes on. It’s a shame Hitch has died, because it would be great to get his take on Bloomberg’s latest ban: feeding the homeless:

The Bloomberg administration is now taking the term “food police” to new depths, blocking food donations to all government-run facilities that serve the city’s homeless.

In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can’t assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans.

DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond says the ban on food donations is consistent with Mayor Bloomberg’s emphasis on improving nutrition for all New Yorkers. A new interagency document controls what can be served at facilities — dictating serving sizes as well as salt, fat and calorie contents, plus fiber minimums and condiment recommendations.

The city also cites food-safety issues with donations, but it’s clear that the real driver behind the ban is the Bloomberg dietary diktats.