Bento Boxes

I've been trying to be better about packing my lunches lately, and it occurred to me that having a set of bento boxes might make my life easier. I've looked around online and seen a lot of plastic ones, but it's hard to judge size and shape from online pictures. Does anyone have one they like?

For that matter, does anyone have any packing-lunch suggestions? I'd really like to be able to pack a week's worth in advance, as I tend to be only semi-functional in the morning...

There Goes My Appetite

I admit that many of my food choice decisions are made on the basis of “Awesome” as opposed to “Good”. Friendly’s has a cheeseburger now where the bun is a pair of grilled cheese sandwiches. So awesome. I should have known better than to look up the nutrition information *sigh* (1500 calories, not including the side of fries)

On the other hand, if I skipped lunch and split it with someone else, it might actually be reasonable. Or, if I didn’t eat anything else all day except coffee and celery...

No, no. I must focus. The Double Down, by contrast, looks practically like a salad with its 540 calories!

Farmer's Market

L. and I went to the farmer’s market this evening, and there was a stand selling seafood -- the proprietor drives down to the coast in the morning, then drives back with a haul of fresh cod, scallops, and lobsters. I bought a 1lb bag of scallops, which smelled absolutely delicious: sweet, really, and very faintly of the sea. I grilled them on skewers with just a brushing of canola oil and a sprinkling of salt. Fantastic. That plus a loaf of garlic bread, a bunch of carrots, and a jar of pickled beets, makes for a nice haul.

We’ve been impressed by how well the market is doing this year. The samosa stand in particular is just doing phenomenally well. Thanks to the warm weather, all the stands already have lettuce and other greens. Hell, we’re already a couple weeks into a very early strawberry season!

Looks look we’ll be eating very well this summer...

Pulled Pork

I can’t go downstairs. If I do, I will jump onto the crock pot and eat the contents. L. and I went to the Norwich Farmers’ Market yesterday and came home with a nice haul: local cheese, a bunch of ramps (for ramp risotto! (rampsotto?)), a Mother’s Day gift, a jar of pickled quail eggs (which are DELICIOUS!), and... a pork shoulder from a local farm, which is quietly bubbling away.

I altered the linked recipe by cubing the pork and then browning all the cubes. It took a lot longer this way, but was totally worth it. I also stirred in some crushed garlic, and monkeyed with the dry rub recipe. It smells really, really good.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

For some reason, my food reading lately has been dominated by things that sound (or used to sound) very wrong to me.

Making french fries starting with cold oil. This bothers me; it seems like the resulting fries will just drip oil, but the claim is made that exactly the opposite is true. I will have to try it at some point, preferably on a day that the garbage goes out.

Savory oatmeal. OK, I get the theory, it’s basically porridge, jook, or the basis for white pudding (think black pudding without the blood). And I like a good savory breakfast (see down the list) but this just seems weird to me.

Salted coffee. I actually picked up on this one a while ago, and can attest that it works well -- but it still just seems wrong, especially because I think salted tea is disgusting.

Hydrating nuts. Certainly hydrating beans makes sense to me. And I’ve even joked about attempting to make baked beans with peanuts instead of the more usual legumes. But this is intriguing and weird and I’m having a little trouble with the idea.

Vinegared drinks. I touched on this earlier when I talked about gastriques, and mentioned that some people were putting them in cocktails. I’m not sure I can bring myself to drink the Vinegar Cocktail in that link... but it does sound awfully interesting, and like Kate in the comments I have also heard of adding pickle juice to drinks, even to beer. Speaking of beer...

Beer for breakfast. All right, this has nothing to do with what I’ve been reading, and everything to do with going to have a good Irish breakfast last week on the 17th. But several people remarked on how well Guinness goes down in the morning, and I was surprised to agree! Ancestry does tell, I suppose...

Your Chef for the Evening Is Rebooting

I was just reading a NY Times article about robot cooks. With Japan, food, and robots, this is an article written just for me. And hey: a pan-handling robot that drinks beer! What’s not to like?

They’re all very cool, representing remarkable technical skill, and probably many long nights in the lab. But I think the reporter is missing the point of those humanoid chef-robots, judging by the juxtaposition of those with the work of the CMU Human-Robot Interaction team.

Allow me to explain in a roundabout way: There are already machines that make ramen (maybe not ones that also have knife-fights, but bear with me here) and otherwise perform many of the other tasks here. For many individual tasks, the use of a humanoid robot or arm robot represents a lack of imagination: the mental agility to imagine how a task would be performed with an unrestricted body type often comes up with far more ingenious and efficient ways of doing it.

In fact, I’d say that very few tasks really require humanoid robots. I can’t think of any off-hand. For any individual task, there will almost always be a better form. But this is not to say that it is a bad idea to develop humanoid robots, far from it. The promise of a humanoid robot, and ultimately the (proper?) motivating factor behind many of these prototypes is the same as the promise of an iPhone or something of that ilk: A flexible device that seamlessly becomes one of any number of other single-purpose devices. This is distinct from a personal computer in some important ways, but right now the primary importance is of *doing* one thing at a time (whatever else it may be *thinking*, if you want to put it that way). By adding more cooking jobs to the general robotic repertoire, they’re converging on a suite of tasks for which the humanoid form probably is better-suited.

