Ah Granola. So easy to make and so easy to customize to your own specific tastes and so very very awesome. It’s irresistible straight and hot out of the oven, beautiful when mixed with yogurt, an easy energy snack for hiking. The effort involved is minimal. About five minutes prep time and one hour fifteen minutes of cooking with minimal oversight. It’s also cost-effective but you have to commit to making more than one batch. The primary expense comes from the maple syrup (each bottle will get you three granolas) and the nuts. The original recipe I used years ago had one quarter cup of brown sugar and more maple syrup but I have decreased it over time to fit my own tastes. The ratio below has a light sweetness instead of an overwhelming one.
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Doruk’s Tomato Sauce
There must be billions of blogs and posts about making food and secret recipes and the like. I have no issue with that. I love food. Here’s an easy recipe for foundation tomato sauce that’s tremendously savory and versatile canvas.
I use canned crushed tomatoes – my brand of choice these days is Cento. If tomatoes are in season, then of course I use fresh tomatoes but still fortify the sauce with something canned. The canned tomatoes are guaranteed to be packing with tomatoeness and they have a tendency to form crusts on the side of the pan, which have a similar effect as fond from meats when folded back into the sauce. Still, they require a bit of rework to remove the tinniness and achieve something wooden spoon-lickingly savory.
I slice and dice some onions very thinly and saute them in a substantial amount of olive oil. I’m looking for them to eventually dissipate into the sauce. Add some garlic after a bit, throw in a pinch of cumin and pul biber, let that get fragrant then dump in the tomatoes. Stir in some umami bombs – a great and easy idea I read in a cookbook: a few shakes of soy sauce, a couple drips of fish sauce (or anchovies would be great) and a teaspoonish of marmite.
Until the discovery of oil, the economy of Dubai was built primarily on pearls and dates. The latter of course is the greatest of all dried fruits, the loveliness of sweet but not too sweet with a texture that is unmatched by other fruits. You cannot escape the date in Dubai. It is a staple in every grocery store, peddled in kiosks in every mall, and featured in every duty free shop in the airport. It is found humbly in bulk, next to the spices and nuts and prepared foods; and it is found in more elegant variations, stuffed with almonds, or wrapped in chocolate.
In the United States, the most common variety of date is the Majdoul from Jordan, and indeed this is considered by many (according to some Internet research) as the premium variety. For many years, this was the only date that I knew and enjoyed. However, on recent trips to Dubai, I have had the opportunity to sample different varieties that are either unavailable in the US, or very difficult to find (I have not necessarily sought them but I have not seen them either).
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Bangkok Food – Continued
Previously I described the food I experienced during the Historic Bangrak Tour during a visit to Bangkok. That same day, I took another tour in the evening – the Midnight Food Tour by Tuk Tuk. I figured that as long as I am in Bangkok, and as long as I greatly enjoy food, instead of trying to find a place to eat for dinner I would do another tour in the evening and experience more flavors.
This time I was on-time to the tour but barely. I had only recently returned to my hotel after getting lost near Wat Pho in the rain, looking for a taxi that would take me back to the hotel (and failing), and ultimately taking the crowded, dark river ferry back down to a metro station I was familiar with. On my way to the meeting point, I walked right past the group and only found them again a few minutes later. I’m just not very good at following certain directions.
The tour included not only food but some tourist activities as well. Our first stop was near the meeting place where there was what seemed like an outdoor Buddhist temple that was teeming with devotees and tourists. There was dancing and music, a shrine in the middle of the square, and some holy water in the corner, which we all got a quick splash of. It was a walled enclosure that led out into a street full of people, noise, and general lively cacophony.
It was early in the morning at that time following dawn when the sun begins to blanket the sea with bleary rays of light. The water shimmered in silver with patches of turquoise and blue awaiting the full rise of day. The water at that time is a flat sheet and the sounds of lapping waves the only music in the still and silent morning.
My uncle drove over to pick me up in the car that would carry us many miles in the next two days. Our starting point was a stretch of sea a couple coves down from Akyarlar on the southwestern coast of the Bodrum peninsula. On any given day the white houses of the Greek isle of Kos are visible; and on especially clear days a hazy silhouette resolves to a view of our destination: the Datca peninsula.
In recent times Bodrum has been civilized in the most modern sense with shopping malls and megamarts forming an integral part of the landscape. Still, a nostalgic, old-fashioned aura persists in many places, especially in villages like Guvercinlik, where we went for breakfast. It was still early enough in the day that even the breakfast proprietors were only just beginning services as they drowsily watched us approach. Here, we fortified ourselves with a simple but extensive meal with cheeses and olives and jams and bread, and washed down with a standard helping of tea.
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Bangkok Food
During a recent work trip to Southeast Asia, I partook on a quick weekend jaunt to Bangkok. It’s a fascinating city and a fascinating culture with a wonderful vibrancy. It also has an intimate relationship with food with more than 20,000 food-serving establishments in the city. So when I went to Bangkok I took not one but two food tours.
The tours I took were offered by Bangkok Food Tours. Aside from the food, it was a good opportunity to see parts of the city I would not have explored otherwise.
In the morning, I took the Historic Bangrak Tour. It began inauspiciously as I was late to the meeting point because I came out the wrong exit at the metro station. However, I found the group and soon thereafter we were heading through a sprinkle of rain to the first destination. There, we were served a simple but delicious plate of roasted duck on rice. That was followed by a more adventurous item: duck feet wrapped in pig intestine (looked like bacon) and stuffed with more pig product. The first dish was quite tasty, the second was just an experience.
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Continental Performance in the World Cup
Football fans tend to identify with the sport at one or both of two levels: club and national team. However, the utterly global nature of the game makes it possible to identify at a third level: continental. It seems bizarre that we could categorize entire continents into buckets that we could then compare, discuss, and argue. What ties say Ireland and Bulgaria together, or South Korea and Qatar, beyond geological boundaries of continents? ((Geological boundaries which football’s governing bodies have cheerfully ignored with the likes of Israel, Georgia, Armenia, and Kazakhstan plying away in “Europe” and Australia a recent member of the Asians.))
| Continent | # of 2014 Participants |
| Africa | 5 |
| Asia | 4 |
| Europe | 13 |
| N America | 4 |
| S America | 6 |
Regardless, continental policy matters. It is how FIFA decides on the number of teams that a given continent can provide to the World Cup. One of the narratives of the current World Cup ponders whether global football power is shifting away from the Old World. ((http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/28117029 and http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/28/continental-shift-world-cup)) A relatively miniscule cadre of six European teams survived the group stages and many have disdained even that number as supposed lightweights Switzerland and Greece had also snuck in. So is the rest of the world catching up to Europe?