Ice cream flavor

The chef liked to experiment, and decided that he had a good mix with miso and caramel ice cream.

I lingered over the taste a while, trying to figure out what sort of cuisine and palate this would fit with.

Not German or Cajun or "American Midwest."

Interesting, but once is plenty.

I'll pass on making it myself, and on this recipe too.

Honeyberry

aka haskap, grows nicely here. We've had some in the front yard for several years now. I've only eaten about 3 or 4 of the berries, though.

The way that you know that the berries are ripe is to look at the bush. If the robins are busily eating all the berries, they're ripe.

FWIW, we also planted strawberries in a 4x4 raised bed. They never produced much, so we yanked them out and planted flowers and fennel (don't do that) and whatnot. However we missed a few runners, and the strawberries spread, escaping the baleful shade of the coneflowers and forming a perimeter about the central garden, that actually produces strawberries. We usually get a few (mice get more), which is fine for a no-maintenance/no-expectation plant.

It took about 25 years for the grapevine to start producing significant quantities, and by then all the kids were grown, but grandkids learned how to harvest them anyway. We squeeze a lot of plants in a tiny city lot. You can't feed a crowd off them, but that wasn't the point.

Damaged taste buds

From an article on recovery of radiation-damaged taste: "All the five taste types are seen to decline around the fifth week after the start of RT. Bitter and salty tastes are affected the most while the sweet taste is the least affected."

Recovery of taste function may occur as early as 4 to 5 weeks after the completion of RT. Complete recovery of taste function following RT is still not quantified or reported. Whether the damage caused to the taste buds is temporary or permanent is still unclear. Partial taste loss is seen to be prevalent even 20 years after completion of RT.

This was an overview of studies, which varied a great deal in methods and selection and radiation targets, and only the most general information is obtained.

I've another data point, though. I could appreciate sourdough fairly soon after treatment, and bitter seems to have gone into overdrive. And nobody will be hiring me for wine-tasting in the foreseeable future. After nearly a year, recovery seems to have plateaued. "This is what things taste like now."

FWIW, I lost about 25 pounds, but was slightly above optimum weight so I had some slack available, and am only a little below my original weight now. There's more to taste than just the tongue's part. The nose plays a role, as does the "mouthfeel," and though I couldn't taste sweet for a while I could still feel the effect of sugar. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I could.

Deciphering labels

We've been getting a variety of whole wheat bread lately -- I won't give the brand. It's a smidgeon pricey, so I looked over the ingredients to see if this was something I could make myself. (And one in the household is keeping track of nutrition.) If I understand labeling rules, ingredients are supposed to be listed in order of their contribution by weight.

One of the ingredients is "Malted Barely Flour." OK...

The label says a loaf provides 17 serving sizes. Loaves consistently have 15 slices of bread, including the heels.

The loaf is listed as 1 lb. The kitchen scale says 1 lb 3 oz.

I'm not complaining, but has anybody looked at what they are advertising on their label?

Anyhow, the nutrition scaling factor is 1.34.

Potluck time

Hash

We had meat pretty regularly in Liberia, though the ship didn't always replenish the Lebanese Abi Jaoudi grocery store on time and the shelves could get a little bare. I liked the canned hams we had a couple times a year, though I never quite managed the key manipulation that would keep the strip from thinning to a snap or widening to engulf the key. Either way somebody had to fetch the pliers.

Abi Jaoudi carried mostly American/European foods, with some local fruits. It had a slightly musty smell, but we didn't mind—past the ground level tank with the large goldfish, past the automatic doors (amazing there!), inside, the small store (large by Liberian standards) was air conditioned! In the tropics! Mom had her list, and our requests for additions went unheeded. Although, if a birthday was coming up, and if the store had been supplied with options, we got to choose what flavor of cake.

You could find lunch meat, chicken, ground beef and other things that could be frozen or kept very cold for shipment. Denmark was closer than the US. Mom made great meatloaf.

Every now and then we had canned corned beef hash—not nearly often enough. I loved the stuff, greasy though it could be—perhaps the grease was part of the joy of it.

When I went to college I ate what the dorm served, or what grandmother made when I stayed with her on break, or what my parents had when I spent the last undergraduate year with them. Grandmother Lorene made cooking look easy. She'd go in the kitchen for a few minutes, then come back and watch TV for half an hour, then go in again, and again, and then supper would appear, sometimes chicken and potatoes and beans and fresh bread.

In grad school I was on my own, with no roommate to help with cooking or rent. I found how expensive some of my favorite foods could be—expensive enough to put a serious crimp in my book habit. Hash was too dear. As was Underwood Deviled Ham, which Grandpa Nugent had taught me about. He called it bacon, and ate it for breakfast on crackers.

