Food and Stuff

Haggis: ach, aye laddie!

2012-01-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

I am not Scottish, nor do I have any but extremely distant ancestors who were remotely Scottish. However, I somehow felt obligated to buy a haggis for Robbie Burns day. I've had haggis before - in Scotland, no less - as part of a "full Scottish breakfast" at a B&B. I recalled liking it, but I couldn't exactly remember what it was like.

So, I picked up a haggis from the Oak Bay Butcher (and no, you don't get a discount for ordering with a Scottish accent and I don't think Mike really appreciated being called "laddie") and prepared it as wee Mike advised, by steaming it for about 45 minutes. The sheep stomach part of it bailed out of the whole deal and I was left with a vaguely stomach-shaped ball of meaty goo that smelled like someone's moldy old sofa.

Despite the unappetizing appearance, I'd already prepared the neeps & tatties so onto the plate it all went. And you know what? It was delicious. The texture was reminiscent of cotechino - that faintly gluey texture that's oddly satisfying. I could totally see how if you were out on the moors all day, chasing sheep around in the rain, and you came home to a steaming plate of haggis, you would think it was the best stuff in the world (and not just for the revenge-on-the-sheep facet of it, either.)

My tummy wasn't too happy with me afterwards - the significant oatmeal component of the haggis not being very Sarah-friendly - but haggis is a once-a-year food and dammit, I'm going to enjoy it. I'm gonna slice me some leftover bits on Saturday and have a full Scottish breakfast, aye.

Goals, plus fun fridge finds

2012-01-13T12:57:00.000-08:00

This week has been really busy, so this post won't be as in-depth as maybe it should be.

I'm leaning more towards basic Paleo eating rather than consciously low-rewarding it at the moment, because as the new year approached and I started thinking "what do I want to improve in my life" I realized I wanted to feel more competent and confident in my physical capabilities. And while I've lifted weights for years and have more strength than many women, even some larger than me, I'm still not that physically capable, objectively speaking. Let's face it - I'm barely five feet tall. While *I* might think a 140 lb deadlift is pretty freakin' awesome, realistically, that's not going to help much in, say, an emergency situation where human bodies need to be moved or something. Or if I finally get my shit together and get my FAC and my hunting license and go get some large deer or (preferably) elk or bear. Also, while my ability to run is nowhere near as absent as I was led to believe as a child (I now think that my sucky running skills when I was 10 were more due to crappy footwear than ability), I still have a hard time running a 5K in less than about 35-40 minutes. My completely arbitrary feeling on this is that most people between the ages of 12 and 50 ought to be able to run 10 kilometers more or less comfortably (ie, not be dying at the end) and in about an hour.

So my goals, therefore, are to be able to lift something useful (I'm picking Stirling here, because it's not a stretch to envision a "worst-case" scenario in which during an earthquake, he gets clobbered by flying debris in the kitchen and loses consciousness) and carry it up to the third floor of our house. Stirling currently weighs somewhere in the neighbourhood of 180 lbs, I think. I also want to be able to run 10K in less than an hour, without incurring any of the usual runner's ailments while training, such as shin splints, wonky knees, foot problems, etc. - which means lots of long, slow slow jogs, and sprints, rather than just bashing 10K over the head until it submits. Because I'm pretty sure I'd submit first.

Given all that - and I've already ramped up the strength training to a heavier-load, lower-reps, more sets kinda deal - dropping my food intake a lot seems a bit stupid. Realistically, my weight is not currently problematic, health-wise. Weight is now a cosmetic issue, and while I don't think that's unimportant, I'm making a conscious choice to focus on ability rather than appearance.

(For the record, for people interested in that sort of thing, I weigh about 135 lbs. Actually, probably a bit more right now, but I haven't been able to locate the scale since I rearranged stuff in the room in which it was located so that'll have to do for now. My BMI is in that range that people quote as being "overweight" but which actual statistics show results in longer lifespan and fewer health problems - for women. I look a bit chunky, but healthy. I'm ok with that, although the fashion-conscious side of me would like me to be able to wear a wider range of clothing styles.)

I've still been eating my stew-o-blandness, although now that the batch I made is finished, I think I'll go back to eating with the family for dinners for a bit because I have more (paid) work than usual at the moment and it's just easier. The fish-and-greens salads are actually really nice for lunch, but as I generally need to eat early and have not been so diligent about actually eating breakfast, I have needed afternoon snacks, and these have been mostly liverwurst on veggies. There is a great charcuterie in town that makes lovely liverwurst and I want him to keep on making lovely liverwurst so I feel obligated to buy it. You should too, it's delightful. And it's liver!

I also found - as the title of this post indicates - treats in the back of my fridge. Fermented green beans! No, fermented in a GOOD way. You know, lactofermented, like kosher pickles. I have been cutting them up and putting them in my salads, and they're just like capers only they taste good and go really well with sardines. I will be sad when they are gone. Experience has shown me that fermented vegetables only work really, really well when the veggies are super-fresh - and the green beans available "fresh" now are just not. I could do some carrots, I suppose - I just picked up a few bunches from Madrona and they are very crisp, sweet and yummy. Anyway the date on these pickled beans (aren't I smart, labeling things? I wish I did that more) is from mid-July. Gotta love lactofermentation!

The New Challenge

2012-01-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

Ok, holidays are over, houseguests are gone, and there are no disruptions in the foreseeable future. It's time to get back to normal. Ah, normal, I missed you so much...

I'm sure everyone is curious how my vacation from my food vacation went. Well, it was pretty crap-tastic, in all senses of the word. I was fine for two or three weeks, enjoying grilled meat and a wee bit of sweet stuff, and lifting better at the gym again, and then I got sick. One of the nastiest colds ever. And of course since it was Christmas and I had piles of stuff to do, I couldn't afford my usual cold "cure" which consists of pho, hot baths, lying around the house doing nothing for 2 days, and sleep. Oh no, I was making presents, running errands, getting stuff together, working (for the client who gave me the virus in the first place, so I didn't even have an excuse to get out of that) decorating the house, baking, etc. So of course my cold lasted longer than it should have, and somehow involved so much snot that I felt nauseous all the time because of it running down into my stomach. The only way I could feel halfway decent was to eat rather a lot of starch. Which somehow turned into bread. And then I felt gross in a different, more bloaty way. Anyway, I'm better now, and eating better, and this week I've been back at the gym and have a new workout routine that I am thoroughly amused by. Of course I have some bloat, and some actual flab, to lose. But what fun is the new year without a bit of extra challenge?

I'm definitely going back to a low-food-reward diet, but with a few modifications. The first is more vegetables - after watching this video I'm very inspired and could definitely have more veg in my life. I'm not as big as that woman so I'm thinking 9 cups a day is excessive for me. I think any more than 6 cups a day would jeopardize my overall caloric intake, so I figure that's a good amount to shoot for. Say one cup in the morning, either in vegetable omelette form or in a smoothie, 2-3 cups in a salad at lunch (simple olive oil & lemon juice or apple cider vinegar dressing), a cup raw for snacks in the afternoon and 2 cups with dinner, either gently sauteed, steamed, or in stew. I like the amount of offal I was eating before so I'm going to keep up with that, but I think I need some extra omega-3's so I'm going to up the seafood by shifting my basic lunch from stew to salad topped with canned fish (salmon, mackerel, tuna or sardines). The trick is finding those without soy oil! So that's going to be my basic diet - omelette, smoothie, salad, raw veggie sticks, stew.

Not so hard, right? But wait! Because extra-extra challenge is even MORE fun, we have the husband (let's call him Stirling) wanting to get HIS diet better too, but he doesn't want to make his food less tasty. For the record, he wants to be basically lower-carb Primal. So that's fine, but we also have a child (let's call her Rowan) who has an entirely different set of dietary needs - she's six, and while I have no concerns about her health or her food intake at the moment, if she started eating less, we could start to see some growth problems. She has approximately 0% body fat, muscle tone that most people would kill for, and burns a lot of energy doing things like this. So she needs food that's nourishing, healthy, AND super-tasty, so she'll actually eat it. I'm also trying to cut back her wheat intake, just on the grounds that I don't think it's the best way to grow little bodies, given the gut-health issues associated with it. I don't, however, want to reduce her overall carbohydrate or starch intake, since those are excellent delivery vehicles for the fat and protein she needs and provide her with a lot of readily accessible energy for her bouncings.

My challenge, therefore, is to devise weekly meal plans that deliver what each person wants and needs, without me spending hours in the kitchen each day. (To be clear, if we won the lottery, I would spend hours in the kitchen by choice and hire someone else to do laundry, cleaning, driving, errands and so on - but the reality is, I have other things I need to do besides cook.) I'm not exactly sure how possible this is.

For this week, my plan is to prep (today, after I get finished procrastinating by blogging) a bunch of veggies. I'm going to pre-cook what I think I'll need for 3-4 breakfasts for me and Stirling (he can have veggie omelettes too, they're nice and Primal) so I can just scoop them out of a container in the fridge onto a partially cooked omelette and stuff it under the broiler. I'll have one container of seasoned veg and one of plain. I'll cut up all the raw-snacky vegetables for snacks for all of us, and have dips for Rowan and Stirling. I'll probably also cut up a mixture of veg for preparing in a variety of ways (steaming, roasting, in soup or stew) to use throughout the week, since veggie-chopping is what takes most of the time in meal prep.

I also need to make some jerky for Stirling and Rowan. I'm going to make myself a nice big tub of Stew-o-Blandness and figure out ways to make dinners in which I can partake so the Stew-o-Blandness goes further. This week is all about the experiments, so I'll post back with what works and what doesn't. Even if you don't have divergent dietary needs going on in your house, I might find stuff that makes healthy meals a bit more streamlined generally.

Gotta go chop now, but coming up is a post on my actual goals for the new year. Unsurprisingly, they involve some physical activity.

Nothing says Christmas like Darth Vader

2011-12-24T16:39:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve. I'm baking cookies for gifts (no, not paleo cookies) and Miss Rowan has an idea for the perfect gift for Uncle Ashley: gingerbread. Darth Vader gingerbread. Well sure, why not?

Luuuuuke...I am your Christmas snacks....

How about the fact that it's Christmas Eve and there's no way I'm going within 100 meters of a retail store? And I don't have any Star Wars cookie cutters. But before I extinguished her visions of awesome giftage, I pondered... maybe, I could repurpose something...

A search through the drawer of kitchen gadgetry revealed that I did have a Darth Vader cookie cutter. It just didn't know it yet. It thought it was a gingerbread girl, albeit one who could use a chiropractic adjustment. I can see how it would make that mistake:

A few tweaks with a pair of pliers, however, set it right.

The next challenge was black icing. The internet thought that it was terribly hard to make and I should just buy it. Screw you, internet, I'm not going out today. Some parts of the internet said you could get closer using cocoa powder. So I started with that, and then put in a lot of almost every food colouring I own. And whaddya know, black icing - or close enough for government work, anyhow.

I think Darth turned out pretty well. He's tasty, too.

how to make awesome hash browns

2011-12-21T09:46:00.002-08:00

And now for something completely different!

I thought I would post this as a useful public service. So often I find - especially in restaurants - hash browns that are soggy, greasy, overcooked or undercooked, and generally lacking in the delectable crisp-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside yumminess that one expects from hash browns. Here, then, is the definitive recipe for how to make hash browns good, not greasy.

First, you need some grease. Ha! No, really. You need fat to make good hash browns. About a tablespoon per small-medium potato. And, of course, you need potatoes. A medium-starch potato like a Yukon Gold works best.

So you have your fat (and please, for the love of your insides, use real fat, not some crappy canola oil or worse, "vegetable oil". It's not made from vegetables, it's made from industrial corn and soy, and it has no flavour at all - use leftover bacon grease, duck fat, or lard), and you have your potatoes. Now, before your potatoes meet your fat, you want them to be softened up and ready to love the fat. Hard potatoes take a long time to accept their fatty fate, and you don't want to wait up to an hour for your hash browns. So dice your potatoes, put them in your vegetable steamer, and steam them for about 10-15 minutes, depending on how big you diced them. Five minutes if you diced them super-small. You want a knife to go in them, but with a bit of resistance.

While your potato chunks are steaming, heat up your fat in a non-stick pan on medium heat. A well-seasoned cast iron pan will also work well. As soon as your potatoes are steamed enough, shake the steamer over the sink to dry them a bit and then dump them in the frying pan in an even layer. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper over (sprinkle more if you didn't use bacon fat). Sizzling should ensue. If they cover the bottom of the pan and form more than one layer, you've used too small a pan and your hash browns will be sub-optimal, but probably still edible. Live and learn.

Don't over-stir them, particularly right out of the steamer. Let them get nice and golden on one side before you start moving them around. It'll take about 20 minutes to cook them properly. Taste them when they're close to done and add more salt if necessary. Then serve hot and enjoy.

(Note that I am not claiming that these are healthy or something you ought to eat every day. But if you're going to eat them, they ought to be good.)

clarifications and going forward

2011-12-02T21:49:00.001-08:00

Well, thanks to Stephan Guyenet describing my experiences and linking to my posts on my experiment with a low-food-reward diet, my blog was read by a relatively vast number of people over the last week (about a quarter of the total views ever happened in that span) and while most left comments on his blog, not mine, there seems to be enough misunderstanding about a few things that I figured a summing-up post was in order.

Some commenters seemed to be concerned that I was sliding into some sort of orthorexia by doing this - that was definitely not the case! I'm not temperamentally suited to that sort of thing. Because this was my first time doing something of this nature, I wanted to do it RIGHT. My rigid adherence to the diet plan I'd devised was no more orthorexia than it would be obsessive-compulsive for, say, a novice knitter to adhere exactly to a pattern. You just don't know enough about the process and how it works to diddle with it. Now, I know what to expect, and my next foray into low-reward eating will be less extreme (and likely less documented).

Other posters missed the point and argued that I just lost weight due to calorie restriction. Um, YES, I lost weight because of calorie-restriction. But it was largely spontaneous calorie restriction. I didn't WANT to eat any more. I could have maybe eaten more on some days, and I did feel hungry sometimes - but it was because I was choosing to and because I had better things to do than eat, and because I wanted to lose as much weight as possible in the span I spent doing it. The point was, this wasn't hard like it was on prior low-cal stints consisting of lettuce and egg whites. I was pretty comfortable doing it and overall it was a really non-stressful experience.

And no, calorie-restriction will not work long-term if prior eating habits are resumed. Part of the low-reward eating is to retrain myself to eat fewer (ideally no) industrial and/or high-reward foods that trigger overeating. The end goal of this is for me to get down to a healthy weight, to understand where my limits are in terms of foods I can eat without overeating, and to develop a readily-available toolkit of "fixits" for when things start spiraling out of control. Because I've lost a substantial amount of weight and regained it several times since hitting adulthood - I know it happens. It's foolish to think it's not going to happen again. But I know the root cause - I get too relaxed and complacent, I think "oh, yeah, I don't have an eating problem anymore, I can just go out for burgers/make some ice cream/have some chips and I'll be fine tomorrow" and, well, three weeks later, I'm having waffles for breakfast, my jeans are too tight and I feel gross, and I put it down to that-time-of-the-month bloating and having the clothes dryer too hot. Six weeks later, I'm not even wearing that pair jeans anymore and I'm soothing my wounded pride with a DQ Blizzard - while still firmly believing that it's not even food. I acknowledge that I'm fallible, and that food and near-food especially is powerful. But knowing that all I have to do is throw some stuff in the crock pot and just eat it - and nothing else for a while - to reset my susceptible little brain... well, that's useful, I think. One thing worth noting is that even after six weeks of it, I wouldn't consider the bland food a punishment. It's not like I would look at a chocolate eclair and think "Don't do it, or it's the crockpot of bleh for you for a week". I'm not the sort of person who is good at self-flagellation like that. If it became a punishment, I probably wouldn't do it. It's more of a respite - and it's one that I will probably eagerly welcome come January.

And while this may land me firmly in the "dysfunctional" camp (and so be it) - I think I DO find the modern food environment stressful. Enjoyable, yes - I mean, you only have to look back on the - what, 7 years? of posts on this blog to know that I'm passionate about food. Food itself, food politics, food policy, nutrition - the whole bit. It excites me. I love cooking. I love creating deliciousness. I love planning food, I love eating it, I love talking about it - but I think it's ok to admit that it exhausts me sometimes, and it's even more ok to do something about that. A break now and then is entirely healthy. And anyone who suggests moderation - pbbbbbtttthhhhhhh - a big fat raspberry to you. You just don't get it, do you?

This experiment is not over. It's not all about the weight loss - that's certainly a part of it, but it's more than that. It's about acknowledging that my brain and body, without intervention, in a modern food environment, is not going to thrive - it's going to keep going back to a state of about 50 lbs over a healthy weight. It's going to take a lot of effort for me to stay at a healthy weight, and I think the best way for me to do that is to figure out exactly how much food reward I can handle without tipping into consistent (and fairly rapid) weight gain. So I'm going to alternate between low-reward months and "normal eating" months. Seeing how my body reacts to the "normal" months will help me refine what "normal" should be, for me, and I will always have the "safety" of a low-reward period to recover from potential dietary messes. Maybe I can handle bits of chocolate here and there. Maybe some seaweed-rice crackers are ok. Maybe ice cream once in a while is ok, or those really awesome Liberty flavoured greek yogurts. And then again, maybe not. If I mess up one month, I'll know better for the next phase. And every time I finish a low-reward month (or two weeks, or whatever) I'll have another opportunity to PRACTICE eating right - for me.

I don't think it's possible to lose weight quickly, painlessly, or effortlessly for most people. It's bloody hard work, and I'm not trying to sugar-coat anything here. I apologize to Dr. Guyenet if people found the first part of this experiment distasteful and are using that to try to argue against the whole food-reward theory of obesity. I think my experience shows pretty clearly that dropping the reward factors from food down-regulates appetite and makes it easy to eat less.

Personally - and no bashing Dr.Guyenet for this! - I think that people who are dismissive of the idea that the brain's response to high-reward food is causative in obesity either have not ever had a problem with overeating and thus cannot understand it in those who have, or they are currently overweight, addicted to high-reward foods, and terrified of giving them up. (There may also be a few folks on various paleo/low-carb bandwagons who for some reason don't want to have to change the rationale for why their ways of eating have worked to reduce their body fat and change their relationships with food. Especially paleo, which has so much going for it in terms of overall nutrition...why wouldn't acknowledging that it's relatively low in food reward compared to most modern diets just add to the already numerous reasons to adopt it??? Is it because people try to sell it as "so tasty, you won't miss the industrial crap"? That's crazy. It's only a small tweak to say "After a short time you'll like it just as much, but it won't screw with your brain like the industrial crap.")

Week Six - wrapping it up for now

2011-11-25T20:04:00.001-08:00

I'm ending this phase of the "food vacation" experiment now. I know I said I would take it through to the solstice, but that looks logistically difficult and frankly unpleasant. The past week has been really hard, psychologically and physically, and due to social commitments December generally was going to be a bit impossible in terms of avoiding yum. I've also started missing the creative outlet in the past week or so and I want to get back into the cooking, and I'd like to be able to look forward to another food vacation fairly soon, so I'm going to stop now while it's still interesting.

The hard week started when I made my daughter's birthday cake - no, I don't force paleo/traditional eating on her, although she eats about 85% that way regardless. (Kiddo loves her fish heads...) Anyway, she wanted a white cake with chocolate icing, and frankly the thought of buying one never even crossed my mind. I went straight for the Cook's Illustrated website (a subscription I highly recommend on the one hand because it's full of recipes of awesomeness, but on the other hand helps people cook in such a way that their food is as chock-full of food reward as possible...). Doing the cake wasn't bad but the icing just about did me in, what with the melted Callebaut chocolate and butter and all. And the fact it kept getting on my fingers. Nevertheless, I made it through without a single lick or taste. The next day, with hot dogs, ramen and cake on the beach, I watched everyone else enjoy their crap while I ate lukewarm tasteless stew. That wasn't so fun - not that I really wanted the crap, but I felt left out of the celebrations somehow.

I think following a low food reward diet would be a lot easier if everyone else in your tribe did it too, and birthdays and other celebrations didn't happen while you were doing it.

But, regardless, I had six successful weeks of absolutely no tasty foods, I feel culinarily refreshed and rejuvenated, I've lost a little over 15 lbs and my palate has certainly adjusted. Tonight, after my last meal of tasteless stew, I had a treat - some frozen cherries. After a few I realized they were too sweet. I ate some more anyway and now I feel vaguely ill. I am, however, very much looking forward to breakfast tomorrow morning, which will consist of an omelette with caramelized onions, goat cheese, and bacon, and COFFEE. Oh, coffee, how I missed you. (The truly pathetic thing is, I only drink decaf...)

So the next phase of this will be trying to eat normally, and see what happens to my weight. I will be following my usual diet of paleo plus dairy, and I will be working especially hard at avoiding industrial foods - anything from a package, sugar, and refined stuff, including cornstarch etc. (Grains are totally out, of course.) Some of my social obligations include eating restaurant food, and there I won't be able to completely avoid industrial stuff like vegetable oils and sauces, but I'll do my best.

I mentioned that this week has been hard physically, and that's because I've started seeing a noticeable decline in my strength. A few weeks ago I could back squat over 100 lbs for at least 10 reps, and a few days ago, I couldn't. I felt energetic enough, the strength just wasn't there. Interestingly, though, the day before that, I did the Mackenzie Bight trail and the usual slog up beside the waterfall was much easier than it's ever been in the past. (And yeah, the thought occurs that my skippy-fast burn up a steep hill the day before might have something to do with a less-than-stellar lifting workout - but if so, it's still a recovery-time problem.) I'll be trying to put some muscle back on over the next month, so I'll be consciously eating more protein. While I dropped 15 lbs, probably 3-4 of those consisted of muscle, and I want that bit back.

In January, I'll do another 4 weeks of food vacation, and see how that goes. In reality, I should have probably only done 4 weeks this time - in terms of permanent weight-loss viability, cycling through low-food-reward phases and figuring-out-what-normal-eating-should-be phases makes more sense. But I needed a longer break from the food, I think, so I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out, and I've learned quite a lot.

Week 5 - realizations

2011-11-19T08:03:00.001-08:00

This week has been mostly good - I had lots of energy when needed, but I was able to spend a day being totally mellow and not doing much when my kiddo was home sick from school. She needed some mummy-on-the-couch-reading time and I had no problem doing that, so that was good.

I've had two big realizations this week. The first is that hunger really isn't an emergency. Years ago, I remember reading some mostly-silly article about the habits and attitudes of thin people. The only one that stuck in my head was that "hunger is not an emergency". And it's undeniably true - when I'm out running errands and I get hungry, nothing bad is going to happen if I wait another hour or so until I get home to eat rather than popping into Starbucks for a snack. (I say Starbucks because they actually have decent snacks - fruit and cheese plates, veggies sticks and hummous, that sort of thing. I don't even mean doughnuts, there's just no justification for those.) Even if it's a good snack, at the end of the day, I just don't need it. The problem is, under "normal" conditions, it's really, really hard to make a good case for this to a large part of my brain. "Oh, but there's a Starbucks right there," says my brain. "It would only take a second. Then you could get MORE done, right? And you wouldn't need as much lunch." (It's lying about the last bit, by the way.)

Now, though, it's really, really easy to not do it. Even though technically, I could eat the raw veggies from Starbucks, I don't even slightly want to actually do that. Hunger really isn't an emergency any more. My brain is happy to let me putter on, hungry-ish, until I get my stuff done. And then I eat. And I don't eat any more than if I'm only a tiny bit hungry (or not hungry. But I don't eat when I'm not hungry any more.) Yesterday morning I got up, had tea, took the kid to school and the husband to work, went to the gym and did a sprint workout on the rowing erg, then on my way home realized that while it was nice and sunny NOW there were some ominous clouds on the horizon. Remembering the previous day's sunny morning and craptastic rest of the day, I figured the dog and I might be better off going for our walk kind of immediately. So rather than have breakfast, I went for an hour-long walk. And then I had a shower, because I didn't want my hair still wet when I went to work and if I waited any longer, it would be. Oh, and then I had to get laundry in as well. In the end, I had breakfast at 11:30 and thus didn't even need lunch. And I was FINE. Moreover, frequently when stuff gets in the way of eating (which it does surprisingly often), the hunger disappears entirely by the time I get back around to having time to eat. And bear in mind, this is me operating at a consistent caloric deficit. It's not like I've already had "enough" to eat by conventional standards. If hunger were truly a response to insufficient food intake to maintain weight, I'd be a lot hungrier, a lot more often. But that's NOT what hunger is. Hunger is a brain-based expectation of food reward. And if you consistently send your brain signals that there ain't none of that happening, hunger becomes transient and unobtrusive.

Realistically, this makes sense - much more sense that the frankly stupid assertion that "You have to eat every two hours for your metabolism/blood sugar/whatever" - really? If humans really NEEDED to eat that often, would we ever have survived as a species? If we were truly such delicate flowers we'd have been toasted by nature a long, long time ago. If you honestly think you need to eat that frequently - like, you feel dizzy or faint if you don't - there is something very wrong with you. You might want to fix it. And, if you are carrying around a few extra pounds, your body's inability to use those pounds when you've got grumblies in your tumblies instead of steering you into the closest cafe or fast food joint should give you pause. Because that's not how a human body ought to operate.

The other thing I learned this week is possibly less generally applicable. And really, it's something I've learned a few times, I just keep hoping it's not really true. Me and grains? We're not friends. And we're not going to be. The potage de semaine now is "variety meat" - meaning I was bored and did some freezer excavations to see what could go in that wasn't chuck roast or stew meat. I found a heart that had actually been re-frozen due to poor planning on my part, a tongue (yum!) and the ubiquitous liver. So it all went in, but heart is very dense and high in iron, and as my iron levels are fine, I figured heart for two meals a day might be a bit much. What can reduce the amount of minerals you absorb from food? Why, whole grains and their high phytic acid content, of course! I hemmed and hawed about this for a while and eventually added a handful or two of hulled barley. It fits the bland requirement nicely, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that humans have been using grains like this - as a minor addition to food - for longer than we've had agriculture. And hulled barley, while slightly processed, isn't what I'd call an industrial food (kind of. There's still the monocrop issue, but...) So I went for it. And now I am all kinds of bloated and I feel like I have a brick in my guts and bleah. Fortunately, I only put the barley in a small amount of the stew, so I'm going to ditch that or season it up and feed it to the family, and haul the rest of it out of the freezer for me to eat, barley-free. Pity - I really like barley, and I'm philosophically ok with using grains in that kind of context - but I guess it is not to be.

week four - a little late due to an actual vacation

2011-11-14T07:52:00.001-08:00

This post was delayed because I took the opportunity of a family-less weekend to head up to Quadra Island for a few days of enforced relaxation. Enforced, because it was pouring with rain on Saturday. I had planned to do a nice long hike, but instead I struggled out in all my rain gear for a short-ish walk with the dog, and then spent the rest of the day knitting. Sunday was nice enough so we got a hike in, but not as long a one as I would have liked. Oh well. It was quiet and peaceful and that was nice. And as I was in a self-catering cottage, food wasn't an issue. I just hauled the other half of my bear stew out of the freezer and took that.

My lovely hosts, though, gave me an apple from their orchard, and as I'd neglected to bring any scurvy-avoidance stuff (ie, frozen blueberries) I did eat it. But I was unable to eat more than a few slices at a time, because it was so intense. Part of that was, I think, that it was a really good apple - but part of it also was that my palate has become so used to blandness that I didn't actually WANT the intense flavour. I think when I finally end my food vacation, it's going to take a few days to come back to normal eating, and it might be wise to end it a day or two ahead of the solstice so I can actually enjoy the traditional solstice feast.

Anyway, folks have been curious about energy levels and sufficient salt intake, so I'll talk about that now. My energy levels, I'm happy to say, are about as good as ever. On my hike yesterday I powered up a hill (they call it a "mountain" on the gulf islands, but... no) that did actually have a bit of snow on top, and it took me only 40 minutes. The information I had was that it was a 2-hour hike, so I feel like my "athletic performance" is still pretty good (but honestly - if you had to take 2 hours to do that, you probably shouldn't be hiking). And I had three really good workouts last week. All of them were in the morning, which is when I normally work out. Previously I'd been trying to work out in the afternoon, usually just after I'd eaten lunch, and I think that was the problem - it's just a low-energy part of my day, naturally. I've been waking up between 6:30 and 7 am without an alarm, after going to bed at 10:30 or so, and that, to me, says I've got plenty of energy.

Salt intake may have been a slight problem. I figured I was getting enough, because of the mineral density of the bone broth that I cooked my meat in, but possibly not. I was experiencing slight foggy-headedness, but it went away when I added a teeny amount of salt to my food before I ate it, so I think that tweak is probably necessary and I'll keep doing it. It'll probably take me another few days to get accustomed to it - even that small amount of salt is vaguely unpleasant at the moment, but it'll make ending the food vacation easier.

And - because this is the question I get asked the most - no, this isn't difficult to stick to in the least. Now that I know my reactions to a tiny bit of salt and the flavour of just an apple, it is not tempting in the least to have even a little nibble of something sweet or highly seasoned. I know it won't be immediately enjoyable, and it may make my later bland food taste even less satisfying, so it's totally not worth it. And while I know this may sound like a miserable state of affairs, it isn't. I'm still very much enjoying the freedom from worrying about what I eat now, what I'm going to eat, when I'm going to get a chance to go grocery shopping, etc. You know how you can look at people lying on the beach, and think "they must be bored out of their skulls"? Well, I'm like one of those people - totally content in my boredom, for the moment. And, as a bonus, I'm losing weight steadily, and nearly all my clothes fit now.

