Blah post--shame on me!

Staff meeting last night and I suspect I forgot all about writing.  There's nothing interesting to write about anyway.  Tonight I looked again for miso paste and failed again.  I guess a trip to Whole Foods is in order.  I could go in the Oriental grocery that I drive by every day, but I'm not sure I could decipher the labels.  I can buy it on "soap.com" in a tub or from South River miso in a 16-oz jar.  So why can't I find it at the grocery store?

The weeds in the front yard think it's spring except it's going to sleet/snow/freeze Sunday night.  So be it--I'm planting spinach tomorrow!  Also, I'll be listening to an absolutely fascinating book--Code Name Verity.  It's the World War II novel I wish I could write!

Watering the garden, nutso?

Came home early to water the spinach and lettuce seeds.  It's supposed to get down to23 tonight--are you even supposed to water seeds when there's a heavy frost coming?  The cold water didn't do my hands any good, that's for sure.

Recipe #7 from The China Study Cookbook was



Breakfast Home-Fry Hash.



Minus the garnishes.  I don't top ordinary hash with cherry tomatoes and green onions and I'm not doing it with this one, either.

And the verdict?



It wasn't half bad.  Which is another way of saying that it wasn't all good.  It was just cubed fried potatoes with bell pepper and onion--same as what my mom made sometimes except she fried everything in oil.  This was "fried" in vegetable broth and it didn't develop the right flavor or color.  I'd make it again, especially for a group breakfast at work, but I'd turn up the heat and brown everything nice and dark.  .

I can't even begin

When I start to read a book, I usually weigh the volume in my hands, look at the back cover blurb, and flip through pages to the beginning. I'm reading them yet, just assessing the font size and word count. It kind of gives me a clue about what to expect.

With an audiobook, I do none of that. I just copy it to the Ipod, navigate to Chapter 1 and press Start.


And thus began London Calling, by Edward Bloor...
and I still don't know how I could have been forewarned.   It was so unexpected and so unexpectedly good, I'm having trouble deciding between a 4-star rating and a 5.  But my mouse pointer is hovering over the 5.

A lot of times a book with an obvious religious message is just plain propaganda, but I can't say it of this one.  There's no more propaganda here than in the TV series Supernatural.  It's as if the author "what if'ed"  angels and spirituality and life beyond death, and came up with something beautiful.  I have no doubt the author is a strong Catholic, but that didn't keep me from loving this book.

Bear in mind, it's a teen book.  Minor details such as the inevitable arrest and subsequent prosecution when the bad guy gets his due aren't included.  I didn't care--I just cheer for it and went on to the good stuff--the unsolved murder; the unanswered question...I can't tell more.  Sorry.

Recipe #6 from The China Study Cookbook

Spinache Chickpea Burgers.  


The only resemblance to a burger is the shape--round and flat.  They'd fit a normal hamburger bun nicely, but of course I had to buy the fancy whole-grain buns that are 20% bigger than normal.   I tried to make the patties a little bigger, to fit the bun, but they tried to fall apart so I gave up.


All that said, they're good.  Especially when topped with a slathering of caramelized onion and mushroom and drenched in tomato ketchup.  (Veggie mayo or avocado slices would have been healthier, I admit, but the whole reason for making veggie "burgers" was to give me an excuse to eat ketchup.)

This recipe also took care of the  Ingredient of the week:

Flaxseeds.  Or rather, flaxseed meal.  Mixed with water and set aside for twenty minutes, it gets gooier than eggs.  I didn't think to taste it, but as a binding agent it's supreme.

Flaxseeds are high in omega-3 fatty acids, in fact, their omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is 0.26:1.  If that looks funny, it is--it's backwards from the typical ratio--tofu 7:1; canola oil 2:1; olive oil 11:1.  It's nowhere near as good as Pacific salmon  (0.2:1), but then it's nowhere near as expensive.

