Octopodial Chrome

Mark Bittman (one of my favourite cooking authors; his How to Cook Everything is superb) recently had a really useful article on simple, customisable soups. Starting from four basic recipes (a creamy spinach soup, a simple broth with toast, an earthy bean soup, and a hearty minestrone) he proceeds to offer two additional variations on each, for a total of twelve different soups. Over the past few weeks I’ve been making the ones that sound good (no tomato soup, natch) for myself & my kid brother.

The curried cauliflower and squash-and-ginger soups are top-notch, as good as anything one might find in a restaurant. I made the spinach soup with lettuce; it was delicious, almost minty, the night I made it and loathsome the next day. I’ve also made a broccoli and ginger soup, which was tasty. I need to experiment more with blended soups: I really, really like them.

His broth recipe is thick and good; I’m going to have to use a variant of it in my future bone stocks. The egg drop soup was tasty, but I agitated the soup too much and the egg drops became more of an egg foam. The rice-and-pea soup was good but perhaps a bit too thick. I might try it again with less rice, or a different kind of rice.

The bean and black bean soups are good. I’m going to do more cooking with dried beans: they’re cheaper than canned, and have less sodium. The problem with the chickpea soup is that even soaked overnight, dried chickpeas take forever to cook. I’ll have to play with it some more.

I haven’t tried the minestrone or mushroom soups yet. I may make the former tonight. As for the latter, neither of us is a great fan of mushrooms, but perhaps with non-button varieties it could be palatable.

One nice thing about these recipes is that, having made them all, one should never again be at a loss for something to throw together at the last minute for dinner.

The Chicago Tribute has a great article about a school where the lunches are good-tasting and good for the students. The students are mostly (93%) low-income, so the chef must rely on the federal $2.73/student subsidy to cover costs. He manages to do so and actually save money, by hiring skilled people to cook fresh ingredients from scratch rather than hiring unskilled workers to reheat prepackaged, processed foods.

The Chicago public school system awards a single food-service contract to cover all of its schools, leaving students with the dubious pleasure of a fish taco composed of a tortilla and a few fishsticks; Chef Boundas works at a private school, which frees him to prepare meals such as white [fish] fillets…in a crunchy panko-cornmeal crust or baked in olive oil, lemon and herbs, with collard-flecked teriyaki brown rice, olive oil roasted potatoes, steamed broccoli and freshly squeezed lemonade.

It occurs to me that this model of doing things from scratch with skilled people rather than hiring the unskilled to roll out products purchased from vendors might be applicable in more than school kitchens. Perhaps in Information Technology or home-building…

Researchers at the Universaity of California have determined that harmful bacteria are less of a problem with wooden cutting boards than with the plastic variety. Turns out that brand-new wooden & plastic boards are similar, but that knife cuts in plastic harbour bacteria whilst similar cuts in wood don’t.

One more piece of evidence dmeonstrating that nature can be better than engineering.

The New York Times has discovered kombucha (for those who’ve not heard of it, it’s basically fermented tea). Inspired by Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation, I started making it years ago. I have all these tins of excellent but old and dried-out tea—it turns out that it can be put to great use as the base for kombucha.

It’s amusing that I led the way on this for the Times…

I’ve added a pastry recipe to my bachelor recipes. It’s pretty good—I use it whenever I’m cooking for folks who don’t like lard.

I just discovered a source chocolate guns, ammunition and grenades. Christmas gifts for all my friends…

I added my recipe for sweet cornbread to my bachelor recipes.

Josh Kurz reports on why some people hate coriander so much. He calls it cilantro, which is of course not the proper English name for it, but it’s otherwise a good article.

Yup, everyone’s busily rediscovering the joy of lard. Unlike synthetic shortening, it has no trans-fats. Its saturated fats do not impact blood cholesterol. It’s superior to butter and olive oil for cooking and pastry making.

Just watch out for the supermarket lard: most of them are partially or wholly hydrogenated, which means that the lard does have trans-fats. Dumb dumb dumb.

Heinz has developed a ketchup cake in order to celebrate its Canadian centennial. Apparently it tastes a lot like carrot cake. I kinda want to try it…it’s just too crazy not to!

I added banana pancakes to my list of bachelor recipes. Tasty stuff!

CNN has discovered probiotics (that is, supplements of beneficial microbes). It seems to me that rather than taking supplements of saccharomyces cerebisiæ boulardii, one could just drink beer brewed with it; rather than taking supplements of lactobacillus acidophilus one could just eat sauerkraut. Or pickles. Or sauerkraut and pickles. With sausages (dry sausages are alive—how many people know that?). And a beer.

Or you could, you know, pop pills. ’Cause that’s healthy.

Joel Stein argues that the majority of nut allergies are an affliction of the idle rich. Roughly 4% of the population has a real food allergy; roughly 25% of parents believe their children have food allergies. Notably, according to a social scientist, We don’t see this problem much in African American or poor communities. So there’s something going on here. We don’t see them in Ecuador and Guatemala.

I suspected as much.

I just found a review if Fat, a wonderful new cookbook in four sections: butter, lard, poultry fat and suet/tallow. It sounds tasty.

Hat-tip to jackdied.

An elementary school in Georgia has banned sugar from its premises for a decade. Not only that, but every morning has a full hours of vigourous exercise and the students are taught proper nutrition.

