Recently in Food Category

Since my move to Victoria, I have tried out and adopted some appliances and discarded others.

I started with a new set of Paderno stainless steel pots - purchased cheaply in 2006 when Canadian Tire dropped the Royale sets. I have added another sauce pan and the steamer and double boiler (not Royale but who cares). Capital Iron carries Paderno in Victoria. I expect the saucepans and the dutch oven to last for a while. The coated frying pans are standing up well although I think the coating in those pans will break down long before the pans wear out.

I bought a larger enameled cast iron dutch oven at Capital Iron which has become one of my favorite pots.

I started with some decent knives - some with the Superstore house brand and some of the midrange Wusthof Tridents.. I bought a couple new knives last year - I went to Mac for a 6 and a half inch Santoku and a 10 inch chef's knife. The steel is superb - it stays sharp enough for ripe tomatoes with a few strokes of a chef's steel.

Reuters Science News has a new story today reporting that the genome of maize has been sequenced, which reminds me that corn is a grain. It is a starchy carbohydrate. Like rice and wheat it could be cultivated to produce an abundant harvest that would feed villages and cities. It was a miracle food. It has been developed into a fertile, abundant and cheap, food resource. This has presented a business dilemma and challenge for farmers, food processors, distillers, and business people. How much corn can people be led to purchase and consume?

It turns up as an ingredient in processed goods. Michael Pollan provides an interesting and informative explanation of modern corn, corn farming and industrial food processing in The Omnivore's Dilemna.

In the grocery store, it is presented identifiably in ground corn flour (grits, meal, polenta), as the main ingredient in corn chips, and as a fresh, frozen or canned product. In its raw forms, it is a nutritious and tasty item. It is a starchy grain, though, not a vegetable. Corn chips are fried or baked flat breads or croutons, made of starch and fat, just like potato chips.

A meal of meat, potatoes or rice, and corn, has protein and two kinds of carbs. I was looking at the labels on the (Green Giant) frozen foods in my freezer. Corn has over 150 calories in a 3/4 cup serving. Peas have about 90 calories for that size serving. Beans have about 35 calories. Mixed vegetables with corn, peas, beans and carrots are marked at about 70 calories.

I like corn. I plan to keep using corn as a occasional treat - corn on the cob is wonderful. I think it is a staple, but I have to think of it as a starch course like bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.

In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto has received favourable reviews in the LA Times and the Sunday Times (of London), and is a bestseller at this point in time.

Michael Pollan is an experienced journalist and writer. He reviews a fair amount of history and science in a short book. He tries to talk about food from a common sense perspective. He is cautious about food science, which is often bad science. He is skeptical about anything the food industry, nutritionists and journalists say about food. All too often, claims about food are made to sell new kinds of processed foods, or to sell books, diet plans, supplements and fads.

His advice for eating well, to avoid malnutrition and obesity is: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." His idea of food is something pretty close to the original plant or animal - fresh, dried, frozen - cooked at home, not processed at a factory. Don't buy or eat processed and packaged things that claim to produce health benefits or weight loss. If you want to avoid obesity, eat less.

Pollan is an advocate of a natural diet, organic produce and Slow Food. He described the Western diet as a disaster, and cites the studies of people who return to a traditional diet from a Western diet. He says that there are many traditional diets incorporating indigenous resources and cultural traditions - and all of them are healthier than the Western diet, which manages to produce malnutrition and obesity at the same time.

Link to an excerpt from Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, a new book by Gary Taubes, published in New York Magazine, The Scientist and the Stairmaster.

Taubes says that the idea that light exercise is a way to lose weight has been oversold. He agrees that light exercise is a good idea, but light exercise doesn't burn enough calories to let us eat and drink as much as most of us, in North America, tend to. He also supports some of the criticisms of the dominance of carbs in diet.

Is the sale of bottled water one of the great triumphs of marketing? When it turns out that Aquafina sells filtered tap water, what is the value of buying bottled water, as opposed to tap water, or filtering your own water?

Buying many high end bottled water brands appeals to snob value - the idea that we should pamper ourselves and that our tastes are more refined than mass tastes. To some extent, that applies to any bottled water. Modern marketing has a way of making everyone feel they are the best sheep in the flock.

"Kick the Bottled Water Habit" is an extract from Tom Standage's new book, A History of the World in Seven Glasses.