The cultivation of flax for fiber has an ancient history, but the mass-production of flaxseed meal or flaxseed oil seems to be a modern invention.  Wikipedia has an uncited report of its consumption--roasted, with rice-- in northern India.  I find it to be an amusing aberration of my brain that it is prejudiced in favor of foods that have been in cultivation for a long time.  Why should "people have been eating this for centuries" have any weight in my food choices?   People have been stupid for centuries, too.  But I'm still a sucker for the "ancient wisdom fallacy."

Everything i like in a memoir

                 Born Round
               by Frank Bruni. 


No, it wasn't on the list--it was an impulse read.  I got so frustrated during last week's "vacation," that the second day I had to work I got on the library catalog and found a couple of books to read, just as a reward for being out on the road yet again.

Born Round was a New York Times Notable Book and it deserved to be.  Mr. Bruni is the best kind of memoir writer--funny, kind to himself, and forgiving of others.  Growing up in a big family of Italian cooks and Italian eaters; cursed with some mixture of genes and personality that made food his drug of choice, you'd think Mr. Bruni was doomed to become the 300-pound, 50-year-old heart attack victim in the Cadillac-sized coffin.  And he probably thought so, too.

I devoured this book.  All I could wish for was more--toward the end, especially.  He artfully describes his strategies for sneaking into a restaurant multiple times and sampling a multitude of courses, trying to remain unrecognized as "The Critic"; and he humorously relates the ways his dining companions sabotage his strategy.  I just wanted to know a little more about the restaurants he visited--the good and the bad and in the case of Wild Salmon, the ugly.

A bit of the Wild Salmon review was quoted and it made me want more.

(Never mind--I just found a bunch of them online.)

The Onions

I was supposed to fix Spinache Chickpea burgers today but I ran out of steam after working most of the day and then trying to squeeze in some garden tilling before supper.  So instead I made

           Baked and Breaded Avocado Bites


                             from the PETA website.


The recipe said to serve them on top of a salad or with a favorite dipping sauce and I ignored that.  Duh, me--they were bland.  Wholesome, but bland.  Some lemon juice or a spicy dipping sauce would have made them good.  Or they would have made excellent croutons for a hearty salad...in fact, if there any left later and if I get up the energy to assemble myself a salad, I'll use them.

Planting date: 2/20/2014 and already behind schedule

Onions planted today!  Thousands and thousands.  There were supposed to be 80 slips--two packs of 40 each--but after I measured out the space required for four rows of 80 plans 6 inches apart, and then started planting, my space had to be extended by at least 18 inches.  I could do the math on that but I'm too tired.

I also planted peas and part of the lettuce, radishes, and spinach.  It's against folk wisdom to plant all of a garden crop on the same day.  Technically I should wait until next week to plant the rest, but I'll probably go ahead with the spinach.

I'll get a picture tomorrow, but there's not much to see except faintly greenish stems poking jaggedly out of clumps of clay.

This is going to be a hard one.

Polio: An American Story

by David M. Oshinsky



My verdict: it's strong in the beginning, okay at the end, weak in the middle.  In the beginning there was the disease and the crusade--Franklin Roosevelt, Hollywood studios, the March of Dimes, the Mothers' March--all joined to raise the money to develop a vaccine and test it.   The tests of the killed-virus vaccine, Salk's, were called the "biggest public health experiment ever."  The sheer amount of paperwork involved in tracking the results seem darn near impossible to me now.  Remember:  1955 = no integrated circuits.

In the middle, the book seemed to disintegrate into a morass of conflicting personalities as Salk's killed-virus vaccine fought against Sabin's live-virus one.  And we all know the ending...but did we know that after 1980, when the percentage of polio cases has dropped to about a dozen a year, almost all cases would be attributed to the live vaccine?  Do we know of the many cases where live monkey viruses (not polio!) could be found in the supposedly inactive vaccination doses?  Will we someday discover that the polio vaccine brought AIDS to the world?

