lyttelfishdotcom

Morgan Williams is a clever guy. He’s the kind of guy who makes things happen. All the time. I am constantly amazed at the ideas he comes up with. Lots of people have great ideas. Not everyone makes them happen every time.

Not long after the earthquakes in Christchurch, Morgan set up Quickie Events, an event company to get people moving again and interacting with a landscape they may have thought had betrayed them. A series of events such as a Quickie in the Forest, a Quickie in the Quarry, Quickie on the Beach and the Quarter Pounder, which, despite the suggestiveness of their names, were family friendly and allowed people to take part in mini multi-sport events and feel successful. Instead of daunting amounts of kilometres on bikes and running, Quickie Events offered short, achievable distances and a way to move on from the shaking.

His latest idea also involves a Q and a good time. The inaugural Quiz Bite was a resounding success, sold out well before the night and resulted in a lot of happy, if perhaps also slightly-disappointed-in-their-own-lack-of-what-they-may-have-thought-was-an-incredible-culinary-knowledge people. Here read I was slightly disappointed in my lack of culinary knowledge.

Five rounds. Three involving tasting and smelling and working out just what was IN (and in one case what wasn’t in) those little pottles and slithers and morsels of entrees, mains and dessert/cheese. Two involving general food knowledge and responding to visual cues. There was also a practical bread-making challenge thrown in for good measure. I’m still not really sure what a zopf is, but there was a lot of laughing and goodness in between the furrowed brow moments.

Look out for the next one, Christchurch people. So. Good.

 

The Lyttelton Coffee Company is like an old friend who has been away for a while but when you catch up, it’s just like old times. You pick up where you left off and feel the glow of familiarity and history.

I’ve been away and LCC had been closed until December last year for almost four years after it was badly damaged in the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch. 

Walking in the door, it felt as though nothing had changed. Owner Stephen Mateer has done a fantastic job at rebuilding the cafe and recreating its charm, as well as strengthening and improving some aspects of the building. Industrial brick walls are easy to take for granted, but when you know that the bricks were individually salvaged, slimmed down and then pieced together again along with steel reinforcement, then the concept of a labour of love really sinks in.

A varied breakfast menu on the blackboard above the counter, a range of cabinet food served with LCC’s own great coffee and spectacular views of Lyttelton Harbour with its breathtaking landscape. What more could you want? 

Now I preface the following with saying that I know there are people way way worse off than me and I don’t want to elicit sympathy where none is warranted. This is just my experience, as it’s unfolding, and while none of it is major stuff, the unfolding and the sum of it gives me pause.

This morning I woke up with a head cold. It’s nothing. A tingly, runny nose and a lot of sneezing. I laugh in the face of this head cold.

I actually did laugh when I realised I had it because I do feel a little as though my body is playing some kind of joke. Or it’s unhappy with me about something and it just can’t use its words.

Because, before the head cold, I had strep throat. Really great, green pus, almost abscessing, strep throat. It was awesome. I tried so hard all last weekend not to swallow. It was like a sport. A painful kind of sport where swallowing is the enemy. I am still on the penicillin. Which apparently has no power over the common cold. Horses for courses. Or something.

Before the strep throat, there was a weird earache scenario. Before that it was tonsillitis. And before that was the fifty shades of shingles which popped up out of nowhere around Christmas time and lasted and lasted.

We take our bodies for granted. And we have no idea what is going on inside them. I have a romantic idea that maybe once we were more attuned to our bodies and had more of an idea what we needed and where to get that from.

I eat pretty healthily. I go to the gym fairly often. I don’t smoke. I drink moderately. Well, why be shy, I drink really well and it’s something I have mastered. But mostly, I think I treat my body with respect. And yet I’m really not sure what it wants right now and that bothers me.