Week 3, a lesson learned and a minor rant

2011-11-05T12:24:00.001-07:00

The food vacation is still going well, appetite still remarkably diminished, down another 2.5 lbs. However, while my energy levels for everyday stuff like getting out of bed, chores, walking the dog, and so on are fine, at the gym, I am having a harder time improving my lifts. This might be me pushing too hard - I could be just at the point where I can't up my squats by 5 lbs at a time. And, too, the workout at the moment consists of 2 sets of 15 reps, which I find very difficult psychologically - I'd rather do 3 sets of 10. So, I'm going to withhold judgement on that, but frankly it's not terribly surprising that on a steady diet of about 800 calories a day, I have a hard time lifting over 100 lbs 30 times. The more important thing is that I keep trying to do it so I don't suffer any muscle atrophy, so when the food vacation ends, I'm in good shape to resume a more aggressive lifting program.

The main lesson I learned this week, though, was that I need to trust my body more. TMI ALERT! TMI ALERT!!!

Ok, you've been warned - there's poop talk ahead.

With a reduced food intake, there's a corresponding reduction in output. Throughout the second week I was only spending quality time in the bathroom every couple of days, which I expected, but this week I went three or four days with no action. Now, I didn't feel constipated or bad in any way, but I was alarmed by this so I availed myself of the large bag of homemade prunes in the freezer. (And yes, they are tasty and technically a violation of the rules of the food vacation, but on the upside, they are very filling and I completely forgot to eat dinner afterwards.) I ate quite a lot of them - about 2 cups' worth. And then I realized a few things. First, I hadn't gone previously because I didn't really need to, and there wasn't a whole lot in there. Second, prunes are incredibly effective and move stuff out that probably isn't quite ready. Blerg. They also dehydrate you in a big way - I went through about double my usual water intake and still felt thirsty. So, I won't be doing that anymore. Things will move when they're good and ready. I'm eating plenty of fat and fibre and getting my probiotics so there's no reason to think that there's anything amiss down there.

Now on to the rant. This story was posted by a Facebook friend this week. The only problem I have with it is that the headline is extremely misleading. "Fatty Foods Addictive Like Cocaine" - but the text of the article (and the research behind it) make it clear that it's not just any fatty food that's the problem - in fact, the fat itself is only harmful when combined with refined starches, intensified flavours, sugars (often several kinds) and other industrial additives. The headline should read "Industrial Foods Addictive" - because none of the foods they list as part of various studies are things that the average person can make on their own - and no home kitchen could possibly duplicate the taste or texture of any of them. The article hints that food processing companies are employing the same tactics that tobacco companies once did - the assertion that their product is produced in response to customer demand, that it's not intrinsically habit-forming and causes no problems when used in moderation - while knowing damn well that their product IS addictive and, in susceptible individuals, impossible to use in moderation. That's what makes it so nice and profitable.

So many people pull out the "Moderation is the key!" blah in response to others - I would argue the majority of humans - who have varying degrees of susceptibility to enhanced food reward and thus problems moderating food intake. But that's exactly like saying "smoke in moderation" - sure, some people can. I know of several people who are casual smokers, who can easily have a cigarette once in a while as a social thing, but who don't smoke otherwise and who never become addicted, or do so only for brief periods and quit easily. But these people are in the minority, and statistics show that most people who start smoking keep going, and usually increase intake over time. Industrial foods - foods that are designed to elicit a maximum of reward response in the brain - work exactly the same way. One reason that obesity is on the rise is because the science of food engineering is progressing and getting better. Companies are able to make food tastier, more satisfying, and better textured all the the time. This leads to increased consumption, increased demand, and perfect feedback to tell companies what works for the masses and what doesn't. And as the article points out, while companies may offer more "healthy" alternatives, it's still the Tostitos and Pepsi bringing in the big bucks to keep the shareholders happy.

As it becomes clearer that industrial foods manufacturers are employing exactly the same brain-hijacking tactics to increase profits that tobacco companies did, my fervent hope is that these companies are dealt with in exactly the same way - taxed to high heaven, with warning labels slapped on all their products ("Warning: this product is habit-forming and use may lead to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and all kinds of yuck."). The best thing would be to adopt very broad definitions of "industrial food product" - basically, if it's in a package and has more than one ingredient, it's an industrial food and should be labeled as such. Yeah, that totally includes bread, crackers, soup - lots of stuff that people count as staples. IT DOESN'T MATTER. If it comes in a package, it's part of the problem. What better way to encourage people to make their own bread and soup? Also good would be government-sponsored quitting programs for industrial-food addicts using some variation of a sugar-free, traditional-foods kind of diet and cooking classes. Further awesomeness could include suing the bastards to recoup health care costs.

Anyway, it was a good article if you ignore the headline. Fat - or any other macronutrient, for that matter - is not even remotely a problem in its natural state. Carbs? All good when they come from veggies, tubers, properly prepared nuts and whole grains if you swing that way. Protein? Fine. A KFC Double-Down that's high in all macronutrients? Now that's a heart attack waiting to happen. Let's stop looking at fat, protein and carbs and start looking at how it's made and what it does to your brain. Because you could take some good soaked whole buckwheat crepes, a nice fatty chicken thigh, some artisanal cheese, and a couple slices of traditionally cured bacon and make a dish that has the exact same macronutrient composition as a Double-Down and it would not do anything close to the same things in your brain and your body. In fact, you likely wouldn't even be able to eat a whole serving. This seems like common sense to me, but you can bet your probably over-large ass that companies like Kraft, Nabisco, Nestle and other purveyors of crap will spend billions over the next few years convincing governments otherwise.

Week Two of the Food Vacation

2011-10-29T16:42:00.000-07:00

Well, my calorie deficit calculations were obviously bang-on as I'm down 2.5 lbs this week. Yay me.

This week was a bit harder. Most of the week I was eating a stew made with pork shoulder, and it was far too mushy and fatty, but there was lots of it so I had to keep eating it. I will not be using pork again, that's for sure. I also found my energy levels were a lot lower this week and I only made it to the gym for one weights workout and the daily walks were shorter on some days - but that was more due to a busy week, work-wise, than anything else (and also, pouring rain). Last night I couldn't face the stew so I had only a small bowl of rice for dinner, and this morning I mixed a little rice in with my hardboiled eggs (which I don't recommend as a taste sensation) and I felt much perkier today, so I think I need more carbs in my diet than I'd been getting. Contrary to what I'd expected, replacing some protein and fat with bland carbs didn't make me any hungrier, so I'm going to try to have some extra carbs - like 1/2 cup cooked rice, or a small potato - with every meal.

I'm still drooling over pears, but not as much. I have supplemented my soups-and-eggs diet with a few other bland things: raw hazelnuts, blueberries, blackberries, raw milk kefir, a vitamin D supplement, and raw kohlrabi & turnip sticks. I eat these in the afternoon if I'm feeling peckish, I don't try to add them onto a meal as it's usually a bit of a struggle to finish a bowl - and sometimes I just don't. It's amazingly easy to leave a snack now... I've found plates of turnip sticks that I've forgotten about, and it took me three days to go through a tiny package of hazelnuts that I previously would have mowed through in one. My insides are working well, with zero gas and bloating, so I think I'm doing ok with the balance of fibre and whatnot.

This week's soup/stew thing, though, is WAY better, thanks to my lovely friend David who gave me some bear meat. I hope he's not horrified at what I'm doing to it - but game meat works SO MUCH BETTER for this than domestic meat. It keeps a good texture, it's nice and chewy, and while the flavour is - as it's supposed to be - mild, there's still enough of it that instead of being actively yucky to eat (as was the pork stew), it's mildly pleasant. Not enough to make me want to eat more than I need, but enough that I'm not pushing the plate away before I'm actually done. I've always wondered why the hell First Nations peoples bothered with stone-boiling (why not just cook stuff on a spit???) and now I know. It's a good way to get a nice, filling dinner. (And yes, I do thank many deities for the existence of my crock pot on an almost daily basis. Stone-boiling is a bit of a PITA.) My next project is to arrange a hunting trip for David and Stirling, because what's just as good as bear stew? Goose stew. Also, I've got a new load of beef arriving next week, and grass-fed beef is nearly as good as game.

So that's week 2 done. I'm going to try to go all the way to the Solstice - that seems a good, meaningful place to end a semi-fast of this nature. And when and if I manage it, I will never, ever be able to tell myself again that I lack willpower - although I must admit that adhering to the food vacation has not been stressful or difficult, not after the first few days. And despite the occasional lapse in energy, I feel pretty damn good. It's also nice to have too-snug clothing fit well once again.

Oh - and for what it's worth - cooking for the family isn't a major problem. The smells do make me a bit hungry, but then I just eat my slop with the rest of the family instead of an hour later when I'd probably be hungry anyway. Keeps me socially appropriate.

one week of food vacation

2011-10-22T08:43:00.002-07:00

I seem to have settled on the term "food vacation" to describe what I'm doing. It works, for now. For those of you just tuning in who can't be bother to skip to this time last week in the blog, I'm taking a much-needed (mentally and physically) break from yumminess, and testing out Stephan Guyenet's theories of food reward and body fat regulation. I'm eating nothing but bland, boring, unseasoned food and in the interests of making it really a vacation, I'm just cooking up a basic meat-potato-veg stew once a week or so and eating nothing but that, hardboiled eggs for breakfast, a bit of raw milk kefir here and there and the occasional few blueberries or blackberries to ward off the scurvy. Unsurprisingly, my appetite has decreased enormously.

So a week has gone by, and what have I learned? Well, for starters, I'm a hell of a lot more productive - I've gotten a few projects done and the house is pretty tidy for the *start* of a weekend - my energy levels are good, I'm going a LOT longer between meals than I used to, kohlrabi is awesome, this is a very effective way to lose weight, and if I do a heavy weights workout and then an hour-long brisk walk/hike, and don't take in any extra veg or anything, I get a headache (which goes away happily with a few blueberries and an advil... the internet thinks it's a low blood sugar thing).

I'm down more than 5 lbs and 1% body fat from this time last week. I don't know if this rate of weight loss will continue - because my salt intake has been cut a lot, I'm probably carrying less fluid in my body, and cutting out all the grains that had crept into my diet (they're so sneaky) made my tummy shrink instantly. That's probably a couple of pounds right there. This next week should provide a good idea of what the long-term weight loss rate will be. Mathematical calculations predict an average weight loss of around 2 lbs per week. (I figure I'm taking in around 800-900 calories a day and with an internet-calculated basal metabolic rate of 1380 cal per day, and an internet-calculated total daily caloric need of 2100 calories, I have a daily caloric deficit of 1200 cal. So every 3 days, I would lose one lb (3500 cal).)

Now, I've done diets before where I've restricted calories to this point, and I've done intermittent fasting, and on both regimes, I've been obsessed with food and often cranky (calorie restriction alone is much worse for all of those than IF). Functional, yes, but also prone to feeling chilly and disinclined to exert myself either mentally or physically. Housework suffered, I wasn't the best mommy in the world, and I found a lot of excuses to not do a workout on fasting days. This is much, much different. Not only am I not really hungry, even 5 hours after eating, I'm not cold in the least (in fact I get warm flushes after meals and I'm the only one not wearing my coat out dog-walking) and I don't feel even the slight hunger at bedtime that I used to. (As an aside, I've never eaten after dinner. I sleep much better on an empty stomach. So I'm used to feeling a bit hungry when I go to bed. Not feeling that is odd. Not bad - just odd.) My moods have been good, I've been pretty chill generally and the family has definitely not suffered. Cooking their food is just another household task, although I still get odd pangs when I'm preparing pears for Rowan. Just pears. Not cheese, carrots, apples, salami, peanut butter, salmon, chicken or sweet-and-sour pork - and in times past, I probably would have chosen to eat most of those before pears.

I've kept my workout schedule the same as prior to the food vacation. I do two weights workouts a week at the gym (and I lift fairly heavy for a woman my size), I walk the dog for about an hour every day, and I do 1-2 sprint workouts a week. Plus, as a stay-at-home parent and a part-time postpartum doula, my "work" day involves a lot of activity, carrying stuff, bouncing babies, cleaning, etc. so it's not like I'm relaxing at a desk all day, and my work day goes from 7 am til about 8 pm - at which point I get to veg out and read or play computer or watch tv or knit or something. This level of activity has not been at all difficult to maintain.

So what does this all mean? Well, it looks like the theory that in the absence of nice palatable food, the body will turn quite readily to fat stores and start munching them up, is holding up. At the moment, the majority of the energy I use is coming from my insides, and my body is using it without such quibbles as the increased hunger, low energy, crappy thermo-regulation or bitchiness normally associated with severe calorie restriction. So, yay so far!

So about those fat numbers...

2011-10-17T11:35:00.002-07:00

Okay, USDA nutrient database, I believe you now. A chunk of moose leg really doesn't have enough fat. Bummer I don't have the whole moose. All the fat is around the organs.

Last night I couldn't finish my soup even though I was still kind of hungry. This morning, I did a weights workout and it wasn't all that fantastic. Not bad, just not great. And it took a lot of convincing myself that I actually wanted to eat some soup for lunch, after a meager breakfast of 2 boiled eggs and a post-workout snack of a diluted 1/2 cup of kefir with a dollop of omega-3+D oil. So I tried adding in about a tbsp of lard (from pastured pigs, of course) to the soup. Wow. What a difference. First, it tasted better (because as we all know, pig fat makes everything better, even when it's just dumped on and heated in the microwave) and second, I was able to eat a lot more, and I actually feel satisfied now. I'm not trying to starve myself here, and I would like enough energy in the tank to enjoy my workouts. Adding that bit of extra fat to my meals will give me an extra couple hundred calories a day (still not going to put me close to what I burn) and will take my mind off my tummy, which was feeling weird with almost all protein and no fat. The extra potato last night didn't help much.

So, while the moose soup lasts, it's going to have pig fat added to each serving. It's still not gourmet fare, and I don't want to snack on it or anything, but I can at least sort of look forward to eating the rest of the batch.

Pretty sure I've got this more of less figured out, so I'll give the posting and navel-gazing about it a rest for a bit and update at the end of the week.

Reduced appetite? Check.

2011-10-16T20:19:00.002-07:00

Well, it really doesn't take long to kill one's appetite with bland food. Two days of my "bare essentials" soup, some hardboiled eggs, a little raw-milk kefir and tea, and I barely want to eat anything. I feel kind of hungry, but not like I want to eat. It's very weird. I also have a bit of a headache, probably because I haven't eaten enough today, and at this rate, it's going to take me a week or so to go through all the current batch of soup.

However, my mood is good, and I didn't crave Stirling & Rowan's delicious-looking dinner - although it was really hard not to take a bite of the pear I cut up for them for lunch. It just smelled so, so sweet and was perfectly ripe. Oh well, there will always be pears. If I'm craving anything, it's crunchy veg and fruit.

So today I've eaten: 3 hardboiled eggs, 2 bowls of soup (although I didn't finish the bowl I had for dinner) one of which had a small added potato and a chunk of steamed cauliflower, the other of which had an added few sorrel leaves, and 1/3 cup roasted chestnuts, which I made for Rowan and of course she didn't like them so I decided they were sufficiently bland and enough of a pain to shell that I was in no danger of making more and over-snacking. They were nice though. And while I was hungry just before dinner and held out so I could eat with the family, I haven't been really hungry all day. Oh, and I had lots of tea, all of it with milk, but we're out of milk now so there'll be no more of that until Tuesday, when more milk will magically arrive. Based on what was in the milk bottle this morning and subtracting what I put in other people's coffee and tea, I think I had about half a cup of milk, total.

My energy levels are fine. I went for a 5 km jog with dog today (which includes a good deal of walking because dog objects to just running, and I also didn't feel like running all the way) and spent the afternoon outside, supervising kids and chatting with neighbours. Come to think of it, maybe my headache is actually from the bright sunlight...it was a gorgeous day!

The Bare Essentials Soup

2011-10-15T10:19:00.003-07:00

For my yum-fast (I really need to think of a better term) I'm using a very basic soup to fill nearly all my nutritional needs. There's no technique involved here, no browning, no deglazing - it's just throwing stuff in the crockpot, with water. Here's what went in:

3 lbs 2 oz moose leg (later removed 6 oz bone, so 2 lb 12 oz moose meat, including marrow)
1 lb potatoes (mostly yellow-fleshed)
8 oz sunchokes
8 oz beef liver
8 oz chopped kale
1/2 cup chopped dried kelp

Before eating, I'm also going to throw in some fresh greens so I don't get scurvy or anything.

I am also eating eggs for breakfast (2 this morning), hard boiled, and I am drinking water and roiboos tea, which may occasionally have a splash of whole raw milk in it.

I played around with the USDA nutrient database (which does, surprisingly, have data for moose meat) and after some guesstimating and wiggling based on the fact that my moose had a bone with lots of marrow and the lack of any significant fat in the USDA numbers suggests that theirs didn't... I came up with a macronutrient ratio for my soup of 30% carbs, 15% fat, and 55% protein. The total amount of calories in the batch is somewhere between 2000 and 2200, depending on whether you believe me or the USDA about fat levels in moose.

Regardless, that's.... a little lean. And it explains why the bowl I had for lunch, while entirely edible and, as planned, fairly bland, filling and inoffensive, didn't satisfy me for very long. I had another bowl at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon (and I ate lunch at 1:30 - my two eggs for breakfast at 9 lasting nicely until then.)

Also, the volume suggests it's at least 3 days' worth of food for me (my 5-quart slow-cooker is basically full). That's not even 800 cal/day, which is a bit less than I was planning to eat - but before you call the medics, remember that I'm really not very big and my basal metabolic rate isn't a whole lot more than that. And, too, I have a fair bit of body fat to run on, and once my body adapts to doing that, it should be able to squeeze a couple hundred calories a day out of there without too much difficulty.

So, I'll see how I fare on this batch. I think I'll sacrifice a (leg of) lamb for the next one, for the extra fat - or a cross-rib roast and cook it in a bone broth. I'll probably add more starchy tubers too, as the carbs could be raised a bit.

Right now I feel a bit low-energy, but that's just as easily attributable to the complete absence of caffeine in my body today and the pile of housework tasks in front of me. After the soup I had for lunch, I DID feel a really strong desire for something sweet - the fruit bowl was beckoning for sure - but it passed quickly with a cup of plain tea.

Mimicking the Ebb and Flow of Nature

2011-10-14T10:04:00.003-07:00

The more I read and think about the paleo food movement, the more it seems less of a strictly dietary thing and more about living consciously, in a biologically appropriate manner. After all, there's more to health than food. There's exercise, sleep, stress management, light exposure, posture, relationships (both human and non-human), outside time, quiet time, pleasure and recreation - all these things have an effect on how we feel and how our brains and bodies work.

I can't shut the lights off in our house when the sun goes down, much as I might like to sometimes. After all, I live with two other people and while I have influence over matters pertaining to their health, I'm not a dictator - nor do I think that forcing someone to do things that are healthy WILL actually result in better health. (More so with adults than children, who look to adults for guidance anyway.) I can't carve out an extra few hours of every day for leisure, but I can take pleasure in some of my daily work (paid or otherwise) - I can appreciate it when I have time to do my more-favouritest chores like cooking and ironing, or when I'm not restricted to a 5-minute shower and can take time to use my orange-aniseed scented tub scrub after my shower. I try not to stress little things, I try not to want too much (although there's this pair of boot I think I really neeeeeed...) and I have a dog to whom I am very grateful because she takes me for long walks every day and we live in a beautiful area with lots of trees and ocean and beach and meadows... so unlike a lot of people, I feel like I'm pretty good with the non-diet stuff - at least as good as I can be without going all hippy and living in a shack in the woods with no electricity.

But this is a food blog, so you had to know it was coming back to diet. I think that even though I eat pretty healthily, I still have issues with the diet.

I think one of my big problems with food is there's no "down time". There's seasonality, because of how I shop, but it's all a variation on feast, with no famine. Even eating well, there's always an abundance of food - quantity, quality and variation. And I'm becoming more and more convinced that's not, overall, a good thing. For kids - perhaps. Always having enough is probably ideal for growing bodies. But for full-grown humans? I dunno.

The problem is that actual starvation and deprivation tend to trigger relapses once the immediate need for restriction is gone, and I definitely found this when I eased up on the full-bore paleo (which I did for about a month last spring). My sensible self thinks it's not a great idea to be constantly restrictive. Even though I think the food climate of modern Canada is unsustainable and unhealthy, I also think it's not healthy for individuals to set themselves too far apart from the rest of society in terms of their food choices except in cases of acute allergy or hypersensitivity - neither of which I suffer from. It's hard, and I think most people have problems with this - the way you feel you OUGHT to eat is hampered by a desire to fit in with the way everyone DOES eat.

But there's nothing wrong with just taking a step back from things for a while. I've been thinking recently of traditions like Lent and Ramadan - an observed period of partial fasting, of meeting needs but not desires. And I've been thinking about how that fits in with Stephan Guyenet's food reward theories of body fat regulation (where appetite and food intake is regulated by the food reward factors in the diet), and how our Stone Age ancestors must have had a period every year where it was time to live on stored food or scrawnier game, when there were no juicy berries, no mushrooms, no eggs - just dried meat, stored nuts and tubers. And I'm thinking, I could probably do with a bit of that. I've put on a few pounds of those I worked so hard to lose a year ago, I've had an overwhelming few months of paralyzing indecision at farm stands (OMG TOO MUCH GOOD STUFF!!!) and I feel like a break from FOOD would be a good idea. Thank the gods berry season is over. (Sometimes I wish I was a bear - come October, bloated on salmon and berries, I could stumble into a cave and sleep it off for a few months.)

So I'm going to do an experiment in - well, I don't really know what to call it. Yum-avoidance? I'm going to take two months (basically, Thanksgiving to Christmas) and eat only completely nutritious and totally bland food. Because I also want a bit of a break from thinking about food (I don't think it would shock anyone if I said I was a wee bit obsessive about it) I'm going to just make big batches of boring soup and reheat a bowl at a time when I'm hungry. It'll be nutritionally balanced soup - just a hunk of meat with bones, simmered for a day or so in the crock pot, with potatoes/turnip/sunchoke/other tuber or root veg, some blenderized liver, and chopped kale or other mild green veg. For breakfast I can eat a couple plain hardboiled eggs if I want, or not. (I'm not usually hungry before 10 or 11 anyway.) That should provide me with all the nutrition I need, but I'm not putting ANY seasoning in whatsoever (nope, not even salt - but I'll run the numbers through the USDA database and just make sure I'm getting enough sodium - might toss some kelp in too.)

If Dr. Guyenet's food reward theories hold true, this bland diet should cause my appetite to decrease as my body gets the signal that the food environment's not all that great right now and it's a good time to use up the internal stores. (The more the evolutionary psychologist in me mulls this theory, the more it makes sense. When food variety and palatability are low, it probably coincides with an extended period of stored-food use. It makes sense, in a small-group situation, if those with a bit of excess fat are able to reduce their food intake without becoming grumpypants so that those who don't have any excess can eat enough. Chubbies who kept eating their normal amount and burned through the nuts at the back of the cave were probably at higher risk of encountering violence from other, less subcutaneously-endowed folk when the nuts ran out. As a parent, I can totally see me whacking some strapping burly guy who was scarfing the nuts and dried auroch that my growing kid needed more. Non-conscious appetite regulation during food scarcity would have been an excellent survival trait, I think.)

In fact, Guyenet goes over several experiments that have shown exactly this - with a very bland diet, appetite decreases as a function of obesity. Very obese people tend to eat next to nothing, whereas already-thin people eat a normal amount. When you remove the reward component of a diet, humans (and other animals) take in only what they need - and when they have a substantial amount of body fat, they need very little on a daily basis to keep going, and the rest of the energy can come from fat stores. You don't have to restrict food, just yum - your brain will do the rest. In theory.

BUT that's all under experimental conditions. My "experiment" is a little more real-world. I don't have just myself to feed - I have two other people who are not going to be happy with meat-and-veg soup for the next few months and they will still get damned fine food, prepared by me. The big question is, as far as appetite and body fat regulation goes, is the food environment defined ONLY by what I eat, or is it defined by the food I see and smell, as well? My will power is pretty good, I think avoiding munching on the husband and kid's food won't be a problem, but I don't know if my appetite will actually reduce all that much. I will keep track of how much I actually eat by calculating the total number of calories in each batch of soup I make, and how long it takes me to go through it. I am NOT going to TRY to eat less.

I'm also going to keep track of how this makes me feel. Never having been religious, I've never had a reason to observe a period of fasting or intentional deprivation (and let's face it, even when I was losing weight eating starch-and-sugar-free, I'm still a pretty good cook and it's not like it was real deprivation, even though the "food reward" factors were lessened.) I freely admit to using food as comfort, motivation, treats, and entertainment. How will my psychological health be affected by removing those? (Or will I just attempt to get as much pleasure out of sitting down with a good book and a bowl of unseasoned meat-and-veg as I did with a good book and fabulous salami, brie, crunchy carrots and a bowl of babaganoush to dip them in?)

So, it all starts tomorrow. I have a chunk of moose I found in the bottom of my freezer (labeled "boiling meat leg" - thanks Chuck!) because I figure it's appropriate to kick off a stone-age-style seasonal yum-avoidance with some wild game (I won't be able to keep that up unless certain friends - hello, David? Are you reading this? - give me some wild geese or something). I've got potatoes and sunchokes, gobs of kale, lots of liver (thanks to my beef lady, who now just gives it to me because I'm the only one of her customers who wants it), and eggs for breakfast. I may have a half cup of raw milk kefir, plain, every couple of days to keep the intestinal flora happy, too. I'm all set, and I'll keep everyone posted.

Best Thanksgiving Side Dish Ever

2011-10-09T21:24:00.002-07:00

I title this post thusly, but obviously these things are highly subjective and I know (although most of me doesn't want to believe it) that there is a large contigent out there who still champion that most vile of culinary abominations, the marshmallow-topped yams. If that's you, you should probably stop reading now.

Anyway. What I'm talking about is a simple dish that combines sweet, sour, salty and meaty into one delicious and nutritious package. It takes some planning, but ultimately only about 15 minutes to put together.

Sauerkraut, Bacon & Apples

1 large or 2 small cabbages
some salt
a large jar or crock

2 large apples
1 lb bacon

(it's cheap to make, too)

1) Make sauerkraut. (You'll want to start at least 8-9 days in advance. I never claimed it was an instant-gratification recipe.) For directions on this, go talk to Sandor Katz. Or, if you really can't plan more than a few hours in advance, go to the store and get a jar of Bubbie's.
2) Dice bacon and apples.
3) Throw bacon in a very large frying pan on medium heat. When the fat has started to render out, toss in the apples.
4) Cook bacon and apples together until the apples are nice and tender and the bacon is done to your liking.
5) Turn the heat down and throw in all your sauerkraut. Stir it around until it's evenly combined with the apples and bacon and warm, but not cooked - you want it still crunchy and full of probiotic goodness.
6) Serve and enjoy!

An excellent counterpoint to turkey, yams, stuffing, etc. Also, I can't recommend enough this delightful non-stuffing. WAY better than any bread-based goo. Even more way better when you get an awesome deal on chanterelles and you use those instead of the criminis. Also you can add sausage meat, which is more yum. But the basic recipe is still pretty damn good.

Life isn't fair, and capitalism is making you fat

2011-05-27T09:23:00.002-07:00

There's this blog that I've been reading for a long time (2 years or so?), and I've found it to be an excellent source of science-y information about food, nutrition, and biochemistry. The guy who writes it (Dr. Stephan Guyenet) has a PhD in neuroscience and currently studies the neurobiology of body fat regulation at the University of Washington. What attracted me to the blog in the first place was his ability to pick apart studies and look at what the results really said, as opposed to what was in the abstract or the study conclusion (surprisingly, not always the same thing). He's also really good at identifying assumption biases, particularly as they relate to study design.

Anyway. Dr. Guyenet is not actually a "paleo" eater but he's pretty paleo-friendly - I think he actually follows a more Weston A Price-type diet. Still, he has a lot of very interesting tidbits on his site and it's completely non-commercial (except for that one time where he was interested in the guy who ate nothing but potatoes for 2 months as a promotional stunt for the Washington Potato Growers Union).

His most recent series of posts is outlining his theory of why people carry more body fat than is necessary (beyond the meaningless "they eat too much" - if that were a useful explanation, obesity wouldn't be a problem - the question is WHY do they eat too much, unless you're Gary Taubes, in which case you just think they eat too much starch & sugar. Mr. Taubes still thinks "because they eat too much" is a crap explanation for obesity. It's a symptom, not a cause.)

Guyenet's theory, in a nutshell, says that people eat too much because modern food is too darned tasty, a lot of it tastes exactly the same every time you eat it, and it's available all the time. He postulates that the degree of "food reward" in a diet influences various mechanisms in the brain (leptin signalling among them) to raise the body's fat set-point (which is defined as the level of body fat that the body will defend by altering appetite) to take advantage of a recognized food surplus in order to store energy for later use. The key to this is that the brain uses "food reward" to determine food surplus - if there is a lot of tasty, satisfying food in the diet, the brain ramps up the appetite to take advantage of it. If the diet is bland and unrewarding, not so much - no matter how energy-dense the food is.

This worked very well in the past, when seasonal food variations meant that it was totally in your best interest to be able to override your normal appetite levels and stuff yourself silly for weeks on end when there were berries and fat little critters and easily accessible roots and whatnot, but that when you were down to the nasty bits of shredded dried meat and a few acorns in the back of the cave, it was a good idea to lose your appetite and live off your fat rather than eating the acorns too quickly, or burn yourself out trying to catch the last few skinny rabbits. Of course, back in the day, the stuff that hit the reward centres of the brain was the good, fresh, sweet & fatty stuff. Dried food (in the absence of things that make dried food delicious, like tamari sauce & maple syrup) is not so enjoyable to eat, requiring a lot of chewing for relatively little flavour, and stored nuts and tubers are just bland and filling. Fresh berries, or spring greens, or the livers and marrow of a freshly killed moose, on the other hand, are loaded with flavour, have interesting, easy-to-eat textures, and smell good. In other words, yum. This would even have worked for agrarian cultures, when fresh produce and newly-slaughtered animals would have produced a seasonal surplus that humans could use to bulk up, balanced by the late-winter fare of stored grains supplemented by whatever stored meat the technology could provide. Sugar and salt (both of which improve the taste of food and thus its reward value) have historically been precious commodities.

