Not about food: yet another blog

fyi:

http://nowedding.wordpress.com/

I heart Valentine’s Day

I do, I’ll admit it.

Regardless of my relationship status, I can’t help but love a holiday that’s all about candy and pink sparkly stuff. My secret is out.

This year though, I’m going to cook us a nice dinner that will be low on pink sparkles. I’ve been tossing it around in my head for awhile, but have finally settled on a menu this morning. Instead of “last-minute” can we call me spontaneous?

Sumac skirt steak with pomegranate reduction: I actualy have pomegranate molasses that I’ve been dying to try. I also have zataar that I hope will fill in for sumac if I can’t find sumac anywhere.

Pistachio couscous: I really like dried fruit in my couscous, but it seemed like it would be too much with the pomegranate sauce so I was glad to find this recipe.

Spinach with tahini or maybe something more unusual like artichokes or asparagus if there is something from not too far away (is it spring in California yet?)

Finally, for dessert, pears in honey and pine nut caramel with artisanal cheese sounds perfect. And maybe a little piece of dark chocolate too.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Seriously. Do something fun and eat something with pink frosting. You can pretend you’re being ironic if you want.

Make your own: cheese!

I hedged a little in my last post, but it turns out paneer really *is* easy to make!

I brought one quart of whole milk to a boil

Removed it from heat and added about 3T of lemon juice (from one smallish lemon)

Poured the mixture through a piece of cheesecloth

Let it drain (and squeezed and twisted it some to get more whey out)

Patted it into a rectangle and put some weight on top

And now I have a (small) brick of cheese (and almost a quart of whey…wonder what I’ll do with that….)

Good thing it’s not this easy to make Camembert.

Menu & Grocery List for 2/9-2/15

We’re going to try something a little different in our house–a friend and neighbor has asked if he can chip in money towards groceries and eat dinners with us. I don’t have any problem with this since I’m cooking anyway, so we’ll try to figure out a fair amount. We’ve been discussing $25/ week, which might be a bit high. He does have a pretty big appetite though….

This week is still mostly veggie, since our local meat options are both scarce and spendy. I am going to buy a whole chicken though, unless it’s just too outrageous. Plan B will either mean chicken thighs, or possibly no chicken with the pinto beans, and split pea soup instead of chicken.

Multi-grain pasta with Sicilian salsa verde, cabbage, and haricot verts: this recipe has mixed reviews so far, but it sounds tasty to me.

Palak Paneer with Indian Potatoes: even though this recipe calls for ricotta (huh?) I think I’m going to try making my own paneer (since I’m unlikely to find it to buy here and it’s supposed to be fairly easy….)

Red Lentil and Cauliflower Curry: a repeat (gasp!) Neighbor Joel requested “something with curry and coconut milk” and I know this recipe is good. It doesn’t call for coconut milk, but really, what isn’t improved with a can of coconut milk? We’ll eat this with rice.

Baked polenta with stewed chicken & pinto beans: I made the beans when we were home last weekend waiting out the weather. We’ll top this with some crumbled cotija cheese, cilantro, and some sliced radishes and jalapenos.

Chicken soup: one of those no-recipe things to use up some odds & ends. One of those odds & ends is some sage, so maybe something like this?

This is one of those expensive weeks where we’re suddenly out of a lot of staples too, like salt. Who runs out of salt?

Grocery List

whole grain spaghetti
red lentils

peanut butter

ground cumin
cumin seeds
Madras curry powder

14 oz. can tomatoes
coconut milk

anchovies
whole chicken (thighs?)
chicken broth

cotija cheese
sour cream
milk
milk for paneer
butter

3 lbs. spinach
italian parsley
savoy cabbage
cauliflower
frozen green beans
radishes
carrots
garlic
ginger
lemons (2-3)
jalapenos (2)

olive oil
salt

update (forgot the pantry items!): potatoes, celery, onions, cilantro, any spices not listed

Food for thought: Totally gross

I could try to come up with a more eloquent title for this post, but this story really is totally gross. Veg(etari)an friends, you might as well stop right here, unless you’re willing to subject yourself to a story that includes “aerosolization of brain tissue.”

This story from the New York Times about a strange disease plaguing some people who worked in pork processing plants reads like a story from Eric Schlosser, though it’s not. The description of the way the brains were removed from the pigs’ skulls made me gag. I’m impressed that the company moved fairly quickly to halt the procedure that seemed correlated with the strange illness the workers developed, but it seems like yet another reason to avoid factory-farmed meat. Even though there’s no evidence that actually eating the pork has caused any problems, the toll on these workers is problem enough.

Food for thought: Pollan’s In Defense of Food

If you consume any media at all, I’m sure you heard Michael Pollan discussing his new book In Defense of Food last month. His catchy “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” mantra was picked up not only by the New York Times, where he originally published the article that spawned the book, but also Slate, NPR (more than once) and pretty much everyone else.

I was excited to get my hands on the book, and read it in less than 24 hours. First in line for a library copy, four weeks later it’s overdue (bad librarian!) and I’m still trying to figure out what it was about the book that left me flat. I can’t imagine arguing with his “eat food…” premise, but I’m not so sure about the way Pollan gets there.

Pollan spends much of In Defense of Food decrying “nutritionism,” a term he found in the 2002 article “Sorry Marge (.pdf)” that criticizes of the “use of and reliance on nutritional categories, and this whole framework of analysis, to guide us in our everyday quest to eat well.” Instead of science, Pollan writes, he relies “mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense” to tell us “how to eat.” This philosophy he contrasts to “letting scientists decide the menu,” “a mistake,” he tells us, because “they simply do not know enough.” It seems that here he either misunderstands or misrepresents scientific research. Science is in the business of describing our best understanding of the world up to this point. It changes, and rightly so. Each individual study adds a tiny building block of knowledge to all the others that came before it, and no single finding alone means as much as the synthesis of the findings together. The food industry, on the other hand, and is more than willing to cherry-pick the science that will help it sell food, and government agencies seem happy to turn a blind eye to the behavior. This is a relationship Pollan does not fail to discuss, yet he seems to ultimately hold science to blame. The distortion of science is not a good reason to reject science itself.

An assignment I always like to see coming through the library is one where students are asked to find an article in a popular source like Time or Newsweek that reports on a recent scientific study. Then, they have to find a copy of the actual scholarly article, the primary source, and compare the conclusions drawn in the two articles. Typically they find that the scientists are fairly circumspect, qualifying their conclusions and noting the limitations of their studies, while the reporting on the studies tends to simplify (and therefore distort, in many cases) the findings. These students are learning to read critically, and they’re learning how we synthesize data into knowledge, skills that are in short supply. The trouble with nutritionism is not bad science, it’s an inappropriate use of science, egged on by marketing, supported by government agencies like the USDA, and made possible by low scientific literacy.

The end of In Defense of Food covers Pollan’s recommendations for how to eat. These are suggestions like “don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does” or “cook, and if you can, plant a garden.” These are the kinds of suggestions that can’t possibly hurt anyone who chooses to follow them, whether they do it because they don’t trust science or because they make sense given what we know about diet and the human body up to this point. Trouble is, the food industry is just as happy to use Pollan’s advice to promote their products as they are to use science. The Salt Institute picked right up on the “don’t trust all that science-y stuff, just eat what you like” message when “Unhappy Meals” was published last January. Caveat lector.