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Archive for the ‘Food, Cooking and Having Company Over’ Category
Someone Ate This
Saturday, May 3rd, 2014Bias Confirmation!
Saturday, March 22nd, 2014I have a family history of heart disease. My doctor wants me to take a statin to help control my cholesterol. The last statin I was allergic too. I have no reason not to believe I’m soon going to find I’m allergic to this one too. Then along comes this article: Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link – NYTimes.com, and my biases are confirmed:
The smaller, more artery-clogging particles are increased not by saturated fat, but by sugary foods and an excess of carbohydrates, Dr. Chowdhury said. “It’s the high carbohydrate or sugary diet that should be the focus of dietary guidelines,” he said. “If anything is driving your low-density lipoproteins in a more adverse way, it’s carbohydrates.”
I have long thought that the low fat / high carb diet is what is making people in this country fat. I have no evidence to report to support my supposition, just 53 years of experience. No one was fat when I was young, but back then the busy bodies weren’t trying to get you to cut fat out of your diet.
About the time my mother started bringing home 2% milk, is when the waist bands started to expand.
America’s Angriest Store: Whole Foods
Sunday, March 2nd, 2014My trips to Whole Foods do not involve all the customers being like those described in the article linked below, but there are certainly a significant percentage of them. The more pieces of metal hanging off various parts of their face, the more likely they are going to be an angry Whole Foods shopper. From the article:
The problem with Whole Foods is their regular customers. They are, across the board, across the country, useless, ignorant, and miserable. They’re worse than miserable, they’re angry. They are quite literally the opposite of every Whole Foods employee I’ve ever encountered. Walk through any store any time of day—but especially 530pm on a weekday or Saturday afternoon during football season—and invariably you will encounter a sneering, disdainful horde of hipster Zombies and entitled 1%ers.
They stand in the middle of the aisles, blocking passage of any other cart, staring intently at the selection asking themselves that critical question: which one of these olive oils makes me seem coolest and most socially conscious, while also making the raw vegetable salad I’m preparing for the monthly condo board meeting seem most rustic and artisanal?
Read the whole thing. I was amused.
White Food
Sunday, January 19th, 2014Similarly, a century ago demanding whiteness was a way to fight corruption and adulteration in purchased food.
Today a fashionable diet item such as South American quinoa may look like ground-up bugs, but we trust that supermarkets couldn’t get away with selling us ground-up bugs. (They can’t, can they?) Back then, however, people didn’t put much faith in grocery stores and restaurants, especially when they were traveling—and often with good reason.
Now, though, even if we get food poisoning we have antibiotics to keep us alive. The introduction of penicillin around 1945 made American life less fraught—the chance of dropping dead from bad bacteria declined sharply.
Sailer does an excellent job in this article making a “Chicago Economics” style of argument: When we observe people doing something odd or seemingly counter to their best interests, there must be a good reason.
Sriracha hot sauce company in trouble
Thursday, November 28th, 2013
It won’t see much use today, maybe for breakfast. on the eggs, don’tcha know, but not much else.
The WKRP in Cincinnati Turkey Drop
Sunday, November 24th, 2013A repost:
From Hulu, here is the entire episode:
For those of you who remember the episode, here is one of many youtube cuts that boils the whole thing down to its essential core:
Now I’m going to go find the Chinese food episode from Bob Newhart.
Bob did a really good job of managing his property. His stuff is not available for free.
Cooking your Turkey
Sunday, November 24th, 2013This woman has the right idea:
“Just put the turkey in the fucking oven.”
Again, the hat tip goes to Gerard.
Really, as someone that has cooked the turkey for family gatherings for over 20 years, it won’t turn out perfect and, because it’s turkey, it will taste like cardboard. The drinks are the key to the whole thing. We are having a smoked turkey. To go with that we are going to have afternoon cocktails (during the Cowboy game) that will include cranberry margaritas. I’m also going to do a leg of lamb, so we’ll also have red wine and tasty beer with dinner. The key to a good Thanksgiving dinner is managing your guest’s alcohol consumption.
Did a little baking today…
Tuesday, October 1st, 2013The Deuce likes to have his breakfast in the car on the way to school. Today I made this sausage stuffed loaf for him:
I used the following recipe, from the King Arthur Flour site:
Dough
1 1/4 cups lukewarm water
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 1/2 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons instant yeast
Filling
1 3/4 cups fresh mushrooms, sliced and lightly sautéed
3/4 pound breakfast sausage, cooked and crumbled, fat removed; 1 scant cup
2 teaspoons fresh crushed garlic
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
Directions
- To make the dough: Mix and then knead all the dough ingredients together to make a smooth, slightly sticky dough. This will take about 7 minutes in a stand mixer; or use the dough setting on your bread machine, allowing the machine to complete its cycle and skipping to step #3 below.
