I have eaten my fair share of Louie Blue Raspberry and Little Orphan Orange Otter Pops (in fact, I have a stuffed animal version of Orange, although her poor little dog Melon Collie is long lost).
And I know a lot of folks have reported drinking the pickle juice from the jars of pickles we've given them.
Still, I never saw Bob's Pickle Pops coming.
I was so looking forward to apricots this summer...and so far, they've been somewhat disappointing. I expect it's weather related, but the ones I've picked up from farmers' markets haven't been that juice-up-to-the-elbow sort of ripe, and the flavor is more uniformly bland than last year. All the ones I've gotten I've just turned into jam--it's amazing what a few teaspoons of lemon juice will do to perk up flavor.
More exciting are the sour cherries I found, for a whopping $9 per pound. They're quite small--maybe half the size of this year's average Rainier--and a lovely bright blood-red color. The stems are short and straight, which make them look a little prim. The unsweetened juice doesn't strike me as sour except as in comparison to sweet cherries--it's not like sour patch kid sour. From my one-pound purchase, I ended up with about three cups of pitted cherries, which I turned into jam. I went with two teaspoons of lemon juice (as much for the pectin as anything else) and about a cup of sugar, and ended up with three small jars of jam after I boiled it down.
I'm sure that pectin packets make a much more cost-effective jam, but since I don't have to worry about profit margin in jam made for personal use, I'm happy to just boil the fruit down to its essence. The cherry jam has an unexpected flavor, almost like cloves--there's a sharp spiciness there that wasn't around in the raw fruit--which was delicious spread on apricot-orange scones last weekend.
So after the batch of apricot jam, and the batch of cherry jam, I ended up having to practically dissemble my entire kitchen. Sticky trails were everywhere, including (as I discovered last night) underneath the toaster oven. I hit a new low point in my cleaning technique: there was so much apricot goo on one of the stove knobs that I pulled it off the range and stuffed it in my mouth like a pacifier. (And yes, it was tempting to just put it back on the range after I sucked the jam off, but I swear I washed it.)
To quote that happy little badger who frolics in the upper right corner of this blog,
Jam for breakfast
Jam for meals
Now I know how a jam jar feels
Full of jam
When I think about myself and science, the (redundant) phrase "obstinate, pig-headed fool" is the first thing that leaps to mind. I argue with science, especially when it comes to science and food safety. In part, this is because I know that while food poisoning is always awful, it's not likely to actually kill a healthy adult. Whether one is generally argumentative or not, I think that food safety concerns tend to relate to each of us more personally than other kinds of science. Do you like to forage for mushrooms? I bet you have different thoughts than I do when I see market signs on false morels that read "must par-boil before eating". I read it as "must par-boil before eating or will require new liver."
I like to can things. I love our homemade pickles (I am not alone, you greedy beggers) and I get better at making jam every year (and less hazardous--so far, no nasty burns this summer). I plan on making cooked salsa this September (with the goal of copying Gordito's), and Cap'n's going to pickle some hot peppers. I have several canning books, which I have compared at length. After The Great Pickle Disaster of Ought-Five I understand that in canning, precision is the better part of valor.
But still, when making jam over the weekend, I ended up in a pointless-yet-interesting discussion about canning technique with Cap'n. A standard method for canning is this: Boil the hell out of whatever you plan to put in the jar. Boil the hell out of the empty jar. Put the boiling goop into the hot jar, seal it with a hot lid, and then put the whole lava-hot sealed jar back into boiling water for 15-20 minutes. Even under these circumstances, most of the jars should be thrown out rather than eaten because they are invisibly suspect.
I understand that safety is preferred to sorrow, but I also have numerous cookbooks that claim pork should be cooked to 180 degrees, when it's generally acknowledged today that 150-160 is fine. Until relatively recently, food science has been notoriously imprecise, with almost as much myth as actual science. I figured that boiled goop put into a hot jar should be enough; that last hot water bath was nonsense.
Except it's not. Yes, most bacteria will be killed in the boiling process, but--in a nutshell--some kinds of bacteria poop out nerve toxin in the form of very hard-to-kill spores. These spores are what causes botulism. Botulism causes paralysis. No jam I have ever eaten is worth paralysis.
