Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Diet record-keeping

So I'm taking this nutrition class, and one of the key exercises is keeping track of everything you eat for five days, once at the beginning of the quarter and again, later, when you will allegedly will have learned enough to mend your wayward chow-hounding.

I think I've done pretty well, but the program we're using to keep track keeps record of both eats and activities. I say "but" because the short questionnaire the program uses has labeled me as "active" and thus believes I need nearly 2,500 calories a day just to keep my head above water. I'm dubious.

I'm also skeptical of the claims about how much the kinds of exercise I do count. For example, I swim (hard, baby). I did a pretty aggressive half-hour yesterday (Friday) and the gizmo thinks that's about 400 calories burnt. I don't know about that. I find it hard to believe that a half-hour swim could counteract, say for example, a six-shot bender of vodka (65 calories apiece). To put it a different way, the swim would amount to four normal peanut butter spoons (1 tablespoon each).

Anyway, the upshot of the five-day deal is that I have been paying way, way more attention to my eating patterns. I probably have snacked a lot less than usual on account of the record-keeping. If you believe my friend Chris Sawin, a college pal, the bad-habit-breaking/positive-habit-forming threshold is 17 days. I assume he came up with that during one of his quit-smoking efforts. Anyway, I'm not sure 17 is right, but five surely is to few?

I've tried to act normal this week, but I'm sure I've cut back. And because I tend to eat cyclically (i.e. I'll go on a V-8 jag starting tonight and lasting a couple weeks, then avoid the stuff), I am certain this isn't going to be super representative. But it is interesting!

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Cheap turkeys in Walla Walla

If you happen to blunder into this blog soon, you might find you can get a good deal on a turkey at Safeway on Rose Street in Walla Walla. I happened in Monday night and wound up with a 13.5-pound Safeway brand turkey, frozen, for $3.46. Supposedly you had to buy $25 worth of stuff to get a discount, and it was supposed to be 37 cents a pound for that size of bird, but I bought about $16 worth and got the 27 cents a pound deal. $3.46! Freaky.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

12 questions

Got this idea from the biz-to-biz publication my employer puts out each month:

1. What brought you to Walla Walla? Originally, college. This time, a good job in a small city with great weather where work and a lot of other destinations are a short walk from my house, which is pretty much downtown.

2. Favorite memory: How to choose! Honestly, though, I look forward, not back. If I had to pick one, maybe having dinner with new friends in Redeyef, Tunisia, with the butterfly lady.

3. Current favorite song/CD: CD? What's that? Current song: Carvel, by John Frusciante.

Album: Sea Sew, by Lisa Hannigan


Favorite movie: The Deer Hunter, but it depends on the day. Maybe Heat, maybe Romeo + Juliet.

Favorite food: Well, that is an impossible question, isn't it? I guess it is a tie: Pastrami and swiss on rye with Russian dressing and sauerkraut or peanut butter and jam on country white.

Favorite book: Only one? Wind, Sand and Stars. But seriously, only one?

Favorite hobby: Bird watching. First easy question!

Favorite place in Walla Walla County: In the wheat fields east of the city, in the hills that overlook the valley.

Most recent local purchase: Two delicate drinking glasses with dragonflies from Willow of Walla Walla.

Worst job: Depends on how you look at it. You might imagine the curséd cannery, the miserable mill or the horrible hospital, but you'd be wrong. Worst job? Working at Roth's Vista Market as a box clerk, where the owner would drop by now and then to patronize his low-paid workers and exhort us to run, run, run when bringing those shopping carts back in from the lot. What a jerk. One of my jobs in New Hampshire was pretty high on the list, too.

Dream vacation: Beats me. How about three months in summer to complete the New England 67? (That'd be summiting the 67 peaks in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine that are over 4,000 feet). I'm between a third and halfway done now, but they're a long drive these days.

Person you'd most like to talk to: Cate Blanchett :)

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Litmus tests

I don't know about you, but when I go to new restaurants and bars, I have a couple of standby orders I use to assess whether I'm going to want to come back.

Sandwich - Reuben
For me, a good Reuben is a few slices of corned beef, about the same amount of sauerkraut as beef, a slice of Swiss cheese and Russian dressing on toasted - but not greasy - rye bread. I can live with some of the variations, like marbled rye or pastrami, but those are small strikes against a place. Too much meat and not enough kraut are the most common felonies.

Drink - Martini
Pretty simple. Gin and olives. If you can't figure out how to put chilly gin in a glass with some big, tasty olives, I'm pretty sure you can't be trusted to make a sidecar. I know, I know, vermouth. I'm with Churchill on this one.

Pizza - Italian sausage, bell peppers, onions, thin crust.
I eat other pizzas, but this combo will uncover any fault, whether it's subpar toppings, flimsy crust, incompetent baking or insipid sauce.

