"Disposed of, girls in the house went for the dead roster to prepare ‘chicken pepper soup’. While boiling, one of them decided to have a taste of the sumptuous soup and subsequently ran into madness."
- from the article Liberia: Rooster Soup Kills Five Pets After Making Girl Mad in The Informer newspaper, Monrovia, Liberia.
(Thanks to Scarlett Lion: Liberia)
We're scheduled to be in Munich in early June. Place your orders now, and while we're there, we'll pick up some Obama Fingers for you.
From Foreign Policy's Passport blog: "The packaging says the product is 'tender, juicy pieces of chicken breast, coated and fried.' A curry dip is included."
(Photo from Foreign Policy's Passport blog.)
Under the newish young Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia was feeling its way through the policies of Glasnost (openness) and Perestrioka (restructuring) when I made my first visit to Moscow in 1986. Despite the stirrings of change, it was still quite the Soviet Union, with hard currency stores (which didn't accept roubles) called Berioska shops full of caviar and Cuban cigars and chocolates, broadsheet newspapers spread open behind glass for people to read in the public parks, and a drink called kvass - kind of a Soviet Tang - served from a communal glass.
There was a vending machine back on the side of the Kremlin near the eternal flame which had a nozzle for dispensing kvass, and then a nozzle for rinsing the cup. You'd drink your kvass, rinse the cup and then put it back in place for the next customer.
The Soviet Union wasn't known for the variety of its cuisine, so we were excited to find Pizza Restaurant. It had a menu which we puzzled through with our Russian-English dictionaries, and everything we tried to order was met with a deadpan "nyet." After all, menu be damned, it turned out that on that night, Pizza Restaurant had one kind of pizza.
Now comes word that just 23 years later the Soviet Union's latter day comrades, in fact pretty much their only remaining direct descendants, the North Koreans, have gone on a pizza jag:
BBC: First North Korean pizzeria opens.
(Photo of St. Basil's Cathedral and Red Square from the Russia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
There's a nice photographic view of South Korean culture in the IHT today:
Watch A visit to the jjimjilbang.
While in the jjimjilbang, you might enjoy some bibimbap.
(Photo by Seokyong Lee for the International Herald Tribune.)
We've been enjoying very much a culinary blog called Eating Asia, which started about the same time as Common Sense and Whiskey, and which appears to be run from Malaysia by a couple named Roybn Eckhardt and David Hagerman, who is also a photographer. Here's Hagerman's photography site.
Ms. Echkardt updates the blog often, and, as you might imagine, the food photography is lovely. Try this recent entry about the traditional Vietnamese dish Pho, as served in Hoi An, a market town midway along the Vietnamese coast, near Da Nang and Hue.
Check out Eating Asia. Positive, upbeat, good-feeling site.
(This photo of the morning fish market in Hoi An from the EarthPhotos.com Vietnam Gallery.)
On the other hand, there's queasier Asian food news below.
Tim Johnson, the Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, writes the blog China Rises. A recent post called Taking the Cat Out for a Wok is about, yep, what you might imagine it's about.
It appears cat meat is a bit of a rage in southern China.
Johnson reminds us that in the run-up to the Olympics, Beijing ordered restaurants to take dog off their menus.
That particular qualm is not shared in Hanoi. On our last visit, over the holidays about this time last year, we happened by the dog section of a municipal market. A lady we were with took pains to point out, though, that only men eat dog. Usually when they're drinking beer. So, see, it's okay then. Just dumb ol' beer-drinking men. Eating dog.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com's Vietnam Gallery.)
If you live in a big city, perhaps you've visited an Ethiopian restaurant. And if you have, you'll have tried injera, the spongy, slightly sour bread on which your food was served. I once bought injera to go - in a convenience store, of all places - in suburban Atlanta.
Essentially a big round pancake, injera is served on a traditional masab, a woven basket table, with stews, greens, meats, main and side dishes placed on top. More injera is served on the side. You tear off a bit and use it to pick up each bite of food.
It's brilliant for a poor land - a filling staple food served with each bite.
Injera is made from the smallest grain in the world, called teff. About 150 grains are the size of a kernel of wheat. You can buy injera ready made, but now that we've found where you can buy teff, the Cook Without a Clue's assignment is: make your own injera. Here's a recipe. We'll report back on how we do.
See photos from Ethiopia in the Ethiopia Gallery on EarthPhotos.com.
(Photo from EthiopianSpices.com.)
Tough assignment, rounding up all those beers. Whattaya know... beers from around the world appear to be a priority at EarthPhotos.com, too....
from EarthPhotos.com
In volatile times such as these, as you move around the planet this is good to know.
The road to Vladikavkaz, capital of the Russian Republic of North Ossetia, from Kazbegi, Republic of Georgia. From EarthPhotos.com.
Visit these two compelling sites from photojournalists covering the Russia/Georgia war:
War in the Republic of Georgia, by Chris Hondros
A Georgian Diary, by Thomas Dworzak
The 14th Century Trinity Church in the Georgian Caucasus mountains, from EarthPhotos.com.
Georgia is just a beautiful country. Robert Kaplan says so in one of a number of articles on the Caucasus for the Atlantic. Paul Theroux writes of his recent trip to Tbilisi in his latest, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. Here is a short excerpt from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey, about our trip to the Caucasus, in summer 2006:
*****
Georgian toasts are famous, arduous and daunting, and there is a well-developed ritual. Zaza ordered a remarkably large glass pitcher of red wine with our beers (Zviadi, the driver, was stoic with his coffee). We’re never gonna down that thing, I thought, but we did.
Zaza’s toasts were masterful little journeys backward to where you wanted to be. He started out with “Now I would like to toast to one man…” and ended up with a salute to the traveling spirit.
“Even little things have a beauty,” he began again, and did a little riff on “be here now.”
In between toasts and shovelfuls of plate after plate of food, Zaza hit on the current political war between his country and its huge northern neighbor, which has soured so badly that, gasp, Russia has banned Georgian wine.
“All people know in Russia,” this was a simple declaration of fact, “Georgian wine is better. It is only politics.”
Continue reading "The Conflict in the Republic of Georgia" »
Food tourism has spawned its own book, academic studies and even an apparently not too successful blog. A culinary trip to Nigeria might be a dish too far, but you've got to give them credit for trying.
On our most recent stay at the (stylish, venerable, legendary - you pick) Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, we spent a morning in the kitchen, divining the differences between Hanoi and Saigon spring rolls, incorporating banana flowers into entrees and learning to carve fruit that pretty Asian way.
Before the kitchen session, everybody hopped a cyclo to the local market to go over the finer points of choosing Asian ingredients. You could buy these dogs there but the ladies told us, a touch disdainfully, that only men eat them, when they are drinking beer.
There are nearly four hundred pictures (including these dogs) from all over Vietnam in the Vietnam gallery on EarthPhotos.com.
You've probably seen sites with funny translations into English. John Rahoi's May I Take Your Order is particularly entertaining. While shopping for future travel destinations, we found a site urging a trip to Namibia, which offers "a wide range of gut-curdling activities." It tells us that Swakopmund "generally enjoys grit in the oyster," and explains, "Swakopmund feels overwhelmingly Teutonic – indeed, it has Germany...."
You ready to head out?
See also our Signs gallery on EarthPhotos.com.
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
The Photos:
