This pretty much sums up last weekend:
And yes, this is D flambeing cheese for the appetizer to a delicious garlic pita dinner. (Thanks J for the photo!)
We also had some other yummy food encounters through the Minnesota state fair, a Chinese place, and homemade Marguerite pizza. (Not to mention the homemade yogurt, and chocolate chip waffles… what better way to spend a weekend off?)
Also known as, I’m making swans!
Kat of The Bobwhites was our August 2012 Daring Baker hostess who inspired us to have fun in creating pate a choux shapes, filled with crème patisserie or Chantilly cream. We were encouraged to create swans or any shape we wanted and to go crazy with filling flavors allowing our creativity to go wild!
This challenge was so much fun, and so easy! The reward to time-spent ratio is fantastically high, which is always an awesome thing. Plus, you can always do a glamor photoshoot at the end of your time baking to further reinforce how awesome the dessert is.
I mean, seriously, how could you make something cooler than this?
And now, to show you how easy they are to make!
So, I try to not spend too much time talking about chemistry, or the new “chemical-free” and “organic” movements, since they tend to really offend me as a chemist. (Which is particularly frustrating, because I like local agriculture and sustainable farming and more benign ways of treating bugs, which is ideally what those movements are supposed to support.)
Unfortunately, claiming chemical-free products isn’t enough. We have to now poo-poo chemistry as a whole in our food:
Jamba Juice’s Campaign Against Chemistry
There are so many offensive parts of this ad that I don’t even know where to start, but here are a few thoughts:
1. Inositol and taurine are natural small molecules that are found in fruits and animal tissues (yes, that means in your body right now!), respectively. Those are just as “natural” as “natural caffeine,” and probably cause a lot fewer side-effects than lots of caffeine drinking.
2. Seriously? “All the energy, without the chemistry”? I’d love to see someone actually function without all of chemical processes that make ATP in their cells (which is, in itself, a chemical). Aerobic respiration, anyone? (With it’s friends the Krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation?)
Last weekend at the farmers’ market was gorgeous – beautiful weather, tasty food, and generally a good time. This week, we bought a few non-produce items, which were/are delicious to munch on.
We purchased our regular onions, and some green beans, but also branched out into butternut squash (the first for the season!), cinnamon chip bread (delicious), and apricot butter (not pictured here – I forgot that it was in the fridge – but also very yummy!). D was talking about making a butternut squash pie, so we’ll see what winds up happening to the squash.
Rachael of pizzarossa was our August 2012 Daring Cook hostess and she challenged us to broaden our knowledge of cornmeal! Rachael provided us with some amazing recipes and encouraged us to hunt down other cornmeal recipes that we’d never tried before – opening our eyes to literally 100s of cuisines and 1000s of new-to-us recipes!
So this month I experimented with two different cornmeal dishes:
Sweetcorn Fritters
Vegetable Tart with Cornmeal Base
Yesterday was absolutely gorgeous at the market. The weather was perfect, so the aisles were packed with people itching to get fresh produce!
This week, we bought peppers. Lots and lots of peppers. We’re hoping to do a stuffed peppers dish later this week, and that’ll get filled out with the onions and some leftover produce from last week. To round out the pickings, we got a watermelon (which is delicious!) and a cucumber for salads (yum!).
A few weeks ago, we picked up some amaranth at the farmers’ market. After looking up some recipes, I finally decided on an amaranth and lentil curry over rice.
On the whole, I thought it came out pretty well. I used a mixture of cooked lentils, blanched amaranth (which leeches out a lot of pink when you cook it, surprisingly), tomatoes and onions, along with a lot of various Indian and Middle Eastern spices. I honestly couldn’t tell you which ones – it took about 20 minutes to cook this dish, and then another 20 minutes to properly season it. D and I pulled out just about every spice jar in our cabinet, smelled the contents and the dish, and then decided whether or not the spice belonged. This is not my normal way of cooking, and it’s something I would have never done 5 years ago, but I guess I’m finally getting more adept at cooking on the fly.
In any case, the amaranth was really good, and I wouldn’t mind trying another dish with it.
Another beautiful day at the market (or so I was told – D went out to conquer the stands on his own Saturday morning). The bright side of this was that when I got home, there were beautiful fruits and vegetables in the kitchen!
Mmmmmm, don’t those look delicious? We got about a pound of tomatoes, a yellow zucchini, an eggplant, five peppers, an onion, and a good number of white nectarines. Yum! D also got some award-winning soft cheese at the market, and our neighbors dropped off some home-grown tomatoes earlier today for us to enjoy. Despite the low rainfall this year, it really is awesome getting to enjoy so much fresh produce!
We’ve already used almost half of our veggies, but that post will come later this month. In the meantime, though, I’m excited to start on the nectarines. =]
Apparently, insects are the food of the future:
Insects provide as much nutritional value as ordinary meat and are a great source of protein, according to researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. They also cost less to raise than cattle, consume less water and do not have much of a carbon footprint. Plus, there are an estimated 1,400 species that are edible to man.
I don’t really have a problem with the idea of eating insects, as long as they’re tasty. Apparently some people do, though, so food scientists are advocating the use of the term “mini-livestock” (apparently as a way to hide the fact that you’re eating bugs?):
MiniLivestock advocates eating insects garnering cultural, economical and environmental benefits. Eating insects, or entomophagy, is internationally practiced; some eat insects for sustenance and others as delicacies. Despite its popularity in other countries, however, entomophagy has not yet caught on in the West because many still view insects as dirty, disease-laden pests.
MiniLivestock’s long-term mission is to challenge perceptions and taste-palates of all ages, backgrounds, and dispositions through the psychological persuasion of product branding. In the short-term, I intend to target the “cultural elite” in niche food markets to spark interest and shift people’s values.
The above quote is taken from Rosanna Yau’s Master’s thesis about how to rebrand insect-eating to make it more palatable. Despite my initial reaction that this was a ridiculous thesis topic, Rosanna actually brings forth some really interesting points and ideas in the document.
