Ho ho ho hippo houx?

I'm really not sure what I'm doing perched up here--an excellent view of the living room, it must be said, and for once the humans have been less wasteful than usual by putting up a Christmas tree that's already dead, and whose decorations are all either edible or wearable. I'm not sure what category that puts me in: do I have more in common with the woolly hat or with the just-begun sausage? Hmm.

UPDATE: Well I seem to have survived so far, as can be seen from the remains of another unfortunate creature in the roasting pan. The main problem now is that I'm completely full, and worried my liver is about to go on strike:

1.5kg pork roast, boneless
1 slice poitrine de porc=3 slices streaky bacon
500g chestnuts, peeled
3 cipolata sausages
2 onions
6 cloves garlic

Chop onion, garlic, poitrine/bacon and half of chestnuts, soften in frying pan. Trim and open out pork to form as flat a sheet as possible, lay stuffing on top and roll up, securing with twine. Place in roasting pan on top of remaining chestnuts, if possible fatty side up. Roast for two hours or so, or probably less in a less feeble oven.

Serve with mashed potato/chestnut mixture and sautéed spinach leaves.

To be preceded by foie gras with quince paste, and followed with lemon curd tart and affogato--vanilla ice cream, coffee and liqueur served alongisde each other. Apéritifs of cheese and olives, while cooking.

Wine: red for the most part. Tawny port in lieu of white with foie gras, champagne with apéritifs and dessert.

And of course the finest of company...

Accidental pastry cleavage, or How to surprise your dinner guests

This entry was meant to carry the mundane appellation of
Beef and Guinness pie
but it would appear that the human has much to learn about pastry crusts. I had nothing to do with this particular fiasco, other than being plunged into the middle of it in puzzlement when it was brought to the table.

Recipe is as follows:
1kg beef chuck, cut into 3-4cm pieces
Flour, salt, pepper
Onion and garlic
Can tomatoes
Beef stock, cubic or otherwise
250mL Guinness--or in this case homemade herb stout
Worcestershire sauce
Thyme or other herbs, if not already present in beer
Pastry for topping

Mix flour, salt, pepper, and turn beef pieces in mixture to coat. Brown meat in batches in heavy pan, transfer to bowl. Add chopped onion, garlic and some water to pan, cook, scraping flour from bottom of pan. Add tomatoes, cook a couple of minutes. Add beef with juices, stock, beer, worcestershire sauce, herbs if necessary. Cook either in oven or on low heat until meat is tender and sauce is thick, maybe 90 minutes.

Transfer to ovenproof dish--in this case rectangular, cast iron. Let stew cool if you have time, otherwise (if you're hungry) place two egg cups in dish to support crust, then place pastry over top of dish before baking. Puff pastry supported by egg cups or similar will give the result shown above, though variations are doubtless possible. If you're boring or don't wish to offend your dinner guests, use shortcrust pastry and/or let the stew cool before adding the crust and baking. That or make the pies in small individual dishes, but really...

Serve with potatoes, beans, and stout or a good strong Bordeaux.

Mmm!

On covering up

I've always thought "Assimil" was a strange name for a line of language-learning products, smacking a little too much of rather too many nations' patronising immigration policies. Not to mention some of the attempts to make Australian aborigines disappear by integrating into colonial society.

I suppose we should be thankful, as at least the brand's English language learning records are said to have inspired Eugène Ionesco's masterpiece La Cantatrice chauve.

Ecoutez, répétez...

This isn't to say I was ungrateful at the loan of a Moroccan Arabic phrasebook--though I was a little puzzled at its omission of any explanation of the Arabic alphabet, not at all difficult to learn, as the main thing I ended up needing a little of the language for was reading street signs.

To its credit, one of the things the book is strong on is exhorting travellers to respect the basic niceties of the countries they wish to visit. One of these is appropriate dress, which generally means covering up, especially when visiting sites of religious significance.

