I Miss Cheese

So before I launch into my rant, I just have to note that my blog readership appears to have increased by 50% in the past week. All the new readers appear to be in Russia? I can't be bothered to run a real analysis on user stats, so who knows what this means.

But back to the rant. I miss cheese. I really, really miss it.

I am on a diet. My goal, well, I have a goal but that's not the important point. My diet, the means by which I hope to achieve that goal, is simply calorie counting. That means I examine food labels, look up things at the USDA nutritional website, and measure out every single thing that I eat.

This is not a diet that requires the excessive consumption or avoidance of any particular food. I've got a set target for the total calories I want to consume each day and I negotiate with myself how that divides up (actually, I have a spreadsheet but it's the same thing). I start with the ideal of "everything in moderation" then balance that against my daily calorie cap. Even with that optimistic start, some foods simply have to go.

The first group of rejects included pasta and rice and bread. I am not going carb-free so sometimes I eat brown rice, and I quite like potatoes because they offer additional nutrients beyond starch depending on how they are prepared. But those other things, they were far too empty of significant nutrition.

Sadly, the next to go was olive oil and cheese.

The olive oil was easy. I now cook food instead with water, fruits, and a lot of spices. It's poaching instead of frying.

The real problem was cheese. For example, a rich, aged British cheddar can have atrociously high calorie counts, as many as 400 kilocalories per 28 grams. Using around 25% of your day's allotted calories on a piddling 28g of cheese is not workable. So cheese has gone. I can't even have it in the house because I eat it all up. This makes me sad.

A small consolation is yogurt. I don't eat any of those nasty fat-free products. None of that dry "Greek" junk either. I eat full-fat, natural yogurt so it has the satisfying mouth-feel of saturated fats without the horrible calorie inflation of cheese. When I need a snack, I choose yogurt first. Still, it's not the same.

I miss cheese.

In Search of BBQ

I've always enjoyed good barbeque. Because I've traveled a lot, I've had a chance to sample all styles of the craft, including barbeque on offer in places like Texas, New Mexico, South Carolina, Brazil, and China. I've tasted quite a variety of beef, pork, sheep, goat, chicken, and sausages made from their respective parts. I've had barbeque with dry rub spices, with tomato-sugar sauce, and with yellow mustard sauce. I've eaten meats cooked over wood, over gas, on a spit, on a grill, in a hole in the ground. Part of the pleasure of good barbeque is learning about the craft that the chef brings to the process. Part of the pleasure also comes from good sides. In the US, these tend to be white bread or corn bread, vegetables (usually boiled), beans, fried things, and cole slaw. Most good US barbeque places make desserts, usually cobblers or sweet quick breads that can be cooked quickly in large quantities; pecan pie is a common barbeque house dessert in Texas. A good chef will pay attention to the details of all these things.

I am not a strict follower of just one school--there are many paths to getting good smoked meat. I prefer pork ribs to beef but I'll never turn down an offer of the latter. While I'm not a paid food critic or a chef in my own right, I do think that I know when barbeque is done right.

I've not eaten good barbeque in some years now. I was on the hunt for a local source, and everyone raves about this family-run place in the next town over. I decided to give it a try.

It was horrible. Utterly horrible.

The cornbread was so sweet that I almost thought I had been served flan made with a dusting of corn flour. I like flan a lot. But I was expecting corn bread. I could taste nothing but sugar. I took two bites and left it.

The salad dressing was gelatinous, neon pink. Supposedly it was a raspberry vinaigrette. It is not difficult to whip up a simple vinaigrette on demand or even by the gallon each day of service. And local berry sources abound. No excuse for this nasty, processed crap from a bottle.

The sweet potato tots were fried in old oil. Under the slightly rancid flavor of the oil, I could barely taste the potato. They had not been made from pieces of sweet potato but pureed sweet potato and they were undercooked so they were mushy instead of crispy.

The sausage was identical in texture and color to the cheap "summer sausage" one buys at the grocery store, with one difference. This sausage had twice the normal amount of salt in it. There was so much salt that it made my tongue swell. I like salt. I usually add it to most of my meals. But this was extreme. I left most of the sausage on the plate. Artisanal sausage hit mainstream grocery stores years ago. There wasn't any excuse for this either. If they didn't have time to make it themselves, they could have easily obtained good quality sausage from other local sources.

