Loved finding this new treat - Yunnan pot noodle soup - yep, this is a single serve :)
A surprise J
Deer penis with
hagfish: City of Gold celebrates the eclectic flaours of L.A.
‘But the documentary is mainly
focused on the families and communities that run, support and keep alive the
numerous eateries and restaurants that make up the LA food scene. Guerilla
Tacos, Soban, Chengdu Taste, Jitlada, Meals by Genet, Pho Minh, Petit Trois and
Earlez Dogs all get a special mention with interesting snapshots into how these
places got started. Many of these are stories of migration, financial struggle
and passionate determination. These fascinating mini-narratives are a
celebration of the ethnic diversity of LA and support Gold’s contention that
cuisine should continually break with convention and create something new.’
I hope the film lives up to this claim.
Bitter truth
‘On the face of it, reducing bitterness in foods sounds like a great
idea...But there is a catch. The same chemicals thatmake fruit and veg bitter
also imbue them with many of their health benefits. When scientists talk of the
healthiness of green tea, dark chocolate, red wine or broccoli, much of what they are talking about is due to bitter
chemicals called phytonutrients. To satisfy our love of sweetness, food
manufacturers are now removing many of these substances, causing some people to
worry that we are turning bitter fruit and veg into junk foods of the fresh
produce aisle.’
A terrific article from New Scientist, 1 August 2015. Jennifer McLagan
gets a side bar talking about how to keep bitter in food based on her book Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most
Dangerous Flavour. Happily I have never had a problem with bitter, which I
put down to my Sri Lankan foodways in which vegies like bittergourd and
aubergine are common items at table. I
have scanned the article and can make copies available on request.
Ah Toy’s Garden: A
Chinese market garden on the Palmer River goldfield.
I came across a reference to this study in Susan Parham’s Food and
Urbanism. It’s a 1984 paper in Australian Historical Archaeology by Ian Jack,
Kate Holmes, and Ruth Kerr. I’ve been reading some other short studies by
archaeologists and anthrolopologists on interpreting sites for what they say
about foodways and find them fascinating both for their approach to deduction
and also the insights they report. This one spends more time on the dwelling
and the site but has intriguing findings on irrigation and identifies some
fruit trees but has little about what market produce was grown. Still, I can
make a copy available to those of you who are interested.
NASA astronauts take
first bit of lettuce grown in space: “Tastes like arugula”
Is it just me, or do you also worry that a romaine lettuce grown in outer
space – well, inside a space thingy – would taste like rocket/arugula? I mean,
they aren’t even the same species, yeh? Arugula is Eruca sativa and Romaine is
Lactuca sativa L. var. Longifolia. Sure, they both have ‘sativa’ in
their name but so does pot.
Greek the Salad
‘Horiatiki was not one of the salads Kremezi
grew up eating, because it didn’t exist until the mid-nineteen sixties. “When
you sat down at the tavern, you ordered tomato salad and feta cheese, and then whatever
else you wanted to order,” Kremezi says. Tomato salad, sometimes with cucumber
or onion, sometimes not, was its own dish. A big slab of feta cheese (sheep’s
milk only, or if you must, a tiny bit of goat’s milk, says Kremezi), covered in
olive oil and dried oregano, was its own dish. Olives, too, were separate.
Horiatiki takes all of those disparate meze dishes and combines them into one
big salad. Horiatiki was created, and then adopted throughout the country, in
response to Greece’s desire in the sixties to be considered a real urban
power—a European country, not a Middle Eastern country, like Turkey. Horiatiki
is a salad to compete with niçoise.’
I asked Maria Kelly to
comment on this one: Great article….I
totally agree with Aglaiia...I can never recall in my childhood having so
called Greek salad - though growing up in Gunnedah there was never any fetta
available. I recall that a salesman used to regularly come through the
town and we used to always buy our tins of olive oil, a head of
pecorino cheese and huge tins of salted sardines from him. I think they
(the wholesalers) were called Gallanis Bros, but don’t quote me.
Our family did mix tomatoes and cucumbers together, with olive oil and S
& P.
Fighting food waste:
four stories from around the world
‘“If the market price is
favourable, the farmer can choose to sell, but they are now no longer forced to
sell immediately following harvest to avoid losses,” explains WFP’s Uganda
programme officer, Richard Sewava. Nakaziba, who purchased the silo and a
plastic tarpaulin from the WFP on a cost-sharing basis, is happy. “Now the rats
cannot get to my grain, and by selling later I am able to get 900 shillings
[16p] per kilogram instead of 350,” she says. “With the extra money I’m getting
I can buy things for my children and my garden.”
One of four terrific vignettes about the small and not so small changes
that can avoide food waste from production to consumption.
