(News & Noise)

Just found out — through pounding on my door — that I’ve got folks coming across the mountains next month for Seafair; I haven’t seen any of them (except the two at the door) in years — in a decade– and there’ll be lots. And since I’m gonna be playing host for a while, my attention to Tekumel cooking & eating will be interrupted.

(Pause for audience ridicule)

I’ve been getting more fired up about this blog again (a little), mostly because of the Tekumel-oid gaming group I’m in. Since they’re 4/5ths academics, and it’s summer, we’re officially on hiatus for another 3-4 months. So maybe this development doesn’t matter.

Anyway, here are two links that, qua grub, I’ve liked.

Cookies in a Jar, from the first food blogger I ever started reading who wasn’t someone I was friends with IRL. I don’t have a sweet tooth at all, but even so I’m kinda enchanted by this idea. In case I ever get put in charge of entertaining (as opposed to educating, consciousness-raising, and corrupting) a bunch of kids, this goes onto my short list of coping strategies.

Kings of Kaukau. Yes, I know they’re a ripoff of whatever that anglo show was. The difference is, I can’t remember anything on that other show that wasn’t pukemaking in its non-mega/unmanly/under-XTreem!!! version even before before they did their thing(s) to it. But while the half-dozen episodes of ‘Kings of Kaukau’ occasionally make me gag a little, I’m basically fond of all the food underlying their ueberization. ‘Malasada Madness’ was especially fun, but made me feel sad. Everyone I know who is ‘into food’ is either intensely into purity and disciplines of moral~spiritual dietar hygiene, or is just too fucking snooty and chi-chi (and at heart parochial) to feel comfortable being around that sort of thing.

Now, if the Tekumel Foundation should arrange for the assembly of just a single six-legged goat/sheep-oid carcass, and its public roasting and devouring, that would be a world(s)-changer…

Pure, holy, cooling soup

This is a hot-weather recipe from the great valley of the Missuma River; a valley that’s the spine of the Empire of The Petal Throne; a valley that’s full of people obsessed with dignity, righteousness, purity in body and deed, milk, and who have a more than slightly dodgy obsession with their huge cucumbers. Cucumbers are clean and purifying, you see, unlike just about every other foodstuff they’re familiar with. Except milk, of course. (Foodstuffs they’re unfamiliar with are literally demonic poisons.) There’s so much impurity in the world![*] Only fresh and clean, very clean cucumbers are fit to offer to the gods.

In less exotic hellholes, my yesterday morning was 80F an hour after sunrise. (The next time someone tells you the Pacific Northwest is cool and cloudy, please murder the shit out of them. I’ll owe you.) I was forewarned, and laid in a stock of groceries that are a) appealing while you’re hovering around heat exhaustion, b) plausibly nutritious, and c) require going nowhere near a stove, oven, cooktop, or other misery-engine. I’ve got the stuff for two more recipes after this one, if needed.

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Fish & Chips – PENOM STYLE!!!

(Right there, I possibly just lost my entire Tekumelophile readership.)

I’d like to try and do more ‘regional’ food stuff set on Tekumel, or at least within the Tsolyani borders. It’s such a bland place, the more I think about it officially.

Here’s a try at street food you might buy in Penom – that smaller, unglamorous, more moldy, fishy, and creepy-crawly city on the southern coast. Or, perhaps, you’d find it in one of the smaller ports, portages, or market centers that I think are scattered around the vast Tsechelnu Swamps around Penom (all unmapped and unknown in the Tekumel canon, alas). You’d buy a serving of it, I expect, in a large leaf rolled or folded double and pinned to make a pair of conjoined basins: one of fish, one of chips.

As a snack it’s quite mildly flavored: slightly tangy fish, slightly floral plantain. The textures complement each other: balls that are springy all the way through, chips that are hard and crunchy on the outside but almost fluffy inside.

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What I’m Watching: God of Cookery

Stephen Chow was basically coasting even twenty years ago when this movie came out. He coasts well. By Shaolin Soccer you could feel that you were facing the beach and not the wave; by Kungfu Hustle, I dunno, we must have each been getting old and jaded. But that did still run you in on those chuckling waves under the board.

God of Cookery helped made Iron Chef a joke before Iron Chef came out anywhere outside of Japan (I think), it has puns I can just barely know that I’m not following WTF is going on, it had its fun with snotty gourmets and also hipster foodies before hipster foodies even had the technology to exist, it has Karen Mok in ugly makeup overacting profoundly, it has horrible food and entertaining food and moving food, it has Karen Mok in ugly makeup overacting profoundly and still causing me tachycardia, it has a deep commitment to treat tradition, dignity, and Honor like straw dogs like a bad kitten meeting tuna-marinated mice, it has Exploding Piss Beef Balls, it has nonlinear narrative, and it has a lot of love. And it has, for the moment, the ability to be viewed in full, English-subtitled, on YouTube.

Oh, yeah, I’ve been inspired by the antepenultimate item above to post another recipe to this blog next. Coming up soon! Hold your breath!

(Bad, bad kitten!)

Plain Old Rendang

I assume, any & all readers, that my apologies for silence (and weirdness) can be taken as read. Anyway, back in early February my Tekumel(ish) gaming group were able to get together for a long session, with food. What follows below was my contribution. It’s just the Indonesian standby of rendang, without any exoticization for the sake of Tekumelization.

(Yes, unexpected as its existence may be, and unorthodox as its praxis may be, I’m doing Tekumel-themed gaming again since last fall, after a long hiatus.)

Beef in Tangy Coconut Continue reading →