masterkitchenwizard

[masterkitchenwizard]

A word (or several) about the Haka that was performed in Parliament.

I hemm'd and haww'd about whether to say anything about this. But just a few weeks ago I stood up at the CTU gathering and gave a speech about how important it is to push back against the government's proposed changes to Te Tiriti O Waitangi, and about how they are betting that people from my background, who look like me and sound like me, won't care. And the truth is I do care. Very much.

For the Brits who are waking up, there's going to be a slew of headlines about how the New Zealand Parliament was today 'disrupted' and 'suspended' because a young female Māori MP performed a Haka, backed by other members of her political party (Te Pāti Māori) in response to a bill being read. This Bill proposes to change the Principals of Te Tiriti O Wantangi, the closest thing New Zealand has to a founding document. It has been proposed by ACT, a small and very right wing party who are a coalition parter to our National Party (NZ Tories). The closest political analogy the UK has to ACT is probably The Reform Party.

Our NZ Parliamentary system is based on the English one (And yes, I said English. I meant what I said). It's very recognisable to me, as a Crown structure and system, as I grew up watching coverage of the House of Commons on UK TV.

New Zealand, in accordance with Te Tiriti O Waitangi, is supposed to be a bicultural society. And Bicultural means Māori and Non Māori, not Māori and 'White' or 'British' - so there is supposed to be room for everyone in this agreement. But Māori are supposed to be centralised in this agreement.

I do not see, in the Parliamentary system, room being made for Māori cultural practices or traditions. The types you would see on a Marae, between Māori people. There is not sufficient room for Haka, for Waiata, for Korero in Te Reo Māori. How do I know this? Because if there was, half of the space of these proceedings would be made available for this. So my feeling about Parliament has been, since arriving here, that it is not truly bicultural. It is not a fusion of systems. It is an imposition by The Crown. Our way or the high way.

So today, when Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, of Te Pāti Māori, lead that stirring rendition of the Ka Mate Haka in Parliament (and yes, she led it, she did not perform it alone) - I didn't see disrespect. I didn't see disruption. I certainly didn't see hate. Though I wouldn't blame her for feeling that way towards the people who have drafted and proposed this bill.

I saw anger. I saw frustration. I saw defiance to the existence of this bill. I saw people fighting, bitterly, to have their say, in their way, in a system which doesn't acknowledge them, doesn't make room for them, and doesn't respect them. Or rather, only accepts them when they use the strictures and structures imposed by The Crown.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi was supposed to enshrine Māori interests and traditions, and the promise of that has never been truly fulfilled.

If Te Tiriti had ensured true bicultural equality, haka performances in Parliament might not be seen right now through a colonial lense and viewed as an inconvenience by so many people. The fact that this haka was performed as this parliament were voting on a proposed piece of legislation which further strips away their rights and recognition...? It was absolutely appropriate. And I back them all the way.

The Parliamentarians had a colonialised view of how today was 'supposed' to go. This wonderful, young, passionate Māori wahine didn't subscribe to that. She did things her way, backed by people who knew why this was important. If Te Tiriti had ever been enacted properly, this wouldn't have been shocking. It would have been expected. It would have been valued. And this ... toilet-paper-in-waiting disgrace of a bill would never have made it on to the floor.

We're all so proud of the All Blacks doing the Haka at the rugby, aren't we! Great tradition for the rest of the world to share, two minutes at the start of the game, great way to amp up the players and crowd. But reducing Haka, in purpose and tradition, to that sole example? That's a disservice. Ka Mate was the first Haka I was ever exposed to, and yes, it was watching the All Blacks perform it at the Rugby World Cup. It is powerful, and not enough people know the meaning of it. It's more than an entertaining two minutes before the game kicks off. It packs a punch, politically. Go take a look. It was the perfect sentiment for this moment.

Kei runga koe, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke. Karawhiua!

https://www.toarangatira.iwi.nz/kamate

[masterkitchenwizard]

I'm a native Dutch speaker and let me tell you I'd be horrified to find out Dutch was the language of paradise.

