Brush Valley Brewer

I would like to thank Deb, over at In My kitchen, for adding me to her list of “Food Journals I read.”

For breakfast this morning, Gretchen made waffles with maple syrup. I also had a glass of orange juice and two cups of coffee. We normally would not have waffles during the week but Gretchen wanted to find out what would happen if you made waffle batter with soy milk instead of cow’s milk. The waffles were nice and light, though that may have been because she beat the heck out of the batter. They were also not quite as dark a brown as normal, but otherwise they were excellent. I weighed 155 pounds.

For lunch today I went to the Penn State Forum’s presentation Prospects for the Internet by Douglas Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2. For those who are not familiar with Internet2, this is how it describes itself.

Internet2 is a consortium being led by 205 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today’s Internet in its infancy. The primary goals of Internet2 are to:

• Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
• Enable revolutionary Internet applications
• Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.

In other words, Internet2 is the next generation of the Internet. It is currently a physically separate network from the one on which you are most probably reading this post. Large parts of it are purely experimental. It is designed to be much faster, and with much greater potential. You think your cable modem or DSL is fast? From my desktop at the Pennsylvania State University, I can sustain a 98.6 Mbps transfer to the University of Indiana — and my connection is not one of the “really good ones.” You think listening to streaming audio is pretty cool? I can watch C-SPAN broadcast live from Northwestern University. Unless you have a direct Internet2 connection, I would not suggest clicking on that C-SPAN link. The application for viewing it is included in the stream itself and then the video feed is 2 megabits per second.

Internet2 is looking for new challenges, but first… lunch!

The thing about buffet lunches is that you get a chance to sample a bunch of dishes. Today I tried anduille and sweet potato soup. Mmmm… Spicy! I would not have said that I would enjoy a sweet potato soup, but I really enjoyed this. The sausage was quite spicy. I followed that with a small green salad. Then there was bow tie pasta casserole, sautéed zucchini and summer squash, turkey and dressing, and roast beef with fried onions. Dessert was a slice of apple pie and I washed it all down with some iced tea.

After the buffet, Mr. Van Houweling spoke. As I just mentioned, Internet2 has significant bandwidth in mind. The speaker was around for the discussions of the original Internet as well and talked about the heated discussion about whether the new “world wide web” application should allow images to be transferred because of concerns over the amount of bandwidth that would be required.

He also mentioned that several corporations turned down the opportunity to take the original Internet commercial. In his words, “Only those in higher education can understand that good things can happen, even when no one is in charge.”

A little while ago I posted a link to Nigella Lawson’s recipe for Vegetarian Chili With Corn Bread Topping in the New York Times. Well, tonight we tried it, and I can say, “It is good.” I washed down two servings of the chili with three glasses of Bolla Cabernet Sauvignon.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not know how the original recipe tastes. You see, I am one of those people who feels that you have to follow the recipe — at least once — or else you do not know how the recipe tastes. Gretchen, on the other hand, likes to look at a recipe and immediately say, “I don’t like cardamom, I’m going to use cloves,” and “There is no chili powder in this chili, I’m going to add a teaspoon.” So when I say, “It is good,” I mean with those changes. I suppose the original is pretty good, too.

On the heals of the success of the first “Is My Blog Burning?” event, Alberto over at Il Forno has announced that there is soon to be a second. This time, the mantle of leadership is being taken up by Clotilde over at Chocolate & Zucchini.

This month’s theme is Tartine. For those of us who are not native French speakers, Babel Fish offers this translation for Tartine: Slice of bread, while Clotilde offers this explanation:

A tartine is a popular Parisian dish, in which different ingredients are arranged and served on a slice of bread — a sort of open-faced sandwich if you will — usually on a bed of greens.

She also offers a link to her post, The Wonderful World Of Tartines, as further explanation. It includes a very appetizing photograph to illustrate the concept.

As a geek, I find the possibilities of this highly exciting. I had been under the mistaken impression that the bread/filling combination we know as the sandwich was purely an n-ary structure. While most people consider the sandwich a binary structure, that is, two slices of bread with something in between, in reality, the sandwich is actually two or more slices of bread with something in between, hence n-ary; where n≠1. Now, with the introduction of the tartine, we can extend this, in a kind Unified Sandwich Theorem, to include the long sought after unary condition (where n equals 1)!

Of course, we are all familiar with the origin of the sandwich, although not created by, but rather named for John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (alias the Insatiable Earl) who, during a long night of gambling, and not wanting to stop to eat, was rumored to have sent a servant to get him some meat between two slices of bread so that he would not soil his cards.

Of course, even the Earl’s title is not without an interesting etymology. You see, “Earl of Sandwich” is a hereditary title that the fourth Earl obviously inherited from the first Earl, who selected the title. The first Earl was originally going to select the title “Earl of Portsmouth,” but at the last moment changed it to “Earl of Sandwich” to honor the town where his fleet embarked on its journey to return Charles II to England. So it is only through happenstance that we are not all eating Portsmouths.

All of that said, the tartine does predate the sandwich. In fact, the Croque Monsieur — similar to the Monte Cristo — is now reverting back to its original form as a tartine.

Anyway, the big day is Sunday, March 7th, 2004, so start planning.

It is time to strap on the napkin because once again there is food in the news!

• We all knew that watching television makes for fat kids, but now we know why. It turns out, according to a new report, that the culprit may actually be the junk food commercials.

