Food expenditure for one week: 1,233.76 Yuan or $155.06
Favorite foods: fried shredded pork with sweet and sour sauce
Seeing the weekly diet of families all around the world gives an insight into how much we and our diet are affected by economic, social, and political factors. Reasonpad blog:
Come see What The World Eats. A few years ago photographer Peter Menzel and his wife Faith D’Aluisio started to photograph what family’s around the globe eat and wrote down what their weekly expenditure is. In 2005 they published an award winning book called Hungry Planet: What The World Eats.
This project turned out to be so educational that he’s currently still giving lectures at universities about this very subject. A current exhibition is held until May 9, 2010 is hosted by the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.
As you look at the photographs and see what they spend per week, you can draw a lot of different conclusions about their dietm their surroundings, their personal/economic circumstance and how globalization has influenced what people eat.
Reasonpad have put all the images from this Time article on one page, and provided the info for how much was spent, where the families are from, etc.
I don’t believe this image exists. Thanks google image search.
The wikipedia page on wine faults describes with scientific detail all the things that can go wrong with wine, and describes the processes and causes.
I love the terms lightstrike, ladybird taint, ropiness and mousiness. The following is about ladybird taint:
Some insects present in the grapes at harvest inevitably end up in the press and for the most part are inoffensive. Others, notably types of ladybirds, release unpleasant volatile compounds as a defensive mechanism when disturbed. In sufficient quantities this can affect the bouquet and taste of wines. With an olfactory detection threshold of a few ppb, the principal active compounds are methoxypyrazines, or pyrazines, that are perceived as rancid peanut butter, bitter herbaceous, green bell pepper or cat urine.
Plants of the genus Nigella are commonly called “devil in a bush” or “love in a mist”, presumably due to their spiky collars. And their seeds are very flavoursome. From wikipedia:
The seeds of N. sativa, known as kalonji, black cumin (though this can also refer to Bunium persicum) onion seed or just nigella, are used as a spice in Indian and Middle Eastern cuisine. The dry roasted nigella seeds flavor curries, vegetables and pulses. The black seeds taste like oregano and have a bitterness to them like mustard-seeds. It can be used as a “pepper” in recipes with pod fruit, vegetables, salads and poultry.
What role does caffeine play in the life of a plant? According to “the naked scientists”, it plays a part in their defence mechanisms.
So it seems that caffeinated plants are lucky to have this compound as part of their natural defences, but it doesn’t deter all attackers. For instance, caffeine doesn’t poison humans in the doses that we typically ingest (even a Monday morning dose), but it does cause addiction. It works by stopping the enzyme phosphodiesterase from breaking down a signalling substance called cyclic AMP (cAMP for short) and its close relatives. One of the actions of the stress hormone adrenaline is to increase the levels of cAMP in cells, so by preventing cells from breaking down cAMP, caffeine potentiates the action of adrenaline, and gives us a buzz. In even higher doses, and with prolonged use, it can trigger anxiety, muscle tremors, palpitations and fast heart rates, and profound withdrawal effects
including headaches, inability to think clearly, and bad moods whenever you mistakenly switch to decaff !
I made a loaf of fake meat (“nutroast”) for Christmas. Similarly to how meat-eaters make sandwiches with the leftover Turkey or Ham, I made my nutroast into sandwiches.
I wouldn’t usually parade my lunch on my blog like this but I just thought it was remarkable how … well .. meaty, it looked at every stage of production.
Here it is after being warmed/browned in a pan.
Looks like cold cuts of lamb, doesn’t it? This is the nutroast, sliced up straight from the freezer.
The assembled sandwich was mighty good. The recipe I used (loosely) for the nutroast is from the vegetarian society.
David Mitchell in the Guardian a couple of months ago:
Lots of people find tipping interactions perfectly normal and can say: “Keep the change!” without breaking into a sweat. More than that, they say it with pleasure because, if they’d been unhappy with the service, they would have said that as well.
“If you’re unhappy, you should say something!” is their refrain. “Otherwise how will the restaurant know?” What a utopia they’re inhabiting, where people say when they’re unhappy, where you can wander around blithely confident that you haven’t upset anybody because, if so, they’d have mentioned it.
Well, that’s not my world. Here, covert displeasure is ever-present and you never really know what anyone thinks of you. So what right does a disappointing restaurant have to the free gift of information? Why should I make the enormous effort of will of telling someone something they don’t want to hear when, instead of thanking me, they’ll dislike me? Society is divided between those who can unselfconsciously tell people what they think and those for whom it takes tremendous gumption.
In this article Mitchell’s arguing on the side of the socially awkward in favour of predetermined service charges at restaurants. Mitchell’s writing is keen, full of humour and sometimes arrestingly creative (“side orders of vegetables that bordered on soup”). Fun read.