Johannes Goropius Becanus, Opera Ioan, 1580

[masterkitchenwizard]

Not if you want to piss off the other 10 provinces that are not North and South Holland

nodding furiously at every second of this video

[masterkitchenwizard]

I'm particularly fond of the saying: "Every attempt to make a system foolproof just challenges God to make a better idiot"

The thing about tumblr is that you could make an entirely reasonable post like "hey in a pinch you can use potato starch as dry shampoo, just sprinkle it on top and comb it in, you can wash it off later and it'll be completely fine", and there's going to be someone reblogging this like

"sure this is safe and ok IN SOME CASES but ONLY if you're 100% sure that the thing you're using is potato starch and not something else, like laundry detergent! DO NOT EVER just sprinkle random powders into your hair before you're sure you've identified it correctly! You could burn your scalp off by following OP's advice without question!"

...Like are you sure that this is a real problem that people might actually have, or did you just feel like it should now be your turn to be talking?

[masterkitchenwizard]

Imagine a Greek Chorus, but played by Pitbull and Ke$ha

"we're going down, I'm yelling HADES!!!"

In her hole in a manner similar to this btw:

[masterkitchenwizard]

As a kitchen wizard I'm tempted to hide spells underneath twenty layers of recipe nostalgia now

Ive seen people be like in modern fantasy like "oh the pritagonists can just look up spells on their phone how do you solve that"

Imma be honest most people who go on recipe websites and book every recipe they see don't even use them lmao why would with be different

[masterkitchenwizard]

Same

I am looking neither respectfully nor disrespectfully. I gaze without recognition of your form, and without understanding.

[masterkitchenwizard]

Can't express how stress free being open minded is.

Some lesbians use he/him? Oh cool.

Some people have people inside their head and sometimes it's fictional chars? Sick your brains like a pirate ship they're all working to run.

Some people like being treated like a pet dog? Bark bark bro.

Being fat isn't unhealthy but a perfectly normal type of body to have? Kinda beautiful how different we can all be.

Something doesn't make any fucking sense? Cool an opportunity to learn. And even if I can't figure it out it's cool we still have mysteries today.

[masterkitchenwizard]

I have opinions about people choosing microwave

saw a post and now i need an answer:

before anyone gets mad about why [insert kitchen thing] wasn't included i knew that would happen because there's plenty of people that think one thing is normal in a kitchen while another doesn't so i used this neat thing called google so it's not my fault:

anyways please reblog for a bigger sample size :]

[masterkitchenwizard]

This really butters my parsnips, because for a moment I thought this was a wonderful new idea for my garden.

IT'S ALL LIES, LIES, ALL OF IT LIES

Vertical gardening.

[masterkitchenwizard]

not sure if anyone is interested in this but here is a list of the most joyfully vital poems I know :)

You're the Top by Ellen Bass

Grand Fugue by Peter E. Murphy

Our Beautiful Life When It's Filled with Shrieks by Christopher Citro

Everything Is Waiting For You by David Whyte

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Is Alive! by Emily Sernaker

Instructions for Assembling the Miracle by Peter Cooley

Barton Springs by Tony Hoagland

Footnote to Howl by Allen Ginsberg

Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman

Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower by Bradley Trumpfheller

At Last the New Arriving by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

To a Self-Proclaimed Manic Depressive Ex-Stripper Poet, After a Reading by Jeannine Hall Gailey

In the Presence of Absence by Richard Widerkehr

Chillary Clinton Said 'We Have to Bring Them to Heal' by Cortney Lamar Charleston

Midsummer by Charles Simic

Today by Frank O'Hara

Naturally by Stephen Dunn

Life is Slightly Different Than You Think It Is by Arthur Vogelsang

Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck

The Imaginal Stage by D.A. Powell

Lucky Life by Gerald Stern

Beginner's Lesson by Malcolm Alexander

Presidential Poetry Briefing by Albert Haley

A Poem for Uncertainties by Mark Terrill

On Coming Home by Lisa Summe

G-9 by Tim Dlugos

Five Haiku by Billy Collins

The Fates by David Kirby

Upon Receiving My Inheritance by William Fargason

Variation on a Theme by W. S. Merwin

Easy as Falling Down Stairs by Dean Young

Psalm 150 by Jericho Brown

Pantoum for Sabbouha by Zeina Hashem Beck

ASMR by Corey Van Landingham

A Welcome by Joanna Klink

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

At Church, I Tell My Mom She’s Singing Off-Key and She Says, by Michael Frazier

[masterkitchenwizard]

Are you nuts? It's Dutch for "that temu ad that"

Die temu ad die

[masterkitchenwizard]

Pancake batter without a pinch of salt will make pancakes that taste of sadness

Put salt in your baked goods. Put salt in your desserts. Just do it. Please. Salt isn't just for savory, it's literally a flavor enhancer so even a pinch can take a meh recipe to one people can't stop eating. Listen to me. Your cookies and cheesecake bars are bland and uninteresting. I'm taking your hand. I'm guiding you with a gentle touch to the back. We can do this together. Trust me.

