finger food? trendy only with ... SPAM...
Onigiri おにぎり, also known as Omusubi おむすび, is a snack of Japanese rice shapedand wrapped in nori (edible seaweed).
oMUSUBI A favorite Hawaiian way to eat Spam is in the form of a musubi
Hawaiian Spam Musubi Recipe
3 cups uncooked short- or medium-grain rice
4 cups water
5 sheets of sushi nori (seaweed in big squares)
1 (12-ounce) can Spam luncheon meat
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup rice wine (mirin)
Water
Wash rice, stirring with your hand, until water runs clear. Place rice in a saucepan with water; soak 30 minutes. Drain rice in colander and transfer to a heavy pot or rice cooker; add 4 cups water. If you don't have a rice cooker, place rice and water into a large heavy saucepan over medium-high heat; bring just to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and leave pan, covered, for 15 additional minutes.
Cut nori in half widthwise. Place cut nori in a resealable plastic bag to keep from exposing the nori to air (exposing the nori to air will make it tough and hard to eat).
Cut Spam into 8 rectangular slices approximately 1/4-inch thick. In a large ungreased frying pan over medium heat (Spam has plenty of grease to keep it from sticking), fry slices until brown and slightly crispy. remove from heat, drain on paper towels, and set aside.
In a small saucepan over high heat, add soy sauce, sugar, and rice wine; bring just to a boil, then remove from heat. Add fried Spam slices to soy sauce mixture, turning them to coat with the sauce; let spam slices sit in marinade until ready to use.
In a small bowl, add some water to use as a sealer for the ends of the nori wrapper; set aside.
Using a Spam Musubi press, place a piece of nori on a plate. Position press on top of the nori so the length of the press is in the middle of the nori (widthwise). The press and the width of the nori should fit exactly the length of a slice of Spam. (Note: If you don't have a musubi maker, you can use the empty Spam can by opening both sides, creating a musubi mold.)
Spread approximately 1/4 cup cooked rice across the bottom of the musubi maker, on top of the nori; press rice down with flat part of the press to compact the rice until it is 1/4-inch thick (add more rice if necessary). Place a slice of Spam on top of the rice (it should cover most of the length of the musubi maker). Cover with an additional 1/4 cup cooked rice; press until 1/4-inch thick. remove the musubi from the press by pushing the whole stack down (with the flat part of the press) while lifting off the press. Fold one end of nori over the musubi and press lightly onto the rice. Wet the remaining end slightly with water, then wrap over musubi and other piece of nori; press down on the other end. cut log into 4 pieces. Repeat with the other 7 Spam slices, making sure to rinse off musubi maker after each use to prevent if from getting too sticky.
Do not refrigerate musubi, as they will get dry and rubbery.
Monty Python's favorite recipes with spam includes:
eggs and spam
eggs bacon and spam
eggs bacon sausages spam
spam eggs spam spam bacon spam
spam spam spam eggs spam
spam spam spam spam
spam spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam
Spam Haiku
from http://www.pitt.edu/~blair1/spam-haiku.html
Highly unnatural
The tortured shape of this "food"
A small pink coffin
Pink beefy temptress
I can no longer remain
Vegetarian
PUBBLICATO DA GNAMGNAM E I SUOI PRODOTTI ALLE 4:18 PM 0 COMMENTI
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2008
DOWNSTAIRS UPSTAIRS
Dec 19th 2007
Women have not escaped the kitchen; it has come after them
THESE days, nobody needs to cook. Families graze on cholesterol-sodden
take-aways and microwaved ready-meals. Cooking is an occasional hobby
and a vehicle for celebrity chefs. Which makes it odd that, at the same
time, the kitchen has become the heart of the modern house: what the
great hall was to the medieval castle and the parlour was to the
Victorian terrace, the kitchen is to the 21st-century home.
The money spent on them has risen with their status. In America the
kitchen market is now worth $170 billion, according to the National
Kitchen and Bath Association--five times the country's film industry.
In the year to August 2007, IKEA, a Swedish furniture chain, sold over
1m kitchens worldwide. The average budget for a "major" kitchen
overhaul in 2006, calculates REMODELING magazine, was a staggering
$54,000; even a "minor" makeover cost on average $18,000.
