Ottolenghi's Hot Yoghurt and Barley Soup

Though this blog is unlike a proper news website in other respects, here is an article in the 'filler' tradition for the holidays.

Hordeum — barley
Photo courtesy USDA,
via Wikipedia

The new cookbook Jerusalem has been well received and has even landed in the bookshelves of Gwyneth Paltrow. I received it for my birthday and have made a handful of its Middle Eastern recipes already. The latest is the hot yoghurt and barley soup.

The barley and the water it is cooked in are enriched by sautéd onions, yoghurt, mint, parsley, and spring onions to make the soup. Further details shall be kept unrevealed for reasons of not spoiling the mystery (and, copyright).

Yesterday I made it the first time and left the barley too long; it was waterlogged and much of the cooking liquid had disappeared. The right response to this contingency was, as it proved, not to make up the difference with more water; that otherwise vitally important compound of hydrogen and oxygen was in the end the defining flavour of the broth. I tasted the soup toward the end of proceedings, then rushed in some 70 g of butter to thicken it; fortunately we were philistines and had wieners with it, so no one went unsatisfied. Today the grains were on the hearth for roughly twenty minutes' total, not even counting the simmering time, but they rested in the pot soaking up water while I prepared the rest of the recipe. This may not be ideal either, but everything retained its flavour and the barley's texture was quite nice.

As far as the garnish is concerned, I sautéed the spring onions until one or two bits were a little browned in the same pan (pot, but we'll pretend it was a better-suited pan) which had held the onions, so that the spring onions would be even more flavourful but gentle. It proved to be a good idea, though the pristine white-and-green contrast of the soup was further marred by this step.

***

Jerusalem
by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi
[Ebury Press]

Cracking the Nut

The Guardian has been showing the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker, presented in the UK's Covent Garden in 2009, in two parts on its website.

So I watched it the day it went up on the internet. I thought the standard of acting was astonishingly good, as well as the detail in the costumes, which are distractingly Jane Austen adaptation-like; the settings, mannerisms and dress all seem to hearken quite faithfully to the ideal of domesticity in 19th-century Germany. In this sense it is probably not as close to the source material; E.T.A. Hoffmann was I think a subversive writer and his Nutcracker is dark and trippy and funny like many of his other works. On the other hand, I once saw an unhealthy interpretation on television, which inflicted some emotional scarring which I've fortunately for the most part forgotten, so there is no need to go to the other extreme! Either way, this Covent Garden imagining is self-consciously indulgent and much like Zeffirelli's Metropolitan Opera art direction seems to be — perfect for people who like tradition and like to be pampered. The question of its balletic nature is probably best left to more knowledgeable heads than mine.

Since the Guardian film is only temporarily available,  here is this production from 2008 — in the same opera house, much the same cast and same stage direction, with the notable difference that another ballerina (Alexandra Ansanelli) is the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

From the Book of Hours for Engelbert of Nassau (1470s)
By an unknown Flemish miniaturist, manuscript in the Bodleian Library.
Courtesy of Web Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary: Mandatory Minimums for Drug Trafficking?

Disclaimer: Since I am not an expert, some of this may be inaccurate. Mistakes are likely mine and not due to the sources.

Since the Anti-Drug Abuse Act came into effect in the United States in 1986, the definition of "drug trafficking" in the courts has meandered considerably from the definition which the bill's sponsors had in mind.

This legislation requires courts to imprison everyone who is convicted of drug trafficking for minimum sentences which tend to comprise five to ten years. But prosecutors are able, according to the statute, to require these sentences even for unsystematic and non-violent crimes, and even as an alternative to treatment.