The funny thing is that even though that's what I order to find out if a place is good, I'd really rather have a peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwich on toasted wheat bread and a glass of bourbon. I'll stick with that pizza, though.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Lasagna shells

So you want a lasagna, the really yummy, homemade kind, but you're a little low on time/patience. Try lasagna shells. You're going to have to forgive me the oddball instructions. I cook this one without a recipe, pretty much, and vary its size on which casseroles are clean and unspoken for.

I'll try to give a 9x13 recipe, but it may be a couple of 6x9s.

Sauce:
Four strips bacon, chopped
An onion, diced
Six cloves of garlic, minced
Two medium carrots, chopped
A big stalk of celery, chopped
A pound of ground (but hot Italian sausage is better!)
A cup of dry white wine
1 big can (28 ounce) crushed tomatoes in puree
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
As much basil as you've got, within reason, chopped or pureed.

Cook bacon on low heat in a big sauce pan or high-walled skillet (it needs to hold all this stuff). Raise the heat to medium.
When the bacon's pretty much cooked and the fat's rendered out, dump in the onion and garlic. Cook about 5 minutes, then dump in carrots and celery. Cook another five minutes, then dump in sausage. Brown the sausage, pour off fat if you're crazy or on a diet, then add the wine. Cook off alcohol for a few minutes, then add tomato products. At this point, you have about 15 minutes of simmering to go. The tomato paste is the key to that. If you don't add tomato paste, you cheap short-cutter, you're in for a 45-minute simmer to achieve the same effect.
When you're on short final, add the basil. I preserve basil by pureeing it with olive oil and a little garlic, then freezing it. For this sauce, I use maybe a third of a cup of frozen puree and just drop the frozen chunk in when there's 15 minutes to go.

As soon as you hit this point, you can cook the shells, but only to the what the box says is al dente. Don't go farther or they'll become fragile and wussy.

Also at this point, mix a 1-pound tub cottage cheese (yeah, yeah. Ricotta. OK, buddy, what do you think "ricotta" means?), a quarter-cup or more freshly grated Parmiggiano-Reggiano and a few sprigs freshly chopped parsley. If you're big on cheese, slice up some fresh mozzarella, too, small enough to fit in a shell.

Now it's hammer time. Strain the noodles and rinse with cold water to arrest cooking. Spread some sauce in the bottom of your casserole(s).

Fill the noodles with a portion of the cottage cheese mixture and top, if you have mozz., slap a slice on each shell as you put it into the casserole(s).

When all the noodles are in the dish, cover with as much of the sauce that's left as you like (I always have leftovers, which I always freeze). Unless you're out of Parm, grate some more on top, and...

Bake at 350 degrees until bubbly, then wait a while and eat!

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Oh, fine. The other goals.

I usually make my New Year's resolutions around my birthday, which is around Burns Day. This year, I think the grand total was to become a really good baker.

Cook? Sure. Baker? Well, not so much. I make really good cookies and some pastries, but except pizza dough, all the bread I've made has been not great. Edible's a start, but really.

One big factor in this resolution is my desire to reinvent a delicious Japanese cracker/cookie found in Matsumoto. It's bigger than most sembei, a disc about three inches in diameter and maybe a quarter-inch thick, crusted with sugar and wasabi. Super tasty, but not readily available here in Walla Walla.

Anyway, my efforts have stalled, though I keep meaning to re-take up the cause. I did make candy for the first time this year, and I didn't even need a thermometer, so that was pretty cool. But as for actual baked goods, there's still room for improvement.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Hit-and-run activism

When I was in college, my friends, enemies and associates and I were often called on to take part in daylong "hunger strikes," overnight stints as homeless people, the list goes predictably on.

I see that a fellow journalist, Jill Silva, took the so-called food stamp challenge, to live for a week on the amount of food the stamps will buy you. In her case, her family of four had $129.50 to spend. Her coverage is worth a read, but begs a few questions from this editor.

What do you really learn by spending just one week in deprivation? More importantly, do food stamp recipients use only food stamps to buy food? If not, how much of their dough do they fold into their weekly allotment? What'll that buy you?

To really get the picture, it would be more appropriate to take the challenge for a month. That'd give despair a better chance to set in. The most interesting part of the talented Ms. Silva's piece is three of her four observations about the emotional and physical effect of doing the challenge:

The challenge felt like a diet. I spent nearly every moment I was not at work thinking about or preparing food.
It was exhausting to shop three times in one week to get the best deals.
I feared I would run out of food.

But it was still a worthy story, even if it was a little too close for my taste to the Global Awareness House holding a Go Hungry for Ghana night.

The most insightful aspect of the coverage, though, was this, the only comment left by someone who read her stories: " You are lucky to have a vehicle to get to the store."

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Fudge...

