Month: January 2004

It’s winter, the season of luscious slow-cooked stews and hearty steak dinners. What is a beef-craving consumer to do?

Here, in Centre County, we have many options. The best and most logical is to know where your beef comes from. We are lucky to have farms all around us and many raise animals for meat. Making the connection between grower and consumer is easy.

At Tait Farm in Boalsburg, organic beef is for sale to the public several afternoons a month. Bill Callahan from Cow-a-Hen Farm in Mifflinburg and Sarah Rider, who raises Highland and Angus beef at her Blue Grass Beef farm on Upper Brush Valley Road, alternate selling dates at the Harvest Shoppe… and are happy to speak with consumers about their methods.

Lyn Garling, from Over the Moon Farm, sells pasture-raised beef to clients who sign up in advance, though she often has extra cuts available.

At the Granary, you can buy organic beef raised by Natural Acres Farm in Millersburg. Natural Acres products are also available at Nature’s Pantry, where Cow-a-Hen meats can be found in the freezer case.

“It is always safer if you know the source,” said Rider, who has been fielding many questions since the story broke. “You can talk to the farmer and find out where the animals are from and what they eat.” [Anne Quinn Corr]

The same foods can produce profoundly different sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, for different people.

The taste buds are linked to nerves that transmit sensations of taste, temperature and touch to the brain. Scientists have quantified how taste is determined by the number of taste buds and their distribution, affecting sensitivity to the major tastes — sweet, sour, salty and bitter — as well as to things like hot peppers and the fat content of food.

About 25 percent of the population are supertasters, blessed or cursed with a heightened sensitivity because the concentration of their taste buds can be 100 times as great as the concentration in nontasters, who also make up about 25 percent of the world. Regular tasters, about half of all people, fall somewhere in between.

Supertasters usually find sweet foods unpleasant, because sugar is twice as potent to their taste buds. The same holds true for some strongly flavored fruits and vegetables, like broccoli and grapefruit. [NYTimes]

Breakfast this morning was a bowl of mixed fruit — orange, pineapple, and banana. I weighed in at 156 pounds.



<ins datetime="2004-01-22T13:33:00-05:00">Lunch was an over four mile walk after a warm up of 10 toe-touchers, 10 squats, 5 pathetic push-ups, and 5 really pathetic sit-ups. <em>Pathetic!</em> I have nothing for lunch, but my stomach is growling. What to do? What to do?</ins>

<ins datetime="2004-01-23T12:52:00-05:00">Dinner was Lo Mien and the rest of yesterday&rsquo;s fudge.</ins>

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Vegetable Lo Mien

Ingredients

• ¼ cup Soy Sauce
• 3 cloves Garlic, pressed
• 1 tablespoon Ginger, ground
• ¼ teaspoon Dried Red Pepper Flakes, crushed
• 2 tablespoons Dry Sherry
• 3 cups Water, to cook noodles
• 5 ounces Noodles (Whole Wheat Spaghetti will do nicely)
• 1 teaspoon Sesame Oil
• 1 teaspoon Olive Oil plus 4 tablespoons Olive Oil
• 2 each Small Onions, chopped
• 1 Carrot, cut into match sticks
• 1 stalk Celery, cut into slices on the diagonal
• 2 cups Cabbage, shredded
• 2 tablespoons Soy Sauce
• ⅓ cup Chicken or Vegetable Broth

Directions

1. In a small bowl, mix ¼ cup of soy sauce, 3 cloves of pressed garlic, 1 teaspoon of ground ginger, ¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper, and 2 tablespoons of dry sherry.
2. Bring 3 cups of water to a boil. Add 5 ounces of noodles. Reduce heat. Cook noodles until done — about 3 minutes. Drain the noodles and toss with 1 teaspoon of sesame oil and 1 teaspoon of olive oil.
3. Heat 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a wok on high heat. Add the onions and stir fry until caramelized — about 1½ minutes. Add the carrots, celery, and cabbage. Pour the sauce mixture over the vegetables. Cook until the cabbage has wilted. Add the noodles and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Stir and cook for another three minutes.

Serve hot. Makes four servings. 

The objective of a tea gathering is that of Zen Buddhism — to live in this moment — and the entire ritual is designed to focus the senses so that one is totally involved in the occasion and not distracted by mundane thoughts. [The Embassy of Japan in Singapore]

In Japan, there are basically four types of soy sauce: regular dark, light or usukuchi, reduced sodium or genen, and tamari, which are the rather syrupy dregs of soy sauce at the bottom of the barrel. The first two are the ones most commonly used for cooking. Reduced sodium is of course used by people with high blood pressure concerns. Tamari is never used for cooking — it’s usually used as a dipping sauce, for sashimi and such…

Kikkoman makes its soy sauce locally throughout the world (a bit of trivia: Kikkoman is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, food producing company in the world, having been founded in the 17th century). and is also decent in flavor.

You don’t have to refrigerate soy sauce, but do screw the cap on tight and keep in a dark place. And always use sparingly. [Really Hungry]

Russian troops have retrieved 10 tonnes of beer trapped under the Siberian ice after a week-long operation.

A lorry carrying the beer was lost while crossing the frozen River Irtysh, near the city of Omsk, about 2,200 kilometres (1400 miles) from Moscow.

The driver managed to jump out after the ice gave way, but the lorry and its cargo sank.

Six divers, 10 men with electric saws and a tank pulled the beer kegs — but not the truck — to safety.

With temperatures reaching -27C, the rescue mission was fraught with problems.

Russia’s Tass news agency reported that the recovery team eventually managed to pull the vehicle through a hole in the ice.

