Gut Germs: The story continues

Two pieces in New Scientist No 2862, 28 April 2012 add to my fascination with the hidden world of my gut flora and its impact on what I eat and what happens to what I eat and what happens to me when I eat it.

We've known since 2006 that the types of gut bacteria in obese rats differed from those in non-obese rats. Now a group of whitecoats at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research  have swapped gut flora between obesity prone and non obesity resistant rats and found that the obesity resistant rats now ate more and  'put on the pounds.

Across the grey pond (a.k.a. Atlantic Ocean) whitecoats at the University of Toronto in Canada have found that the gut flora in the faces from 20 month old babies overlaps with the bacterial make-up of dust samples found in the particular baby's home. They conclude that babies and their domestic dust are are sharing a common bacterial pool (oops - almost childish pun). The extension of this is that maybe other people in the house will also share whatever health and behavioural influences these bacteria produce when in the gut.

Putting these two together, I give full warning that I will carry around those white point nose covers that are supposed to keep out things like avian flu germs and have no hesitation in putting them on should I find an obese baby in a home or restaurant I enter, particularly if someone happens to be changing the kid's nappy while I am there, or I suspect they have returned from doing so without washing their hands and are about to hand me a slice of pizza or I gloved finger wiped across their mantel shelf goes any shade less than white.

Mushroom and almond soup

Casey, my niece, went mushrooming for the first time this week in the Penrose State Forest south of Sydney. She and her fellow foragers were after saffron milk caps/pine mushrooms  - Lactarius deliciosus. a native of the Southern Pyrenees now long established in pine forests in Australia. They found plenty, it having rained recently and the weather firmly now in autumn mode (let's not get into the issues of seasonal naming in Australia). Her companions were reluctant to collect ones they thought a bit overblown; some bruising on the gills, a little ragged at the edges. But Casey was sure I would say they were perfectly all right, which of course they are, and so brought home a vast quantity.

We had them on the day of picking lightly sauteed and served with wilted spinach and a saffron risotto that Marilyn made in her zoosh new Thermomix. That still left quite a quantity. As I have been reading Sue Shephard's informative and entertaining Pickled, Potted and Canned. The Story of Food Preserving (Headline 2000) (which interestingly when I looked for a link to it I find is now listed as Pickled, Potted and Canned. How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World - have I got some weird rare copy (in my dreams!)) I immediately thought of drying them. Not being confident of doing this by the method of stringing them up and in the absence of a fireplace or dry weather to do it I turned to the oven.

Alas, I have to report failure here. The notes I hastily found online didn't lead to the hoped for result - took way too long and didn't end up dry as I had hoped even then and certainly not as pretty as the store-bought dried European mix I have on hand. Another time perhaps.

My other thought was mushroom soup. Casey being a vegan, I looked for recipes that didn't require using butter or lard as for sauteing the mushrooms or adding any dairy as a thickener. The first criteria was easy enough with olive oil being substituted, and for the second I found suggestions for using  ground almonds, a practice that has a long history but seems to have gone out of favour.

Here's what I did - imprecisely as I didn't measure things as I went, not having planned ahead to write this blog - well, who knew if it was going to be successful anyway.

I wiped the mushrooms with kitchen paper to remove pine needle and other bits of plant matter and soil that had attached itself to the caps.  I don't know where I read never to wash mushrooms but I follow that practice. I took about a dozen largish mushrooms and sliced them across the vertical (oh, say, 4 -5 mm thick) and then , as some of them were quite large, into bite size pieces. I diced half an onion quite fine (I was going to use a leek but there was half an onion left in the fridge and I am on a reduce waste kick). I put a good slosh or three of olive oil into a saucepan and when the oil was hot I tossed in the onion to soften. I threw in some Greek dried oregano (I get it in a packet still on the stem and crush it as I need) and poked it and the onions around a bit. To this I added the chopped mushrooms and gave it all a bit more of a paddle to lightly saute the mushrooms.

While this sauteing was going on I made up some vegetable stock (of course I used a cube- as I said, I have been reading Sue Shepard's book and am no longer ashamed of using cubes but see myself as part of the great tradition of preserving by concentration). I poured in enough to set the mushrooms a-swim comfortably in the stock. Casey brought back some herbed salt from her trip to Spain last year and I put in a good couple of pinches of that. Finally I added a good grind or two of pepper. I set all of this to simmer.

