Sunday 13 February 2011

Thoughts over Lunch at 38.5 weeks



I'm trying to make corn tortillas for a little black bean wrap invention of mine... but they KEEP breaking. I don't have what, after a little research, I've discerned is called a Tortilla Press. A little contraption that could be mine for about 12USD plus postage and handling.

So while standing there with my hands in the cornflour dough I'm thinking about food, cooking, and culture.
About why I insist on making tortillas from scratch, when the flour I'm using is not organic and therefore probably not much of a cut above the packet I could have bought and filled with beans for a much quicker and more satisfying outcome. Answer: Food snobbery. A little something I think I carried over from home, picked up a little more of in Italy, further rubbed in by Melbourne food culture. I don't like food from packets. I watched some of Jamie Oliver's reality show on YouTube the other night and had to close my eyes as though it was Silence of the Lambs.

Side note: I watched it with my friend Raquel who told me that as a high school exchange student in the U.S 10 years ago she saw lettuce sold in a bag for the first time, and thought to herself "What a good idea!". Well now most of Spain's lettuce is sold in bags, and she hates it. But even the two of us buy it in bags occasionally, and spinach is ONLY sold in bags, even at the market.

About why we eat the things we do.

About all the things I know about cornflour: In Italy it's used to make Polenta, In Venezuela/Colombia- Arepas, In Mexico- corn tortillas.

So the Italians decided to cook it slowly, addding water and stirring for hours and hours, and serving it like mashed potatoes under stews or runny sauces OR, molding the mush into pieces and quickly frying them making little sticks that look pieces of toast cut into soldiers for soft-boiled egg dipping. While thinking about Polenta, I get to thinking about the cultural divide between Italy's north and south. Polenta is a northern thing. The Northerners disparagingly refer to the Southerners as "Terroni" roughly translated to dirt people, by which they mean peasants. The Southerners disparagingly refer to the Northerners as "Polentoni" which can be roughly translated to Polenta Eaters, and which, I must say, should go down in history as one of the world's weakest comebacks.

The Arepa looks like a little muffin and I realised that they have this in North America's south, we think that this is what Cormac McCarthy calls a Biscuit but someone should be able to fill me in on this. (I am really curious, about Cornflour and its uses).

The Corn Tortilla, is a flat wrapping bread. But how did it get that name? In Spain, a Tortilla is a big fat Omelette with potato. Actually more like an egg-based potato cake. And is Corn Flour, Cornflour, CornFlour, KoRnFlour the right name for what I'm talking about? There is a cornflour that we use as an egg subsitute in cakes and stuff but it's different.

A Tough One.

Some other things I thought about today:

Time travel, how unfathomable it is,and how overused it is in fiction. It's not deep, it's not spiritual. It's confusing, impossible and annoying. We are nearing the end of Lost which is the worst depiction of time travel I've ever seen. They try to explain it using (what I assume are) faux mathmatical formulae, and claim that time travellers are unable to change what happened in the past when obviously, their mere double presence would in someway do just that...

How annoying it is that I can't find a Yoga Ball in this entire city, (which has a population 315, 522, something that really should make things like this easier...) I could buy it online but I really just want it NOW.

Then, just briefly, I thought about when I will go into labour, and whether I'm ready for my little one to have her own independent body yet.... Then I felt like a mother.



And then this song popped into my head again, and I started to get quite teary. Then the tears turned to laughter as I relised that Benny, and the other one (not really an ABBA fan, actually...) don't really know the words to the song, and are singing it like an Olympian sings the national anthem, something that never ceases to make me laugh...




Late Pregnancy+Lazy Sunday+Me= Blog posts like this.

3 comments:

  1. When? WHEN, did 38.5 weeks happen?

    You sound like a woman readying to give birth.

    Perhaps the yoga ball is unavailable for good reason. I once had an undignified, heavily-pregnant, highly amusing (for the Mr) interlude with a yoga ball.

    As far as the corn flour thing goes, I have no relevant piece of rivoting info for contribution. But the indignance of those 'Dirt Eaters' made me LAUGH.

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  2. Extra points for writing 'KoRn' into yer blog post.

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