chef surprise or old-new world cuisine

I tried my developing skill—well interest or perhaps just curiosity, at a more complicated dish: black bean and sweet potato tortillas. The process, messier and a little more demanding, was a reflective one, going from skepticism at the combination, the clashing colours and textures—the orange sherbet of the grated sweet potato and the oil-gush of black beans from a can—to thinking about how all the ingredients are native to the Americas. The sweet potato, a vegetable distinct from the Asian fruit of the yam, the tomato, chile, the black beans (frijol negro), the corn (we call it maize) tortillas are all native to the Americas. The cheese, too, I suppose, but I think it could be reduced or almost eliminated since it didn’t really carry the meal, unlike in a lot of cases. I am an advocate for supporting local farming but old world choices would really be impoverished without new world discoveries.

 

Makes four servings

• About 800 ml of whole, peeled tomatoes (28 oz can)
• 6-8 corn tortillas
• 2+ teaspoons of chili powder, oregano, salt and pepper to taste
• 3+ tablespoons of cooking oil
• 2 garlic cloves and a large onion
• 2 small to medium sweet potatoes
• 500 g shredded cheese (Cheddar or a spicy mix)
• 450 g of black beans (14 oz can)

First, peel and grate the sweet potatoes coarsely for about a 500 g (two handfuls) yield, chop and dice the onion and put aside. Preheat the oven to 230°C (450°F). Start heating up a skillet on the range, on medium heat with about a tablespoon of cooking oil and toss in about half of the diced onion and the garlic. While that is cooking, with a food processor or hand mixer, puree the tomatoes, the other half of the onions with a bit of oil, salt and pepper until smooth and transfer to a bowl and set aside. To the onions and garlic on the range, stir in the grated sweet potato and black beans with the chili and oregano and let cook an additional 5-6 minutes. Take a casserole dish and spread the tomato mixture on the bottom, covering the pan but not too thick. Remove the beans and sweet potatoes from the heat and stir in a couple handfuls of cheese and allow it to gel for about a minute. Spoon the bean and sweet potato mixture on the tortillas, roll, and place in the casserole dish. Afterwards, top with the remaining tomato mixture and the rest of the cheese. Pop the casserole dish in the oven for about 20 minutes, until the cheese browns and bubbles and the excess liquid cooks away.

fennec fox

The United Nation’s climate summit that just concluded in Durban, South Africa faced some enormous challenges in trying to recapture the concrete results and spirit of cooperation of the Kyoto Protocols of two decades ago. Some progress was made, I think, during this last session but it remains to be seen if these agreed upon goals will be enough to staunch environmental irreversible change. I admire the European Union’s determination to take a leading role and maintain reduction targets, even among disheartening divisions, and China for, with some significant reservations, moves towards stewardship and sustainability that will potentially upstage everyone. It was discouraging to hear that Canada for financial reasons has decided also to break ranks, since any gains would be undone by the profligate actions of the world’s biggest polluters and developing nations. It’s especially poignant, and I didn’t notice the symbol until after all was said and done, as the UN, I think, choose to hold the summit under the good auspices of Durban with a reference to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince--the baobab tree taking up the whole planet, as the trees would do to the Little Prince’s little home world without pruning.  The Little Prince had more than one world to explore, however, singular domains and ruled by different potentates.  The allegory is a bit inverted but probably apt for the struggle and squabbling over responsibilities for what belongs to everyone.

modular text or cabinet shuffle

Nine months or so after his self-imposed exile in the States, Germany’s former Economic and Defense minister, with the affectionate moniker zu Googleberg (EN/DE) has returned but this time on the board of the European Commission as the advocate for protecting freedom of the internet, especially from oppressive regimes who would quash the voice of revolution and insurrection.

The former minister assures the commission, the executive branch of the EU governing body, that he can use the network that he built up during his time in the German government to promote measures to safeguard democratic and transparent avenues of expression--plus his own honed skills in citation and referencing. This return and announcement, and perhaps this needed post was created especially for him, comes at a strange time in the court of internet freedom, as the US Secretary of State spoke from the Hague, just days prior, demanding that no country attempt to subvert the freedoms of speech and assembly that the internet helps facilitate. This plea seemed a little facetious given that the US and perhaps in collusion with the rest of the western world is concocting its own more insidious forms of oppression. Perhaps the US alone imagines itself competent and high-minded enough to manage the censorship, what with already having blocked wi-fi coverage to areas where protesters planned to gather (the Los Angeles mass-transit platforms) or courts deeming bloggers separate from journalists or SOPA, which more famously criminalizes cover-bands but also suppresses originality that is not licensed and vetted by the industry. I admired our former minister, despite his transgressions and being made to fall on his sword, and I hope that this post is not just an echo of idealized US policy towards free-speech and internet self-regulation.

titanomachy or primus inter pares

In a dispatch from the Swiss edition of thelocal, the central government of the Helvetic Confederacy in Bern is reluctant to share (otherwise befriend America) access to its electronic criminal records database with the United States. The arrangement is not reciprocal, mutual as Switzerland isn’t taking on the whole onerous burden of America’s security apparatus but Swiss authorities are expected to surrender all the vital information of its citizens, in case a native ne’er-do-well ever decides to visit the States, and the only thing that the Swiss people are getting in return for this openness and trust for the US to safeguard its information better than the US can keep track of its own is the right to travel to the States under the Visa-Waiver program, a government web-site that supposedly announces one’s plans and intentions well ahead of time but despite the publicity, one is asked the same stock questions by countless airport personnel coming and going, prodded and frisked just the same.

I think that Switzerland ought to resist submitting to this sort of security theatre, which while mining the demographics of dozens of other countries for something speciously actionable, goes on to treat each and every that’s participating in the Visa-Waiver program (and consequently, sharing their police dossiers) as if they cannot handle their own affairs—or connect the dots and have an over-abundance of domestic problems and are eager to export them to America. The US already bullied the banks into disclosing too much, ostensibly over money-laundering and terrorism, that made a shambles out of everything, as if the US had any business dictating to the Swiss how to manage money. Even after, through controlling the flow of wire-transfers, America became this hundred-handed Hecatonchires of the world’s financial system (or law-enforcement), it was still unable to forecast the knock-on effects of its gross mismanagement of its own business. Private and personal information, of breakers and abiders, is not being entrusted to good hands, I think, and the Swiss ought to allow their waiver program to lapse. Giving up all these records is something much more permanent than the daily fluctuations of the stock markets or the designs of some paranoid security czar. At least requiring a mutual visit to the embassy to apply for a Visa could be one thing that the Swiss could reciprocate in kind.