Food / Drink « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

◊ Cooking With Umami: Lentils For Breakfast

Food / Drink ...

When I was a kid, I ate a typical suburban 1960’s breakfast — i.e., cereal and milk. What kind of cereal? Oh, whatever I saw advertised on TV. Maybe Frosted Flakes, maybe Crispy Critters, maybe Captain Crunch, maybe Cocoa Puffs. My mother was nice enough to stock the kitchen with a variety of popular cereals, so my brother and I had the luxury every morning of deciding whether it would be Kixx, Trix or Apple Jacks. As we got a bit older (say into the teen years), our tastes matured a bit — we would sometimes forgo the pre-sweetened stuff and go with Special K or Rice Chex or even Shredded Wheat (but actually, we still added our own sugar).

A lot of people gave up on breakfast as they got into college and then into the early adult years, but I never did. At some point, however, maybe in my mid 30’s or so, I gave up on milk and (soggy) processed grain in a bowl, and went over to yogurt, usually mixed with fruit or oatmeal. This wasn’t all that different from my earlier breakfast days (it still combined dairy product and grain), just a bit more cultured and fibered and whole-grained. That would get my day going for many years.

But in late 2000, start of a new century, I was trying to re-boot my career by going through a 4-month all-day computer programming crash course (Chubb Institute’s long-gone “Top Gun” program for mid-career professionals), and I decided that I needed to kick my breakfast up a notch. By then I was a committed vegetarian, so pancakes and bacon and sausage patties weren’t going to do it for me. I decided on a fairly unconventional breakfast item — cooked lentils. I have cooked for myself since I got out of college, and » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:38 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

◊ A Bloated Blog Post on a Fat Gene

Food / Drink ... Health / Nutrition ... Science ...

Here’s another “interesting article” post from me. Yea, yea, I know, people usually do this sort of thing thru Twitter, and do it with a lot fewer words. Seems much more efficient, right? Well maybe, but I try to squeeze all the “juice” that I can out of an interesting article and share it with the world. And that wouldn’t go so well on Twitter. So, here’s another article post for you, this time from the October, 2015 Scientific American (gonna be about science, right?).

This one is called “The Fat Gene”. Sounds like it’s about the question of genetics and obesity — many people claim that obesity is driven largely by genetics and not all that much by eating and exercising habits. Thus, the fact that they are overweight is not their fault. There is some solid evidence for the existence of such “fat genes”, although it remains that for most people, being overweight is driven more by eating and exercise patterns — i.e., too many calories go in, and not enough go out. Although heredity may make it harder for some people than others to maintain a proper weight, in most cases, genes are not destiny with regard to weight.

But the article in question is not about that. Instead, the authors are searching for clues about how modern humans evolved from the great apes and early hominids. Many aspects of our past are written within our genes, and scientists are » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:05 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, October 31, 2015

◊ Last Brave Nastrurtium

Food / Drink ... Personal Reflections ... Photo ...

For the past few years I’ve been trying to grow flowers on a little plot next to the parking lot in my landlord’s back yard. The soil is pretty bad back there, full of red clay and rocks. Morning glories and moonflowers have taken pretty well to it, but most other plants (other than weeds) don’t do well, or never get going in the first place.

This past spring I tried to start a number of different flower seeds back there, but only the nasturtiums took to it (I also had some sunflowers come up, but they hardly reached 3 feet and then keeled over after pushing out a few small flowers). During July and August, a handful of petite yellow and orange nasturtium blooms would sometimes greet me on my return home from work. But this summer was quite dry, and by early September only the green leaves and stems remained. And as it started to get colder over the past few weeks, even they made their resolution with the coming of winter. But a few plants decided to play die-hard, and yesterday one managed to rage against the dying of the warmth by popping out one last bloom.

So, enjoy this last little act of defiance against the inevitable from my backyard plot. If all goes well and I’m still here in the spring, I definitely plan to buy a variety of nasturtium seeds in different colors and shapes (and maybe I’ll give them a boost by laying down a bag of manure). For now, one last look, and then on with another winter. Oh, PS — I see that nasturtiums are actually edible, all but the seeds. They are related to watercress, and the flavor is supposed to be a cross between mustard and slight sweetness for the flower, and the leaves are peppery. Perhaps I’ll give that a try — next year.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:30 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, October 12, 2015

◊ Brix City Sunday

Food / Drink ... Photo ...

Finally, a new pic! This is a Sunday afternoon scene at Brix City, a small microbrew factory and visitors center (complete with a rudimentary bar offering a choice of 8 different brews at $4 a glass; I had the porter, and it was very nicely done, lots of vanilla notes with some coffee and cocoa, lightly hopped with a firm, malty body). There’s also a wall you can write on, right behind the woman in the pic. You can find Brix on an industrial backstreet in Little Ferry, NJ (just north of Route 46). Worth a visit, if you like microbrewed beer.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:34 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, August 22, 2015

◊ Hormesis and Plant Toxins — Good Eating?

Food / Drink ... Health / Nutrition ...

