vilakins | 'Tis the season to be piggy

'Tis the season to be piggy

Yum, it's that tempting time of year again. Yesterday I had my first local seasonal treat: a mince pie.

Um, that probably needs translation; after all, the café I bought it at labelled it as a 'Xmas tart'; and the Chinese owners starting looking in the meat pie area when I asked for a mince pie. It's biscuit/cookie-sized: minced fruit and nuts in a short pastry casing which can be left open, fully encased, topped with latticework, or in the case of the one I had yesterday, a star. It was a six-pointed one too, covering two festivals in one go, though probably unwittingly.

And tonight Greg's company is paying for us to have dinner out seeing we can't go to his work year-end party because he'll be away. It's at Molten, a restaurant so popular and trendy I had difficulty booking which is why we're going on a Monday night. Their menu is to die for. Mmm-mmm, espresso crème brulee...

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La la la la la
la la la laaaah.

Different from the UK mince pie, I assume? Or do they do stuff with mincemeat in the UK and you just got the veggie version? *is confused*

We do get meat pies with mince in them (and yes,it's called that here too, not ground beef as in the US) but I dunno, 'mince pies' are traditional Christmas fare and I would assume they came from the UK originally. Yep. Here's a pic of Fortnum's ones (http://www.fortnumandmason.com/images/products/091593_M.jpg). I forgot that a lot of them have icing (confectioner's) sugar on them. What's even more confusing is that some people use the term mincemeat (http://us.st11.yimg.com/store1.yimg.com/I/englishteastore_1872_29444557). [boggles] There is no meat involved.

I was once flamed on the low-carb newsgroup by some uppity Yank (Yanks Know Better Than Those Damn Europeans, the bitches) by using the term "mince". He had a British wife and was proud on how he'd taught her the PROPER meaning of "mince". Fucker. Glad I'm not on that newsgroup any more.

Apart from this usage, to me mince is minced meat.

Hey, just got home and the yellow t-shirt with the bear was waiting for me! You mightn't like yellow, but it's the next best thing to brown for that pic and it goes well: all warm honey-ness. :-)

YAY! I'm so glad you like it:). Yellow does go well with the bear and the honey-ness, yes:).

Thank you, again, SO MUCH for helping me survive. Although the cheque won't probably come through until January, if then:(. *sighs and goes off to pimp PayPal to more people again:(*

Apart from this usage, to me mince is minced meat.

To the best of my belief, the UK usage is exactly the saame as the NZ one. I believe that mince pies started out being made with real mince, but somehow transmogrified in Victorian times into the the things we have today, filled with currants, sultanas, raisins, chopped candied peel and so forth. The only difference from NZ is that I don't think ours normally have nuts in them.

Ours don't always. Fruit and peel seem to be de rigueur but the optional nuts add some nice crunch.

Maybe the better ones, out of my price range, have nuts in them. One other thing that's traditional here is to have them as a dessert and add brandy butter. Lovely. :)

Now that I've never heard of. Brandy butter on Christmas pud, yes (and preferably not in summer).

Mincemeat (the filling stuff used to contain meat as well as dried fruit way back in history, hence the name. Some versions still contain suet, others don't.

Then again we tend to say 'mince' (or minced beef/lamb/turkey or lamb/beef/turkey mince) when we're talking about the meat product and mincemeat when we're talking about the dried fruit version (with or without suet. See here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat) for confirmation.

Gina

Thanks for that; I never know it had meat once.

I hear mincemeat (and fruit / Christmas mince) here too. Suet though--ewww! I've been known to make my own Christmas mince (with brandy even) but not with that. I'm not even sure you can buy it.

Back in the middle ages the fruit was added to disguise the fact that the meat was going off. The meat content gradually reduced over the years.

You can get vegetarian suet as well as the real stuff in supermarkets here. Don't know what they make the vegetarian version with but the real thing is the fat from around the kidneys, cleaned and minced.

And to be really yuk for meals how about
sweetbread // n.
the pancreas or thymus of an animal, esp. as food.

