Tag Food

Worst. Drink. EVAR.

So this list of 20 “Harmful Drinks in America” has been popping up here and there since I first saw it last week. The list is based mainly on the sugar content of the drinks (with calorie count as the second most important factor), and they illustrate each bullet item with an equivalent (in sugar) snack food as well as suggest a “better” alternative for each. The drink they rate as #1 is this milkshake from Cold Stone Creamery, which tops out at over 2000 calories, 153 grams of sugar and 131 grams of fat. The calorie content alone is about what an adult man should consume in an entire day’s worth of meals, and the fat is TRIPLE the daily suggested amount. That much sugar is the equivalent of over 30 teaspoonsful of sugar, or about half a cup.

Unbelievable.

And yet somehow they missed this drink, which, while lacking in sugar, is certainly waaay too popular with people in Washington:

You Gonna Eat That?? SRSLY??

Domino’s Pasta Bread Bowls, The Fantasy:

dominos_pasta_bread_bowl

Domino’s Pasta Bread Bowls, The Reality:

real pasta bowl

Boy, howdy, that looks….um, tasty?

(suggested by This Is Why You’re Fat)

Make Your Own Damn Dinner Ingredients

Some DIY foodie stuff to share:

old-bay

Writing at the group blog “The Smart Set”, contributor Meg Favreau tells you how to make your own Old Bay seasoning at home. Or not. Because, as she says, you’ll probably pay ten times as much for all the ingredients as you would to just go out and buy a little container of the stuff. And trust me, unless you live somewhere like Baltimore or Louisiana and use it in every single recipe you make, one can of Old Bay can last you a looooooooooooong time. Plus, I gather from her post, the recipe makes something that tastes “like” Old Bay but was clearly identified as the fake by all her taste-testers. So it’s probably worth doing only if you’re one of those foodies who can’t bear the idea of buying pre-mixed seasonings. In which case, bite me.

Infused Oils and Preserves

Yes, all of us DID in fact at one point or another make our own infused vinegars about ten years ago, and if you didn’t make them you probably received them as Chrismukkawanzaa gifts from your insufferable foodie friends. In fact, those of you who were the lucky recipients may even still have them gracing your pantry shelves as decorative items that you do not dare throw away for fear of insulting those of us who made them. But don’t worry, since all we really did was pour some cheap supermarket vinegar into some fancy-shmancy bottles we got at Pier One or someplace similar, and then toss in a handful of herbs or some other crap we had lying around. Hey, it was a cheap way to look like you were giving someone a “nice” gift, and waaay better than those shitty homemade soaps your other friends gave you.

So, what’s all this then? “The Kitchn” contributor Kathryn Hill (who is a Mutual Friend of Torrez) posts today about how to make actual vinegar from scratch. And, no, she does not mean leaving an old half-empty bottle of wine sitting on the kitchen counter until it’s a year old, although that’s not very far from it. You do, in fact, need the wine to make vinegar, but you also need a starter called mycoderma aceti to get the action going. Mycoderma aceti is the sort of thing you buy in beermaking/winemaking stores, and when added to the wine it makes a “mother”. The mother helps eat up all the stuff in the wine that you do not want in your vinegar, and once you’ve got a vinegar mother started, you can keep it going indefinitely (like a sourdough starter or one of those infamous Amish Friendship Bread things) by adding leftover wine to it.

Over at squidoo.com, there’s a page which explains how to make vinegar out of honey, which sounds pretty good, too. Honey needs a little yeast and needs to be kept just a little bit warm (70-80 degrees Fahrenheit) to produce mycoderma aceti on its own. Setting a honey pot with a little yeast in it out in the sun was the traditional method. This article claims that in Ye Olden Dayes, honey vinegar was preferred for making sauces and dressings because of its natural sweetness.

Zog Want Meat

i-eat-dead-animals

Gear Patrol which is a manly website for manly men who like manly male stuff, is running a series of articles this month called “Be A Better Man In 30 Days”. Yesterday’s article was a piece called “Know How To Properly Order A Steak”, which is actually a pretty useful bit of information to have if you are a carnivore.

