Monkey Monday: pop quiz edition 10 September 2007 9:33 am
Posted by Tracy in : CSA, books, monkeys, seasonality , trackbackDear readers: If I had a recipe for delicious beet salad, and a story about how learning that recipe got me in big trouble, which would you rather read first: the recipe or the story? What if the story had monkeys in it? Just wondering. In other monkey news for this week, I had a bad fruit day on Saturday, How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons gets a mixed review, and more.
I had a bad fruit day on Saturday. First there were moldy strawberries at work, and I thought that was the saddest thing ever until I picked up my backpack and it was all soggy and wet because I had put it down too hard and cracked the CSA watermelon that was in the very bottom of the bag. Dammit. Did I wipe out the backpack with paper towels and put the watermelon in a plastic bag and take it home to eat anyway? You betcha. Just because it’s the end of the summer doesn’t mean I have to let all the delicious tastes go by unsavored. And just for the record, that watermelon was freaking delicious, even the sad-looking cracked bits.
Also on Saturday I returned How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons to my friendly local public library (that first link goes to Culinate’s page about it, which is sadly just information from the publisher). If you’ve got questions about how to tell fresh, ripe veggies from the under- and over-ripe kind that have been languishing in a fridge for far too long, Parsons wants to answer them, and also suggest what to do with your delicious produce once you’ve selected it. I wasn’t too impressed by his recipes, and was thoroughly weirded out by his surprise that the Netherlands has brought the world all kinds of advances in produce-breeding, transporting, and storing technology, but hey, he’s from Los Angeles and probably doesn’t like people talking shit about the California produce-industrial complex. Oh well. [Update, 10 December 2007: Culinate ran a real review of HtPaP, by Eugene's own Suzi Steffen, in late September, when I was too busy freaking out about my Nepal trip to notice it. --TvC]
Today I am reactivating my library card and returning Food Not Lawns by Heather Flores, because it cannot be renewed even with my reactivated card; someone else has a request out on it. I don’t have a quick and clever review for that one, except that it walks a fascinatingly fine line between “Hey, that’s a good idea!” and “Oh, hippie please.” Firmly in the “hippie, please” category was a friendly (and extremely dirty) fellow named James who accosted me outside the Kiva book-wine-grocery store in downtown Eugene on Saturday (yes, it really is amazing that I ever shop anywhere but the Kiva, but I digress). James did not approve of the way soap strips natural oils from the skin, but told me he preferred to wash himself with baking soda and sometimes finish up with aloe vera juice. “Oh yeah,” I said (or something like that), “make soap out of your own skin oil. I guess that could work.” He looked bewildered, and I decided to spare him even a teeny tiny chemistry lecture and ride off to my own well-earned shower, complete with the magic of Dr. Bronner’s. (Yes, I know this paragraph was only barely food-related, but hey, it amused me.) Then my surreal Saturday was made complete in the wee hours of Sunday morning, by Peter returning home from his high Sierras adventure almost 24 hours early, after a truly epic drive. Woo!
Hot and fiery tip of the moment: if your partner’s been on a big backpacking trip and comes home with sun-blistered lips, try cooking something a little less spicy than broiled corn with chili-cumin-cayenne-infused butter (I really wanted grilled corn, so I tried to approximate it with the broiler, which actually worked okay, but I really should’ve given that topping a second thought… oops). And that’s everything delicious that happened to me this weekend, or at least all I’m going to write about before dashing off to work.
Not-so-confidential to Matthew and Liz: I’ve almost finished writing up that kushari recipe for you; it’ll be up later this week.
Comments»
Can you give use the casual conversational version of the alkali + oil makes soap lecture? I brought this up when working in a winery, upon the slick feeling of the potassium bisulfate solution we used for cleaning stainless steel. Anyway, a fellow cellar rat was not convinced.
Oh man, and look up more chemistry than base + fat makes soap? I’ll see what I can do. I know it’s something to do with soap having both hydrophobic and hydrophilic properties, and I’m sure the general magic that is water is involved… eep. There may be diagrams.