Humans aren't the only animals that store seasonal surpluses (or surpluses of any sort). Rats are opportunistic scavengers that also benefit from eating strategies that allow them to store fat against possible future scarcity. There are a lot of rat studies showing that you can make rats chubby by feeding them "supermarket food" (danishes, spam, oreos, etc.), whereas it's hard to make them fat on rat chow, even if the macronutrient ratios are the same. Yes, you read that right - the same percentages of fat, carbs & protein - but the rats will eat a lot more of it if it's tasty and has interesting textures. (Very little that resembles rat chow occurs in nature. Even the most disgusting-to-you potential rat food (bugs, human garbage) has objectively more flavour than rat chow.) You can produce a similar effect feeding two groups of rats the same stuff, only adding water to one group's food. The water makes the food taste better (to a rat) and they'll eat more of it and get fat. Humans are possibly a little more complex, and it's conceivable that other factors like sounds, ambient conditions, social aspects etc. have some influence on food reward. Also, humans rarely subsist on the human equivalent of rat chow - although one suspects that in the past, feeding prisoners gruel was a good call economy-wise not only because it was cheap, but because it actually worked to suppress prisoner appetites.

The other key to this theory is that the more similar a tasty food is to one that was eaten before, the more it tends to raise the set-point. This is because the brain learns to associate flavour (and probably texture & aural cues to some extent) with caloric intake, so tasty foods eaten repeatedly that taste the same each time are better at raising set-point than novel tasty foods. In other words, when you taste a new food, the brain says "better wait until we see what this does before we go nuts with it" but if it's one that's been eaten repeatedly with obvious caloric benefit, the brain goes all "dig in! eat as much as you can!" and loosens the reins on your appetite. (In other words, your brain knows damn well exactly how many calories are in that Big Mac and it's totally cool with that.) Non-tasty foods don't provide enough stimulation to trigger such a response, and completely flavourless foods seem to suppress appetite.

This whole theory makes some sense, and does explain why obesity rates have risen in the manner in which they have. Convenience foods - prepared foods you purchase, many of which are manufactured to be tasty rather than nutritious (ie, chips, cookies) - are a product of a market economy, and as such exist for only as long as consumers buy them. Industrial food manufacturers therefore engineer their food to provide as much "reward" as possible so they will be repurchased. (I heard on CBC's "Age of Persuasion" yesterday that Kellogs put a vast amount of money into concocting a unique "crunch" to outsell generic cornflakes.) Obesity rates closely mirror the availability and consumption of such foods. This also explains why the obesity rate in some traditional cultures skyrockets when people are exposed to western foods, even though the fat OR carb content remains the same or even decreases - because nearly all of the new foods (ie, shelf-stable & shippable to remoter locations) have been developed with palatability, not availability, in mind.

The obvious and unfortunate conclusion from this is that in order to obtain and maintain a desirable body fat percentage, far less delicious food is in your future - especially far less delicious "comfort food" that tastes the same every time - recipes with few ingredients in strictly controlled measure, packaged food (KD!) and fast food or even food from chain restaurants. Indeed, that's posited as the real reason that low-fat AND low-carb diets have some success, because initially, food reward is reduced on either, and eating processed food is typically reduced. These diets usually start to fail when dieters find ways to create the deliciousness to which they were previously accustomed within the boundaries of the diet (paleo brownies, yum! weight-watchers chocolate caramel pretzels!), which prompts their brains to go back to hungry-mode. (It should be noted, though, that a strict paleo diet limits fruits and sugars, even naturally occurring ones, on the grounds that these were not typically available year-round, and especially sugars (like honey) were hard to obtain and occasional, so a hard-core paleo diet would necessarily be lower in food reward values, so more likely to work long-term. Also more likely to result in some degree of social ostracization in the current food climate.)

This theory also suggests that stable and persistent fat loss, in a convenience-food environment, is going to be damned hard for individuals who are susceptible to excess food reward (in the same way that not everyone is susceptible to the pleasures of alcohol or crack cocaine). And, if you're one of those susceptible individuals (as I am) it's a sad thought that if you want to carry a healthy amount of fat, food is just not going to be as enjoyable or - importantly - such a reliable source of comfort. For the rest of your life. It's a good thing I never had any expectation of life being fair. On the other hand, it's probable that my extra flab is a good indicator that I've enjoyed food MORE than some other people up to now, so I guess it all evens out in the end, if this theory is correct.

There's actually a diet plan (more like a hack, but let's not quibble over terminology) that takes advantage of unflavoured food to reduce set-point easily. I'm experimenting with it now and I'll see how it goes. For the time being, the aforementioned blog post series is well worth reading.

Food Reward: A Dominant Factor In Obesity Part 1
Food Reward: A Dominant Factor In Obesity Part 2
Food Reward: A Dominant Factor In Obesity Part 3
Food Reward: A Dominant Factor In Obesity Part 4

There is also a podcast that is lengthy but worth listening to here.

Unassailable Oatmeal

2011-05-08T13:53:00.003-07:00

Yesterday I posted an interesting link on Facebook which detailed a study in Pediatrics done on a small (n=12) group of obese, adolescent boys. The study showed that eating an oatmeal breakfast (and, it should be noted, an oatmeal lunch) versus eating a vegetable-and-cheese omelette for both meals resulted in the boys consuming more calories after lunch, when they were permitted to eat as much as they like from a selection of foods. This was an interesting study because the results were partially opposite what proponents of whole grains have been maintaining (ie, that they provide fibre and bulk in the diet, which fills you up more and lets you eat less). I say partially because they actually had two oatmeal groups - one using instant oatmeal and one using a less-refined oatmeal, both with identical toppings, and indeed the less-processed oatmeal reduced subsequent food intake more. However, both oatmeals fared poorly compared with the omelettes. This study was a rarity in nutritional research in that it was experimental in design and very tightly controlled - far fewer potential confounds than in most other studies - AND it clearly measured actual intake and actual blood glucose levels rather than reported intake and/or hunger. What I find even more interesting is that while spikes & dips in blood glucose as a result of eating cereals and other high-GI foods are pretty well-acknowledged in nutritional research, the effect of those spikes & dips on later food intake has not been so well-documented.

I apparently have a lot of friends who maintain that oatmeal is an awesome breakfast, and indeed, I was formerly a huge fan of the oatmeal, too. Easy to prepare, hot, filling, and, with a modest amount of brown sugar and maybe some raisins or other dried fruit, satisfyingly delicious. Especially the steel-cut oats. Yum. (Critics please note that I am not disputing oatmeal's yumminess. Of all the grains, it ranks second in my book only to barley for inherent deliciousness.) But I was unprepared for the angry backlash when I questioned the overall health-providing aura of the Oatmeal. It was like posting a link claiming Elizabeth May used to work for Monsanto. OMG HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT?!?!?!?! (Later clarified to "Who are you to tell me what to eat, internet nutrition sucks, everyone is an individual and *I* am very cool with oatmeal" - which are fair points, but worth looking at more closely.)

Being yummy and filling is not the same as being good for you. And just because something is FILLING doesn't mean that you'll eat less, later. If you eat oatmeal for brekkie, can you then be fine *all afternoon* if you have only a salad and a couple hard-boiled eggs for lunch? Is an afternoon snack a necessity? Now, you may feel hungry earlier towards lunchtime if you eat protein and veggies for breakfast rather than oatmeal (hard to say if this is due to faster absorption of nutrients, response to an unexpected LACK of blood glucose spike, or stretched-out tummy, or even true), but hunger levels do not necessarily dictate later appetite. I'm sure everyone has had times when they've been hungry, but were satisfied by fairly little food, and conversely sat down to dinner really not so hungry but then scarfed an 8-oz steak, baked potato with butter, and 3 helpings of cheesy broccoli anyhow. In other words, hunger isn't what we're looking at, we're looking at post-oatmeal eating. Different.

Interestingly, few if any of the Facebook oatmeal-defenders are overweight. (Massively pregnant sisters don't really count.) And as the discussion on Facebook pointed out, eating more later is not necessarily a bad thing. If you're an athlete, or if you work a physically demanding job, or your personality and food habits are such that you have a tendency to forget to eat, then you may very well want to eat a breakfast that enhances your appetite later on. This study was not aimed at providing useful information for people like this. It was aimed at people who have weight to lose, and who want to be able to decrease their overall caloric intake. Is it such a stretch to say that people like that, who are eating oatmeal for breakfast, should probably take a week or two and try something different?

The pro-oatmeal crowd kept prodding, though, and because I am ornery and a fully brainwashed paleophile I posted a link describing an old, old study showing that a single variable - oatmeal - in an adequately controlled experimental setting could account for a significant portion of dental caries in children. The reason it's an old, old study is that handy orphanages with piles of kids on which you can experiment like that don't really exist anymore. But the researchers were able to clearly show that oatmeal intake was positively associated with development of caries (cavities). Oh noes! Not the oatmeal, doing something BAD!!!! Well yeah. That particular result was most likely due to the phytate content of oatmeal, and it is possible to get around that one, but your oatmeal won't taste the same. (I like it a little sour, but I can see how that's a bit of a tough sell.)

So, two experimental studies show that oatmeal may not be the perfect breakfast food. Why get upset about that?

I think part of it is that people are sick to death of hearing that foods that were supposedly good for you aren't a panacea of healthy, or that previously "bad" stuff that was pretty easy to avoid (liver, anyone?) is actually really, really good for you and you should eat lots of it. Food ought to make us feel good. It's damned hard to feel good about eating when some nutrition dilettante tries to tell you that dear old oatmeal, which is one of the few foods that has enjoyed a good nutritional reputation since Roman times, MIGHT not be so good. If we can question oatmeal, for chrissakes, is ANYTHING sacred? (And at what point do I get labeled an orthorexic?)

The real question underlying this is, does it do us more harm than good to put our considerable, but still very flawed, scientific know-how into examining what we eat? Many good food writers (Michael Pollan among them) have noted the absence of a real "food culture" in North American society. Much of our angst about food and probably no small number of diet-related disorders is driven by sheer uncertainty about what we should eat. And it's easy to answer the "should we listen to research scientists?" with a quick "No!" because intuitively, we know that if we can stick with traditional foods - like oatmeal - that we've eaten for hundreds of years, we're good, right? Granny ate oatmeal every day and lived to be 107, etc.

Except, what if Granny *could* have lived to be 112, and maybe not had chronic hemorrhoids for the last 20 years of her life? What Granny carried a series of fortunate genes and a gutfull of awesome bacteria gleaned by accident or as a result of a borderline-unhealthy childhood obsession with being a chicken? Is her oatmeal still good for you?

See, science helps with these questions - but it doesn't answer them definitively. Science is, by its nature, always changing in its body of knowledge. As more experiments are done, more epidemiological data analyzed, and more evolutionary puzzles unraveled, our knowledge base changes, and our ideas about optimal or even healthy nutrition change. And, too, science has a human element, and human interests and even hubris can take over a whole field and distort its findings for decades through unnoticed confirmation bias, unexamined assumptions and statistical trickery for funding purposes. Nutritional science is also incredibly difficult to do WELL because we have all these inconvenient rules about experimenting on humans, and while rats and mice are convenient, they're different from us in some pretty important ways. So, it's easy to dismiss nutritional science as next to useless, and on more than one occasion I've done so too.

But if we're going to dismiss (or severely limit) direct science (ie, reading research articles) as a factor in deciding what to eat (or what not to eat), I think we also need to look really hard at what DOES influence what we eat. Government policy? Media? Advertising? Family traditions? Religious traditions? Packaging? Grocery store placement? Simple palatability? The limits of our culinary skill? Time? Is using these as rationale for what you put in your body really any better than using ever-changing scientific research findings? (It's entirely possible that it makes you a less annoying person, I'll grant that.) And if you prefer to rely on medical professionals for your dietary advice, do you ever actually ask how much training your doctor/nurse/nutritionist received, how many journals he/she subscribes to and what was the last interesting article he/she read that made him/her revise his/her views on whatever?

And does it really hurt to examine your food periodically, and ask if it's doing enough for you?

All right oatmeal fans, comments are all yours. Go for it. Justify your love for the oatmeal. Rip apart the internet nutrition, convince me I'm a loser nutrition geek who ought to have better things to do with her Sunday afternoons...

The Heart of Yumminess

2011-02-06T20:39:00.002-08:00

Like all offal, heart has been under-used for the past 50 years or so, but it's making a comeback (along with liver and tripe and sweetbreads). I recently discovered a big old beef heart in my freezer and it met my crock pot today, with excellent results. Heart requires long, slow cooking, but it's delightfully rich and satisfying when done well. It also comes with several convenient chambers, into which you can stuff MORE yumminess. Here is what I did with heart today, but experimentation on the basic premise of "stuff with yummy, cook in yummy" is encouraged.

Stuffing:
1/2 small onion
4-5 mushrooms (any kind, but shiitake would be best)
3 slices bacon
minced garlic, about 2 cloves

Dice everything and sautee. Set aside.

Trim any extra fat and silverskin from the exterior of the heart and wash out the cavity. Make a seasoning rub:

3 large pinches salt
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp smoked paprika
fresh ground pepper

Rub all over the inside and outside of the heart.

Stuff heart with the prepared stuffing mixture, and place in slow cooker. It's ok if some of the stuffing leaks out during cooking. Add red wine as needed and a few bay leaves. Turn on slow cooker and ignore for many hours.

When the meat is done remove the heart from the cooker and wrap in foil to keep it warm. Dump all the liquids from the cooker and any bits of stuffing into a saucepan, and bring to a boil. Reduce until the salt level is what you want for a sauce, then go just a touch further. Thicken if desired, then add 1/2 cup heavy cream and a shot of brandy. Oh yeah. A squirt of mustard is nice too.

Slice heart to serve and top with the sauce.

Finally, a use for Jerusalem artichokes

2011-01-13T22:27:00.002-08:00

Several times over the past few years I've purchased (or dug up) Jerusalem artichokes and attempted to make something edible with them. I've roasted them, tried them raw, and put them in stews, but the end result was always...meh.

Tonight, after finding more than half of the last impulse-purchased bag in the veggie drawer, I figured I'd give them another go in hopes they would make an adequate addition to a blended veggie soup. And whaddya know, they actually did.

I have no real recipe for this soup because it was sort of a make-it-up-as-I-go thing. But here's what I did. I peeled some jerusalem artichokes and cut them up a bit, diced one slice of bacon, some celery, a couple mushrooms and carrots, and threw a small baggie of dried torpedo onions in with some olive oil and cooked it until it all started to brown. I deglazed with a splash of brandy and then added some good chicken stock. I simmered it for half an hour or so until the jerusalem artichokes were soft, then threw it in the blender. Then I gave some chopped leftover chicken and some more bits of mushroom a quick fry in some chicken fat and threw the blended soup over it, stirred it a bit, and yum.

It's really good soup. And jerusalem artichokes may now visit my fridge more frequently.

cave-person wannabe

2011-01-01T14:10:00.003-08:00

Over the past few months I've managed to annoy friends and family by refusing to eat grains & sugar. I understand the annoyance - it's mildly offensive when food is refused, especially if it's handcrafted with care like Corey's pannetone or my mom's shortbread and christmas cake. But the grains and I hadn't been getting along for some time, and back in July I realized that it just wasn't ever going to get better. It wasn't them, it was me, and I had no way to make my guts happier so we were just going to have to split up permanently.

At the same time, I was unhappy with my weight, and recalling the net wisdom of the 500-page tome of dry scientific blatherings that was "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes (which could be summed up with a terse "no starch, no sugar") I decided to drop sugar and any remaining starch (mostly potatoes) from my diet and be slightly more assiduous in the practice of my favourite activity, which is weightlifting.

So, here I am, 6 months later, more than 30 lbs lighter, in much better shape and feeling better than I have since I was a kid. Imagine my surprise when about a month ago, I found that someone had managed to make a living by promoting my own personal health plan. Seriously. I knew that my way of eating had some similarities to "Paleo" eating, which is basically avoiding "Neolithic" foods to which our bodies aren't well adapted - mostly grains, tubers that are inedible raw, refined sugars, and dairy. I was still eating dairy though, and had no philosophical objection to potatoes, so I didn't really identify myself as "Paleo" - although I must say I do wholeheartedly endorse it from a logical perspective. Anyway, I was searching the internet for Paleo recipes in a moment of boredom and came across the book "The Primal Blueprint" and its associated website, Mark's Daily Apple. As I browsed around it, I realized that this Mark dude had taken my idea and run with it, and it's totally his whole business and there's a huge internet community that subscribe to his ideas about health. AND - even his exercise plan looks like mine! It's even simpler: lift heavy things a couple times a week, walk or hike all the time, and once in a while, run fast for short distances, repeatedly. (In my weight training book, it's called "interval training" but whatever, it's the same.) Eat loads of vegetables, meat, eggs, fruit, dairy and a few nuts. Get enough sleep, don't be a stress case and play when you can.

AND HE MAKES MONEY ON THIS. Damnit all. Oh well. In one sense it's validation - I figured it out on my own and he has, like, some kind of master's degree in nutrition or exercise physiology or something. And I don't agree 100% with everything he says, but, if anyone's wondering why I eat and exercise the way I do, I can pretty much refer to the book and that covers it. (Mark Sisson also sells supplements and stuff. I'm sure they're fine supplements but I'm not buying them... I don't take much besides the odd herbal thing for whatever and vitamin D/fish oil.)

Anyway, if you're looking for a relatively sane way to drop some pounds or just feel better, I have to say I thoroughly recommend this method. It does work, with some caveats: you can't binge on the nuts and fruit, you DO need to like and eat lots of vegetables, and it thoroughly sucks if you're trying to be vegetarian. And, calories are still calories, no matter what Gary Taubes thinks, so as a 5' tall woman who doesn't spend all day engaged in heavy farm work or anything, I can't just sit and eat rounds of brie and pate on endive leaves and expect to lose weight. However, if you don't eat starch and sugar, you don't get the blood sugar swings that prompt that sort of behaviour, and meat & veg is pretty filling and satisfying (as long as it's not chicken breast, bleh) so I've been eating a bit less without trying. And no, I don't particularly miss bread or cookies or chocolate or pizza or anything else. I don't feel deprived, and I'm fine with the idea of just eating like this for the rest of my life. There is still a LOT of good food to be had without those things. If you look back over my posts for the last few months you'll note that any grain products in them are either optional or on the side. Over the next little while I'm going to start working more on the recipes and I'll try to post more.

Mystery Meat

2010-12-28T20:06:00.002-08:00

Here I am in Whitehorse, where's it's been close to -30C for the entire duration of our trip and after the excitement of Solstice & Christmas had waned, I needed a little challenge.

Enter: The Freezer. It sits in my mom's basement, innocent enough on the outside - your standard medium-sized white chest freezer - but on the inside: CHAOS!!! I'd already managed to use an unlabeled container of vaguely fruit-like stuff in the dessert for our Solstice dinner (it turned out to be all the fruit ingredients for Summer Pudding), and a bag of ground meat helpfully labeled "04" was turned into quite delcious mooseburgers by my mom, but the best freezer discovery was a punctured zip-loc bag containing a lump of probably game meat that had been labeled with a pen obviously assumed to be permanent, which equally obviously wasn't. So we had no idea what it was.

Closer inspection revealed the presence of a freezer-burnt but thick layer of fat, and significant amounts of connective tissue, so I figured whatever it was, it would probably fare best in the slow cooker. I stuck it in the coldroom to thaw and forgot about it for a day or so.

When I remembered it, I hauled it out and inspected it carefully. It was definitely a braising roast, not too badly freezer burnt, and a quick sniff rendered a verdict of "moose" - but not the one that Stirling and Anna got a few years ago, so its age was indeterminate. Lacking any further inspiration, I got a new zip-loc baggie, dumped in the mystery meat, a half bottle of red wine, some fortuitous fresh thyme from the fridge, and a few peeled and smushed cloves of garlic. Then I shoved it back into the coldroom for another 24 hours. More, actually, since I completely forgot about it until after 2 pm the next day, at which point it had missed the slow-cooker window for dinner that night. I threw it in anyway, added some onions, bay leaves salt and pepper, and then turned off the slow cooker when I went to bed that night and threw the crock back in the coldroom.

That coldroom is so damned handy. Wherever we move next, I want one.

This afternoon I hauled the alternately abused and neglected hunk of mystery meat out of the crock and cubed it. I diced up some carrots, celery and pepper (having used all the onions previously in the dish) and sauteed them in leftover fat from my sister's homemade bacon. I stirred in some flour and added the resulting mess to the liquid left in the crock. Then I dumped the meat back in, turned it on, and left it for another couple of hours.

And, believe it or not, it was FANTASTIC stew. Tender, juicy bits of meat, flavourful broth, and vegetables cooked perfectly. Stirling pointed out it could have used some mushrooms, and he was right, that would have been awesome - but I wasn't going out to get them. Still, it was really good.

I do have to give some credit to Alton Brown who, at some point in the last 10 years, had a show on making goulash where he mentioned that with really tough bits of meat, it's best to slow-cook them one day and warm and serve them the next. There was some science mumbo-jumbo involved, but I forget that part. Anyway, he was right.

So - next time you find some unidentified mystery meat in your freezer, give it a chance in the slow-cooker. You may be pleasantly surprised. Also, pay no attention when you hear things like "meat will keep nine months in a deep freeze." PAH. Meat keeps forever in a deep freeze - you just need to get more creative with it after a certain point.

Vaguely Ethnic Meatballs in Sauce

2010-11-13T17:57:00.002-08:00

This is a good dish to make on a chilly Saturday afternoon when you've got nothing better to do than fiddle around in the kitchen. Not really from any particular regional cuisine, more of a "fusion" dish. The spice amounts are left intentionally blank - you can adjust as you like. I have to cook for a 5-year-old so I went lightly on the duqqa and berbere (both are hot) but if I was just cooking for me & Stirling I would have added a lot more.

Ingredients

Meatballs
approx 1/2 lb ground lamb
1/4 lb or more liver (pork, beef or lamb)
1/2 cup or so bread crumbs
1 egg
1/4 large onion, finely diced
1/4 green pepper, finely diced
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
duqqa spice
berbere spice
cumin
salt

Tomato sauce
1/4 large onion
large can tomatoes
2-3 cloves garlic
medium fennel bulb
bay leaves
1/2 can coconut milk
cardamom
lemon zest from 1 lemon
maple syrup
salt

First, saute onion and green pepper and place it in a mixing bowl. Let cool slightly. Put the liver and the egg in the blender and whiz until fully blended. Combine with the remaining meatball ingredients, shape into small (less than 2" diameter) balls and cook in a non-stick frypan until thoroughly browned all over.

For the sauce, saute the onions and fennel until soft, then add tomatoes, garlic, lemon zest and cardamom. Cook until it's reduced a bit, then add the coconut milk and reduce further until it's a nice thick sauce. Add salt and maple syrup to taste - don't make it too sweet, just take the acid edge off.

If you have a slow cooker, dump everything in it, turn it on and leave it til dinnertime. If you don't have one, use a large saucepan, keep it on low, and stir frequently to prevent burning on the bottom.

Serve over rice, topped with diced mango and cilantro. Yum!

Brasserie L'Ecole-style Mussels

2010-10-21T19:04:00.002-07:00

Everyone loves the mussels at Brasserie L'Ecole and they're pretty easy to make. I didn't bribe any sous-chefs for the recipe or anything, I just figured it out. These are a perfect appetizer for 4, or meal for 2.

Ingredients:

3 slices good bacon
1 medium onion
1/2 large fennel bulb
1 bottle (not the honking huge kind, just a regular bottle) good medium-bodied beer. I used Phillips Blue Buck, but any ale will do. Brasserie uses La Maudite.
splash of apple cider vinegar
2 lbs mussels

Dice the bacon and slice the onion and fennel very thinly. In a large pot (big enough to fit all the mussels) put the bacon in while the pot is cold and start cooking it on med-low. When some of the fat has rendered out, add the onion and fennel. Cook on medium until onions and fennel are transparent then turn down the heat. Cook slowly, for a long time (around an hour), stirring frequently, until the mixture is thoroughly and uniformly browned and there are lots of stickies on the bottom of the pot.

Meanwhile, clean the mussels. The easiest way to do this is to empty them into a pot of clean fresh water, then pick them out one by one, brush off any grit or ickies and pull off their beards. If any are slightly open, squeeze them closed, release, and check that they then start to close on their own. If any do not respond, put them aside. Check the "aside" pile later for just slow ones that have subsequently closed - these can go in the pot, the others can go in the trash.

When you are ready to cook the mussels (ie, 5 minutes before you want to eat them), bring the heat up on the pot. Pour in the beer and let come to a boil and boil for about a minute. Add the splash of vinegar (this counteracts the bitterness in the beer). Then pour all the mussels in and slap a lid on. Steam for approximately 3 minutes. Once the mussels are opened, they're ready to eat. Discard any that have not opened. Divide the rest evenly between the bowls and then spoon the delicious liquid from the pot over top.

Serve with garlic toast or frites.

Gonna stick with the meatloaf

2010-08-06T18:05:00.003-07:00

I think I'm done with the liver experiments. I just don't like it.

But, there lurks in my freezer several pounds more of the stuff, so we're going to consume it one way or another.

By "we" I mean our whole family, including the dog. She likes it, and our vet said we should give her some, so I'm going to interpret that as "give her half the package when you open one".

The other half goes into meatloaf. Here's the recipe. It's delicious, and the liver just makes it taste richer, not livery.

1 lb or so ground beef
8 oz beef liver, chopped finely or whizzed up in a food processor
1/2 medium onion, finely diced
1 small carrot, finely diced
1/2 bell pepper, any colour, finely diced
1 small stalk celery, finely diced
olive oil
bay leaf
1/3 cup ketchup or bbq sauce, or some combination thereof
1 tbsp mustard
2 cloves garlic, grated
1 egg
1 cup breadcrumbs
salt to taste (yeah, you're going to taste it raw. Deal.)

Sautee onion, carrot, bell pepper & celery in olive oil, with the bay leaf. Cook until transparent, but it doesn't really matter if you forget and it starts to brown. Dump it in a large mixing bowl and let it cool so you can touch it, then remove the bay leaf.

Add everything else and probably 2-3 tsp salt. (How much salt you need depends on what kind of breadcrumbs you used, the brand of ketchup you have, your mustard, etc. It really varies.) Mix it all up (by hand is best, just squoosh it around with your fingers. Take your rings off first, because it's really gross if you don't.) Taste. If it's too salty, throw in some more beef if you've got it, more breadcrumbs if you don't. If it's not salty enough, add more salt. Mix thoroughly.

Put the mixture in a parchment-lined loaf tin and bake at 375F for about an hour. You don't even need to tell your family that there is liver in there.

A season of plenty on Quadra Island

2010-07-03T12:00:00.003-07:00

We just spent a week on Quadra Island, at Bold Point Farm. We went last year, and I packed lightly intending to buy food on the island. We were sorely disappointed by the selection in the stores and unable to source any more local food than what we found on the farm (lovely vegetables, eggs and mutton). So this year I packed a cooler full of veggies, chicken and beef from our local farms. And of course, Murphy's Law being what it is, a lot of it came back with us.

June on Quadra is a lot different than August (when we went last year). The cool spring/summer this year meant the shellfish harvesting season was extended, and we took full advantage of it. Oh, the oysters! Beaches literally covered with oyster-farm escapees, the meaty, buttery Japanese oysters favoured for their size and flavour. Clams so plentiful it took only minutes to fill a bucket with more than enough for a good-sized chowder. If we'd been so inclined we could have done mussels as well, but shellfish are so rich that we found it hard to keep eating them.

So we moved on to fin fish. Stirling, with his amazing shore-fishing prowess, was able to score us a rockfish, a pile perch and a ling cod. Most of the latter is in the freezer, it was too big to eat there so I filleted it and put the fillets in the freezer, and we ate just the head and back steamed for lunch on our last day there. The rockfish we did chinese-style, and the perch we had as pan-fried fillets. Pile perch tastes a lot like grayling, only with fewer bones. Yum! The crazy thing was, we caught the perch off a dock at Granite Bay - we'd seen them schooling under the boats - and when we hauled it up we said "wow, that's a chubby fish." But when Stirling administered a quick dispatching knife to the back of its head, the fish suddenly spewed 20 or so baby fish onto the dock! It was the strangest thing I've ever seen. We had a sudden rush of guilt - but then realized that the babies were slipping through the grated deck into the water, and swimming away, adeptly if not happily. A closer look at the fish revealed that the exit point (what would that bit be called on a fish?) was reddened and swollen, indicating that she was certainly close to birthing if not already in the process, so the babies were mature. It was a learning experience for all of us, and we still felt a bit bad, but what was done was done. Now we know that all sea-going perch are viviparous (thanks, Kindle wikipedia access) and in future we'll check for excess chubbiness before dispatching them.

It wasn't just protein lying around for the munching on Quadra. The strange weather this spring - warm early, then cool and wet - produced the most phenomenal salmonberry crop I've ever seen. Every branch on every bush was loaded with berries. A walk down the drive at the farm took five times as long as normal because it was impossible to walk past so many berries and not eat them. All of us must have eaten near our weight in salmonberries over the week, and we picked close to 10 lbs for jam and syrup as well. We could have picked much more, but there were other things to do. There was a good crop of huckleberries as well, but they are more tart, smaller, and more fiddly to pick than salmonberries so we just snacked on them apart from the one breakfast of huckleberry pancakes I made.

Overall, a fun trip. I think we ate something we caught or picked ourselves at every meal. It was a hunter-gatherer's paradise.

