Octopodial Chrome

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.

Blog Sober has a record of making homemade bacon. I really, really, really want to do this. Bacon may not be good for one, but it tastes oh so good.

I’m pretty good at doing things myself: I brew beer, sew historical clothing, grind wheat into flour, bake bread from the same flour, make various pickles (including sauerkraut), cook my own food, make my own soap; paint my cabinets; replace my plumbing and so forth. I’d never made jam, for some reason thinking that it’s some difficult task. Inspired by a cookbook I’ve been reading, I decided to make a batch.

Egad, it’s easy. As in, I don’t know why I haven’t been making it all my life. I don’t know why my mother ever bought jam. I don’t know why anyone would buy jam.

Here’s how to do it. First get six cups’ worth of washed, peeled, cored, roughly chopped &c. fruit, berries or what-have-you, three cups of sugar and the juice of a lime or lemon. Mix these together in a pot over medium-high heat until the fruit starts to give up its water and the sugar is completely dissolved. Turn the heat down to medium-low and let cook for at least half an hour. Every fifteen minutes thereafter, pour a bit of the cooking liquid onto an ice-cold plate and refrigerate for two minutes: once it’s gelled, the jam is ready. If it hasn’t gelled at the half-hour point, add in another cup of sugar and cook down for at least another 15 minutes, maybe longer. Seal up in self-sealing jars, invert for at least fifteen minutes, then turn upright, make sure the seals are tight and stow. As long as the jar dimples are sucked in, they’re sealed.

Yes, it’s really that easy. It’s insanely easy. The hardest part is peeling the fruit (which can be helped along by parboiling for a minute, then rinsing in cold water). There’s no reason one shouldn’t have one’s own fresh & pure preserves. My first batch was peach and the second was apricot-pear (I had to add some pear because I didn’t buy enough apricots). They are both stunning.

I looked up the difference between jam, jelly & preserves. It turns out that a jelly is made with fruit juice and sugar; a jam is made with crushed or pulped fruit and sugar; preserves are made with chunks of fruit and sugar syrup. Now you know—and as G.I. Joe taught as, knowing is half the battle.

The New York Times offers 101 10-minute recipes. Some decent stuff here.

The New York Times has an article on getting a basic kitchen setup. The full article has information on what’s important, what trade-offs to make, when it’s worth buying extra and when it’s not; here’s the basic list of items:

• 7 qt. saucepan
• 3 qt. saucepan
• 1 qt saucepan
• pot cover (for above)
• 10 in. nonstick frying pan
• 14 in. steep-sided skillet with handles
• 13x18 in. sheet pan
• loaf pan, nonstick
• roasting pan
• 1½ qt. mixing bowl
• 3 qt. mixing bowl
• 5 qt. mixing bowl
• measuring cup
• 6 in. strainer
• vegetable peeler
• skimmer
• 14 in. colander
• 2 wooden spoons
• slotted spoon
• 13 in. solid spoon
• bread knife
• 8 in. chef’s knife
• paring knife
• heat-resistant spatula
• 9 in. tongs
• 12 in. whisk
• 6 oz. ladle
• 12x18 in. cutting board
• instant-read thermometer
• can opener
• mandoline
• grater
• salad spinner
• food processor
• coffee/spice grinder
• whetstone
• measuring spoons

I have most of this stuff, and most of it’s useful. I think I have a skimmer somewhere, but I’ve never used it—frankly, a slotted spoon works just as well IMHO. I have no idea why one would need a thermometer for cooking; somehow mankind managed to survive for millennia without thermometers. I do have a floating thermometer for brewing, and a clip-on for cheesemaking, and a meat thermometer which I don’t think I’ve ever used. I think I have a whisk, but I don’t really have much call for it. I don’t see the point of a mandoline: I can cut with a knife, after all.

I’m thinking that maybe a food processor would be handy, but again: somehow I’ve lasted this long without one, and our race has survived even longer without them. Cooking for one is pretty quick as it is, after all.

One thing he doesn’t mention that I have is a hand mixer. Honestly, though, it’s not worth much: mashed potatoes can be made by hand, without electricity. The mixer has bread kneading attachments, but I always knead by hand anyway—so what’s the point?

Times restaurant reviewer Giles Coren lived and ate like an Edwardian gentleman for a week, dining on oysters, roasts, champagne, tongue, bacon, eggs and all the rest. The diet is supposed to be horrible for one, but man does it sound tasty.

Nowadays most folks make their bread with storebought yeast; the older method was to keep a starter going (perhaps a lump of bread from a previous batch, perhaps flour colonised by wild yeasts and bacteria), and use it to propagate the leaven from loaf to loaf. I’ve been brewing for a dozen years, so I’m pretty comfortable with fermentation and keeping yeast and bacteria happy (all beer’s made with yeast—a type of fungus—and certain sour beers are also made with bacteria); I’ve even performed a wild fermentation using lactobacilli found on the outside of barley grains and recently made sauerkraut, so even spontaneous fermentation is nothing new to me. I’ve enjoyed breadmaking for the past year or so, so it makes sense to take my bread to the next level and quit using instant yeast.

Making a starter is pretty simple: put equal amounts of flour & water in a large jar (some references say to start with 1 cup each; others 2, but it works either way), then wait. There are wild yeasts in the air we breathe and on the flour we use, so the starter will start to bubble after a few days as the yeast get going. It’s then ready to use, or can be fed a tablespoon of flour a day in order to increase in size.

To use the starter, form a sponge of one cup each starter, water and flour, then let sit somewhere warm for 8–24 hours. Once the sponge is good & bubbly, stir in 3–4 cups of flour until it’s the proper dough consistency, then knead and rise as for any bread.