What’s more, in addition to all my other superpowers, I seem to have developed and be emitting the pheromone that attracts wasps. I have never noticed this particular ability before, but the last two weeks, they cannot leave me alone. And it’s not just fly-by checking out, it’s hovering and trying to land. It’s coming into my apartment and refusing to leave, except by force. It’s ‘following’ me all the way from the supermarket to my apartment building just now.

What does my body want from me? I feel like a metaphor I just can’t work out.

Some words get out of hand.

They become overused, used in a way that no longer resembles their original use, aren’t even words at all, but text acronyms, or are just plain stupid words that get way too much airtime because someone somewhere used them with a hashtag and they became a thing.

These words generally run their course. Every year, some pretty flash and fancy pants people in the media and academia try and help some of the more ridiculous words run their course more quickly by including them in lists called The List of Banished Words. If ever a word was to feel rejected, being included on this list would be that time. Sadly, the fine work of the BBC, New York Times, Time Magazine and Lake Superior State University, are more wish lists than lists that tweeters and instagrammars actually adhere to.

There’s always hope.

The 2015 list is up and running and so far it already surpasses lists from other years in the amount of words that are so darned annoying that we want to stick our fingers in our ears and sing Shake it off maniacally to ourselves just so we can’t hear them.

What does it say about us that this list is so long?  Why are we making up so many annoying words?

Perhaps it’s a good thing. Language is evolving to meet the times and trends and in the face of certain world events and accelerated social phenomena we have emotions we just can’t express in what is currently available to us.
 
And, while I might be talking about all this in some sort of tone of superiority and disdain, I have to sheepishly admit that I’ve used some of these words myself. You know, you hear something so often, it just gets in.

I certainly have never referred to anyone as bae, the affectionate term for the person you put before anyone else, nor have I pulled out an “I can’t even” to describe a situation which the speaker can’t even comprehend, but actually sounds as though they can’t even finish a sentence. I haven’t described anyone as cra-cra or bossy (in the sense of cool).

But.

I have, sigh, pulled out foodie, polar vortex, skill set, hipster and hashtag, although with hashtag I was being ironic. These are all on the 2015 list. I’m up there with the people using the banished words. Yup. Humble pie.

But.

And here I set aside that serve of the pie to concentrate on one word that I think has completely got out of hand. It has been building for a while and it is on this year’s list.

Curate/curated.

It’s everywhere. They’re all doing it, curating this and that and trying to sound high brow.

Originally a curator was someone associated with a museum, library or archive. They had a degree in a specialised field, knew a whole lot about their particular area of content and were responsible for an institution’s collections. They would oversee the acquisition and maintenance of items in the collection and interpret these items, that is, explain their context, why they were in the collection and how they might relate to other items.

Nowadays, curate has really come to mean any act of choosing something and including it in a list, a store, a menu, a playlist. There are curated websites, like Etsy or Brainpickings, where someone else has done all the scouring the internet and found the most interesting products or articles and put them all together so you can just sit down and read. In this sense, it has replaced the term formerly known as aggregating, where software was used to pull content, particularly news reports, from a whole lot of different sources and then publishes it in one place. Curating, on the other hand, is a manual process where the most significant pieces of content for the topic and the audience are selected from everything else that is out there.

I don’t mind that use of curating. I actually kind of like it. And I understand why it is so prevalent. Currently there is a hankering for all that is artisan, done the way it used to be done, properly, with care, by hand. The manual selection of the most relevant and the best fits that way of thinking.

I don’t think that the selection of mussel dishes I tasted at the media preview of an upcoming event were curated, even though the invitation said they were. I don’t think we can curate lipsticks, cat videos, Tony Abbott memes or recipes using coconut sugar. But that’s just me.

I do think that in a world of Facebook friend lists in the several hundreds, Instagram likes and Tinder swipes, we could maybe be a little more discerning in the way we select the people we call our friends and those we discard; the information we allow ourselves to be distracted with and the information we ignore; the experiences we seek and those we overlook.

Some words get out of hand. And some could do with being taken by the hand.

