Monday, November 29, 2010

Hands UP for the English Language!




I invented a new word! Ready? "nontrition"

I've been trying to get it into Urban Dictionary, because hey if it's on the internet it must be true. ha. So far it hasn't taken yet. Edit: it's officially up, check it out. But if it did, it would say this under "nontrition":

A quality of a food lacking nutrition. Most commonly found in foods packaged in shiny plastic or paper bags that fly out of drive-thru windows.

I.e. That microwave dinner is filled with nontrition. OR Better check the nontrition facts on that, I'm not sure that vend-a-snack has real food ingredients in it.

Also, remember when I shared a lecture with you from a very professional food authority, Michael Pollan? Well, I want to go the other way and share this little 5 minute video from a much less educated person. He may be reading from a prompter, but hey! whatever gets at people emotions. I love his point about paying the farmer or paying the hospital. So true!

Check out this ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/birke_baehr_what_s_wrong_with_our_food_system.html




I put some pictures of cows in this post because people like to look at pictures. So here's a friendly reminder of where your food comes from. Although, probably not because these are pictures I took of Fairmount Park cows. You get the idea.

More recipe posts coming soon...

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

You're So Vain, MSG



In this post I'm NOT going to talk about how much I hate faux- meat dishes. I'm not even going to mention the fact that I exchanged my stomach fluids for new ones after a Chinese lunch last Tuesday and now can't eat more than 1/4 of my normal caloric intake. You know, it's so stereotypical to blame MSG. My bean curd disguised as curry chicken was probably just left out in an alleyway for too long. It happens.


The problem with MSG and other such additives is that if you do enough research, you'll find equal supporting evidence for either side of the argument. The skeptics are very detailed in their rants (complete with a million case studies), and the supporters are very non-committal in their official 'safety' reports of investor sponsorship.



In my opinion, the story of MSG is like that of so many other additives, really. It's a compound isolated from a plant or whatever that's normally found whole in nature. And something about that refining and adding process just isn't good for you. Identifying something we want from nature, isolating and extracting that thing, refining it into something mass produceable and 'usable', and then using it mindlessly... sounds like oil. Ah! Tangent! Tangent!



So yeah, that's NOT what this post is about. This post is about spicy tuna and shrimp tempura sushi. I know, fighting a weak stomach with raw fish. Good thing the seafood stand at Reading Terminal Market is legit. I lived.


Sunday, November 14, 2010

Small Tomatoes Needs a Camera



Well, I've made a handful of exciting food things between last week and this week. But you know what? My phone, fondly called "Droid" just doesn't take internet-worthy photos. I could rant about pumpkin and cranberry pancakes topped with walnut crumbles and a side of cinnamon apples washed down with hard apple cider all I want, but it just doesn't look appetizing when it looks like this:


I guess it doesn't help that it's half eaten.

The same thing goes for the mushroom risotto, and the spaghetti carbonara. Both were supremely creamy and satisfying... but yeah, the lighting was bad.




The picture for my packed lunch came out all right. You're looking at a variation on a work in progress.

On my lunch menu: Spent grains flat bread with tender red-tip leaf lettuce, a shmear of apple butter, shards of a sharp cumin dusted cheese, and hard boiled egg. I've made it better toasted and with a poached egg, but runny yolks don't pack well. I can just see it now, egg yolk all over the inside of my bag... that's something that would happen to me.

I've been experimenting with spent grains bread (made from the mash leftover in the beer brewing process). This particular loaf was made with grains from Philly brewery which I won't mention yet, but unfortunately I fell asleep during the last phase of the rising sequence. Hence, it's a flat bread!

So here's a promise to put more effort into making my Droid work for me. Maybe I should dig out my old polaroid camera and go in the other direction. Who needs an SLR? Psh. But then I'd need a working scanner........ technology, ugh.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Jam Your Own and Loose Weight!


Remember last week how I posted about making your own grape jelly, and you were like, "yeah right, I'm gonna keep buying the 2 for 1 deal of Smuckers cuz I don't have time for this ridiculous canning scheme." ??

Well, I have some more ammo for my war on fake food.

Check out the ingredient list in the Smucker's Concord Grape Jelly: Concord grape juice, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, fruit pectin, citric acid, sodium citrate.

Alright, we've got TWO familiar ingredients... Concord Grape Juice, and fruit pectin. 2/6. Awesome. So what else are you eating here? Uh, synthetic corn something, synthetic acid something, synthetic synthetic something....... It's not all that terrible. Citric acid is a natural preservative used to maintain freshness... if you squeeze lemon juice on a cut of avocado, it will prevent it from browning as quickly. I'm not gonna pretend like I know anything about sodium citrate beyond the fact that it's a preservative.

But the real thing I wanna point out is the high fructose corn syrup. You're thinking, "yeah yeah that's only been the go-to buzzword for unhealthy food since last year". I know, it's old news. But it's STILL on our shelves, and people are STILL eating it. So to further support my bashing of the stuff, here's a great article from scientists at Princeton.

It basically says that eating high fructose corn syrup is NOT the same as eating sugar. The synthetic stuff contributes significantly to unhealthy weight gain.

You can find HFCS worming food everywhere, and can be hard to pick out. Take this little cup of yogurt. It's LOWFAT, it's got PROTEIN, its got BLUEBEERIES (oh the anti-oxidants!)... but wait, high fructose corn syrup is in the top line of ingredients. And stuff like this (low-fat yogurt) gets tagged as 'healthy'. Sickening.


So, in defense of jamming your own, or at the very least, paying a dollar extra for real jelly....
do it for your taste-buds... and for your gut.

PS. I hope everyone understands the sarcasm in my title line. (I don't understand sarcasm very well, so I feel compelled to spell it out for others in my predicament.) I'm commenting on the ridiculous diet trends that seems to govern our predilections for certain foods.