- Transfer the dough to a lightly greased bowl or 8-cup measure, cover it, and allow it to rise for 60 to 90 minutes, until it’s just about doubled in bulk.
- While the dough is rising, stir together the filling ingredients.
- On a lightly floured or lightly greased work surface, roll the dough into a 9″ x 15″ rectangle.
- Sprinkle the filling atop the dough, leaving a 1″ border at the edges. Roll the dough up jelly-roll style, starting with a long edge. Pinch the seams well, and tuck the side edges under, pinching them to seal.
- Pick up the log of dough and transfer it, seam-side down, to a parchment-lined baking sheet. Shape it into a crescent or horseshoe shape.
- Make cuts (about 1/2″ deep) at 1″ intervals across the top of the loaf. Cover the crescent with greased plastic wrap and let it rise for 30 minutes. Towards the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 375°F.
- Bake the bread for 25 to 30 minutes, or until it’s golden brown. Allow it to cool for 10 minutes before serving warm.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings.
Since I didn’t have any breakfast sausage lying around, I just cubed/chunked up some kielbasa. The Deuce prefers kielbasa to the typical breakfast sausage anyway. I browned the sausage and drain off all of the fat. I also didn’t use any mushrooms. The Deuce hates mushrooms. My experience from making this tells me you could use just about any stuffing you’d like. If you’re going to use eggs, make certain that you cook them dry.
Here is the way it looks sliced:
Looks good enough to eat, huh?
Americans are fat
Monday, June 3rd, 2013We all know that. We hear it all the time. What many of you don’t know is that we are not alone. When I was in Mauritius, a surprising number of the Euro tourists were fat. Going into one of those fancy resorts could be almost as bad as going to Walmart.
Check out this article by an Aussie doctor, it begins:
In the late 1980s I spent a year in the US as an exchange student. The exchange organisation allocated me a local support person named Emily. Emily was white and loud and the fattest person I had ever seen outside a caravan park. She looked different from the rare very fat people I’d seen in Australia. She smelt good and her climate-controlled house meant she did not sweat. She was very well dressed. Her husband was some kind of professional; I didn’t know they even made suits that big.
It just gets better from there. Oh, and for those of you that aren’t up on how the Antipodeans use the English language, a caravan park is a trailer park.
The author gets close to proposing a couple of very intrusive leftist type solutions, but admits that she probably wouldn’t want to live in a society that imposed the kinds of controls on lifestyles that would be necessary to force weight reductions on people.
There are several problems that I don’t think we can ever hope to address. With our socialized medical system, there will always be calls to control expenditures, or to deny treatment, when the patient is participating in an activity that is not popular with the elites that control the system. Being overweight is one of those things that the elites don’t like. It ruins the view, I guess. They won’t give up on the socialized medical programs because that will reduce their power, so we will continue to muddle along.
Another problems is that it clearly costs a lot less to be fat today than it did 100 or 150 years ago. I’m not just talking about the cost of food, although food is cheap these days, I talking about the actual cost of being fat. You don’t have to worry about walking far, or whether or not you are too heavy for your horse. You don’t, most of us anyway, have to be in good enough shape to handle the manual nature of our work. The list goes on and on.
I also wonder what our food supply would look like without the government’s interference. We have price supports for corn. I’m no expert, but we probably have them for other crops too, such as wheat and soybeans. We certainly have federal and state interference in the dairy market. Beef, chicken and pork probably have some government benefits involved too. I believe government programs lead to large entities being formed to mine those programs. The crop subsidies are the reason we have big corporate farms. The water subsidies are the reason we have big corporate farms in weird locations. We would have a greater variety of food stuffs without crop subsidies. When there is no financial advantage of one crop over the other (except for market acceptance) we should see greater variety in the absence of subsidies.
On problem the author addresses, and I believe would remain in a free market, is just how hard the food companies work to sell us food we don’t need. That wouldn’t go a way in a free market. Companies can likely make more by selling me a tasty treat in a colorful package than by just delivering a crown of broccoli to the market. Temptation would not go away in a free market.
But I do think in a free market for food we would have fewer fat people.
Oh and here’s the picture that illustrated the article:
Do go read the whole thing. It is time well spent.
Tuna Pizza
Saturday, March 2nd, 2013From The Mid-Century Menu, I found this delightful recipe: Tuna Pizza.
The source of the recipe:
You just need to go read the whole post. The picture is from a 1958 magazine ad. As you can see from the recipe, it looks just awful. According to Ruth, who runs The Mid-Century Menu it is awful. From the photos of her husband attempting to eat the pizza, you can just see and smell the awful.
HT: Gerard