Maybe not, but it's still scary.  I also learned about Post-Polio syndrome, a partial recurrence of the symptoms in the later years of life, even among those who had fully recovered.

My only disappointment in the book, other than the confusion of the middle part, was its concentration more on social history than medical history.  Others might disagree with me on this, but I didn't get enough science.  For example, did we ever find out why it strikes mostly children?  Did we ever get a grip on the apparent link between improved sanitation and increased polio?  The author kept his story firmly in its time, never giving away the future.  But...I would have enjoyed a second epilogue called "What we know now."

My old buddy is nagging me.

I seem to have come down with this cold that the rest of the family has survived.  When I cough, it hurts.  And I have no energy.  I tilled a bit yesterday; transplanted an onion; went and got a shovel out of the barn but didn't use it.

Today I tilled a little more and then went to Lowes to see if they had the seeds I wanted.  It was annoying--apparently Ferry-Morse and Burpee have both decided to put minimal descriptions on their seed packets.  Burpee assumes that everyone has a smart phone, so they put a code on the package that will bring up the description on their web page.  I guess it will--I don't have a smart phone.

So I bought "Seeds of Change" variety when possible.

And I bought 80 onion slips.  Oops.

The China Study Cookbook recipe #5

Baked Vegetables from The China Study Cookbook.  It was supposed to be Scrumptious Baked Vegetables With Fresh Spinach but the bagger at Kroger's failed to give me the bag containing $3.50 worth of spinach, $.25 of ginger root, and $2.00 of broccoli crowns.  When I got home, I noticed the ginger was missing and assumed it had just been left on the counter.  But how did they manage to misplace a huge box of spinach and a big bag of broccoli?  I wonder if the next person got it?

Whatever!  From now on, I'm watching those guys.  It's wasn't the money so much as I wanted my darn spinach.

The vegetables, without the broccoli and spinach, were pretty nasty.  The recipe instructions bugged me, so I messed with it to try to improve it, but I think it was hopeless.  First off, sweet potatoes take longer to cook than green vegetables.  They should have been precooked.  Second, it told you to cook the vegetables with no seasoning and then, when they're done, add dry herbs--thyme, basil and rosemary.  And raw garlic.  Yuck.

So I made the sauce and poured it over the vegetables before cooking them.  That made sense for the herbs but not for the orange juice and balsamic vinegar.  It came out sweet and bitter.

I wonder if it was a misprint?  In any event, not telling the reader how big to cut up everything, so that it would all cook at the same rate, was not doing us a kindness.

I also cooked Bourbon Barbeque Prawns With Greens, for the meat eaters. 

The prawns (I subbed shrimp) were okay, just a little overcooked.  The sauce didn't stick to the shrimp, but it tasted good spooned over.  I substituted gold rum for bourbon so I may never know how the dish was supposed to taste.  I noticed that no one came back for seconds.

(This is a picture of the leftovers.)

Food of the week

and The China Study Cookbook recipe #4
Lentils

 I've eaten lentils before but I don't recall cooking any.  The recipe called for brown lentils--the store had red, yellow, green and black.  Thank heavens they didn't have golden.

I chose the green ones.  I'm not a Dwarf--I eat green food.  Agriculturally, lentils are a "pulse", which appears to be a legume crop grown and harvested only for its dry seed.  They're a good food for the heart and the heavy; lots of fiber and they taste good, too.  Just not as good as a chocolate bar.

As to the recipe, I think I'll try a different one next time.  I ate it with some rice and, not to put to fine a point upon it...it was bland.  I wonder if my curry powder is old?   What I really need to do is mark the purchase date on every container of spice that I buy.  I'm not a chef who can sniff a spice and declare it "fresh" or "old."  Some of the spices in my pantry could be ten years old...or more.  Scary.

Hey, look what I found!  Wraps that use olive oil instead of "intesterified" soybean oil.  Taste and texture seem fine to me.  And I can eat them without feeling my arteries harden.

Time for a quick mystery

And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie.  Didn't they "Lady" her or "Dame" her at some point?