Consultant Gregg Rapp tells clients to “omit dollar signs, decimal points, and cents … It’s not that customers can’t check prices, but most will follow whatever subtle cues are provided.”
If a restaurateur has his wits about him, he’s using his menu to manipulate you and make your dining choices the most profitable. So it seems in this feature at the New York Times.
Ochazuke is rice, tea and a lot of very Japanese stuff.
Ochazuke combines two quintessentially Japanese ingredients, plain white rice and green tea. Ochazuke is commonly served at the very end of an elaborate Japanese full course meal. It’s also favored as a midnight snack, a hangover cure, or just when you want something hot and filling. It’s commonly made with leftover rice, though ideally the rice should be heated up if it’s cold.
The stuff that goes on top makes it flavorful. Nowadays most people use ready-made ochazuke packets, from companies like Yamamotoyama. These come in flavors such as pickled plum, salmon, wasabi and sea urchin. If you can’t get a hold of such packets, here is a recipe of sorts. It’s basically about rice, tea and “stuff” on top. Despite the fact that this is a make-in-a-minute kind of thing, the very Japanese-ness of the “stuff” that goes on top makes authentic ochazuke a rather difficult dish to assemble outside of Japan, unless you have a Japanese food store nearby.
Great — another excuse to consume tea! There’s a recipe for Ochazuke at Just Hungry.
Similarly of interest: Brown rice and green tea porridge or ‘genmai chagayu‘.
Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.
He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”
The UN believes that meat consumption will double by the middle of the 21st century. Read more.
Heidi Swanson’s recipe blog 101 Cookbooks is glorious: All adventurous, healthy and yet covetable food, described intelligently and photographed beautifully.
The premise this site was built on is best summed up in two sentences: When you own over 100 cookbooks, it is time to stop buying, and start cooking. This site chronicles a cookbook collection, one recipe at a time.
I thought it would be nice to make a list — almost like a restaurant menu — of the items in my culinary repertoire, so as to make it easy to plan meals and keep track of new recipes I find/create.
Then it occurred to me that somebody must have already devised a system expressly for this purpose. It turns out they did, and one more advanced than the one I had in mind. The most promising, free recipe organizer that I’ve found so far online is we gotta eat.
There are three things that make it highly attractive for my purposes:
You don’t have to fill in all information in order to make an entry. For me this means I can quickly establish an archive of just recipe titles and descriptions, so that I can quickly build an archive of my repertoire, even including recipes that are committed to my memory and therefore would be a waste of time (at the moment) to type up in detail.
You can choose on an individual recipe basis whether or not to share your recipes with the wegottaeat community.
You can (optionally) add an enormous amount (see below) of categorical information to help you search your database later.
Above: categorization of ‘pasta e fagioli’ soup.
There are other fun (what?) gadgets too, like a shopping list manager. Check it out: wegottaeat.
4tbs white wine vinegar
3-4tbs fresh basil, chopped
2tbs lemon juice
half tsp ground ginger
1 apple (royal gala), cored, chopped, skin left on
1 tsp tabasco sauce
salt & pepper to taste
Blend everything smooth. Very potent, tangy, flavoursome.
If you have read my last post, about the snail parasite leucochloridium paradoxum, you’ve probably lost your appetite. But maybe you can still philosophize about eating.
NYT Magazine has a round-up of reader-submitted food philosophies, such as “don’t yuck someone else’s yum” and “it’s better to pay the grocer than the doctor”. They’re a fun and evocative read even if you don’t agree with all of them.
Here’s a round-up of my favourite recent posts from TheKitchn. Firstly they have an exciting collection of soup and broth recipes. Can’t wait to try some of these out as I’m somewhat of a soup fiend.
Then there’s an interesting food science piece that explains the “digestive consequences” (I like that) of beans and offers tips on how to reduce the severity of said consequences.
The second option is to be sure to cook your beans long enough. The cooking beans low and slow eventually breaks down the carbohydrates so that our bodies are able to absorb them
without trouble. While this method takes time and patience, the positive is that all the good vitamins and minerals are retained.
This recipe for pear and currant chutney sounds easy and looks delicious. I’m on a sort of pickles and chutneys buzz of late.
There is some nice design on display in this roundup of snazzy fruit bowls. I think it’s admirable to give your fruit the attention it deserves like that… I don’t think I’ll be shelling out 100 dollars for a design I could replicate myself though. Some of them are more reasonably priced however.
Speaking of tea ceremonies, here’s a video demo of “blooming tea” in action. Obviously not for everyday consumption, but certainly an attractive and fun bit of ceremony.
Now I think of it, it’s like a more tasteful teapot version of those razzle-dazzle Chinese birthday candles that open up and sing when you light them. I naively lit one of these at my housemate’s birthday party and it roared into action like a garden firework, taking us all aback.