Ewwwww! [gags]

Mince pies are called mince pies in every English-speaking country in the world. (I can say this from direct experience of four of them, and anecdotal evidence of the Southern hemisphere ones.) :) We have them for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, only they're the large eight-serving-sized pies.

And the mincemeat usage isn't too surprising, if you look up the definition for sweetmeat or nutmeat.

You live and learn! I had no idea mincemeat or mince pies were known in the US. I've heard of pumpkin pie--and eaten it, yum!--but I guess it's never come up in conversation or on TV. We also have mince slice for all year round, otherwise known as fly cemetery. :-P

Right, off to bed now, full of very nice food and feeling like a fat little chipmunk...

I wish I could come to Xmas mini-parties or hold one myself. Sigh.

This is it for me: dinner for two tonight. I wasn't invited to the office party and we miss out on Greg's work one too.

I have perused the menu though and yumyumyum!

Thing is, most of my Pagan friends here are allergic to cats. Noki is the most allergising cat EVER:(

...so I can't hold a Solstice party in my tiny flat:(. Poo.

How about at a cafe or restaurant? There must be some reasonably cheap ones, even if it's just pizza; you could all go dutch.

Go Dutch as in paying together? I dunno, Paganism isn't very accepted in this country:(. And we'd be talking about it ANYWAY:D. Hm, there is a nice cheap-ish cafe called Viipurilainen (Viipuri=Vyborg being the biggest Finnish city the bloody Russians took away from us in WW2 and where my Granddad was born:()... and it's smoke-free! Yay!:)

There ya go! :-)

My God, that menu looks good - reminds me of some of the more stunning restaurants I've been to in Melbourne. Now I am developing theories about why the southern hemisphere has all the best food...

And what are they?

The food was amazing. I had the coconut and kumara soup, the goat cheese gnocchi (but snaffled half of Greg's risotto which accompanied his game fish) and we both had the espresso crème brulee. The chocolate tart with the tobacco sauce sounded ... interesting. I'm sure it was delicious but just no. Perhaps it's for the smokers who can't light up in restaurants any more (and a good thing too).

We've lost a few favourite restaurants lately and this one goes right to the top of the list. The wait staff were excellent and friendly (I loathe restaurants with snotty staff) and it wasn't full of black-clad trendies as I feared, but a wide cross-section of people.

I don't think they're very ground-breaking: mostly, I think the immigrant-ness/multiculturalism of Australia and New Zealand, plus the fact that you're just physically nearer South-East Asia, means that you get amazing fusions of food - lots of cooking that's rooted in a particular national or ethnic tradition, but which has also learned from other traditions (and from traditions associated with places which are widely geographically separated: there's a restaurant in Melbourne called Shakahari's which does amazing Italian/Japanese food). And it's not just something that's imposed on the food, either ('fusion food' has a very bad name here, don't know if it's the same in NZ): there seem to be a lot of cooks who are actually using different traditions to have more respect for the possibilities of different ingredients and combinations, rather than just, say, chucking soy sauce into a Mediterranean tomato dish at random.

Fusion is considered a Good Thing here. We also have a lot of fresh and good quality food all year round and that probably helps. Shakahari's sounds interesting. I could imagine Italian/Chinese fusion more readily but I'd love to try that.

We also have a lot of fresh and good quality food all year round

I forgot to even mention that! I went to a fruit&veg market in Melbourne last autumn (northern spring) and was stricken with vast remorse for bringing Gerald to this land of elderly, imported and/or scarce vegetables.

Aww. I have to say I had a standout meal in Bath, at Demuths (http://www.demuths.co.uk/). It was highly recommended by

spacefall and she was right: excellent vegetarian food of different styles (Greg had a laksa). Maybe you could take her there one day.

Um, that was meant to be "different world styles" which is what they call it.

That was nice of Greg's company to pay for dinner out for both of you. Hope you had a nice time...

We had a great time! The food was amazing and the restaurant (where Cafe Gero used to be) is now my favourite, so many others having gone recently. They'd have paid for us both to eat there at the Christmas dinner next week with everyone else but as Greg leaves tomorrow, we got dinner for two. :-)

Glad to hear you had a good time. :-)

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'Tis the season to be piggy

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