I'd call this a perfect engagement for the mind, with no emotion involved unless you consider curiosity an emotion.  A delightful contrast to the last book I read.  And no, I didn't figure out the killer, although I suspect brainy readers did.  The best I could theorize was that the killer set up the last couple of deaths and then killed himself.  I shouldn't have said that.

But never mind.  It's "the most popular mystery of all time."  You've already read it, haven't you?

Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel

For the first time since I started doing audiobooks, I've found one that would have been better read on paper.  With a paper copy, I could have skimmed all the teenage angst--what am I doing here?  Where am I going?  Does she like me?  How could she like me?  Why am I kissing the girl with hair that smells like sandalwood?
 
Sheez--it's like Twilight with airships!

And that's a shame, because the action is superb and the imaginary world is mind-blowing.  I really liked this book--I just wished the main character would quit making the same stupid mistakes over and over again.  He reminded me of young Luke Skywalker--impetuous, stubborn, and incapable of following orders.  Barely lucky enough to survive.

But oh, what a magical world it weaves!   Airships, ornithopters and aerozoans; a skybreaker called Sagramata and the legendary wreck Hyperion; the rich girl, the gypsy girl, the Han Solo-style captain, and the mysterious "B" who seeks the same treasure.
Very cool.

Gripe and complain...what's why I blog, isn't it?

Stupid eight o'clock meetings have resumed.  That's eight P.M., not a.m.  Which means dialing in from home.  Could be worse....

No, it couldn't.

So, on Sunday I slipped in a vegan dish that wasn't in TCSC.  Chickpea salad from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. 

A little too much olive oil--depending on who you're talking to--but excellent.  I used dried mint and dried parsley, which may have compromised the flavor a little, but, as I said already, excellent.

My only quibble is that all of the ingredients are different sizes and it's hard to pick up on a fork.  How would it be if you split or quartered the chickpeas and then cut the roasted red pepper into half-inch cubes?  Better, I think.

Long anticipated Call Of The White

Call of the White
by Felicity Aston

If my expectations had been set correctly, I would have enjoyed this book more.  I'd put it on my must-read list last winter when I was following Felicity Aston's solo trip across Antarctica.  Traveling alone, her twitter feeds were all about "me, myself and Antarctica."  But this book is much different--it's the story of an earlier adventure where she led an eight woman skiing expedition to the South Pole.

After a short teaser involving a collapsed tent in a severe storm (note: wind gusts of 40 knots = 46 mph), she backtracks to the genesis of the expedition--the idea, the planning, and the choice of team members.  Half of the book is over before they set foot in Antarctica. It's all about funding, training, passports and personalities. Women from all over the world were interviewed--she ended up with team members from Brunei, Cyprus, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Jamaica, and the United Kingdom.

All of this is interesting stuff, but not what I'd expected.  Although I might have enjoyed a section of before-and-after observations from each member of the team.  Especially if it were told in their own words.
There's a lot of detail here; a lot of minor matters that, if unattended to, could become trip killers.  There's not much margin for error when you're outdoors in -20C. (-4F) Aside from the obvious--exhaustion; getting lost; snow blindness; freezing to death--there is overheating, perhaps the most dangerous of all.  Sweating in your long johns means damp skin and damp clothes.  Frostbite.  Hypothermia.  Death..

When the skis finally hit the ground, I was thrilled by an occasional passage like this:

It blew steadily against our backs, dragging loose snow across the surface in a continuous flow along the ground.  The surface wasn't smooth but had been worn by the wind into sastrugi, wave formations carved into the snow.  The sharp, clean lines of the ripples were as perfect as the petals of a flower.  They caught the sunlight, creating shade and texture so that the ground was flecked with pale pink and purple as well as flashes of pure white.

