Flash in the Pan

One of the unfortunate things about my upcoming Complete Idiot's Guide to Pizza and Panini is that I ran out of room and so I had to cut a number of recipes. Here's one for rye bread - an easy way to add some excitement to a sandwich.

Yield: 2 loaves
Prep time: 3 hours
Cook time: 25 minutes
Serving size: 2 slices

Ingredients

2[1/4] cups water, 105ºF to 110ºF water
2 cups rye flour
2[1/4] tsp. dried instant yeast (1 packet)
4 to 5 cups bread flour
2 tsp. ground caraway seed (optional)
2 TB. whole caraway seeds (optional)
1 TB. salt
1 tsp. vegetable oil

Directions

1. In a small bowl, add 1 cup water to rye flour. Let soak for 20 minutes.


2. In a small bowl, add yeast to remaining water, and stir until dissolved.


3. In a large bowl, combine 4 cups bread flour, rye flour, ground caraway seed (if using), 1 tablespoon whole caraway seed (if using), and salt, and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Add water and yeast mixture and rye flour and water mixture to the bowl, and mix. Add additional bread flour, 2 tablespoons at a time as necessary, until dough comes away from the sides of the bowl.


4. Sprinkle flour on work surface, place dough on surface, and knead dough for 10 minutes until dough is satiny.


5. Add vegetable oil to the empty bowl, and swirl the bowl to coat the inside. Don't worry if there's a little oil left in the bottom of the bowl. Return dough to the bowl, and turn dough to coat with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let dough double in volume.


6. When dough has doubled in volume, turn out onto a floured work surface and fold to deflate. Divide dough into 2 parts. Shape each portion of dough into a loaf, and place in 2 greased 8[1/2]-inch loaf pans. Lightly oil two pieces of plastic wrap, each large enough to cover one pan, and loosely cover each pan, oil side in. Allow top of bread to reach top of pan.


7. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Remove the plastic from the pans, and brush each loaf with water. Sprinkle tops with remaining 1 tablespoon caraway seeds (if using). Bake 25 minutes or until the top is golden brown and the bottom, when removed from the pan, sounds hollow when tapped.

Labels: bread, complete idiot's guide, panini, pizza, recipe, rye

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• How Big Is the Hamburger? H.J. Heinz is helping with a school fundraiser in Collinsville, Ill., home to the world's largest ketchup bottle, by creating an 8-foot tall ketchup packet that will hold an estimated 1,500 hundred gallons of red goop that they company hopes will go into the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest ketchup packet. Someone's going to have messy fingers from opening it. (Press Release)


• RotCam The Winn Meat Company, promoting its dry-aged beef line, set up a web cam trained on steak that sits in controlled temperature and humidity for 21 days. At least when you watch grass grow it eventually does something. (Company Web Site


• I Thought You Were Grabbing the Butter A romantically-linked pair of bank robbers grabbed a bag of dinner rolls instead of a bag of bank notes and one accidentally shot the other. At the Cuckoo Restaurant. (Independent Online)


• What Did You Call Me? A Taiwanese waitress is suing a co-worker for nicknaming her "Looking for Death." He was wrong - it should have been "Looking for Lump Sum." (Ananova)


• Killer Jumbo Squid Make that hungry jumbo squid. In a poor takeoff on grade B movies, giant squid are entering the waters of California and eating commercial fish like anchovies. No news about requests for dough, cheese, tomato sauce, and pepperoni. (AP)


• Don't Drink the Yellow Water An Indonesian maid in Hong Kong got six days in jail for giving her boss a cup of water with urine in it. It was all a mistake, she said. Yup, those cups look so much like toilets. (Reuters)


• Be Glad He Wasn't Cutting Onions Four teens trying to rob a restaurant went running out when the 70-year-old cook started swearing up a storm and waving her spatula at them. (NBC10.com)

Labels: aged, catsup, Heinz, ketchup, packet, steak, weird, Winn

An article in the New York Times about people making maps on the web and annotating them with all sorts of information mentioned one for inexpensive but good (I hope) restaurants in Manhattan. I took a look at it and it's interesting. A knife and fork duo mark each establishment and the names appear to the left. Click on a restaurant name and a balloon, pointing to the spot, opens up, gives you the address, and offers directions. I'm waiting for an online map that can also deliver samples.