Me at the museum, Tiny Ruins

(Hand sculpture by Tim Middleton)

My friend William says that sauces are like mothers; they hold everything together. This statement comes hot on the heels of his lament that Melbourne does not do Mexican food properly. It’s the lack of sauce, he says.

It got me thinking about sauces. Every culture has them. And in the whole fancy pants kitchen system, the role of the saucier or the sauce chef, is often the most highly respected role, reporting directly to the head chef or sous chef. Sauces, wowzer. They’re a thing.

Now it might come as as no surprise that I’m going to bring up frenchiness here, but France and food, meh, you know it’s going to happen.

The French appreciate sauce so much they made five of them the cornerstone of all of cooking. And they named them mothers. Yup. There are mother sauces. Béchamel, velouté, espagnol, hollandaise and mayonnaise, although mayonnaise is controversial because it’s not cooked, so there’s a bit of a maybe mayonnaise should go and tomato sauce should be in thing that I don’t feel qualified to comment on. But, regardless. These sauces…good. Béchamel, velouté, espagnol; they’re all flour-based sauces that begin with a roux and then have liquids like milk, chicken stock, and beef stock, in that order, to make them thicker. Other sauces such as the unctuous bearnaise and the garlicky aioli are derivatives of these bases. So these mother sauces are like the head of their own little sauce family because each of them form the base for a whole lot of other sauces.

So the French have the mother sauces. But other countries love sauces too. Curry, soy, fish sauce, tonkatsu. And…um…tomato sauce in New Zealand and Australia…? Anyway. Sauce. It’s what adds the je ne sais quoi to the food. It tops it off, pulls it together, makes it happen.

Mothers do that. But also fathers do it. Good friends do it. People do it who put the ones they love before themselves and bring it all together to create harmony, balance and goodness.

It Is Here
(for A)

What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was that sound that came on in the dark?
What is this maze of life it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
to turn away, and then turn back?
What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen.
It is here.

~ Harold Pinter

…at least a little bit…

Hummus means chickpea in Arabic. I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know that a few years ago there was a lot of controversy over the aforementioned hummus. 

Hummus has become huge in Israel. Israelis might well say that it has always been huge. Chickpeas are one of the oldest crops in Israel and Israelis consume more hummus per head of capita than any other country in the world.  But Lebanon claims to be its spiritual home, and in 2008, The Association of Lebanese Industrialists tried to go all AOC on it (Appellation d’Origine Controlée, where geographical jurisdiction and authenticity became major KPIs in Hummus Gate.

“Well, when we talk about hummus,” Israeli academic Dafna Hirsch said in 2012, “we talk on the material level and also the symbolic level. There is a mythology that completely surrounds hummus that doesn’t surround a lot of other foods. It’s a fascinating thing.” Hirsch was speaking as an expert; in 2011, she published a cultural biography of hummus in an ethnology journal.

I’m not really sure where we’re at on the whole hummus status. I do know there was nothing political about the hummus Yossi made for a United Nations gathering of friends last night. But it is, without a doubt, the best hummus I have ever tasted. Smooth, creamy even. And the falafel?  Flavoursome and the antithesis of the dry offerings usually labelled falafel, these are in a category of their own. Then there was the marinated eggplant, the salads, the chilli dip, the olives, the eggs, the pita bread and all the other things that Yossi took two days to prepare.

It’s a multi-sensory experience to rival that of Heston Blumenthal. Seated outside around a long trestle table or the couch against the wall, mosquitos biting, exotic music coming out of speakers perched precariously on the windows and having the most interesting conversations. A chef originally from Massachusetts; a Hawaiian on a seven day cleanse on the brink of a most remarkable 8 month journey; a Portuguese guy who came to Australia for love; Israelis savouring the taste of home; the loveliest young French woman who reminisced about being able to wire a speaker at the age of 16 and whose equally lovely partner from Dunedin is testing the freelance waters of design and illustration. 

Some people have a knack for bringing good people together. And I feel lucky to be part of that.