Confit Nutter

Well, what am I supposed to do with all that goose fat lying around? In addition to a jar of confit of 4 goose legs, I have another jar of a pair of duck legs, a small jar of shredded breast of lamb, and today's project was a stab at beef. I used topside and shin. The shin is a perfect choice for this (topside less so, but it's what I had in the freezer). Because I'm greedy and selfish, I did scoop out the marrow from the shinbone as soon as that bit was cooked so I could eat it warm with a bit of salt. I love the marrow. I cooked it with lots of garlic in the goosefat, and it seemed to work ok. We'll see how it is in a few weeks or months.

Goose Fat

Many people wrongly think animal fat is 100% saturated fat. Regardless of whether you think saturated fats are "bad" or mononsaturated fats are "good", the breakdown of various fats is pretty interesting. Lard, for example is nearly half monounsaturated. Goose fat, which is a culinary gift from nature, has more than twice as much mononsaturated fat as saturated (by weight, less than 28% saturated, more than 56% monounsaturated; and it's less than 10% omega-6 to boot). Almost all of that monounsaturated fat is oleic acid, the same magical stuff in olive oil that makes everyone near the mediterranean live to the age of 300 without heart disease. Having some extra goose fat from the confit session of the christmas geese, I let some cool to room temperature in a spare jar, and the solids settled out at the bottom, leaving most of it a golden liquid at room temperature. I used a little for eggs this morning, and it had picked up a bit of the garlic, bay, and thyme from the confit process. Aromatic and satisfying.

Can Travelling Get Any Worse?

A few months ago, my youngest and I were stuck on an unmoving Eurostar train for a couple hours. They turned the air and power off. Fortunately, the delay was only a few hours and not nearly day-long imprisonment hundreds of passengers had to suffer recently due to the wrong kind of snow. And now flying is going to get even worse.

A few years ago, one idiot tried to light his shoe on fire and now we all have to kick ours off as part of our pre-flight routine. Now a new idiot smuggled something a bit like semtex in his underpants and tried to ignite it. So can we look forward to being aggressively groped and fondled by security automatons? You betcha!

"They patted you down really well," said Allen, 41, an automotive engineer from Shelby Township, Mich. "It wasn't just a quick rub, it was a slow pat."

Fabulous! I'm looking forward to the slow pat already. But it gets even better. What's the best way to prevent someone from blowing up a plane with a c4 jockstrap? If you said, "don't let anyone put a pillow in their laps", you're qualified to work in airline security. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that waiting until the end of the flight was not an essential feature of this particular explosion plot. But once you remove the power of critical thought, you get idiotic practices [already adopted!] such as these:

Passengers getting off flights from overseas reported being told that they couldn't get out of their seat for the last hour of their flight. Air Canada also said that during the last hour passengers won't be allowed access to carry-on baggage or to have any items on their laps.
...
Passengers on a United Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Washington were not allowed to have anything on their laps during the descent into Dulles, or to open the overhead bins an hour before landing

Since I haven't yet had my lobotomy, I'm not seeing how these measures will help. If he tried to ignite his pants in the middle of the flight, would there be a ban on getting up or putting a pillow in your lap for the middle hour of the flight? What color were his underpants? Can we ban that color, too? He spent 20 minutes in the loo, can we look forward to flight attendants having to time our toilet breaks?

What preventive measures would be better to put the kibosh on copycats? Given dogs' natural love of crotch-sniffing and some breeds' remarkable ability to be trained to detect explosives, I think the solution is obvious.

Eurostar Should Consider Steam

"If any of the train operators want to modernise their services by using steam trains, I would be happy to give them a quote."

