Recipe Reduction 70-69

 Roasted Veggie Spreaddip
from hungry-girl.com

As a spread for a veggie sandwich, this would be pretty good. As a dip for vegetables, okay but bland. But as a low-calorie, healthful alternative to hummus, this is tops! No added oil other than the low-fat yogurt. It needed some sort of spice...cayenne pepper? Will try.

I nearly cried when I read the recipe. See this:

Halve the head of garlic widthwise, exposing the cloves. Remove papery outer layer from the bottom half, leaving skins around cloves intact. (Discard or reserve the top half for another use.) 

Discard??? Discard??? Throw away HALF A HEAD OF GARLIC? What kind of person would do that?  What kind of person would even write that?

I'm not a child of the depression but my mother was, and I can tell you, she'd come back and slap me with an iron skillet if she saw me throwing away half of a head of precious garlic. It's not the cost of it--it's the waste.



Tuna With Sprouts

(One of my non-recipe recipes. Why did I save it?)

Tuna is good with sprouts. But tuna is not good because it's almost impossible to find sustainably harvested tuna. I'm eating my last can rather than throw it away symbolically, but it will be a long time before I guy another one.

Best History Award! (from me)

1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by 

Charles C. Mann

We need to make this required reading for all college students, or at least all those in natural sciences. And we really need to rewrite our grade school text books.  Because...

When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas, the Western Hemisphere was not a sparsely inhabited wilderness. It was neither sparsely inhabited nor a wilderness. There were a lot of Indians here--we know this, both from early explorers' accounts and from archaeological records--and they were managing the plants and animals to suit their needs. In some cases, managing them a lot.

The book goes in a lot of directions and tackles a lot of topics, all fascinating.  Why have we not known about the Indians' influence on their environment? What were their civilizations like, and what happened to them? How many were there, and why did they die? In what ways did they change the environment?  and the last and most scary of all, what happened to the plants, animals and peoples of the world during the Columbian exchange?

One chapter deals with a classic example of the mistake we make when we assume that what we see is what has always been. It's known as Holmberg's mistake. Allan R. Holmberg was an anthropologist who studied a tribe in Bolivia called the Siriono. He wrote that they were "among the most culturally backward peoples of the world." They suffered constant want and hunger, had no clothes, no domestical animals, no music and little religion. They couldn't make fire or even adequate shelters for themselves. For millennia, he thought, they had existed almost without change in a landscape unmarked by their presense.

He was wrong. Both about the people and about the land in which they lived.

...smallpox and influenza laid waste to their villages in the 1920s. Before the epidemics at least three thousand Sirionó, and probably many more, lived in eastern Bolivia. By Holmberg’s time fewer than 150 remained--a loss of more than 95 percent in less than a generation. So catastrophic was the decline that the Sirionó passed through a genetic bottleneck. (A genetic bottleneck occurs when a population becomes so small that individuals are forced to mate with relatives, which can produce deleterious hereditary effects.) 

In addition to the population crash, the Bolivian military was rounding up the Sirionó and putting them in prison camps or working them as slaves on cattle ranches. The people that Holmberg found in the forest were fugitives, escapees hiding from their captors.

He also failed to realize that they were recent migrants to the area, and that area had once supported a large, sophisticated peoples who built an extensive and complicated array of causeways, mounds, and fish weir. These massive earthworks were all around, but no one guessed they were of human origin.

Above information from https://erenow.com/modern/newrevelations/3.html

Recipe R&R 72-71

Squash, roasted tomato and popped black bean salad
from A Modern Way to Cook

To be fair, I should get the book back out of the library and check the time estimate on this. I wrote down "30 minutes" but it says inside the recipe to roast the squash for 40 minutes. Little matter--it actually took me 54 minutes.

The idea of popping black beans is you rinse and dry the cooked beans with paper towels--
Why paper towels? I have a stack of tightly woven dish towels that would have been fine for the purpose. It's about time that a book titled "A Modern Way to Cook" would stop harking back to the old days when every cook kept a roll of paper towels in the kitchen. That's SO seventies, man.
--then dry-fry in a medium-hot skillet until they pop and turn crisp. Mine failed to pop, probably because they weren't dry. Don't blame the paper towels, blame me for forgetting to do that step.

