Homemade Curry Paste

Control the spice, control the universe.

I know that making your own curry paste might sound like a ginormous pain in the arse, and there will be a part of you that keeps whispering ‘Why the hell are we bothering with this?’ but trust me, it’s really good. And the big benefit of making your own curry paste is that you can tweak it to suit your taste, and it will be much more aromatic than commercially-produced curry paste without having to be a visit to chilli-town. If there’s a particular spice you don’t like, just substitute for something you do. I pretty much used a bit of everything, and invented this mix by combining and tweaking three or four different recipes. This will be a spiritual adventure, a commitment to experimentation and discovering what you like most in this world (or at least in the world of spices and aromatics).
Also, all measurements are really approximate, but don’t worry, this is really really really hard to screw up. Just zen it, baby.

 INGREDIENTS

• 10 cloves
• 2 tsp peppercorns
• 3 tbsp cumin
• 3 tbsp cardamom
• 1 tbsp paprika
• 2 tsp chilli powder
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp turmeric
• 1 onion
• 3 large garlic cloves
• 2 inch square of ginger
• 6 tbsp fresh coriander leaves (approx. half a bunch)
• juice of half a lemon
• 2 tbsp white vinegar

METHOD

Put cloves and peppercorns in mortar and pestle or spice grinder and grind.

Optional: drop unsealed packet of whole peppercorns all over your kitchen floor and discover what a minefield that can be.

Add the rest of the dry spices and stir together.

Transfer spice mixture to spice harvester food processor.

Optional: make Dune jokes in your head because you live alone with no pets and this is the most entertaining thing you’ve done today.

Optional: walk without rhythm / it won’t attract the worm.

Roughly chop onion, garlic and ginger. Add to food processor.

Add coriander, lemon juice and vinegar.

Mix on high speed until thoroughly chopped and combined.

Optional: open food processor, discover just how much sulfenic acid* comes out when you blend a whole onion, cry like a baby.

At this stage, you can either slather the paste all over meat as a marinade, or scoop it into a jar and store in the refrigerator for, like, probably a while. This recipe makes about a jarful, which should be enough for two strong batches of curry or 3 weaker ones. So I guess it’s 8-12 servings of curry paste. It’s hard to say.

I like to cook this up with chicken, sweet potato, carrot and capsicum. When cooking, add a small tin of coconut cream or yoghurt, and as much water as you need to achieve appropriate curry texture. Serve with rice and extra coriander, if that’s your thing.

*actually onion tears are caused by a particular reaction with 1-propenesulfenic acid which creates syn-Propanethial-S-oxide, but that’s not nearly as catchy.

Deleuze, Spinoza, and Zadie Smith

“That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination.”

Gilles Deleuze. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books (1988); p. 125.

Confession: I’m not exactly a rigorous Deleuzian. Deleuze and Guattari are handy tools for my thesis, but I’m not immersed in either of their oeuvres. I’m not a hardcore philosopher, so I’ve never really delved into the ramifications of their work in light of their philosophical influences and debts, and I wouldn’t really recognise a Hegelian, Nietzschean, Heideggerian, or Spinozan argument if it flapped in front of my face. Of course Deleuze has a book on Spinoza. Of course there are connections. None of this will come as a surprise to a proper Deleuzian or a proper Spinozan (and there’s my inferiority complex again).

The point is this: ultimately, this post is probably shot from way behind the eight-ball and is primarily lifted from Zadie Smith, anyway. Hopefully that doesn’t make it valueless.

In Smith’s essay ‘Middlemarch and Everybody’ she briefly discusses Spinoza’s notion of conatus, which she describes as ‘striving’, the compulsion towards that which is good for us. For Spinoza, and for Smith’s discussion, this is about a human drive, and there’s always a risk in anthropomorphising rhizomatic structures, given how much rhizomatic functioning relies on drives, movement, desire, and change. However, I think this ties in closely to what Stuart Mouthrop, in describing the rhizome, has called “promiscuity”. The rhizome’s promiscuity comes from this striving, towards those other elements or systems that will strengthen it, empower it, give it the functions that it requires. To step back into biology, briefly, it is the striving of a chlorophyllic organism towards the sunlight, the osmotic transmission of sugars across a membrane from an area of density to an area of scarcity*.