Within six months of the sugar ban, students misbehaved 23 percent less than before and reading scores improved 15%.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

I made coffee ice cream this past weekend. It’s a great recipe, but is a lot of work. If I make it again (and I probably will) I’ll make more than a quart. Man, it was good stuff.

Michæl Pollan has some nontraditional advice on how to be healthy: eat food; not too much; mostly plants.

The full article is actually a wonderful examination of how nutritionism has damaged the American diet. Instead of eating healthy food, we flock to unhealthy food with a few extra nutrients added. Believe it or not, removing fat or adding oat bran or fibre does not a healthy product make.

Our own public servants are of no use, for they are to beholden to the producers. Pollan details how back in 1977 the federal government was to have released a recommendation to reduce consumption of meat; due to pressure from the cattle industry, the recommendation was instead choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake, which is not at all the same thing. It’s much like advising choose a method of driving which maximises leg and arm motion instead of just saying exercise more.

Fortunately, Pollan also offers some good advice: eat food; not too much; mostly plants. Eat real food, not manufactured food products. Processed food-like substances trigger our taste sensors, but there’s no there there: they don’t actually contain the substances we need to survive. Avoid them, and you’ll be better off. Don’t eat too much food; gluttony is a sin for a reason (actually, all sins are sins for a reason, but that’s another blog entry). Eat mostly plants: they are chock-full of nutritious goodness. Meat’s good stuff too; you should have meat in your diet. It’s tasty, and it’s a good way of getting certain proteins in a hassle-free manner. Livestock can be an excellent way of eking out subsistence from barren grassland; some animals, pigs in particular, are excellent mechanisms for turning garbage into food. But too much meat is most definitely not what the doctor ordered. If you want my advice, do as the Church teaches and abstain from meat Wednesdays, Fridays, during Lent and Advent (there are several other fasts, but those are the big ones): you’ll cut your meat consumption down considerably, but you’ll still get what you want and what you need. Plus, self-discipline is a virtue.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The stupid word of the week is flexitarian. It means a vegetarian who eats meat. In other words, someone who eats vegetables and meat. In other words, a normal person. It’s possibly the stupidest word I’ve ever heard.

It’s actually not a stupid concept, just a stupid word. The idea is that there’s no need to eat meat at every meal, or even every day. Which is cool. I don’t eat meat on roughly half of the days in the year—this is a Good Thing IMHO. But it’s a dumb word.

Eating food that’s in season is definitely cheaper than eating whatever you like (it’s cheaper to ship raspberries from the next state over than from Chile). Some people think that it may even be better for you. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that it’s pleasant to live life according to the cycle of the year and not according to my own whims. There’s an element of anticipation when a food is about to come into season, a rush to pick, enjoy and preserve it once it’s ready, and a spot of sadness when its course has run. I’d even go so far as to argue that there’s a moral dimension to it: God designed the plants in our world to be eaten and enjoyed in a particular order, and we adhere most closely to His plan when we follow that order. Mind, it’s not exactly sinful to eat strawberries in December, but it’s better to eat them in May.

The Food Network has produced a partial lists of fruits & vegetables by season. It’s a good start to living life the way we were meant to.

A pair of Boston-area men are campaigning to replace paper cups with mugs at coffee shops. It makes sense if you’re a frequent coffee drinker: bring a mug every day instead of throwing away a paper cup daily.

The New York Times has an article about chefs coming to terms with the ethics of meat-eating. My own perspective is that it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that an animal is a living, breathing creature which should be treated well; it’s also important not to lose sight of the fact that it is, when all is said and done, an animal and not a man. Animals should be treated ethically; they should be raised well and slaughtered in an appropriate manner.

I think that it’s very valuable to kill my own food from time to time in order to remind myself of what meat-eating means. There’s nothing wrong with eating flesh (after all, our Lord did it), but it should be done appropriately.

From CNN comes this list if bad foods which are actually good: red meat; ice cream; eggs; pizza and Canadian bacon. Taken in moderation, all actually help one lose weight.

A British physician claims that mediæval men had better diets than their modern descendants. This isn’t exactly surprising, to tell the truth, but it is nice to have confirmed. If you’re interested in details of mediæval cooking, I can recommend the following books:

Pleyn Delit

Pleyn Delit is the first mediæval cookbook I bought, and it’s an excellent one. All recipes are presented in two versions: the exact original (in Middle English, vulgar Latin, Old French or whatever) and a modern redaction. Having the original there enables one to do one’s own redaction if the modern one is unsatisfactory, or if one suspects it makes some unwarranted assumptions.

Take a Thousand Eggs or More

Another very good one in two volumes. The first volume consists of original recipes and redactions, the second of original recipes only, the assumption being that the reader will have gained enough skill with Volume I to do his own work with Volume II; this is a great scheme and one which I heartily approve of. This makes the perfect gift for the mediæval cooking enthusiast on your list.

The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy

My mother gave me The Mediæval Kitchen (for Christmas, I believe) and before I opened it I was afraid that it’d be something execrable like Fabulous Feasts (which has set back living history a generation with its recipes full of New World ingredients); I was pleased to discover instead that my mother had done her research and found a book whose authors had done the same. It’s really good, with lots of recipes and historical notes. I’ve it sitting on my coffee table right now.

Hat-tip to my brother Tom.

It sounds disgusting, but it could work: bacon chocolate chip cookies. Sounds like one of Hervé This’s ideas.