However, if I had remembered to dry the beans, would they have still left my skillet coated with black grime that took me ten minutes to clean off? I didn't include the extra cleanup time in my results, but I wanted to. Just out of spite.

Sorry to write so negatively. Recipes like this make me feel like a crappy cook who can't take time to read a recipe. It didn't taste good enough to be worth the hassle of peeling and slicing butternut squash, seeding cardomon and grinding the seed, jesting a lime, grating ginger; putting pans in and out of the oven and then having to wash two cookie sheets when one would have done the job.
Luckily I followed this disaster with a winner:



Spanish Tapas Peppers
author unknown: darn!

Take a bunch of lovely little peppers from your garden, stuff them with richness, and bake them a bit. Serve warm. Ahhh.

The recipe called for bell peppers but the Italian frying peppers I used were much, much better. The richness consisted of a lot of little bits of stuff that you simply had to chop up all together: raisins, garlic, green olives, anchovies, tomato, saffron, bread crumbs and olive oil. I was scared of the raisins and anchovies, but they disappeared into a medley of flavor.

I may never make this again but I'll smack my lips forever.

Recipe Reduction 74-73

Instant Pickled Cukes
from Roy's Choi's LA Son

Absolutely revolting. I must have made some major mistake in copying out the recipe--it's pretty short so I would have just copied it by hand instead of using a camera.  Maybe  I missed "how long" to cook the cucumbers--the recipe just said "while the cucumbers are cooking, get the other ingredients together," and add them. Then you add black pepper and cook one minute more.

But no amount of cooking would eliminate the bitter aftertaste. Maybe it was my substitute for star anise--cooking experts suggested that equals parts anise seed and fennel seed would be fine.  Maybe it was my cucumbers--I used some from the garden and some from the farmer's market. I tasted the ones from the garden and they were fine, but I didn't think to taste the ones from the market. Let's check now....

Aha! The market cucumbers are bitter. But even if I pick them out, the spice mix is odious.

Other than the revolting taste and lack of cooking times, I don't think it's realistic to expect that a bowl of cooked food will chill after only 30 minutes in the fridge. Mine was still warm after an hour.  That could be very disappointing if you were cooking for a crowd--imagine having to serve warm, mushy pickles?

4 o'clock No-bake Energy Bites

I messed up royally and yet I still liked these. What's not to like about a goop of oats, chia seeds, dark chocolate, maple syrup, vanilla, toasted coconut and peanut butter?

If I'd remembered to toast the oats and grind the chia seeds, it might have been exceptional, tastewise. But as an energy booster, not so much -- too much sugar. I ended up with about 10 balls, with 24.6 grams of sugar per ball, more than my entire daily target for added sugars, 19 grams. The measurement is tricky--I take "added" sugar to be "sugar that's not a naturally occuring component within a whole food." So I'd count the sugar in the chocolate, maple syrup and peanut butter but not that in the oats, chia or coconut. Maple syrup isn't a whole food; if I made my own peanut butter in the blender then I wouldn't have to count it...interesting. Peanuts have .375g sugar per tablespoon; peanut butter 1.5g. So technically I should count added sugars using difference between peanut butter and peanuts.

Splitting hairs. Too much sugar. Probably not enough to offset the fiber.

Gardening In My Roots and a book review

Unbelievable--I've managed to grow shallots.  If I'd realized they had bulbed up I'd have harvested them before they started blooming. Having tasted one yet--the hot weather may have ruined their flavor--but I will soon.

Moxie
by Jennifer Mathieu

Tops! Great YA that even a parent can enjoy. Possibly young people don't want their parents enjoying their books, but what can I say?

There were several side plots--or themes--along with the central one of "how can girls fight back against rampant sexism in a small-town high school?" In the beginning, I thought it was unrealistic--how could boys get away with wearing obscene tee shirts? At my kid's high school they'd have been sent home in a blink. And groping? They'd probably get outside suspension. But this book depicts a culture of "backing the football boys" and a lack of balance in the teaching staff that could let that sort thing happen. It's a cautionary tale.

The sideplots are good: the heroine learns to make new friends even if that might mean losing her BFF; she gets to meet a boy; and she gets to deal with her mother starting to date again.