Enough with the liver, try this chicken recipe instead.

2010-06-05T19:41:00.002-07:00

Sarah's sister here - I just made a delightful meal and would like to share the main recipe. It started with some harissa, which was purchased by my mother as a curiosity without really knowing what should be done with it (it's more of a condiment really). There was also some chicken thighs about, so the plan was to make them edible if not tasty and utilize the harissa. The harissa is very hot: chilies, oil, garlic, salt, rose petals (in this particular brand) and 'spices'. I initially thought I might just rub it on the chicken and grill it, but it really would have been too hot with not much flavour. Enter the sour cream. I would have used yogurt but there wasn't any and the sour cream worked out nicely. Add ground cumin, quite a hefty dose because my bottle of pre-ground cumin has been in the cupboard for a long time so the flavour is a bit weak and I didn't feel like grinding my own today as my mortar is currently housing some chunky salt that requires grinding up a bit before I sprinkle it on things. Back to the marinade - I found some medjool dates in the cupboard that I probably bought in January and are turning quite dry and sugary, so I put three of those in a blender with a small amount of hot water, whizzed it a bit, added the sour cream mixture and a clove of crushed garlic and then a big pinch of salt, and then another pinch of salt - always good to have a slightly salty marinade (slightly!). The resulting blended sauce was pretty tasty, but missing something which turned out to be orange, best sourced from orange juice concentrate, which I am a big fan of for use in sauces, dressings and marinades as it has a lot of flavour with reduced liquid (add a bit to a basic Dijon vinaigrette and use over spinach salad - yum). The marinade was then slathered on to the chicken thighs, left to sit for an hour, then baked in the oven for about 35 minutes ~375F. Served with a low-parsley tabbouleh (add a blend of other herbs - mint, oregano, basil, dill and a bit of parsley, and a lot of diced vegetables - this also helped me prune the herb garden a bit to encourage some branching) and sliced orange with yogurt (purchased after the marinade was made) and mint. Tasty, tasty, tasty. I happily have one chicken thigh left for tomorrow, and in future I would be inclined to make rice to go with this so the baking marinade could be ladled over it. It might even be worth putting some orange juice in to thin out the marinade and increase the volume for ladling over rice. I did originally plan to grill the chicken on the barbeque, but the marinade was so tasty I wanted to conserve it with the cooking.

Recipe as best as I can recall:

-4 chicken thighs, skin removed and fried up for dog treats (okay - and Rachel treats too)
-1 - 1 1/2cup of sour cream (or I would use plain, Balkan style yogurt with a fairly high MF%). I'm not sure about that quantity, it was enough to slather liberally over four chicken thighs.
-1 tsp harissa paste or some other hot chili paste or fresh chili, make it as hot as you want or leave it out if you are not into chilies.
-1/2-1 tsp ground cumin depending on how fresh your cumin is and how cuminy you like your food
-1 large clove of garlic, crushed
-3 large dates, chopped then whirred in a blender with 2 tbsp of hot water.
-1-2 tbsp of orange juice concentrate, or juice and zest of a medium navel orange for a runnier marinade
-salt to taste (to be a shade on the salty side, but not too much as the marinade is baked with the chicken)

Blend all the marinade ingredients together. Slather over chicken thighs (or equivalent amount of other cuts) in a baking dish. Let sit for as long as you want in the fridge - you could do this in the morning or the day before or immediately before cooking. Heat oven to 375F, put in the dish of chicken, uncovered. Check after about 25 minutes and see if it needs more time which it probably does (unless you are using boneless chicken breasts - they don't need as much time as bone-in cuts usually). At this time you can flip the chicken over and spoon the marinade over it again. Put back in the oven for 10 more minutes (or use your judgment about doneness). Serve with marinade sauce over top. Scale up/down the recipe to provide 1 or 2 pieces of chicken for each person.

liver attempt #1 - fail

2010-05-11T13:34:00.001-07:00

The liver and sour cream was... not good. It sounded like a good idea, but the recipe was not enough to compensate for the moose liver. Maybe I should stop trying with the moose liver. It's good when it's really, really, really fresh. After that, not so much.

The liver challenge

2010-05-10T11:57:00.002-07:00

I know that liver is very good for me. I also know that I have quite a lot of it in the freezer - some moose, but mostly beef. Oh and some pork too I think. Somehow I end up with the livers whenever an animal is divvied up. Also, good pastured chicken livers are readily available here and cheap. Liver is a fantastic source of iron and other minerals, vitamins, A, D, and lots of different Bs, folic acid, and other good things. And, contrary to what people think, toxins are not stored in liver. Livers are responsible for metabolizing (or conjugating) toxins, but those that don't get dealt with stay in the blood and eventually lodge in the lyphatic system and fatty tissue, not the liver. So, as long as you'd happily eat the meat of animal, you can safely eat the liver. More than safely. Liver is the ultimate health food.

The problem? I don't really *like* it very much. I like pate, but I'm trying to cut way back on bread because it's been disagreeing with my insides, and pate on endive is good but violates my locavore philosophy too much to be a regular thing. (Somehow, belgian endive seems not to be grown around here.) Plus, you can get tired of pate.

Soooo... I am on the hunt for new liver recipes. I don't mind the basic liver, bacon & onions we all know and tolerate to some degree, but the child and the husband are less enthusiastic. My plan is to try one new recipe a week, and success will be determined by the amount of any given recipe we can eat. I have some moose liver sliced and soaking in milk in the fridge, and I think I shall make the Russian dish Liver with Sour Cream tonight (and maybe a meatloaf too just in case.)

(I have, in the past, hidden liver in meatloaf, but I feel that's cheating somehow.)

Got some great liver recipes? Post them in the comments!

Yummy Impromptu Dinner

2010-05-02T19:49:00.004-07:00

Sarah's sister here - I've been visiting Victoria for a couple of weeks now and enjoying the lovely foods available here, both local and imported. Sarah and family are at the in-laws for dinner and I am on my own tonight. I feel like mentioning the pleasant simple dinner I just had, sourced from stuff I found in the fridge or on the counter. I sliced a pear and wrapped it up in prosciutto with the remains of the blue de Basque cheese and half an avocado. Washed down with the last glass of Quail's Gate Dry Riesling. Really good, and when I ran out of cheese and had enough of the prosciutto, I pulled out the maple smoked salmon candy and sliced up a few pieces of that to go with the rest of the pear and avocado. Finished with a square of Denman Island dark chocolate and a few spoonfuls of Liberte Dulce de Leche yogurt for dessert. What a good dinner.

Helllloooo, brand new bbq...

2010-05-01T20:08:00.002-07:00

I got a spiffy new toy. I luuurrrve it. It makes delicious things. So far I have grilled sausages, done a slow-cooked smoked pork shoulder, and tonight I made skewers of scallops and bell peppers brushed with rosemary-infused lemon butter. YUM.

The scallops, by the way, were local - Qualicum Bay scallops purchased at Finest At Sea. At $23/lb they are not what one could term cheap, or even affordable. However, thanks to a generous donation to this week's grocery budget by my visiting sister (and occasional blog contributor) Rachel, I figured we could have a wee splurge. If you're going to buy scallops, it's worth spending a bit extra and getting good, fresh, local ones. SO much better than the squishy wet pucks that Thrifty's sells. Rowan fortunately decided she didn't like them, so Rachel, Stirling and I had more than enough. (I didn't like scallops either as a child, and really the last thing I need is Rowan being fond of yet another expensive form of seafood. Trips past any seafood counter are currently difficult as it is.)

Anyway, it was a delightful dinner and I am thoroughly impressed with the new bbq. I hope it lives up to its billing and lasts until we hit peak oil and propane becomes too expensive to cook with. (And no, I didn't pay the price listed on the Home Depot site.)

Good for what ails ya

2010-04-18T19:20:00.003-07:00

Oh, it has been a looooong time since I posted. My apologies. I thought about posting about Jamie Oliver's new show in the States, but that's been hashed to death by others, so I think I'll leave it alone.

However, I do have to share this. It's a recipe from a book I have, Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice. I think it's one of my favourite food books ever, because it marries food (including excellent recipes) with spirituality, research, and entertaining stories.

I can't quite figure out if we're still in the Egg Moon (there are a LOT of eggs to be had right now!) or if we're into the Milk Moon - since we got our first milk of the season last week. Regardless, I have sniffles and was feeling sorry for myself and remembered this recipe from the Egg Moon section of the book. It is SO fast to make (like, 5 minutes) and if you have small hands who want to help, there is ample opportunity, what with the washing the greens & beating the eggs. Plus it's instant gratification, which always goes over well with the little ones.

Stracciatella (Roman Egg-drop Soup)

2-3 cups chicken broth
1-2 eggs
2 tbsp grated parmesan cheese
2 handfuls of greens (spinach, chard, any tender green - but sorrel is tastiest)
salt to taste
pepper & grated nutmeg

Heat chicken broth in a saucepan and salt to taste. Rinse & thinly slice (coarse chiffonade) the greens. Beat the egg lightly, then stir the parmesan into the egg. When the chicken broth reaches a boil, dump the greens in. Depending on the greens, you can cook for a bit or just dump the egg mixture in right away, stirring gently. The egg will cook as it hits the hot soup.

Serve immediately with some ground pepper and a touch of grated nutmeg, if you feel inclined to dig your nutmeg out of your disorganized spice cupboard, which I did not. (It is good with the nutmeg though. Usually I have a nutmeg sitting on the back of my stove but it has run away.)

Where's the kaboom?

2009-12-28T16:05:00.002-08:00

Further adventures in fermentation...

I decided to try my hand at lactofermented soda. This is soda made the old-fashioned way, with a "ginger bug", water, sugar syrup and flavourings. The basic methodology is covered here, along with some interesting political/philosophical musings.

I read it all very carefully and then proceeded to do many things wrong. First, I think I overfed the ginger bug by about 2 or 3 days, resulting in some kind of super-powered creature capable of fermenting many more gallons of liquid than I had. Secondly, I might have added too much sugar for the volume I had, but I realized as I was adding the liquid that I had only a quarter of the volume of starter I was supposed to have (according to the recipe). So basically I ended up throwing something together in a carboy and hoping for the best.

Here, to the best of my recollection, is what I used:

ginger bug: 1 cup water, with 2 tsp sugar and 2 tsp finely diced ginger added every day for 5-6 days.
3 1/2 gallons water
2 litres apple juice
2 kg blackberries, juice only
6 cups sugar

I put the carboy beside the fireplace, thinking the warmth would make up for the lack of starter. (The recipe suggests 1 cup of starter for each gallon of liquid.) I was quite surprised to see the carboy airlock begin to blip the next day. I let it go another 2 days then decided it was fermenting away nicely, so I should bottle it and let it get fizzy. I did so. The next day my neighbour came by and, as she was heading off for Christmas, I figured I should give her a bottle. Before I did I opened one to see how the carbonation was going. It was definitely going!!! Fortunately I had the foresight to open it in the sink. It made a bit of a mess but it was mostly contained, and it was really yummy. Then, for some reason, I thought it was still a good idea to give my neighbour a bottle so she could put it in her van and bump it around for the 200 km to Port Alberni. In my defense, SHE thought it was a good idea too.

I gave a bunch of the rest to other friends and they have not yet called to complain so I am hopeful. But the bottle that went to Port Alberni exploded all over the kitchen there when opened - like, BOOM right up to the ceiling - and when I heard that I decided that maybe the bottles I'd stored in the cool entryway were not quite cold enough, as that exploding bottle had been stored outside. I took them over to Justine's for lunch today and told her to open the first one with a plastic bag over it in the sink. KABOOM! Went right through the plastic bag and splattered all over her kitchen, her clothes, her shoes and her husband. Good times. We opened the second bottle outside but it was not quite as explosive, probably because we had the camera ready to go to capture the action.

It is truly delicious soda, though - almost worth the explosions. It's refreshing and nicely balanced - the blackberry flavour isn't too sweet or overwhelming and I would totally do it again. Except maybe with more... caution.

I have seen the promised land, and it is filled with corn tortillas

2009-11-14T10:40:00.002-08:00

How is it that I have never before realized the wondrousness of the humble corn tortilla? I have owned packages of them, used a few as a poor alternative to flour tortillas (which are a poor alternative to home-made flat breads) and then thrown the rest out after several weeks of sitting in the fridge. They always have tasted kind of raw and mealy, and generally unappealing.

I have made a discovery - bake the little suckers until they're toasty and they turn out delightful, crispy around the edges, with a pleasant tortilla chip flavour without the deep frying. ALSO, if you sprinkle on a very minimal amount of grated cheese (minimal! I mean it, no big gluey globs) and some salsa (also minimal amount), pop it in a 400F oven for about three to five minutes (so the cheese is bubbling), and then use as a shell for enchilada/burrito/taco type dishes. I make a filling of carrot/celery/pepper/tomato/onion/garlic and some sort of meat, fish or tofu, seasoned with a bit of chili and cumin, and then topped with avocado, more salsa, lime juice, lettuce and fresh veggies. Really good, simple, and family friendly, and ten thousand times better than those hard taco shells that sit on the store shelf for a few years before blowing up into little pieces as soon as you bite into them.

This also makes good breakfast with leftover filling. Just pop the tortilla with cheese and salsa in the oven. When toasty, put on some of the filling and put it back in the oven to warm for a couple minutes while you scramble an egg. Put the egg on top of the filling and scarf it down. Yummy!

more kitchen alchemy (or, my yeast pee was awesome!)

2009-11-07T15:31:00.003-08:00

The mead is finished and it's really good. The blackberry batch turned out drier than I expected (additional yeasts on the blackberries maybe?) and the plain one is really nice - a different flavour than last time, despite using the same honey. (Well, from the same company - maybe their bees were in a different place?) Anyway, success!

I also recently tackled another alchemical hurdle - cheese! The Scholefield clan went away for 3 weeks and I was under orders to preserve their milk share for that time. They get 3 gallons a week, and my fridge operates at capacity most of the time, so immediate processing was necessary. They requested feta, so I made some using some "rennet" I found at Ambrosio and yogurt as the starter, and a recipe I found on the internet. It turned out ok, but 3 gallons of milk makes a decent amount of feta, so I thought I should produce something else the next week.

The following week I borrowed our cowshare administrator's book on cheesemaking and attempted a queso fresco. It was actually pretty fun to make - cheese curds are like a blend of jello and cheese, and enjoyable to cut and play with - but on further reading I discovered that the rennet I had bought was actually junket rennet, and largely unsuitable for cheese. Indeed, the cheese that resulted was edible, but didn't melt, and had some crunchy bits because I had no kosher salt, only celtic sea salt, which contains small particles of "minerals" (aka sand).

So I did some panicked ordering off the good old internet. Several days later, thanks to some speedy shipping by Danlac, I had proper rennet and some mesophilic starter. I had to do math to figure out how much rennet to use, and as it turned out the stuff I got was SO concentrated that the amount was on the order of milligrams and I had to use Stirling's powder-measure scale. But wow what a difference! The milk gelled up in an hour and was a much firmer set than with the junket rennet. Lesson learned.

The next batch of cheese turned out decidedly better, and I made some with garlic and herbs in it that was really quite tasty. I had another batch planned, but I got distracted while heating the milk and ended up scalding it, so I reduced it by half and turned it into pumpkin pie ice cream, which was also pretty tasty.

After all that I was a bit cheesed-out. But I've had a rest now, and it's colder so I think my pantry might actually be the right temperature for aging cheese soon, so I will attempt something more cheddar-like next.

An Easy Snack

2009-10-04T17:02:00.003-07:00

Sarah's sister here - once again covering for Sarah's lack of postings. I do not consider her preceding post as valid since, as a science nerd, it made me cringe a bit. I am glad you enjoy the wonder that is fermentation dear, but bacteria do not fart carbon dioxide and pee alcohol (and bad spirits don't give you a tummy ache either)! Please refer to Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" for less whimsical explanations of these mysterious phenomena.

I thought I would post another easy recipe, this one for a tasty afternoon snack that will get rid of any mushrooms you have turning smelly in your fridge. Good for using stale baguette too.

Mushroom Topping:
-a bunch of button mushrooms, diced into very small pieces (if you have exotic or wild mushrooms, all the better)
-butter and olive oil for some sautéing
-a clove of garlic, minced
-small sploosh of dry sherry, or a touch of brandy
-salt and pepper
-thyme
-cream (half and half is fine, whipping cream would be nice too)

Method:
Put butter and olive oil (or one or the other) in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add mushrooms and saute for a while until partially cooked. Add garlic and keep sauteing for a while longer to get rid of the water. Add sherry or brandy (note that brandy is a bit stronger and can get nasty if you add too much, so I stick to sherry when possible). Let the liquid cook mostly then add thyme, salt and pepper. Once liquid is gone add some cream. Cook off the liquid so it is a thick coating on the mushroom pieces. Taste for desired level of saltiness and increase if necessary. Take off heat and serve on little toast rounds or in cooked mini-tart shells. This is very easy and people like it. You could get fancy and add some bacon or cheese or dried fruit, but this is perfectly good as is.

And before I forget - let me mention how much I enjoy Niagara Grocery. It is a nifty, family-run place with some great local products and it is conveniently located a couple of blocks from my seester's house for those times when I need cream in the morning and the fridge is empty.

Alchemy

2009-08-22T13:15:00.003-07:00

I am SO sorry for failing to entertain people. I had vacations to go on, job interviews, and a busted computer, but I suppose I should have made blogging more of a priority than, say, paying attention to my child. Or feeding my husband.

Anyway, I have a blog post now. It's about how much fun it is to use chemistry without really understanding it. This is illustrated best by late-summer preserving. Specifically, jam, jelly, mead, pickles and sauerkraut.

See, I KNOW that fruit contains this thing called pectin, and when it's heated to the right point (223F last I checked, I think) pectin will make jams and jellies set. The trick is finding fruit that's the right degree of ripeness (or not ripeness) so that the amount of sugar you have to add to get the temperature to go that high doesn't make the jam or jelly taste disgustingly sweet, and that contains enough pectin anyway. (Yes, I spurn the pectin you buy in a box in the grocery store. It makes jam too hard, and flavourless. As an aside, people who make "low-sugar" jam belong in the same rung of hell as the low-fat dairy types.)

The mystery is, I have NO idea why pectin does that. I don't know if it forms some sort of crystal lattice or expand-o-starch molecules or what. I tried to read the explanation on wikipedia and bailed out after "The characteristic structure of pectin is a linear chain of α-(1-4)-linked D-galacturonic acid that forms the pectin-backbone, a homogalacturonan." I decided I like it better as a mystery. You take fruit, you take sugar, you throw them together on the stove, and at some point, you get jam. If you screw up and jar it before it's really done, you can always go back and boil it up again and fix it. Unripe fruit has more pectin, so picking fruit for jam is fun because you can go to places that other people have already been to and still pick lots, AND if you happen across a really ripe berry or fruit, you can just munch it up secure in the knowledge that your gluttony is helping your jam set. What could be better?

The mysteries of pectin are nothing, however, to the mysteries of lactobacteria. GERMS!!! yay. And they make pickles for you. People who are afraid of germs haul out their canning equipment and vinegar and whatnot and have to wait, like, 3 months for their pickles to be ready. Me, I love germs. I wash little bitty cucumbers and stuff them in a jar with salt water, garlic, dill and grape leaves. (Another lovely alchemical mystery. Actually no, a lack of alchemical mystery... the grape leaves stop the cucumbers from going mushy.) I stick them in the pantry with the jar lids on lightly to prevent unfortunate explosions and typically bugger off on vacation for a week. When I come back, they have magically turned into pickles. Intellectually I know that salt-tolerant lactobacteria are responsible, but I don't know what the bacteria actually DO. What part of the pickles do they eat? Why do they turn sour? Is that like eating bacteria poop? I don't understand. But I don't have to - that's the good part. I trust my bacteria. They make things tasty and good for me. And then I eat them. Ha ha ha! (Sauerkraut is even easier. Shred cabbage, mix with salt, pound into jar, wait.)

The mead part I actually understand. Yeasts are easier, somehow. Wee beasties that eat sugar, fart carbon dioxide, and pee out alcohol. So I kind of get the science on this one, but it's still really fun to just mix honey and water and watch it get all foamy and bubbly. Sourdough bread is similarly entertaining, except when I forget I left some rising and I come back and it's like some sort of slime mold crawling all over the oven, mocking my attempts to keep the damn thing clean.

I just think this stuff is so FUN. It's like nature has all this fantastic food ideas just waiting for you, and you just have to mix it right and then leave it alone. No other animal could have discovered these things. The kind of ingenuity and willingness to put food that microorganisms have tampered with in our mouths, and claim to enjoy it, is what makes humans really special. Also, the patience to wait it out and let perfectly good food get munched on by microorganisms first. I don't see raccoons, for instance, waiting for things to start fermenting in the garbage before knocking it over. Never mind that getting into outer space stuff or those nuclear reactors - the fact that ordinary humans can team up with things they can't even see to make food tastier and last longer is pretty remarkable.

Lemon Pickled Onions

2009-08-17T09:41:00.003-07:00

Once again, Sarah is failing to entertain me with blog posts - it's like she's busy or something. Once again, I will pick up the slack with a tasty and simple recipe. A condiment this time - lemon pickled onions. I think I saw Jamie Oliver do this on TV, and now I make it frequently and put it on just about everything - salad, burgers, salad, in soup, salad, sandwich or I just eat them out of the dish.

Directions:
Thinly slice some red onion (you can use yellow onion, but it really isn't as good). The thinner you can get it, the better. Sprinkle liberally with salt. Cover with fresh squeezed lemon juice, none of that stuff in a bottle. You can also use lime juice for a slightly different flavour. Leave for at least 10 minutes (the thinner it is sliced, the quicker it pickles) and then use or cover and put in the fridge, liquid and all. It keeps for at least a week, but I usually finish it off pretty quickly so I don't know how long it will go for. You can use the juice in salad dressing, or anything that needs some acidity. This recipe has proved to be quite popular with friends and family. Give it a try.

Japanese breakfast

2009-05-30T14:17:00.005-07:00

Don't ever let anyone tell you kids aren't influenced by things they see "just in passing" on TV. In this case, it was a good thing - Rowan wanted breakfast like Satsuki and Mei from "My Neighbour Totoro". I didn't remember exactly what it had looked like - not that remembering would have helped, necessarily - so I looked up what constituted a traditional Japanese breakfast and found many a site, all listing essentially the same things:

- rice
- fish, usually grilled
- miso soup
- natto
- pickles and/or ume plums

I didn't feel up to the natto. I've heard nasty things about it and didn't feel that breakfast was a good time to deal with a food phobia. So I substituted toasted mochi instead. (BC-vegetarian mochi knockoff, actually, made with brown rice.) Totally not the same thing, but I'm ok with that.

I did make the miso soup from scratch, and finally, with the addition of kombu and bonito flakes (turned into dashi), it actually tasted RIGHT. Apparently few Japanese make dashi from scratch these days, and I have to wonder why, since it takes like 5 minutes - especially if you cheat and boil the kombu for 3 minutes instead of soaking it for half an hour in cold water (it tasted fine). Wierd. Anyway, I had the remains of a tub of shiro miso, fortunately, and vast stashes of seaweed, because I'm weird that way. I didn't have any tofu, unfortunately, so we just had plain wakame soup.

I also found that the Japanese often eat salmon lightly salt-cured, which I tried. I salted the small filet of spring that I'd bought pretty heavily - about twice what I'd put on just to cook it - wrapped it in the paper it came in and left it uncovered otherwise on a plate in the fridge overnight. Then to cook it, I stuck a dry small frypan under the broiler for ten minutes or so, lightly oiled the skin side of the salmon and stuck it skin-side down in the pan. I left it in the oven for maybe 5 minutes and when I took it out I put the pan on an already-hot burner to crisp the skin a little more. It was still slightly translucent in the middle, and it was sooooo good. I highly recommend this method for salmon.

I also steamed some greens (bok choy) and made a little dipping sauce for the mochi out of maple syrup, soy sauce, and miso. The mochi was definitely improved by this.

Overall it took less than an hour to put this together, and if I'd done some minimal prep the night before - put the kombu in the cold water for the soup, put the rice in the rice cooker, chopped and washed the veg - I think I could have got it down to about 30 minutes. Some of it of course is timing practice, too. But I think it's a weekend thing, not a weekday morning rush-breakfast.

Rowan looooved the miso soup and the salmon, though. These are quick and easy and may very well become breakfast staples. (Very small portions of salmon, btw - about 2 oz each.) And I suppose that even without the greens and the mochi, it's a pretty balanced breakfast since there is lots of seaweed in the miso soup. Better than, say, oatmeal. And it kept me going until lunchtime with no need for snacks, which was great. Stirling wasn't such a fan - I think I'm pushing things "denying" him breakfast cereal (which is evil) and this was too far out of his comfort zone. But Rowan and I liked it. (For the record, if Stirling wants breakfast cereal, he can buy it himself. I just won't. I did, however, make him granola yesterday too. )

Oh, and I kind of forgot the pickles. I HAD pickles - I made some quick radish pickles the other day, and they were lovely - and I put them in a bowl, and completely forgot about them on the counter. I ate a few afterwards, if that counts.

So, thumbs up for the Japanese-style breakfast. (And no, it wasn't my usual hardcore local fare, although much of the seaweed was local, the greens and the salmon were local, and the mochi and miso was *made* locally. I'm sure some kind of local adaptation for bonito could be made if I tried hard enough, but... there's a limit, y'know?)

101 uses for arugula

2009-05-19T19:11:00.002-07:00

Well, not really. I can think of 3 or 4, but I thought I'd post them since it is that time of year when so many people buy huge bags of arugula because it's all lovely and fresh and green and that first bite tastes so good.

Then they bring the bags home, find that their kids/husbands/wives won't eat the stuff, and it sits in the fridge, maybe decreasing by 10 leaves or so every time a salad is made, and eventually turns yellow and starts to smell iffy.

However, here's something you might not know: you don't HAVE to eat it raw. In fact, studies* have shown that children prefer most greens - including arugula - cooked. With lots of butter. Interestingly, many of the nutrients - especially vitamins - in greens are better absorbed in the presence of fats, so the butter is a good idea nutritionally, not just taste-wise.

So idea #1: quickly blanch the arugula, and toss with butter and balsamic vinegar. Delicious. (This works well for any greens, actually.)

Idea #2: pretend it's spinach.Arugula can also work very well as a spinach substitute. Any recipe that calls for cooked spinach will also work with cooked arugula. I actually prefer it to spinach, because it lacks that weird tooth-feel that spinach has.

Idea #3: add to spaghetti sauce. Just wash and toss in about 5 minutes before serving. As long as it's wilted, it's good to go.Frequently, I find that pasta sauces often go further if you add some greenery. Arugula is a good choice because it actually adds a bit of flavour, too, and it mitigates the cop-out feel of spaghetti night, since you're getting greenery into the kids and reducing the vegetable population in the fridge.

Idea #4: Risotto. Arugula lightens up a risotto nicely, making it feel more spring-like and fluffy. Just make a regular risotto with white wine and chicken stock, cook it a little dryer than normal, and add loads of coarsely chopped arugula and a few handfuls of grated asiago at the end. Serve when the arugula is fully wilted. Yummy.

*Ok, it was one study, and it was conducted at my house.

lavender tarts

2009-04-29T15:40:00.003-07:00

This is an adaptation of a very old family recipe for tarts that are called either egg tarts or vinegar tarts, depending on whom you talk to. Originally it was meant as a faux lemon tart recipe, as it came out of Nova Scotia back in the day when lemons weren't readily available.

You will need 24 small tart shells, or 12 large (muffin-sized) ones.

Filling (original recipe)

3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 tbsp apple cider vinegar
splash vanilla essence

Mix sugar and eggs but do not overmix to frothiness. Add vinegar and vanilla and mix to combine. Pour into tart shells and bake at 375F until tops are nicely browned.

Filling (fancy lavender version)

3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
3 tbsp or so lavender flowers

Before you even make the pastry, place the vinegar and lavender flowers in a small saucepan over low heat. Don't let it boil. Leave it there until you need it.

Once the pastry is made and the tart shells are ready, mix as above, except pass the vinegar through a sieve to remove the lavender flowers before you measure 3 tbsp for the mixture. If you have a tiny bit extra (it's hard to say how much the flowers will absorb) you can toss it in. If you have less than 3 tbsp, just add regular apple cider vinegar as needed.

Sprinkle the tops with a few dry lavender flowers before you put the tarts in the oven, and bake as above.

A more food-like alternative to creepy orange 'cheese' spread

2009-04-27T20:20:00.002-07:00

Since Sarah is not appropriately entertaining me on a daily basis with blog entries, I will create my own...

Who doesn't have fond memories of Cheeze Whiz? Ah, that wonderful orange goo that made celery sticks palatable as a child. Unfortunately, I still like to eat celery sticks and apple slices adorned with the horrid substance, an occasional habit that was rekindled after housesitting in a place that had some in the fridge. I finished off the jar and bought a replacement, and ate some of that too. Something about it is just yummy, but I hate to consume a product that likely has few ingredients found in nature and is manufactured by Kraft. Ugh, I genuinely feel shame when I buy it. Not that I eat a lot of the stuff, but probably every couple of years I get a jar and it lives in the fridge and gets slowly consumed.

Imagine my delight then, when I was at a friend's (of Japanese decent) parent's place for dinner, and she was mixing up a vegetable salad dressing of equal parts miso and mayonnaise. Upon tasting the dressing I exclaimed "That tastes like Cheeze Whiz!" which was met with disbelieving stares and that look that one gets when one is perceived as strange, a little pathetic, and hopefully not dangerous.

Skip forward almost a year...

