food
revere | March 17, 2009President Obama used his weekly radio address last weekend to talk about an urgent matter for all Americans. Which one? It could have been any of a half dozen, but it was one that received essentially no attention from the last administration: food safety. He also officially announced his nominations for the two top spots at FDA, Dr. Margaret (Peggy) Hamburg and Dr. Josh Sharfstein. Both are public health experts and intimately familiar with urban health problems, Hamburg as Commissioner of the New York City health department, Sharfstein as head of the Baltimore health department. Both are…
jstemwedel | March 14, 2009Here are my entries to the ScienceBlogs Pi Day Bake-off:
End-of-winter fruit pie
Apples and amaretto-soaked dried fruit in a nut crust. Dense and rich.
'I want to taste springtime!' violet custard pie
Delicate, creamy, and a little bit fantastic (seeing as how it requires harvesting petals from a couple hundred violets).
Schnockaschtettle
Quick and easy, with the perfect balance of molasses and crumb topping.
Tea-time cheesecake pie
Tea-scented cheesecake topped with citrus-y marmalade.
Foolish rhubarb pie
Tart, sweet, and creamy, rich and yet light
Lemon-berry pie
Lemon curd in a…
greengabbro | March 13, 2009This one's for Wilkins; it's a Pi Day / St. Patrick's Day twofer.
Ingredients
1 lb. stew lamb
1 onion
A few tbsp diced tomatoes (whatever was left in the can you used for pasta the other night)
1 clove garlic
6-8 ice cubes of broth - I make broth from whatever bones and scraps I have left over after other cooking, and freeze it in ice cube trays for easy use later. Fortuitously, my most recent batch was mostly lamb ribs and onion butts.
~1/2 pint Guinness
Salt, pepper, and MSG to taste
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
8 tbps (1 stick) butter
2 1/2 tbsp vegetable shortening, and…
jstemwedel | March 13, 2009Of all the Pi Day pies I have offered to you here, I'm pretty sure this one is my favorite. It has a fabulous mix of flavors (sparingly sweet chocolate, almonds, a hint of cinnamon) and textures (creamy custard in a crisp meringue shell).
And, since people have been telling be that pi are squared, this one is, too.
Meringue shell:
Line an 8 inch square pan with parchment paper.
Beat 6 egg whites and 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar until foamy. Continue beating at high speed while gradually adding 1 cup granulated sugar. Keep beating until the whites are glossy and form stiff peaks.
Fold into…
jstemwedel | March 12, 2009Saturday is Pi Day, and I figure we need at least one dinner pie to precede the parade of dessert pies currently on hand. (It's the whole parental responsibility thing. I do not judge adults who eat dessert pie for breakfast, trust me!)
Since the Free-Ride household is vegetarian, the pie Wilkins posted won't quite work. In lieu of an actual meat pie, we offer the vegetarian shepherd's pie.
"Meat" layer that isn't really:
Heat a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add 1 small onion, finely chopped, and saute until translucent. Add 12 ounces Yves…
revere | March 12, 2009My problem with The Onion is that sometimes their pieces are so good I can't figure out how to extract pull quotes. I just want to reprint the whole damn thing and that's not exactly "fair use." So if want to read it all you'll have to go there (link with pull quote after the jump). Here's a piece that is at once so grotesque and so spot on it's scary:
WASHINGTON—Calling it "perfectly safe for the most part," and "not nearly as destructive or fatal as previously thought," the Food and Drug Administration approved the enterobacteria salmonella for human consumption this week.
FDA director…
jstemwedel | March 11, 2009Given that we have an enthusiastic lemon tree, a lemon pie for Pi Day was inevitable. The kind of berries you use will change the character of the finished pie. My recommendation is to go with berries that are fresh and as local as you can get them.
Gingersnap crust:
Pulverize 6-8 ounces of gingersnap cookies. In a butter pie pan, mix the crumbs with 6 tablespoons melted butter. Pat mixture into bottom and sides of pan. Chill for at least an hour.
Lemon curd filling:
Beat 3 egg yolks until lightened. Mix in a small saucepan with finely grated zest of 3 lemons, 1/2 cup lemon juice, and…
jstemwedel | March 10, 2009Rhubarb seems to be one of those foods that people either love or hate. I love it, but I didn't feel like using it for strawberry-rhubarb pie, the pie that introduced me to rhubarb.
Instead, I decided to make a pie whose filling is essentially a rhubarb fool. The pie itself is easy to prepare, but because each of the components requires time to chill, it won't provide instant gratification. Some things, however, are worth the wait.
Graham cracker crust:
Mix 2 cups of graham cracker crumbs with 6 tablespoons melted butter. Press into a buttered pie pan and chill for at least an hour.
(…
jstemwedel | March 9, 2009The wet weather in these parts led to an almost (but not quite) predictable cancellation of soccer games on the weekend that we were supposed to provide snacks. This means I ended up staring at a surplus of navel oranges and thinking, "What am I going to do with these?"
Marmalade presented itself as an option, except I'm still in Pi Day pie (a la) mode, so I don't want to be distracted with canning. Then I thought, "I wonder whether a marmalade topping would work well on a tea-flavored cheesecake pie?"