Labels: cheap, inexpensive, Manhattan, map, New York, restaurants

Tsk, tsk, late with my entry today. Ah, well, it happens from time to time - it is summer, after all. And what better to consider in this season than berries. Blackberries. I'm lucky to live in a part of the country where fresh berries are available in season. But if the season is over, or if you're not near farms, your choices might be more limited.

We recently purchased a jar of Trader Joe's Blackberries in Light Syrup - 15 ounces for $1.29, which is certainly cheaper than getting even a half pint of fresh. My test bed was a couple of scoops of French vanilla ice cream, berries put on top. It's a good thing I had the sweet base, because even being in light syrup, these berries had a sour kick to them. Now, berries, like most fruit, are unpredictable. I've bought pints where some were sweet and others sour. But, so far, each of the berries had that combination of sweet (presumably from the syrup) and sour (from the berry).

They do look nice and ship in a glass jar, so they don't get crushed or otherwise mangled on their way to your fridge. But I'd be careful in how and where I used them. This can be a way to add a decorative touch to a dessert, as you'd probably have enough sweet taste already where the contrast might work. Given the yin/yang taste, you might be able to use them in something savory - for example, as a condiment to game meat. Just don't spoon them out and not expect a slight urge to pucker.

Labels: blackberries, jar, Trader Joe's

Do you have a kinship with the cranberry? Like to add those little red globes that bounce to almost any dish? Ocean Spray is having its first Ultimate Cranberry Recipe Contest. Creator of the winning recipe walks away with $25,000. That could buy many of the "red wonderberry," as the company calls them. (It sounds like they could really do with a trip away from the office.) Here are some of the requirements from the press release:

Recipes must be original, use a minimum of 1/2 cup of any Ocean Spray product (beverages 1 1/2 ounces), and fall into one of the following categories: Beverages, Snacks and Appetizers, Salads, Main Dishes, Side Dishes, Desserts and Baked Goods. Recipes will be judged on creativity, use of product, taste, overall appearance and ease of preparation. Entries must be postmarked by August 23, 2007 and received by August 31, 2007.

Four semi-finalists head to New York in November for a final judging. Each finalist gets a trip for two to New York and a year's supply of products from Ocean Spray. There's more, and official entry guidelines (are these things ever non-official?)

Labels: contest, cranberries, cranberry, Ocean Spray, recipe

The Agricultural Research Service, part of the US Department of Agriculture, has developed two new varieties of watermelon that have less than half the sugar of conventional varieties. The researcher, Angela Davis, is "currently sharing the new watermelon stock with interested growers," which I'm guessing means that you shouldn't be looking for them this summer. It will take time to create enough for commercial seed stock and then for growers to actually have them in stores.

The sugary taste we associate with watermelon is apparently a recent development. Companies have bred the fruit (OK, technically a berry) to be ever sweet. Heirloom varieties actually have about 25 percent less sugar than contemporary types. They had some difficulty getting a real red color, as that often goes hand in hand with sugar, but apparently they've conquered that barrier. And they also have a variety part way between the usual types and this more astringent version.

Labels: agricultural research service, agriculture, ARS, sugar, USDA, watermelon

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• A-pealing Deposit Oregan financial institution Umpqua Bank is offering kids a kit and start-up capital to run lemonade stands. And with a certificate of deposit, I'm sure you'll get the monopolistic version. (NYT, et. al.)


• No Slaggard There - Any More A Swedish chef made a meal of the Spanish slug. Must have elicited ewws and ahs. (Independent Online)


• Crime Pays in Fast Food Bags of uneaten fast food (and a heaping pile of cash) helped clue police that they had pulled over counterfeiters, who were paying for snacks with fake $100 bills. A suggested punishment? Eating everything they bought. (AP)


• Fake Cardboard-Filled Buns The story I ran last week (along with the rest of creation) about the cardboard-filled pork buns in Beijing was apparently a hoax. Or is that what they want you to believe? The pork is out there. (Reuters)


• Fox Tries to Bite Man A wild fox chased people into and around a Maryland steak house. (AP)