I never did get around to buying myself some miso to try it out. I've had miso before and usually use a few tablespoons and then the rest of it sits in the fridge because it looks okay, but I don't really know how long it keeps so I daren't eat any more of it after the first few weeks. As fortune may have it, the place I am housesitting at now happens to have a tub of aka (red) miso and a big jar of mayonnaise. I mixed a few teaspoons of each and voila, exceptional Cheeze Whiz flavour (actually better than Cheeze Whiz), without the unnatural colour and unpronounceable ingredients. If you wanted to be a real superstar you could use homemade mayonnaise. One caveat - it is perhaps a bit more salty, but the flavour is quite intense so you don't need to glop it on.

So go ahead, try it. A childhood snack craving satisfied by something better tasting than the original and undoubtedly better for you.

spring!

2009-04-17T13:28:00.002-07:00

I found some local rhubarb at Red Barn today, which means that spring is officially here and at some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be a strawberry-rhubarb pie coming out of my oven. (Strawberries are from last year, I froze about 20 lbs of them and we've barely made a dent. Note for next year: more blueberries, less strawberries.)

There are loads of greens available now: chard, spinach, lettuces of all sorts, beet greens, arugula, kale & cabbage tops, leeks, spring onions, salad mixes. It's time to overdose on the fibre, vitamins C & K1, and whatever else is in those lovely green veggies! There are also eggs everywhere (I think this is the "egg moon" that Jessica Prentice talks about in "Full Moon Feast") and we got our milk this week for the first time in months. (Nell gave birth to a big strong healthy calf named Oliver last week.)

And finally, fresh chickens are back in the smaller shops! Cowichan Bay Farms chickens can be found at Red Barn and hopefully soon again at Pepper's, and Dan's Country Farm Market has Stonefield Farms chickens which are huge, and even more delicious than the Cowichan Bay Farms ones.

beef sorta-stroganoff

2009-03-18T08:03:00.002-07:00

I haven't posted a recipe in a while, and this was a fun one because Rowan helped a lot. With the mushrooms, anyhow.

Ingredients:

bit of steak, sliced thinly (this is easier if it's still partially frozen)
2 large portabello mushrooms (or equivalent mass of whatever mushrooms strike your child's fancy at the store. Most mushrooms you see in the grocery store come from the lower mainlaind and therefore count as local if you do the 100-mile radius thing. Or you can get fancy and get the Vancouver Island dried wild-harvested ones, which are tasty but not anything resembling cheap.)
1/2 an onion
about a cup of beef-like stock (mine is made with scraps and often contains things that aren't beef)
balsamic vinegar & olive oil (not local. You can get local, but you need major connections and a huge grocery budget.)
splash of red wine
loads of greenery (I used spinach, but mild chard, kale, beet greens, braising greens or most chinese veg would work. Just use lots, because they all cook down and you want texture. You might want to blanch the kale first if you use it.)
1/2 cup of either sour cream or creme fraiche (which is sour cream, only twice the cost and minus all the guar gum and stabilisers and crap - you can make it yourself for cheap, but only if you plan well and have a day to let it thicken.)

First have your toddler prepare the mushrooms. Little fingers are perfectly suited to peeling and removing the stems. Slice the mushrooms yourself. Put them in a bowl, whisk together the olive oil and vinegar, and coat the mushrooms with this. Toss to make sure every bit is covered, and let sit while you do the other stuff.

Slice the steak while a large sautée pan heats up. Add a bit of fat to the pan (good lard works best, but if you're still brainwashed by industrial agriculture, you'll be using canola oil.) Fry the steak quickly so it gets nice and brown, sprinkling lightly with salt as it cooks. Remove the steak, add some more fat to the pan, reduce the heat to med-low and put the onion (sliced) in. Cook until golden, turn the heat up to medium, and toss the mushrooms with all the marinade in. Cook until mushrooms are soft and the liquid has evaporated. Return steak to the pan, and deglaze with a splash of wine.

Once the wine has cooked off, add the stock. Bring it up to bubbling, then add the greenery. Stir and fold in the greenery until it's nicely cooked.

Add the creme fraiche, whisking to combine smoothly. Taste and season with salt and pepper as necessary. At this point you can turn the heat down and let the excess liquid evaporate to thicken the sauce while you enjoy a relaxing glass of wine and catch up on your e-mail, OR if you have a hungry family circling like sharks, you can mix a little stock with a bit of cornstarch and thicken the sauce quickly.

Serve over broad noodles or mashed potato. Or nothing, it's good as-is.

I almost feel guilty about living here

2009-03-13T20:57:00.004-07:00

I know most of the rest of Canada - and much of the US - is still buried under a pile of snow, so I almost feel bad posting this, but I expect I'll get over it.

March has hit and the local hothouses are starting to pump out deliciousness. Compared to 3 or 4 weeks ago when I was gleeful to get carrots, parsnip, kale and the odd rutabaga, today I bought all this:

What you see there is savoy cabbage, lettuce, chard, spinach, carrots, eggs, tomatoes (cherry & slicing) cucumbers, basil, kale, salad greens, green beans, beets, parsnips, kale, eggs and candied hazelnuts. (not in picture: boring packages of meat) This is food for 2 families, so divide it in half and that's about the amount of veggies we eat in a week.

I would be surprised if any of that was picked more than 24 hours ago. It's all beautiful, and what the hothouse stuff lacks in nutrition, it makes up in tender delicate deliciousness.

Oh, and those tomatoes? YUM.

(BTW, the reason I am posting pictures of my groceries is that certain people have complained that there are not enough pictures on my blog. I don't know what's more exciting, reading about groceries or seeing pictures. Either way, readers/viewers are advised to limit the amount of time they spend on this blog so they don't overdose on adrenaline or anything.)

Tomato countdown

2009-03-06T17:34:00.003-08:00

Sun Wing opened this week. Sadly, I missed the few cherry tomatoes they had today, but I put an order in for next week so in 6 days and 10 hours I will get to eat tomatoes again (and, of course, exercise some will power and bring some home for Rowan rather than scarfing the lot in the car.) I will be sure to actually TELL her about the tomatoes before I go so as to remove that temptation.

I freely admit that this is not technically seasonal eating. These tomatoes come out of a hothouse. However, they are pesticide-free, and the hothouse is owned and run by a local family, and darn it, I want tomatoes.

In other news, I found Saltspring Island mussels at Pepper's today, and since I am family-less for dinner I am having mussels steamed in beer with lots of carmelized onions and bacon, and a nice spicy salad of Dave's winter greens. Now that's dinner. (And total cost: approx $5, just in case you think I'm sneaking luxury dinners in.)

and now, a pretty good article written by me

2009-03-05T20:49:00.001-08:00

Heh, I totally forgot that I'd written this article for the Beacon when I put up the last post about the MSN article. But it makes for a nice symmetry of post titles. Anyway, go read my article! I actually like it, a month after I wrote it, which is rare.

an excellent article not written by me

2009-02-22T20:48:00.002-08:00

I have crappy Vista on my computer, which means IE regularly malfunctions (note to self: get around to installing Firefox). I find that it's more likely to run properly if another Microsoft program launches it, so I've been randomly selecting links that come up on my Windows Live thing that launches when Instant Messenger starts up. Today there was one that read "How safe is microwave popcorn?" This intrigued me. My initial response would be "It's practically toxic waste, don't eat it." Imagine my surprise when I read the article and it actually agreed with me! And totally scooped my microwave popcorn methodology, too. Yay MSN.

Now I'm going to go read about the 7 hottest Oscar night dresses EVAH because that's what I was going to click on before I saw the popcorn link, and I'm curious.

a little sign of spring

2009-02-20T14:37:00.003-08:00

The Red Barn Market on West Saanich had local lettuce, spinach and mizuna today, all fresh and lovely. Hothouse-grown, of course, but still nice to see (and eat!) In a few more weeks, Sun Wing will open and we can have tomatoes again. Drool. And Dave found a wee cache of forgotten hidden carrots this morning, so I am munching on sweet delicious carrotty goodness now. Mmmm.

Your Guide To Local Shopping

2009-02-15T20:53:00.003-08:00

As per request, here's a rundown of what I buy where.

Vegetables & Eggs

Madrona Farm - Blenkinsop Road, 1/2 km past Galey heading north, on the east side of the road. They just had kale, parsnips, leeks and garlic this week but you know, you can do a lot with those. Come March there will be more leafy stuff. Open Wed-Sat at 11, don't be late.

Dan's Country Farm Market - Oldfield Rd, just before Oldfield Orchard going north. By some miracle, they still have local carrots, cabbage, leeks, beets, turnips, brussel sprouts, and celeriac. They also carry local potatoes, onions, garlic, squashes, apples, kiwis, eggs, chicken (sometimes, but not til May now - it's fantastic and well worth getting) and frozen chicken sausage (which I don't like, but whatever) and honey (Babe's). They have some frozen soft fruits (raspberries at the moment) and fresh apple juice. Not everything is local, but the local stuff is labeled. Also, delicious baked yummies, which are not local, but are tasty. Prices are so good, you'll wonder why you ever bought produce at Thrifty's. Open Wed-Sun regular hours. In summer they have loads and loads of everything including fruit.

Red Damsel Farm - West Saanich Rd, just before The Red Barn. It's on the left, there's a sign. At the moment they just have eggs, but they're really good, even if they are $5/doz (that's still cheaper than comparable eggs in grocery stores.) Open Fri-Sat at the moment. In summer and fall they have produce, which is varied and good.

Food Roots Pocket Markets - see website for locations and times (note: there is one at the new Fol Epi/Caffe Fantastico location at Dockside Green that is not listed on Saturday mornings.) They have local collards, kale, chard, beets, turnips, apples & pears, eggs, plus other goodies. Not everything is local, but the people running them are pretty knowledgeable about where everything comes from so you just have to ask. It's a great concept and it's nice to support this organization.

Meats

Red Barn at Mattick's Farm - local beef, lamb, pork (Hertel's, so not completely organic and dubious ethically, but not going to kill you AND they do roasts with the rind on), chicken, duck. Also non-local bison and elk. The sausages are good. Check the freezer before you look at the fresh stuff, there are often very good deals in there. The butcher will be able to tell you what's pastured and what's not. Sometimes they switch to Alberta beef so you have to keep your eyes open, but it seems in the winter they use Quist Farms beef.

Choux Choux Charcuterie - local pork products, including bacon and ham (check the labels to see what's made in-store). They use Sloping Hill pork which is not only local, but ethically, healthily raised and good for you. They have rabbits (frozen) from Saanich but all their duck is Fraser Valley farmed. You can get lard as well, and sometimes eggs, which are good but overpriced. If you're feeling rich you can order grass-fed beef and venison through them too.

Pepper's Market - Cadboro Bay Village. They carry Cowichan Bay Farms chicken, Farmhouse Chicken (which is processed in the same facility, but is factory-farmed if that bothers you), and Sloping Hill Pork (check labels, it isn't always Sloping Hill.)

Market On Yates - best selection of local cheeses, plus the really good Jerseyland Farms unhomogenized yogurt, which is not quite local but makes up for it by being really delicious.

Ambrosio Markets - Cadboro Bay, Oak Bay, Cook St. Village, James Bay. Local produce when they can get it, they try their best. Come March there will be local hothouse tomatoes & cukes, loads of local stuff, especially soft fruits, in the summer. Decent prices but not as cheap as buying from the farms.

Grains

Plenty Epicurean Pantry - Fort St between Vancouver & Cook. They carry some of the TrueGrain stuff from Cowichan Bay. Apparently you can also buy direct from TrueGrain.

Other stuff: I buy Island Farms or Avalon Organic butter from Thrifty's, plus Island Farms homogenized milk for Stirling's tea and coffee cream for me. I also sometimes buy cheese there for convenience, they have some of the Natural Pastures cheeses and we really like those.

Last year we went halfsies with a friend on some pork and a side of beef. It's almost gone, so I'll need to look for something along those lines again when it's available. I will keep the blog posted. I liked the pork we got but the beef wasn't great, it was from an animal that was too young and hadn't been aged enough and didn't have much flavour - also I think it had been frozen too slowly because it seemed to lose an inordinate amount of juice when thawed. But, it's edible, and cheap, and conveniently located in the freezer.

good vegetables, bad vegetables

2009-02-15T19:01:00.002-08:00

I found a bag of brussel sprouts (local, purchased from Dan's Country Farm Market several weeks ago) in the bottom of my fridge and decided to cook them up tonight. I wasn't expecting much from them because, well, they'd been in there for a while and Dan's has stopped selling them on the stalk, probably because the stalks didn't fare too well in the snow and they look a bit grotty now. Also, I think my fridge is a bit cold and some of them were actually sort of frozen. I was expecting something akin to the brussel sprouts I cooked at Christmas, kind of bitter and nasty. Thus, it was a very pleasant surprise when they turned out beautifully, sweet and tender and mild.

I don't know what has to be done to brussel sprouts in order to get them to taste as bad as the ones in grocery stores. I mean, what more abuse could you put brussel sprouts through than plucking them from their stalk, sticking them in a plastic bag, putting them in a cooler unit in a store for a few days, then dragging them home and sticking them in a too-cold fridge for at least two weeks before finally cooking them? Or is it just that brussel sprouts grown here just taste better than the ones grown in the Fraser Valley? Hard to say, but I'm sticking with Saanich brussel sprouts from now on.

And yes, this will absolutely be the last post about brussel sprouts. For this year.

just in case you hadn't heard

2009-02-06T22:47:00.002-08:00

If its negative effect on your insulin pathways, support for unsustainable agriculture and just plain non-foodness weren't enough to keep you away from high-fructose corn syrup, here's another reason:

MAY CONTAIN MERCURY. It seems the chance is about 50-50, which is not good odds for something like this.

Just don't eat it, k? It's bad all over. Also, it never, ever shows up in Canada labeled as high-fructose corn syrup. Instead, they call it glucose-fructose. Check your shelves, and ditch the stuff with glucose-fructose in it. Mercury isn't one of those things you want to mess with. Your brain and nervous system will thank you.

when life hands you toranges...

2009-02-01T20:41:00.002-08:00

... you make torangeade, then you make tarts. Because you need something to entertain the child for half an hour until bedtime.

Toranges are apparently exclusive to Thrifty Foods and not produced anywhere in the world other than the Buck citrus orchards. There is a good reason for this: they taste like crap. Like lemons, only without the refreshing zing - just kind of bitter and sour. Also, they cost about 5 times more than lemons.

I am thinking they were a mistake. I should have been more suspicious when the cashier told me that the produce guys wouldn't give samples to them when they asked. My bet is that they are a failed experiment from Buck that Thrifty's is obligated to sell because they're contractually bound to buy their entire crop. Which, generally is a concept I approve of, so I don't think I will actually be complaining to Thrifty's.

Anyway, I bought one because it looked like a pomelo and I like those, and I haven't seen any this year. Won't be doing that again. I was still making faces several minutes after taking a bite.

I ended up juicing it, and I dissolved some honey, diluted it, and mixed the diluted honey-water with the torange juice to make torangeade. It's ok. I can drink it. I also used 5 or 6 tablespoons in tart filling - the tarts I usually make with apple cider vinegar. I cut the sugar a bit and used more vinegar substitute, and they turned out pretty well. Here's an approximation of the recipe:

24 small tart shells

3 eggs
6 tbsp torange juice
1 cup sugar
splash vanilla

Beat eggs lightly, add sugar, torange juice & vanilla. Whisk just to combine, put in tart shells, bake at 375F until brown on tops.

food privileges

2009-01-22T21:11:00.003-08:00

I finished reading Raj Patel's book Stuffed and Starved last week while I was in Whitehorse. A lot of it was not entirely new to me, in concept if not details, but it still made me think a lot. The main point of the book is that what the globalization of the world's food supply has done has been to concentrate the power, money and means in the realm of food into a virtual bottleneck of wholesalers, processors and suppliers, leaving producers and consumers largely at their mercy, and ensuring that the only concerns in food production, on a large scale, are yields, cost of purchase and cost of final sale, and the greatest possible difference between the latter two. In other words, profit. Sustainability is so not even on the radar, and the fun new thing is Monsanto, who is in bed with everyone including food distributors and governments and thus holds a big old virtual club over all the producers' heads... and Monsanto, as we all know, is pretty keen on the GMO/pesticide combinations. Wholesalers keep driving down prices, Monsanto comes in saying "wellllll if you plant OUR stuff, you can squeeze an extra hundred pounds per acre (or whatever)" and what choice does the farmer have? Plant the GMO, or watch his family starve - because there's only one buyer for his stuff. That's what a bottleneck does, and that's what the globalized system has done. (Patel also points out the really horribly shocking suicide rates for farmers in developing countries, and if that doesn't shake you a bit then you have no soul.)

Well duh, it's a big old "laissez-faire" system after all - except it really isn't, since governments, especially ours and that one a bit further south keep pumping money into grain crops, which incidentally have about the highest profit margins for processors - and the lowest level of sustainability. The only thing keeping soils only remotely fertile is rotating with soy, which has the side effect of pumping OUR diets full of the stuff in ways that are barely foodlike, and of upping the protein content in animal feed to the point that they can be churned out bigger, faster and less healthily than ever before. Yay.

Anyway. You should read the book, it's very illuminating, especially Patel's analysis of how food aid has been used as a very strategic weapon directed at the developing world, and why ever-increasing amounts of food available in the developed world mean ever-increasing amounts of poverty in the developing world.

The main thought that I was left with at the end of it was that actually being able to choose what you eat is, in our world, a privilege enjoyed by very few, even those who actually believe that they do choose. Indian peasants, for example, know that they don't have much of a choice - they eat what rice and vegetables they can afford to not sell. But North American consumers often think they have a choice. After all, they walk into a grocery store and there are thousands of products to choose from. The thing is, all those products were chosen (or forced by price issues) by whoever runs the grocery store (and ultimately, those are very very few people), and the choices available to THOSE people are limited by the supply chains that they're linked into, and the people who actually grew the products had no choice about what they grew, who they bought the seeds from, and what price they got for their crops.

Moreover, most of the products in the "middle" of the grocery store consist mainly of 3 ingredients: corn, soy and wheat, and most, if not all of the meat and dairy also consists of those things too, only second-hand. In the produce section, there may be some variety in species, but the origin of everything is likely to be wherever is cheapest to produce things. In our grocery stores, that's Mexico and California (also Mexico. Don't fool yourself thinking that produce from California is produced by Americans earning fair wages. It's virtually all grown by impoverished Mexicans only possibly legally employed by huge corporations (the same ones that operate in actual Mexico) that pay absolute crap. With no health benefits or compensation for pesticide-related illness.)

Moreover, grocery stores evolved in a manner that effectively trained consumers how to shop in the most consuming way. My own mother refuses to go in the grocery store (granted, only on "old people's day") without going up and down every single aisle, regardless of what she actually needs. Many people - myself included - try to fool themselves that they are immune to the display tactics and marketing, but we all occasionally (or not so occasionally) fall prey to the lure of a new product, a new flavour, temptingly placed RIGHT in our way as we make a dash just for the milk. Which, incidentally, is why dairy cases are always at the back of the store - because that's what most people "dash" in for.

But the thing is, I don't need to go into the grocery store every week. I actually have other options AND I know about them, and how to use them. I have a freezer full of meat obtained from local farms, a local-purchasing small butcher and my fabulously awesome moose-hunting sister (with help from my husband). I can, and do, buy most of my vegetables from local farms. We eat relatively few grains - I buy a loaf of bread from a local bakery once every couple of weeks, organic oatmeal every couple of months, and I keep some organic (local if I can get it) flour on hand if we neeeeeed treats. The milk that Rowan and I drink comes from our cow. We froze a pile of fruit last summer, and we can still get local apples, pears and kiwi fruit. I have a multitude of egg sources, and Choux Choux makes bacon from up-island pigs. I do even forage occasionally, from parks and my own garden.

I'm not a complete purist; Stirling doesn't get the good milk for his tea, and I do buy Buck Brand oranges in-season from Thrifty's (the blood oranges are excellent). Occasionally a package of chips or a cookie from Bubbie Rose's will find their way into our house, or a piece of fruit leather or a package of Baby Bels will be required as a bribe. About once a month we'll eat pasta. But largely, we eat local.

And I KNOW how damned lucky we are to even be able to do that. Isn't that crazy??? That MOST people in the richest country in the world cannot be fed by their surroundings.

In Whitehorse, by contrast, there is a farmer's market that runs during the summer months. That's pretty much June, July and August. If you're savvy, you can buy local meat or go out and shoot it yourself. Eggs you can get if you know the right people. Vegetables in the middle of winter? Either you're the world's most amazing gardener (aka my late father) and you can grow enough to fill the freezer and the root cellar to get you through the winter, or you hit the Superstore. Grains? Well, my sister (as previously mentioned) grew a cup of quinoa, and I think some people are experimenting with rye. The potato crop in the territory largely failed last year. Could you live on home-grown and wild food, eschewing grains, getting your vitamin C from cranberries scrounged from beneath the snow, living out of your freezer and losing ten or twenty pounds between September and May? Well sure. But why would you, when your next-door-neighbour is out munching Doritos as he tinkers with his snowmobile?

This is where the other part of food privilege comes in: knowledge. I'm coming to realize that I have it good not only because I live somewhere that I can get a lot of good, ethically produced food that I don't pay too much for and the producer gets a fair price for - I'm also blessed to have been raised by people who firstly gave a crap about what they ate, secondly knew a LOT about food and nutrition and thirdly had the means, will and ability to do most of it themselves.

I posted a while ago on a discussion board about how sick I was of all the slavish adhering to the dubious wisdom of food gurus and nutritional studies and scientific research, blah de blah blah and why couldn't people just eat good sensible food, listen to their own bodies and realize that nutritional science was reductionist and limited and etc. etc... it made sense, what I wrote - but what I got in response was a bunch of people saying "ok. But we have NO CLUE what even constitutes good sensible food - we were raised by people who thought WonderBread was healthy because it had vitamins in it - we don't know what it feels like, to be healthy - we have no choice but to trust someone or something, because we can't trust our instincts."

It follows, from this, that looking outside a grocery store for food is so outside the box for most people that it's approaching unthinkable. Food comes from a grocery store - end of story. And that, unfortunately, is where all the food revolutions will end, I think... in the space of three or four generations, the entire developed (and, increasingly, developing) world has been trained to look in only one place. People will bemoan the cost - both in dollars, and in ecological harm - for buying salad greens from California in nasty plastic clamshell packaging - but they will never question either the need for salad greens in the first place OR that they must obtain them from the grocery store. And, on their way home, they will no doubt (given that they live here, anyway) pass hundreds of pounds of perfectly edible, tasty greens in parks, common areas and relatively clean roadsides, just sitting there, loaded with vitamins, minerals, and flavour, and completely free and sustainable. But the their first thought if someone suggests picking them will be "Ew, what if a dog peed on it?"- completely forgetting the whole e-coli-spinach fiasco of barely a year ago that resulted from the very common practise of spraying "organic" crops with the run-off from factory-farmed animals, of which pee was by far the least offensive part.

They'll buy bread made from GMO grains containing GMO canola or soy oil and all kinds of dough conditioners and stabilizers and preservatives because the words "WHOLE GRAINS" are splattered all over the package, while never considering that bread need not be actually packaged, preserved, marketed - or even eaten at all.

Don't even get me started on WalMart's approach to organic foods.

I don't know if I have a solution to this. Haul kids off to local farms whenever possible, then point out to them that NONE of the food they saw growing will ever see the inside of a grocery store? Start leading grocery-shopping field trips for other household food purchasers? (This has actually been suggested to me...) I just don't know. I don't know how to make people care about food. Or, how to think about food in a way that doesn't simply serve the huge corporations.

Maybe, slowly, the people like Michael Pollan and Raj Patel and Barbara Kingsolver who keep nattering on about this will sink in. Maybe Barack Obama will have a spine and yank the corn subsidies in the States, and Harper or whoever else is in charge here will follow suit with the wheat ones here. That would go a LONG way to reforming our food. I'm not necessarily against subsidies, but for crying out loud - CORN??? Does something that makes junk food even cheaper really need subsidizing? Subsidize diversified farms. Heck, completely bankroll corn farmers as they transition to something a little more healthy and sustainable. But stop with the damn corn.

I think that's enough for now. I guess the main point of this post is: grocery stores suck. And most people have no choice, either by virtue of circumstance, their own mental worldview or both, but to use them, and because of that, the world is pretty doomed.

a polite and respectful dialogue between omnivores and vegans

2008-12-30T16:16:00.002-08:00

Well, one can hope.

The comments section in the "vegan cupcakes are stalking me" post was getting too long, and I think that my self-indulgent use of hyperbole was probably not helping my arguments any, so I'm going to give it all a take 2 here, play nice, and address the arguments that MediaMer put forward. It would be easy to just shrug and say "well, we can agree to disagree" but there's not much else to post about now except how much supermarket produce sucks and how I am counting the hours until I can buy real vegetables again (approximately 12, if they can pick anything tomorrow morning) which frankly isn't that interesting so we might as well tackle this.

First, for Adrienne - I have tasted the vegan cupcakes, they are not good - very bland and sweet - and sugar is WAY worse for you than meat, I'm pretty sure even the most mainstream medical professionals would agree on that.

On to why I don't think veganism is a good idea:

MediaMer wrote: B12: Agreed, this is a vitamin you would need to supplement on a vegan diet. But you know what, docs recommend that we all take a daily multi-vitamin. And since that applies to omnivores and vegans alike, it's hard to use it as a case for eating meat.

Does it not strike you as kind of wrong, in a very fundamental sense, that everyone's diet should be so insufficient for basic health that we need to supplement with pills? To me, that says more that the diets most people eat are deficient, vegan diets a bit more so. That doesn't equate to "so we should all go vegan". What we SHOULD do is look at WHY our diets are deficient. I'm pretty sure that the main reason is the way food is produced - industrial, efficiency-based rather than quality-based agriculture and manufacturing. Our soils have been steadily depleted since industrial agriculture began, stripped of minerals. The plants that grow in those soils, and the animals that eat those plants, are themselves deficient and unable to either take up soil nutrients that aren't there, or create the vitamins and nutrients from those nutrients. Moreover, use of chemical fertilizers instead of compost and manure removes bacteria from the soil that the plants need, and that humans and animals require for our own guts to work at their peak efficiency. More on industrial agriculture, evils thereof, later.

2. Complete protein: How about Quinoa? Buckwheat? Amaranth? Beans & rice? It's naive to assert that you can only find complete protein in animal products.

While it's true that certain grains and legumes can, either on their own or in combination, provide the right ratio of essential amino acids, it's not all about the protein. You have to consider what goes along with the protein, and how those things interact. Let's do a side-by-side comparison of quinoa vs. chicken leg - and bear in mind that the only nutrient data I have to work with is the USDA nutrient database, which is no doubt based on industrially farmed foods, not organic for the quinoa or pastured for the chicken. I think it's safe to assume that mineral content and some vitamin content (for ex. vit E in the quinoa, and A in the chicken) would be higher if that were the case.

1 cup quinoa (185 g) contains: 222 calories, 8 g protein, 3.5 g fat, 39 g carbohydrate of which 5g are fibre and 32g are pure starch. It also contains 31 mg calcium (2% RDA) and 2.76 mg iron (15% female RDA). Vitamin-wise, we're looking at no vitamin C, D, B5, B12 or K; vit B1 (13% RDA), B2 (14%), B3 (3%), B6 (11%), folate (20%), vitA (<1%), vitE (23%).

1 cup chicken leg (140 g) contains: 325 calories, 36g protein, 18 g fat, 0 g carbohydrate. It also contains 17 mg calcium, 1.86 mg iron. Vitamin-wise, we have no vit C; B1(6% RDA), B2(17%), B3(53%), B5 (16%), B6 (35%), folate (2.5%), choline (20%), betaine (7.4 mg, no RDA exists), B12 (18%), A (5%), E (5%), K (7%).

While quinoa has more minerals than the chicken, bear in mind that chickens contain bones that can and should be boiled into broth using a mild acidifying agent to leach calcium. Bone broth has very high levels of calcium. Additionally, the iron in chicken is heme iron, which is a lot more bioavailable than non-heme iron, although the bioavailability of non-heme iron can be enhanced with the ingestion of citrus fruits at the same time, you would still not get the benefit of all the iron in plant sources. Also (and most vegans would know this and take advantage of it) grains contain phytates that block germination until neutralized; they also block mineral absorption in the intestines. In order to neutralize phytates grains need to be soaked in a mildly acidic solution or sprouted, otherwise the minerals in them and any food ingested at the same time are not readily available to the body.

Aside from the minerals, the chicken provides more of everything except starch. Protein-wise, assuming that the average person needs about a gram of protein per kg body weight (give or take, depending on activity level), an average 68 kg person would have fulfilled more than half their entire day's requirement for protein with that one cup of chicken, plus they'd be much further ahead in most of the vitamins. The person eating the quinoa would still need an additional 60 g of protein - more than 7 cups of quinoa.

And what about that starch? Humans don't really need it. Back in the good old days when we were all hunter-gatherers, we didn't get a lot of starch in our diets. We were lean, and by most estimations far healthier than we are today. Of course, we didn't have fun antibiotics and life was a good deal more hazardous, but by all acounts hunter-gatherers had it good, health-wise. The addition of a large proportion of starch in our diets resulted in more body fat, but not better health. Unfortunately that resulted in a lot more people, generally, which kind of got us stuck with agriculture. And wealth disparity, and all sorts of other crap. But that's a whole 'nother topic.

Meats are the most nutrient-dense way of getting protein and fat. If you rely on grain or legume sources for protein, you will get a lot of surplus starch and not quite enough vitamins (and possibly minerals, although this is more likely a problem with depleted soil and not inherent to grains and legumes.) Eating meat leaves more room for vegetables, and all their myriad and lovely healthy vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

Also I would like to point out that most omnivores eat WAAAAYYY too much meat. A couple eggs and a small serving of meat is plenty per day. You do not need bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham sandwich for lunch and a 12 oz steak for dinner. If you eat enough meat-based protein, but not too much, and fill the rest of your daily food needs with vegetables and fruits, you are rockin', health-wise.