That's the way it goes on any trip, not to say that this just any trip by any stretch of the imagination.  A few moments of majesty, then back to wrestling with details.  And as leader of the expedition, Felicity Aston wrestled with a lot of details.  The failure of team members to follow orders had to be the worst.  I'm reading another book in which the main character's inability to follow orders should have gotten him killed multiple times already.  But that's a different story.

 Re , as a travel/adventure reader, I liked.  But maybe not loved.

Fungus lesson

 

Food of the week--crimini mushrooms.


Also known as baby bella, mini bella, baby portobello, or portobellini.  I'll just call 'em "brown mushrooms."  They're harvested at an intermediate state of growth, so they're a little tougher and chewier than the white button mushrooms I love so much.  Their big sister, portobello mushrooms, are simply crimini that have been allowed to grow to full maturity.  I'm scared to try portobello--I might like them too much for my pocketbook to accomodate.

The whfoods.com website recommends giving crimini a quick saute to bring out their best flavor.  I'll try that--next time.  (I just chucked them in the salad and gobbled them raw.)

whfoods also speculates on their possible health benefits--protection against cardiovascular disease and hormone-dependent breast cancer.  And they might even be a significant source of vitamin B-12--although the amount varies widely.  I find the whole vitamin B12 issue amusing.  Humans need very little of it and can store it for years, but since it's the only known vitamin not easily obtained from a plant-based diet, sources like whfoods always rush to recommend foods that might contain a trace of it. 

They also say, "The B12 in these mushrooms was apparently produced by healthy bacteria growing on the surface of the fresh mushrooms."  Which is true for any other vegetable.  It appears that we can get all the B12 we need by eating organic vegetables and not washing them too carefully.  Which is certainly true of foods out of my garden, which I frequently don't wash at all.  Sometimes I rub them on my shirt front before popping them in my greedy mouth.
Hmmm...careless gardening == health-promoting.

To change the subject...I seem to observe that people who underline or highlight in a book frequently quit after the first couple of chapters.  My hypothesis, drawn from that observation, is that people who mark up a book are the people who are likely to abandon it.  (the stupid people)
How to test that?

Recipe #3 from TCSC

Quick apple loaf.

It's a good breakfast bread--ready quickly and delightfully spicy--but not very apple-ey.  I wonder how it would taste if you substituted some rich homemade applesauce for the banana?




I wimped out by doing one of the easiest, most familiar recipes in the cookbook because I already had something new and unusual to try.  About which I will post.  Tomorrow.

Interesting, but I prefer my Whole Foods Market

We went in a Trader Joe's today.


It was literally crammed with people, all in their mid-thirties to mid-fifties, reading labels and carefully selecting produce and organic grains.  I couldn't find the veganaise I wanted so I skipped the checkout lines--four to five deep--and left.

Later we checked out the new Super 1 Foods (a discount grocery) that replaced our Brookshire's in McKinney.  The produce department was brand new, clean and filled with shiny and appealing fruits and vegetables.  The shelves were immaculately neat, well-stocked and easily to navigate.  And there were only two or three people there.

Dare I to suggest that consumers are finally voting with their feet?

Golly this took a long time

I was very confused by Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. 

It was certainly entertaining--a "lively romp"--but it lacked that certain something that pulls me into a story and prevents me from putting it down.  It had humor, plot and characters, but not story.  (see http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Blog2012.html and go to 51. The Narrative Gift...)

The previous reader of the book felt the same way, I think.  Either that or she was a busy mother who only snatched short intervals from her day to read a page or two at a time.  I deduce this from the number of dog-eared pages, all of which had been left turned down, every three or four pages.  Towards the end they stopped--either she gave up, or else she stayed up an hour late to finish it in one big gulp.

I won't mention how inconsiderate it is to dog-ear the pages of a library book.  Would you do that to a book you borrowed from a friend?

But back to the book.  I don't think I'd recommend it, except possibly to a friend of mine who is a voracious reader but has a slightly different taste in literature than I do.  She likes quirky people who do strange things and frequently hover right on the edge of mental illness.  This has all of those.  And Manjula Kapoor is a hoot.  But I could definitely put it down.