They retrieved the kegs of beer but the rope snapped and the truck slipped back under the water.

The Rosar brewery in Omsk said the freezing temperatures probably kept the quality of the beer from deteriorating and said it will still take the delivery.

It plans to sell the beer at a discount. [BBC News]

There are three basic kinds of rubber: natural rubber, which comes from latex, the sap of the tropical tree Hevea brasiliensis; synthetic rubber, which comes from a chemical plant; and silicone rubber, which comes from, well, a different chemical plant.

The last two were dreamed up by chemists to duplicate some of natural rubber’s unique properties and improve upon others. A synthetic rubber called neoprene was first marketed by DuPont in 1931, while a wide variety of silicone rubbers have been manufactured by General Electric and Dow Corning since the 1940s. These two man-made products inherited the silly name “rubber” from the natural material, which was so-christened by the English chemist and clergyman Joseph Priestley in 1770, when he found that it would rub out pencil marks…

Silicone bakeware has a remarkably useful set of properties. First, the material is inherently translucent, so a veritable kaleidoscope of bright colors can be incorporated into the products. (KitchenAid’s line of muffin pans, loaf pans and cake pans comes in red or blue.) They can withstand high temperatures without melting (i.e., without their molecules flowing apart from one another) because the molecules are very long and tightly intertwined, like a cold, leftover plate of Spaghetti with Glue Sauce. That’s also why you can take them directly from the oven to the freezer or vice versa without any fear of cracking; the molecules, while individually flexible, are so rigidly fixed in place that the material can’t expand or contract very much with changes in temperature.

Silicones don’t absorb microwaves, but like all microwave-safe utensils they can get hot in the microwave oven from contact with the heated food. Because silicones are chemically inert, the pans are dishwasher safe; caustic detergents can’t touch them. Also because of their nonreactivity, they are more or less nonstick; cakes and muffins release easily — most of the time — since you can flex the pans to pop them out. [Food 101]

Breakfast this morning was a bowl of mixed fruit — orange, pineapple, and banana. I weighed in at 157 pounds.



<ins datetime="2004-01-21T12:28:00-05:00">Lunch was an orange. No walk &mdash; I had a 1:00 meeting.</ins>

<ins datetime="2004-01-21T19:49:00-05:00">Dinner was a serving of Gretchen&rsquo;s terrific butternut squash and vegetable gratin. We were both still hungry so we made some <a href="http://www.bigsteer.biz/page/page/640487.htm" title="2-Minute Microwave Chocolate Fudge Mix (Retail Price)">Rich &amp; Famoose Microwave Fudge</a> (with added walnuts) &mdash; the last of the Christmas gift food &mdash; we each ate about 3 ounces. It is pretty good, looking and tasting a lot like fudge, especially when it is still warm. It comes in a burlap bag with a cute moose holding it closed. Apparently the <a href="http://www.columbusrealtors.org/9912.cfm" title="Holiday Gifts for clients">Columbus board of realtors</a> recommends it as a gift for clients &mdash; not that that would have anything to do with me.</ins>

After months of weeknights of blearily waiting well past midnight for batches of stock to cool and weekends spent simmering similar but critically different batches side by side, I answered the questions myself. And I learned quite a lot more than what most recipes reveal.

• It’s not a bad idea to befriend a butcher if you want the traditional chicken necks and backs for parts.
• If you don’t like parsley, don’t put it in your stock. Same goes for celery. They contribute bitterness and pungency that detracts from the chicken. On the other hand, whole cloves impart an undercurrent of sweetness that nicely enhances the poultry flavor.
• Stock made from freshly dug organic carrots and onions doesn’t taste appreciably different from stock made with limp carrots languishing in the vegetable bin and trimmed onion ends that were destined for the trash.
• Fat adds flavor. You can leave that skin on the chicken and then skim the rendered fat when the stock has cooled.
• Never turn your back on stock during the crucial early moments. Boiling, rather than simmering, stock is an irreversible mistake, resulting in a cloudy appearance and a correspondingly murky flavor.
• Stock is mindful of no one’s schedule but its own. Think twice before beginning a batch past 8 p.m.
• The thought of cleanup (the bones and chicken parts, the fat, the grease) inspires more dread than the mess itself merits. (But after flopping raw chicken parts about, I feel like both the kitchen and myself need to be sanitized.)
• It’s not a bad idea to keep some chicken parts in the freezer. (I confess that after the hurricane last September, while neighbors were altruistically throwing ad-hoc dinner parties inspired by the contents of their freezer, I made chicken stock by candlelight.)

And I learned one other thing. The outcome is not exactly as resplendent as, say, a chocolate souffle or as spectacular as something like cassoulet. You’re left with a layer of fat to skim, a bowl full of gray scum and a vat of pale, clear broth. Understated? Perhaps. Worth the effort? Absolutely. [Schettler]

People tell us all the time that they want to start taking notes on wines, but they fear they won’t know how to describe them. They’ve read so many highfalutin and nonsensical winespeak descriptions that they’re paralyzed with fear about putting something down on paper. We recently encountered a Pinot Noir described by the winery as “buxom.” Yep, we know some wines have legs, but we’re having a hard time getting our heads around the notion that they have, well, you know.

Of course, there are some descriptors whose usage and meaning have been embraced enough to give them currency. One classic description of the smell of Sauvignon Blanc, for instance, is “cat’s pee” — that’s how it’s always put — though we’ve never sensed that ourselves, perhaps because we’re dog people… Here’s what’s important: The only notes worth keeping are notes that bring back tastes and memories to you. Only you know which words can do that for you. [WSJ]