• Zoo Story An eastern German mayor has filed charges against zoo workers for shooting some of the animals and selling them as meat. Think the ad for zebra steaks gave them away? (Reuters)


• Next Time, Drink and Drive The town of Newmarket, Canada, fined a man for overnight parking when he was trying to avoid driving after a few glasses of wine. That's teach him - next time he can weave home like everyone else. (Toronto Sun)

Labels: bank, lemonade, Umpqua

There are three things that immediately irritate me about Cucina Del Sole, a "celebration of southern Italian Cooking," written by Nancy Harmon Jenkins. One is calling it a celebration. Sorry, but the word is overused, and I see no streamers and party hats in my office at the moment. The other is a blurb by Alice Waters, who seems to have become a professional book promoter, as I run across her name on the back of one book after another. (Alright, maybe it was just two in a row, but that was too many.) And then there are no pictures, as happens all too often in cookbooks these days.

But the lack of pictures makes more room for the writing, which is engaging, and I'm delighted to find someone whose penchant for rambling sentences exceeds even mine. The recipes are marvelous and often surprising. For example, I had done a lot of research into pizza last year as I finished the Complete Idiot's Guide to Pizza and Panini, but I had never seen an approach that called for a biga - a starter slurry of flour, water, and yeast that is variously called a poolish, levain, or sponge, depending on where in the world you are. (And certainly I hadn't seen the tip of adding a teaspoon of white vinegar to adjust the pH of the dough and make it easier to work.) There's a recipe for making semolina-based pasta, rather than the ubiquitous northern Italian approach of eggs and regular flour. There are terrific seafood recipes (no surprise in southern Italy) and meat dishes with variations that are usual in English texts, like Sicilian Braised Rabbit in a Sweet-and-Sour Sauce. The delights continue through vegetables (Marsala Carrots - what a natural pairing) and desserts (Olive Oil Cake with Walnuts). List price is $29.95, and it will be worth every penny - and a lot cheaper than flying to Italy to collect the recipes and know-how yourself.

Labels: cookbook, Cucina Del Sole, Italian, Italy, Nancy Harmon Jenkins, review, southern

At the end of June, I received this recipe from Cointreau's US PR agency. New York chef Geoffrey Zakarian created it "in partnership" with the liqueur company - which probably translates to Cointreau paying Zakarian to create the recipe and mention the brand name drink. Of course you could substitute anything similar, such as Grand Marnier, triple sec, Bauchant, or Harlequin.

Ingredients

1/2 cup orange liqueur
1 Tbs. plus 1/2 tsp. brown sugar
1/2 Tbs. salted butter
1.5 lb strawberries, cleaned and cut into quarters
1/2 vanilla bean, split
cracked black pepper
1/2 bunch fresh mint, stemmed and roughly chopped
6 Tbs. crème fraiche

Directions

1. To make the marmalade, in a small saucepan over medium heat, combine orange liqueur and 1 Tbs. brown sugar. Reduce to 1/8 cup. Set aside.


2. Heat butter in medium saucepan over high heat. When melted, add 1/2 tsp. brown sugar and cook until lightly caramelized, about three minutes.


3. Add strawberries and vanilla bean to saucepan and sauté for 15 seconds. Add 1/4 tsp. black pepper and sauté for 30 more seconds.


4. Add mint and immediately split among six serving dishes. Garnish each dish with 1 Tbs. crème fraiche and 1/4 tsp. black pepper. Drizzle with warm marmalade. Serve immediately.

I can also see a variation: leave the vanilla out of step 3 and forget the crème fraiche. Instead, cook through step three, put 1 scoop of good vanilla ice cream in each dish, top the ice cream with the strawberries, and garnish with the pepper and marmalade.

Labels: Cointreau, dessert, orange liqueur, recipe, strawberries, vanilla

I love garlic but hate having the smell on my hands. When I've been chopping some cloves, I remember an old professional trick. When you're done with the work, take something made of stainless steel - like a spoon, for example - and rub it over your hands. It immediately dispatches the odor. I don't know exactly why it works, but it does.