Well, I'm not so sure about how good it is, but I made fudge last night. I had some leftover chocolate from a flurry of brownie baking, so I figured I might as well. After an amusing screw-up (added the butter rather than the chocolate to the milk and sugar and had to start over), I think I succeeded for the first time in making candy (I have tried before - not great).

I don't have a candy thermometer, so I had to use an old-school method for guessing as to whether the choco-sugar-milk-salt was early or late "soft ball" during the crucial part of the cooking. This could be important later, because I'd like to make some marchpane over the weekend and it of course involves candy-ing...

Anyway, now I'm going to inflict/bestow upon my co-workers some fudge Cockaigne (I found this interesting site while double-checking my guess as to the provenance of "Cockaigne" - land of cakes).

The flurry of brownie manufacturing is going to turn into a food story in the paper, so I'll spill the beans about that later.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Guess the food

Here're the ingredients:

Corn syrup
Sugar
Palm oil
(and less than 2 percent of:)
mono- and diglycerides
hydrogenated cottonseed oil
salt
soy lecithin
artificial flavors
Blue 1
Red 40
Yellow 5

Yum!

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Beans & rice

Sometimes the store has sliced up smoked pork shanks, which don't look too appetizing but are brilliant soup starters:

2 sliced pork shank pieces (frozen, thawed, who cares?)
Five cloves garlic
1 to 1.5 cup beans (I like the white ones with the black eyes), rinsed and sorted
2 bay leaves
5 peppercorns
4 whole cloves

Place the shanks in a soup pot and add water to cover by about 3 inches (aka 2 or 3 quarts).
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat. Skim off the inevitable scum and discard.
Add the beans, garlic and spices and simmer until the beans are tender, about 1.5 hours (depends on the beans. If you soak them ahead of cooking, they will be done earlier.)
Make rice, and serve with the beans!

Friday, February 08, 2008

What a deal!

I thought improving morals would be a lot harder, but I was once again wrong:

To be fair, the little packets are pretty good. The orange was, anyway. I think it might be a stretch to say that the packets will make you healthier (encourages hydration and contains vitamin C - 25 percent of the RDA - maybe just enough to avoid scurvy?), but who's going to quibble when you have better "moral."

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Sugar cookies!

Speaking of cooking, I made some sugar cookies the other day. I think everyone on Earth has a different recipe. This one, from all recipes, is fabulous: sweet, crisp, not overblown:
  • 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 cup butter, softened
  • 1 1/2 cups white sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
I suspect you won't need the instructions. I would like to caution that chilling the cut-out cookies before baking is a good idea; the alternative is cartoonishly smooshed-out cookies (in my case, gorillas that resembled bison and moose that ran into the bison-rillas in suggestive ways.

Warm up corn tortillas

Forty-nine tortillas into a 50-tortilla package, I think I finally have the method down (besides frying, I mean):

Plate
Paper towel
Tortilla-size piece of wax paper
Tortillas (four, maybe more?)
Tortilla-size piece of wax paper

Microwave for about two minutes (I have a cheap microwave, so if yours is one of the fancy, powerful ones, maybe less time is the way to go.

Anyway, you get nice, warm tortillas that aren't dried out or gummy. I'll let you guess how the previous 45 tortillas worked out...

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Tough nut to crack

Or, perhaps, nuts of friggin' steel.
Maybe this is why you have to pay extra for shelled nuts, so you don't have to buy a new nutcracker when the filbert says, "hammer time."

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Eating Alarm Time...

One of the features my paper carries is called the Diet Detective, a weekly column by Charles Stuart Platkin. We don't run it every week: Some columns are much better than others. This week's is about Eating Alarm Times (maybe he's German and likes capitalizing things). Platkin calls the EAT (oh, clever clever. I just got it) a time when a person can consume an extra 300 calories, thus gaining weight.

His column is based on asking people about their EATs, and the results are pretty interesting, if for no other reason than that mine is the third-most popular. He calls it Afternoon Snack Attack, between 1 and 5 p.m. I call this period "lunch" because I eat after swimming. That seems like maybe a better plan than wolfing down a sandwich before jumping in the pool. Anyway, I do notice that when I get done swimming, I am even more ravenously hungry than usual.

By "usual" I mean almost all the time since I dropped about 25 pounds in August 2005. I also get cold more easily than I used to, but I have a pretty high tolerance for being cold, so maybe now I'm just normal. Whatever. I'm still hungry, damn it.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Lentil soup

I'm OK with lentils, although I wouldn't call them a favorite. I've made a bunch of lentil dishes, all of which, I think, are Indian. Even with plenty of tinkering, nothing special. This soup, however, passes the relatively easy "me" test and the much more stringent butterfly lady test.

This was a fact-finding mission, not a closely measured soup session, so measurements are approximate:

Lentils
"spices"
water
Mix and cook. Serves portions.

Just kidding.