Boxing Day Dinner

The confited goose legs are happily sitting in a jar of gorgeous golden goose fat. Yesterday no one was keen for a big dinner so we saved the festivities for tonight instead. Roasted a goose, sans legs, stuffing the neck with a sausage stuffing and the body with apples, onions, and prunes. Made the inauthentic green bean casserole, and brussel sprouts with roasted chestnuts, plus almond cake for dessert. I do occasionally have big gaffes in the kitchen. When I was prepping the legs and rending the fat from the geese, I fried and ate one of the livers (which was wonderful), and made a stock from the rest of the giblets/offal. I added some onions, carrots, bay leaves, and some unused mushrooms that were nearing end of shelf life. The stock ended up with a nice earthy flavor and a very dark brown color, or so I thought. Today I pulled it out and thickened it a bit with a bechamel, at which point I noticed the color was actually grey. It was the most unappealing thing I've concocted in a long time. It looked so bad, I tried to brighted in up with a bit of turmeric, which just turned into green (in a greenish grey kind of way). It still tasted ok, but I couldn't get over the horrifying pall it was casting over the rest of the cooktop and had to toss it. Oh well.

This Year's Geese

Picked up the geese from the butcher today, and started the prep. The year-old confit the other day was delicious, but I don't think this batch will survive that long before I eat it.

Gooseful fridge

Year Old Leftovers, Never Frozen

Just tried some goose leg confit I'd made almost exactly a year ago. Normally it would've been eaten much sooner, but I forgot about it in the winter and then the summer didn't seem the right time to break it out. It's very tasty. Hopefully I won't die from botulism but if this is my last post ever, assume my followup would've been: "Oops!"

Bad Science 2009

A nice wrapup of the year in bad science from Ben Goldacre.

Great Urban Run

Went for a last long run of the year (about 22km) yesterday through (of course) East London. Went up through Homerton and Lower Clapton, east to the canals by the football pitches of Hackney Marshes, down the Lea (aka Lee) River, south past the Olympic Stadium (in progress), down through Three Mills and past the House Mill into the Bow Locks, with Canary Wharf shimmering in the low winter sun beyond, like the emerald city. Then to Limehouse Cut, around the Limehouse Basin, and back up the canal through Mile End park and into Victoria park. The run has a bit of everything bad and good about the East End: neighborhood shops, council estates, new schools, row houses in various states of gentrification, crack houses, Georgian canals, 300+ years of buildings, from those old mills to repurposed Victorian industrial warehouses to 21st-centry work/live buildings on the waterfront. It has industrial decay as a backdrop for moor hens, geese, heron, swans, mallards, and the old boys fishing for carp. It has hand-cranked locks, tidy canal boats, derelict barges, kayakers, rowers, and yachts. A bit of sunshine, often rain, always mud, yesterday ice. Keep the pristine wooded nature trails, there's nothing like a great city run.

How To Play Chess With Kids

Simple: handicap yourself by removing some of your pieces at the start of the game. Then you get to play all-out. Adjust based on results. Fun for both of you. Now it works both ways: since my 11-yr-old crushes me regularly at full strength, I'm going to make him start handicapping.

Perpetual Performance Art

So a company in Dublin that appears to be headed up by Deco Cuffe from The Commitments is demonstrating a perpetual motion machine. I will be disappointed if this isn't a brilliant viral marketing scheme for a new Roddy Doyle book.

Police Crackdown on London Photographers

Kind of like the dreaded "africanized" bees that have been threatening to swarm homicidally over the US any decade now, I'm concerned that UK cops have been getting "americanized". The image of the mild-mannered police who actually walk around and talk to people, neighborly-like, is largely being replaced by that of militarized guys covered with gear and weapons and carrying a chip on the shoulder. Everybody wants to be a hard-ass I guess. The power-grab masquerading as protection from terror has made things a lot worse. There have been disturbing reports of photographers getting hassled. Yes, section 44 of the Terrorism Act sucks, but a few police are acting like it invests them with powers far beyond the letter of that law. Watch this video if you want to be depressed by an example.

To the credit of the police, the Met actually publishes a useful sheet on advice to photographers. It would be great if the police in the streets actually read this as well. A few key quotes that not all of them seem to be up on:

Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.

The Terrorism Act 2000 does not prohibit people from taking photographs or digital images in an area where an authority under section 44 is in place.

Officers have the power to view digital images contained in mobile telephones or cameras carried by a person searched under S44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, provided that the viewing is to determine whether the images contained in the camera or mobile telephone are of a kind, which could be used in connection with terrorism.

Officers do not have the power to delete digital images or destroy film at any point during a search.