Category Un-Meats Of The World

• Nori rolls

  THIS USED TO BE a good blog, a food blog. What happened to that? I got a job, obviously, and the impetus to post food subsided. So here are the nori rolls I like to make on Fridays (in an exercise of quasi-Catholicism) after I go and get some fresh sashimi.

  Posted 3 December 2024 · Author Liam Hogan

• Champ

  EVERYONE CAN MAKE MASHED potatoes, but what do you do when you want to make the kind of mashed potatoes that deserve a blog post? You make champ, Ireland's answer to the question 'carbohydrates and fats, how can we make these even more delicious'.

  Posted 3 April 2020 · Author Liam Hogan

• Vegemite Bagel

  JOSEPH ROTH'S RADETZSKY MARCH is one of those novels that years ago, someone you know told you was really good, and that you should read it. Whoever gave you the tip was right. It's that good...

  Posted 27 November 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Feta Margherita

  YOU WAKE UP UNDER a slowly rotating fan, the sweat pouring from your body onto the sheets of the bed you barely remember sleeping in. A tatty venetian blind casts narrow shadows across the room in sepia. One of The Doors’ songs, naturally, plays slowly, as you give a monologue describing your mental disintegration, and the progress of your terminal journey through another country’s trauma.

  Posted 29 January 2013 · Author Liam Hogan

• Fried Onion

  WHO DIDN’T TELL ME about this? Who neglected to mention the simple process, that could have delighted me so well in the years since I have been old enough to be trusted with a sharp knife and a hotplate? What horrible self-censorship stopped me ever doing this, and what shameful ignorance ever ruled the process out of bounds, non-decision, un-knowledge?

  Take half an onion, chop it very finely, toss it in a teaspoon of flour, and fry it in lots of sunflower oil.

  The recipe is that simple, if you want lovely crispy onions like burger places put on their hamburgers, like Indian places put on top of rice, like anybody would want an onion to turn into. The italics are mine for importance: this has been an honest-to-Protestant-American-come-to-Jesus-moment-cliché revelation. Open palms in the air, dancing, call-and-response, Billy Graham with fried food, genuine hallelujah-and-pass-the-chicken-salt stuff.

  Put it all over your messy-as-hell omelette. Yeeeeahhhhh.

  

  Posted 10 January 2013 · Author Liam Hogan

• Shakshuka

  DIFFERENT RULES FOR DIFFERENT times of day are symptoms of a subtle tyranny. Humans have always obeyed the sunlight, getting up and going to sleep with the light, but it’s the modern city of workplaces and—and, though it’s a subject for another time, public transport—that has forced us all under the oppressive rule of the clock. Up in the morning and out to school as the song goes, we’re creatures of punctuality, routine, and the habitual regimen of the time-of-day, more self-disciplined to the hour than Medieval monks ever were. Even the most notoriously time-bound workplaces of all, the watches of sailors on board ships in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were enforced by relentless explicit violence and compulsory drug abuse. Like proper post-Foucauldians on board the Inner West Line train to work, we get the discipline without the fun.

  Posted 3 January 2013 · Author Liam Hogan

• Toasted cheese sandwich

  ‘HOW DO YOU MAKE such nice toasted cheese sandwiches?’ my assistant asked me.
  ‘Emmental’, I replied.

  

  Posted 10 November 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Toasted Sandwiches In Space

  
  Lift off: a Titan-Centaur rocket (NASA)

  ON THE 20 AUGUST IN 1977 an ugly rocket drew a smoky curved line in the sky, starting as a noisy flash at the launchpad at Cape Canaveral into a blink somewhere out to sea, off and out into the solar system for Science. “Ugly” is a kind word for it; a Centaur-Titan combination looks, sadly, like nothing else than the kind of phallic symbol you see chiselled into toilet doors all over the world. Take one big liquid-fuelled rocket designed to lob bombs across the Arctic (the Titan stage), strap two generic solid-fuel boosters onto the sides to get it off the ground in the first place, then onto the top add another big rocket to speed a robot up to escape velocity (the Centaur stage). It’s the kind of rocket that you set off underneath the ugly tree, expecting it to hit every branch on the way up. If Moe Syzlak were a rocket engineer, this would have been the lets-strap-together-a-bunch-of-rockets-to-make-one-big-rocket rocket he’d have come up with.

  Posted 17 April 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• French Onion Soup

  AS A WHITEY-AUSTRALIAN, I FEEL deep down the imperative, despite criticism and all sense of self-reflection, to carry on my ethnic burden to cook utterly climate-inappropriate meals. It’s a reflex that should be familiar to anyone who’s listened to Paul Kelly’s narrator, languishing in clink, fantasising about Christmas gravy. By the age of twenty, like it or not, every Anglo kid has at some point in her or his life, accepted the terrible demands of tradition despite the urgings of the weather and common-sense and the knowledge of inevitable gastric punishment and eaten pudding and custard in December. We accept this, as a small price of eternal national foreignness. It’s normal, and funny. We make jokes about the dissonance.

  The latest details from the Bureau of Meteorology list the temperature as 24.8°, with a 65% humidity, and I’m cooking French onion soup.

  Posted 16 March 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quesadillas Inauténticas

  INAUTHENTIC IS HOW I roll. It’s a slogan and a helpful cliché but every now and then it’s a literal description of the dinners I make.

  

  Posted 23 January 2012 · Author Liam Hogan