[masterkitchenwizard]

Normally one of my go-to jokes is that cooking is science and baking is witchcraft. But in all honesty baking is a lot more rigid and orthodox than cooking is to me.

If I cook curry, or potatoes, or what have you, my dish will not care about a half teaspoon paprika or cumin more or less, or me deciding to freestyle mushrooms in there instead of ground beef. And when a dish is done I can easily let it sit for an extra 15 minutes on low heat most of the time if the table isn't set yet or my kid needs a last minute diaper change before dinner.

Baking is not that forgiving. Baking is about proportions, measurements, knowing your oven. Don't freestyle a shitload of new ingredients in there if you don't know what you're doing. Baking recipes are important and don't permit a lot of reading between the lines unless you know what you're doing.

Cooking is the domain of fucking around.

Baking is the domain of finding out.

i’d like to be controversial for a second.

i hate—genuinely hate—the general attitude towards baking.

remember at the beginning of the 2010s, when the great british baking show came about and spread an interest to baking to the general public? i caught a newer episode of their celebrity edition and i think all of two people on the last three or four seasons took it seriously. everyone else thought it was just a joke. and it’s not just with cooking shows, either. i see it everywhere, on tumblr, on facebook, on instagram…

“I have a recipe here but i’m going to read between the lines and add more shit to it. oh, no, why does it look like that? oh, no, why is it burning? oh, no, why is it raw?”

i’ll never forget seeing someone on here post about making chocolate chip cookies and they added a bunch of shit to their mix and just about set a fire in their oven. i still wonder if op even had a recipe on hand or if they were just trying to see if they can get away with it by guessing. they��re like the easiest cookie in the world to make, how do you fuck that up?

yesterday, i saw a post saying “bake 10-12 minutes is obviously code for bake 11 minutes” and i couldn’t reblog it because op turned off reblogs for some reason. it’s that way when you’re cooking: a recipe card from hellofresh will tell me to cook an onion for 4-6 minutes until it’s soft and browned, it’ll take 5 minutes to do that just from how the stove works when i turn it up to medium heat and i just let it cook. baking is a whole other animal: if it says to bake for 10-12 minutes, bake for 10 minutes first and then check it, and if it’s not done, give it another 2 minutes or until it is.

my mom tells me i’m a patient cook and… i am. just let the ingredients do what they do at medium heat and watch over it. trust the recipe. put your fucking phone away. and you don’t need to cook something in a skillet at high heat because it’ll burn on the outside and be underdone inside.

bread is a living creature, especially sourdough.

i guess it’s just the nerd in me, but i find it all incredibly insulting. it’s insulting to the person who penned the recipe, to the chef who tried it out and mastered it, to the wheat used to make the flour, the sugar cane used to make the sugar, the bird that gave us its eggs, the cow that gave us its milk so we could have butter or cream, the cocoa beans used for chocolate, the vanilla beans used to make extract, the vegetables used to make veggie oil or olive oil… and it’s insulting to us, the viewers, the followers, the readers, the people on the other side watching this shit happen and feeling helpless to stop it. the culinary world has been humbling for me, the same way chemistry and biology labs, ceramics lab, all my machine shops, and welding class have been humbling; the difference is cooking and baking get personal really quick. you put your heart into the dish or the cake, all while following a recipe. it’s a meeting of mind and heart (if you’re making bread, it’s mind, heart, and body).

a recipe is nearly identical to a science experiment, like it’s an experiment that had been tried out and written down for us to try out ourselves. just like how in laboratories and the machine shop, you have things in the kitchen that don’t care if you have hair, or jewelry, or appendages. things that can cut and burn you. things that can burn your nose with the smell, like vinegar poured into a hot skillet. things that don’t seem hot but don’t assume anything (never forget the time in high school chemistry class where my first lab partner picked up an erlenmeyer flask and didn’t listen to me when i told him i just had it over the bunsen burner; i worked solo after that).

