Hello, all. I did not have research time to finish up the next installment about nuclear fusion in stars, so we will have to do with this. I began planting my garden last week, so the subject of canning food came to mind.
Most people do not realize that canned foods are relatively recent developments, not counting wine and beer, which are at least technically, canned in many cases.
Hello, all. I'm at work tonight & will check in as soon as I get home.
What is your favorite comfort food?
I like (s)mashed potatoes & gravy.
Ham steak & hominy (one ham steak, two cans of whole hominy, drained. Sear the steak on both sides, remove from pan. Add the hominy to the skillet & stir to scrape up the ham bits, then put the steak on top of the hominy & put the whole skillet into the oven [350] for about half an hour until the ham steak is cooked through and the hominy has browned a bit & absorbed the ham flavor. Serve with your favorite green veggie: I like spinach).
No, I have no idea what that means. But I do know about ham & hominy! The problem with ham steaks where I am is that they tend to be too wide in diameter & not thick enough. It's still possible to work with them, though: sear on each side, remove from skillet, put a couple of cans of (drained) whole hominy into the skillet, stir while sauteing, put the ham steak on top, and pop it into a 350-degree oven until the ham is cooked through.
Serve with a side of spinach or a salad or something like that.
That's comfort food chez Youff. What do you enjoy?
Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is often used as a flavor enhancer in many savory dishes. What most people know is that it often added to foods. What most people do not know is that is present in many foods naturally, either in free form or as glutamic acid in proteins, since glutamic acid is a very common naturally occurring amino acid.
There is considerable controversy surrounding MSG, mostly due to the so-called Chinese Restaurant Syndrome (CRS). Symptoms commonly reported include numbness and tingling of the extremities, facial flushing, and several others. Tonight we shall take a fairly in-depth view of MSG.
Distillation is a technique of "squeezing" out the essence of a given material (or series of thoughts to one or a few abstractions) into a concentrated product. The term is from the Latin, distillo, from the combining term de, meaning "down" and the noun stilla, a drop. Thus, distilled water is literally a drop of water coming down something. Taken to the extreme, distilled water literally means "a coming down drop of water that is water". That does not fit with the modern usage, but is illustrative.
Aristotle, with all of his faults, noted that seawater, boilt under cool sponges, would yield fresh water when the sponges were pressed. Distillation was known in the ancient world, but not much used except for preparing "medical" remedies, most of them toxic, in a manner that I will describe to you later, in a more modern form.
Actually, the earth is a huge still, with the water cycle reproducing exactly, but on a massive scale, what goes on in an industrial or laboratory still. Heating, evaporation, segregation of components, and condensation are all essential parts of distillation, and our planet does it well. Without that process, the planet would not be recognizable.
The fall apple crop is in and so jelly has been on my mind. We shall cover jams and other preserves as well, but jellymaking takes more technique, so more detail will be given to jelly. If you can make jelly well, the others are easy. Jellymaking is not really hard, but there are a couple of rules that have to be followed.
Jelly and other preserves thicken upon cooking because of the interaction between pectin (found in many fruits), sugar, acid, and water. Pectin is one of the soluble fibers that get so much attention as part of a balanced diet, even though it contributes few nutrients. Its main purpose in the diet is to help regulate the metabolism in the gut, and soluble fiber has been shown to be beneficial for blood pressure and blood lipid regulation.
This essay is sort of a prequel to two that I am scheduled to write for What's for Dinner, posted at Dailykos.com (and here) Saturday evenings around 7:30 Eastern. Next Saturday I am writing rather long one about jellies (and related items) with lots of technical information and pictures of the process from start to finish. On 05 December I return to write about my favorite holiday goodies.
This got me to thinking that some of those goodies need background preparation before cooking them. Tonight we will discuss several key ingredients in some of my favorites, and some of the biology and natural history about them. Some things, like preparing nuts and persimmons, HAVE to be done in advance for various reasons, and some can be done in advance to ease the workload during the busy holiday season.
Preserving food by drying it is prehistoric. Humans have dried food for millenia, and it works as well now as it did way back when. In this sense, I am not talking about grains and seeds that naturally dry on the plant, with no interaction from humans, but rather foods that need a bit of help to dry without going bad.
Let us take, for example, apples. Dried apples are wonderful, but leave that apple of the tree and it falls to the ground, and just rots. Apples are too moist in their prime state to dry whole, especially if nature is all that is working for one.
Enter mankind to make a better process. We have learnt to peel and slice the apples, and then put them into a place where the water is lost rather quickly, before bacteria and molds can grow. Please read further.
Food preservation is as old as humankind, and actually predates us. Animals are known to preserve food in a crude fashion, from dogs burying bones to squirrels stashing away nuts and acorns for later consumption. Strictly speaking, that is not really food preservation but rather food stockpiling, but the two are extensively connected.
Our hunter/gatherer ancestors began to preserve food with the discovery and taming of fire. The mere act of cooking meat has a preservative effect, especially when the meat is cooked to near dryness. Drying food in the sun was also certainly practiced in warmer climates, and freezing food for later use was and still is done by nomads in the Arctic regions.
With the advent of agriculture the need for preservation of food on a large scale became essential to provide sustenance during times of crop failure, especially for grain crops. Grains are fairly easy to preserve since they are dry, so keeping them dry and vermin out of them are the keys. It is thought that the cat became domesticated around this time.
