That's How It Happened

So simple, so effective, and so going to be plagiarised for an ad or an arthouse movie. Its pure cinema verite qualities might be dependent on the Tokyo setting. The diners and chefs are either too engrossed in their sushi to notice the camera, or too cool to play up. (via metachat) (link for rss)

A Game Theoretic Approach to the Toilet Seat Problem is a humourous, but enlightened approach to an age old riddle:

"Now let us consider the scenario where John and Marsha (a hypothetical couple) cohabit and both use the same toilet. In our analysis we shall assume that John and Marsha perform toilet operations with the same frequency...and that the order in which they perform them is random. They discover to their mutual displeasure that their cohabitation adversely alters the toilet seat position transfer cost function for each of them. What is more there is an inherent conflict of interest."

As the article mentions, women supposedly have a smaller bladder volume. My own research as part of my thesis confirms that women do have a lower maximum bladder capacity, but contrary to folk wisdom tend to void at a higher volume. This provides support to the idea that John and Marsha should both adopt utilitarian Strategy J, in which:

"Each person retains the default strategy that they used before cohabiting."

Despite this, my general experience of cohabiting is that Strategy M (in which the toilet seat remains in the default down position) is usually ruthlessly enforced. I just have to be grateful not to live in a house operating on Strategy E (for emasculating), in which Marsha makes John perform both toilet operations #1 and #2 while seated.

This is looking like probably the busiest ever day in the history of That's How, at least since my unintentionally inflammatory comments about Zidane last year. The servers are groaning under a blizzard of visitors from bOINGbOING, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon. These are just some links from other marginally less prolific referrers:

The Vader Project. A collection of customised Vader helmets to instantly overcome any 30th anniversary Star Wars fatigue.(via POIL)

Battle at Kruger. For my money the best 8 minutes on YouTube this year. Safari was never meant to be this exciting.(via waxy)

Desktop Blues. Be a mini-blues guitar hero from the comfort of your own keyboard, without any need for rhythm or even musicality.(via 22nd Floor)

Anarchic bike trail for drunk cyclists in Montreal. (indirectly via Jorn)

1938 Ballot Paper. "Do you agree with the reunification of Austria with the German Empire that was enacted on 13 March 1938, and do you vote for the party of our leader Adolf Hitler?" "Ja". (via Neatorama)

Crazy Ladybugs, a tricksy japanese action puzzler.

Viva Voodoo, which is like Yeti Sports with more Mortal Kombatesque finishing moves.

Saucer Attacks! a simple french arcade game, in which you help cartoon animals evade alien kidnapping.

Red Team, pilot two spacemen through different caverns at the same time. I'm curious to know if skilled pianists can handle this test of coordination easily.

While everyone else is obsessing over Heroes, Lost, and Prison Break, I've been meticulously TiVoing Great British Menu. It's a very British, very restrained version of Iron Chef. The winning starter from this series, was Sat Bains' Ham, Egg, and Peas. Uniquely it got full marks from the judges, perhaps because it looks good, and represents a witty molecular gastronomy reworking of a working class British classic dish. It is also the dish that used the most bits of expensive kit, which immediately made me want to try it at home. The recipe on the BBC website is rather over-simple, so I've annotated it below.

1. To make the pea sorbet, bring the liquid glucose and 200ml/7fl oz of water to boil in a saucepan to make a stock syrup. Add the frozen petit pois and mint. Allow to cool slightly and then pour into a food processor or blender. Process on high speed to make a purée. Chill, then pour into an ice cream machine and churn for 20-30 minutes or until the sorbet reaches a soft-scoop ice cream texture. Taste for seasoning and adjust with a pinch each of sugar and salt if necessary. Transfer to a freezer container and freeze.

On TV Sat Bains made the sorbet using a £2500 Pacojet. The Pacojet produces an entirely smooth puree that can't really be reproduced using a home blender. I Magimixed my pea puree, and then strenuously passed it through a tamis, before adding it to the ice cream maker. Copying El Bulli, I dressed the scoops of pea sorbet with fleur de sel.