Saturated fat: Major medical organizations (CDC, AHA, WHO, for starters) have repeatedly shown that consumption of saturated fats can contribute to prostate and breast cancers, dangerous cholesterol levels, and increased risks of cardiovascular disease and stroke. I'm not quoting the Wisalla Times; we're talking Harvard University studies. We should all be reducing our intake of these types of fats. Yes, vegan sources stem from tropical oils. But the carbon footprint of supplying coconut oil in the quantise that folks would healthily be consuming is FAR less than the environmental impact of factory farming.

And I'm not talking about factory farming. Couldn't agree with you more, factory farming is bad bad bad AND evil. Also, those highly esteemed Harvard University studies are based on - yup - factory-farmed meat. Which, in addition to being bad for the environment, is also bad for YOU. The omega 3:6 ratio of factory-farmed beef is completely off (something like 1:10 instead of 1:2) and the sheer amount of saturated fat in factory-farmed beef is just way overboard. Also, consider that fats concentrate environmental toxins and hormones and whatnot, and it's easy to see how the fats of animals that are pumped full of crap are not a healthy thing to consume. That having been said, I know of NO studies that look at saturated fat consumption while also controlling for not only carbohydrate intake but also individual tolerance for carbohydrates, which varies considerably, and the whole cholesterol thing is a big bag of modern-medicine-mighta-messed-it-up-ness.

When you spoke of "running screaming from the problems of animal welfare," were you categorizing my efforts or just expressing your frustration with the vegan community as a whole? I fail to see how discussing the merits of a vegan lifestyle is equated with running for the hills. If I eschew animal products in support of my beliefs of animal rights that makes me ignorant? If I engage in a discussion on your opposing beliefs that's sticking my head in the sand? Surely, you can't be suggesting that the only way to support animal welfare is by eating them!

I was more frustrated with the vegan community as a whole. And, perhaps I am misunderstanding, but I am under the impression that vegans are opposed to animal husbandry altogether. If the vegan community were to prevail in this, thousands of species, subspecies and breeds would disappear - and there is a growing understanding among many ethical philosophers that while individual interests apply to animals, species and population interests may also apply too, and to make it worse, these are species and breeds that WE created. It's just not right to let them fade out of existence because we changed our morality. But basically, what I object to is the notion that a life that ends with getting eaten by a human is not worth living, and that it's wrong to create it in the first place.

I know there are vegans who believe we are not, biologically, omnivores, and if you believe that then there's no amount of science and logic that will sway you so you might as well bail out now. But if you accept that we ARE omnivores, and veganism is an ethical choice, then why? I don't think anyone is going to argue that a bear is acting unethically by munching on baby deer. By our standards, their slaughter methods are frequently cruel, but they have to eat. They have a right, by virtue of their biology, to eat other animals. Why wouldn't humans? Are we so different? We have empathy, to be sure - but we also have the capacity to provide quick and pain-free deaths and lives free of suffering. To be honest, I think the queasiness that vegans - actually, most Westerners - feel in saying "I have the right to take life and eat it" stems from a notion that unlike the rest of God's creation, we are not only imperfect, and outside of nature, but deservedly so. Unlike the innocent and perfect bear, we know too much of mortality to cause it without inflicting irreparable harm on our souls, and since we can demonstrably live without eating meat, we SHOULD.

It's a nice, easy solution. We feel sorry for the animals, we don't think we have a right to kill them by virtue of our own fear of death, so we stop eating them. There are only 2 problems with that. First, when we stop eating them (or using their wool or eggs) there ceases to be a reason for their existence, and I still maintain that existence is preferable to nonexistance. Secondly, there is ample evidence that *we* suffer without meat, health-wise. Too much starch, too few nutrients.

There's also something about veganism that strikes me as just wrong on a deeper level. I think it's the notion that it's better to remove ourselves completely from our 'natural' place in the food chain than it is to repair our relationship with that food chain. Of course, our place hasn't been natural for 10,000 years. During that time we've been taking our natural habitat and transforming it into agricultural land, farming it intensively, and trading health for reproductive ability (higher body fat % due to starch intake = less space between babies). We've outgrown the capacity of the planet to support us in our natural habitat. But going to an all-plant diet is not going to fix that, and especially not if we take animals out of the equation entirely, because sustainable intensive agriculture isn't possible without the fertilizer that they can provide. Moreover, there is SO much land that's grazeable but not arable. Rotational grazing leaves grassland healthier than no grazing, and can even restore badly eroded areas. And, it can be a sustainable source of protein, from an area that left alone would be barren. We don't HAVE to be a destructive force. I think one of the saddest legacies of industrialization is that there are now several generations of humans who have a deep-seated belief that they are, no matter what they do, a heavy burden on the earth.

Furthermore, how to you define welfare? The state of well-being, happiness, contentment? Killing a living being does not make great strides in fostering these qualities of life. You suggest that raising animals humanely is "far from the worst fate an organism can expect." But how is killing humane? [...]It's illogical to suggest that my actions would represent great morality - simply because there are worse things I could have done, like locked her up in a cage the entire time she was alive. But that's exactly what you're suggesting. Because we give cows fresh air, it's represents model ethical behavior to then slaughter them? What?You assertion that "not existing would be considerably worse" is bizarre. I'm not doing a chicken a favour by letting it roam around in a field and then slaughtering it. That doesn't make me a humanitarian. I'm not saving it from the fate of non-existence. I'm killing it. Again, you're not saving an animal by killing it. You're killing an animal by killing it.

It's not about death, it's about life. Death follows life. Nothing follows nothing. If you knew that you were going to die, say in an automobile accident, when you were 40, would you prefer just not to go through the bother of living? If you were 20? 10? Life is always worth it, no matter how it ends, and death is pretty darned inevitable, whether you're a cow or a human. But those two years or so of living contentedly munching up grass, hanging out with your cow friends, they have meaning, in the grand scheme of things. Just because it ends doesn't mean it isn't worth it. Even Peter Singer, when interviewed by Michael Pollan, admitted that it may well be preferable for domestic animals to live their happy little lives and be eaten than not exist at all. Peter Singer! What more do you want???? Oh, no death, right. Um, good luck with that.

Maybe it would be helpful if you stopped looking at the world as linear, and changed your view to be more circular. Every living thing on the planet absolutely DEPENDS on death. Death is not this huge, evil, dark force, it's part of being. Life morphs into death morphs into life. We're the only species that gets all worked up about it. I'm not advocating a *casual* attitude towards death, mind you - but a respectful, grateful, unfearful one.

And you can wax poetic about the millenia-old tradition of killing as long as you like, but at the end of the day it doesn't make you Mother Theresa - it makes you suited for a career in marketing. Slavery is an ancient institution, too. Let's bring that back! Oh, and miscegenation! And let's not forget women's suffrage. They couldn't vote until 1920 in the States, right? So the wisdom of precedence *must* indicate that our old ways of thinking were clearly superior and morally correct.

It wasn't so much the wisdom of precedence as much as the "we made this bed and we should lie in it." Interestingly, all the other examples of practices you cite have to do with human-human interactions. (I'm assuming, too that you meant anti-miscegenation... because I have quite happily indulged in miscegenation. The result is very cute, and totally legal, I assure you.)

What I'm talking about is human-animal interactions. These are fundamentally different; to suggest otherwise is anthropomorphism. We have a responsibility to these animals that we created; it's a completely different problem. You can't discredit an argument of ongoing responsibility simply by bringing up past injustices that are completely unrelated. That's like going to your bank and saying that they should forgive your loan because some Swiss bank with the same parent company took deposits from the Nazis.

Look, I appreciate the fact that you condone eating locally grown meat in moderate amounts. While I disagree, I can see your point of view from an environmental and health standpoint. Yet, it's a system that's lacks the scalability required to feed the current population of our planet. You can't feed 6.6 BILLION people by raising chickens and cows in your backyard. While that model of animal agriculture may have supported the small towns of our past, and may keep a business like Polyface Farms alive, it's killing the planet of our future. The water and land requirements of growing enough grain to feed animals will always outweigh the resources required to just grow grains and vegetables.

So, you must have missed the part about Polyface Farms where it's producing more food per acre - by weight - than the most efficient industrial monocropping, be it grains or vegetables. And, a good portion of that food is healthy protein and fat, which reduces the overall amount of food that people need. It's very management-intensive, and requires a lot of skill, something we've been carefully breeding out of farmers. But it IS scalable, just not in the way you've been conditioned to think. There wouldn't be vast Polyface farms covering the land, there would be vast NUMBERS of Polyface farms. It would be more expensive, and it would take a LOT more manpower. (On the other side of things, we can call that "employment".) But, it would also take less fuel, produce more healthful food, and preserve instead of eroding our soil. (Polyface doesn't produce just meat, it produces loads of veg too.) With the political will (which frankly I'm not optimistic about) it could certainly be done.

And, most importantly, ANIMALS SHOULD NOT EAT GRAINS. Except chickens, and then not nearly as much as are typically stuffed into the poor things. The Polyface animals eat hardly any grain, they eat grass. Again, you're confusing the argument against meat with the argument against factory farming. NOT the same thing.

In the end, I don't believe that 6 billion people can be fed for very much longer on grains and vegetables, the way we're doing it. It takes vast inputs of chemical fertilizers, and that style of agriculture just can't last. The Polyface style - starting with grass, and animals, and their manure - IS sustainable, for most of our current farmland. In other areas, different things will work. Urban agriculture. We have a small lot, but we could easily raise chickens enough for much of our meat and egg needs (our landlords used to get most of their eggs from a mere 5 chickens in the back yard, which could support more.) Goats, in managed grazing on marginal land. Reindeer ranching in the far north. Small self-sufficient holdings instead of cash crops. How much land is wasted on corn production? Tobacco? But however you look at it, small-scale agriculture is the only way to sustainable feed the planet, and small-scale agriculture NEEDS animals in some way.

I am tired, this post is too long, and if you made it this far, you're a champ, vegan or no. And I'm sure, too, that neither of us is trotting out anything NEW in the argument and we're both bashing our heads against some proverbial brick walls. But that's what the internet is for, right?

buy fresh, buy local, actually choke down your brussel sprouts

2008-12-27T21:31:00.003-08:00

I got a good lesson I didn't really need in why buying fresh and local is so important this Christmas. Several weeks ago, I offered to make the brussel sprouts for Christmas dinner, on the vague grounds that Rowan liked the way I did them and I didn't want her turned off brussel sprouts. Then the weather gods turned nasty and dumped a couple feet of snow on Victoria, and Dave's great plan to open the farm stand on Christmas Eve got similarly buried. You can't pick brussel sprouts if you can't find them, apparently. He did offer to let me wade through the fields and pick my own, but somehow I didn't find the time to do that.

So I went to Pepper's, which is otherwise a very nice little grocery store, and bought several pounds of "BC" brussel sprouts which, aside from not being attached to a stalk, looked fairly fresh and decent-like.

I cooked them up in my usual way, sauteed with bacon (grease included) and then steam-fried with apple juice. Normally this produces lovely sweet tasty brussel sprouts, but not this time - they were as godawful as I remember brussel sprouts from my childhood (sorry mum). Ugh. Blech. I couldn't believe some of them were actually eaten.

Lessons learned:

1) Do not ever buy brussel sprouts from a grocery store.
2) Rowan's love of brussel sprouts is in no way due to my amazing cooking skills. Dave gets ALL the credit, and he can probably take most of it for all the other veggies she likes.

vegan cupcakes are stalking me

2008-11-28T18:31:00.002-08:00

The other night I had to go hang out at an uber-trendy craft fair downtown because the kind folks who organized it (Erin from Rebel Rebel clothing store) were running it as "admission by donation to the Madrona Farm campaign" so we the farm fundraising team decided it would be a good idea to be there, to answer questions and get people to give the gift of food security this christmas instead of trendy little gifties that would get worn/used/played with once or twice then freecycled 6 months later. Turns out, people don't go to craft fairs to buy anything OTHER than trendy little gifties, so we didn't have much success with that, but it was heartening to see the pile of entry-donations accumulating. Thanks ever so much, Rebel Rebel!!!

BUT. We got parked next to the vegan cupcake ladies. I've ranted about the cupcakes before on my other blog, but I think it deserves a longer mention here because they are attempting, after all, to be food. They are not food, and in fact I maintain that they are anti-food and a really stupid idea to boot.

Consider this. If you ARE vegan, the LAST thing you need is gobs of sugar and white flour (the primary ingredients in cupcakes) because not only do these take up valuable tummy space without giving you any nutrients whatsoever, there are some good reasons to believe that refined sugar and flour actually TAKE nutrients from your body to digest. Vegan diets are really quite deficient in a lot of nutrients, and if you're really set on being a vegan, you ought to be living on a strict, strict diet of soaked nuts, seeds and grains, fermented organic non-GMO soy products, and very high-quality organic vegetables, preferably NOT washed so you might slip in a slug or bug or something that would give you a bit of a nutritional boost. You do not have room for cupcakes. Sorry, but if you're going to go with a diet that your body isn't adapted for, you're going to have to make trade-offs (like not eating cupcakes) or suffer. More. I think the point to veganism is that you're suffering so the animals don't have to, right? Well, I'm pretty sure the animals wouldn't want you to compound your suffering just to eat frickin' cupcakes. They might also have something to say about your squandering precious resources and energy churning out fake processed margarine-type crap and monocropped soy plantations. But I digress.

If you're NOT vegan, why the hell would you want a vegan cupcake? The company doesn't list ingredients on their site, but at a guess I would say that there is probably soy milk in them, not enough to get uptight about, likely, but still, it's yucky stuff. White flour, for sure, white sugar, for sure, and various flavourings. Where you get really nasty is the icing, which unless it is made with actual yummilicious trans fats, is most likely made with interesterified fats, which are just as bad as trans fats, just harder to spell and thus not as prone to media attention. Interestified fats have a bonus over trans fats in that they raise blood sugar levels more. Because a sugar-laden cupcake is not enough of a buzz already. If you're not vegan, just go get a REAL cupcake. It'll taste better, and it won't do you any favours nutritionally, but it won't hit you quite as hard as the vegan one.

The cupcake company claims the motivation for the vegan cupcakes is that soooo many people are lactose intolerant and thus incapable of eating regular cupcakes. (They say, on their website, that 70% of people worldwide are lactose intolerant. That might even be true, but MOST OF THOSE PEOPLE LIVE IN ASIA AND ARE NOT BUYING YOUR STUPID CUPCAKES.) I fail to see how eating cupcakes is such a huge need for the much smaller percentage of lactose-intolerant people (many of whom tolerate butter quite nicely, I should point out) that they had to go make a whole company out of it. I would bet money that MOST of their customers are poor normal lactose-loving people who are duped into thinking "vegan" = "healthy". It makes me angry.

But, back to the craft fair, I was heartily amused that the vegan cupcakes were stuck right next to the table of... stuff? hard to classify... made from bits of animal fur. Yeah.

Strawberry Cupcakes

2008-11-20T14:32:00.003-08:00

It's Rowan's birthday today, and she wanted strawberry cupcakes. I employed my usual recipe-finding method (google, pick one that only contains stuff already in the house) and made these.

I did my own icing though - creamcheese with strawberries in it - and the strawberry tip on top of each is my own garnish. (I was worried they'd look a little boobalicious, but nobody said anything so I guess not.)

They turned out really well, so I give that recipe a big thumbs-up. I didn't follow it exactly though, because I didn't have cake flour and it called for blending the oil with the flour, oddly, and whacking that around for some 2 minutes. With non-cake flour, that would be a nice recipe for bricks so I did the usual muffin method of mixing wet and dry separately and combining gently, which worked nicely. Also, I didn't use vegetable oil because I don't believe in it, so I used melted butter instead, and because I didn't have unsalted I also cut the salt in half. It all worked fine.

How to Cook Cabbage

2008-11-11T12:03:00.002-08:00

I cannot for the life of me understand why cabbage is not everyone's favourite thing to eat. Or at least favourite vegetable. I have been led to believe that it is because everyone is cooking it wrong, so here is how to cook a cabbage:

1) Take off outer leaves that look kind of yucky.
2) Remove core bit.
3) Get out a nice big frying pan, with a lid.
4) Chop cabbage into 1"x1" pieces, approximately.
5) Put cabbage in frying pan with approximately 2/3 cup of water and two generous pats of butter. And I mean generous! Like a tbsp each. Or more. This is no time to be stingy on the butter.
6) Turn heat on stove element under frying pan to med-high. (Like on a stove that goes 2-9, put it on 7.)
7) Put the lid on.
8) The water should start boiling fairly quickly - boil with the lid on for about 2-3 minutes, no longer. The cabbage should be a lovely bright green.
9) Remove the lid, keep the heat up. The water will boil off quickly, then you need to stir to prevent sticking and burning. When the bottom of the pan starts to show some browning, TURN THE HEAT OFF!
10) Sprinkle a pinch or two of salt over the cabbage and continue stirring until the sizzling stops.

Serve immediately. The cabbage should be sweet and delicious with a faintly caramel-y flavour. If it doesn't taste good, it means you're buying crappy cabbage and you need to find a new source. I highly recommend the Madrona Farm cabbage, of course, but any freshly picked local cabbage should be fine. If you are buying cabbage from California you deserve what you get.

giggle giggle snicker

2008-11-05T09:43:00.002-08:00

Hee. Look what I grew!!!!

We all got a good giggle out of this, and it was spared the saucepan fate of its neighbours. This is one of my balcony carrots, most of which are large, delicious, perfectly formed Scarlet Nantes. The balcony carrot pot was one of my more successful gardening experiments this year.

Also, I am plowing through my excess of red peppers... most of them are delicious and sweet, and I will definitely grow the Corno del Toro ones again, but I am still perplexed by some of my supposedly sweet peppers turning out frighteningly hot. WTH???

green tomato mincemeat

2008-10-17T14:08:00.004-07:00

This post is for Sue, who has green tomatoes, and Anna, who is bored. Also, for anyone in Victoria, because it was a weird year for tomatoes and apparently there is a surplus of green ones. You could chance it and leave them on the vine because part of the weirdness is that the blight hasn't hit yet, but it won't be long. Really. I know we all thought that in September, but this can't go on forever.

So. Here's the recipe:

2 quarts chopped, cored green tomatoes. (A quart is 4 cups, to save you the trouble of looking that up)
1 tbsp salt
3 tbsp grated orange zest (about 2 oranges)
1 tbsp grated lemon zest (about 2 lemons)
2/3 cup peeled seeded chopped orange and lemon (The observant among you will notice that this is not as much as 2 lemons and 2 oranges would provide - in fact yes you ARE left with a zested lemon and a zested orange at the end of all this. I suggest juicing the orange and making a child happy, and having a hot rum yourself with the lemon.)
2 1/2 quarts peeled chopped apples (cores removed, duh) This is about 8 large apples.
1 lb raisins or currants (currants are nicer)
3 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 1/2 cups chopped suet (yeah, you need this. Don't worry, it won't taste like beef. It's in the frozen meat section at the supermarket, near the ducks you possibly didn't know were there either. If you buy chicken nuggets regularly, near there. DO NOT USE THE KIND THEY SELL FOR BIRDS. And no I don't have any, I used the rest of it in my batch.)

Chop then salt the tomatoes in a large collander. Set aside for an hour (or, if you're me, read the recipe to figure out what you're missing and head to the store while the tomatoes are salting). This removes some of the moisture and most of the bitterness from the tomatoes, plus adds some flavour.

Rinse the tomatoes really well (a good way to do this is to cover them with warm water for a few minutes then drain). Combine tomatoes with all the other ingredients in a large pot, and bring to a boil. Don't cook too long past the boil unless you like your mincemeat more homogeneous - that is, mushy rather than chunky.

Place in canning jars and process for 25 minutes at 10 lbs. If you don't have a pressure cooker, you could probably do a water bath process for an hour or so... but don't blame me if you get botulism.

The problem with government

2008-10-12T09:11:00.002-07:00

As someone who has worked in government for many years (note: Rachel, Sarah's sister, is writing this. Don't go thinking that Sarah has a secret bureaucratic life.), and as most of the work I have done lately has involved procuring regulatory approvals for construction projects, I have spent far too much time trying to explain to project staff and contractors why they should comply with what often seem like silly or arbitrary measures imposed on them by regulatory or assessment bodies. Alternatively, I have spent a lot of time arguing with said regulatory or assessment bodies that the imposed measures are uncalled for or otherwise an offence to reality and common sense. What does this have to do with Food and Stuff you ask? See this link to a BBC article about a ban on Marmite in a Welsh school due to Marmite's high salt content. This is a perfect example of the difficult balance between good intentions and responsible government, and a realistic and sensible application of said good intentions and responsible government. Yes, it is great to ban processed foods; however, anyone who has ever eaten Marmite will know that a person who can consume enough it in one sitting to be negatively affected by the salt content probably has something wrong with them anyways and we should let natural selection take its course. The same goes for ketchup, which has also been banned. I am not someone who believes that government has no role in regulating such things; anyone who thinks that people always behave rationally and in thier own best interest has not looked up from their first year economics text book in a while. There are limits and trouble with implementation however, and this is a good example.

If you're looking for something to do this weekend...

2008-09-29T18:49:00.000-07:00

Anyone in the Victoria area concerned about the future of local food? This Sunday the Friends of Madrona Farm Society is putting the "fun" in fundraising and hosting the Island Chefs' Survival Challenge at Madrona Farm. Come and watch 10 high-profile Victoria chefs battle the elements, run a farm-related obstacle race and hunt for their own veggies, then strip their equipment down to basics and create masterpiece meals with what really matters - quality local ingredients! Participants can interact with the chefs, and bid on a made-before-you mouthwatering meal featuring the deliciousness that comes from the farm. Proceeds go to The Land Conservancy for the purchase of Madrona Farm - this project will keep Madrona Farm as a productive, sustainable food farm forever. For more information, see www.madronafarm.com Tickets available at the farm gate Wed-Sat 11-3, 4317 Blenkinsop Rd.

tropical finds

2008-09-10T11:19:00.003-07:00

Our time in Hawaii is at an end, and I have a few minutes to share the tropical food wisdom I have gleaned:

- Breadfruit is delicious. I wish I could grow it in Victoria. It's like sweet potato, only easier to deal with and tastier. So yummy! Leave it until it's really ripe and squishy, scoop it out and plop it in a frying pan with butter into little pancake-things. Total convenience food, yummy and probably even healthy-ish.

- There must be some good grass on the north end of Oahu, because the grass-fed beef is amazing. Some of the best steaks I've ever had. Not quite as good as Tabasco, but close.

- Supermarkets suck, except for the sushi. I guess it's all about what sells, but the majority of stuff in the supermarkets here comes from Thailand or Ecuador (like, seriously, importing *bananas* in Hawaii???). The packaged sushi is fantastic though, and a much, much wider variety than Victoria restaurants even.

- Jackfruit looks really fun, but doesn't taste good enough to actually buy any. Those suckers are HUGE. Even a slice is too much to eat. And it's so... not refreshing. I dunno, it's really sweet, really rich, and more than a bite or two is too much. Which is unfortunate, because they grow up to like 30 lbs each, and one would keep you going for a while if you could actually eat it. It's the irony of the fruit world.

- Starfruit, on the other hand, is REALLY refreshing, especially if you pick it yourself.

- The bananas that DO grow here are much tastier than the standard Chiquita tpe. They're called apple bananas, and while they don't taste like apples, they are more tart, firmer, and have a whole pile more flavour. Especially if they're wrapped in a wonton wrapper and deep-fried. Mmmmmm.

- You can eat too many papayas. And mango season ends about now, apparently, but when it's going, it's gooooood.

- Wheat beer brewed with lili'koi (passionfruit) is absolutely lovely, and just what you need after a long day of kayaking and whatnot.

That's about it. Back to Victoria now, and I'll be without computer for a few days.

from muskox to mai tais

2008-09-01T20:09:00.002-07:00

Aloha, all 3 loyal readers.

This will be a brief post to apologize for the lack of recent postings and provide a quick update to my culinary adventures.

Our visit to the Yukon was highlighted by the successful hunting trip executed by Anna and Stirling into the wilds of the Nisutlin River, wherein they shot and expertly dismembered a most delicious and tender young bull moose. So far it has been nothing short of exceptional; recipes for moose-liver pate will most likely follow at some point, which really are more for taunting than following since it's unlikely most people have access to any moose liver, never mind super-fresh liver from a two-year-old willow-and-grass-fed bull. Oh, and I had a muskox burger that tasted exactly how I expected muskox to taste, but I hereby fail in my attempts at food journalism because I couldn't describe it to save my life. It was tough though, and Rowan wouldn't eat it. They should have added some pork fat and breadcrumbs or something. Also, mossberries are a good thing.

Ok, so then we had a brief stop in Victoria where I frantically picked blackberries, made a pie, then tossed the rest in the freezer due to lack of time. Then we jetted off again, to Hawaii. Waikiki to be exact. And so far, the food is kind of crappy, except for one Korean place and the sushi bar next to it which is cozy and delightful. And cheap - I think we had the cheapest sushi dinner we've ever had there, but that was probably because they were out of ikura and Rowan usually eats a horrifying amount of it.

But. Waikiki makes up for the crappy food (or disguises it) by having rivers of booze pouring out of all the hotel bars. I just popped down to the Marriott to have my obligatory mai tai and ordered it after overcoming my initial shock at the $10 price tag. That's easily twice as much as a "mai tai" in Victoria would cost. However, it turned out to be a veritable bargain, because there is easily four times as much booze in the ones here. Honestly, I felt bloody heroic for finishing it, even though I made the bartender add some juice. Because there wasn't any. In an eight-ounce drink. I think. Hard to say now, but I know my own alcohol tolerance pretty well, I am NOT at a thin, easily-boozed state of my life right now, but I am seriously borderline for dinner with the in-laws and it was only ONE drink. So, fun. Should have left more time for that.

So that's the update, I'll try to post more later, but now I'm off to cook my grass-fed beef steak on a probably inadquate electric bbq, and attempt to brainwash my dear father-in-law into understanding why MY steak is a better deal than his marked-down "kobe" steak he got at walmart or wherever it is they shop here. (There is a very good farmer's market... more on that later.)

culinary wisdom from a two-year-old

2008-07-29T19:24:00.002-07:00

This evening, as I was suffering from a cold, a chicken overdose and a distinct lack of imagination as to what to do with the piece of sockeye Rowan talked me into at the grocery store, I decided to consult with her about the side dishes. I sort of listed what we had - potatoes, soba noodles, beet greans, beans - and she said "Beet greens and soba noodles are a good idea with sockeye salmon." And so it was, and so they were. I invented this dish many years ago, I'm glad the child approves. (Scroll down to the January 20th entry.)

just call it like it is

2008-07-27T10:42:00.002-07:00

Dear Restaurants,

Please stop listing your fruit salad as "seasonal" when it obviously isn't. Victoria in July produces some lovely seasonal fruits: strawberries, blueberries, cherries, raspberries, even some early blackberries and transparent apples. This would constitute a seasonal fruit salad, and I would certainly pay more than $2.25 for it.

Bananas, grapes, melons and pineapple do not constitute a "seasonal" fruit salad anywhere. Bananas, to the best of my knowledge, are not even seasonal. The others may well be, but not here, and not generally with each other.

There is nothing wrong with just calling it just a "fruit salad". Fruit salads are nice. They are a refreshing part of a complete breakfast. But a regular old fruit salad with stuff from Ecuador, Hawaii, California and possibly Florida is NOT BLOODY SEASONAL.

yours truly,
the only person on the planet with a bee up her bum about this.

green googlies!!!

2008-07-25T19:51:00.002-07:00

I got creative with some of the vast quantities of veg infesting the fridge at the moment and made the following luridly green pasta sauce:

1/4 small onion, diced
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup fava beans, blanched & peeled
2/3 cup heavy cream
large handful of arugula, blanched
1/2 cup or so grated parmesan
1 clove garlic

Saute onion in olive oil. Just before it starts to brown, add wine. Add fava beans and cook until soft. Add cream before wine is cooked off. Add arugula, parmesan, and garlic. Throw the whole lot in the blender & blend until smooth. Toss with cooked hot pasta, preferably fun stuff like spiraled long fusili. Call it something entertaining like "Green Googlies" and watch the child (and the husband, it should be noted) suck it back like there's no tomorrow.

where not to eat

2008-07-24T21:48:00.002-07:00

Boxo. Don't go there. It sucks. A supposedly mild-medium hot prawn coconut curry showed up as a mess of rice noodles, most of which were broken and ratty looking, with some bean sprouts, 2 improperly prepared snap peas and 4 prawns. It was too hot for me to eat, and I'm not really a spice wimp, there was no discernable coconut flavour, and it was completely dry with no apparent sauce. Probably one of the worst restaurant meals I've ever been served. I picked the prawns out and left.

I must be doing something right...

2008-07-22T14:08:00.003-07:00

This post is more or less a brag about my kid. Be forewarned.

I just had a lovely lunch downtown with Rowan at Konpira, where the chef makes his own udon noodles. We ordered the wakame udon (udon noodles in broth with seaweed and a piece of tamago) and I ordered Rowan a side of her fish balls (ikura - marinated salmon roe).

So my little bunny demolished her ikura in less than a minute, and then ate pretty much ALL the seaweed out of the udon dish, played with some udon noodles and ate maybe 2 of them, and then sucked back a bunch of broth before declaring herself done. A child who prefers salmon roe and seaweed to noodles (and these were darned good noodles) - wow. She didn't like the tamago though.

Anyway, I would highly recommend Konpira. It's on Broughton St. near Douglas, pretty much beside The Wine Barrel. Fantastic udon in lovely broth. The tamago was nice too.

thank you, Tabasco

2008-07-13T11:08:00.002-07:00

When we bought into our cowshare, the farmers had another cow that they planned to breed and milk next year. Her name was Tabasco, and she was a Jersey/Angus cross.