But food expense was a solvable problem, so I got a cookbook and a crock pot and some garage sale pots and pan, and started trying some cheap dishes—especially ones that didn't require many or complicated ingredients.

I set black-eyed peas with some bacon in the crook pot to cook one morning, mouth watering in anticipation of the evening. However, a group of us wound up having to go to Fermilab for something that afternoon, and I didn't get back into the kitchen until after 10. Most of the water had boiled away, and the recipe was scorched. It took months to get the burnt taste out of the crock.

I tried one of the Betty Crocker pancake recipes—except the idea of getting buttermilk just for one recipe didn't sit well with me, so I substituted ordinary milk from the second recipe, confusing the two recipes in the process. The hybrid tasted quite good, and has become a family staple since then.

I learned the hard way that orange juice may be acid, but not so acid that a little mold can't build up in the pitcher's lid. I located the culprit when I recovered.

I learned that an off-brand of OJ concentrate reliably gave me indigestion, and read in the news a couple of years later that the manufacturer was indicted for adulteration—their OJ was mostly citric acid and sugar.

One day I decided to make my own corned beef hash, since the canned stuff was unaffordable. I figured that corned beef was beef, and ground beef was beef—and conveniently already chopped up for me too.

So I froze a pound of ground beef (cheapest grade). I would cut off a chunk and dice it up, then dice up a potato and small onion, and fry them all together. The ground beef even provided the fat to cook it all in.

I'd start this frying, dump a can of green beans into a pot to simmer, and sit down to watch the news, getting up to stir during the commercials. Grandma had made it seem easy. Then I'd drain off the fat and plop it all on a plate, with OJ on the side.

It never did taste nearly as good as corned beef hash, but it was my own, and inexpensive. Presumably it was nutritious too, though I only weighed 135 lbs when I married. (When I called Grandpa to tell him of the engagement, he demanded to speak with her. "Can you cook?" "Well, I just helped prepare a feast for 200." "Hmf. Well, you put 30 pounds on that knucklehead by Christmas or I'm sending you home to your mother!") I called my culinary experiment a success. The matrimonial decision worked far better.

In the meantime, while still unmarried, I kept reading about how good for you fish were supposed to be.

The prospect of having raw fish in the fridge, and being on a deadline to cook it, was daunting. I'd not grown up eating any fish other than fish sticks (and sometimes tuna salad), and only those when Dad was out of town—the New Orleans man hated fish. And the Liberian markets selling fish smelled pretty strong. Mom never shopped at them (she was a nurse, and taught hygiene and sanitation). So I had no favorite recipes to look back to. I'd had fish with potatoes once, so I knew they went together sometimes.

But canned anchovies would keep until I had the energy and enthusiasm at the end of the day to work with them. The usual fish recipes in the cookbook looked complicated, and none of them involved anchovies, but I figured that fish is fish. Well, I'm an experimentalist, right? And, OK, maybe a bit lazy.

Thus, one evening I diced up the potatoes and onions per usual and tossed them into a little oil, on the way to making my new patented anchovy hash.

The fish can had that little key opening tool, but I was much better at getting the strip unwound now. Dexterity had been a little slow in coming, but it got to me eventually.

The smell was quite a bit stronger than I expected. But I figured, soldier on, and try breaking the slippery things up into hash-sized chunks.

I'd not realized there'd be all these little bones. I quickly gave up on the ribs, but tried to pry out the spines.

Into the pan went the resulting shreds, beside the already-cooking potatoes and onions. Frying filled my apartment with anchovy smell, and then with too-hot anchovy smell. The fan over the stove exhausted into the apartment, so I opened the madras-cloth "curtains" and the windows, and set up the floor fan for a cross-breeze.

A little noise told me the neighbor's cats had decided to hang out under my back window.

After some contemplation I figured tea would be a better compliment than juice for this confection.

I cleared the books off the little table and sat down and looked at the hash.

I tried a bite.

I sipped a lot of tea, and ate about half the green beans.

I tried another bite. I had perpetrated this; I owed it to myself to make a go of it. And I hated throwing food away.

Plainly I was going to have to make more tea.

I ate the rest of the green beans, and looked at the hash again.

I scraped the plate into the trash and shoved a couple of paper towels on top to try to keep the odor down. An hour later I gave up and carted the trash out to the dumpster.

At least the cats liked the smell.

Some experiments fail.

