Festive Season and Food-Roasted Pork

The weather during the past ten days has been biting cold , it snowed for two days (thank Heavens) and then stopped, although the snow stayed atop trees and the fields were covered with a white blanket, since the temperature remained below -04C. My wife and me came back from Malaysia and Thailand after a three week holiday in November and the cold just does not agree with our old bones. We yearn for the 40C heat and the blue skies, the brilliant light and shimmering seas. And the food! What delicious food. But C'est la Vie.


As a rule we do not eat sumptous food during Christmas and the New Year. This year our younger son went on a four month backpacking tour of India, Malaysia, Indonsia and singapore and lost twenty kilos weight. During his four month trip, from ninety kilos he came down to seventy kilos and has stopped eating meat and fatty foods.


However, on the 24th December, we oven grilled a loin of pork meat (which is called roti in Germany) stuffed with coliflower, onions, ginger and mushrooms. This was accompanied by cooked red cabbage, boiled black potatoes and mojo picon. This is made by shredded green herbs submerged in extra virgin olive oil, wine vinegar, lot of very finely chopped fresh garlic, salt and hot chilli powder. Mojo Picon is ideal for grilled and boiled potatoes, fish and pork chops etc. For dessert we had Vanilla pudding with fresh cream. We opened a bottle of red wine from Valencia (Spain) and a bottle of Lambrusco white wine from Italy. My wife and son do not drink alcohol, so they had a few sips and I finished the white wine in two days and then had red wine too.


This morning for bidding farewell to the year 2007 we are fixing honey pork spare ribs with baked potatoes and garlic bread. Very simple.



To prepare honeyed Pork SpareRibs I use a seasoning of cumin and corriendar powder, tandoori masala, mixture of grinded cardamans, cloves and canella and marinate the ribs for two hours and then grill in the oven at gas mark 200 for foty minutes or until the meat it tender. When the meat is nearly done, spray the ribs with a mixture of honey and little vinegar with a bristle baking brush and leave it (the ribs and not the brush) in the oven for further ten minutes. With this delicious food, I will open a bottle French red wine wine from Bordeaux, a Medac 2006 from Chateau Pessange.




The photo at the top left is of the market a few hundred metres from China Town in Kuala Lumpur. We had delicious coffee there. The market is full of shops and stalls selling clothes, antiques, perfume, hand carvings and much more. Worth a visit when in KL


Wishing you all a Very Happy New Year, Peace & Harmony and Lots of Travel & Adventure.

Human Rights. Does anybody care?

Australia's new government will issue a formal apology to Aborigines for the abuses they suffered in the past, prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd has promised.
Mr Rudd, whose Labor Party swept to power in an election on Saturday, said the apology would come early in his first parliamentary term (BBC News).
Mr. John Howard, the defeated PM refused to offer a full apology to the Aborigines, saying the current generation should not feel guilty about mistakes from the past. What arrogance and hypocracy.
The Indigenous Australians have been the victims of the white population for nearly a hundred years. Will the mutilation of their culture, uprooting of their children and handing over to white families under the Australian government’s so called “assimilation” policies for nearly sixty years, can be remedied by an apology from the current PM?
The US government has never apologized to the Pueblo Indians for taking away their lands, destroying their heritage and their culture, denying them the right to own their own lands.
Without looking much back,the present US government has not apologized to Iraqis for invading their country and killing over a million Iraqis. The British government has also refused to apologise to Iraqis.British govt has not apologised to the inhabitants of Chagos Islands who were duped, deceived and uprooted from their motherland and dumped on Mauritius Islands. Chago islands and Diego Garcia were under british yoke and were secretly handed over to US government with a promise to get rid of its inhabitants.
No past or present British government has ever apologised or expressed regret or remorse over its role in African slave trade .
No French governments ever apolgised for slavery by their country men on their plantations in the Carribean and south pacific islands. No Belgian governments ever apolgised for their atrocities and human rights abuses in Congo.

The Spanish conquistadores destroyed ancient civilizations in South America, plundered and annihilated, debaced and destroyed entire populations. The european nations wiped out entire populations in the South Seas islands. By introducing alcohol, guns, christian religian, diseases, they wiped out generations of islanders. The list is interminable.
What is in an apology from an incumbent politician of a country? If I were to step on the toe of a person, drop hot coffee on his jacket, then I would apologise. But countries and their respective governments who systematically plundered, destroyed, annihilated other countries and their populations, should be held responsible. They should be forced, through international courts of justice, to pay csompensation to the descendants of all those people whose ancesters were made salves, their civilizations destroyed, killed outright and whose human rights were ystematically abused.