In the state of Iowa, even the possession of 5 grams of meth leads to a 5-year minimum sentence ("unless," the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy recommends, "the defendant pleads guilty and/or cooperates with the prosecution of other defendants.").* On the federal level, crimes involving 5 g of crack cocaine or 500 g of powder cocaine roughly result in the same sentence; 50 g/5kg in the 10-year sentence.**

* Methamphetamine is an unusual case; other controlled substances, e.g. heroin and cocaine, may be met by milder sentencing where, for example, a first offense occurs. Marijuana, K2 ('synthetic cannabis'), and controlled Schedule IV medicines like diazepam are exempted from any mandatory minimum.
** "Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy," p. 5. Until the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, the simple possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine was also punished with a 5-year minimum mandatory sentence. Having even an enormous amount of any other drug except Rohypnol would lead to a year's imprisonment at most. Since there was a racist element to the sentencing (in 2006 81.8% of crack cocaine offenders were African American [p. 15]) it became an urgent issue; a sentencing disparity of 18-to-1 still exists.

"DRUG trafficking," according to a critical article on the American Civil Liberties Union's website, presently covers furnishing a methamphetamine dealer with a cold medicine (pseudoephedrine) which is used to make the drug, being a middleman, or picking up drugs for a friend. By contrast, Senator and co-sponsor Robert Byrd had wanted the law to target crime bosses and dealers higher in the hierarchy.

In a 2002 report the United States Sentencing Commission had formulated the principle:

(3) enhanced sentences generally should be imposed on a defendant who, in the course of a drug offense –
  (i) murders or causes serious bodily injury to an individual;
  (ii) uses a dangerous weapon (including a firearm);
  (iii) involves a juvenile or a woman who the defendant knows or should know to be pregnant;
  (iv) engages in a continuing criminal enterprise or commits other criminal offenses in order to facilitate the defendant's drug trafficking activities;
  (v) knows, or should know, that the defendant is involving an unusually vulnerable victim;
  (vi) restrains a victim;
  (vii) distributes cocaine within 500 feet of a school;
  (viii) obstructs justice;
  (ix) has a significant prior criminal record;
  (x) is an organizer or leader of drug trafficking activities involving five or more persons.*

*Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy, p. 7

Also,

The Subcommittee on Crime of the House Committee on the Judiciary generally defined serious traffickers as "managers of the retail traffic, the person who is filling the bags of heroin, packaging crack cocaine into vials . . . and doing so in substantial street quantities" and major traffickers as "manufacturers or the heads of organizations who are responsible for creating and delivering very large quantities."*

*Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy, p.8

MELISSA Harris-Perry of the television channel MSNBC commented during a roundtable discussion on her show on November 18th that there has been no proof, in any case, that mandatory minimum sentencing has any effect on crime rates.

It has however been proven to exacerbate imprisonment rates, correctional institutes' overcrowding (the population in federal prisons is now three times what it was in 1986, fed by the influx of drug offenders on mandatory sentences), costs, injustice in that the prosecution is felt to be disproportionate to the offense, and indirect and broader problems like broken families, cyclical criminality and poverty. The prisoner may also be forced to serve his sentence in a far harsher way than was ever intended; for instance, young prisoners are sometimes put in solitary confinement as a method of shielding them from older fellow inmates. Solitary confinement is generally increasingly used, also for suicide risks and many other problems; and one factor which arguably contributes to its popularity is overcrowding.

Illustration: Statue of Themis in the Central Statue Square, at the Legislative Council Building, in Hong Kong.
Photo by ChvhLR10, via Wikimedia Commons. (CC BY-SA 3.0) Licence.

*

Day of St. Martin

In honour of the day.

***

Lead glass window in the Catholic church Église Saint-Aignan de Chartres in Chartres. It portrays Saint Martin and was fabricated in the early 16th century (according to a leaflet in the church); the deterioration of this window and others appears to be owing partly to the siege of Chartres during the 'Wars of Religion' in 1568. The parish in which the church is situated once belonged to the counts of Blois and of Chartres. Photograph taken in January 2011, and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, by Reinhardhauke. 

(Additional information from "Église Saint-Aignan de Chartres," French Wikipedia, read November 11, 2012.)