What are the implications? Discussing rhizomatic systems in terms of striving might be slightly more valuable than adopting Moulthrop’s term: ‘promiscuity’ seems awkwardly allied to the desire-based philosophies of poststructuralism, which can have benefits and drawbacks in different situations. Conversely, linking the rhizome and conatus acknowledges the scholarship Deleuze undertook on Spinoza’s Ethics, and makes the rhizome seem less like an idiosyncratic offshoot of poststructuralism and more like a link in a larger philosophical history.

I’m not entirely sure whether these are worthy goals or not, but it’s definitely fascinating, and indicative of the vast wealth of academic writing that I’ve missed by Deleuze and Guattari alone.

(Tangentally, Zadie Smith’s book of essays, Changing My Mind, is a fantastically interesting read–aside from the piece on Middlemarch, which I read without knowing the first thing about George Eliot, the essay on Barthes and Nabokov is a brilliant survey of both.)

* my science is even worse than my philosophy but I’m fairly confident that’s how osmosis works. If not, my excuse is that I’ve been sick all week and I’m too lightheaded to do proper research.

The Circuit of Psychoanalysis

[Pierre Bénichou] does not address the masochists, themselves; he does not have them talk. They would gladly talk. Were they to talk, however, they would enter a preformed, prefabricated circuit: the circuit of their myths and fantasies, including the circuit of that psychoanalysis whose ideas everyone today is more or less familiar with, a circuit in which each of us knows more or less in advance what is expected of us…

–Gilles Deleuze (2004). ‘Your Special “Desiring-Machines”: What Are They?’ in Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974. Ed. by David Lapoujade. Trans. by Michael Taormina. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext[e]; p. 242.

And here is Deleuze on much the same subject: the preformed, prefabricated circuit into which the analysand enters, under the guise of freeing or relieving the unconscious.

The Psychoanalytic Method

“The original and insidious character of the psychoanalytic method thus resides in its conducting a minimal lifting of the constraints that weigh on discourse ordinarily, and in engendering the illusion that through it certain singularities of desire might gain expression, especially in the field of sexuality … [Psychoanalysis operates through] some all-purpose formulae, some encouragement on the basis of which, in principle, a free expression is authorized. But only in principle! Because, in fact, very little use is made of this enunciative licence, any slight impulse to free up the ‘analysand’ running into the apparatus of the cure …”
— Felix Guattari (2003/1989). Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury; p. 43.

In other words: psychoanalysis offers the illusion that you are free to articulate all of your desires or feelings or thoughts that go beyond what society will accept, but actually you’re only free to articulate things that fit into the psychoanalytic model. You can’t be unique or idiosyncratic or ‘singular’ because you’re still just part of a systematised program of expression.

In other other words: AHAHAHAHA this is in the context of Guattari talking about how psychoanalysis and religion are structured in really similar ways in that they offer the illusoin of freedom but actually impose a bunch of new constraints, LOL SNAP psychoanalysis/organised religion DOUBLE SNAP.

In other other other words: I finally called my psychologist about making a new appointment (the first since December) even though LOL LET’S JUST SAY I’M A BIT SCEPTICAL OF THE WHOLE DANCE.

It is therefore…

It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear. They are already elsewhere than in this discursive machinery where you claim to take them by surprise. They have turned back within themselves, which does not mean the same thing as ‘within yourself’. They do not experience the same interiority that you do and which perhaps you mistakenly presume they share. ‘Within themselves’ means in the privacy of this silent, multiple, diffuse tact. If you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: nothing. Everything.

Luce Irigaray (1977/1981), ‘The Sex Which Is Not One’, trans. by Claudia Reeder, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Brighton: The Harvester Press Limited; p. 103.

I find this use of ‘tact’ really interesting, given the connection in French between ‘tact’ and ‘tactile’, touching, which is such a major part of Irigaray’s writing in ‘The Sex Which Is Not One’. To be tactful is to have a light touch. To be feminine, for Irigaray, is to be always self-touching. Touché.
I don’t know how this reads in the original French but I suspect this is a very clever and sensible moment of translation.

Pasta Salad with Salmon and Kale

Sounds classy, looks like a hot mess, tastes like delicious, provides many nutrients.

Makes 3 main meals or about 6 side servings or 1 big ol’ potful.

In case you can’t tell yet, take all my measurements with a grain of salt and use your judgement and don’t sue me. I’m not a food blogger.