Let's find out, shall we?
Marmalade topping.
It takes some time to draw the pectin out of…
drorzel | March 9, 2009Why in hell is there soy in Italian soft rolls?
Parents of sensitive-stomached babies everywhere would like to know.
jstemwedel | March 8, 2009Well, in truth, I did all the preparation and cooking, so I guess technically I made myself lunch. However, it was by way of Twitter that I was given a good, quick idea for what to do with a mess of produce I brought in from the garden today. (Eating this produce promptly is important, seeing as how our fridge is full of pie at the moment.)
Within moments of my Tweet:
What meal can I make from: broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, beets, carrots, spinach, lettuce, spring garlic, and lemon?
blogger, SciBling, and food-maven Mark Chu-Carroll replied:
have you ever had soong?
and then:
Dice and…
revere | March 8, 2009I might be an atheist but I'm glad when the food industry "gets religion." How observant they will be is another question, but for now, they are making noises to suggest they know which side their bread is peanut-buttered:
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) issued the following statement from GMA President and CEO Pam Bailey regarding the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act cosponsored by U.S. Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Additional cosponsors include: Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Christopher J. Dodd of…
jstemwedel | March 8, 2009In the ScienceBlogs Pi Day bake-off, it would seem that Pastry Chef Free-Ride has a posse.
Reader Jake emailed me to share a pie recipe for me to prepare with the sprogs. Writes Jake, "This is one member of the extended family of molasses crumb pies and a cousin to the Pennsylvania Dutch Shoo-fly Pie. This recipe comes from my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother, and when it comes out right (tends to vary a bit with relative humidity and barometric pressure) it is nowhere near as gooey or sickly sweet as most shoo-fly pies I've had. A cooled slice can be picked up with the fingers and eaten out…
jstemwedel | March 7, 2009We're still a week away from Pi Day, but the break in the rain here has made me believe that spring may be on its way. What better way to celebrate spring (especially in the aftermath of a wintertime fruit pie) than a violet custard pie?
The violet custard is based on a recipe from The Savory Way by Deborah Madison.
The day before you're going to bake the pie:
Go out to the garden and pick about 150 violets.
Avoid the ones with little bitty slugs on them.
Have a seat -- preferably a comfortable one. Carefully pluck the petals from the violets and put them into a small saucepan. Do it…
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2009In Colorado, someone is very bothered by the idea of kosher salt:
You've heard of kosher salt? Now there's a Christian variety.
Retired barber Joe Godlewski says he was inspired by television chefs who repeatedly recommended kosher salt in recipes.
"I said, 'What the heck's the matter with Christian salt?'" Godlewski said, sipping a beer in the living room of his home in unincorporated Cresaptown, a western Maryland mountain community.
By next week, his trademarked Blessed Christians Salt will be available at http://www.memphi.net, the Web site of Memphis, Tenn.-based seasonings manufacturer…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2009When I give talks about Internet subcultures I like to say that I could devote the entire talk to on-line forums for retired Spanish-speaking transvestites. That's how niched groups a global communication network makes possible.
Myself, I'm on a Swedish site for skeptics, a US site for science bloggers and two sites for boardgame geeks (in English and Swedish). And now Dear Reader Tsu Dho Nihm tells me that there's a beer geek site with a huge reviews database: Beer Advocate. Awesome! Beer as culture, beer as baseball stats, beer as philately. Though an abstainer myself, I highly recommend…
jstemwedel | March 5, 2009It's not Pi Day yet, but there's no reason to believe my first pie will be the one that hits the target. So, here's my opener in anticipation of March 14th, a dried cherry/dried apricot/apple pie in a nut crust. I'm calling it an end-of-winter fruit pie because it's made with what I have on hand as I wait for spring, summer, and fresh stone-fruits to arrive.
The recipe follows.
Filling:
1 cup dried Montmorency cherries
1 cup dried apricots, chopped
1/2 cup Amaretto (or substitute 1/2 c. apple juice or orange juice)
Let the dried fruit soak in the Amaretto (or juice) for a few hours.
2…
jstemwedel | March 3, 2009It has come to my attention that today's date (03-03-09) makes this a Square Root Day.
The Free-Ride household will be marking the occasion pretty much the way you'd expect -- with an evening meal that includes square roots.
Well, approximately square. The roots include diced sweet potatoes (both the canonical orange-fleshed ones and the Japanese white-fleshed ones), carrots, parsnips, turnips, chiogga beets, and potatoes, and sliced leeks.
If you want to get picky and say that the potatoes are not in fact roots so much as tubers, do not expect to be offered seconds.
I've tossed the…
jstemwedel | February 26, 2009At the New York Times Room for Debate Blog, a bunch of commentators were asked to weigh in with easy-to-make changes Americans might adopt to reduce their environmental impact. One of those commentators, Juliet Schor, recommends eating less meat:
Rosamond Naylor, a researcher at Stanford, estimates that U.S. meat production is especially grain intensive, requiring 10 times the grain required to produce an equivalent amount of calories than grain, Livestock production, which now covers 30 percent of the world's non-ice surface area, is also highly damaging to soil and water resources.…