Here’s a health and nutrition topic that I believe should be watched by all those who, like me, have been looking for the fountain of eternal youth. Or at least something that slows the body’s aging and decaying process down a little bit, anyway. The topic in question regards the toxic chemicals found naturally in a variety of edible plants, and how they induce “hormesis” in the body. Hormesis is based on the notion that a little bit of bad can do you good. In other words, just a little bit of poison in the body, in just the right amount (not too much and not too little), puts temporary stress on the cells that make up our various body parts and systems; however, when the poison goes away and the cells recover, they become stronger and better than before.

It’s sort of like exercise, which improves the state of the body’s muscle fibers by causing slight injury to them, tearing and mangling little bits of them. Once you stop the exercise and rest, the body over-compensates in repairing these minor injuries, and your muscles become firmer and stronger, maybe even bigger (i.e., the body supplies more structural tissue to the temporarily over-used muscle, as to better handle similar stress in the future). Well, it turns out that many fruits, vegetables and condiments, especially the more bitter ones like broccoli, coffee, eggplant and turmeric, have various chemicals in them that help the plant to survive by making it unpleasant to insects. These chemicals (e.g. polyphenols) are somewhat toxic; too much of them can eventually kill living cells. However, in most edible plants, there isn’t enough to really harm a person, unless maybe that person ate only one thing (e.g. arugula) all the time and nothing else (just like too much exercise can result in actual muscle or joint injury).

But it you eat a typical portion of one of these food items, your internal organs (including your brain) will get a bit stressed, but given enough resting time to recover from the “insult”, they will be stronger and more disease-resistant. I found out about all of this in an interesting article in » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:57 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, November 29, 2014

◊ Restaurant Review: Lan Sheng (and now, Shanghai Lulu)

Food / Drink ...

My brother and I recently tried a relatively new restaurant here in our corner of northern NJ, and I thought it was pretty good. In many ways, it was rather unique (at least to New Jersey; maybe it’s just another dive in Manhattan). So I thought I’d give it a plug here on my blog. I’m not a Yelper, so I’ll use some real estate on my own site. As to Yelp — some years ago I put up two reviews of local places on Yelp, and subsequently got banished and had my reviews removed. In both cases I conveyed a positive perspective; but it’s actually no surprise that I got canned for that, as I’ve read that Yelp uses an automated algorithm to ferret out possible “shill” reviewers. That’s the way the on-line world is today; if you’re not at least a little bitchy from the get-go, then its presumed that you must be a shill.

Anyway, the restaurant is called Lan Sheng, and is located in Wallington, NJ, right along Paterson Avenue along the border with East Rutherford (Carlton Hill, to us old-timers). Lan Sheng is not another take-out storefront Chinese joint; it’s a small but tastefully furnished restaurant with a full bar. Some Yelpers complained that the service at Lan Sheng isn’t so good (guess that Yelp won’t be removing them!). But for us, the service was just fine. The staff was actually rather friendly and personable. My brother ordered a glass of wine after we sat down, and he found it to be quite adequate. Adequate enough to get 3 refills – the staff knew how to keep his wine glass full. I nursed my usual beer, then managed to fulfill my Friday night ritual of sipping down an after-dinner cordial. This involved a little bit of negotiation about the proper pronunciation of Grand Marnier; but admittedly, a part of that confusion was my own fault (I am a serial name butcherer).

Now, as to the food — take a look at the menu (it’s rather large), and you know that you’re not in Kansas anymore. There appear to be some very authentic Chinese dishes here — including tripe, sea cucumber, duck tongue, black fungus, frog, rabbit, eel, pigs feet, ox tail, and catfish. But there are also a wide variety of » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:46 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, October 25, 2014

◊ Cold Brewing and Cafestol — On Safe Grounds

Food / Drink ... Practical Advice ...

I’ve become a fan of cold-brewed coffee. Not that I go around seeking local coffee shops or bakeries that serve it. I’m talking about producing my own home brew. Thus far I’ve make it in the simplest way possible; I get out an iced tea pitcher, dump in a few cups of ground coffee (decaf, please, I’m a bit oversensitive to caffeine), pour in about 3 to 4 cups of water for every cup of java, stir it up, and into the refrigerator overnight. (Albeit, I have experimented with keeping it at room temperature for 12 hours and then refrigerating it, as to boost up the flavor extraction process a bit; thus, I often go this route). I let the grounds settle and harden, and then just pour out the liquid on top, perhaps straining the final cup for excess sediment. The end result is really good coffee, in my book; a lot smoother and a touch sweeter than the hot-brew.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with coffee; I love the smell of a nice steaming cup of joe, but it usually becomes a different animal in the mouth, with all sorts of intertwining acids and bitter / sour notes competing for attention. Cold brewing seems to leave most of these “foreign” notes behind, and you get something a good bit closer to what the vapors once promised, the first time you ever got near that black potion of the gods. The main trade-off with cold-brewing, interestingly, is the wonderful vapors themselves; cold-brewing leaves behind many of the “voluables” that hot brewing brings out. So even if you heat up a cup of coffee that was produced cold, you won’t get the same wonderful fragrances. If you want the best of both worlds, then, make a cup of hot-brewed coffee and sniff it, then pour a cup of cold-brew for actual drinking!