Labels: garlic, odor, smell, stainless, technique

Those used to professional baking recipes will doubtless be familiar with using powdered milk instead of the liquid variety. In baking breads, I've taken to this practice. But I've always used liquid buttermilk when I needed that ingredient, and have never even liked soured milk as an alternative. I was surprised when my wife and I found SACO Cultured Buttermilk Blend on a local grocery shelf. We picked some up and I gave it a try last night in biscuits. It was a pleasure and added the flavor I wanted (though I couldn't figure out where I has put the baking soda, so had to make do with baking powder). According to the web site, what you get these days as real buttermilk in cartons is actually cultured skim and not the byproduct of butter making. The company's web site touts the qualities of the results. I can't speak to the long term keeping (biscuits go within a day in this house), but I did like the texture of the results. Four tablespoons - rated as having 80 calories - is the amount you need for a cup of buttermilk, which is significantly less than whole milk. I automatically mixed the powder with the other dry ingredients, as I would with milk powder - and which is the approach the company suggests. The only inconvenience I see facing us is that after you open the container, it's supposed to go into the refrigerator. But then, I have a feeling it won't smell as bad as one of those buttermilk containers that you buy for a cup worth and then forget you have sitting around. Here's the biscuit recipe:

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 TBL. sugar
4 TBL. buttermilk blend
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
4 ounces butter, softened
water

1. Preheat oven to 375º F.
   
2. Thoroughly mix dry incredients.


3. Cut in butter until you get a coarse meal-like consistency.


4. Add just enough water to hold dough together.


5. Knead dough on a floured surface for about 30 seconds. Roll out to 1/4-inch thick. Cut into 3-inch rounds.


6. Place rounds on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake about 15 minutes or until golden brown on top.
   

Labels: baking, biscuits, buttermilk, powder

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Weight Loss of the Mysterious West We in the US have seen our share of secret Asian weight loss measures. Now a Chinese company is facing oversight heat from seling a weight loss patch, supposedly used by Chelsea Clinton and imported from America, that oozes oil. Ew. (Reuters)


• Milwaukee Mess Some Wisconsin brewers, protesting a proposed law that would restrict the ability of brew pubs broadly selling their beers from serving food, spilled beer suds into the Milwaukee river. Fermenting protest, perhaps? (AP


• More Dinner? Three hours after running out on a $410 bill at an expensive Minneapolis restaurant, the two stopped for drinks and more food at another - owned by the same restauranteur, an ex-Judo instructor, who chased one down an alley and held him on the ground until the police showed up. (Independent Online)


• Relax, Charlie Japanese researchers want to reduce the stress of tuna after their caught so they taste better when they hit the plate. Here's an idea - have a steak special. (Reuters)


• With Its Own Paper Wrapper In one part of Beijing, the "pork" buns are partly filled with chemically softened chopped cardboard. I'm waiting for some American fast food establishment to hop on the trend. (AP)


• Put Down That Charcoal A Pennsylvania mayor got into trouble for banning outdoor grilling at night. Wonder if anyone charred him in effigy? (AP)


• Larceny - and Love Guests at a dinner party foiled an attempted armed robbery by offering the criminal a glass of wine. He accepted their hospitality, apologized, asked for a group hug, and left. (AP)


• Good Thing It Wasn't the Butter Knife An 47-year-old woman faces charges after stabbing her 86-year-old busband with a fork as they were fighting in a restaurant. (Detroit News)


• Soba Soak A Japanese spa is offering an experience of bathing in a fake giant bowl of noodle soup. Faux Pho? (AFP)


• Swell Swill A sub-$3 bottle of chardonnay best hundreds of others from around California to be named the state's best. Thousands of wine snobs are looking for new terms to describe the sensation of having egg on your face. (WPVI-TV)

Labels: brewers, California, chardonnay, China, Japan, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, noodle soup, restaurant, tuna, weird, wine

I saw a press release from a company called China Organic Agriculture, which currently focuses on organic rice. At a time when Chinese food products have caused so many health problems becasue of contamination, the idea of having that country enter the organic food supply is disconcerting. According to a page no longer on the company's site, but still in Google's cache, selling to the US is apparently one of its goals. Given the New York Times story about the widespread nature of problem foods, I think my organic purchasing will stick to home grown products.

