The software that was included on the CD Rom with the image data was a very crappy Windows application and I didn’t do much with it. But today I found an open source Mac viewer and it produced these stunning revealing images.

Have a peek into my body:

Just before Christmas a car was parked in front of our house. On top of the car were some styrofoam boxes placed and two people were pacing next to it, trying to stay warm. I went outside to talk to them. It appeared that the parking spot in front of our house was one of the drop-off points of a fish smoking outfit from Kamouraska. I asked if they had some fish for me, but no, you had to order in advance. However, it didn’t happen often, but today somebody hadn’t picked up their order. If I wanted I could have some of the products they ordered. And so I did. I ended up with half a pound of smoked Anguille de Kamouraska (eel), half a pound of smoked of Omble-de-fontaine (a trout species) and in the little pot are some smoked Octopus in oil. They told me all of it was smoked just one day before. It was excellent.

If one of you want to get some, call or email them. I think they deliver once per month or so, in various places in Montréal.

La Boucanerie
111, rue Principale
St-André de Kamouraska

(418) 493 2929
email: laboucanerie@videotron.qc

During the opening of the exhibition at Galerie de l’UQAM the machine was fed a copious amount of food and subsequently it had a satisfactory bowel movement.

The artist, Wim Delvoye, was there and seemed content with the reception by the rather large crowd.

I took Wim (who does a lot of stereo-photography) to the Sami’s fruit and vegetable store. He was amazed by the giant mountains of veggies and took some stereo pictures of me. This one if while buying some bunches of Cilantro. Click the image for a bigger stereo 3D image. Red/Blue are glasses required to see the stereo effect.

(On a related note: I just read that Cilantro is the most profitable vegetable you can grow. So now you know.)

This is a machine that makes poop. They’re installing it now in Montreal and it will be on public display from Friday onwards. (You can go to https://cloaca.be to find out more). My friend Wim, another Wim than the artist that made this machine, is photographer and he’s here in Montréal (for the second time already) to document the setting up of the machine. There are also stereoscopic pictures on display that he made over the past few years.

The opening of the exhibition will be this Thursday 16 January and there will be plenty of food, for both human and mechanical lifeforms. Yes, this machine eats the same as we do, and it gets digested into the same excrements. You’re all invited.

Here is more info about the exhibition.

Today Amazon brought me a package. In it were two books: one on programming and the other one is a cookbook. And what a cookbook it is. It is thick, and of coffee table format. The first 50(!) pages are filled with essays about food, cooking and the Alinea restaurant, and then follow another 350 pages with recipes, ordered by season.

It is self-made and self-published by the folks of the Alinea restaurant in Chicago. They couldn’t find a publisher so they did the publishing themselves. The chef wrote the text himself, the designer who designed the restaurant, their website and their house-style, designed the book, even though he never had designed a book before. His sister/wife/partner (I couldn’t find what their relationship is, but they share the same last name) made the photographs, even though she was also an amateur at that. But they took almost two year to make this book and during that time they sure got the hang of it. The dishes are real food, made during the daily prep in the restaurant, and not in a pantry kitchen in a food photographer’s studio with fake ingredients that just look good and don’t wilt. After just browsing in it for an hour or so I almost want to book a ticket to Chicago. I’m salivating.

The recipes all look quite simple, often requiring just between 4 and 10 ingredients. O wait, that’s is just one part of the dish. A dish often contains 4 parts but the recipes for those parts can be prepared ahead, all recipes end with phrases like “Store in airtight container”. The final part of the recipe contains instructions how to assemble and serve them as beautifully as in the restaurant. O boy do they look gorgeous.

I’m not a real foodie, I’m too poor to dine in expensive restaurants and too lazy to make elaborate recipes just for the two of us. I do cook (and like doing it) when we have friends over but that usually eats away (no pun intended) a whole weekend, including tidying up the house. We should do it more often, however.
Festive meals like Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving are mostly spent with Alison’s family and the food is traditional turkey dinner (with nut-loaf for us pescatarians). But maybe I’m going to break that tradition soon.

And now for the best part: the book only cost me 35 dollars. I pre-ordered it a month ago on Amazon and received it today. But strangely enough the book is still marked as ‘not yet published’ so you might still be able to pre-order it for this amazing low price. (I feel like I’m on the shopping channel now: “But there is more…”)
The normal price in bookstores is $56. Even at that price it is a steal for an impressive book weighing just shy of three kilos.

Order Alinea at Amazon.com

O, and please also take a look at the Alinea book website for more pictures.

We had a guest over for supper and I decided to make something I read about the day before on some weblog.

Smoked fish made on a gas grill.

Put a board of cedar that has been soaked in water on your really hot grill. Let it burn a while until it has developed a lot of smoke and then put some salmon (or other fish) on the board. Let cook for 10 minutes with the lid closed and you have a delicious smoked salmon.

At least, that is the plan. It’s always a gamble to use recipes you find on the Internet. And certainly to try them out on a guest.

But it turned out pretty good; certainly something I’ll do again. The guest liked it too.

[I won’t mention the big glass bowl of grilled vegetables that I dropped. I had to throw it all out because there might have been shards of glass in it. I still had some veggies left, but they were still raw so we ate them quite some time after we had finished the fish.]

Watch him get special food. It’s not fair.

Pepe often covers his bowl of food so he can eat it later when he doesn’t feel nauseated. He does this by using his nose to move sand over his food. Since we are in short supply of sand in our kitchen, the dishtowel that we put his bowl on has to do. And it does.

Now he only needs to find a solution to that pesky creature called Poupoune, who keeps eating his food the moment Pepe leaves the kitchen. Even when he covered it.

What a difference a day or two makes. Yesterday I brought Pepe to the vet, who was very concerned and wanted me to take him to the animal hospital (the same place where I spent 1500 dollar for Poupoune a couple of years ago) to stay on an IV for the weekend to get some fluids and nutrients into him. She feared he had an ulcer and wanted to do lots of tests to come to a diagnose. I decided to only treat his symptoms, so she gave him an antacid and some subcutaneous saline. After paying 100 bucks I went home, with him wrapped in a blanket under my coat in the softly falling snow.

He slept all day, but then ate a little bit, and didn’t vomit. By the time Alison came home from the airport after midnight he was already feeling much better. He greeted her with his signature dance and she was very happy to see him alive. Today he’s even feeling better and eats and drinks, although not in very big quantities. But he is still frail. He lost almost a pound in body weight mostly of a lack of fluids. That is not healthy and we really have to fatten him up over the next weeks. He is very low on reserves.

I suspect him from pulling these stunts just to make us bond stronger to him. That and to be on the front-page of loglog every day.

I still need to record his dance for posterity; fortunately it seems he gave me a chance to do it. Now I only have to make him dance on camera. So far when I point the camera at him he immediately stops dancing and just stares at me and barks. His bark is just loud and annoying and not nearly as cute as him dancing in circles.