food
drorzel | February 13, 2007A couple of times a year, our department secretary will organize potluck luncheons, and badger the faculty into cooking things and bringing them in for a big gathering in the conference room. We invite all the students, and everybody eats way too much, talks too much, and generally has a good time.
We had another luncheon today, in honor of Valentine's Day, so the stated theme was red food. This did not produce what you might call a heartburn-friendly menu, but that's why I've got a sixpack of Red Seal Ale in the fridge... Hooray, beer!
My contribution was what I think of as Grad School…
clock | February 13, 2007
And there's many, many more here. Do not look on empty stomach. I was just about to eat an eclair, but now I think I'll wait a little....
(Via)
clock | February 6, 2007My daughter, as part of her school assignment on Vasco Da Gama, bought a bunch of stuff that Vasco brought to Europe from Asia. Now I have all those foodstuffs and do not know what to do with them.
Cucumber and melon were easy.
But, what would I do with a coconut, a jar of cinnamon sticks and a jar full of whole cloves?
Give me your recipes or links to recipes to good dishes that contain one (or two or all three!) of those ingredients. And, if those dishes turn out tasty, I may as well start on my foodblogging career!
clock | February 5, 2007Just quickly for now without commentary:
Totally cool paper in the last Science:
S. Libert, J. Zwiener, X. Chu, W. VanVoorhies, G. Roman, and S.D.Pletcher
Regulation of Drosophila lifespan by olfaction and food-derived odors:
Smell is an ancient sensory system present in organisms from bacteria to humans. In the nematode Caeonorhabditis elegans, gustatory and olfactory neurons regulate aging and longevity. Using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, we show that exposure to nutrient-derived odorants can modulate lifespan and partially reverse the longevity-extending effects of dietary…
clock | February 3, 2007Think again! Not just that we have already started planning for the NEXT year's Science Blogging Conference, but Anton is taking the lead in organizing another one this summer. And if all you liked at the SBC was dinner (and please do tell us if that was the case), you are definitely going to love this one: it is a Food Blogging Conference! Check the proposed program - eating, eating, eating (yes, and some tasty drinking as well) and liveblogging it all!
Update: There is more related news here.
omnibrain | January 30, 2007 GW Pharmaceuticals has developed a diet drug derived from Marijuana which suppresses the appetite. This is especially surprising for obvious reasons - perhaps a little ironic?!
Clearly the marijuana plant contains many many different compounds - but who would have thought that one of them suppressed the urge to gorge yourself on cheeze doodles and icy pops. The drug will soon be entering into human trials to combat obesity.
Don't get too exited about getting high on the drug though since that doesn't happen to be one of the side effects. Well...that is unless you want to find the secret…
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2007
Dining with polyglot friends (he's a Sinologist who also works with Georgian and Basque and speaks a bewildering variety of Asian languages, she interprets Mongolian and speaks the most exquisite Swedish), my wife and I learned something about Mongolian cuisine and cursing.
Mongolia has kind of a heavy-metal reputation. I mean, leave them to their own devices and they'll conquer Eurasia. But as it turns out, these people cook really bland food and use extremely low-key expletives.
Salt is the only spice in regular use. A typical meal may consist of a pound of boiled goat and a bowl of…
revere | January 30, 2007I am going through the latest mathematical model papers on the spread of influenza on the air travel network and another on antiviral resistance, both published last week in PLoS Medicine. It's taking me a while. They are not instant reads and I am busy at work. The air travel paper by Colizza et al. sent me back to the authors' previous papers for additional details and then I wanted to sort out the many tiny errors that inevitably creep into long technical papers (the antiviral paper by Lipsitch et al. remarkably had only one, a wrong subscript). So a fuller post is for another day, and…
clock | January 29, 2007I love seafood, but I eat it quite rarely. About a third of my old Department did fisheries and aquaculture science so I've seen many seminars and Thesis defenses on the topic and am quite aware of the problems with the world's fisheries stocks.