I especially liked the copy center guy (minor character). It would be cool if Ms. Mathieu would write another story with him either as protagonist or simply as a link between the two stories.

I just read some of the other reviews (that's okay since I've already written mine) and I was disgusted to see people thought the need to add a "Content Warning". What idiot thinks a YA novel should need a content warning just because it deals with serious issues? We're not talking zombie attacks, serial killers, or unabombers here--we're talking about exactly the sort of serious issues normal teenagers face every day. And the book isn't the slightest bit graphic--the really bad stuff happens off stage. People who say this book needs a content warning ought to consider asking their school board to post one at the front door of the high school.

Recipe Reduction 76-75

Fried Pepper and Tomato Salad
from Breaking the food seduction

Some very interesting flavors going on here, and joy-on-joy, NO balsamic vinegar!

I would have called it a relish, not a salad. You simply fry red bell peppers in oil until they're really soft, add tomatoes, garlic and a pinch of sugar and salt, simmer until thick. It's very good, but...

I'm sorry to say that I've just found another food that I can't buy at the grocery anymore--
red bell peppers
Red aka **ripe** peppers are sweet and soft, but the ones at the grocery are sour and hard.  Let me give you a lesson in botany.

When fruit (peppers are fruit) is green, it is sour. When it gets ripe, it becomes soft and sweet. The color might be an advertisement to the animal world--time to eat! That's how fruit-bearing plants get their seed spread around--when the fruit is developing, it's hard and sour so animals don't eat it prematurely. When it's ready to be planted, it becomes soft and sweet. Along come the animals to spread your seed far and wide, fertilizing it as they go.

It's a great strategy and has worked for millenia, but them came big trucks. And cross-country travel. And even cross-continent travel. Ripe fruit is soft; it bruises and spoils. But mankind is smarter that nature--he realizes that fruit doesn't have to be ripe to be purchased, it just has to look ripe. It worked for tomatoes and now, I fear, it has started working for bell peppers.

In a way you could say that modern-day consumers are stupider than mice. Mice wouldn't keep on eating something hard and sour just because it was red and had the words "all natural" printed on the package. Mice would take a nibble, spit it out, and go on down the aisle to purchase a can of Spam.


Baked Cucumber Chips

(picture withheld because they look so unappetizing)

Theoretically it's possible to slice up cucumbers and bake them at a low temperature for four hours and they'll turn into chips. (American chips--not British ones) This recipe gives four seasoning options, so I chose to do onion-and-garlic plus salt-and-vinegar, at different ends of the baking sheet.

Sadly, it assumes you don't prepare them and then realize you need to use the oven for something else.  I have a two-oven stove, but with outside temperatures approaching 110F I chose to use only one. So the chips had to wait a long time and then only got an hour of baking before bedtime.  I turned off the oven and left them inside....

And sort-of forgot all about them.  A couple of days later they got another hour of baking and--hard to believe--got left in the oven again.

Five days later I tried them. The ones that were crisp were pretty good, but most of them were dry and leathery. Not their fault.

Good recipe; bad execution.

Murder mystery but did I like it really?

A Share in Death
by Deborah Crombie

There's a serious problem in starting a series of detective fiction by reading the oldest book first. It seems a no-brainer--read the first one first. If you hate it then stop; if you love it continue and you'll be glad to have read them in order. But...what if it's neither love nor hate, but somewhere less than the midpoint?

On Goodreads, the first book in this series got a 3.79 star rating but then they gradually climbed up into a consistent 4 star--and even one 4.19. Is this because she improved or because the people who didn't care for that style of book simply stopped reading and rating it?

I suspect it's because she improved--authors tend to do that, you now. But do I want to continue reading at #2 (3.95) or jump to one of the later books and make sure I love them before I spend months on the series?

I wish I'd started in the middle. But if you're thinking about starting these, make sure you're okay with a complicated timeline and a large suspect pool who are a little hard to tell apart from each other. Make sure you can tolerate being inside multiple people's heads (although, thankfully, not at the same time). And be prepared for a frightfully lucky coincidence at the end. Sounds awfully critical of me, doesn't it?  But there's so much potential here--I want to like this--I'll have to try again.