Labels: China, imports, organic, rice

I was actually taken aback when I heard that for years Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey used to go into finance chat rooms anonymously to act as a cheerleader and to attack rival Wild Oats, which he now wants his company to acquire. The Federal Trade Commission filed suit this week to block the merger. As Bloomberg reports:

Mackey, 53, made the postings "under an alias to avoid having his comments associated with the company and to avoid others placing too much emphasis on his remarks," Whole Foods said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.

Oh, please, who is the Whole Foods PR machine trying to kid? He posted it anonymously to keep himself off the hook of criticism and of potential charges that he was trying to game the stock prices. But then, as I learned first hand, the Whole Foods PR department isn't above trying to say things like manmade synthetic versions of chemicals fed to salmon to color them aren't artificial dyes. In fact, I received an anonymous comment from someone trying to take the "It really is all natural" which makes me wonder if Mr. Mackey's comments went farther and wider than the Yahoo chat rooms.

Fortune is asking if he's too much of a loose canon to have as CEO of a pubicly-held company. As a consumer I'm wondering just how much more I'm going to be paying as a result.

Mackey is trying to put a good face on the whole FTC challenge, going on at length about it on his corporate blog, but then ended up posting the internal memo that the FTC is supposedly using as part of its case. What were reasons one and two for the move?:

Elimination of an acquisition opportunity for a conventional supermarket — our targeted company is the only existing company that has the brand and number of stores to be a meaningful springboard for another player to get into this space. Eliminating them means eliminating this threat forever, or almost forever.

Elimination of a competitor — they compete with us for sites, customers and Team Members.

He then went on to try and explain the memo. Interestingly, the memo was all about what it would do for the company - and that's fair enough, because, after all, it's a business move. But then as Mackey is trying explain why its so reasonable (twisting logic in some places, like trying to say that if the FTC objected to this merger, they should have objected to all acquisitions the company had done), he forgets that customers really don't care about getting the best business environment for Whole Foods. They want better choices and better food for themselves. Here's Mackey's argument:

Since the FTC never actually compared prices between Wild Oats and Whole Foods, how can they in good conscience claim that this merger will mean higher prices for consumers? They didn't conduct adequate research prior to making this claim! In fact, the exact opposite is true. Why? Because after the merger is complete, the acquired Wild Oats stores will be brought into Whole Foods system and their overall prices will be lowered. Consumers will be receiving lower prices, not higher prices after this merger is completed.

Oh, someone get me some aspirin. The biggest "natural food" chain buys the second biggest and, of course, prices won't go higher? Wait, wait - maybe I can go buy a bridge at the local Whole Foods. Let me get my piles of small unmarked bills first.

Labels: Mackey, posting, Whole Foods

As the New York Times reports, China is far from being the single source of contaminated food, which includes:

• black pepper, coriander powder, and shrimp with salmonella from India


• crabmeat, lollipops, and dried chili peppers from Mexico so dirty that it wasn't edible


• mislabeled candy from Denmark (impounded 520 times last year)


• traces of illegal pesticides on produce from the Dominican Republic

If this has been so prevelant - and apparently making China sometimes look like a piker, why is the media just getting around to reporting this now?

Labels: China, contamination, Denmark, Dominical Republic, food, Mexico

If you've ever made a packaged corned beef and have the experience of the real deli variety, you may have noticed that the home version is decidedly blander. Not only is there the difference in curing, but in the cooking. The packages say to drop the meat into water and simmer for hours. But adding some pickling spice to the water can enormously improve the flavor without your taking on brining the meat yourself. Last night I used some corned beef spice that my wife had picked up from Pensy's - somewhere around 2 teaspoons to a tablespoon. (That's significantly less than the 3 to 5 tablespoons per 5 pounds of meat that they suggest for actually marinating.) I think it's adding that little extra edge that the commercial producers leave out because a) many people like blander food, and b) it's cheaper for them.

Labels: corned beef, marinating, Penzey's, pickling, spice, spices

A review copy of Southern Cakes: Sweet and Irresistible Recipes for Everyday Celebrations by Nancie McDermott arrived. Although I haven't had a chance to test the recipes, there's a great tip on pound cakes. The traditional recipe is a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, a pound of eggs, and a pound of butter. But the question I always had was how do you get a pound of eggs? Crack five or six or seven (depending on the size), and you might get more or less a pound, but not on the money.

