Food & Drink


Faithful Acowlytes! Have you always longed for an alcoholic beverage that contained its own hangover cure? Have you ever wondered why there’s a créme de menthe and a créme de cacao but not a créme de pork? Do you find yourself constantly disappointed that a Bloody Mary is a little too vegetarian for your taste? Well my lucky Cowpokes, your prayers ((This is a figure of speech. Praying doesn’t really work.)) have finally been answered. Allow me to introduce for your imbibory ((Yes, I’m aware that this is not a real word.)) pleasure Bakon Vodka. Bakon Vodka takes the clean clinical precision of superior quality potato vodka and smooshes its molecules with the smoked meaty taste of hog flesh.

In past musings we’ve featured vodka here on The Cow, and also brought to your attention the dawn of the pork-flavoured cocktail. It was of course inevitable that these two ideas would eventually coalesce into one streamlined commercial concept.

Bakon Vodka, promoting itself as Pure. Refreshing. Bacon. (‘pure’ and ‘refreshing’ being two words not typically found in the same sentence as ‘bacon’), claims to be a part of a burgeoning trend for ‘Carnivorous’ Cocktails. Sadly there are no further examples of this supposed fad on the Bakon Vodka website, which, as I’m sure you will understand, came as a great disappointment to me. ((I was anticipating all kinds of goodies: Smoked Salmon Schnapps; Andouille Anisette; Turkey Tequila…))

My despondency was short lived, however, when I found the Bakon Vodka recipe page. Oh joy! Here I discovered all manner of liquidy alcoholic bacon concoctions, including the Hawaiian Luau (Bakon Vodka, Pineapple Juice and Butterscotch Schnapps), the Scottish Bacon (Bakon Vodka and Scotch) and the Russian Rural Sunrise (Bakon Vodka, Orange Juice and Grenadine) ((I originally this read as ‘Russian Rural Surprise’ which I like rather better – I would like to suggest that the Bakon Vodka marketeers change the name.)), and Bakon Nog (Bakon Vodka and Egg Nog). That last is obviously something you’d drink at hogmanay.

And then there’s the Elvis Presley.

Yup. It’s the perfect way to toast your favourite overweight rock legend. The King is Dead! Long Live the King!

OK. So I’m in the middle of the country in northern California and hungry. I venture out to a local pizza place (local being an approximate term – it’s about a fifteen minute drive). I order a small pizza and a starter of garlic bread.

‘Do you want the ‘Special’ garlic bread with cheese?’

I decline and just go for the standard. It arrives in a few minutes. It is covered in melted cheese. I beckon the waiter over.

‘Excuse me, I ordered the garlic bread without cheese,’ I say, indicating the basket of cheesy comestibles.

‘Oh, that’s the way it comes’, he says. ‘That’s just parmesan. The ‘With Cheese’ option is with melted mozarella.’

‘Right,’ says I.




Great Moments in Food Science #211


Massimo



☆July 23, 2004: University of Guelph Food Scientist Massimo Marcone tests Kopi Luwak coffee beans to determine whether passing them through the gastrointestinal tract of the Asian Palm Civet (or ‘luwak’) really makes them taste better.

‘The coffee cherry fruit is completely digested by the luwak, but the beans are excreted in their feces,’ says Marcone. The internal fermentation by digestive enzymes adds a unique flavour to the beans, which he said has been described as ‘earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich with jungle and chocolate undertones.’

I… er…




Violet Towne has been on holidays visiting me in Hollywood, and while she was here we took the opportunity to visit The Edison, one of the many cool nightspots that can be found in the great big sprawling City of Angels. The Edison, located in downtown LA in a former power station called the Higgins Building, promises a flashback into times when electricity was still a novelty, when the in-crowd dressed for a night on the town, and when cocktails were serious business rather than fluffy concoctions of gaudy alcoholic lolly water.

I read about The Edison over a year ago and it seemed like exactly the kind of place I’d find time to hang out, if it was half as good as it sounded. The club styles itself as a remembrance of things past – an antidote to the crass modern pickup joints that most nightclubs have become. The article I read emphasized The Edison’s draconian dress code: make an effort pal, or get your ass kicked back to the cheap margaritas and watery bourbon up on Sunset.

The Edison is dedicated to a resurgence of Old World style and sense of romance that once dominated Los Angeles Nightlife. Thus, innovative, sophisticated and cultured attire is required. We will always strive to more quickly accommodate those whose style and imagination suit the environment. Our door has sole discretion with regards to enforcement of our dress code.

Fair enough! This is not something that daunts either myself or Violet Towne, and so, dressed in our best retro 1900s contemporary fusion we headed off downtown to see what the best of the best had to offer.

