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.