This series will examine various food preservation methods from the ancient to the modern, including an extensive installment on chemical preservatives. Some of these have gotten bad press undeservedly, and some are not as safe as commonly thought.
This is the second of two installments on non-nutritive sweeteners. This time we will talk about one very ancient one, the new ultra sweet aspartame analogue, and a couple of natural products, one of which is gaining popularity these days.
Non-nutritive sweeteners probably have value in managing conditions such as diabetes and obesity where caloric intake, particularly from simple carbohydrates, needs to be restricted. However, these materials are not panaceas and other dietary measures are essential to control either of those conditions. Some studies also are consistent with the premise that the mere sensation of sweetness can cause a rise in blood glucose in non-diabetic people, thus making these agents act like sugar even though they contain no calories. These interpretations are controversial, though.
Hello, folks. Here is another installment regarding the things that we eat. Remember, I am a trained expert in the field (I used to head one the few "Megalabs" for FDA) so I know of what I speak. This time we will talk about non-nutritive sweeteners since we all use them from time to time, even if we do not know it.
I was going to talk about the drugs that Michael Jackson took before he died a short time ago, but the information is still dribbling out from the Coroner's office, and I want the whole story before I add my opinion about it. But be assured that I will weigh in when the story is out in the open.
Milk, in its human form, has been the foundation of nutrition for hominid infants for millions of years. In the past few millenia, animals have been domesticated for milk and meat. Many of them are ruminants, but not all are. The camel and the horse are notable exceptions, highly regarded in several cultures for their milk.
In the western world, kine (aka cattle), (Bos) are almost exclusively used for providing milk in useful quantities. As a matter of fact, in the United States this is such an important agricultural industry that entire sets of laws and price supports have been enacted.
This essay looks into the the issue of milk that is produced with Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), (also called Bovine Somatotropin (BST))and will likely prove to be controversial. This is an important issue, and I will attempt to give it a fair treatment, but remember that many folks have already made up their minds without considering the actual data, and it is difficult to make folks who have already made decisions based on emotion to see logic. With that said, here we go.
There is a lot of attention regarding the topic of trans fats, but hardly anyone outside of chemists and biochemists really understands what a trans fat actually is. This evening we will discuss what they are, whence they come, and some health aspects of them.
This is a controversial subject (not as controversial as high fructose corn sweetener), in that the medical community is not completely in unison with the interpretation of the data from studies. However, the case is more clear than with high fructose corn sweetener.
This is likely to be a hotly debated essay. The subject of High Fructose Corn Sweetener (HFCS) is extremely controversial, with a spectrum of advocates ranging from those who articulate that is nothing but poison in any amount, to those who articulate that is nothing but safe. I believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
We will examine first the chemistry of sugars, then the use of added sugars in processed foods, then some of the political and economic causes, and finally have an open forum. I hope that everyone will contribute.
In light of recent enthusiasm for a "robust public option" on Big Orange I thought it apropos to suggest other "robust public option" solutions to the routine denial of necessities offered Americans by their beloved capitalist system.
Good evening! Ek asked me to post tonight. I am pleased to do so. It has been a long time.
Tonight we are going to talk about a very quick (as far as preparation time goes) and fairly inexpensive main dish. Traditionally, it is made with meat but it does not have to be. The results will be somewhat different, but still very good.
Dr. Kessler (former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration) Delves Into the Mysteries of Food Cravings and Overeating
Health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser
talks to author Dr. David Kessler about overeating and what is behind people's cravings, the subject of his new book, "The End of Overeating"
On Tuesday evening's Newshour, Dr. Kessler made some very interesting observations regarding the food industry's neurological manipulations of people who eat their products.
The food industry has been able to figure out the bliss point, the optimal combinations of fat and salt, fat and sugar, fat, sugar and salt that you think tastes good, but when you look at the science, we now know that those ingredients stimulate, they activate the brain's circuitry.
To find out what the ONE simple thing people can do to lose weight, hop in a barrel and follow me over the fa-a-a-a-alls...
Economically speaking, this also means that you are what you consume.
Since consumer spending makes up over 70% of our national eonomy, logic dictates that the smarter, healthier and more sustainable our purchasing is as individuals, the more sustainable and strong our national economy will become.
The simple ripples in the water can have drastic effects, in the long run.
So, here's what we do.
If Americans ate less meat, less fast food and manufactured food and instead ate more locally grown fruits and vegetables, as well as whatever food you can grow yourself, we could bring about the change we need without having to wait for anyone to take the lead.
Simple changes to your daily diet, even if done in moderation, combined with enough people doing the same thing can literally change the world.
For those of us who often wonder where our food comes from, but don't exactly want to visit the abattoir, themeatrix.com has the power to open your mind a bit. Before you click the video and take the red pill, I offer you the blue pill if you want to bail out now.
If you have gone this far, there is no turning back now.
So far nothing has worked; not bailouts, or conversions to bank holding companies, not front page stories or investigative committees...nothing is helping the economic crisis it only continues to get worse.
What if we cannot stop the economic crisis from continuing to deteriorate, what if the economic levees break?
How is our government (Federal, State, Municipal) preparing for the worst case scenario?
How are we hoping they are preparing, what should we be expecting of them, what can we do?
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