Exclusivity, more familiar in the world of HAUTE COUTURE, has reached
the kitchen: Robinson & Cornish, a British maker of bespoke
kitchens, offers a Georgian-style one which would cost
GBP145,000-155,000 ($290,000-310,000)--excluding building, plumbing and
electrical work. Its big selling point, the publicity suggests, is that
nobody else will have it: "You won't see this kitchen in HELLO."
Estate agents commonly use photographs of kitchens to sell properties.
Celebrity chefs slice, steam and sear in aspirational culinary shrines
of stainless steel and high gloss. An entire genre of television
reality shows has grown up to supply ideas for turning that pokey back
room into a place of cherry wood cabinets, polished granite and brushed
aluminium.
The elevation of the room that once belonged only to the servants to
that of design showcase for the modern family tells the story of a
century of social change. Right into the early 20th century, kitchens
were smoky, noisy places, generally relegated underground, or to the
back of the house, and as far from living space as possible. That was
as it should be: kitchens were for servants, and the aspiring middle
classes wanted nothing to do with them.
Royalty ran them on an industrial scale. Henry VIII extended the Tudor
kitchens at Hampton Court Palace into 55 rooms, covering over 3,000
square feet (280 square metres). These included the great kitchen,
privy kitchen, cellar, larder, pantry, buttery, ewery, saucery,
chaundry, spicery, poultery and victualling house. They were staffed by
200 people, serving 600 meals a day. In one year during Elizabeth I's
reign, according to records at Hampton Court, the royal kitchens
roasted 1,240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,330 deer, 760 calves, 1,870 pigs and
53 wild boar.
The scale was more modest but the principles the same for the middle
class. The Victorian and Edwardian kitchen was organised for live-in
servants, which were plentiful in England, as they were in America
until the civil war. Only the poor and the servants ate in the kitchen.
The master of the house scarcely set foot beyond the green baize door;
the mistress only to supervise. The kitchen's comfort, let alone its
aesthetics, were of little concern to them.
But as the working classes prospered and the servant shortage set in,
housekeeping became a matter of interest to the literate classes. One
of the pioneers of a radical new way of thinking about the kitchen was
Catharine Esther Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the
abolitionist. In "American Woman's Home", published in 1869, the
Beecher sisters recommended a scientific approach to household
management, designed--with puritanical zeal--to enhance the efficiency
of a woman's work, and promote order.
No corner of the kitchen escaped Catharine Beecher's critical eye, nor
the precision of her advice. She recommended the construction of
cupboards, shelves and drawers adapted to each sort of utensil. She
favoured a work-table with built-in drawers, in order "to save many
steps". She advised a "grooved dish drainer" for the sink, an ingenious
idea at the time. She included detailed instructions for hanging dish
cloths, stressing that these should be hung on three separate nails
over the sink: one for greasy dishes, one for non-greasy dishes, and
one for pots and kettles. "A housekeeper who chooses to do without some
of these conveniences", she wrote, "and spend the money saved in
parlour adornments, has a right to do so, and others have a right to
think she in this shows herself deficient in good sense."
Many contemporary ideas about kitchen design can be traced back to
another American, Christine Frederick, who set about enhancing the
efficiency of the housewife. Her 1919 work, "Household Engineering:
Scientific Management in the Home", and her articles for the LADIES
HOME JOURNAL on radical notions such as "Suppose our servants didn't
live with us?", were based on detailed observation of a housewife's
daily routine. A zealous advocate of Taylorism, she borrowed the
principle of efficiency on the factory floor and applied it to domestic
tasks on the kitchen floor. On dishwashing, for instance, she noted the
following:
How wrong she was. It turned out that her sink was too low (the
"stupidity of builders", she sighed); for every five extra inches in a
woman's height, she calculated, the sink should be raised by two and a
half inches. She repositioned the draining board, moved the drying
towels, and scraped her plates more thoroughly before washing. Thus a
45-minute operation was reduced to a mere 30.
Frederick's central idea, that "stove, sink and kitchen table must be
placed in such a relation that useless steps are avoided entirely",
directly informs modern kitchen design, based on the "work triangle"
between fridge, cooker and sink. It also inspired the first fully
fitted kitchen, designed in the 1920s by Margarete Schutter-Lihotsky.
