smooth text, with extra exotic anglo roasting

by jebni on January 20, 2006

You know you’re fully immersed in geek mode when you start fantasising about text editors. Honestly: code highlighting, code folding, code completion… I’m drooling.

Moving right along…

The other day I roasted an animal for the first time.

When I was growing up, a “roast dinner” was a strange, alien… exotic thing. I really had no firm idea what one was. Cool, exotic Anglo food. (This reverse fetishisation reminds me of the first time I had bangers and mash. I was six years old, living in England for a year, and over at my girlfriend’s place for dinner. We were going to have “bangers and mash”. I hadn’t been in England that long — what the fuck was “bangers and mash”? Must be cool, exotic Anglo food. After dinner, Nicola’s mum frowns and asks me if I’m okay. “I’m fine thanks, Mrs S, that was delicious,” I reply, rolling around on the floor, clutching my tummy.)

Some years later, the idea of popping a hunk of meat and some vegetables in the oven seemed like cheating. I mean, where’s the cooking? Juggling stuff quickly on top of a flaming stovetop — that’s cooking. Bah. So it’s finally taken me a couple of decades, but I’ve now found roasting a meal to be a very satisfying procedure. Maybe it’s that cooked-animal aroma, slowly permeating the apartment, when I’ve always been about searing stuff. Ahhh. And it’s still uh, exotic.

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5 comments

ha. =I never thought roasts per se were exotic, but those beef (or chicken) roast and 3-veg meals – now, I still find them exotic. With gravy. yum yum But, the meat has to have lots of lemon, of course. Without it, it just seems wierd.

by s0metim3s on 20 January 2006 at 7:53 pm. #

you gotta try the roast with candied yam casserole. the South owns exotic anglo cuisine.

by sandy on 23 January 2006 at 10:41 am. #

Okay, I think everyone’s missed the point of the post. You had a girlfriend when you were 6?! Now that to me is exotic. Whereas some Anglo peeps may have thaought that’s cute, my parents would never have been cool with that.

by hon on 24 January 2006 at 1:17 pm. #

But as the previous post shows, they came to their senses very quickly…

by jebni on 24 January 2006 at 3:24 pm. #

Hey, man, just add soy sauce, and it will be right! I usually do. Growing up, roasts weren’t so strange – my mum did them for special occcasions, but with lashings of both think and thin soy sauces, pepper etc. Her recipes were handed down/mutated from some Hainanese chefs from pre-WW2 colonial Singapore.

Coming here, I was amazed that the gwei-lohs burned their meat with hardly any seasoning, then poured a whole lot of claggy gravy on top of it after… Weird.

And yes, I caught that 6-year-old fling references too. Hmmm. Precocious.

by Mark on 1 February 2006 at 2:05 pm. #