Live Blog 2: Republican National Convention

After yesterday's hiatus in, er, reportage, here is the third and last day of the Republican National Convention from Tampa, Florida. I am watching it through C-Span's livestream.

"Baby elephant mud bathing Chobi, Botswana Photo"
by Lee R. Berger (Profberger)
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Before we begin:
"Texas voter ID law is blocked," (August 30, 2012) Washington Post
 
THE U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided earlier today that Texas's new voter ID laws are discriminatory against African-Americans and Hispanics of modest means. An appeal to the Supreme Court is intended.

Republican lawmakers have argued that the voter ID law is needed to clean up voter rolls, [. . .] Texas, they argue, is asking for no more identification than people need to board an airplane, get a library card or enter many government buildings.

In South Carolina, voters would need to show a driver's license, DMV identification card, U.S. military ID, passport, or a photo ID which can be obtained from election workers in one's county free of charge. In Texas, the Department of Justice has estimated that anyone without a copy of their birth certificate would have to fork over at least $22.

Live Blog: Republican National Convention, August 28, 2012

"The eye of an asian elephant at Elephant Nature Park, Thailand",
photograph by Alexander Klink (2008)
From Wikimedia Commons, Licence (CC BY 3.0)

Warning: written from a pro-Democratic viewpoint. Of course I endeavour to present facts correctly; please do not assume that I have succeeded entirely, however. Please excuse typos, non-sequiturs, and other oddities.

As the US Republican Party's convention in advance of the November elections takes place in Tampa, Florida, I am following this second day of events through the government broadcaster C-Span's livestream.

6:41 p.m. EDT  (UTC-4:00) C-Span lady says the Convention is officially in recess until 7:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

6:43 p.m. Philosophical West African lady telephoning in from New York State: Have civilized dialogue, not violent language. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama still have to work together after the election, no matter what happens.

6:56 p.m. Smarmy besuited young male individual waving "MITT" sign behind NBC news anchor Chuck Todd during his interview. We get it already, we really do.

7:02 p.m. Pale Texan delegate who has apparently not needed to be shielded from the sun for a while wearing cowboy hat is really incongruous. And he is at least one individual on Earth's green and blue sphere who would like to see former President G.W. Bush at the convention; still says he thinks it's tactically better for him to be absent. Is this the southern passive-aggression I've heard about?

7:04 p.m. A Hispanic lady who is for Romney-Ryan has been discovered!

7:07 p.m. Earlier at the convention: Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney were determined to be the nominees, which — as many a Twitter jokester commented — is an unforeseen contingency that threatens to capsize this Republican electoral season.

Convention begins again.

Wishful Thinking About Violence Against Women

REPUBLICAN congressman Steve King of Iowa has contributed his own remarks to the fray over Missouri congressman and senatorial candidate Todd Akin's contention that 'legitimate rape' almost never results in pregnancy. (A video of Rep. Akin's comments appeared on the web on August 19th; he has apologized since then.)

In an August 20th interview with the television station KMEG 14 (a CBS affiliate in Sioux City, Iowa), Rep. King replied to a question about how pregnancy after statutory rape (e.g. consensual sex between an adult man and a twelve-year-old girl) should be treated,

Well I just haven't heard of that being a circumstance that's been brought to me in any personal way and I'd be open to hearing discussion about that subject matter.

He was speaking in the Le Mars and Sioux Center, where he was campaigning, and the video of the news segment which includes his comments is on the television station's website. His spokesperson has since responded,

Cinema, Antipodeans, and the Queen

Since it is the British monarch's Diamond Jubilee year, articles relating to Queen Elizabeth II have been turning up in unexpected places.

The presence of one such article on the website of the Daily Telegraph — given its conservative sensibilities — is not really unexpected; but this scene in it, narrated by David Poole (who has done more than one portrait of her) truly is:

On one occasion she asked, 'Have you seen the film Crocodile Dundee? You must, it's hilarious.'

("I saw it on her recommendation," the painter adds, "and agreed with her.")

