bits and bobs

bits and bobs, this and that, ducking and diving, apples and pears, rashers and knobs, cor blimey someone stop me before i’m arrested by the cockney police!

truth: this is a cop-out post.  no real cooking.  it’s a mere 3 days before thanksgiving, and though i have no large plans for cookfest 2012, the rest of the country does, so i shan’t cloud your already food-addled brains with thoughts of more recipes.  no, no.  instead we shall be celebrating a fancy-for-no-reason sunday lunch; a long-standing tradition in my family. 

when you look “bit” up in the dictionary, you find definitions involving drill components, horse bridles, and occasionally hatchets.  rustic.  cosy.  but when you ask anyone in my family to tell you the definition of “bits,” they’ll inform you without hesitation that it involves a lunch consumed on sundays and special occasions, consisting of cheeses, cured meats, crusty bread, and wine. 

this tradition reaches back to my childhood in asia, when we would spend our sundays taking our big wooden boat out for leisurely cruises and weighing anchor off one of hong kong’s outlying islands.  we’d spend the morning sunning ourselves silly and diving off the roof of the boat into the murky water, praying that no tiger sharks were lurking that day.  by early afternoon, my mum would whip out the cooler that she had packed full of deliciousness that morning, and a spread of glorious bits would be carefully laid out, then devoured in minutes, washed down by a bottle or two or something cold & yummy.  a few decades later, the wooden boat might be gone, and there are certainly less tiger sharks about (whew), but these lunches remain a firm doctrine of fuller family tradition. 

so let’s say that the main four ingredients of bits are your sex and the city gals: cheese is carrie, appeals to pretty much everyone.  cured meat is samantha, you know she enjoys a good salami.  wine is miranda, a little bit sassy.  then bread is charlotte: can be kind of boring, but you need it to balance out the other ingredients.  boom.  then, of course, you also have your supporting cast of characters: your pickles and olives who are your bigs and your aidans.  their storylines might be on the periphery, they might not make an appearance every week, but they certainly make the show more yummy.  i found a pack of quails eggs at my local asian supermarket the other day, and decided to add these to this episode’s Very Special Guest Stars.  i’ve always had a fondness for these teeny eggs, from the beautiful pale blue of the inner shell to their delicate and somehow rich flavour.  

i also noticed after taking this picture that they are the exact same pattern as my countertops:  

what?!  where’d they go?  stealthy quails…

there is no recipe here, my turkey-focused friends.  you are in control of your own bits (as they say).  make it your own.  but i will say this: with no cooking involved, it makes a spectacular option for the day after, say, cooking some kind of 12-course feast.  and as traditions go, you could do a lot worse.  so enjoy your jours du turkey!  i wish you all things moist and perfectly browned and well-behaved guests.  being foreign, i have no turkey traditions as such, though i shall be helping my matey prep for her feast the day before, the sous chef to her in-law invasion, as we no doubt raise a glass together.  and perhaps good food and good wine and good friendship is something that we can all be thankful for.  even foreigners such as myself.  gobble gobble!  cheers!