She developed the "Frankfurt kitchen" for social housing in the city,
its size--1.9m by 3.4m--and layout determined by a time-and-motion
study. It was a modernist triumph, and many elements--the L-shaped work
surface, head-height rows of built-in cupboards, an extractor hood
above the cooker--remain central features of today's kitchen.
BOB, BETTY AND JAMIE
In the 1920s, three factors ushered in the modern kitchen. One was the
influence of the European modernist movement, led by Bauhaus architects
in Germany and Le Corbusier in France. Another was the development of
electrical appliances. General Electric was promoting all manner of
newfangled equipment, including the electric refrigerator, automatic
clothes washer, pop-up toaster, electric coffee percolator, electric
iron and automatic suction sweeper. Finally, the rising cost of
servants boosted demand for such labour-saving devices. Lorain Gas
Ranges advertised their new oven thermostat in 1926 as "The Answer to
the Servant Problem".
The kitchen by the 1930s became a showcase for the middle-class home,
its newest appliances badges of status. Magazines explained how to
introduce flair and colour. A woman was taught to fulfil her dreams
through her kitchen. In 1936 Monel Metal, an American kitchen
manufacturer, advertised a new model with a photograph of Betty, newly
wed, apron already securely fastened around her waist. Her hands
happily plunged into soapsuds, she gazes gratefully at her husband,
Bob, under the headline: "She wouldn't take No for an answer". "Said
Betty to Bob one day," reads the ad, "wouldn't it be wonderful if we
could have a bright and shining kitchen--with everything matching in
Monel Metal?""Swell," he replies, but fears it will cost too much. She
discovers otherwise. He is seduced. She gets her kitchen.
It took post-war prosperity, suburban living and Formica to finish off
the kitchen's coming of age. By the 1950s, in newly built houses, the
kitchen was promoted to the front of the house, allowing the housewife
to anticipate cheerily her husband's return. The kitchen had taken
central place in the American dream.
Yet the kitchen remained a place for cooking, and thus principally for
women. As Ellen Plante, author of a history of the American kitchen,
points out, its revival as a hub of the home did not take place until
women joined the workforce in big numbers, during the 1970s and 1980s.
Working mothers were decreasingly keen to cook--hence the rise of the
takeaway--but still had to prepare meals, and they did not want to
spend their evenings slaving away in a space cut off from the rest of
the family.
Out went the idea of the kitchen as service area, where housewives
scrubbed, chopped and boiled. In came the open family space, where
friends hovered, teenagers grazed and children did homework. Its early
incarnation, in the late 1970s and 1980s, was often "country-style" or
"farmhouse", all oak, orange Le Creuset casserole dishes, and often
centred on the AGA cooker, as urban women, shuttling between the office
and the home, tried to recover something of the pre-industrial age of
hearth, flagstone and pantry.
The farmhouse style still sells well, even in New York and London,
where it seems to speak to some nostalgic yearning among urban
families. Some of the priciest hand-built English kitchens today are a
cleaner, less fussy, often Shaker-inspired, version of the farmhouse
kitchen. In a 2004 study in Britain, June Freeman, a sociologist, found
that the farmhouse kitchen, of natural wood and terracotta, was the
preferred model for 41% of her sample, beating hands down the designer
kitchen in "high-gloss aubergine and black lacquer", which only 11%
favoured.
So the kitchen has come full circle. As Ms Plante puts it: "In the
early Colonial kitchen, with its massive cooking hearth, the family
gathered together for meals, conversation and home-related activities."
Today's lived-in kitchen, the central set for much TV drama, from "The
Sopranos", to "Desperate Housewives", is not so different. "People want
to express themselves through their kitchens," says Jesper Brodin,
global head of kitchens at IKEA: "Today, the dream of an open living
kitchen designed for social use is universal."
Certainly, European kitchen suppliers are thriving internationally. At
Bulthaup, an upmarket German supplier, sales of kitchens in Asia
tripled in the year to April 2007. Kitchens by Poggenpohl, another
smart German brand, are selling well in Dubai, Shanghai and Istanbul;
it recently opened a showroom in Nairobi, Kenya. In the middle market
too, IKEA is busy spreading flat packs and frustration into all corners
of the globe: in 2008 it plans to add two more stores in China to the
four it already runs there, for instance, and four more to its eight
stores in Russia.