What I’m wondering is how sour my starter will become. The local flora are a strong influence on the taste of the starter (hence lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, the source of the famous San Francisco sourdough tang). My condo’s flora are composed of an absolutely huge number of yeasts from my brewing (and yes, brewer’s yeast and baker’s yeast are the same stuff), along with some lactobacilli from my cheesemaking and some acetobacter from my vinegarmaking. Right now the starter is really sweet-smelling, with a slight hint of alcohol (that’s from the yeast); will it sour, or is my air so choked with yeast that nothing else has much of a chance? Regardless, it’s all quite exciting.

For more on starter making, S. John Ross’s sourdough page is a useful reference.

I recently made my first batches of sauerkraut. It’s a traditional process: one slices cabbage, then massages it up with salt (2 teaspoons per pound). The cabbage slowly wilts and oozes water, which mixes with the salt to form a brine. If it doesn’t extrude enough juice, mix a brine from 1 tsp. salt per cup of water and add. Let the cabbage sit covered for 24 hours, stirring frequently, then put into Mason jars and let ferment. There are three bacteria found on the skins of cabbage which get to work and turn it into sauerkraut.

The first bacterium is one or another coliform, perhaps Klebsiella pneumoniæ, Klensiella oxytoca or Enterobacter cloacæ (mmm, that last one sounds tasty—not!). The coliform produces acid, making the brine more hospitable to leuconostoc, which produces yet more acid along with carbon dioxide. Finally, the lueconostoc is followed by a lactobacillus or perhaps a pediococcus, which finishes the fermentation, leaving the cabbage preserved in a tasty sour brine.

I got my recipe from Jack Schmidling’s recipe, which uses Mason jars instead of a crock. My one concern—I’m writing to a health safety office—is that the sealed lids might encourage botulism, which prospers in anærobic environments, and that his procedure works because he pasteurises the finished sauerkraut. I want to want to eat mine live, but I want even more to live, so I won’t be eating any unless I get a okay.

A biochemical overview of the process is found at the sauerkraut page of a University of Wisconsin professor.

The basic idea behind community-supported agriculture is that folks pay a farmer at the beginning of the season, and he delivers them food on a weekly basis. The consumer benefits because the food is in-season and typically organic, pesticide-free or something similar; the farmer benefits because some he’s able to off-load some of his risk. I’ve know about CSA for some time now (I’m pretty certain that my folks used Quail Cove Farms when I was a teenager in Virginia Beach), but hadn’t ever gotten around to signing up for it.

Well, last night I was inspired. I went online and used a number of CSA search engines (LocalHarvest ended up working best for me) and found several farms in my area. Cresset Community Farm have an endearingly bad site and a nice selection of produce, but they’re sold out for the winter and the closest pick-up location is a bit of a haul. Monroe Organic Farms have a nice site and a good selection with decent pick-up location, and I was tempted to go with them, but they’re a tad pricey. I ended up settling for CoastalFields (strange name for farms located thousands of miles from the nearest coast, it’s actually a portmanteau formed from the names of the owners), whose site is beyond atrocious, but who have free delivery, a great selection (they’ll even plant stuff on request!) and good prices. They’ve not been in business long, which is a bit of a risk once they’ve cashed my cheque, but I’m not too concerned.

For $300 I’m getting ¼ bushel of fresh produce weekly from next week until October. That’s over 7 bushels (65 fl. gal.) of vegetables, which works out to around $4.75/gal.—not too shabby. And of course I get the advantage of eating healthy food in season, and can always jar/ferment/salt/pickle any leftovers. I can’t wait to get started!

Of course, we’ll see how I feel at the end of the season…

Noka chocolates are the most expensive in the world ($309–2,080 per pound). But are they worth it? The Dallas Food blog examines what exactly goes into Noka chocolates, and discovers that they’re really nothing particularly special; you can find similar and better chocolates for less than a tenth of the price!

The article’s also fascinating for the details of the chocolate trade. I’d never known that there was so much to know, and that it was so complex a subject. This might be an excellent new hobby…

From the Rocky Mountain News comes this recipe for snow cream:

• 1 gal. snow
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 Tbsp. vanilla extract
• 2 cups milk

Stir sugar & vanilla into snow, add milk to thicken.

I just made a quart of it. Wow! Great stuff. Next time I’d blend the milk & sugar before adding; otherwise it’s perfect.

You want clean snow; for normal snowfalls just put a bowl outside. In my case I scooped some snow out of a clean drift.

I recently made my first batch of kefir, a Caucasion fermented milk drink. It’s pretty cool: you add a packet of bacteria and fungi to a jug of milk, then let it sit at room temperature for a few days. The microbes multiply to sour & thicken the milk. It’s pretty tasty, and very healthy. And you just gotta love anything which involves letting milk sit on a counter for a few days…

Eugene Ciurana has written a very cool guide to eating sushi. I need to run this by the Japanese I know, to make sure he’s got it correct—but if so, then I’ve some great new things to try out next time I eat the wonderful delicacy.

At last, a simple listing of negative calorie (or negative BTU, for those of us still hewing to a sane standard) foods is available at http://life.currenttoday.com/index.php/2006/03/12/negative-calories/. Interestingly, one could make a good Lenten diet from the listed foods.

A recent study suggests that fruits and vegetables aren’t as vitamin-rich as they once were. Of course, the natural-foods folks have been going on about this for quite some time now…

The Guardian reports on the last decade’s sushi boom. It’s strange to think that my first sushi was in 1994, right when it was becoming a big deal—I never believed that I was that avant garde, but apparently I must have been.

Mmm…sushi…