Here's the flash of the obvious - the important thing is equal proportions. So you weight the eggs first, and then you weigh out equal measures of everything else! Then you cream the sugar and butter, beat in the eggs, and mix in the flour. Bake in a floured and greased pan at 350 until a skewer put into the center comes out clean.

Labels: cake, cakes, McDermott, pound cake, southern

Derrick Schneider writes the blog An Obsession with Food and he had two back-to-back entries I particularly liked.

One was about some promotion Hellman's had going with Yahoo called The Search for Real Food. He asks the question:

I don't have a problem with Hellmann's as a food product—none apart from a general stance against flavorless, chemical-laden industrial foods, anyway—but is there any food less real than the preservative-laden spread?

My answer? Yes - the fat-free version.

The other entry was a new search tool that food science expert Harold McGee has been working on with Google. It's essentially an index to McGee's On Food & Cooking.

Labels: An Obsession with Food, Derrick Schneider, Google, Harold McGee, Hellman's, search

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Chocolate in Moderation A recent study suggests that daily dark chocolate reduces blood pressure. Unfortunately, the necessary ingestion is around 6 grams, with the restriction undoubtedly leading to depression. (AP)


• Penguins and Garlic Shanghai zoo keepers are feeding garlic to the penguins to ward off respiratory problems, sutffing a few cloves in each fish the birds eat. For some odd reason, there has also been a sharp drop in the number of people wanting to see the birds. (AP)


• Paris Hilton Goes to Dogs Someone supposedly poked through Paris Hilton's garbage, found a can from some organic dog food, and sold it on eBay for $305. Hopefully they will recycle it. (AP)


• Porn Pizza A western Canadian pizza joint has been putting a pornographic picture in the bottom of each box, under the pizza. The restaurant sold hundreds of pizzas in one week. Do delivery personnel ask if it was as good for the customer as it was for them? (AFP)


• Movie Munching There's a new documentary on speed eating. Get to the theater early - the snack stand lines will be fierce. (AP)


• Really Fresh Fish A chef in Taiwan got into trouble for serving a fish that wasn't quite dead. Boy, and ususally people complain because the fish isn't fresh enough. (AP)

Labels: blood pressure, chocolate, dog food, fish, fresh, garlic, Paris Hilton, penguins, pizza, porn, speed eating, Taiwan, weird

After having frozen coffee drinks from Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, and a local place called Shelburne Coffee Roasters, I decided to try my hand. Here are the results:

• 1 1/2 ounces freshly brewed espresso


• 6 ounces milk


• 3 TBS. sugar


• 1/8 tsp. vanilla


• 1 cup ice

Put all the ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth.

Labels: coffee, espresso, frozen, recipe, vanilla

What a marvelous book Ian Hemphill has created. If you have any interest in spices - which is to say, if you have any interest in cooking, this is a must. There are some recipes by his wife, Kate Hemphill, but this is primarily a practical reference from a second-generation spice merchant and obvious expert. The volume starts with interesting history that applies a pragmatic eye. For example, he dismisses the notion that people used spices in the dark ages to mask tainted foods because anyone who could have afforded the then-astronomical prices of the spices would likely have had money for something fresh. Instead, he attributes the growth of spices to improve bland food and, interestingly, to help moderate the strong gamy taste of many meats and poultry at the time, which might explain the concept of covering over a taste or aroma.

Of course there are sections on growing and using spices, and I found interesting the section on the spices and herbs that specific cuisines use. An approach I hadn't seen before is using relational weights - for example, in Indonesian cooking if you used cloves, turmeric, and coriander seed, they would likely be in a ration of 1 to 5 to 8. My first impression was that there were supposed to be proportions of spice blends, but that didn't make sense when you had, say, 15 different ingredients and you know that the cuisine in question doesn't use all of them every time. And there are recipes for specific spice blends at the end of the book. No, this chapter was to give you a feel for how the given cuisine uses and combines spices - very good to know.

What really grabbed me, though, were the entries for individual spices and herbs. Each includes the following: origin and history, processing, buying and storage, use, other names for the item, names in other languages, suggested quantities for a given type of dish, and what other spices and herbs that work well with it.

