TracyFood

Monkey Monday: cookies and random 29 March 2010 1:28 pm

Posted by Tracy in : baking,cookies,dessert,eating,friends,fun,monkeys,people,photos,pictures , trackback

So first things first, big thanks are due to Sam, for bringing homemade Oreos to one of Greg’s dinner parties and saying stuff like “they’re super-easy!” and “just Google for ‘homemade Oreos’” because I did and the results were delicious:

Oh yes.

These are almost exactly the recipe at Smitten Kitchen, with the somewhat-less-sugar version of the cookie parts and a heaping teaspoon of instant coffee thrown in for extra bittersweet chocolatey goodness. The only drawback was that they were SO HARD to stop eating that Peter and I had to bring them to brunch for Gina’s birthday yesterday, so that we would not eat them all ourselves, and spend the whole week in sugar shock. Oh, and I got both the food processor and the stand mixer dirty, but SO WORTH IT (and next time I think I can do everything in just the mixer — and there will be a next time, oh yes).

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In other news, I can’t believe I haven’t posted about choke-free hot dogs yet. On the one hand, holy slow news day, Batman! But on the other hand, I couldn’t help but do a little arithmetic on the statistics in that article… 60 percent of all choking incidents are food, of which 17 percent involve hot dogs, which means that one in ten times someone chokes it’s on a tube steak? Yeesh. Especially after last week’s reading for my food industrialization and processing class, Roger Horowitz’ Putting Meat on the American Table. It was a pretty good book, but I kept wanting it to be better, if that makes any sense. Still, I learned a few really cool fun facts, like the fact that bacon used to refer to meat that was processed in a certain way, and only switched to referring to a particular pig part processed in that way when the process got sufficiently mechanized. Also, the unholy power of convenience: In 1962, 83 percent of all chicken sold was in whole chicken form; by 1995, 86 percent was cut up or processed into patties or nuggets and scarier, oh my! And just to bring things back around to sausage again, I think that makes for a really fascinating way of understanding chicken nuggets, don’t you?

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Readers who know me from back in the Claremont days might be interested to read that food systems analysis has made its way to Frary dining hall on Pomona. Or maybe that’s just me?

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Non-vegans up for some less research-intensive food systems perspective might dig Where Is My Milk From? — the shiny web toy which taught me that the Fairway brand Organic Grade A Pasteurized Homogenized Vitamin D Grass-Fed Whole Milk in our fridge is from Longacres Modern Dairy Inc. in Barto, Pennsylvania. (Our Organic Valley heavy whipping cream, on the other hand, is from East Syracuse, New York. And we are out of half and half.) I am oddly delighted to have this information so readily at my disposal, yay! Also I love the website’s tagline “yeah, yeah, it probably comes from cows, but then where?”

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And now I should stop procrastinating and get back to my readings. Whee!