Coffee

I see coffee memes regularly. I never really acquired a taste for the stuff. I can drink it if there's nothing else available, and it's useful for the owl shift. Not essential, though for some people it seems to matter a great deal.

I'm old enough to remember a song touting an alternative:

Taste

When taste goes almost entirely away (water tastes very odd now), you start to learn just how central taste and eating is to your day and to being social. When you share food you expect that it will please the other--it's disappointing to disappoint them. "Thank you, it seems very nutritous." 'But the food you hoped would be delicious tastes like nothing at all.' You feel like their effort was wasted on you.

(I shouldn't say nothing tastes of anything--an apple tastes like a cucumber that's gone bitter. No clue why.)

Anyway, I walk near the kitchen and think "I've got a taste for peanut butter." OK, I can have some (I need to push the proteins and fats), but the taste ... not happening. And the swallowing is harder now. "Would you like to share this banana with me?" "You're tired; shall we order something?" Courteous, and even loving, but something's missing.

I'd never given much thought to it before, but taste suffuses much of my day.

That, together with a patch of nerveless flesh, could be a more-than-daily reminder of how contingent and temporary I am, and a reminder to be grateful for even the simplest things--like touch. It could be a little like a fast. But, habits are strong, and I get distracted easily. I'll try to remember.

Learn something new every day

I lived there for some time, but never realized(*) that Liberia grew its own coffee variety: "quite different (and somewhat superior) in every way compared to other species, including Arabica and Robusta". It's a bit rarer and pricier, and has a "more complex flavor profile with distinct fruity and floral notes."

The main growers are now Malaysia and the Philippines, not Liberia.

---

(*)Of course I hadn't acquired a taste for coffee then. Nor have I now, though if there's nothing else to drink or I need to stay awake ...

Africa is a big place

and stories that lump it all together don't give a very enlightening picture of what diets are like in any one place. You're not likely to get local Fufu (from cassava) and Fura (fermented millet) in the same place.

This article is about fermenting for preservation, not alcohol. Preservation matters: "The climate makes the preservation of fresh farm products such as milk, fruits, and vegetables very challenging, resulting in reports of over 70% loss of some products yearly"

That 70% sounds a bit high.

Cutting board data point

We've a small plastic cutting board that sees a lot of use because of its convenience. I had a look at it yesterday, and then had a feel of it. The edges had the original smooth corrugated surface. The middle felt fuzzy to the touch. I had a closeup look at it (*), and the surface looked like a sea of floppy snouts pointing up. A lot of plastic had been carved away, and in between where cuts had been the ridges had been re-scored in random directions -- everywhere I looked were bits of plastic begging to be cut or twisted free. I can see why the researchers found that cutting carrots on a board generated more fragments than cutting the board directly -- you'd also get the sideways motion of the cut vegetable to push on those little nubs of plastic. (This was on boards that had already seen a lot of testing.)

I think we're going to retire that board, and use it for craft work instead.

In answer to a question: The best case is that the plastic consumption is harmless, and given that we haven't all keeled over, that's a good approximation. There are lots of other things in our food environment that are "mostly harmless."

WA Guess--these things are a little like mercury: where the inorganic version is somewhat harmful but the organic compounds are deadly. The plastic bits may not cause much problem, but if (e.g.) our gut flora mutate to devour plastic on our behalf, the resulting waste chemicals might be harsh on the body.

At any rate, I prefer not to eat dirt or soap or other "mostly harmless" stuff, so I'll be trying to minimize my plastic consumption too. I won't be losing sleep, though.

(*) MicroBrite Plus pocket microscope--I bought it for science demonstrations in the park. The kids were too young and fumble-fingered to get much benefit from it.

UPDATE: Crummy picture, but you can see a couple of the "snouts."

Bread

The supermarket or Joy Of Cooking baguettes never quite seemed as good as those in Geneva (or New Orleans) or the pricy bakery--and sometimes even the pricy bakery's wasn't quite right either. Searching around easily found other recipes, including one which explained that a slower rise/proofing developed the flavor better, and suggested half a day proofing in the fridge.

My experiment wasn't entirely satisfactory (room temperature is a bit low in winter), but the flavor does seem to be better.

Using more of the fruit

The BBC reports that Swiss chocolate researchers have found a way to use the cocoa fruit and not just the cocoa seeds. The article drags in irrelevant self-flagellation about slavery, and somehow manages to miss the fly in the ointment--the cocoa fruit rots quickly. Harvesting that would demand refrigeration on site and in its delivery, and the concentration process would have to also be in-country. The latter industry would be a good thing for the producing country, but providing reliable electricity to the farms might be challenging.