You do need to keep in mind that the book is from Australia, because some terminology might throw you. For example, there was a recipe for a savory biscuit. I was thinking the flaky type you bake, and then I suddenly remembered that in Australia and the UK, biscuit can mean a cookie or cracker. You will also find a few spices that aren't readily found in this part of the world. That said, at $24.95, this is a bargain.

Labels: book, cookbook, Hemphill, herbs, reference, review, spices

As July is National Hot Dog Month (no, I can't make this stuff up) and today is the annual hot dog eating contest on Coney Island, I thought that a few choice bits on this snack:

• For more than you ever wanted to know about hot dog consumption, preferences, history, and trivia, see this page from the National Hot Dog and Sausage Counsel.


• There's more on hot dogs (including information on the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile) at MadeHow.com.


• The FDA has its say about the way to cook one today.


• The Off the Broiler blog did a massive hot dog tasting.


• wikiHow has instructions on calculating the value of pi by throwing frozen hot dogs.


• HowStuffWorks on how hot dogs are made.


• Some history of that hot dog landmark, Nathan's, from Amusement-Parks.com.


• In 1981, the USDA tried to classify ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables, as FoodReference.com reminds us.


• GlobalGourmet.com brings a history of ketchup.


• For those who prefer mustard, here's a history of that condiment from GlobalGourmet.

Happy Fourth, and good eating!

Labels: FDA, hot dogs, kosher, Oscar Mayer, pi

I'm kicking myself for not having remembered to review New Belgium Brewing's spring beer during the season, and it's probably off the shelves for the rest of the year at this point. But I'm mentioning it now because any regional brewer that can produce something this good bears watching - and addtiional tasting.

The company advertised Springboard in a way that usually puts me off - with the inclusion of Chinese herbs. By reflex I generally consider that a gimmick. But in this case, it's one that worked. The brewmaster added schisandra, gogi berries, and wormwood in addition to oats. The result was a full, rich fruity flavor with a hint of bitterness in the aftertaste, but one that was pleasant. I had an impulse while tasting and took a bite of some reheated spaghetti and my quick tomato sauce, and the combination was dynamite, so I suspect this would work with many acidic foods.

Now I just have to find some of the comapny's Skinny Dip summer offering.

Labels: beer, brewer, Chinese herbs, gogi, New Belgium, schisandra, wormwood

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Vampire Bats - and Now Vampire Peacocks In the parking lot of a Staten Island Burger King, a man attacked a stray peacock, claiming that it was a vampire. "He was going crazy," said a worker at the establishment. Eating at a fast food joint, what else could you expect? (AP)


• The Last Blow An apparently suspicious object left outside a Salt Lake City fast food place cause the city to close down several blocks for a couple of hours before someone determined that it was an abandoned trumpet that had seen better days. They probably thought it was a peacock. (AP)


• Manners, Please A man in a Pennsylvania fast food drive-through punched the woman handing him his meal because she didn't say please and thank you. And here I thought it was because he actually tasted the food. (AP)


• Wimbledon Food Woes Former top tennis player Marat Safin was griping about food at the annual tournament because they always serve the same things, charge about $20 for a plate of pasta, and the food allowance for players doesn't cover one meal. (AFP)


• Tennis, Anyone? Scientists have developed a pill that swells to the size of a tennis ball in the stomach, making someone feel full before sitting down to a meal. Possible side effects include over-dependence on your backhand. (Daily Mirror)


• Munchies, Anyone? A top Indonesian politician thinks that it's fine to use marijuana in food, although he doesn't approve of full legalization. What, does he have the brownie concession? (Reuters)


• Sports Injury The six-time winner of the annual Fourth of July hot dog eating contest on Coney Island may have to pass because of arthritis in the jaw. Maybe mom didn't know best when she said chew 20 times before swallowing. (AP)


• Stopper that Bottle San Francisco says it won't pay for employee bottled water, claiming that tap is as good. "'In San Francisco, for the price of one 1 gallon (3.8 litres) of bottled water, local residents can purchase 1,000 gallons (38,000 litres) of tap water,' according to the mayor's order." But how do you get the bottles out of the faucet? (Reuters)

Labels: dieting, fast food, hot dogs, marijuana, San Francisco, weird