"35 years of portraits of the Queen from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters" [Daily Telegraph], by David Poole et al. (April 19, 2012)

***

"RP Exhibitions & Events" [Royal Society of Portrait Painters]
With details of a May exhibition at Trafalgar Square, London, of portraits by Society members, including ones shown in the Telegraph's slideshow.

"Crocodile Dundee (trailer)" [YouTube: WhenNatureCall] (Uploaded June 2, 2008)

Further reading:

Karl to comment on Jubilee [Elle UK], by Emily Cronin (April 18, 2012)
(Karl is Lagerfeld, the designer for Fendi and Chanel, and by 'Jubilee' Elle means the anniversary celebrations on June 3rd, one day after the exact day Queen Elizabeth was crowned in 1953.)
"Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II" [Wikipedia]
An exhaustive overview of the festivities. The proposed ceremonies in the United Kingdom, flotilla and bank holiday and all, are detailed toward the bottom of the page.
"The Queen Through The Ages" [Elle UK], slideshow from various sources and with commentary by Sunil MaKan (March 30, 2012)

Best of YouTube: Death and Cows in Halves

In anticipation of the exhibition (April 4th to September 9th of this year) by Damien Hirst at Tate Modern in London, the Tate put together a video, shown on its YouTube channel, in which curator Ann Gallagher and the artist walk through the rooms and discuss the artworks together.

The art is a retrospective of the artist's past three decades: 8 Pans — a row of eight coloured saucepans (whose gloopy paint makes them look like cakes of the acrylic paint which normally comes in squeezable plastic bottles) from the 80s which Hirst confesses he doesn't think so much of now; tanks with animals preserved in liquid, vaguely psychedelic turning wheels of paint colours which run and expand like fragmented rays of sunshine to the rims, a roomful of live butterflies with a double curtain of clear plastic streamers at the doorways so that the lepidoptera aren't lost, a regimented and overlarge replica of the shelves and superminimalist counter in a pharmacy, a huge disc encrusted with flies; and so on.

*

In the Turbine Hall there is (not shown in the Gallagher-Hirst film but in a second film of its own) the diamond-encrusted skull which, since the artist originally demanded the famously immense price of 50 million British pounds for it, has been cited as a leading exemplar of the subjective pricing of any art and particularly of modern art — where it is arguably difficult to tell how much thought and feeling and work have gone into something, in the absence of the innumerable brushstrokes and details and generally noble (undemocratic?) aesthetic of any classic canvas from a medieval altar triptych to the impressionists.


("I made the skull," he told Anita Singh of the Daily Telegraph,

because in a situation where there was all this money being made, I wanted to make something about the money. When you're in a position where you have made loads and loads of money, it should be used to make art rather than letting it pile up.)

The making of the skull itself is outsourced to Bentley & Skinner, a jeweller's at 55 Piccadilly Street in London, whose employed are shown in the Tate's short film drilling holes into the platinum frame and then placing the crinkly diamonds — there are 8,601 all told — in them. At the forehead of the skull (which is a cast of a true old skull) there is an enormous tear-drop shaped diamond, fringed by middling-sized ones, as an ornament like a comic book deity's 'mindstone.' It and the music in the background of the video and the richness are oddly reminiscent of Karl Lagerfeld's Paris-to-Bombay fashion collection in December — which was at once the height of awkward taste in a time where the questionable solvency of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc., were vexing the souls of Europe, and Britain across the Channel was already suffering under budget cuts to alleviate the tremendous government debt, and the United States was still twisting under its own financial shortcomings and political budget debate, all of these things being the metaphorical skeleton at the feast — and strangely compelling.

So it is helpful to hear in the video what Hirst was thinking, by and large, when he conceived the divers installations.

Painting: Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (ca. 1640), by Georges de La Tour
in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons
It is arguable by prejudiced persons like me that Hirst's memento mori is in better taste than this rather kitschily dramatic though often-loved painting, which is one of several with the gloomy candle-phile Mary Magdalene motif.