I saw "was" because it became apparent that Tabasco's temperament was not well-suited to dairying. She had always been a little high-spirited, but as she grew older she became aggressive, and finally started getting into the vegetable sections of the farm, which was just not cool at all. Her aggression made it unlikely she would ever allow herself to be milked, and you just can't let a cow with dairy genes be bred if she won't be milked. Dairy cows produce far, far more milk than their calves can use, and if they won't be milked, they become very sick and suffer a lot of pain.

So, Tabasco was humanely and respectfully slaughtered by the farmers, and sent off to a butcher.

I couldn't be more grateful that this happened when it did. Because I have a 2 1/2 year old child who is fully, conversationally verbal, and right smack in the middle of her "why" phase, trying to sort out the world. So when Tabasco wasn't at the farm any more, she of course started asking questions. And I was able to tell her the unvarnished truth, and she is young enough to accept it, but old enough to understand some of the implications. The conversation went something like this.

Rowan: Why isn't Tabasco at the farm anymore?
me: Tabasco was starting to be mean to people, and she wouldn't have made a good dairy cow, so [the farmers] slaughtered her and she was cut up into steaks and things.
Rowan: Why wasn't she good at dairy cow?
me: She wouldn't have let people milk her, and that would have made her sick and hurt. There are only two possibilities for cows, they can be dairy cows or they can be beef cows, and Tabasco had to be a beef cow.
Rowan: That was very nice of Tabasco, to give us her steaks.
me: Well sweetie, Tabasco didn't have a choice in the matter, but you're right that we should be very thankful.

And I am thankful, SO thankful, that we are able to get our place in the world as omnivores introduced into Rowan's little brain while she is young enough to accept things without judgement. We ate Tabasco (or bits of her, anyway), she was delicious, and we are thankful.

I know a lot of people have a hard time explaining where meat comes from to children. In some senses, I think if you can't justify it to your kids, you shouldn't be eating it or asking them to. As much as I think that a modest amount of good-quality, pasture-raised meat is one of the healthiest things you can give a kid, there are always considerations other than health for what you eat.

But having to explain meat to a child can also help assuage any over-educated first-world guilt we as adults feel. The reality of the situation is that cattle and other animals are given life by farmers, and under the circumstances that produce healthful meat, they have good and happy lives, free from predation, stress and hunger. Their deaths - again, under ideal circumstances - are free from fear and stress, quick, and painless. Death is part of life no matter how you look at that; we are the only species to place such an intense and overriding morality around the consumption of death to fuel our own lives.

I think the attempt to avoid and hide from this is the reason factory farms have been so successful - people are quick to avoid complicity and happy to have the realities of being an omnivore hidden from them. But I prefer to feel the faint twinge of guilt that a beautiful animal that I knew, whose nose I had stroked, died to produce the brisket I ate last night. And it was a spectacular brisket, as the steaks we ate on Canada Day were spectacular steaks. It makes me more conscious of the implications of my food, and I DO want Rowan to question her food, and foster a sense in her that food should not be anonymous, and that yes, we SHOULD be grateful for cows that give us their steaks.

so much for the balcony garden

2008-07-10T14:17:00.002-07:00

My intensively planted balcony garden fell prey to a squirrel last week. Everything is gone. The little bugger made off with every single one of my plants, edible or not. The culprit is a psychotic squirrel living under the balcony who currently has or will have babies. She is a known people/dog attacker, and generally an unpleasant beast. Steve has a mandate now to get rid of her in any way possible, humane or not (but due to the cats, no poison.)

Anyway, gone are all my tomatoes except the decrepit ones on Marina's balcony that got shredded by the windstorm, a couple peppers, an eggplant, several varieties of squash, cucumber and melon, four nice little lavender plants, some beans, some corn, some dill, and several nice dahlias. I hate squirrels.

But in good news, it's pea season. I love fresh peas. Dave's were ready last week and mine are coming in now (the squirrel hasn't touched the main garden plot). Mmmmmm peas. We've also really enjoyed the broad beans (fava beans) this year. My chard is fantastic, the carrots are approaching edibility, and everything else in the garden looks great. Even my dill - which has been an abject failure every other year - is doing fantastic this year and has already contributed to a very nice potato salad.

Funny or disturbing?

2008-07-04T09:51:00.002-07:00

Here is a link to a BBC article regarding the taxable status of Pringles, which is apparently more of a biscuit really, not a potato crisp. I like the part where the company describes its features as "not found in nature". Is this something to admit to?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7490346.stm

why should I save the farm???

2008-06-26T15:56:00.004-07:00

For the past couple of months I've been volunteering with the Friends of Madrona Farm Society. In a nutshell, the FOMFS's mandate is to raise $1.4 million dollars for The Land Conservancy, so TLC can buy Madrona Farm. The farm's owners want to sell; the farmers (my friends David and Nathalie) don't want to see it end up as some rich guy's estate with the fields turned into marginal pasture for his ponies. Which is exactly what has happened to MOST of the other farms along Blenkinsop Road. Dave and Nat don't have the money or the desire for the soul-crushing mortgage that would be required for them to buy the farm, so they convinced the owners to go the conservation route, then they went to the TLC, who were amenable to taking ownership of the land and placing covenants on it to protect its current food-producing status -but TLC didn't have $1.4 million hanging around. So David and Nathalie then went to their loyal customer base - those of us who lined up in January rains hoping for just a couple bunches of kale - and asked us to actually raise the money.

I jumped at the chance, of course. Not only are Dave and Nat friends, but the farm is my primary source of vegetables, and I am a huge advocate of local food production generally.

Volunteering on something like this isn't easy. Everyone has limited time, we have limited resources generally, and nobody has any experience with fundraising. But more than that, actually getting the money rolling in is HARD. Even from the customers at the farm stand - the ones you would think would actually care about this farm in particular, if not the whole concept of saving farmland - the money is hard to come by. And gradually, from conversations I've had with people at the stand, it seems the reason for the reluctance to donate is that the land is theoretically already "protected" because it's in the Agricultural Land Reserve, and isn't the government supposed to be protecting farmland or something?

Well, here's a newsflash, kids - this is a democracy, and corporate lobbying notwithstanding, policy generally bubbles up from what the populace wants, more or less. And what the populace has wanted for the last 40 years is climbing property values, and cheap produce from Mexico. And thus the ALR protections developed in the 1970s were specifically designed to merely restrict development on land with established agricultural use, since the farmers of the day protested that restricting the actual use of the land to food production would lower their property values too much. Even then, BC farmers were having a hard time competing with cheaper produce coming from the USA and elsewhere, so the farms were barely if at all profitable, and lowering the property values would have destroyed the farmers' exit strategy: if all else fails, sell the farm to some rich guy who wants a pastoral view. In this respect, the ALR actually preserved real estate agents' incomes far more than actual farmland.

Fast forward 30 years and you have some of the most fertile land in the whole entire world, valued at such astronomical amounts that it's insane to purchase it for food production. If you buy it, though, you can always improve on that base valuation by doing things like building a mansion, landscaping it for horse ranching, or better yet actually building a riding circle... or applying for its removal from the ALR, then subdividing and developing it. Don't think that doesn't happen - land has been steadily removed from the ALR since the program's inception.

So when a farm is on the brink of extinction, is it right to expect the government to step up and save it? The government has, historically, merely responded to the priorities of the populace, which sadly have been more along the lines of wanting huge houses in ever-more-distant suburbs (carved in many cases out of agricultural lands), and cheap food so they can afford the huge houses and the gas to commute to work.

Nowhere, in the pressures on the government for the past 30 years, has the general populace ever called for affordable farmland OR even fresh and healthy food. The average BC citizen wants things he needs - like food - to be cheap, so he can afford things he wants.

Food prices have been steadily driven down through price controls (as on milk), and free trade arrangements that mean cheaper produce can always come from somewhere else, where labour is not so likely to complain about wages or conditions. The food didn't taste as good, had god-knows-what sprayed on it, and nobody actually producing it saw any money from it, but it was cheap and plentiful, and that was what mattered.

Now people are rediscovering the joys of local eating. They're finding that a tomato tastes a hell of a lot better when it's picked that morning and you haven't had one in 6 months. They marvel at how sweet a new potato is when it's fresh. And they're starting - slowly - to understand that the cost of California strawberries, Mexican tomatoes, and Arizona lettuce is more than what they pay at the till. The carbon footprint of such well-traveled veg is only one aspect. There are continuing concerns of the effects of pesticide use on farm labourers, plus the ever-present threat of widespread bacterial contamination through improper irrigation and cleaning methods.

Promising as the new trend towards sustainable local eating and building actual connections with food is, it's still limited to certain sectors of the populace. They're not uninfluential, these sectors - they typically comprise us overeducated white folk with time and money on our hands - but they're by no means the whole of the population. There is still the vast bulk of the population of BC that shops happily at Safeway for lettuce from California and LIKES it, especially if it's on sale.

Yes, locally produced, sort-of organic produce will always be tastier and healthier and better for the environment, but don't fool yourself that any more than 10% of the population is ever going to make a decision on those grounds. So you know what? Everyone who IS interested in preserving what little remains of our agricultural capability is going to have to step up to the plate themselves, because frankly most of the people in our lovely province would far rather have their tax dollars go to subsidizing cheap food or better yet, gas. And even more sadly, but perhaps inevitably given the long-term lack of respect afforded them, most farmers today would STILL oppose more limitations on ALR land use, for the same reason - food production is so unprofitable, there has to be value in the land itself or individual farmers are screwed. Unfortunately, unless food production is valued more highly by everyone, eventually we'll all be screwed. And we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

If we as individuals actually care about our health, the health of the planet, and the taste of our food, we need to start supporting projects like Madrona Farm or other TLC initiatives to preserve farmland in BC. We will not be in the majority, at least not for probably another 5-10 years, I'm guessing, maybe longer. And we will be putting our cold hard cash towards something that will benefit even those who are still driving SUV's and eating California-grown broccoli now. But we will be taking a stand, a stand that will be noticed, in the long-term - a consumer decision to put money towards community food security infrastructure rather than consumer goods or even personal investment or security. Money talks, and if the government sees its citizenry putting money towards projects like this instead of spending it on consumer goods, gasoline, or imported food, the government WILL notice, the rest of the province will notice, and maybe the bulk of public opinion will back sustainable food production as a real priority.

Revenge is actually more savoury than sweet, and it goes well with bacon

2008-06-26T09:42:00.003-07:00

Well of course *everything* goes with bacon.

But on to the story: My balcony garden this year has been heavily thwarted by the wretched pigeons that took up residence in our unfinished balcony. They nibbled all the seed leaves off pretty much everything that sprouted, leaving me with about 5 bean plants and some dill, which they left alone for some reason. Steve eventually sealed off their hidey-hole, but they are stupid birds, and did not understand that they had been evicted, and just kept hanging around.

Yesterday I went and scoured a bunch of garden centres for any vegetables I could find, and went out on the balcony to put them in pots (after having determined that it was just the seed leaves the pigeons liked; if a plant escaped their notice until it was larger, they left it alone.) And what did I find in one of my battered pepper plant pots?

Hah. That, of course, begat this:

The whites were more translucent than chicken eggs - more like duck eggs - and with really thick shells (hence the broken yolks). They tasted just like any other egg.

And no, the thought of letting the pigeon hatch the eggs DIDN'T cross my mind until after they were in my tum.

another reason why you want to drink real milk

2008-06-15T22:47:00.003-07:00

If you put 4 or 5 ounces of milk in a plastic sippy cup, and give that sippy cup to your child in the car, what happens if she doesn't drink it and it sits on the back ledge of the car for 3 days in sunny weather?

Well, if it's pasteurized milk, you'd probably notice after a day or so that there was a distinct pong in the air of the car, so it wouldn't go that far. But, if it's good clean Nell milk...

...you open the sippy veeerrrry carefully over the sink, figuring the holes got blocked hiding the stench. Then when nothing happens after you open it, you bravely take a careful sniff. And smell... virtually nothing. A mild, cheese-like smell. The milk has separated into a smooth curd and some whey. It's almost edible. It looks and feels just like mozzarella. (But you don't go that far, because... well, because you just don't feel that adventurous tonight.)

Kind of amazing, huh? Makes you really believe the old legends of early agrarians toting milk around in sheep stomachs and discovering cheese *and actually eating it*. That was the part I never got, thinking that even pre-industrial taste buds couldn't be THAT off-base - but now I know better.

grow your own

2008-05-20T20:54:00.003-07:00

There's been a lot of kerfuffle in the media lately about how people are all of a sudden all keen on growing their own veg - the "100 metre diet". har. Nobody in these parts is subsisting on what their gardens provide, I'm thinking - it's more like the "100 metre condiments", because for many people veg is just side-dishes and salads. If you get lots of tomatoes, they're ketchup. (I actually made ketchup last week, and it turned out sort of meh, but I got a couple litres of it out of a $15 box of (local!) tomatoes. It tastes a little too much like Christmas. I think I had the spices off a bit - hardly surprising because I was out of cheesecloth so I used Stirling's tea stick for the spice "bundle".)

I digress. The point to this post was to say, yes, growing your own veg is all good but it's not really going to do much in the way of making your diet more local since let's face it, vegetables do NOT make up the majority of most folks' diets.

That having been said, I've got my garden going, and this year I'm foregoing the lush floral balcony in favour of a lush vegetable balcony. I've got beans and strawberry spinach, beans and basil, beans and corn and pumpkin, cucumbers and dill, and peas. Did I mention beans? I think I was craving beans when I hit the seed swap or something. Maybe you shouldn't go to those things hungry. In the regular garden there's the peas, cukes, dill, fennel, strawberries, chard, carrots, beets, summer savory, parsley, salad mix, sage, thyme and chives. Oh and more beans. (Cannellini beans, my favourites.) And then in the sunroom I've got about 20 tomato plants and a few less peppers. I'll be picking up a few more tomatoes for the balcony next week at Carolyn Herriot's sale and - if I can find good ones - watermelons, because I think they'd be very happy on my deck.

So that sounds like a lot, but it's nowhere near our vegetable needs for the year. That's not really the point though. Every year I learn more about gardening, and vegetables, and how it all works, and it's all good knowledge to have in the event I ever actually have enough space available to grow all the food we need. I think a lot of people garden for that reason rather than immediate food security - they just want to know that they CAN.

another great kids' menu

2008-05-19T13:55:00.001-07:00

Mo:Le has an awesome kids' menu too, just so ya know, and it's in downtown Victoria which might be more accessible than Smoken' Bones in Langford. We went there for brunch after Rowan decided that an hour was enough of the parade and she was done. We had a leisurely brunch of deliciousness, then when we left we discovered the parade was still on. That's a LOT of parade!

Anyway, check out Mo:Le. Good food, nice place.

veggie storage - a better way than plastic bags

2008-05-07T21:47:00.002-07:00

I got a bit sick of all the plastic vegetable bags I was using and decided to cut back. I contemplated making cloth bags, indeed I may still do that, but for now I just buy veggies without using bags wherever I can (the veggie stand won't even give bags, so that makes it easier!) and I line my vegetable drawers in the fridge with damp dish towels. Then I cover what goes in with another damp towel. This works really amazingly well! My veggies stay beautifully fresh seemingly forever - far, far, FAR longer than they ever did in plastic bags.

The only thing I'll use bags for now is for produce that tends to escape, like grapes (which I rarely buy anyway). I know those bags can be recycled, but that still uses energy. Reduce comes first in the three R's, and in this case, it actually works better than the alternative. Go figger.

I change the towels in there sort of weekly. But if they don't look grungy, I just damp them a little more and put them back in. It is pretty low-maintenance as far as maintenance goes, and it certainly makes putting groceries away and quick fridge inventories faster. And did I mention the staying fresh part? I have chard in my fridge from last week that is indistinguishable from the chard I bought today, and I had some celery last something like 2 months (why no, we don't eat a lot of celery!)

another restaurant recommendation

2008-05-05T22:09:00.002-07:00

Tonight on our way back from picking up the milk - Stirling came too, to see the farm and meet the cows - we stopped in at Smoken' Bones for dinner. Other foodie types have all reviewed the restaurant sufficiently glowingly so I'll skip that bit - but I do want to say that they have THE best kids' menu EVER. Four items: pork ribs, pulled pork or bbq chicken sandwich, mac & cheese (homemade with aged cheddar), or a salmon fillet, each with choice of one side (and there are a LOT of tasty, child-friendly vegetable options in the sides).

It is so nice to find a casual restaurant - think hillbilly music and hockey on tv - that serves good food to grown-ups and the SAME good food to kids, scaled appropriately, but nary a fish stick or chicken finger in sight. YAY. Finally! We will go back, for sure!

pork belly

2008-05-04T21:52:00.004-07:00

Some time ago, back in the good old days when we had cable, I remember watching an episode of "The Heat" on FoodTV in which the head chef guy (Mark McEwan?) made a couple of his up-and-coming young chefs duke it out with pork belly, and they all screwed up. Ever since then, I've figured it was one of those things, like foie gras mousse, that probably shouldn't be attempted at home.

But then I saw some. A little package, maybe a pound and a bit, in the freezer/discount bin at Red Barn (which carries only Hertel's pork, which is fairly decent as far as ethics go, and local). Unable to resist, I bought it. And it sat in the freezer for many long months, taunting me every time I went looking for that last little baggie of chicken stock that I knew was in there somewhere.

Then several weeks ago, while my mom was visiting and I was on the second day of a wretched horrible virus and had no appetite whatsoever, it came to pass that my mother and I went to Vista 18 for dinner (only because we had theatre tickets for later that evening, and my participation in THAT was only because my neighbour Inge was starring in the production... I felt like crap and would much preferred to have been home on the couch, but we'd had this evening planned for months.) I barely felt up to an appetizer, but fortunately on the appy menu there was a dish consisting of beer-braised pork belly, creamed sauerkraut and purple potato perogis. Even with a fever, sore throat and no appetite, that sounded good. And it was, although I suspect - even more now in retrospect - that the pork may have been just day or so past its prime. But the way it was prepared was a revelation. It was braised, yes - but then it had been sliced and fried, so it was all crispy, but still tender, but chewy. Anyway, I managed to finish the whole dish and we stumbled off to the theatre where I dozed fitfully through much of the first act.

This morning, I had had enough of the pork belly taunting me from the recesses of the freezer, and I figured I *probably* knew how to cook it properly, so I took it out of the freezer. Later this afternoon, after the pork belly had spent the day thawing in a most un-foodsafe manner on the counter, I sliced some onion, smooshed all the remaining cloves of garlic, sliced up the slightly battered ginger in the fridge, dumped that in a saucepan with two different kinds of beer (because one bottle didn't have enough in it) and some soy sauce and honey. I warmed that up while I examined the pork belly and found the rind still on. It would be a waste, I reasoned, to leave the rind on to possibly be ruined by my experimental cooking, so I took it off, salted it, and threw it in the toaster oven. It emerged 20 minutes later as crackling, which I devoured. (The husband and child were away; I didn't think they needed to know about this bit.)

I nestled the pork belly into the cooking liquid (which came up about 1/2 way on the meat), and braised it for 2 hours, then transferred the meat to a cutting board. I turned the heat up under the liquid to reduce it, tasted it and found the beer I'd used had been too bitter and I'd forgotten to add vinegar at the start to mitigate that, so I added some vinegar, then poured some of the result into a measuring cup, and added some more soy sauce, more honey, and a glug of hoisin.

Then I attempted to slice the meat into 1/2 cm slices, and found my knives needed sharpening. I ended up with some slightly ragged slices, 5 or 6 in all. I heated some grapeseed/sesame oil in a saute pan and seared the slices until they were brown and crisp on both sides, pulled them off, brushed them liberally with the liquid concoction, and stuck them in the toaster oven to keep warm while I finished the blanched kale off with some hoisin, sesame oil and vinegar.

It was STELLAR. Perfect. Will do again in a heartbeat. SO good. I never thought I'd say this, but pork belly is wasted on bacon. Wait, not completely wasted. I can't imagine life without bacon. But bacon is perhaps not the zenith of what pork belly can aspire to.

Altogether it was a lovely meal. I wish I'd bought a bigger bit of belly, but I'm deluding myself if I think that would have meant leftovers.

I made butter!!!

2008-04-22T22:50:00.004-07:00

We picked up our first gallon of milk from our cow, Nell, yesterday, and I tried some and it was like drinking half-and-half. Crazy rich. So I let it sit overnight so the cream would rise up and then I siphoned the milk off the bottom into smaller bottles, and dumped the cream into a big pyrex measuring cup thingy - I got almost a litre of cream off a gallon of milk.

Tonight I used just over half the cream, and turned it into butter. It was less hassle than I thought it'd be... of course, it's not like I was using a butter churn like Laura Ingalls or anything, I have a KitchenAid stand mixer with a whisk attachment. In a very short time I had butter globules floating around in buttermilk. I used a cheesecloth to strain out the buttery bits, squooshed them all together and squeezed out as much buttermilk as I could, then rinsed the butter under cold water. That was the only PITA part, and only because it was cold! It was actually kind of fun mushing the butter around. Then I threw it back in the mixer (after washing it of course), added some salt, whipped it around a little and put it in a nice little bowl. See?

It's lovely butter. It's WAY darker than store-bought, which is partly due to the breed of cow (Nell's a jersey) and partly because she eats proper cow-food (ie, grass) rather than nasty soy and grain feed. This is Nell, btw - having a moment with Rowan.

And buttermilk tastes nothing like what is sold in stores as buttermilk. It tastes just like milk. I don't quite get that, but whatever. I guess I'd have to culture it to make it taste sour. (And I would want to do this why...?)

lamb shanks

2008-04-21T21:59:00.002-07:00

I cooked lamb shanks the other night, for my ma, and have received a request for a recipe. Well, there kinda isn't one. Sorry. Here's basically what you do:

Fry some diced onions and bacon in a dutch oven until golden and just starting to brown. Remove and reserve.

Add oil if necessary. Salt lamb shanks well, brown on all sides. Return onions and bacon to the pot, add minced garlic and rosemary and a bay leaf or two.

Toss in most of a bottle of red wine. Bring to a boil, cover, then place in a low oven. Cook for 2-3 hrs.

Remove shanks from liquid, keep warm. Taste liquid, determine how much you can get away with reducing it before it becomes too salty. If it's already salty enough, get rid of half of it and replace with the remainder of the bottle of wine. Strain out solid bits, separate off the fat, and reduce the remaining liquid until it tastes good, then thicken it with a paste made from the fat and some flour (you can add this to the boiling liquid, just whisk as you're adding it and it won't go clumpy.)

Serve and enjoy!

restaurant recommendation

2008-04-21T21:41:00.003-07:00

Ok, anyone who has a child and likes good food - you have to go to Cafe Brio. A couple years ago I went there and found the food not fabulous, portions too huge, overpriced, etc. But when my mom was last visiting about a month ago we were looking for a place to go and discovered they had an early dinner special, and when I called for reservations they didn't freak out when I said "two adults and a small child", they just asked if I needed a high chair.

Well, it turned out to be one of the best restaurant experiences I've had with a child. The food was *fantastic* - the early dinner special was well worth the $28 for 3 courses - and they were great with Rowan, even bringing her the extra dill pickle she asked for. The children's pasta we ordered was bucatini - fun - LOADED with butter and parmesan, and there was enough that Stirling ate the leftovers for his dinner later on. But Rowan isn't that super-keen on pasta, especially when there's pate and steak.

So we went back when my mom visited this month, with Stirling this time, and we had another fantastic meal, quite similar to the previous early dinner special, but with a different kind of steak, different veg, and different dessert. All of it still super-tasty, and we all just contributed to Rowan's meal instead of ordering her pasta she wasn't going to eat. In retrospect, we probably could have ordered her a whole meal and taken the leftovers home, because Stirling and I both lost about half our steaks to her. But again, wonderful service, especially with Rowan - no raised eyebrows at her spooning her ice onto her bread plate and munching it, and none of the other diners seemed to mind her loud proclamations of "YUM YUM YUM" as she hoovered in the steak. At the end of the meal, she got stickers.

I have to say I am just super-impressed by this restaurant. They serve great food, they do all their charcuterie, their pickles, and some of their cheese in-house, they source locally as much as possible, the service is outstanding and they do a great job of balancing family-friendliness with upscale dining. And it is great to have restaurants to go to like this, so that Stirling and I actually feel treated (as opposed to "family" places like White Spot or whatever, where I know I can cook everything on the menu better than they can), but where Rowan is welcomed and can learn restaurant manners without us being all stressy about it.

Dear Kraft Canada

2008-03-21T14:55:00.002-07:00

You are evil. EEEEEEEEVIL. You are the WORST company for blatantly LYING on your packages. Now, I don't actually buy your products - I just perused my pantry and there are no Kraft products in there, so I don't count as a customer - but I am thoroughly pissed that you are misleading a whole bunch of my friends who keep buying your products that are labeled "0 Trans Fat!" when the ingredients list clearly shows they contain hydrogenated oils. Your tricky small serving sizes in which yes, there is probably less than 0.5 g trans fats per serving, might let you get away with this, legally, but it is SO clearly a case of clinging to the letter of the law and completely ignoring the spirit, it makes me want to eat some of your nasty peanut butter on your pernicious little stoned wheat thins just so I can vomit into a box and ship it to your headquarters. Just STOP IT already, ok? Why would you keep doing that??? People with children don't have time to read every single ingredient on every single label, they're busy making sure the kids don't do a header out of the grocery cart. They want to trust you when you say there's no trans fat, and you lie to them. LIES!!! LIES!!!! Bad Kraft!

Oh, and government dudes? Maybe that legislation was just a wee bit lax. Next time, give the industry lobbyists some peanut butter on crackers and boot them out the door, don't let them water it down like that. Millions of moms and dads count on you to help make the food safe for their kids, and you're failing them. You suck too.

And mamas and daddies? Once in a while, leave the kid somewhere else (I mean like at home with grandma or the other parent or something, not in a planter in the parking lot) while you shop, and read the labels on the stuff you usually buy. Because you don't want MSG, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, food dye and other nastiness in your food, right? Here's a quick checklist for ya:

high fructose corn syrup = glucose-fructose (this is how it usually appears on labels in Canada)
hydrolyzed yeast = MSG
hydrolyzed soy protein = MSG
hydrolyzed vegetable protein/vegetable starch = MSG
hydrogenated anything oil = trans fat
partially hydrogenated anything oil = trans fats
spices = usually MSG

"Natural flavourings" can refer to any compound that started life as an animal or vegetable, no matter how heavily it was processed or how many straight-up chemical thingies were added.

Anyway, Kraft Canada, back to you... yes, of course consumers have some responsibility to read labels and make informed choices. BUT don't kid yourself. Your horrid little lobbyists - for whom I sincerely hope there IS an afterlife - made damn sure that consumers would have to REALLY know what they were doing, and we all know that YOU know how most parents shop - 90% of their attention on their kids, with the amazingly adapted peripheral grocery-store vision employed to grab familiar - theoretically safe - brands from the shelves as they whip past, desperate to forestall a meltdown or catch a runaway child before the display of Toblerone collapses and buries some poor old lady with a walker. They don't have TIME to read anything more than the cheery "0 Trans Fats!" logo splashed on the front of the peanut butter, and you KNOW that you evil, evil nasty bad corporation!!! You don't give a crap about the long-term health of kids, you just want them hooked on your products and it's in your best interests, even, to stunt their brain development by pumping them full of your insidious slimy trans fats so they are less able to make decent decisions about what to feed THEIR kids when they have them.

Well. I hope you feel VERY VERY bad about what you've done, Kraft Canada. I hope you and all your shareholders sleep very badly at night. I hope you think twice the next time you design a product, but I'm not holding my breath. I am going to turn down my dearest husband's request for more Kraft Dinner in the pantry, and he will have to make do with Annie's - which is no better, nutritionally, but at least their misleading labelling is slightly more benign in nature.

avoiding packaged food

2008-02-20T22:02:00.004-08:00

(edited to remove Judgy McJudgerson aspects. Apologies to everyone who now thinks I think they're evil because they buy canned beans - I should NOT write blog posts late at night when I'm all fired up about stuff.)

I'm taking a course at UVic (extension - no credit, no exam) about food culture. Tonight the topic was food branding and it was an interesting albeit fairly depressing topic - how much money is poured into marketing, especially to children, is really, really not fun to hear about.

I've been trying, mostly successfully, to avoid food in packages. Avoiding brands and marketing and supporting the industry behind that was admittedly a secondary (tertiary?) goal - the first being eating healthier, since I've yet to be convinced that anything in a box or package is healthier for me than either nothing or something I can make myself from raw ingredients, and the second goal being of the green-me-up variety - packaging is just inherently wasteful and bad for the environment. But the more I think about it, the more disgusted I am with food marketing because invariably it targets the vulnerable - like children, who lack the capacity to understand what advertising is, and poor people who work hideous long hours to put food on the table and who don't have time to shop around and kind of have to believe the packages when they say they're the cheapest most nutritious source of whatever-it-is available, and even if they don't believe it, they don't feel they have a choice because who has time to do that from scratch anyway???

I am extremely fortunate in that firstly I love spending time in the kitchen and I think it's more fun to do things like make my own bread than to let Mr. Dempster do it for me, and secondly I have the lifestyle (stay-at-home mom) and resources (supportive family) to do it. I'm under NO illusion that everyone is like that. I don't want to guilt anyone for using packaged food - it's so prevalent because there is no arguing that it DOES fill a perceived need for people. Time is the most precious commodity for most people - food that maximizes time for other things is understandably desirable. Also, a lot of packaging extends shelf life, reducing cost and making food cheaper - and there is the economy-of-scale factor, which comes into play for things like mayonaise, where sure you CAN make your own, but industrial eggs & oil make it cheaper for Kraft to make it for you, plus they give you a nice jar too. (I actually like mayo jars, they are infinitely reusable.)

