In the spirit of the previous post; my first night in Innsbruck, Austria, I walk into a restaurant and ask, point-blank, before I even sit down, if there are any non-pork dishes on their menu. The host explains that they used to have “more than one”, but as they are in the process of renovating their kitchen, they can only offer me beef-steak at the moment. I figure I won’t have many future opportunities to try Austrian steak, so I go for it. As I’m waiting for the steak, I decide to share my earlier experience with the waiter. He smiles as he listens to the full story, and as soon as I finish, the smile morphs into an audible laugh as he says: “You know what they say, the time when pork was bad was a long time ago!”
He also tells me that the steak dish I ordered usually comes with sautéed green beans topped with bacon-bits, but that, unfortunately for me, I will have to miss on that goodness too.
The steak was delicious, albeit a little overdone for what I ordered — Calgary steak is still unbeaten in my book. The beans, deprived of their awesome topping, were still good. Actually, they were a little too salty for my Canadian-accustomed buds; not at all for the average Egyptian tongue. So, you can say, I consumed them out of nostalgia more so than enjoyment or hunger. There was some sauce on the side, which wasn’t at all necessary.
“If you’re still here by next Wednesday, drop by,” the waiter says, I should be so lucky then as to have more options to choose from. I didn’t inquire about the number or variety, for I didn’t want to destroy any feeble hope left in getting a decent meal thereabouts that region. Also, I will not be here next Wednesday.

This “try-at-stir-fry” is not turning into a restaurant-review blog, as much as that might actually make it a worthy read after all.

Note: This kezboard sucks, and I’m too layz; exchange all z’s with y’s and viceversa.

I’m in Munich, and I have 22 minutes to kill, so here goes a food-realted storz.
For the past couple of dazs, I’ve been wanting to trz Bavarian cuisine, but standing between me, and those delicious-looking chunks of meat was mz lack of communication skills using the German language (’lack’ is not an exaggeration — mz German consists of the one phrase pronounced ‘nichste halte’ ). I don’t reallz care what I eat as long as it is not pork, but I didn’t know how to point that out, short of immitating a pig in the middle of a restaurant. Zou might point out that some Germans do speak English, and that that should solve mz problem. Correct zou would be, except that I was close to mz saturation limit with the number (and kind) of looks I’ve been getting as an answer to the question ‘do zou speak English?’ without actuallz having to walk into a Bavarian restuarant.
Nevertheless, earlier this evening, I braved mzself (encouraged when the grocerz-store ladz’s answer to the aforementioned question was: ‘No Problem!’) and walked into one of them castles thez call restaurants. I asked for an English menu. Lo and behold, the ‘african-german’(?) waiter turns out to be fluent in English, with a North American accent — perhaps that’s whz he was the one waiting on mz table out of the ten or so waiting staff. He brings the menu, and I start reading. Skipping all the dishes with pork in them, I count a couple of ‘meat-loaf’ dishes, one ‘duck and chicken(!)’ dish, and one ‘msuhroom’ dish. Four out of twentz or thirtz items. ‘Ok, whatever, I’ll order one of the meat-loaf ones,’ I thought to mzself, ‘who eats “duck and chicken”?’ Well, I wouldn’t be writing this if that would’ve worked, would I? Well, it didn’t.
Turns out that the ‘meat’ in a ‘meat-loaf’ is also pork, which provides the following answer to mz earlier question: The person who ends up going blindlz to a Bavarian restaurant without the willingness to eat pork is the person who eats ‘duck AND chicken’ — to be precise, a chicken-thigh and a duck-breast in a (prettz good) mushroom sauce, and a ball of starchz material. Zes, and two pretyels, .80 € each.
At least I don’t have to crave it anzmore.

Laila Lalami argues:

Muslim women are used as pawns by Islamist movements that make the control of women’s lives a foundation of their retrograde agenda, and by Western governments that use them as an excuse for building empire. These women have become a politicized class, prevented by edicts and bombs from taking charge of their own destinies. The time has come for the pawns to be queened.

Agree or not, the article is worth a careful read.

via rockslinga.