Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

To make four tortas This dish comes from Mexico from the state of Jalisco famous for its Mariachis and for Tequlla. It is a dish eaten on the street and the Jaliscences believe it is one of the hottest foods on the planet. In a notorious case, in order to make their tortas ahogadas the hottest in Jalisco, one restaurant added battery acid to the sauce. Tortas ahogadas are served many big events in Jalisco. Football matches, at the charros, at marches and demonstrations and you can usually buy them in family run cenadurias, or ‘dinner restaurants’. It is essential that you use a very hard and chewy type of baguette roll. If you don’t then the torta will fall apart after you add the hot chilli sauce and the result will be an unpleasant mush. Ingredients • 3 hard variety small baguettes (birote) • 500 grams of pork • 500 grams of ripe tomatoes • 60 grams of tree chillies • Two mugs full of Rose Cocoa beans • Two limes • 3 large onions (red or white) • Three laurel l...

Technical university in Brandenburg £9000 a year on university fees is not a bagatelle. Of course the £9000 is a bagatelle to all those who send their children to public school. The worst possible public school would charge £9000 a year. To the elite riding on the establishment choo-choo into positions of influence, £9000 pounds is peanuts. Not to me. Pay £27,000 a year to go to Harrow or wherever, then pay less than that for three years at Oxford. That is the logic of these people. They have the mindset of public schoolboys and school girls and their parents. If you want higher education to work for society you have to pay for it through taxation and the tax burden should fall proportionately on the rich and tax loopholes should be closed. That's the long and the short of it. That is realism. Raising the fees the way the elite would like them raised for the top universities will just make them into an extension of the private school system. Almost anyone with a l...

NGOs jump in, boots and  all - whoosh! Organisations like the Ford Foundation with all its financial muscle  pushed the ideas of Nyerere-phobes like Ali Mazrui. It's all very fine to speak about transparency and accountability as a way to monitor and control NGOs and all those things, but who looks at these organisations' agendas? It might not be an exaggeration to say that half the NGOs and philanthropic organisations that one sees working in the field are there to proselytize. What kind of a mechanism would be needed to make transparent the aims of the evangelical organisations in say Latin America? The behaviour of some of the "aid" organisations in the tsunami-hit countries was stomach turning, with teddy bears wearing "Jesus Saves" T-shirts being distributed to traumatised children. Those organisations went in there boots and all. Whoosh. What do you mean by transparency? Do you mean just the handling of money or watch dogs to observ...

Every Friday afternoon I used to wait for my mother outside my boarding school, buttoned up snuggly into my Petite Madeleine uniform, a double breasted navy coat with shining brass buttons, a sailor hat trimmed with white ribbons, and knee high white socks. I usually held a posy tightly in my sweaty little hand, to give my mother as she swooped down to kiss me. At the worst of war times in Paris people sold flowers and I always saved my little bit of pocket money. She smelt lovely, better than my favourite snow drops. Her soft blond hair tickled my neck, her velvet skin stroked me, her large blue eyes enchanted me. She was so beautiful and fair, and I was her dark little changeling. I wondered how she could love me, but love me she did. I had proof of this seventy years later when, peering at a photograph taken of me then, she said in a puzzled voice: “But I thought you were so beautiful!” I usually had a gleaming white and gold medal pinned on my chest: best in my ...

This album should really be seen in tandem with Mom's  article on her experiences during the war, something she wrote at my request in October 2007.  I'll publish it again above.