So I think I'm going to try to start an anti-package movement, and try to write some articles and maybe work with community centres or wherever to provide information to people on how to live without packaged food. It's going to be an uphill slog, because there are very, very valid reasons for using packaged food and even I am by NO means blameless - I buy cheese in packages, dairy stuff, the aforementioned mayo, rice noodles... almost everything comes in a package! What I'm trying to get after most is stuff for which the benefits are illusory - products that don't *really* save you any time, or provide the nutritional benefit that they claim. But I think I need to do some research first, because I am admittedly not a normal person and can't expect everyone will act (or want to act) like me, food-wise, and that is where all my 3 or 4 readers come in. Can you all please either post in comments or send me an e-mail and let me know:

1) In your last weekly or bi-weekly or regular shopping trip, what foods did you buy that came in a package? (I'm only including things with more than one basic ingredient. So, milk, basic dairy, canned beans, veg, tomato and frozen veg & fruit don't count.)

2) How much time do you have for food preparation? So, typically how much time do you spend fixing breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks?

3) How many packaged foods do you consider staples, and how many are treats?

4) On your last grocery bill, what percentage of the total cost was packaged food?

5) How many people are in your household, and how many share responsibility for food preparation?

I think that'll do for starters. Help?

The Heart of the Beast (was pretty tasty)

2008-02-06T18:23:00.000-08:00

Last week Deanna dropped by with some elk treats, courtesy relatives with a farm and little liking for the nosy, destructive creatures. The steaks and ribs were certainly appreciated, but I was apprehensive about the bag of unidentified bits. I accepted them without hesitation though, figuring if all else failed, Daisy's new all-raw diet would get some good variety.

After thawing, the bits were easily identifiable as a heart and a tongue. Yikes! Obviously too valuable to turn into dog food. I did some quick research and called a friend with a copy of Mrs Beeton's cookbook.

I boiled the tongue with aromatics (onion and herbs) and peeled it (fun!) and sliced it up. It was a tad bland - I should have added more salt to the water - but mixed with some of my homemade duck fat mayo, it was delicious on salad greens.

Then I used the reduced, leftover broth from the tongue (which was SO tasty) and a bottle of beer and I stuffed the heart with fried up bacon, mushrooms and onions and threw it all in the pressure cooker. It was very tasty, especially the sauce that resulted, but terribly rich. And unfortunately rather too high in iron for my little Rowan - it left her a bit bunged up. Poor kid. But she did really, really like it.

So, thanks Deanna! I am thoroughly sick and tired of elk now, but that's what freezers are for. And I have conquered any remaining qualms about cooking with "the nasty bits".

lesson: don't trust a package

2008-01-19T17:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/01/18/heart-logo.html

Does anyone really think that those "Health Check" logos are meaningful? Honestly, if you think you're eating "healthy" but you're buying packaged stuff and *trusting* claims that it's good for you without actually reading the ingredients, you deserve to be ripped off.

Healthy food DOES NOT COME IN A PACKAGE. End of story. Just try to think up something in a package that's actually good for you.

winter salads

2008-01-19T17:05:00.000-08:00

Salads and winter have never gone together well for me. I've always been completely happy to be salad-free between about November and April. Maybe March if it's sunny. But salads have always been kind of a summer thing - light, crunchy, cool... not what one needs on a cold and blustery January day.

At least, that's what I thought. Then I started on this no-starch-no-sugar thing and had to get creative about lunches when a certain someone took all the leftovers to work for lunch on a regular basis. No starch means no bread which means no sandwiches, which have always been my default lunch. So, a couple weeks ago, I caved and bought a bag of salad greens from Dave's farm, and I discovered that salads CAN work in winter.

The trick is that they have to be seasonal, and they have to be challenging. Dave's salad mix is made up of stuff that's still growing at this time of year, and it's picked fresh every day. It contains much chewier greens in winter than it does in summer, and they all taste a lot stronger. Especially the arugula, which takes "peppery" to a whole new level. Yowza! I could eat a plate of those greens with a yummy dressing containing lots of mustard, and maybe a spoonful or two of sauerkraut, and be content. But that's not exactly a balanced lunch, so I supplement. We usually have some sort of leftover meat, roast chicken or sausage or beef or something, so I slice some of that into my salad, and grate some of Dave's amazingly wonderful fabulous oh-my-god-that's-the-best-carrot-I've-ever-eaten carrots in, and slice a hardboiled egg and put that in, and maybe some pickled whatever that's hanging about in the bottom of the fridge, some cheese if we've got enough, some tomatoes if I've been naughty enough to buy them, and some fruit, just for contrast - usually half an apple or pear. And I made some delightful pesto the other day with wild fennel and chickweed, so that goes in the dressing along with mustard, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a touch of honey or maple syrup and a sprinkle of salt. Today I had smoked salmon and I threw some of that in instead of cheese.

Now these are salads I can totally get into, even if it's freezing outside. The spicy greens warm me up, the protein keeps me full and the zing from everything else is just, well, dressing on the salad. (The phrase "icing on the cake" seems sort of really wrong there.)

I think the key here is that all the ingredients are SEASONAL. Tough, chewy, spicy strong greens are what's growing right now, so that's what really works for me right now. I tried using some more "standard" grocery-store organic spring mix but it wasn't as satisfying, and I just didn't want a salad made out of it the next day.

Obviously, if you live in a place where there's no way in hell that there are any greens growing at this time of year, then you're just going to have to respect your body's desire to steer clear of raw green leafy bits. I think that our bodies, if we listen to them carefully enough, do provide some clues as to how we can feel good in the environment we're in... and on the west coast, the environment provides fresh greenery you can eat and enjoy at this time of year. Give it a try!

kefir

2008-01-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

I know I mentioned kefir a while back, but recently there's been some call for a sort of guide-thingy to show what it is and how it works.

Milk kefir grains can be used in cow milk, goat milk, or soy milk - theoretically any milk that has sugars and protein. It's a symbiotic colony of yeasts and bacteria, and all of them are good for you. Over a period of about a day, the grains feed on the milk, and in the process they thicken and flavour it. Kefir can help regulate your digestion, and it tastes great in smoothies.

Here's what the "grains" look like. The jar pictured is a pint mason jar.

So you dump the grains in a jar, add milk, and let it do its thing. To use the kefir, you remove the grains from the jar - they float on top, so I just pick them out with my fingers, keeping track of how many there are, transfer them to a clean jar and fill it with more milk. Theoretically. This worked great for me in the summer, but when I returned from vacation it seemed my grains were suffering from some unheard-of kefir illness, and they wouldn't work properly. It turns out that they just didn't like the cooler weather - my kitchen was running at consistently about 25-28C over the summer and that's the temperature they like. I solved the problem by sticking the jar in the oven and leaving the oven light on, although I recommend some visual cue (like a piece of paper taped over the oven control) to remind you, otherwise you might cook your grains by mistake. I've had a few close calls!

When it's done, your kefir jar should look like this. This jar is slightly atypical in that the whey layer on top is not usually so pronounced - I shook the jar when it was a little far along and trapped the grains under the top layer of cheesyness, creating more coagulation at the top and thus more whey. But that's not important. The important thing to look for when deciding if your kefir "worked" is the little pockets of whey at the bottom of the jar. This means that the coagulation has reach the bottom of the jar and your kefir is nicely thickened. If you leave it longer, those pockets will get bigger and the coagulation will become more pronounced until you have a jar with just a cheesy layer on top half and clear whey on the bottom half. There's nothing wrong with this, it just tastes a little strong. It's still completely edible.

sweet & sour ribs

2007-12-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

Wow I've been neglectful of the blog lately. Bad me.

Ok, here's a recipe I just invented tonight, and it was deeeeelicious. Born, as most are, out of necessity - these happened to be the ingredients I had on hand.

1 pkg maui-cut ribs (no, I don't know the weight. Enough for 3 people or so.)
2 tbsp EVOO
1 cup crushed tomatoes, frozen, fresh or canned
1 small onion, diced
1 small acorn squash, diced
1/3 - 1/2 cup sweetish booze (I used my homemade mead)
3-4 cloves garlic, smooshed
2 tsp allspice
1/3 cup brown sugar or sucanat
1/3 cup vinegar
salt & pepper

Soften the onions in the olive oil, add the squash, and cook at a highish heat until things start to brown a little. Deglaze with the booze. Add the tomatoes, garlic and allspice, and simmer until the squash is tender enough to mash with a potato masher. Mash squash until the sauce is kind of homogenous-looking. Add sugar, vinegar and salt to taste. Adjust seasonings as necessary (will vary depending on tomatoes and type of booze).

Season and brown ribs in a small amount of oil, in an oven- and flame-proof pot big enough to hold everything (a dutch oven is a good choice). Pour sauce over ribs, cook in a low oven (275-300F) for 2 hours. Serve over mashed potatoes. Mmmmmmmm.

And, in case you care, I've tweaked my diet to be all-you-can-eat, but no starch or sweets. It's not technically low-carb because things like the above recipe are cool as long as I don't have the mashed potatoes, and I'm still having half a banana in my morning smoothie and any fruit I want. It seems pretty effective, because I've lost 4 lbs in 4 days (down 10 lbs now!) but I doubt this rate of weight loss will continue. It's pretty easy to follow this "plan" though, so big points for that.

not an excess, but an absence

2007-11-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

Gary Taubes was on Quirks & Quarks today, hawking his new book. It's all about how the conventional diet wisdome of "fat is bad" is not so much rooted in science as it is in politics, and how exercising doesn't really help you lose weight, nothing you know is true, blah blah blah.

I listened, I read the Science article and the New York Times article and then I went and read some criticism, which basically amounted to "but he didn't include this and that study". There were a couple of things that pretty much everyone seemed to agree on though:

- vegetables and fruits are good for you
- refined carbohydrates are bad for you

One thing that Taubes did say at some point was epidemiologically and historically, heart disease rates by country vary more by availability of year-round fresh produce than by fat intake or anything else. And he made the very good point that American culture is still caught up in some Puritanical ideas, such that we can't conceive of any other paradigm than if we're suffering, it must be because we are susceptible to one or more of the deadly sins. In this case, it'd be sloth (lack of exercise) and gluttony (too much food). Taubes says that just ain't so, and the problem might be more along the lines of too much of our food is sugar (snuck in, for the most part, into packaged and processed foods, much of it in the form of high-fructose corn syrup), and we don't eat enough vegetables. But more importantly, the whole "what's a healthy diet" is just a far, far FAR more complex question than we're willing to admit, and there probably isn't a one-size-fits-all answer.

This, combined with a recent study showing that organics really are better, makes me even more convinced that the "traditional foods" route is the way to go. All TF says is, if you couldn't grow it, then make it from the raw ingredients with the equipment you have in your kitchen (or could have, if your kitchen currently consists of a microwave and a sink) don't eat it. Pretty simple, but it rules out white flour, any refined sugar, white rice, artificial sweeteners, etc. It also rules out industrially grown vegetables, grains, and animal products - because I don't see anyone sane applying RoundUp to their back yards or keeping chickens stacked in boxes. So organic veggies, naturally raised animal products, minimal processing on everything. TF also plays pretty nicely with the local eating thing, too.

TF can be high-fat. It doesn't have to be extremely high-fat, you can adjust the balance between meat, grains and vegetables to suit yourself. But most TF authorities like to point out that the fat of meats raised naturally is quite different than industrially-raised animals, with a far better omega 6:3 ratio, and fat actually contains a whole lotta vitamins. Vitamins A & D, for example, in their most useable forms, occur ONLY in animal flesh, primarily in fats.

This is getting rambly and I think I've lost the point, so I'll end here. By all means listen to Gary Taubes - it's interesting, and I think it's immensely valuable for the scientific process for people like him to come and do reality checks every once in a while. I don't agree with everything he says - the whole exercise thing, for one - but it probably needs to be said. I did, however, find it funny, that in the whole discussion of diet and exercise and weight loss, the phrases "will power" and "hard work" were never used. I think Gary Taubes is still trapped in the American paradigm that there IS, somewhere, some magic formula that will let people get to normal weight without any pain, suffering, hardship, or annoyance. And that is just not the case. As he said "exercise makes you hungry". Um, yeah. And then, you just don't eat. It's called "will". Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't. But like a muscle, it gets better the more you use it.

For the record, I've lost about 5 lbs. Nothing special, I made it to the gym 3 times this week and I'm eating smaller portions.

is there anything better than soup?

2007-11-04T13:25:00.000-08:00

I love soup. Love love love soup. It is easy to make and easy to make delicious, and healthy and comforting to boot. Yesterday I made some bean soup from one of those bean mixes (this one was about $2 from For Good Measure and was a fundraising thingy for something or other - the cool thing was that it came with a wee bottle of tabasco which surprisingly enough was *exactly* the right amount for the soup). I followed the recipe that came with it to a certain point, then I diverged and just started throwing stuff in.

The exact ingredients aren't important. The main thing is, soak beans in salted water overnight. Get a mirepoix together, get it going in some oil, when it starts to colour toss in your beans, a good deal of water and a ham hock. Simmer for a couple hours. Take out the ham hock, remove the meat and cut it up, then put the bone and the meat back in the soup. Then throw in some tomato paste, salt, pepper, tabasco, bay leaves, molasses, whatever. Taste it, play with it until it tastes really good, then throw in whatever veggies are in your fridge and threatening to go nasty, simmer a bit longer, remove the bone, and serve.

Yummers. I also like my blended veggie soups, which I do by sautéing sausage or bacon and onions, adding a pile of veg (roasted is nice, but not essential) and covering and then some with some good home-made chicken or veal stock and whatever herbs are lying around. Simmer that for an hour or so until the veggies are good and mushy then throw it in the blender. My favourite veggie combination for this so far has been roasted veg: tomato, onion, carrots, parsnip, peppers, garlic and beets. Gorgeous colour too! The only tricky thing about those soups is remembering to take out the bay leaves before you blend, although I have to say that nothing bad has happened on the occasions on which I've forgotten.

Soup typically provides leftovers, is easy to clean up after, and is a very convenient way to get a lot of vegetable variety into your toddler or significant other. It freezes well too. Really, what's not to like about soup?

Looking for a pumpkin?

2007-10-31T13:27:00.001-07:00

I hope Google picks this up. Apparently the media have been blathering about some sort of pumpkin shortage in Victoria. (That's Victoria BC, Mr. Search Engine.) Anyway, 'snot true. There are thousands of available pumpkins for way cheap at Dan's Country Market in Saanich. Probably other markets too like Ploughshare/Ambrosio and Red Barn markets, Big Barn I would guess, Galey maybe... call around if you don't feel like driving all the way out to Central Saanich, but they're CHEEEEAP at Dan's - I picked up 3 good sized ones for $1 a piece. Yes, that's right, ONE whole dollar for each. If you don't buy them, they're gonna be compost. (Yeah I know, compost at your place, compost at their place... but they're actually decent pumpkins, if you wanted to you COULD cook something with them post-spook.)

In other news, I found organic beef, organic free-range pork, and bison at Pepper's this morning. Reduced prices on most of them no less! Peppers really does have a pretty great meat selection, if a tad small. They also carry Cowichan Bay Farms chicken *sometimes* but beware - they have another type of chicken that they slap the Cowichan Bay Farms name on, on the Peppers price label, but I don't think they are. The package label says "Farmhouse Chicken" and while they're local, which is all good, they definitely do not TASTE like free-range birds. They are about 2/3 the cost of the real Cowichan Bay Farms chickens (which are great btw). To further plug Pepper's, they are one of the last true Victoria-owned grocery stores (Thrifty's sold out to Sobey's this summer). I shop there whenever my travel route makes it feasible.

a public pronouncement of sorts

2007-10-28T19:33:00.001-07:00

Well, I think I've finally had enough of being a piggy little chunky monkey so I'm going to drop my "PPD" weight. And I'm going to try to do it without any program or diet or whatever. Actually no, I've invented a new diet I call the Michael Pollan diet, after his succinct summation of most of the nutritional research from the past 100 years: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

So, that's what I'm going to do, focusing mainly on the "not too much" part. Really, it's all about portion control and eating nutritionally dense foods. Strictly speaking I don't think nutritionally dense foods are necessary for losing weight, but I think they help in that you don't get so many cravings for foods if your nutritional needs are being met, and I think they help you stay healthy while you're losing weight. I'm also going to avoid refined carbs since that also makes for fewer cravings and better energy.

I figure this will take a while, maybe until next summer, since I just don't have the exercise opportunities I used to (no job to cycle to for one thing). I have about 40 - 45 lbs to lose. (Or, more accurately, I need to drop my body fat down about 15%.)

Now, for the first week or two I am going to go pretty hard-core, mostly just to shrink my tummy. I don't care what scientists say, tummies totally get used to a certain volume of food and mine is definitely currently expecting too much. So, teensy meals for the next, say, two weeks, then I'll just eat off a salad plate for the forseeable future.

The point to this post is to keep me honest. Please feel free to regularly ask me about the whole eating less thing. Ask me how much weight I've lost or whatever. I promise I will find it helpful, not offensive.

Now I'm going to go finish my jelly beans. This deal starts tomorrow. Just because, Monday, y'know.

"In Search of Perfection"

2007-10-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

I saw a new-to-me show on Food Network yesterday. It's called "In Search of Perfection", hosted by a guy called Heston Blumenthal (one of those "what were his parents thinking??" kind of names). It's British, and the food he plays with on the show is very British. Yesterday the episode was all about steak and salad.

It was interesting, no doubt about that. I watched the whole show avidly, which I rarely do. But the reason it grabbed me right off the bat was because I was highly annoyed by the way he totally bought into the American standard - and even admitted it was an American standard! - of "quality" beef being beef with a lot of intramuscular fat (marbling).

It's time people stopped thinking that is a good thing. Marbling does a couple of things: it does keep the meat juicier if one has a tendency to cook meat beyond medium (which is a sin in and of itself, but that's another post). It also provides a bit more umami flavour to the meat. But on the other hand, it makes the meat taste less like, well, meat.

The sad thing is, most people don't know what meat tastes like. I had the good fortune to be raised on moose meat, which is typically grass, pond-weed, and willow-fed. The meat is dense and meaty and no, it doesn't "melt in your mouth". It hangs out in there for a while, communing with your taste buds, saying "I am MEAT. I will make you big and strong!" You have to chew it. It is satisfying in a way that well-marbled meat isn't. Well-marbled meat makes you want more. Grass-fed meat makes you feel like you've eaten.

Taste aesthetics aside, there's a health issue too. Marbled meat comes from cows that have been "finished" on grain. That is to say, for the last few weeks or months of their lives, they are fed a diet of grain so that they gain fat quickly. This is the fat that is deposited intramuscularly, creating the marbling. This is always a short-term project since cows do not stay healthy for very long on this kind of diet - in human terms, this would be like taking a healthy, active young man and removing all the vegetables from his diet and feeding him solely on on twinkies for a few weeks. He'd be putting on some intramuscular fat too, but we wouldn't call THAT a good thing and he probably wouldn't feel so good, either. Nobody pretends that intramuscular fat is actually *good* for cows, but what's mystifying is how people can think that it's ok for them to eat it.

In fact, grain-finishing significantly alters the omega6:omega3 profile of the fat in beef, skewing it radically in the direction of the omega6s which are already too high in most North American diets. I would be willing to bet significant amounts of money that THIS is the reason some research shows that red meat is unhealthy, and probably a large part of the reason that cardiovascular disease has been on the rise since about 1950 (approximately when cows began to be fed grain). Red meat now comes from unhealthy animals, it only makes sense that it would make *us* unhealthy too.

Ok, so anyway, back to the show. I got annoyed at Heston's choice of meats. He "tested" various steaks from various cattle producers by cooking them like normal people would. Then he went on to actually prepare his choice in an entirely different fashion, which I think would actually have been better with a meat with little intramuscular fat. (He took a forerib roast, blow-torched the outside, then roasted it at 50C for 24 hours, let it stand, carved it into steaks, then seared the steaks off, let them rest 10 minutes, and served them.)

It was a fine little experiment. But, Heston, who in their right mind ties up their oven for bloody 24 hours cooking a damn steak?!?!?!? That's ridiculous. I am all for slow-cooking, I think it's a great idea and usually produces wonderful results. But 24 hours of continuous oven use is just silly. Most of us only have one oven, and what if we want something baked to go with our steaks? Oops, we're SOL. Not to mention that sort of thing even done once or twice a month would make me very reluctant to open the hydro bill.

Also, the blow torch? coughpenisextensioncough. And there is growing research that shows that charring meat creates carcinogenic compounds. (Not that I am opposed to a little char here and there, but he charred that meat *twice* with pretty excessive heat.)

Then I got to thinking about the show's title. In search of perfection. It's an argument I have regularly with Stirling, and my usual response to HIS perfectionist tendencies is a saying I heard at work from someone (I forget who, I'm pretty sure it was an IBMer so if anyone knows please tell me so I can attribute it properly): Perfection is the enemy of excellence. Meaning, if you shoot for perfect, you usually go over budget, over time, or lose sight of what you were trying to do in the first place.

And boy has Heston lost sight of what food is. Yes, it needs to taste good. I am sure his steak tasted lovely. But was it excellent food? Hell no. Food's primary purpose is to keep people alive. And while there are people who actually TRY to sacrifice some years of their lives in exchange for absolutely the tastiest things around, the vast majority of us would like tasty foods that do good things for our bodies. And frankly the last thing TV-viewing audiences need is some food "perfectionist" telling them to buy grain-finished beef.

(I think Heston is also one of those chefs who frequently utilizes sous-vide techniques that involve slow-cooking foods immersed in water, sealed in plastic bags. That just gives me the willies.)

I would REALLY like to see a TV show about real food. Food the way food was meant to be. Meat from animals raised on the diet they evolved to eat. Vegetables grown in real soil, on real farms, not monocropped things that look like vegetables grown in some hydroponic solution that has the correct balance of NKP but no real soil nutrients. Food that feeds our bodies, food that we don't feel guilty about, food that satisfies our taste buds and our nutritional needs, food that connects us to our community and the land we live on, food that contributes to the well-being of the planet, our farmers, our local economies and ourselves. But something tells me that the Food Network would have a hard time selling ads to run during a show like that.

raw milk

2007-10-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Rowan and I took the ferry down to Port Angeles and picked up a couple gallons of raw milk. She's had some constipation issues and I suspected that pasteurized milk had something to do with it, as her issues got worse when we were in Portugal and there was nothing but ultrapasteurized milk (which is milk that's been fully, completely sterilized by having pretty much all the goodness along with all the bacteria boiled out of it... it lasts indefinitely without refrigeration until opened, at which point it goes bad rather quickly. not my idea of food.) I've also been reading a lot about why raw milk is so much healthier for you than pasteurized, not to mention tastier. Basically what it comes down to is that milk - any milk - is a substance that nature intended to be drunk as-is, from the source. Baby cows certainly can't thrive on pasteurized milk, it doesn't make sense that humans would either. Pasteurization kills all the beneficial bacteria and enzymes in milk, which incidentally are the bits that help humans (as well as baby cows) digest it. There is also evidence that without these bacteria and enzymes, the much-vaunted calcium content of milk is just not really very bioavailable, and calcium uptake from pasteurized milk has been the subject of scientific debate - a debate that has never been settled, thanks largely to the lack of funding for research that isn't likely to please the dairy industry.

So if raw milk is healthier, why is milk pasteurized? Well, the historical explanation is that in the mid-late 1800s grain surpluses started to appear in the US. The most profitable way of processing these surpluses was to turn them into booze. Then some bright spark discovered that cows could, if given no choice, live for a time on the spent grains (mash) from the booze-producing process. So they set up dairy feedlots beside breweries and distilleries, and piped the leftovers directly into the cattle pens. Thus was born the first confinement dairy. The milk from these dairies was substandard, but exceptionally cheap, and the working poor in the cities where these dairies were located were forced by economics to buy it. The conditions the cows lived in were appalling, disease was rampant, and naturally many people, mostly children, were sickened or died from drinking the milk, producing a public health crisis. Then pasteurization was developed, which provided a quick "solution". As dairies consolidated and grew bigger and dairy farmers found it cheaper and more convenient to feed cattle grains rather than maintaining pasture, pasteurization provided the "fix" needed to render the milk from the confined, malnourished cows safe. Large dairy producers cuddled up to overworked health officials and universal pasteurization became the norm.

It's not the only solution, though. Even waaaay back there was the concept of a "certified" dairy - a dairy that met health needs for its cows, cleanliness standards for its barns, and kept the cows OUT of the barn for the most part. Cows on grass are far healthier than cows on grain - grain produces an acidic rumen which allows all kinds of nasties (including that really bad e. coli) to thrive, and the excrement from grain-fed cows is a far, far better place for bad bacteria than a grass-fed poop. Moreover, cows who are fed grain are typically confined to a stall, where they hang out ankle-deep in their own poop, which frankly isn't good for *any* organism. Cows in confinement dairies live about 2 years if they're lucky; cows on pasture live for about 12.

But, inspecting these dairies and maintaining two separate standards is WORK and the diaries and health departments have done a fantastic PR job convincing people that pasteurized milk is just as good as raw milk, and the pasteurization is in their own best interests. The thing is, they're partly right. Nobody in their right minds would drink raw milk from most dairies in operation in North America today. But milk from a clean, grass-fed dairy herd is an entirely different story. And that's where our milk came from: the Dungeness Valley Creamery.

Washington State is one of the few jurisdictions that recognize that a lot of people want raw milk, and it's in the State's interests to make sure that they can get it and that it's safe. (It's a great way for small family dairies to thrive, for one thing.) Raw milk producers are pretty much forced to have their cows on pasture to maintain the cow health standards, and the milk must meet bacteriological and coliform standards that are waaaaay higher than those of pasteurized milk. California has similar standards, raw milk has been available there for a long time (since the early 90's I believe) and not one single case of food-borne illness has ever been proved to have originated at a raw dairy in California, although the health department has certainly *tried* to prove various outbreaks were linked, they failed in every case to actually detect any pathogens in the milk or bottling equipment. (In fact, many more people have been made ill by salmonella-tainted produce and by contaminated *pasteurized* milk than by raw milk.)

Canada is not nearly so enlightened - raw milk is basically more illegal than pot here (to sell, at any rate - you can bring it over the border for your own consumption.) It's sad, because some places (like Vancouver Island) are geographically ideal for raw milk dairies. We have a mild climate that enables cows to be outside almost all year long, plenty of rainfall for good grazing, and a host of little wee cheesemakers to take up any excess. People would pay double the price of organic pasteurized milk for raw - dairies could actually MAKE MONEY!!! - and if the government wanted to stay out of it, a handful of independent contractors could make some money doing regular milk testing.

However, legalizing raw milk might make people take a harder look at conventional dairies. It might make people realize that cows don't HAVE to stand in shit to produce milk, that cows really don't need or want grain (yikes, what to do with all that surplus crap-quality grain that comes off the more soil-depleted areas of the prairies?), and that dairy doesn't have to be one of those things that's only good for you if all of the fat is taken out. (That's another triumph for the dairy lobby, with more people clamouring for the "healthy" low-fat dairy products, they're able to take much more cream out of the milk and use it in much higher value-added products like ice-cream, compensating for the lower milk-fat yield from their overbred, high-yield Holsteins.) A harder look is something that the dairy industry would like to avoid, since it might cut into profits that are already tenuous thanks to government fixes on milk prices. So, dairy lobbyists work darned hard to make sure that the government keeps telling you that unpasteurized milk is like drinking straight salmonella with a dash of e. coli, and the government is quite happy to do so, because frankly pasteurizing everything is darned easy and means that the government can cheap out on ag-school drop-outs for their inspection staff. (<- ok I don't actually *know* they do this.)

Anyway, that's enough ranting for one night. I should add, however, that raw milk tastes WAY better than pasteurized, but the jury is still out on whether it's helping Rowan with her poop.

crispy yummy potatoey buttery yum (did I say yum already?)

2007-10-10T20:41:00.000-07:00

Tonight I discovered the ultimate compensation for having to do fiddly things to toddler food. I don't exactly have the pickiest toddler on the planet but there are some textures she just won't do. Potato skins are one of those things, so as I carefully scraped all the fluffy baked potato out of the crispy skins I wondered what I should do with the skin. I briefly considered giving them to the dog, but that seemed wrong. My gaze slid over to the butter dish, and before my food conscience kicked in I cut off a pat (not a small one, let's say) of cold butter and smooshed it between the two potato skin halves.

Well, I have to say, that was a little - no, actually a substantial portion - of heaven, if one believes in such a concept. Warm crispy potatoey goodness filled with cool smooth buttery yum. It was so good that it completely overrode any sensation of guilt with one of blissful food discovery. It's so simple, but at the same time so elusive - the potatoes have to be perfectly cooked, with thin skins that crisp in the oven, and the crispness only lasts a few minutes so you really have to almost burn your fingers getting the insides out. And the butter has to be right out of the fridge. This is not something that could ever be served in a restaurant or even on a plate. It's the perfect cook's treat.

(FWIW the potatoes were from a bag of organic Yukon Golds (I think?) from the Fraser Valley. The butter was Avalon Organic, which overall I am unimpressed with but it did the trick here.)

A few good articles

2007-10-04T21:55:00.000-07:00

I found these on Salon.com (thanks to a link from the Traditional Foods group on MDC). They're a little excited and perhaps a weeeee bit disingenuous, but good.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/2007/10/03/breakfast_cereal/
http://www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/2007/01/30/annies/index.html

For the record, I can't remember the last time I ate breakfast cereal and I miss it not at all. We eat first a kefir smoothie for breakfast (which contains kefirized milk, fruits and if I'm feeling sneaky, some leafy green veg), then some kind of eggs or oatmeal, or occasionally for a treat pancakes or bacon & eggs for breakfast. I never spend more than about 10 minutes preparing breakfast, either.

If Rowan's around other kids who have cereal o's I let her have them, but we don't stock them at home. I just don't think they're *food*.