The article starts off with a quick lesson in the different cuts of beef, which isn’t really all that helpful in ordering a steak anywhere except in an honest-to-goodness steakhouse. Most typical restaurants really only give you a couple of cuts to choose from — some type of sirloin (most commonly New York Strip), ribeye, and filet mignon. A steakhouse will obviously have more variety, but knowing about the primal cuts of beef won’t help much there, either. At an average restaurant, I almost always order a ribeye steak because they’re usually more marbled than sirloin. On the few occasions I have been to a proper steakhouse, it’s a Porterhouse or nothing.

I agree with the writer that you should always order steak medium-rare in a restaurant, and I also always cook steak to medium-rare when I make it at home. You never know who is going to cook your steak in a restaurant, so don’t give them a chance to ruin your meal by overcooking the meat trying to get it medium. Medium doneness (officially defined as pink all the way through) is the most difficult level to get just right and you will invariably get a steak that is pink in the middle and gray on both ends. Medium-rare is much easier to get right because it gives the grillman leeway with the middle of the steak. Blue and rare are just not safe to order in restaurants, and anything beyond medium is equivalent to setting your money on fire.

I’m also with him on the baked potato as the right starch to go with. French fries are for children, not men. Mashed potato is not a manly side dish either, and potatoes au gratin is too good to be squandered as a side to a first-rate steak. My preference for a green veg with steak is broiled or grilled asparagus that has been marinated in lemon with garlic. I know a lot of people don’t like asparagus because of the odor it lends to one’s urine, but personally I think there’s something kinda manly about stinky pee.

Linkapalooza 03-25-09: Food

chiles

Years ago, I got a reputation at work for being a lover of hot and spicy food. It was somewhat falsely deserved, however. I do indeed enjoy a dish with a little kick to it once in a while, and I am not one to pass up a dish because it is spicy, but I’m not one of those people who feels compelled to slather everything I eat with hot sauce or to engage in competitive throat-burning by always trying to go “one hotter”. That way madness lies. Anyway, you might very well wonder how chile peppers came to grow in such a wide range of concentrations of capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot. This article in the latest Smithsonian Magazine goes with a University of Washington biologist to the wilds of Bolivia, which is the origin point for all the peppers we know today, to look for environmental/evolutionary explanations for capsaicin concentration and comes up with an answer that hadn’t been considered before: capsaicin is a fungicide, and peppers that grow in moister conditions develop more capsaicin to retard molds and other fungi.

The BBC reports that the champagne maker Perrier-Jouet recently held a special event to uncork one of the world’s oldest extant bottle of champagne. The champagne was bottled in 1825, and was one of three bottles remaining from that vintage. To the surprise and delight of the wine tasters on hand, it was still drinkable, if no longer all that bubbly. The remarks of the tasters in the BBC story are tactful and well-considered, to be sure, though I’m not too sure about the ones who professed that the ancient wine was better than a modern bottle. The guests also sampled champagnes from the 1840s and 1870s at the same event.

News From Home — Jonathan Bloom, who writes the Wasted Food blog, reports that he visited St. Joseph’s College in Standish, ME yesterday to observe the college’s effort to reduce food waste in their cafeteria by going trayless. The idea is that if students don’t have trays that they can pile up with lots of food, they will take less and thus waste less by not leaving food uneaten. The program has been in use since 2007, and it sounds like the on-campus students have come to accept it, if not openly embrace it. (Note: I taught as an adjunct at St. Joseph’s College about 15 years ago.) Americans in particular have a very long way to go in terms of recognizing how much food we waste, and a social engineering method like this is relatively painless and effective.