I also prefer freshwater fish - I grew up on the Danube and my Mom fixes the best Fish Soup in the history of the Universe.
But, if you like seafood and you want to eat shrimp occasionally, yet you want to act in an environmentally responsible way, you need to know quite a lot about ecology, about behavior and natural history of shrimp, about the…
clock | January 29, 2007Lots of food blogging around here lately, so why not re-post this one (from October 27, 2005):
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A few years back my brother went to Japan to do some fieldwork for several months. Although he had been taking Japanese for several years, the classroom language skills and real-life language skills are different kinds of skills.
Early on in his endeavour, trying to immerse himself in the local culture, he went to a restaurant. He picked up the menu and had no idea what any of the names of dishes meant. Well, he thought, if the Japanese can eat something…
clock | January 28, 2007Perhaps it's time for me to get serious about eating doughnuts!
(Hat tip: Greg)
clock | January 26, 2007In this Sunday's NY Times Magazine (not available online yet), Michael Pollan will have the cover story: "The Age of Nutritionism: How Scientists have Ruined the Way We Eat."
Looking forward to reading (and perhaps blogging) it.
Update: You can now read it here.
clock | January 24, 2007Every farm that converts from conventional to organic farming is the equivalent to taking 117 cars off the road
revere | January 17, 2007If you are an abstainer, you can abstain from this post. Likewise if you are svelte and always struggling to keep your weight up. For the rest of us, the University of Rochester has an interesting compilation of the caloric value (and alcohol content) of about 50 brands of beer, domestic and imported, and another table on wines (hat tip MedGadget).
Some interesting factoids:
Commonly misattributed to excess alcohol calories being stored as fat, the "beer belly" is actually a result of alcohol's more complex effects on the body's metabolic system. Simply put, alcohol reduces the amount of…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2007
My wife just hit me with some pretty heavy surrealism, suddenly handing me a foot-long yellow can of spicy Turkish chicken sausage.
Her mother is visiting with us. The other day, this lady had an appointment with her acupuncturist (no, of course I don't, don't blame me). And apart from the treatment, she was given sausage. Dawkins knows what she's expected to do with it.
It's made in Haderslev, Denmark from halal chicken meat. I think I'm gonna eat it.
clock | January 1, 2007Food From Cloned Animals Safe? FDA Says Yes, But Asks Suppliers To Hold Off For Now:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued three documents on the safety of animal cloning -- a draft risk assessment; a proposed risk management plan; and a draft guidance for industry.
The draft risk assessment finds that meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. The assessment was peer-reviewed by a group of independent scientific experts in cloning and animal health. They agreed with the methods…
drorzel | January 1, 2007Well, that was a cranky post. Not a good start for New Year's Day, is it?
To make up for that, how about a good recipe:
Cheesy Poof (From Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food)
Ingredients:
270 g all-purpose flour
10 g baking powder
9 g dry mustard (1.5 teaspoons)
100 g eggs (2 large eggs)
43 g vegetable oil (3 Tbs)
227 g milk (1 cup)
15 g granulated sugar
4 g kosher salt
227 g shredded cheddar cheese
Directions:
Pre-heat the oven to 375 F (do your own Celsius conversion).
Mix together the flour, baking powder and mustard. Toss with the cheese.
Mix together the eggs, oil, milk, sugar, and…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2006
Here's one for Peezee.
Like many Chinese Swedes, my mother-in-law hails from Qingtian in Zhejiang province. Though located in a rich coastal province, Qingtian is a pretty poor place, high up in the hills, with little arable land. Marginal farmers are susceptible to wanderlust, and so Qingtian's sons and daughters have travelled far, taking their rustic dialect and cuisine with them. (Speaking Qingtianese seems to be easy: take Hangzhounese and substitute "öööh" for all vowels.) According to Wikipedia, Qingtian is the single Chinese community of whose population the largest percentage has…