Best of YouTube: Blumenthal Part II: Bacon and Egg and Liquid Nitrogen

Heston Blumenthal - Bacon & Egg Ice Cream
Uploaded by lesterfontayne onto YouTube, January 11, 2011
From "How To Cook Like Heston," Channel Four

Background reading on the restaurant whence it was served: "Mix snail porridge, sardine sorbet and you have a Fat Duck" [Guardian], by Richard Jinman (April 19, 2005)

GOOP: The Hunt for the Perfect Academy Award Attire

In her serving of GOOP from the week of March 22nd, Gwyneth Paltrow generously offers an insight into the grand and complicated process of selecting a dress and of embarking on her final preparations for the Academy Awards back on February 26th.

THIS year she chose a white dress with cape by the designer Tom Ford, and it was surprisingly flattering and unusual and to my recollection well-received by armchair and proper critics. (It also appeared, in near-identical form, in the designer's Fall-Winter 2012 collection.)

***

Illustration: Irises, by Vincent van Gogh (Rijksmuseum)
via Wikimedia Commons
[BEFORE she decided on her final ensemble on the day of the Oscars, Paltrow tried out a cuff by Anna Hu "inspired by Van Gogh's painting, Irises, and [. . .] made up of garnets, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds in the same colors as those of the painting." This could in fact refer to any of several still-lives of irises by van Gogh. (Another, 'orchid' cuff "was inspired by Monet's color palette and designed while listening to Chopin.")]

***

Best of YouTube: "The Dreaded, Infamous, Famous, Call It What You Want, Delicious Porridge"

A propos of nothing in particular, here is a video depicting the cooking of a 'signature dish' by the notably adventurous British chef Heston Blumenthal:

Heston Blumenthal's snail porridge
Uploaded by monkeynews000 onto YouTube, February 24, 2009
From "Full on Food," UKTV Food

Background reading on Blumenthal and 'molecular gastronomy': "'Molecular gastronomy is dead.' Heston speaks out" [The Observer]

Across the Pond: A UK/US State Dinner

Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama
in the Oval office
 via yfrog, Number10gov, ca. March 14, 2012 [App'tly public domain]

YESTERDAY evening Barack and Michelle Obama hosted a dinner for the UK's Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha and 370 guests under an enormous tent on the South Lawn of the White House.

Among the cultural luminaries who were invited were Idris Elba of the HBO series The Wire and George Clooney; Carey Mulligan came along with the eponymous Mumford of the Mumford & Sons who were performing music (folk rock according to the White House); John Legend (the other performer) came with his girlfriend Christine Teigen. Miramax studios executive Harvey Weinstein was present with his London-native wife Georgina Chapman, who is also the codesigner with Keren Craig at Marchesa, which created the dark blue dress that the First Lady wore. Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern of the historical television drama Downton Abbey arrived with their partners, and US Vogue editor Anna Wintour attended with the investor Shelby Bryan.

"Expected Attendees at Tonight's State Dinner" [White House] (March 14, 2012)

Hugh Bonneville raised the satirical possibility of more interesting attire when he tweeted, "Dressing for dinner. I'm thinking Union Jack: red eye shadow, white moob tube, blue culottes #StyleIcon #AtTheWH." Yet in the end the sartorial choices of all attendees — as they figuratively waltzed across a checkerboard-floored room through the flashes of the press cameras on their way to their tables — were, if not thrillingly patriotic, suited.

Samantha Cameron does British fashion proud at White House dinner - in pictures [Guardian], Commentary by Imogen Fox (March 15, 2012)

These (along with the political guests including the customary throng of campaign contributors and financial titans like Warren Buffett and born Briton Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, as well as veteran press figures like Gwen Ifill of PBS and Katty Kay of the BBC) then dined on a menu of fried halibut, salad, bison, boiled lemon pudding and American wines — off amethyst-and-gold, candlelit table settings with planters to 'evoke the American backyard' which was a theme and with roses as a nod to an emblem of both countries.