In a similar vein of learning to rethink our food habits, more and more people are beginning to take interest in CSA’s (“Community Supported Agriculture”). Not all of us have a green thumb like Michelle Obama, and many urban dwellers don’t have anyplace to grown their own veggies, so the idea of a CSA is that you pay a share to some folks who ARE working a vegetable garden, and in return they give you some of the produce they harvest. It’s a good system, but, as people who have been on the receiving end will tell you, sometimes you get too much of one thing, or not enough of something else, or you might end up with veggies you don’t normally eat. At Slate today, food write Catherine Price talks about learning how to deal with getting 30 pound of turnips in your CSA box or what to do with kale.

That’s just one of the several “locavorian dilemmas” one might have to learn to face. Another is food safety. Doug Powell, who writes the evocatively-named BarfBlog, points out that there is a tendency to associate locally-grown food with greater food safety, but that in reality locally-produced food products may even pose greater risks of contamination for the very reason we prize them: because they’re fresher and more likely not to contain preservatives, the chance of spoilage either from age or improper storage is greater. Locality is not a guarantee of safety.

While we’re talking about paying attention to what you put in your mouth, did you see this Boston Globe story a few weeks ago about how commercially-produced orange juice is made? It’s an interview with author Alissa Hamilton, who has just published a book called “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice”, which may do to the orange juice business what “Fast Food Nation” did to McDonald’s. It certainly does make commercial orange juice (yes, even the “pure premium” stuff) sound like just one more crud-laden, over-processed, junk item you can live without.

pepsi-natural

And that brings me to the last link for this post: trying to cash in on the success of Pepsi “Raw” in Europe, Pepsi is planning to roll out three varieties of Pepsi sweetened with good old fashioned cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. They’re going to call it “Pepsi Natural” here in the U.S.. It’s supposedly available right now in selected markets (Boston is not one of them, unfortunately) and is not intended to be a “limited-edition” product like some of the flavored varieties but instead a permanent addition to the product line. I suppose that means those of us who don’t live in the test markets will have to wait six months or so. It’s also worth noting that this product is NOT the same as the “Kosher-for-Passover” version of Pepsi, due to some of the other ingredients.

This is clearly the thin edge of the wedge in the coming backlash against HFCS. I’m sure you’ve seen the insulting “HFCS is good for you” commercials that have been running since last fall that suggest that just because you’re too stupid to remember why high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you, it must be perfectly OKAY. Cadbury-Schweppes, which owns Snapple, has also announced that they are replacing HFCS in their products with cane/beet sugar. But, as this activist website points out, it’s necessary to keep in mind that too much sugar is just as bad for you as too much HFCS, just in different ways.

For The Foodie Who Has Everything

Still hoping for that last-minute inspiration for a Christmas gift for your favorite foodie who already owns every single kitchen gadget in the world? (And you know who you are…)

Instructables.com comes to the rescue yet again with step-by-step instructions for building a homemade cheese press that also doubles as a cider press (via MAKEblog).

Depending on how handy your home chef is, you can simply print out the instructions and give them a pile of lumber to build it themselves, or you still have plenty of time between now and Christmas morning to put it together yourself. I have no idea how you’ll wrap it and get it under the tree, but if you’re handy enough to build a cheese press, you can probably figure that out, too.

Sure, your house will stink like curdled milk and/or rotting apples for the rest of your life, but on the plus side think of all the delicious cheese and cider you’ll have!

A Pinch Of This, A Dash Of That

Mint Sauce With Packets Of Dry Onion Soup Mix Crust
Serves 4
You will need:

* 80g mince
* 10ml red wine
* 90ml mint sauce
* 1 packets of dry onion soup mix

Instructions:

1. pre-heat the oven to 230 C
2. fry the mint sauce
3. put the packets of dry onion soup mix in the saucepan
4. whisk the packets of dry onion soup mix
5. sauté the red wine
6. microwave the mince
7. bake for 40 minutes and serve hot

No, I haven’t gone insane, I’m just getting all my new must-try recipes from this Random Recipe Generator. Who wouldn’t LOVE “Pizza-Style Porridge Oats” or “Ham With Ham Dressing” or “Coffee A La Vinegar”?

I note that the creator of the site is English, so to him these probably seem like perfectly reasonable recipes. :-p

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