The ribs were smothered in so much sticky sauce that I could hardly tell meat from bone. And the sauce had no flavor of any kind except sugar. I presume it once had other ingredients waved in its direction but it seemed to be a glaze made from sugar and nothing else. It overwhelmed the meat. It was so thick that it left me with no option of adding other sauces.

On top of this pile of disappointments, the meal cost USD 20. The portions were generous but charging this much for poor quality food was insult added to injury. 

I scraped the glaze off the ribs and brought them home for the dogs. Mimi ate one and threw it up around midnight. My feelings exactly.

Deductive Reasoning

I like pizza. But good pizza is hard to find here. So I make do with frozen, which on the scale of pizza-ness is already hovering down around 3 or 4 out of 10. And Saudi-made frozen pizzas pretty much fall off the scale. But sometimes one of the grocery stores will get frozen pizzas from some European company or other and those aren't too bad (anyway, you can make them better by slathering them with bacon).

Because I live alone and don't care what people think and because I love my dogs very much, I like to share things with them. This sharing includes pizza crust which is for me the least interesting part of pizza. I carefully pile the crusts up to one side of my plate and divide them equally between the dogs after I finish eating. All three of them love this little treat.

The other night I was in a hurry and had to eat early and quickly so I tossed some frozen veggie egg rolls in the oven. As I was eating them, I noticed Mimi staring at me with laser eyes. I kept looking back over at her and thinking, what is up with that crazy dog? She was perched up on a stool to better keep an eye on me, and wasn't moving a muscle, not even blinking.

Then it hit me. She is far more observant than I thought. Where do pizza crusts come from? The oven, of course. Therefore any food that comes out of the oven has pizza-crust-producing potential and that means treats for alert pups, Q.E.D.

I love my terriers.

Shopping Adventures

There's a new single woman named LW who just joined Aramco's legal finance group. Through mutual connections, I was asked to get in touch with her and show her around a bit. She and I could not be more different in personality, taste, opinions, etc. (I strongly suspect she votes Republican and she has TWO TVs in her 740 sq foot hovel because she leaves them on all the time for background noise; I probably turn my TV on two or three times a month at most) but when you live in the little bubble that is the expat community in Dhahran, you don't have the luxury of not hanging out with someone simply because they are different than you. So we've been out shopping a couple of times and I had her over to the house to meet the beasts for about half an hour.

Yesterday we went into the Dhahran Mall in Khobar with the express purpose of visiting the Pottery Barn store which opened a couple of weekends ago. Sadly, a store that I would never have shopped in at home has become a local tourist attraction for us expats. On our way through the mall, LW nabbed a pair of white flats to wear to work. It was the work of perhaps 10 minutes--she spotted them, dived into the store, tried on two pairs, asked for a less scuffed pair in her size, and paid the guy, all the while negotiating his lack of English. I didn't even know it was possible to buy shoes this quickly. I am not a true size and have to try on multiple pairs in each brand to find the fit.

We also stopped in at Saco World (sort of pale imitation of Home Depot) where we grabbed some 110V multi-plug extension cords (110V appliances are no longer available IK but all Aramco housing is still 110V), I got some paint for my contact training board (bright blue and brighter yellow) and some dog toys, and LW found a package of "real" sponges.

Then it was off to the glorious, glittery home furnishings displays of Pottery Barn. I was on a particular mission to find two new pillows for my couch. Surprisingly, we both gravitated to some lovely muted blue ones with a floral pattern. Pillows purchased, mission accomplished.

Then because it was about 15 minutes to prayer time (LW didn't believe me at first when I told her that we'd be locked out of the stores but locked in the mall during prayer), we skipped over to Chili's restaurant to get nutritionally disastrous but delicious burgers. Chili's is another business that I would never patronize by choice at home but it's about the only place to get a decent burger here. We had a fun time chatting about life experiences and our respective plans for the future.

All in all, it was a very successful day of shopping, one of the best I've had here so far.