True to the form of door bitches from here to Bullamakanka, the guy with the clipboard in front of The Edison was brimming with attitude. There was no way he was going to get us on dress code, so the best thing he could come up with was to ask for our ID. What? We’re being carded? I haven’t got the foggiest idea what this was all about – there’s no mistaking either me or VT for being under age, sad to say, ((Unless of course there is an upper age limit for The Edison – I hadn’t thought of that till just now.)) and I really can’t think of any other reason he’d need to see ID. Prissy little power-monger. I fought back a very strong urge to call him ‘sonny’ and ask if his mum knew he was out this late. But all was well – we had a reserved table and he was plainly short on reasons to keep us outside, so in we went.

The Edison is a stunning place. The staff, dressed impeccably in a mash of couture that spans the fin de siècle to the 1930s, were polite and appropriately haughty. A descending stairway of impressive industrial gravitas takes patrons down into the club, which is arranged as an asymmetrical juxtaposition of halls and rooms radiating off a large bar. Each space has its own individual valvepunk flavoured interior design, and any of them would be a fun place to end up for an evening.

We were seated at a small table in the main room, a proto electric-age cathedral, with cascades of filamented light bulbs streaming from the ceiling, and every naked brick wall reflecting back projected images from the films of D. W. Griffiths and George Méliès. It was truly wonderful.

Drinks? If you would be so kind my good man! For Violet Town, an Absinthe ’75 – a cocktail made with Kubler absinthe, lemon and champagne. For me, The Edison – bourbon, pear cognac and honey. The recorded music meandered from Cole Porter to swing with detours via Gershwin and Tommy Dorsey. A pretty girl dressed as a green fairy appeared, pushing a little trolley of chemical flasks – flavoured absinthes by the test-tube. We each took a walk through the rooms – the early clientele seemed right in the spirit. There was a guy wearing a top hat and emerald green earrings, on his arm a woman in a long silk dress as red as fresh blood. Some kids who’d obviously escaped the ID screening looked pretty good in neckties and waistcoats, and their young girlfriends a little too dangerous under black veils.

For the first hour, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

And then it all went to shit.

Yes folks, the high-falutin’ talk of dress code, the pinch-nosed door Nazi, the pretensions to a time when things were… civilized… all seemed to melt down into a pathetic limp acquiescence almost on the dot of 9pm at which time there was an influx of the trashiest riff-raff I’ve seen this side of Marulan RSL.

Dress code? You say what? How did that guy with the cornflower blue shirt (no tie) and the plaid tam-o-shanter get in? What about the chap with the ill-fitting sports shirt (no tie) and tan slacks (did he come direct from his job at Kwik Kopy?) Or the girl with too much lipstick and the oh-so-teeny figure-hugging silver lamé dress? (No Atlas, that image you’re forming in your head is wrong. Add another 90 pounds to it, and reduce the dress by two sizes). What about those two sleazy guys in the black open-neck shirts with the gold chains? Innovative, sophisticated and cultured attire? If you’re in a Greek disco.

The only dress code I could see in operation here was ‘no flip-flops’, ((In Australia it would be ‘No Thongs’ but that phrase has an entirely different meaning here. And I’m guessing that such a rule would have turned away at least half the female clientele, aside from being rather challenging to enforce…)) and I’m not at all sure that the doorman wouldn’t have turned a blind eye to that either if someone slipped him ten bucks.

Around about this time, the guy waiting our table completely lost the plot, screwing up our drink orders and vanishing off out of sight. It was like someone had flipped one of those big old relay switches on the wall and plunged the building into a dark mediocre funk.

And then, as if the invading hoi polloi had brought their own CD collection as well, the music also went to shit. Gone was the urbane swing and the jaunty Cole Porter, submerged by the same old thumpy crap you can hear in any nightclub in the Western world. Oh the humanity. It was vastly disappointing. It was like waking up from the best dream you’ve ever had and realizing it was a school day. It was like seeing Blade Runner for the first time and wishing you’d never seen the mawkish ending and that the movie had played out with the profound scene of Roy Batty and Deckard on the roof of the Bradbury Building. ((Which is, coincidentally, only a few blocks away from The Edison.))

We stayed for another hour or so but the vision of what this place might have been had well and truly faded. Such a grand inspiration suffocated to death by the vast bland pillow of ambivalence.

Dear Edison owners: 10 big points for trying. No points at all for sticking to your principles. Somewhere this side of your grand vision, you appear to have well and truly lost your way, and it’s a great pity. Phone me when you really do have a dress code and taste that lasts at least till midnight, and when you’ve ditched the appalling and totally inappropriate ‘dance’ music. Then I’ll be back. Until then, I’m off to find The Tesla.