Cold brewing seems like the better way to go, in my coffee book. However, there’s a problem with the way I’ve been doing it. Coffee has oily elements in it (i.e., “diterpenes”), and one of those is called cafestol. Most of the oil is ok, but cafestrol can raise a person’s harmful cholesterol levels (i.e., LDL’s and triglycerides) and possibly contribute to heart disease over time. If you don’t somehow filter your joe, you’re going to get a pretty good wallop of cafestol (and never even notice it, taste-wise). However, common methods of hot-brewing coffee » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:50 pm Read Comments (6) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, September 28, 2014

◊ Types of Restaurants, and Memories

Food / Drink ... Personal Reflections ... Practical Advice ...

My brother and I were talking about restaurants the other day, after having a nice dinner at a local restaurant. We agreed that there are basically six kinds of restaurants, arrayed according to a 2 x 3 matrix (to put it mathematically; the matrix arrangement is mine, not my brothers). Along one of the two matrix axises, we have three choices: the new start-up restaurants, where the staff and management (often the owner and his or her family) are very anxious to please and go the extra mile to listen and respond to every customer’s desires and suggestions. The second choice is the restaurant that has been around for a while and is more-or-less doing OK; the owner no longer jumps thru hoops to make each customer happy, but will respond to any complaints as he or she is satisfied that the place is doing OK and wants to continue the whole enterprise.

Then there is the sunset restaurant, where the owner has decided that the place is not going to make it, and keeps the place going as long as possible just to wring out a few extra dollars in revenue as to defray all of the debt obligations that are not going to be fully paid off. The staff probably knows that the place is on the decline, and mostly just go thru the motions. Hopefully the cook will not take too many shortcuts so as to threaten food poisoning, nor let sanitation decline such that insects start showing up on the plate. But you know that some of the food being served is not quite as fresh as it might be in a better place. And you start hearing “oh, we’re out of that today” more often from the waiters.

So that’s one set of choices on the matrix grid. The other dimension holds two basic categories. The first is for restaurants that are more-or-less generic restaurants. The owner has gone around looking at other local restaurants, getting ideas on » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:17 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, September 20, 2014

◊ Beer, Peanut Butter, Zen, Dung, and the Sacred

Food / Drink ... Zen ...

Way back in November, 2002, I started this blog. My first blog post was a quick introduction to the world, but my second post was a review of some craft beers that I liked. Since then, I haven’t posted a lot of beer reviews; I guess I’ve had “bigger fish to fry” over the years (pardon the carnivorous food allegory, since I’m still a committed vegetarian). I still like beer though, especially craft-brewed beers. Since 2002, I’ve tasted a whole lot of different ones. Most have been pretty good, a few were pretty great, and some were OK . . . almost none were terrible. If one good thing has happened to America over the past 25 years, it has been the comeback of good beer choices (although the basic mass-produced stuff like Bud, Coors, Corona and Heineken still rules the sales charts).

There are a whole lot of beer varieties available these days (you can find beers made from a range of different grains, including wheat, barley, rice, sorgum and rye, combined with most any flavoring you can think of in addition to the usual hop flowers, including apples, milk, watermelon, coffee, Italian spices, strawberries — most anything besides broccoli or turnips, and who knows that someone won’t figure out a way to even make that taste good!). Still, very rarely does a beer make a memorable impression on me. But I just had one that really was worth remembering. So, I’m going to go back to the original intent of this blog, and talk a bit about a beer.

The beer in question is called “Sweet Baby Jesus“, from DuClaw Brewing in Baltimore. This is a porter style beer, meant to be a bit dark and substantial (but not quite as substantial as a stout). The gimmick to this one is that it is flavored with chocolate and peanut butter. Well, as I already said, there are lots of flavored beers out there, but » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:23 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, July 12, 2014

◊ Cupcakes Going the Way of Spuds?

Food / Drink ... Photo ... Society ...

Here in the affluent suburbs of the United States, we live in a world of social trends — and not all of them wise or useful. Some of these trends are just trends for the sake of . . . well, for the sake of being trends. I.e., for giving people something to read about and then join in on and talk about with others.

One trend from the past 5 years or so has been the renewed popularity of the cupcake. Cupcakes are nice treats for kids, given their cravings for sweet stuff; you get a lot of icing and other sugary stuff (like multi-colored sprinkles) relative to the somewhat less sweet (but still VERY sugary) cake within the peel-off paper lining. Thus a cupcake usually packs more of a sugar-blast than a regular slice of chocolate cake on a plate (unless you get a side piece with plenty of icing). And you don’t need the plate, so you can run around with it and eat it where ever you wish. A very good feature for restless kids. So yeah, cupcakes were the perfect kid’s snack (at least from the perspective of kids themselves and their dentists).

Adults generally don’t crave cupcakes as much, being more reasonable and sedentary. But we reasonable adults are also subject to occasional bouts of nostalgia for the days of our youth, back when » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:52 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

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