I followed that up with an early morning trip to the commissary this morning (it's Friday so my weekend). No Saudis (they never get up that early on Friday morning), just a few bleary eyed expats like me wandering around. I didn't find any baking soda--it is a very irregular product here. But I managed to score some coarse sea salt for my grinder. I've been looking in numerous grocery stores for over two months for coarse salt. I of course purchased two large containers of it (per the usual hoarding).

And I found this over in the veggie section:

Yes, that is a container of locally grown, organic red bell peppers. Three of them for about USD 5. The com also had organic potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, and some fruits from the same company. I am not sure I can express what an amazing and dramatic change this represents. First, you have to have consumer demand, then you have to have a Saudi farmer enterprising enough to see the potential and then make the effort to grow these items in some more or less environmentally friendly fashion.

Some other interesting shopping-related changes have been happening here in the Kingdom. Women have not been allowed to work in shops for quite some decades (because it leads to mixing of the sexes, which the mutawahs fear more than anything else). That meant that there were only male clerks in the lingerie shops. Imagine having to buy your bras and underwear from some smarmy, smirking Indian or Saudi clerk. It's bad enough that you can't try anything on (no Saudi clothing shops have dressing rooms) but you couldn't even be measured or fitted.

Enough women from sufficiently powerful families complained (for years) such that at the end of last year, the King decreed that all lingerie shops had to employ only women clerks by June 1 of this year. The sounds of wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth from the conservative religious factions lasted for weeks. But the King didn't budge and it actually became a reality: you can walk past those shops and see women clerks in them. To be sure, these women clerks are veiled head to toe in abaya and niqab, but it is a giant leap for women's rights in this repressive country.

Lamb With a Cherry on Top

Time for another recipe. This one fell together last night because I was too exhausted from kick boxing class to come up with anything more complicated. It was quite tasty.

A note on the meat (you non-meat-eaters might want to skip this paragraph; well, really, you non-meat-eaters might want to just skip the entire post). I used a cut of lamb available in all of the stores here that is simply labeled "boneless lamb." I am not even sure what part of the lamb is involved. (I did a google search on "boneless lamb" and I can assure you that what we get here looks NOTHING like any of the pictures I could find.) Shanks, shoulders, and necks are pretty tough cuts and require hours of simmering to become edible. I use the word "cut" loosely. The small brown guys that work in the meat departments of the grocery stores don't so much cut up the meat as they hack it apart. All I know is that the "boneless" cut doesn't have a bone in it and it isn't full of tough connective tissue. You can put it in a curry without fussing for hours in the kitchen. This recipe will also work for lamb chops.

I often marinate meat before grilling it and I've been experimenting with fruit marinades for years. One of my memorable efforts was a homemade, fresh plum-garlic chutney marinade for shark (any firm fish would work). Mmm. The dish I'm posting about uses non-sweetened dark cherry preserves, a half-bottle of which I just happened to have in my fridge.

• Wash, and if needed, trim, the lamb ("boneless" or chops). Pat the meat dry. You want to leave some fat on it because that is what gives meat flavor.
• Wash your hands! You've been handling raw meat.
• Drizzle some olive oil in a shallow bowl and drag both sides of the lamb around in that. 
• Liberally sprinkle salt and garlic powder on both sides.
• Spread 3-4 oz of natural (unsweetened) cherry preserves on the meat, covering it evenly.
• Take the dogs for a walk (30 minutes). When you get back, turn the meat over and spread the preserves that smooshed out from under it all over the other side.
• Heat the grill. 
• Make a foil pan and put the lamb in it. Scrape all of the preserves out of the bowl and onto the meat. Put the pan on the grill.
• Grill on low flame to medium rare (smaller cuts of lamb can get dry and tough if you overcook). I'm not going to be more specific here because you should know your own grill, but no matter what cut you are using, the meat should be on the grill no more than 5-6 minutes.
• Serve with a vegetable of your choice. I chose to gently saute shiitake mushrooms in a bit of butter and olive oil. I would have added parsley if I had some. A green salad with a simple balsamic dressing would be good as well.

Odds and Ends, Mostly Odds

Today is a holiday. It is not an official Saudi holiday but one engineered by and for Aramco. It has been a few months since there was a company-wide and/or national holiday--Aramco likes to intersperse those 3-day weekends throughout the year. School just ended here, it is close to July 4 (not that the Saudis care about that but the positioning of the holiday near an American one is an anachronism from the days when Aramco was an American company), the eid following Ramadan is still about 8 weeks away...all factors pointed to the need for a holiday sometime in early July.