At the same time, I find articles like this one frustrating. Most jam recipes use way too much sugar for my taste, so I have adjusted that by both cutting the sugar and increasing the lemon juice. This changes the acidity level in my jam, which seems to mean it's no longer "safe". Except I can't "adjust that upon serving" as the article suggests for salsa; I don't plan on squirting lemon all over my morning toast. This Alabama Extension article seems both less fussy and more detailed, it's about reducing risk and being sensible, not about instilling panic.
Once again, Cap'n and I proved that eating locally doesn't have to mean salads and fruit and fancy food and lengthy cooking processes. Dinner last night was cheesesteaks with French fries. The meat: Skagit River Ranch's "stir fry" cut, which is palm-sized slices of thinly-sliced beef, and is tender as all get out when sliced on the bias and cooked quickly. Both sandwiches had mozzarella (not the Whiz, sorry traditionalists) and just-starting-to-caramelize onions; Cap'n's also had a few pickled cherry peppers mixed in.
The fries were the first cooked in our new death machine, the deep fryer. There is a beloved burger stand down in Astoria, OR, which descibed their fry-making process as, "We take a potato and make one order at a time". So when I offered to make cheesesteaks, Cap'n says, "ooh, I'll take a potato!" I pulled out The Joy of Cooking so he had the basic directions to follow: cook for a couple minutes at 320 degrees, let sit for five minutes while increasing the fat's temperature to 375, fry until brown and crisp. Total time, with scrubbing and slicing: about 12 minutes. Results: Delicious. Some were crisp, some were a little soft inside, and all had a nice difference between inside and the crust. They were so good, and so high on the quick/easy scale, I can't figure out how frozen batter-dipped fries ever caught on for home cooking. Fries aren't a necessity, so when you do eat them, they should be this good.
In the summer issue of edible Twin Cities, there was a story on mini farmers's markets, called urban farm stands in some places. The premise: Up to five farm stalls, specifically located within easy walking distance of low-income (and low-income senior) housing. There's even one on a college campus. This idea rocks.
Seattle is lucky enough to have an insane number of markets--we have a fairly long growing season thanks to hoop and hot houses (OK, so not this year, when even the hot houses were freezing in April) and our farmers grow a huge variety of foods and always seem to be adding new stuff. We're also now set up for virtually every WA market to accept WIC and food stamps. Some are located within a block of bus lines (Broadway, Ballard and Phinney Ridge are really easy), and since I walk to my market every week and live directly across from what might be the biggest low-income building on all of Cap Hill, I know at least one market isn't an impossible haul, even for women with metal spines like yours truly. But if I was 80? Yeah, I'd be hopping a bus, and using a wheeled cart, and if it was raining, I'd probably skip it. And I'd want the dogs out of the way, but that's because at Broadway I routinely trip over at least one micro-dog on too long of a leash.
So the mini market. A few links, to other cities that are rolling these out: Sacramento, Minneapolis (this is a link for a pdf-as-html, the edible Twin Cities story isn't online yet), Eau Claire and a handful more (Dallas, Richmond, San Francisco) that have such minimal info online that it's kind of hard to tell whether they should be called "programs" or "special promotions".
More than 1,000 sick folks spread out over 2.5 months, and the CDC has yet to determine the sourceof the salmonella outbreak. Because so many folks got sick after eating salsa or pico de gallo, it's now possible that peppers and/or a few kinds of chiles are involved. And a bunch of tomatoes are still on the "probably shouldn't eat 'em" list (the link above will take you to the CDC site, if you want more info).
That listing of safe tomatoes include the ones you grow at home, which I find both funny (people are stupid, let's make sure to cover all the bases) and sad (people are easily frightened and we'll end up with dummies fire bombing their neighbor's tomato plants) and extra-sad (people make such poorly-informed choices that the freakin' Center for Disease Control provides purchasing advice).
The other ignorance-related issue has to do with having to explain to people what restaurant dishes might have tomatoes or chiles. Gee, does it have words like "red sauce", taco", "fajita-style", "Tex-Mex flavors" or "chock full o' tomatoes"? Probably has tomatoes in it.