About British people

British people may talk funny and they don't think Americans can do comedy, but they do one thing right.

Put on a scarf in cold weather.

It was 26 degrees when I walked the dogs tonight (think -4 C).  My cap was warm, my mittens were warm, my coat was warm.  Only that insidious little crack around the top of my collar undermined the whole arrangement.

A House Of Tailors

 
by Patricia Reilly Giff

You've heard this before.  I wish I'd read this book as a girl. 

It's a lovely, lively adventure of a German girl sent to Brooklyn to live with "The Uncle" and his wife.  It's set in the 1870's during the era of the Franco-Prussian war and it appears to be beautifully researched.  They need to make it into a graphic novel or an illustrated edition--that would be splendid.  Maybe there is one--I was listening to the audiobook.  No pictures.

If I were twelve again, and if there had been pictures of the hats and dresses she sewed, and if I'd read it, I'd have run to my fabric scraps and needles and thread and started immediately on recreating her creations.   There's just something about sewing--I don't know how to explain it.  It's tedious and mundane and totally unworthy of the modern woman's attention. 

But it's fun!  And creation   And art.

Oh, that dreadful, dreadful lunch

We took a visitor to the Corner Bakery Cafe.  I had the brains to tell them to hold the cheese, but I didn't realize that when they "grill" a panini, they slather the bread with oil or butter first.  If I can assume that the amount of withheld cheese was one ounce, then my panini delivered 500 calories and 18.5 grams of fat to my insides!    The side of mixed greens tasted like it had oil on it, too.


Something so bad for me should have tasted better.  But enough. 
The Food of the week is




Tahini!







How's that for a list of ingredients?








High in copper, manganese, magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, iron, zinc, molybdenum, and selenium...sounds like a little vitamin pill for the bones and joints.  And just full of phytosterols, which sound scary, but are added to processed foods like fake butter so they can be marketed as cholesterol-lowering.


I used my tahini to make creamy sesame noodles--soba noodles dressed with tahini, almond butter, maple syrup, etc., and tossed with a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds.  When I first tasted them, they were still a little warm and I wasn't thrilled.  But later I put them together with the butternut squash and they were a delight.
Which brings us to:

China Study Cookbook Recipe #2



Quick Butternut Squash

 
Very good except for the part where you have to peel the squash and cube it.  I have a very sharp vegetable peeler and it was still a pain in the butt.  I wonder if it would taste any different if I halved the squash, brushed the seasonings on the insides, and baked it?

No matter--I have plenty of leftovers.  I'm happy.  And no one but me will touch it.

China Study Cookbook Recipe #1

Veggie Fajita Wraps -- Great!  

I used a little extra virgin olive oil to start off with, then added the broth--I think the health benefits of extra virgin olive oil are worth a little added fat.  I also subbed squash for the broccoli and totally missed the part where you are supposed to create the wrap with lettuce, tomatoes, salsa and avocado.  I just used a little vegan ranch dressing.

Whatever, they were great!  I'm still cherishing the leftovers.



:-(   I just realized that most grocery store tortillas and wraps have hydrogenated vegetable oil in them.  I feel violated.

And what the heck is interesterified fat?  New one for me--it's where they take vegetable oils and apply catalysts or lipase enzymes to rearrange the fatty acids such that the linoleic fatty acids at the sn-2 position are replaced with a saturated fatty acid.  Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid; an omega-6 which is not necessarily good for you, but still required by the body in small quantities.  So what they're doing is to remove an essential fatty acid, replace it with a saturated fatty acid, and make the vegetable fat look like a a laboratory engineered animal fat.   This is an oversimplification--for full details you can look it up yourself.

Studies on the health benefits of interesterified fat seem to come out either neutral or slightly positive--but who cares?  Why is there any saturated fat in my tortilla?

And if I wanted to eat man-made chemicals I'd eat a bowl of Special K cereal!