INGREDIENTS:

salmon fillets: 500g skinned and boned

pasta: 400g dry I guess

red capsicum: like, half to three-quarters of a large capsicum

kale: 2 stalks (or substitute rocket or baby spinach)

olives: 3 tbsp pitted kalamata from a jar (or whatever olives you like and I don’t know how you measure olives? So 75g of olives or approximately two dozen olives or more or less depending on how much you like olives)

pesto: 2 tbsp at least

lime juice: juice of half a lime-ish

parmesan: at your discretion

(and, just to be totally clear, you’ll need basics like water and salt and pepper. And a saucepan and a frypan and a drainer and a big spoon and an optional steamer. And a knife. And a bowl and a fork.)

METHOD:

Set water to boil for the pasta. Put frypan on medium heat for the salmon. I mean, probably the water will take much longer than the frypan so use your judgement. Ideally, you want them ready to cook with at the same time, but the world won’t end if you do the pasta process and the salmon process separately/screw up the timing.

Take photos because no one has every used the internet for photos of food before.

While you’re waiting, sprinkle salt and pepper on one side of the salmon fillets. Chop capsicum, halve olives, strip leaves from kale stalks and tear into small pieces.

Make a mountain of kale that dwarfs the other ingredients.

When water is boiling, add a pinch of salt because that’s how you do it, and add pasta.

Add salmon to pan seasoned side down. Don’t bother with oil unless your pan’s very old and non-non-stick. After 4 minutes, flip fillets.

Around three minutes after that/after the pasta has cooked for 7 minutes/when your heroic multi-function kitchen timer tells you so, add kale in a steamer on top of the pasta. You just want it to wilt and go bright green, so it’s good if you can see it, but otherwise, this will only take 2 minutes.

He’s a maverick.

Place steamed kale in drainer, unless you’re like me and you use your drainer as a makeshift steamer, in which case you’ve already got your kale exactly where you want it to be. Drain pasta over the kale. Return both to the saucepan.

Add pesto and stir through. Add vegetables and stir through. Flake salmon, add to saucepan, squeeze over lime juice, stir through.

This is a great recipe for impressing someone who has already agreed to sleep with you and/or someone with very bad eyesight.

Serve in a bowl because sometimes we all just want our food in a big easy-to-eat pile. Add parmesan I guess if you’re eating it hot, and I recommend eating at least some of this hot. Store the rest in Tupperware.

Brain Bytes #1: criticism

The four key qualities of a worthwhile critic:

• courage
• experimentation
• generosity
• good faith

Some Thoughts At The Beginning Of The Academic Year

There are a bunch of contradictory arguments about the value of living in the ‘now’, being grounded, being present for what one is experiencing, as opposed to dwelling in the past or fantasising about the future. Presence is valuable, but so too is recognising one’s past mistakes and learning from them, and having hope and ambition to move forward into a better future.

I have a dreadful memory, which I usually enhance by dwelling on past mistakes and slights, exaggerating them, pulling out each minute facet of a moment like a Cubist, searching relentlessly for clues to why I am the way I am, why other people act in certain ways, why things went down the way they did. I am notoriously (occasionally gloriously) past-oriented. I ignore the future as a place of unknown terror, and, from a certain viewpoint, I’d say I waste the present.

HADES GREY

HADES GREY, a blackout poetry project based on Fifty Shades of Grey.
To be performed at the Marvellous Scandal: Supermarket Noir on March 8th, 2013.

↖’Our strange arrangement’, p. 359.

↖’The best form of defense’, p. 351.

The Graveyard Tree [draft]

He tells me “you don’t belong here,”
my fingers sweating the thin psalms.
“You don’t fit in,” he whispers,
his mouth just above my collar.

His voice is breaking. The Bible
spreads a vast emptiness on the pew between us.

After the service, we sneak
around the church’s corner,
flake paint from worn timbers
while the congregation leaves.

He lays me down on the well-kept lawn.
Unbuttons me.
My knees askew, hair loose,
the edges of my pale body melting
into earth.
I kick off my shoes.

The yew’s branches are kissed
with bright red cones
and drip thin tickling needles.
God stays silent in a hot blue sky.
I lay still beneath his kisses
my bare stomach pulled tight
heart tremoring
taut as a bow.