Anyhow, kudos to the researchers!

Modern food

Is modern food lower in nutrients?

Too big a question, impossible to answer. Try again.

Is modern wheat grown in England lower in certain nutrients?

That, thanks to a 180-year-old project, can be sort of answered.

Yes. High yield wheat strains grow more carbs quickly.

"The increase in carbohydrates dilutes other grain components, including minerals. So although we see higher yields, the grains themselves are poorer in micronutrients: average concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in the grain of the newer varieties were 19–28% lower than those of the older ones."

So the same pound of bread, presumably made from larger but fewer grains, has less magnesium. It shouldn't bother the wheat any--a seed should still have all it needs, it's just bigger these days.

So a second slice of toast is indicated.

Penances?

I should ask somebody why Christ Lutheran has lutefisk and meatball dinners.

Unexpected harvest

For the curious: the giant puffball is edible when its flesh is white, before it reaches the gills and spores and fun stage. We were given a 15" wide one the other day. They do not keep long, so you have to deal with them quickly.

Basting a slab with olive oil and garlic and a few other seasonings and grilling it like a steak works ok, though the result is much like eating tofu. I would think sauteeing thin slabs in butter will be good, but it's a bit late to try since we dehydrated the rest already, resulting in several quarts of mushroom powder. I'm told the powder works very well as an ingredient for stock.

Our neighbor's parent's farm produced a lot of them this year.

UPDATE: A word to the wise: my daughter put the dehydrator in their garage for this exercise, since the mushroom aroma was intense.

Stingless bees

A rabbit track, as usual--I was curious if AmerIndians domesticated goats (seems not), and found a list that included stingless bees. That sounded interesting--it might help get around objections to bee-keeping in the city.

Unfortunately, they are tropical or subtropical only. Their honey is expensive (\$100/pound or thereabouts). It apparently contains more flavonoids than the usual honeybee's output, and all sorts of wonderful claims are made for its medicinal properties. "stingless bee honey has antioxidant, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, and natural moisturizing properties that aid in wound healing. Moisture content, water activity, pH, peroxide, non-peroxide, phenolic acids, flavonoids, vitamins, and enzymes are likely to be the components of stingless bee honey that contribute to fast wound healing".

American grapes

I don't remember hearing about grapes when we went to Cahokia, but they, and many other tribes, used grapes. Raw, dried, as jam, as medicinal tea, a drink thickened with cornmeal--one variety even was used for a snakebite remedy and an emetic. Another was supposed to strengthen women and increase fertility.

One familiar use is not in the list.(*) I'm not sure why--perhaps the North American varieties didn't have enough sugar to make it easy. Some people make wine from American heirloom grapes, but I notice that they include as "heirloom" the crosses between the Old World Vitis vinifera and the American varieties. I suspect they would maybe be a bit more selective if the native varieties were as good.

Idle curiosity--I'm not into wine myself.

(*) The Zuni made wine from grapes. (The Kwakiutl made an alcoholic drink with elderberries, molusks, and tobacco. Yikes.)

Pottery

An archaeologist on a video I was watching explained how very many pottery fragments they found, and how big the village was, and I thought "That's about a bowl a month per household gone smash!" We break cups and plates around here too, but not so many as that.

OK, our china is probably more robust than their pottery. The shell bits and other stuff in the pot below are for tempering so it doesn't crack in the heat when you hang it over a fire. It doesn't look terribly robust.

But look at it (late Anglo-Saxon, British Museum). Imagine trying to scrub it clean if something gets caked on. I suppose if it got used every day you wouldn't get strange things growing in it, but it doesn't seem altogether appetizing to be eating "Pease porridge in the pot nine days old". And if it was as fragile as it looks, cleaning it would be a daily risk.

Maybe a bowl a month is about right.

Chukulati

Chocolate has always been a staple--at least aspirationally. Even things that only distantly resemble it, such as tootsie rolls, those little football eggs that defile Easter baskets, and the 90% cocao tests of fortitude--insofar as they partake of the divine nature of chocolate, they are good.

Long ago, in a Los Angeles far far away, the fanciest chocolate I could find was Hersheys. Not that I could afford it on my allowance, but I could dream and see who was willing to share. (It wasn't until we went to Liberia that I learned of the dear wonders of Toblerone.)

But in the young years, Easter and Christmas were the chocolate times. My sister was terrified of her (foil covered) chocolate Santa. More for the rest of us.

Sometimes chocolate appeared in the ice cream--generally Neapolitan. Vanilla I could understand, but why put that red stuff in there? Make it pure. Make it chocolate.