Who wouldn’t like the helpful little mushroom? You can grill the portobello, stir-fry the shiitake, tempura-batter the oyster… and colonize new worlds with the mycelium.
I’m selling a new bumpersticker on Cafepress: I’m pro-fungi and I vote.
Imagine taking a pill that even makes bean flour taste good. What if the pill was a fruit? Celiacs (sounds like something from Land of the Lost), diabetics, vegans or even those who choose to have fussy palette might find use of the fruit discussed in this article. Synsepalum dulcificum is the “miracle fruit” that tricks your taste buds into interpreting flavors as sweeter than you naturally know them to be.
Chew the fruit, suck on a lemon and you’ve got lemonade flavor. If I host my own culinary adventure gathering, I’m dressing in a purple velvet coat and top hat… there’s no earthly way of knowing — which way this flavor is going.
So our body is deceiving our brain? Is our preference for or against flavors as much biological (mechanical?) as cultural and mental? Fodder for future reading lists, I suppose. If anyone has recommendations on the topic, please forward them to me.
That I could find a Pee Wee Herman and Willie Wonka reference in so few words concerns me slightly. Concerns me that you’re reading this too.
It’s iced-coffee season again and I’m stuck with extra strong coffee dumped over ice from Alterra. Bah. Last year, the New York Times published an article about the cold-brew method and its superiority to any other way to brew coffee that you intend to water down with ice cubes. This is so true.
Toddy is my favorite way to brew cold coffee. You need one pound of coffee beans (ground for drip) and 9 cups of filtered water. Let it sit 8-12 hours. Then pour the concentrated coffee over ice in a glass, filling only about 1/3 full. Then top the rest off with filtered water and stir. Then drink it, maybe with cream and sugar if you like. So what’s that… a 2:1 water to Toddy coffee concentrate ratio.
This type of brewing also produces a lower acidity coffee for people with sensitive stomachs. Not lower caffeine though. So it’ll still rev you up on a hot summer morning.
It’s just a Flickr group. Calm down.
Upon receiving an invitation to dine out for an Indian lunch, I tried to recall the name of the tradition in India where lunch food is prepared at home or by street vendors and then delivered in small metal boxes to people’s places of work. Dabbawala or Tiffin Wallah was the term that escaped me. I’m not sure if my memory has been jogged properly and that could be the wrong term. The thought process, faulty or not, lead me to discover something more useful than knowledge…a cool gadget.
The tool you saw if you clicked on the Flickr group link is Mr. Bento. It strikes me as a better way to quarantine edible glutenfull items while traveling in mixed company. The mix of folks being those who are tolerant of wheat and those who are intolerant - of wheat. As a bonus prize which will serve to entertain me all afternoon, I found Mr. Bento and his cult. See the pretty snapshots …
I should qualify: equatorial in a geographic (not mathematical) sense.
Hot Pockets were never in my parent’s freezer as a kid yet I can still hear the TV jingle in my head so they must have sold a few dozen boxes. Frozen pastry stuffed with molten filling. Mmm. Warmed inside of chemical dough, the barbecued magma waiting for a row of teeth to crack open the pie’s crust, bursting forth, spraying steam and sauce, raining upon the lips of it’s hungry consumer. Haht Pah-ckets!
Pudgie pies, the campfire version of Hot Pockets, are just as dangerous by the way. If you’re cozy-camping with a bunch of people from Michigan or Wisconsin, don’t let them convince you otherwise. They will tempt you with cherry compote filled tarts — or maybe marshmallows and milk chocolate between two butter-and-fire-fused slices of Wonder. Ho no! Sweet viscous hell will flow over your tongue, leaving you with no taste buds remaining to enjoy the weekend supply of Milwaukee’s Best Light and Seagram’s Kiwi Wine Coolers. To quell your flaming lips, you might be better off licking one of the cans or bottles floating in an ice water slurry along with food particles and mustard plugs inside the plastic cooler upon which your acquaintance’s cheese curd enhanced buttocks rest.
But I’m not taking your time to write about Hot Pockets or Pudgie Pies or make inflammatory statements about fat Midwesterners (I just did, actually). Number one, I’m a fat Midwesterner myself. Number two, I’m interested in the Equadorian equivalent of these scalding, stuffed pastries. Pupusas.
If your friends and family can’t eat gluten, real corn masa is a good friend. When made into a dough, it gives a satisfying texture that stands up to your teeth and leaves a carbolicious weight in your belly. My recipe for pupusas called for a whole pound of masa. It was totally wrong and I barely rescued any semblance of a real pupusa, but that’s the Food Network’s problem for posting an imprecise recipe.
Learn about making pupusas from people who know what they’re doing, not a TV channel. Or start here. Or here. I filled mine with black beans and queso blanco. They were mediocre at best. Without condiments or the standard coleslaw accompaniment, curtido, he little corn cakes are dry and chewy. Once I find something useful to report regarding successful pupusa making, I’ll report back.
Ethiopian injera is fabulous. It’s a flat, spongy bread made of teff, a tiny grain that you could process yourself with a mortar and pestle or food processor. Or just buy it from Bob’s Red Mill or your local natural foods store.
See a recipe and a bit of history on injera. This one calls for all purpose wheat flour, which you obviously shouldn’t use if you’re making non-wheat bread. Either substitute buckwheat flour for AP flour, use a multipurpose GF blend or just use all teff flour and all will be well.
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