Now I took a good handful of almonds and ground them to a paste in my spice grinder. I added a little of the hot stock from time to time to assist the grinder.

I tipped all of this paste into the saucepan and let it cook down for 15 minutes or so. The mushrooms were fresh and thickly enough cut to remain good and firm in the broth, which was now a lovely pale orange from the mushroom juices.

Casey pronounced it delicious and I concur. There was enough to keep in the fridge for tonight as well, and I added a finely diced fresh green chili to mine as a superfluous but satisfying garnish.

D-oh

Okay, it is just possible I cannot make dough. Pie dough, that is (well bread dough to if it comes to that). I think it is because I have absolutely no understanding of what it is. I understand rice, have all my life. I understand hoppers - those yeasted batter bowl shaped pancakes (for want of a common description) and can turn them out, albeit I have to use a non-stick hopper pan so the sides aren't as frilly as they could be, but I also don't understand tempering of a pan so am unlikely to make great advances in using a trad hopper pan. I understand string hoppers, which are from a kind of dough, a rice flour paste really that has to be just the right consistency not to totally set off my arthritis as I squeeze out the noodles (some describe them as vermicelli) onto the bamboo mats for steaming, and I make them darn well. I understand pittu, that mix of rice flour and grated coconut steamed in a columnar thingy. I can turn out a damn fine coconut roti and have been known to assay a decent godamba roti (a wheat based roti on the Malaysian side of rotis). But Euro dough is another country to me. I shall persist, however, as I am determined to make a curried beef (or for my vegan and vegetarian housemates curried vegetable) pie.

Learning the game

I think I have talked before about how comfortable I mostly feel now in putting together a dish from scratch based on the years I've spent cooking and coming to understand flavours and techniques that while they may not produce cutting edge cuisine will get me through most meals whether for myself or for a hastily gathered group.

I'm not claiming for myself anything other than practice, but it feels great to take a basic bechamel and add a splash of tomato sugo, a generous pinch of herbed sea salt and an equally generous pinch of smoked paprika (one of my favourite flavourings), reduce it down to a stage where I can add a panful of lightly sauteed mixed mushrooms and simmer this down quickly to a creamy mixture that I can pour over a layer of slices of just cooked potato lining the bottom of a grapeseed oiled dish, top with another layer of potatoes sprinkled with grated parmesan, grill, and have a most satisfying wet autumn night's dinner. But to also recognise as I hoe into it that the next time presenting the dish with a side of chopped fresh herbs (parsley, thyme, marjoram and perhaps sage either solo or in combo) would take the dish just that step further. Would I go the extent of sliced kalamata olives along with the parmesan on top, absolutely, and I may even go so far as to slice up my home salted dried kalimata that have been marinating in olive oil and dried chili for a couple of years. But no more, I think. There's a fine balance to be found between the additions that enhance the basic dish and those that overwhelm its basics, in this case that combination of potatoes and mushrooms, and I think it's that balance that I get right more often than not these days (there still are disasters that are best composted).

As I think I have in my barbecued whole fish (snapper works well as does redfish). In the absence of lemon or dill one day I looked to the herbs in the garden for a tad of inspiration. What I came up with was first oiling, pepper and salting a sheet of aluminium foil, then laying on top of it a generous bunch of lemon verbena and sprigs of bay, putting the same mix inside the gutted belly of the fish, deep scoring the flesh of the fish three times, laying the fish on its side on the prepared sheet of aluminium foil, then covering the exposed side of the fish with more lemon verbena, bay, pepper, salt and oil, covering that with another sheet of foil, sealing the packet and barbecuing it at a high heat for around 10 to 15 minutes each side.

I have New Scientist No 2857, March 24, 2012 to thank, I guess, for bringing to my attention LFTB, that's lean finely textured beef. This matter, apparently delightfully and it would appear accurately called 'pink slime' is an additive to a range of meat products, and consists of 'slaughterhouse trimmings separated from fat and sterilised using ammonia'.

NS reports that the US Department of Agriculture has agreed to 'offer schools food without LFTB' post a 235,970 signature petition over March 2012.

What fascinates me about the story is that the petition was apparently based on 'microbiologists' concerns, and incidents of Escheria coli and Salmonella contamination - all of which were intercepted before reaching customers'. Why does this fascinate? Because I would have hoped that those 235,970 petitioners had petitioned for the removal of this muck from school canteens on the basis that it was repulsive crap to be feeding kids despite the manufacturer apparently claiming that LFTB is '94 to 97 per cent lean beef, with similar nutritional value to 90 per cent lean ground beef''.