2. Next, poach the eggs. A rice cooker is the best thing to use, but if you don't have one, heat a pan of water to around 62C/143F, ideally monitoring the temperature with a digital probe. Carefully add the eggs in their shells and leave at 62C/143F for about 1½ hours - the whites will be just firm and the yolks runny. Remove the eggs with a slotted spoon and set aside.

I've experimented a lot with slow cooked eggs, and as far as I can see, a rice cooker is too hot. I use a wide pan on an electric hob, on the lowest setting. I monitor the temperature with a digital meat thermometer. If you pierce a cork with the probe, you can have it float in the water easily. Setting it to "medium rare beef" will let it alarm whenever it starts to get too hot. Sat Bains had his water bath set to 60.9 degrees C, but the eggs come out fine anywhere between about 60 and 65. Fresh eggs are really important not just because of salmonella, but because it's much harder to peel such soft eggs, especially if they are a few days old. I used Clarence Court Braddock Whites.

3. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Arrange the bread slices on a large baking sheet, brush with olive oil and bake for about 12 minutes or until golden-brown.
4. Pour the chicken stock into a medium saucepan and add the butter, shelled peas and a good pinch of salt. Simmer gently for 3-4 minutes to braise the peas until tender.
5. To serve, carefully peel the shells from the duck eggs. Spoon the braised peas into the centre of warmed shallow soup bowls. Sit the eggs on top of the peas. Lay a slice of ham over each egg, and arrange a spoonful of pea sorbet to one side. Lay a couple of pieces of toast on top of the ham. Dress the pea shoots with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt, then scatter them all around.

I couldn't find pea shoots anywhere, so I substituted celery shoots. Fortuitously we had picked up air dried ham on our trip to L'Enclume, in the Lake District. The overall dish is a real success, and ideal for a dinner party, because almost evertthing can be prepared in advance. It's the best breakfast I've had this week.

"A businessman arriving in Boston for a convention found that his first evening was free, and he decided to go find a good seafood restaurant that served scrod, a Massachusetts specialty. Getting into a taxi, he asked the cab driver, "Do you know where I can get scrod around here?" "Sure," said the cabdriver. "I know a few places... but I can tell you it's not often I hear someone use the third-person pluperfect indicative anymore!"

(found while trying to dig up a recipe for roast cod)

Labels: scrod

On Park Lane is an Animals in War sculpture, about which Monbiot has previously complained. It features pack horses, carrier pigeons, camels, elephants, and even glow worms. Somehow the designers overlooked bats though. Before the Manhattan Project came up with the goods, President Roosevelt authorised a $2 million dollar research project to use bat bombs to destroy Japanese towns:

"By March of 1943 a suitable species had been selected. The project was considered serious enough that Louis Fieser, the inventor of military napalm, designed 0.6 ounce (17 g) and one ounce (28 g) incendiary devices to be carried by the bats. A bat carrier looking like a bomb casing was designed that included 26 stacked trays each containing compartments for 40 bats. The carriers would be dropped from 5000 feet (1525 m). Then the trays would separate but remain connected to a parachute that would deploy at 1000 feet (305 m). It was envisioned that ten B-24 bombers flying from Alaska, each carrying a hundred shells packed with bomb-carrying bats could release a million bat bombs over the target — the industrial cities of Osaka Bay."

If that isn't farcical enough, testing of the bat incendiaries did not go smoothly:

"...in one test, a village simulating Japanese structures burned to the ground...a careless handler had left a door open and some bats escaped with live incendiaries aboard and set fire to a hangar and a general's car."

Naturally there's a book about the bat program, and from its jacket we learn that the: "oddball cast of characters included an eccentric inventor, a distinguished Harvard scientist, a biologist with a chip on his shoulder, a movie star, a Texas guano collector, a crusty Marine Corps colonel, a Maine lobster fisherman, an ex-mobster, and a tiger." Unbelievable that such fantastic source material has never been optioned for a movie.

Steve Sansweet's Star Wars collection, is an insane mishmash of super rare film props, and the worst kind of mass market "repro" items.

"Sansweet's collection includes Yodas from Episode I, Episode II and Episode III, plus several fan-created Yodas, including one made entirely of marzipan."