It would have been a much more enjoyable holiday if we hadn't been hit with a major dust storm on Thursday morning. The worst of the storm lasted almost 48 hours. The Eastern Province has a nearly constant haze of dust and salt in the air but the furnace-blast wind and dust in this storm were particularly ferocious. We didn't see the sun on Thursday and the sky was a murky orange all day.

We haven't had a true shamal (sand storm) here in the two years I've been here but we frequently get the tail ends of them. The sand blows itself out somewhere between Riyadh and the coast, leaving us with the dust, so baby fine that it manages to work its way into every crack and crevice. My sinuses feel like they have been extracted, thoroughly pounded with a meat cleaver, sprinkled liberally with something suitably caustic such as Drano, then stuffed back into my head.

That this area is unsuitable for long-term human habitation is clearly demonstrated by the absence of ruins of towns. Oh, sure, remnants of the occasional Bronze Age seasonal fishing village are stumbled across, unless the Wahhabis get to the site first and destroy it (destruction and denial of pre-Islamic civilization on the Arabian peninsula is a refined cottage industry here). But even these tattered bits attest to the larger point: nobody lived in this god-forsaken landscape year-round. (There were towns along the western trade routes, but those were established by different peoples altogether.)

I'm preparing to leave this vile weather behind for a bit--my annual government-mandated repat leave is coming up soon. We are required to be OOK for 14 consecutive days each year. Add on the Aramco-mandated travel days and it turns into something like 21 days off from work. Doesn't matter where we go, but go we must. Aramco ensures our cooperation with it all by paying us extra to leave.

In other news, both dogs have a nasty case of dermatitis on their feet from the toxic combination of raw irrigation water, dust, salt, and sand fleas. Their front feet are most affected as both have lots of tiny bites between their toes. It doesn't help that we take most of our walks at dawn and dusk when the nasty little fleas are most active. I'm going to try spritzing their feet with an herbal insect repellent to see if that helps at all. Mimi licked her front feet so much that she gave herself a yeast infection (the vet, after taking a whiff of her feet, agreed that they did have "quite a pong"; he's a Brit, in case you didn't guess). He told me that nearly all dogs in camp develop this dermatitis after a year or so--it is just part of living here. We do have ticks and regular fleas so the dogs get FrontLine but it is not effective against the sand fleas, unfortunately.

Since cooking is one of my hobbies and I'm not exactly a shitty cook, I thought that I would start adding a semi-regular cooking or recipe note to the blog. So here's the first one (I'll start adding photos once I see how this goes):

Mango season is winding down at last. I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to mangoes--I like nearly all varieties--India, Africa, Pakistan, Mexico--bring'em on! I don't care much for melons or papayas or other tropical fruits but I really like mangoes. I stumbled across a great recipe that uses up as many mangoes as you need it to. Even better, this mango salsa is quite a crowd pleaser at parties. It's so simple to make! No fat! No salt! It's all good for you!

Mango Salsa

1 small red onion
3 large mangoes (if you use more than one kind, you get interesting variations in color and texture)
1 medium red bell pepper
1 hot pepper, about index-finger length (I buy the red Thai peppers but hot green ones work too)
1 lime
2 cloves of garlic (optional)

one bowl large enough to hold all ingredients

Wash all of your veggies well! Finely dice the onion. Deseed and finely dice about 1/3 of the hot pepper (add more if you are brave or your guests are hardy). Now wash your hands, the knife, and the cutting board. You just handled that hot pepper and you don't want those fiery juices getting places they shouldn't. Finely dice the garlic if you are using it. Mix these ingredients well with the juice of the lime. No hurry! Letting the onions and hot pepper sit in the lime juice allows their flavors to mix and mellow. Dice the red bell pepper. Peel and dice the mangoes. Mix all ingredients. Keep in the fridge until ready to serve with crackers (otherwise the mango bits can get kind of mushy). Also works wonderfully as a relish or salad for curries and grilled meats. Keeps for about 3 days in the fridge.

Bon appétit!