i think that’s why i have such a hard time agreeing with this general consensus that baking is a feminine or girly endeavor when it’s not, it’s very cerebral and often technical (and women in baking is actually a relatively recent trend, too, it was only a couple hundred years ago when women started undertaking it themselves). it’s an art as well as a science. if anything, cooking is more of the art here, because even though you’re following a recipe, there’s a great deal of craft involved.

i also think of the general attitude towards science now that i write this out. the number of people who think covid is fake. the number of people who think the moon landing was fake. the number of people who think skinwalker ranch is fake. the number of flat-earthers still running around. i’m actually not at all surprised that people think baking is this girly thing that’s also a joke now that i think about it.

and all you people who are like “i couldn’t even make a sandwich let alone make dinner”, just follow the recipe and turn on your burner to medium heat at the most—you never turn a burner on high unless you’re boiling water. it’s literally not hard.

[masterkitchenwizard]

I actually learned a term for this from my German wife: Mischmasch Pfanne. Literally translated it means "mixup pan".

We take a few veggies we have in the back of the fridge, maybe the stray potato or some leftover pasta, and just fry it all up in a frying pan. If you have eggs crack one or two in and stir fry them with the rest. Season it with whatever and serve. Great way to get rid of leftovers

When you’ve been cooking for long enough, you stop making recipes and start making “shit in a skillet” and “whatever soup”

[masterkitchenwizard]

Sometimes we, just like the dough, need to rest a bit so we can rise properly

After years of making my own pizza dough, baguettes, rounds, rolls, braided intricacies at all levels of acidity, I've decided store bought is fine. For me, anyway. There's a rhythm you easily establish with bread baking. You wake up early in the morning, you take a bit of your months-old starter, mix it with a larger proportion of water and flour, and you let it sit in a relatively (+/- 2C) part of your house for some hours, shape it, let it proof some more hours, then you bake. This gets you a standard 1 kg loaf. Or a set of baguettes. Bagels you'll need to spread out over a weekend. But there really is no added complexity, just more time.

Most of this is down time. Bread dough needs only occasional attention during this process, and sometimes none at all. You could easily bake a good loaf with dough that's been left to sit during a whole work day. The shaped dough will proof just fine, baring some catastrophe. Cats will be cats, after all...

However, that process of shaping, and cleaning, and vacuuming the stray flour and dough. Ah, it's only maybe 1-2 hours total in what can be a 24+ hour process, but. I'd rather have those 1-2 hours. I'd rather outsource. The artisan loaf from the good bakery down the street is $6-10 depending on the quantity, if any, of such vaunted ingredients as nuts and dried cranberries.

But I'm fine with that. My time is more valuable. Bread baking is a hobby, not a necessity, and there are things you cannot outsource. Photography, or physics, or lifting. I'm sure I'll come back to bread eventually. I'm still feeding that starter weekly. The billions teeming in the primordial bread won't want for food.

There's no broader point here, really. I'm just documenting a minor transition, but , it's nice to be able to make such a transition all the same.

[masterkitchenwizard]

I've recently discovered the awesomeness of quick pickling. Pickled red onions or curry cucumber make sandwiches go from good to heavenly. I can shoot you the recipes if you want.

Also, homemade spice mixes can be vastly superior to store bought, whether it's curry powder, chili con carne seasoning, garam masala or ras el hanout for that awesome Middle Eastern flavor.

I'm working on a family cookbook because I want it to be something to pass down to my niece, nephew, potential future kid, and to share with all our family. And it's cool because our family is more than just the blood ties we have a lot of people who became family through bonds so we wanna pass down a lot, including photos, stories -- and of course tips and tricks in cooking and in life in general. So if anyone's got suggestions on the advice and hacks end, let me know.

One of the best ones I've got is cookie baking in a tried and true way is put them on the bottom rack and watch them; when they're rising and starting to tint at the bottom, move them up to the top rack and once they've started to brown, pull them out. No timer needed. It's been our method for my grandma's cookie recipes and how she was taught by her mother in law. I've also recently found baking them inside of a muffin tin? 10/10 perfect for dunking in milk.