I'm amazed that someone with unlimited access to the Lucasfilm archives would gain any pleasure from amassing so much junk.

This is a day of shame for our nation's headline writers, who have stumbled and blundered to new lows of unoriginality:

Time for a HIP replacement?

Time for Brown to order a HIP replacement

HIP PAIN!

Property rush ahead of fractured HIPs

Bungled HIP operation.

Kelly's Hips replacement on waiting list

Perry Bible Fellowship on why patients are really transferred between hospitals.

It's poor form to link to prank calls, especially prank calls that feature extensive mocking of religious beliefs, but this call to a halal restaurant in Singapore to request pork products really rises above its base origins. It features fantastic subtitled singlish (qv globish), and I found it via a half-singaporean, so you can feel OK while you LOL.

I am reasonably confident I would beat Ken Jennings in these Jeopardy! categories.

Video of Jellyfish Lake in Palau, a saline lake that no longer has access to the sea, but which does have jellyfish as the top predator, lots of them. (via liquidx)

"Not to offend anyone, though it may be hard to believe (and there are many who do not want to believe it), but Ferran Adrià is capable of imagining – better yet, creating – more and better dishes than all the chefs in the world combined." Lo Mejor de la Gastronomia have some really cutting edge recipes from Spain's gastronomic powerhouses, including two from the El Bulli 2006 season. (via megnut)

Os Gemeos and other Brazilian writers are spending a month redecorating Kelburn Castle in Scotland. This video is a timelapse of their first 3 days' work. link (via)

Truffle oil is made from 2,4-dithiapentane and olive oil, without any real truffle.

“I used to use white truffle oil a lot, but now I only use a little bit in my liquid black truffle ravioli,” Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago told me. “It adds a little more perfume, a slightly different flavor. I cut my teeth cooking at the French Laundry, and when we were using truffles there was always a bottle close by. But after I was on my own for a while I started to ask myself why I was using it, and I didn’t have a good answer. It doesn’t even taste like truffle.”

The NYT on truffle oil's unshakeable synthetic grip on restauranteurs.

The new Ricky Powell Issue of Arkitip comes with "Ricky's Italian Espresso Coffee Blend(Makes 10, 12 cups of coffee)" produced exclusively for Arkitip. Most unusual magazine freebie ever?

The Briefbox, a briefcase camoflaged as a boombox.

The new facade at Guy's Hospital hasn't been officially unveiled yet, but the main structure seems to be complete. I took these photos yesterday. The facade is built from a mesh of steel tape, woven something like a wicker chair. It covers up the boiler room, perhaps the ugliest part of London's ugliest hospital. Everything Heatherwick designs seems to have instant icon status, and this is no exception. It's visually appealing both from a distance and close up. It somehow combines the qualities of a rigid armour suit for the building, and as the light shines through it, an ethereal veil. It isn't a facade that radiates health and wellbeing, but it had to fit in with the existing brutalist backdrop of Guy's Tower.

Labels: heatherwick

Crowd porn a flickr photoset.

Labels: fixedgear

I brought a plague upon my own refridgerator. Last year I asked the kindly denizens of AskMe for advice about the worst tasting foods. The third suggestion included Hákarl, a putrified form of shark meat that is one of Iceland's national dishes. Traditionally the shark is skinned, and then buried for up to 6 months in a gravel pit. During that time the shark is cured by salt water and decomposition, and the uric acid in the flesh turns to ammonia.

"In many sub-societies of Iceland, a person is considered a weakling if he cannot eat the shark."

