Our cutlery drawer is a confusing place.  Why do forks come in so many different sizes?  We’re not exactly fancy eaters, but somehow we still seem to have a fair range of fork sizes.  At least when you get different sized forks on the table in a restaurant you know to begin with the fork on the outside of the setting and gradually work inwards.  You might not know what each fork is for, but at least you know in what order to use it.  Of course, if you skip a course, everything gets thrown into disarray.  A tip to help avoid that predicament is never to use your fork for the soup.

 As far as I know we’ve only ever bought one cutlery set, and it is standard food eating size.  It included some dessert forks we never used much until our kids started wanting to use cutlery.  It is pretty easy to spot a dessert fork from a standard fork, the dessert forks are the ones too small to be of any practical use other than to a four year old.  Of course, when you’re four you can get away with using your hands, so why would you bother with cutlery anyway?  Because when you’re four you want to do everything grownups do, and by the time you realise eating is simpler with your hands it is too late and you’re expected to use a fork all the time.  Other than a cutlery conscious toddler, who decided dessert forks should be that small anyway?  When I eat a piece of cake I don’t intend to sample it crumb by crumb.  If I was designing a cutlery set from scratch the dessert fork would be the size of a small spade. 

The forks that really confuse me are the ones that are almost the same, but not quite.  In our standard issue cutlery set there are two slightly different sizes of fork.  They’re too similar to notice by eye.  To get a big one you have to line the ends up in the drawer and see which forks poke out the furthest.  This is important because if you’re hungry you don’t want to be mucking about with sub-size cutlery.  This is also a handy test if you don’t care which one is technically the dessert fork but just want to get stuck into a great smelling apple pie.

 When somebody else in our family sets the table I sometimes end up with the smaller size of the regular size forks.  Again, at first sighting there isn’t much difference, but after two or three mouthfuls I realise I’m having to work much harder than normal.  There are more arm motions required to deliver the equivalent amount of food to my tastebuds.  This rattles me sufficiently that I have to go and swap forks, although I’m also aware this is a sacrifice of precious eating time.  It is worth the effort to be able to eat with a regular, measured and comfortable rhythm.  Otherwise my mouth is producing saliva at a rate required for my regular eating habits, throwing the moisture to food ration way out of balance, and things can get messy.

 I’ve been to restaurants where there are more forks on the table than dishes listed on the menu.  It seems the amount of cutlery is a kind of culinary status symbol.  The more forks at the table setting, the fancier a place must be.  For a restaurant owner this is actually a fairly certain way to increase the amount you can charge.  At each table setting simply provide an entire cutlery drawer, and the eatery’s reputation is sure to go through the roof.  If they then get some decent size dessert forks into the place, they’ll never look back!

Popcorn is fantastic stuff. It must be the only food we deliberately blow up before we eat it. In fact, next time you cook a BBQ try to deliberately make the sausages pop out of their skins and see who wants one. Not a pretty sight. Even if it were hidden in a bun you probably wouldn’t want to eat it. Why the discrepancy here? Popcorn is unique. You don’t just cook it, you destroy it, and then it magically becomes edible. Eating raw popcorn, on the other hand, is to guarantee at least seven hundred and eighty dollars of dental bills.

Wouldn’t it be funny if other foods were cooked to the point of explosion. What if you did the same thing to a banana? Can you imagine planning a quiet night in by saying “I’m just popping out to hire a movie. Why don’t you whack a banana in the microwave until it explodes so we can have something to munch.” Actually, I frequently overcook stuff in the microwave and it splatters everywhere. Rather than thanks for a delicious snack I’m scolded and asked to wipe it out.

I enjoy making popcorn at home, it is really easy, which is why I honestly can’t work out why popcorn is so expensive when you go to the movies. Maybe there is some kind of nuclear core powering those giant red booths. There could be an ultra-performance-nuking device specifically designed to pop corn at its optimum temperature. This would ensure the lightest, fluffiest morsel without risking the burnt flavour that can happen if you keep cooking popcorn too long after it has erupted. There is another one of the mysteries of this food, you destroy it to eat it but then you can actually ruin it by leaving it on the heat too long – there is a fine balance between destroying and ruining. I’m sure there’s a theory in there that could be used by the military if they tried.

Movie popcorn is in a league all its own, simply due to scale. Popcorn produced in the machines there seems to take on a life of its own, like a hive of popcorn that is greater than the sum of the individual kernels. The combined force that has gone into each little explosion, multiplied by the number of popped corns, is a concerning level of energy. Perhaps the expense at these venues is related to the need for extra thick glass to contain the morphous popcorn mass as it writhes and squirms, looking for some way to break free. Probably the attendant that scoops it out needs special training, too, to capture the popcorn in a cardboard tub and remove it from the collective consciousness in order to return it to a safe eating state. I guess in that light a few extra dollars is a small price to pay.
Posted by A.Ready at 10:42 PM 0 comments

Does capsicum make anybody else suspicious? It just doesn’t seem right that the same vegetable can come in so many different colours. Oh, I know, there are yellow tomatoes and different coloured chillies, but they’re not exactly high frequency veggies, more the fare of “gourmet” types. But capsicum regularly turns up in salads or stir fries, and between the red, yellow and green slivers essentially transfers a green salad into something resembling a shattered traffic light.

Truth be know, I’ve always had a fair degree of suspicion of veggies in general. The majority of them have the decency to be what they appear (if a carrot isn’t orange, pointy at one end, and fat at the other, it’s probably a sweet potato), however there are enough who do things on the sly to taint the upright and honest decency of the rest. This is sad, but true. How, for example, can zucchini get away with looking so much like a cucumber? A weird, mushy, bland vegetable masquerading as a cool, sweet, refreshing salad addition. As a kid I was always reluctant to take cucumber on a salad, just in case some “gourmet” adult had decided it would be nice to use zucchini instead. I knew I’d have to eat what was on my plate and although I enjoyed cucumber it just wasn’t worth the risk.

Zucchini is one of those particularly funny vegetables that are often used because they take on the flavour of the other ingredients in the recipe. If this is the reason for using it, why not just use more of the other ingredients? Why humour this uninventive, flavourless impersonator who not only looks like something else but doesn’t even have its own taste? I often eat zucchini in dishes, I’m not a bigot or anything, but I must say I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand it. Suspicious flavour behaviour is another reason not to trust your average vegetable too far. Raw onion has a smell that can peel paint, and a flavour that will clear your sinuses for a week. Cook it though, and it becomes sweet and syrupy. Roast onion is one of my favourite tastes, as is the delicious flavour of onions of a BBQ. Why can’t it just taste that good to start with and save us all that mucking around?

Of course, the ultimate vegetable funny business is not actually performed by a vegetable at all, but a fruit: the lime! Most fruit has the decency to start life green, then gradually change colour to let you know it is ripe. Not the lime, it spends its whole life looking unripe. So suspicious am I of the lime that I am considering researching a theory that lime is not a distinct fruit at all, but simply a lemon whose development has been stalled through clever genetic engineering. I’m convinced that if one were to try eating a lemon that was not yet ripe, it would taste suspiciously lime like. Of course, if I’m wrong, it would probably taste even more disgusting that a mouthful of fully ripened lemon, which is why I’m a bit hesitant to test my theory. Meanwhile, the conspiracy lives on…