  “We want kids to buy our products,” said Steven Rotter, chairman of the Rotter Group in New York, an agency that specializes in marketing to children. “But Mom and Dad, if your kid is eating too much and eating the wrong stuff, don’t let them have it.”

  So, not only is it your fault you are fat, it is your fault that your kids are fat, as well.

• If you want to help kids get proper nutrition, and make a little money too, it seems that the New York City school system is looking for a head chef. The job, which pays $125,000 per year, requires the production of 800,000 meals per day that “appeal to youthful but discerning palates from Staten Island to the Bronx and cost about $2 each, if not less, to produce.” Piece of cake.
• If you think proper nutrition for kids is not important, you might want to look at another new study that “found that improving the diets of young offenders at a maximum security institution… cut offences by 25%.”
• While most kids think that school is prison, this guy waxes lyrical, in one of the most eloquent pieces I have ever read, about his sorrow over the introduction of fast food into the British prison system and longs for the good old days when he was “dining at Her Majesty’s table.”
• If you think cooking for the head of state would beat dining in prision, you might want to read Kim Jong Il’s Chef, which is excerpted in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

  Kim Jong Il has an exceptionally discriminating palate. There is an episode I remember well that demonstrates this. I was preparing sushi in the Number 8 Banquet Hall. All of a sudden Kim Jong Il said, “Fujimoto, today’s sushi tastes a little different.”

  He had had a lot to drink that evening before the meal, and I suggested that maybe that was the reason.

  He replied, “Maybe…” He seemed doubtful, but didn’t pursue it any further.

  However, when I returned to the kitchen, I checked the seasoning used that day and found that the sugar was ten grams less than usual! Kim Jong Il was the only one who had noticed. Even I was astonished at this.

  With respect to rice, before cooking it a waiter and a kitchen staff member would inspect it grain by grain. Chipped and defective grains were extracted; only those with perfect form were presented.

• Finally, while I knew that French Toast was probably named for it’s inventor, rather than a country of origin, I always thought that the French Fry was named for the way the potatoes were cut, but now it seems that it was merely a case of mistaken identity¹. “The name French fries probably arose among non-Belgian allies fighting in the first world war alongside the Belgian army, which spoke French.”
• P.S. If you are suddenly thinking about fried potatoes, here is a recipe for fries and another for chips.

¹ This requires a subscription to see now. You can find a copy here.

Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit, a glass of orange juice, a cup of coffee, and a bowl of steel cut oats with brown sugar, soy milk, and hazelnuts. I weighed 155 pounds.

At work this morning I had two cups of green tea with a cinnamon stick.

For lunch, I walked over to the Joegies at the HUB (two miles, round trip) and had a Hawkeye — a chicken cheesteak with provolone cheese, grilled onions, mayonaise, marinara sauce, lettuce, and tomatoes.

Dinner was a salad and the last bowl of tin roof ice cream.

Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit and a cup of coffee. I weighed 154 pounds.

Over lunch, I walked to the HUB and then to the IST building and back — I am guessing about three miles. I had a banana when I got back and there seem to be a bunch of fund raisers going on right now, so I broke down and got a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup three pack.

Dinner was broiled flounder, roasted potato wedges with balsamic vinegar, a small salad and a bowl of tin roof ice cream.

• 12.053 Gallons
• $1.659/Gallon
• $20.00
• 295.9 Miles
• 24.5 Miles/Gallon
• 7¢/Mile
• 20 Days

Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit, a bowl of toasted oat cereal with sliced banana and soy milk, and a cup of coffee. I weighed 155 pounds.

Over lunch I took a winding four mile walk through campus and downtown. After I got back, I had two cups of green tea with a cinnamon stick.

Dinner was half of a sautéed onion and red pepper pizza and a bowl of tin roof ice cream.

This comes to us via The Food Section: Appetizers, via Nuggets. In American Treasures of the Library of Congress you can find a facsimiles of a number of historical documents, including Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence, but more importantly, his plans for a pasta machine, and his recipe for vanilla ice cream.

Maccaroni

The best maccaroni [sic] in Italy is made with a particular sort of flour called Semolina, in Naples: but in almost every shop a different sort of flour is commonly used; for, provided the flower be of a good quality, not ground extremely fine, it will always do very well. A paste is made with flour, water, & less yeast than is used for making bread. This paste is then put, a little at a time, with about 5. or 6. lb each time into a round iron box ABC. The under part of which is perforated with holes, through which the pasta when pressed by the screw DEF, comes out, and forms the maccaroni g.g.g. which when sufficiently long, are cut & spread to dry. The screw is turned by a lever inserted into the hole L of which there are 4. or 6. It is evident that on turning the screw one way, the cylindrical part F, which fits the iron box or mortar perfectly well, must press upon the paste and must force it out of the holes. LIM is a strong wooden frame, properly fastened to the wall, floor & ceiling of the room.

N.O. is a figure on a larger scale of the holes in the iron plate, where all the black is solid, and the rest is open. The real plate has a great many holes, and is screwed to the box or mortar: or rather there is a set of plates which may be changed at will, with holes of different shapes & sizes for the different sorts of maccaroni. [Thomas Jefferson]

Breakfast this morning was two slices of toasted pound cake, half of a white grapefruit, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of coffee. I weighed 155 pounds.

At work this morning I had two cups of green tea with a cinnamon stick. I walked downtown to Irving’s for lunch — maybe three miles, round trip. Lunch was a pizza bagel with a strawberry, orange, banana smoothie.

Dinner was a turkey salad and a bowl of tin roof ice cream.