On a similar topic, we've got another huge hamburger recall happening right now. A bunch of it appears to have been sold at Kroger stores, so that includes local chains QFC and Fred Meyer. The sell-by dates start back in May and go through our recent holiday weekend, which is just awesome, I'm sure nobody ate hamburgers on July 4th.
What does it always come back to? Knowing where your food comes from. And as food prices are jumping all over the place, I'd say that local purchasing is the main priority--not organic. Organic is big enough business that it's now more commonly subjected to exactly the sort of supply-chain insanity that cheap food is.
I like milk. Not only am I apparently among some sort of freakish lactose-supertolerant group of humans (which I am making up, although maybe it's true), I actually like the taste. My routine disregard for nutrition claims based on specific foods began with milk: In the early 90s, I was told repeatedly that people shouldn't drink milk, but I liked it so, basically, I decided the advice was wrong. Or wrong for me.
I switched to Organic Valley milk from whatever's-on-sale milk many years ago. And today I learned something from them, which is both interesting and a little gross. A few days ago, I picked up a new carton of their milk. I poured some on my bowl of cereal, took a bite, and actually raced over to spit into the sink. It was like intense goat cheese, but mixed together with Cap'n Crunch. Repulsive. The milk smelled fine, and was three weeks before the "use by" date, so I poured a tiny bit into a glass and took another sip. Still, almost goat-cheesy. I love goat cheese, so this is sort of weird way to describe a bad flavor. Grassy times 1,000? It didn't taste like "bad" milk...but it was bad.
But it was also a brand-new carton, and I couldn't bring myself to pour it away, so I thought I'd use it with chai and cover up the grassiness. Today, I wanted a milkshake, and thought that chocolate syrup would be enough to disguise the flavor. It wasn't. It was gross.
This spurred Cap'n to do something I wouldn't have bothered with: He called Organic Valley's customer service. The guy on the other end of the call asked a few questions, including whether it was pasteurized or ultrapasterized (it was the latter). Turns out that this weird grass-cheese flavor is what happens when ultrapasteurized milk begins to spoil. The sugars begin converting, but instead of growing bacteria and doing the curdle/stink thing, it just goes weird (this is my translation of what Cap'n reported when he got off the phone, so it doesn't offer much in the way of scientific precision). O.V. said they were glad to get the call, because now they know that "somewhere in the supply chain", the milk was allowed to warm up. So: kind of gross, but also interesting.
And now for an (also sort of gross) historical milk tidbit: I am convinced that any kid who went to a south-end Seattle school and drank milk right around 1980 has the same compulsion. If any of us drink out of a single-serving carton, we have to shake it before opening it. There was a big problem with serving spoiled milk at lunch, sometimes spoiled enough that it was fully curdled. The alternate, equally common problem was for it to be partially frozen, like a milk slushee. Shaking the carton before opening allowed you to figure out which it was going to be--although this only worked for the curdled problem if there were substantial solid chunks. I have met carton-shakers from several other schools at the same time, but all were in the Rainier Beach-Beacon Hill-CD area. The staff knew about it, but it still took at least a year--maybe two--to fix.
In other words, I just got a deep fryer.
Online deep fryer research proved to be so horrifically entertaining it was hard to stop. User comments about hardly frying any food--just a few times a week--and "my teens finally learned to cook" and "we just got sick of microwaving our mozzarella sticks"...well, it's just one giant reminder of my insulated world. I was all set for a basic-and-midsize GranPappy (the size in between Fry Daddy and Double Daddy, and I am not making these up, and like clothing sizes they seem to have scaled up from the FryBaby days of my youth), but then a nice DeLonghi one turned up at a thrift store and I couldn't resist the combination of shiny red buttons and $7 price tag.
Now if only I had resident teenagers I could teach to cook by making me fried mozzarella sticks just a few times a week. Instead, I'm testing out the new kitchen frenemy with the most basic fried recipe I know: Navajo Frybread. I'm trying a slightly different variation of what I've skillet-fried in past years, and Cap'n is tremendously excited about a summer filled with Indian Tacos (which I don't think of as Navajo because I've only seen them on the Olympic Peninsula). Both recipes--and a sad story about Navajo frybread history are here.