Following this advice, I thought a slight change of costume might cause less offence in public, namely:

Do we all agree on this, or is anyone game to start another argument about the French ban on wearing the veil (sorry, on wearing "conspicuous religious symbols") in schools or while carrying out offices of public duty?

Be warned, anything you say may be misquoted out of all recognition, as the human is getting ready for another conference paper in February on humour and the Danish cartoons...

Update: hippo horthorgraphy

According to she with whom I look to be sharing a room for most of January, there are a couple of possible spellings of the word “haloof”—suggesting that is probably a dialectal word that was at some point transcribed into Arabic and whose spelling can vary according to local pronunciation:

ﺣﻠﻮﻒ
equals Haloof with strong h, usually transliterated with a dot underneath
ﮬﻠﻮﻑ
equals Haloof with a weaker h

Apparently, the word originally means “wild boar,” which seems a much better hyp(p)othesis to me than a type of horse, though still far removed from my cetacean connections. The classical Arabic dictionary I consulted gives “ﻓﺮﺲ ﺍﻟﻨﺤﺮ”—“fars al-nahur” or “water horse”—simply transcribing the etymology of those untrustworthy latinate Greeks Timothy Danaos and Dona Ferentes.

The human is a big fan of languages written from right to left as he’s left-handed, and is in fact so clumsy with his right that he had trouble eating his tajine without a fork.

I always suspected there was something sinister about him.

Haloof or human?

The following photo, snapped by she whose travels make me green with envy, and whose cooking posts inspire hunger and jealousy in equal measure, should be evidence enough that hippos are social creatures. Dangerous at times, yes, especially to foolish bipeds, but we are civilised beings that like nothing better than bathing in congregation.

It will be of little surprise, then, that the human was far more amused than I by a recent encounter at the inexpensive and commodious HI hostel in Casablanca, site of the Hassan II Mosque, the world's second-largest. He kept talking about trying to find a certain Signor Ferrari, but in the end had to settle for being driven from the station in a bright red Fiat Uno.

Anyway, despite his pitiful efforts at speaking Arabic (a practice that he justified by claiming that he was hiding behind someone else's colonial past by speaking French), some visitors from Fes were kind enough to invite him to share their dinner. He was reluctant to join them at first--too busy reading Huysmans' A Rebours, I ask you!--and so had to be gently reminded that sharing meals was simply part of being human, whereas eating alone and keeping to oneself was to be a Haloof--a hippopotamus!

Not once did the (h)aloof human speak up in my defence, even though he's far less sociable than I am. My only revenge was that he ended up having a cold shower, but he'll get his come-uppance one of these days.

I point him, and all ungrateful humans, in the direction of horrible haloof Howard, whose final ingnominy was to refuse to concede to the inevitable until every last vote had been counted.

On bathing

It may be that it's winter again, it may be that the curtain-less French telephone shower (did I forget to warn you about that, o unsuspecting Christmas guests?) is starting to get on my nerves, or it may be a flash of self-satisfaction and/or hypocrisy at Australia finally ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. I have been fantasising about having a nice hot bath.

Off with the pet human to Morocco tomorrow where I fully intend to indulge in a hippo hammam, but my thoughts are strangely starting to turn back to Australia with its hot summer temperatures, chronic water shortages, and newly-confirmed status as the most energy-hungry nation per capita in the world.

In short, I wish to locate and clean a bathtub of the sort used as cattle troughs in dry paddocks, place it at a suitably commanding viewpoint, fill with water the night before and light a fire of red gum logs or other rare native hardwood underneath. The idea is that the next day the water is just right, and there are are just enough coals to keep the water hot. The bath is to be taken with a bottle of red wine and preferably the company of a like-minded, bath-loving, château-owning hippoess. Bathing can occur both by day, with a good book, and by night, as clouds of steam waft down the hill, and wisps of smoke drift upwards, engendering that authentic country smell native to toasted marshmallows and after-pub overcoats.

[Dsclaimer: I must thank the gentleman in the silly hat for kindly sending me the CAD-created rubber duck appearing above, and apologise if any of my environmental statements end up jeopardising his career as an architect.]