My brother arranged to go trout fishing in Iceland, and consequently I felt compelled to suggest some Hákarl, as a possible gift upon his return. He was good enough to bring back some Brennivin too, an Icelandic aquavit, used as a chaser to take away the taste of the rotten flesh. He did consider getting me some Minke whale as a starter, but decided sensibly not to chance it through customs.
The shark comes as small cubes, and is supposed to be eaten one dainty bite at a time, with a toothpick. Strangely for something that's been cured for months the expiry date was 15/05/2007. That was hardly reassuring, and meant that I couldn't delay. Opening the jar is the worst part. The ammonia given off burns your nasal mucosa (I think the official chemistry phrase would be "pungent odour"), and left me choking until I could get to an open window. After that, the actually eating isn't too traumatic. The shark flesh is very soft, almost buttery, a bit like lutefisk. The foretaste is strong, of unfresh oily fish, and that's quickly followed by a flood of ammonia filling the back of your mouth, and nose. It's not really something to savour. The Brennivin tastes strongly of peppery caraway and quickly "clears the palate".
Overall I'm slightly underwhelmed, because it's actually almost tasty. It certainly has a strong flavour, but it's not repulsive and nauseating like ika no shiokara (salted fermented squid guts). If I was a hunter needing cured food to take on a prolonged trip away from the Icelandic homestead, I'd relish a hearty plate of Hákarl, after a hard day clubbing seals.

This makes me fearful for Harry Potter prequels, once the Deathly Hallows hype is all burnt out. (via)

At Tobu, a Tokyo zoo, squirrel monkeys have "domesticated" capybaras, and ride around on their backs. (Link includes uber-cute photo) This goes on the list of must-sees if I ever make it back to Japan.

The E-puzzler is an "unshredder" being used to reassemble 6,000 bags of documents, shredded by Stasi agents in 1989.

Time lapse video of low altitude gravity waves seen in clouds over Iowa.

As someone has commented, 1.01 is the funniest part. (link)

On Sunday night the GF and I ate at L'Enclume in Cartmel. We signed up for the "Underground Menu", advertised as "No holds barred, no deviations" and running to as many as 26 courses. The chef Simon Rogan is possibly the most innovative chef in the UK, pushing forward concepts and ideas in molecular gastronomy more than anyone except Ferran Adria. It's safe to say that I was more excited about this meal than anything I've eaten since the Fat Duck.

Cartmel is extremely rural, teetering on the edge of the Lake District National Park. It's famous for two things: its priory, and sticky toffee pudding. It would be a strange place to put a bleeding edge restaurant, except that the Lakes attract lots of tourists and weekenders from northern towns. We hardly heard a London accent all weekend.

The restaurant has five rooms and also a small garden. It's practically under the eaves of the priory, on the edge of a small river. Our original supper was booked for 8.30pm, but when we upgraded to the Underground Menu we were asked to come at 6pm, in order to have an aperitif in the garden, and warm up for a marathon meal. The maitre d' explained that they serve the extended menu to only 2 or 3 tables a week. He stressed that when eating almost continuously (albeit in tiny portions) for 5 hours it's best to drink very modestly, in order to stave off fatigue.

We obviously didn't need pre-dinner nibbles, but it was cashew nuts dusted with masala spices.

The real opener was "Rehydration Dehydration", consisting of a thin fine textured biscuit tasting of pina colada, and a shot of foamy juice tasting like fig newtons. The pina colada biscuit seemed to have been really made by baking actual pina colada on an exopat at a low temperature, until just the pineapple and coconut fibres were left as a solid piece.

This second course was called "Coney's Cornets". The cornet on the left had a sweet red pepper ice cream, with hundreds and thousands made from dehydrated pepper flakes. The right hand cornet I think was tarragon ice cream, with a block of gel shaped to look like a flake.

This is "Lollipop 'perigourdine' and pickled onion turkish". The lollipop was a hard caramel of foie gras and truffles, reminiscent of fleur de sel and foie gras creme brulee, which is almost a standard on the Ile de Re. The turkish delight was really excellent too, with the sharp vinegar of the pickled onion cutting through the cloying powdery nature of the turkish delight.

This was "Whim 03", and I think was one of the dishes that came semi-unplanned, off the cuff, as our menu evolved. It was the first dish that absolutely knocked me into a cocked hat for technical brilliance. The white block was an impossibly light, and yet completely sturdy marscapone foam, topped with salmon roe, on a bed of parsley puree. The pink powder was grated frozen tuna, which reminded me of freeze dried astronaut food. The white puree was grapefruit foam, with passion fruit seeds. This was a riot of contrasting textures, with absolutely surprising complementary flavours.