Homemade maple bars? Samosas? Deep-fried Twinkies? Hush puppies? Pakoras? Empanadas? Sweet potato fries? Plantain chips?
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point we tried to create the GeekBoy Best Food Idea Ever: Popcorn Popcorn. There has to be a way to batter-dip and fry popcorn, right?
You probably have to be registered to read this article in the NY Times about the salmonella tomatoes. The surprising things: The outbreak is probably not over, and the source of the tomatoes may not be traceable unless at least one individual remembers where he ate the tomato that made him sick, and did not eat any other tomatoes that day.
And so the great tomato crisis becomes the great tomato mystery.
I think it's most interesting that a person needs a sort of CSI memory to help the medical folks track a disease outbreak. On one hand, the amount of "Only you, Mrs. American Housewife, can keep your kitchen free of bacteria" articles that inspire guilt and fear in equal amounts are pointless. On the other hand, we should take some personal responsibility for where and what we eat. Show me a giant corporation you can trust, and I'll show you a giant corporation with a great PR firm.
(The title is in honor of my 10th grade gym teacher, a 4.5' tall woman with a 2' beehive, who taught me how to do the cha cha. I doubt Mizz Willkins would much like chai, unless it was iced, non-milked, non-spiced, and ten times sweeter than normal. Southerners will recognize the final result as being simply "tea".)
About a year ago, I started wondering whether I liked chai or whether I only thought I liked chai. Ordering it in cafes, it often seemed both bland and too sweet, but what I got in Indian restaurants was never bland (if occasionally sweeter than I like) and always pretty likable. I figured out that there was a specific brand--Morning Glory--that a bunch of cafes sold, which I liked. I still do like it.
But what I've found from them in shops is the pre-mixed boxed blend, and I wanted something a little more customizable, especially after reading the whole strange history of British tea companies giving tea away all over India, for several years, to create the now gigantic Indian tea market. The spices were added because spices are added to everything there--and the tea companies kept trying to lower the proportions because more spice/cup = less tea/cup. (There's also a whole thing related to caste and the type of tea cup used, which led to a few riots--it's sort of a Jim Crow story, but you should just read the book.)
There's one other reason--a minor one--that I didn't really want to suck down a couple of cups each day of the Morning Glory version: They load it up with five herbs meant to be medicinal. Because I happen to think that a great many herbs are, in fact, medicinal, I would prefer to only take them when I want them--not as an unnecessary "tonic". (The alternative, I think, is assuming that each cup of tea has unnoticeable amounts of each herb, in which case they still shouldn't be there.) It's not like I avoid the brand--I think the flavor's vastly better than the other boxed chais I've had. But until I'm convinced that I need a daily hit of astragalus to avoid diabetes, I'd prefer it not be in my afternoon tea.
I tried a few chai-spiced loose teas, and bleh--I didn't like any of them. Some whole spices were usually visible, but the taste was that of cinnamon and/or clove oil--Red Hots plus toothache remedy. Because the tea had already been mixed in with the spice, it meant that either the spices were under-steeped, or the tea was over-steeped. I was reluctantly considering going to the fussbudgety zenith of hand-blending spices and keeping a tub separate from the tea--but that would've led to a whole round of testing plus about 30 minutes of delayed gratification everything time I thought, "hmm, chai sounds good".
Then I wandered into Travelers looking for lentils and saw an interesting packet of chai, which included a bag of spice blend and a separate bag of black tea. The directions had each packet steeping for different times, and a note that the final blend could be stored in the fridge for a while. It was good--the right spice blend for me, and the steeping times seemed accurate--and duh, storing a non-sweetened, non-milky, pre-made blend in the fridge is just what I needed. A more recent trip turned up an improvement: The spice blend packet is available separately, without the tea packet, which means I can use my own preferred tea to mix with it.
My tea leaves are larger than the Travelers brand, so the steeping time needs a bit of fiddling, but in general, it's still yummy. I'm not sure why or how--let's say epiphany--but I determined that evaporated milk is part of the proper taste and texture for my ideal chai. Lastly, the tea and spice mix has to be strained through a double layer of cheesecloth, because I hate the grainy spice sludge that's fine enough to make it through my sieve. (I am not an oyster. My liquids should come pre-strained.)