Brand-conscious Russians, it seems, are happy to have their taste
dictated by design gurus in Stockholm and London. But if Americans and
northern Europeans seek timelessness in natural wood, the newly rich
Chinese and Russians tend to think high-gloss surfaces are a better
reflection of modern designer living.
Even in the poorest parts of the world, a modern kitchen seems to have
particular aspirational value. Tim Dirven, a Belgian photographer, came
across a bizarre but powerful illustration of this at a street
photographer's stall in a dusty run-down district of Kinshasa, the
capital of Congo. Of all the pictures that customers could choose as a
background to be photographed against, the most popular was a bright
yellow and blue European-style fitted kitchen.
The cult of the social kitchen has its limits, however. In China and
Japan, modern city flats are usually too small to make a lived-in
kitchen practical. IKEA says that its Chinese customers are concerned
chiefly with how to make the most of small cooking spaces, not with
creating open-plan areas. IKEA's Mr Brodin says smoky wok-cooking also
makes the open kitchen less appealing there. According to a 27-country
survey for IKEA by IsoPublic, a polling firm, less than 20% of Chinese
families eat in the kitchen compared with 64% of Canadian and over 50%
of American ones.
The more traditional family roles are, the less likely the kitchen is
to be used as a living area. In Sweden, 30% of households say that the
man is the main cook, and nearly two-thirds of families socialise in
their kitchen, according to IsoPublic. At the other end of the scale,
less than 5% of Saudis use their kitchen socially, and a man is the
main cook in just 3% of households.
The French too seem to be reluctant to bash down the kitchen wall and
let their guests in. In the land of gastronomy, separate dining-rooms
remain common--and an open well-designed kitchen is known as UNE
CUISINE AMeRICAINE. In Paris, the architecture of 19th-century
apartments, combined with a formal eating culture, has generally kept
the kitchen hidden away at the end of a narrow corridor, overlooking a
gloomy interior courtyard. The French, along with the Portuguese and
Spanish, do the least socialising in the kitchen among western
Europeans--half as much as Swedes and Finns. Despite the fashion for
open kitchens in new designer gourmet restaurants in Paris,
food-preparation in the home is still often considered an art to be
mastered backstage.
Shirley Conran, a British feminist writer, famously declared in the
1970s that "Life's too short to stuff a mushroom." Throwing off the
apron was the first step to a woman's freedom. Today, for some working
women, the celebration of gastronomy, and its accompanying cult of the
kitchen, is in turn a liberation from this anti-domesticity creed. At
last, it is acceptable to know how to bake brownies as well as read a
balance sheet. For others, though, it is simply a new form of domestic
enslavement. Not only do women now have to climb the professional
ladder but they are expected to be domestic divas too.
Professional designers reckon that the kitchen of the future will be a
more egalitarian place. Women may still be the main cook in 77% of
kitchens, according to the IsoPublic survey, but men increasingly spend
time there too. Mintel, a market-research group, suggests that British
men have been inspired to put on their aprons by male celebrity chefs,
such as Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. Kitchen catalogues show today's
Bob and Betty cheerfully chopping together in domestic bliss.
Kitchen manufacturers are responding with a cool, harder-edged look,
designed to appeal to masculine taste. Poggenpohl is shortly to
introduce a new model designed specially for men, in aluminium, dark
gloss and glass--a "sleek and functional design language specifically
addresses male customers". It comes complete with an in-built high-tech
audio-visual system. It even includes a cooker.
Appliance manufacturers are also beaming music, TV and the internet
into the kitchen, in part to meet what are considered male demands.
Various manufacturers have introduced a digital TV refrigerator, with a
built-in LCD screen on the fridge door. Electrolux has a model with an
internet screen built in above the fridge doors, complete with a
bar-code-detected food stockage and ordering system.
What with wireless and digital entertainment zones, kitchens have come
a long way from the era of the open fire and blackened pot. Kitchen
designers plainly think that the lure of state-of-the-art multi-media
gadgetry will pull more men into the kitchen in the future. And they
may well be right. But whether they go there in order to stuff a
mushroom, or rather to download music and stick a frozen chicken tikka
in the microwave, is probably an open question.
See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10281275