In the United States of America, around 30 kilograms (66lb) of beef is eaten per capita every year. ((According to the Guardian article linked here. A search around the web mostly gives numbers higher than that.)) That’s over 9 million metric tons of cow meat. ((Or more than 10 million ‘short’, or US, tons.))

That’s a lot of cows. And a lot of cows take up a lot of space and use up a lot of feed. The Guardian reports this morning that Professor Richard Gradwohl of Washington state has come up with a solution to this problem by spearheading a drive for miniature cattle. Gradwohl’s farm boasts 18 breeds of miniature cows, including ‘microminiature’ varieties that stand just over a meter (one yard) tall. He claims that 10 miniature cows can be raised on the same amount of land as two full size cows, using just one third the feed and producing half the amount of methane. Sheer genius. Not only that, the tinier the cow, the better it tastes, according to the Guardian article.

Of course, here at the Tetherd Cow Ahead laboratories, the boffins were quick to see the potential of this scheme. “Why stop at merely ‘miniature’ cows?” asked the Head Boffin, “Surely if you make the cows even smaller you can make even greater savings and get even tastier beef!”

That’s why he earns the big bucks! To this end, I have set the laboratories to work creating the first nano cows. By my calculations, using the savings in feedstock and land that Gradwhol’s reductions in size have achieved, the shrinking of cows to nanoscale should mean that a million cows could fit on one square centimeter of farmland and would only need a blade of grass per year. On the five acre pasture that Gradwohl uses to raise ten mini cows, TCA Labs can raise trillions of cows, producing a billionth of the methane of conventional cows and yielding enough beef for one thousand billion billion McDonalds’ all-beef patties every month. ((Quoted statistics may or may not be entirely accurate – strange things happen at subatomic levels.))

I also have the labs investigating what happens when the miniaturization process ‘goes homeopathic’ (as we say in the science business). What this means is that once the cattle are shrunk past a certain size, Gilbert Einstein’s famous equation E=M¾ kicks in and the cows become ethereal. The beef yield simultaneously becomes infinite. Needless to say, the taste of flame-grilled steaks also improves immeasurably via this process.

Here in the Land of Shoo!TAG, I don’t see how I can possibly fail to get some investment interest.



One of the delights of being a Stranger in a Strange Land is discovering new and wonderful foodstuffs. In one’s own country, one is fairly familiar with the products on the supermarket shelves, but being abroad opens up whole new vistas of comestible possibilities. As I stood dazzled in the breakfast cereal aisle of the local Ralph’s, I wondered how I could ever pick just one from among the thousands of brightly coloured packages.

I thought I was reasonably circumspect in choosing Yogi Cherry and Almond Crunch.



Sounds alright, doesn’t it? All natural, no artificial thingummybobs, none of the dreaded high fructose corn syrup (that American food manufacturers seem to throw into everything with wanton abandon) and 5 grams of protein and 3 grams of fiber in every serving (although 3g of fiber – or ‘fibre’ as it is properly spelled – does seem a little on the shy side for something ostensibly made of grains).

So, anyways, I headed off home with my groceries and thought nothing further of it until breakfast the next morning, whereupon I poured myself a bowl of Yogi Cherry and Almond Crunch, splashed on some milk and bluuuuuuuurrrrghhhhhh! Gag. Gasp! How much fucking SUGAR is in this stuff!!! This is the sweetest breakfast cereal I’ve eaten since I was a kid. Sweeter even than Sugar Frosties! Let’s have a look at the ingredients:



Lotsa grains, evaporated cane juice, brown rice, almonds, but no suga….. waidjustafuckinggoddamnminute! Evaporated cane juice? EVAPORATED CANE JUICE!!!???

Yes folks, Yogi knows full well that the ‘s’ word is big minus mark when it comes to selling a ‘healthy’ product and so it doesn’t actually appear anywhere on the packaging. Instead we have evaporated cane juice. I almost find myself admiring their guile. Indeed, when I actually pay attention to the um… ‘creative’ language on the packet, it appears that various sugars make up almost a fifth of the volume of what’s inside the box of Yogi Cherry and Almond Crunch!

A little cereal with your sugar, anyone?

I’m also slightly uneasy about the cherry quotient, which is listed as cherry ‘powder’. Something about being able to turn cherries into a powder reminds me of anthrax. No, I don’t know either.

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Disclaimer: Readers of this post should not infer that just because I chose to buy a cereal with the word ‘yogi’ in the name in any way implies that I am some kind of dippy trippy hippy. I was merely attempting to pick a cereal that had some modicum of healthiness. Plus, I always had a fondness for pic-a-nic baskets.

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