Lentil soup
Three 3/4-inch thick pieces of smoked pork shank (shanks are much better than hocks)
1.5 cups lentils, carefully sorted and rinsed
1 small yellow onion, halved
4-5 cloves garlic, peeled
12 peppercorns
1 dried chili (more if you want noticeably spicy soup)
6 cloves
2 dried bay leaves
A stalk or two of celery
1/4 cup wild rice
1/4 cup barley

In a spacious soup pot (mine is 9 inches in diameter), simmer the shanks in about three times as much water as it would take to just cover them (aka a couple of inches). You may need to add more water later.

Give it about 10 minutes a-simmer, then add everything but the barley and wild rice.

This is a little tricky. You want to simmer the lot until the lentils are about 35 minutes from ready, then add the rice and barley. I guess this is an unnecessary and fiddly step - maybe you could add the grains earlier, but I feared they would wind up mushy.

In the initial simmer, you can let the soup get near a boil, and skim off the scum from the top. I think the scum's zenith (or nadir, depending on how gross you find it) tends to be about 10 minutes into the simmer.

This makes plenty - maybe six medium to large bowls of soup (I think!)

Thursday, October 11, 2007

All quiet on the front

I would call it the western front, but my father's definition of The West is west of Interstate 5, and the eastern front hasn't got the same ring to it.

Anyway, this is my way of saying, not a lot is going on in sunny Walla Walla. About the top piece of excitement just now is deciding what kind of casserole to make over the weekend. I want to do something new...

Monday, September 10, 2007

The oven's on

The weather has finally arrived at the point at which I am happy to turn the oven on for extended periods. I think the overnight lows have been in the 50s, so the house has been about 60 degrees in the morning. It is nice, like camping.

So, over the weekend, I made a couple of pizzas and sugar cookies - yum!

I'm still refining the pizza recipe: I was using sauce I froze some time back, and next time I plan to do two things differently: reduce the sauce much more (too damn watery) and add one of those cute little cans of tomato paste.

This time I used fancier mozzarella than usual (usually I just buy the chunk of fake-o mozzarella - the same type that's used for string cheese, I think, and the same kind that most pizza parlors use). I opted for fresh mozzarella partly because the cheese was buy one, get one free at Joe Albertson's supermarket.

The only disadvantage of the better cheese is that it isn't salty, so I think the addition of freshly grated Parmesan would be a big plus (as if it wouldn't be anyway).

This reminds me of when I worked at Sunshine Pizza Exchange (alas, nobody every exchanged anything but money for our pizza). This was a pretty good pizza parlor in the Northwest, one that when times were good could be counted on for very good thin-crust pizza.

We had a policy, for example, that when making a pepperoni pizza the pepperoni needed to overlap and entirely cover the pie. Pepperoni shrinks when cooked, so overlapping was just insurance that you wouldn't be able to see the cheese showing through when the pizza was baked. Oh, and we used good-quality pepperoni, too.

I worked there long enough to become fairly picky about pizza. Now, if you're buying, I'll eat just about anything, but if I'm buying (or baking), I am really only happy with very good pizza. Life is too short for schlocky stuffed-crust, dipping-stick junk.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Scary microwave popcorn story

from the wire, and thankfully irrelevant to me, because I use a mechanical popcorn popper: Apparently, a non-popcorn factory worker has come down with the dreaded popcorn lung, aka bronchiolitis obliterans (I don't think you need to be a big expert in Latin to guess at what ungodly thing happens to your lungs in this one).

Luckily, I guess, the guy got it by making and eating a couple of bags of popcorn a day and deeply inhaling the fumes each time he opened the bag.

He's on the wagon and the road to recovery, so that's a cheerful outcome, but it is creepy nonetheless. Popcorn lung would be a pretty lame thing to have to put on your tombstone.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Caprese

I don't think I've previously mentioned how much I like caprese, but let it be known, O Universe, that I like to eat caprese. I've had it in many different forms, all of which have included tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, oil and balsamic vinegar.

In a few places, it has also come with other ingredients (olives, salt and pepper), and I've had it served in varying ways: At Dan Marino's pub/restaurant, the tomato slices seem like they are an inch thick (but they're really only three-quarters of an inch or so - that, and they're slices of HUGE tomatoes), with a lot of cheese and not so much basil.

At Cafe Med (a New Hampshire favorite), the recipe is a lot like how I make it at home, with thinner tomatoes and chopped basil.

I had yet another version last night at an undisclosed location: three thick tomato slices (not Marino-esque, thankfully), three slices of mozzarella and three basil leaves, arranged in a column on the diagonal of a square plate and dressed with oil and balsamic vinegar. Pretty tasty, for sure, but not a very generous helping. On the very bright side, I was also not super hungry, so this made a perfect-size meal. I think if my fellow diner and I had been sharing this as an appetizer we would have been disappointed, though.

Is there a moral to the story? Uh, no, not really.