I am all for eating offal not awful.

Figs

My first sight of a fresh fig was in the infamous scene in Ken Russell's film of DH Lawrence's Women in Love when Rupert Birkin demonstrates how to break into one with your thumbs, pull the cheeks created apart and then suck the flesh out with you lips alluding in that Lawrencian way to the sexual imagery of the fig as vagina. For an 17 year old who had skipped school to see the film, that scene was as erotic as it was intended to be, never mind that this particular 17 year old was (undeclared to himself) homosexual.

It wasn't until years later that I came across my first fruiting fig tree in the backyard of one of the share houses of my university days. The tree produced a lot of green figs which birds had a great time pecking into and so few got anywhere near ripe and those that did were underwhelming.

Since then I've had many a fresh fig via Italian fruit shops first and then more widely as they were popularised. Charlie, my Calabrian neighbour across the road, often brings some across in season from the tree in his front yard. I went fig and chestnut picking on one of the bus trips he organises annually for the Italian and Portuguese communities in Leichhardt and Petersham. You can read about that trip at Not That Old Chestnut (not my choice of title, it was Andrew Wood's, editor of the much missed Divine magazine in which the article was printed).

All this by way of saying that it's fig season again, and I have had my first by way of a delectable fig and ricotta brioche from Black Star Pastry at the Newtown end of Australia Street. The sugary sweetness of the fig and brioche are nicely balanced by the milky sweetness of the ricotta and cut into by the sesame and poppy seeds on the brioche. The mouth feel is unctuous, the ripeness of the fig, the creaminess of the ricotta and the light almost sponge-ness of the brioche combining smoothly on the palate. Visually it seduces, the golds of the brioche echoing the khaki/bronze of the skin and core of the fig, the flecks of sesame and poppy like fig seeds grown fat and burst from their pink fleshy bed, the white of the ricotta seeming to have leached out of the band of white inner flesh of the fig. It's disingenuously simple in its ingredients and its execution.

Hot Mumma

The title of this blog I owe to my sis-in-law and comes from gin being called 'mother's milk' in the Hogarthian days. The 'hot' part needs a little more explaining.

When traveling through India some years ago, Marg, Marilyn and I were in a dive of a hotel in Aurangabad pre-excursioning to the cave temples of Ajunta. Attracted by its name which involved the word Garden and what seemed a reasonable description of a cheapish place in the Lonely Planet at the time, we booked in not knowing it was the kind of hotel that Indian commercial travellers frequented, a fact not recorded in said guidebook, but clearly the reason for the aghast looks of the reception staff when we arrived late at night and cheerfully proceeded to book in. We lasted on night, I think, post which we hastened to the Taj hotel there, much to the relief, I must say, of our chaffeur who clearly was not happy with his accommodation that night either and was definitely up about spending the next few nights with his mates at the Taj digs.

To celebrate our good fortune in finding and still perturbed by the former nights experience, though somewhat blissed out post the caves, when settled into the splendid new surrounds we decided to go wild and put a split green chili into each glass of our regular gin (drink of choice at the time). We let it steep for or a minute or two and then had what I still recall as the best neat gin I have ever had  - no jokes about the effect of several gins on recollection of anything, though I confess Marg and Marilyn had an extended fest of giggles in the restaurant later.

Having remembered to by my two bottles of duty free Bombay Sapphire recently, I couldn't resist having a welcome-home-glass (all right, it was three, and your point is?) and having been chili starved most of the time in PNG from whence I as returning (bar a brilliant biriyani at the Lamana Hotel in Port Morseby over which I sprinkled a tingling hot sliced green chili courtesy of the kitchen) I recalled I had some fresh green chilis in the fridge and had a highly satisfying sozzle.

I was intrigued to see if others had also self-discovered the delights of gin and chili, never one to think I could be particularly original in cocktail combos. There's quite a nice recipe for Chili Lime and Gin Marinated Oysters which I am very much going to try; ditto the Gin and Chili Infused Grapefruit Drink which is apparently a 'spiced up version of a greyhound cocktail' which usually is just gin and grapefruit juice and the Gin and Chili Pepper Martini and the Hair of the Dog Cocktail that is the gin alternative to a Bloody Mary.

I intend now to go the next step and put a couple of chillies into a whole bottle of gin - sooooo time-saving!