Standage is a little too kind to public water supply. It isn't always safe, and it often has a smell or taste, associated with the source, or with the level of chlorination, or with sitting in old cast iron and lead pipes before it reaches the tap. Seattle has good water. Winnipeg used to have good water, drawn from the bottom of a Canadian Shield lake, but algae growth in the reservoirs, aging aqueduct and water main infrastructure and chlorination means that in July, August and September, tap water smells like the contents of a leaf filled swimming pool. But you can get rid of that by running it, letting it stand and pouring it into a container for drinking water, or by filtering it. So go figure what the convenience of buying bottled water is worth.

That's a nice thing to be worried about in the first world. What about the third world? Leaving aside the anti-corporate rhetoric, clean safe water is huge issue. I want to see that movie Thirst some time.

Mick Hume, editor of Spiked, happily skewered Hattie Ellis, author of Planet Chicken in his review, Stop Planet Chicken, I Want to Get Off. He says that if she is able to view the production of abundant cheap food as a bad thing, her values are off. Ellis is not a vegetarian but she thinks that it is only acceptable to kill and eat chickens if they have lived a full and healthy life. The problem with Hattie Ellis's viewpoint is that she would let her sentimental ideas about the welfare of chickens and her ideas about natural foods interfere with things that have made it possible to provide affordable nutition to people who don't have the time to raise free range chickens or the time and money to buy them.

My bottle of olive oil became dangerously depleted this weekend. It started with a bad moment in the purchasing department last fall. I had run out of burger patties and had spied a box of what I took to be bison burger patties in Thrifties. It was a solid frozen block of ground, and has been in the freezer for 8 months. I thought about using it in a chili, but inspiration took hold on Saturday. I have a venison cookbook by A.D. Livingstone, the food writer for Gray's Sporting Journal, a magazine for upscale rednecks (think Cy Tolliver in Deadwood). Livingstone had a recipe for venison Moussaka. I used at least a cup of olive oil to saute two eggplants. Livingstone's recipe calls for making a sauce with 1 and half cups of milk, and a couple tablespoons each of flour and butter, seasoned with a pinch of nutmeg. If he had said it was a bechamel sauce, I might have passed on the dish as too pretentious, but Livingstone just plugged it into the recipe. Livingstone believes in good food more than redneck values, obviously. My only mistake was using a liberal sprinkle of nutmeg in the bechamel instead of a pinch. It was fair bit of work - slice, dry and saute eggplant, a cooked meat sauce, a bechamel, and baking it, but not more than baking lasagna.

When I traveled to Winnipeg last Christmas, I picked up the January 2007 issue of Discover Magazine, which is the annual stories of the year issue. At number 14, a medical story. In the February issue, Killer Fat. Both stories deal with the health effects of transfats - more precisely trans-fatty acids - and their ubiquity in snack foods manufactured with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to bake bread. It started with a resolution to pack a lunch, which I have not done consistently since University. It brings back memories of Men into Space (see also the Wikipedia entry) and the lunch box I carried to grade school.

I was finding that I was not consistently eating the bread I bought at the supermarkets. The slices are light, suited for toast, not necessarily for hearty sandwiches.

This may not be a great discovery, but it worked for me. I haven't had good results with making my own pizza on a pre-made pizza shell. The topping usually doesn't taste right. I don't like frozen pizza because they use a lot some synthetic flavourings including a garlic oil on the crust, but I keep a few in the freezer for those days when I am too tired to cook anything else.

Last week I tried to make a pizza from scratch using a frozen shell, plain canned tomato sauce, and tuna, black olives, capers and grated parmesan cheese. I spread the sauce on the pizza shell and then sprinkled marjoram, oregan, and dried powdered garlic on the sauce. Then I put the flaked tuna on. Then I took a fork and stirred the topping before adding the other ingredients. It turned out much better than my past efforts. I think in my past efforts, I just sprinkled the herbs onto the sauce, and they dried out. Stirring the herbs into the sauce makes a difference. I am not sure, but other times I have used Italian seasoning which is a blend including marjoram, basil, thyme, savory, sage, oregano and other spices. I think basil tends to be overdone in many factory sauces and it may be overdone, at least for my tastes, in Italian seasoning. This pizza came out very nicely.