"BBQ pig, cola, rasins, oregano". Small chunks of aromatic roast pork belly, with a coca-cola gel, raisins steeped in something mysterious, a thick mustard espuma, and a sprig of seaweed. This was a deconstructed version of Nigella's Ham in Coca-cola. Reworked dishes can be a let-down, with the new presentation adding nothing, but this was the sweetest best tiny piece of pork ever.

This is "Cold and colder foie gras, blood orange, pistachio, quinoa". Cold foie gras slices, with foie gras ice cream on a pistachio and nori wafer. To get a Michelin star you practically have to serve foie gras, but surely the inspectors don't expect it frozen. The fine powder was camomile, which suggests that this whole dish might be a hat-tip to Heston Blumenthal's roast foie gras with almond fluid gel, cherry, and camomile. Anyway this was better.

This was "Charentais melon, horseradish, smoke". It's an elaborate inversion of the expected ingredients. The green ball is not melon, but actually a perfect sphere of horseradish cream, with a crisp coat, similar to a chocolate truffle with a liquid centre. It was floating in melon juice/foam, dressed with drops of red salmon oil.

"Cornish crab, black radish, ricotta, and gingerbread." The GF claimed she's seen gingerbread as a accompaniment to seafood before, but I was amazed. The white sauce was a pine nut infusion, and came in a separate test tube. The foam was plain ricotta, and the white diced vegetables were slow cooked radishes, leaving them translucent.

This "Egg drop hot and sour soup", is a steal from Wylie Dufresne. I've previously conquered the technique, but I was still pleased to see it done it a real restaurant. The cup contains very hot soup, and comes with a syringe of semi-cooked liquid egg, secretly laced with transglutaminase. Squirting the syringe into the hot soup causes the egg proteins to coalesce as noodles. Despite the theatrics, the soup was a great authentic Hot and Sour soup, with plump quinoa at the bottom of the cup.

The pace and invention of the menu is unrelenting. These dishes kept coming almost as fast as we could eat them. This is "Razor Role Reversal", featured in this video. Razor clams and chestnuts as a sort of soup with "croutons" in the egg shell, and creamy chicken in the clam shell. Again this was beautiful, intriguing, unexpected, and above all delicious. Up to this point the GF perhaps felt that technique was triumphing over taste, but the combination of chestnuts and razor clams won her over completely.

"Greek meatball and textureless tzatziki" was utterly brilliant. In Decoding Ferran Adria, the great man talks about wanting food that tastes like itself. This was a perfect example of that. A fabulous juicy kofte meatball, with tzatziki foam. The added irony being that Cartmel is such a rural idyll, that it doesn't even have a kebab van.

Although it looks as though I was too drunk to focus, I was actually suffering equipment failure. It's harder than you might think to surreptitiously photograph each dish is such a smart restaurant. This was "Diver scallops, joselito, peas agastache". They got bonus marks from me for serving something I thought I'd never heard of, but agastache is another name for hyssop. It was used to make the gel cylinders. The star of the plate was the "peas", which were actually pea puree, formed into actual pea shapes, using Adria's famous caviar technique. It uses sodium alginate to form a skin on individual drops of puree as they plunge into a calcium chloride water bath. I've played about with alginate endlessly, and it's next to impossible even under low pressure home cooking conditions. When I find the cash for El Bulli 2003-2004, I may actually discover how to do it with any reliability.

"Scottish langoustines, passion, sage, eggplant, yuzu". These two langoustines were topped with a sweet passion fruit foam. The yuzu was formed into gel blobs around the plate. I am little hazy on what else was going on, but there was a sage powder made using tapioca maltodextrin. This was off-the-wall inventiveness in terms of flavours, although the gels and foams, were seeming familiar, particularly having eaten at The Vineyard only 48 hours earlier.

Another technical marvel in the form of "Butternut, sweet cicely and tonka". The butternut had been crafted into layers to make a ravioli. Whether this was done using a steady hand, or wizardry I don't know. The beans were actually kidney beans, with the rich tonka bean flavour being infused into the foam.

