Monkey Monday! 29 January 2007 9:43 am
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,America's Test Kitchen,anthropology,books,coconut,cooking,dessert,eating,friends,Harold McGee,health,Marion Nestle,Michael Pollan,monkeys,news,people,school,sustainability , trackbackAfter long consideration and much indecision, I’ve decided to stop trying to come up with a clever alliterative food pun and name my Monday miscellany posts in honor of something even more near and dear to my heart than asinine wordplay. Henceforth Monday is Monkey Day here at TracyFood, with love to my brother Piett. And now, on with the randomness!
Monkeys love coconuts, right? It would appear that I do, too, because this weekend I made:
- a vegan approximation of Thai coconut soup (tom kha) based on my Sundance recipes and more; the recipe still needs some work but I took notes and will post a final version as soon as I’m satisfied it produces soup that completely rocks.
- black sticky rice, because it will be a good accompaniment to my next attempt at Oregon Snow coconut-lime sorbet (and yes, that is a pretty funny name for such a tropical dessert)
and I plan to make some kind of curry in the not-too distant future, either with coconut milk or served on coconut basmati rice. Yum! The black sticky rice in particular was a revelation: in the past I’ve tried to make it in my rice cooker, but it turns out the stove, with its range of temperatures more nuanced than “rice cooking/keep warm/off” really is the way to go. Yay for learning!
Speaking of learning, I got my very own copy of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking in the mail on Friday, courtesy of my parents, and it is still every kind of awesome, perhaps even more food geek bible than the publications of America’s Test Kitchen, which I love for their similarly obsessive attention to even molecular details. I have been reading the sections on ice cream with particular interest, as they contain specific ratios of fat to sugar used in regular dairy milk ice cream, and which I hope to approximate in the aforementioned coconut-lime sorbet for awesome deliciousness. It can be done, I tell you! Look for a triumphant report on the results here just as soon as I succeed (and finish eating my exultant way through whatever I make with the winning recipe).
Mom and Chiara: I’m slowly working my way through this week’s New York Times Magazine‘s cover story, Michael Pollan’s “Unhappy Meals”, which both of you have been so kind as to mention. Everybody: So far the piece is about the spread of quasi-nutritional pseudo-science into the ways mainstream U.S. consumers think about food (ok, so Pollan doesn’t actually say it’s about mainstream consumers as compared to subcultures like vegetarians, health nuts, or people more concerned with having anything to eat than whether it fits any kind of nutritional standard, but I think it’s important to be aware who he’s talking about — and, for that matter, who he thinks will read his piece, but I digress). There’s a lot of good history there for anybody who hasn’t yet experienced the collected works of my hero Marion “so badass” Nestle (ahem, I highly recommend both Food Politics and What To Eat, and am looking forward to getting my hands on Safe Food) so those parts read like review to me, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important for this information to be relayed far and wide. After reading Pollan’s claim that public knowledge about nutrients (as created largely by government recommendations and guidelies) hasn’t really improved public nutrition, let alone public health, I remembered something Prof. Moreno said in Food and Culture last term: when she started doing fieldwork in northeast Thailand, nutritional concepts like protein were more or less unknown in the area, but in recent years people have started using such terms. Which makes me curious if anyone has been taking data about eating habits before and after the introduction and spread of such terms in countries that don’t have as long a history of food anxiety as the U.S. (Prof. Moreno: I’m sorry I spaced out at times during the lectures on your fieldwork: they were relevant after all!) I’m sure I’ll have even more to say about Pollan’s article as I finish reading it, so I’ll move on for now.
Speaking of Marion “still my hero” Nestle, she’s speaking in Corvallis in February. Twice, in fact. I am so there, or at least I’ll definitely go to the one that’s free and open to the public on Friday the 17th. I have until February 8 to decide if I want to shell out $30 for the Small Farms Conference where she’s giving the keynote address on Saturday the 18th. Maybe I can swing some kind of work exchange deal where I help people at the registration tables in return for admission? I won’t know until I ask. The fabulous Chiara assures me that Dr. Nestle is a rockstar speaker, and I am eager to confirm her opinion (and maybe try to score an autograph, because yes, I am an academic groupie).
This week in Sustainable Agriculture we’re going to be discussing water issues, which should be good for a few flashbacks to the Environmental Studies campus landscape clinic my senior year at Mudd. My primary goal for our class discussions is to bring up the 2000-2001 California power crisis, and in particular the fact that they actually switched off the pumps on the California Aqueduct to avoid rolling blackouts. That’s right, the choice was between water and power, and power won. Along similar lines, if you managed to suffer through last week’s State of the Union address, you may have caught a few references to energy independence, and alternative fuels like biodiesel and bioethanol, which have very much the same flavor to me, only this time we’re choosing between food and power. I know it’s not the same thing, really, and that there’s plenty of corn, even too much, but that’s not going to change if we start using it to feed cars instead of cows or people. The senator from Iowa seemed pretty psyched to hear W shout out to the notion of corn-fueled cars.
To end on a happy (if somewhat unrelated to food) note, far better than corn-fueled cars are people-fueled vehicles like the custom-built bright orange Tandem Two’sDay Peter and I picked up from Bike Friday last Thursday. Here’s to lots more long, calorie-burning bike rides that make whatever we eat afterwards taste like the food of the gods! (Saturday night it was delicious buckwheat crepes, some filled with feta cheese and roasted winter vegetables and others filled with jam or lemon juice and honey, which would have been awesome even if we hadn’t worked up our appetites for 25+ miles. Go team!)
-
debbie