"Sole, saffron, asparagus, mastic, carrots". Every ingredient made into either a gel or a foam to dress the sole, except for the glassy sheets, which were actually a rosemary caramel. Although the gel/foam combo had popped up again, this was rich and wonderful, and really successful. It was followed by "Five flavoured monkfish, pimento, lentils, hazelnut". My photo of this is somehow trapped in my broken phone. It was an incredible succulent monkfish fillet dressed with hazelnut foam.

Between the fish and meat courses we got this palate cleansing "Ginger beer, galangal, cardamom". The ginger beer was whipped into an air, probably using lecithin, and ladled onto the galangal jelly.

The single meat course (except for the foie gras and the ham, duh), was this "Beef rib, watermelon, liquorice, and perilla." It was a giant clash of techniques that had been showcased earlier. One little fillet was resting on diced watermelon, while the other was resting on a powder that was made from a mix of a rich beef stock reduction and liquorice. As a final show-off move, it was topped with a bone marrow gel. This was swiftly followed by the largest "cheese chariot" that I've ever seen, complete with an actual french "cheese sommelier".

"Parmesan cake, white chocolate, celery, black olive", was the first pudding. It reminded me of a pudding being served at Bacchus, the "Black olive financier, roasted pear ice-cream, fig puree, pine nuts". Olives in a pudding is high-risk, as Sat Bains found out on Great British Menu, when Oliver Peyton called his "Raspberry sponge with black olive and honey puree, fresh raspberries and goats' milk ice cream", the "worst pudding he had ever tasted". At L'Enclume it worked well, with the strong olive and parmesan flavours tempered by the chocolate.

The first and only punning dish was this "Expearamenthol Frappe". Espresso powder, on a eucalyptus foam, on a pear jelly. Once again a stunning combination.

The penultimate pudding was definitely the technical summit of the meal. It was called "Stiffy Tacky Pudding". Each blob had to be eaten in sequence from left to right, chewing as we went, and not swallowing until they were all in. They were each a different component from sticky toffee pudding, some solid, some liquid, encased in a transparent gel, so they could be picked up by hand. This was flabbergastingly futuristic, like something from 2001 (the movie, not the year).

This was "Blancmange in strawberry, verjus, basil, and sheep's milk". The blancmange was an artful strawberry and basil construction, topped with sheep's milk ice cream, and verjus foam. I was almost too fatigued to appreciate its intricacies, but there was also a lemongrass gel capsule, with a liquid centre, and what might have been a dehydrated "fruits of the forest" powder.

Coffee came with these delectable petit fours.
I don't think there's a more exciting meal than this anywhere in the whole world, even in Roses. This was 24 flawless brilliant courses by a chef who is not just "at the top of his game", but somewhere out in front of his rivals. For me he's edging ahead of Heston and Ferran, because in addition to technical fireworks, and novel flavour combinations, he's also using predominantly local seasonal ingredients. What is even more astonishing is that the entire menu is changed four times a year. I can't wait to go back. Book now before L'Enclume gets overwhelmed with foodie pilgrims.

Labels: l'enclume, moleculargastronomy

My post from last Sunday, suggesting that affordable food was the key to the London restaurant renaissance, made it into the Letters Page of the Evening Standard. The irony is that I'm spending this weekend on an orgy of unaffordable molecular gastronomy. The meal booked for tomorrow is "POA" which is definitely a first for me. Last night we ate at The Vineyard which Michael Winner described as "a palace of naffness". The food is incredible though, and I've uploaded the photos as a flickr set.

Word of the day is disposophobia AKA Collyer brothers syndrome. I'm amazed that a movie of the Collyer brothers' life has never been made. Their final paranoid days, trapped in their decaying, booby trapped house, overloaded with garbage and ephemera, would seem like a suitable next project for Wes Anderson. It could offset constant carping from his many critics about his somewhat immature self-regarding levity.

Meme watch: I ain't afraid of no NOT ghosts, from which the clear numerical winner (and my favourite) is "I ain't afraid of no goats"

Lamest internet controversy of the day is the furore about Hermione's breasts. Observe closely the difference between this IMAX Order of the Phoenix poster and the original. Should I really be outraged that someone has worked their photoshop magic on a 17 year old's (entirely clothed) chest?