Microsoft Robotics also kind of gets this, I think. They ought to, anyway, as it is an analogue to Microsoft’s original strategy and success: of standardizing the slow part (the hardware) to focus on doing as much as possible with the fast part (the software). A humanoid robot (or more simply a single arm) can mechanically do just about any task they might desire (if inefficiently), so if we standardize on that ideal, the software and the logic can take a more central place. It represents a sort of design convergence: when you try to combine tasks into the simplest possible hardware, the more human tasks you add, the more human the hardware is going to look.

As for the people focused on human-robot interaction, there are interesting research questions there, and good science being done. But that research, to my mind, is not so much robotics research as it is human research with some very difficult test equipment: kind of like when zoologists design puppets that baby animals will feed from. (I really wish I could find a copy of a particular Calvin and Hobbes to link to here. It’s in “There’s Treasure Everywhere”, page 148)

Anyway, that’s my two cents on the subject. (And keep in mind that I’ve never actually done humanoid-robotic research, having focused entirely on rover-types, so I could be totally off-base)

Oh! If after reading that article you’re wondering what okonomiyaki is, by the way, it’s often referred to as a cabbage pancake or pizza. It’s... neither, really, or maybe both. I’m familiar with Osaka-style okonomiyaki, but as anyone will tell you, it can vary wildly, especially by region. For me, the little okonomiyaki-ya outside my dorm at Gaidai is the only true form: You take a batter of flour, potato starch, egg, and shredded cabbage, and spread it out on a hibachi table for some high heat, usually spread on top of some kind of meat filling like bacon or shrimp. Flip it once (so the ‘filling’ is now on top), finish cooking, then top it. The traditional toppings, to my mind, are a thick sugary sauce (like yakisoba sauce or BBQ sauce), Japanese mayonnaise, bonito flakes, and powdered seaweed. It’s... tastier than it sounds? I like it, anyway.

One final thing: I’m trying out new blog software -- MacJournal 5 from the most recent MacHeist. The interface isn’t too bad, and I do like the ability to keep separate journals in the same interface, plus locally-organized stuff: one of my big complaints for my current writing software is that it’s difficult to manage multiple projects.

Tagging seems to be more difficult compared to the web form, which autocompletes and shows me a list of tags I’ve already used.

Two Cooking Primers

These are worth reading. (Vegetarians might want to skip to the second one)

The first is from the French Culinary Institute's blog, Cooking Issues, the first part of a primer on sous vide. Sous vide is basically the idea of cooking in a medium no hotter than the goal temperature for the food: usually in a (food-safe) plastic bag in a swirling water bath for maximum temperature transfer, it can produce dramatic results in meat texture and taste. If you eat red meat, imagine that perfectly tender spot near the center of a perfectly-cooked steak -- and think about having that texture all the way through. It's remarkable, and not too difficult. That primer I linked to is the single most thorough description of the process I've ever seen, and I plan to refer to it often.

The second primer, from The Paupered Chef, concerns gastrique. Never heard of it? I'm not surprised. But you've probably consumed it. It's basically a thick sauce of vinegar and sugar. (Actually, I think what he's describing is technically an agrodolce, but whatever) It's been around for a while, but has apparently found new life in making cocktails! I'm intrigued by this development. Maybe one of you will try it and report back :)

Negative-calorie foods?

I've been thinking a lot about diet, and that thinking will eventually make its way into a blog post. But one thing in particular has always bothered me: since so much of the body's energy is devoted to maintaining temperature, shouldn't cold foods have essentially fewer calories than their warm equivalents?

There's not much out there on the subject, but I did find this paper by Paul Horowitz, of all people, a name the SETI fans among you might recognize, and the electrical engineers definitely will. (H/T to the summary I found here)

To summarize: yes, cold foods use up additional energy -- about 3.3 calories per ounce for a frozen yogurt. For cold foods that do not contain any calories (water, diet soda) a 12-oz can near the freezing point deducting a whopping... 12 calories. Yeah, you'd be better off at the gym, but in the mean time, now you have a good reason not to drink your Coke Zero hot. You're welcome.

Jaime Oliver (and me) on Food

Watch this. (Go ahead, I'll wait. Sure, it's 20 minutes long, but it's important)



We eat a lot of crap in this culture [1]. Any time you see a misspelling or invented word on a package of food, you're buying crap. Anything that needs to tout its health benefits on its packaging is probably crap. Anything that is fortified with niacin is probably crap.

But we're also eating a lot of decent food way out of proportion. Stuff that used to be reserved for special occasions has become daily fare, meat particularly. Ever made french fries? They're a royal pain in the ass! You have to wash or peel the potatoes, slice them into relatively slim fry shapes, wash the starch off them, pat them dry, deep-fry them once at 250 or 300 degrees to par-cook them, let them drain, deep fry them again at around 400, then let them cool while the delicious aroma wafts around your kitchen. They're hard work, even disregarding the issues with filling, maintaining, draining, and cleaning a deep fryer. If you had to do that kind of work for a fry, how often would you eat them?

Most cultures have two kinds of cuisine: the everyday cuisine, and the celebratory cuisine. The former is nearly always simple, vegetable-heavy, and often pretty tasty. The celebratory stuff (usually served at weddings, holidays, or other special occasions) tends to be heavy on meat, use lots of ingredients, take a long time, and taste really good. There needs to be a place in our diets for both of these kinds of foods, in the correct proportion. The problem is, we don't really celebrate with food anymore. [2] We don't as a culture really save much for special occasions -- the celebration cuisine has become our everyday cuisine. When we borrow food from other cultures, we tend to take the celebration stuff and leave the everyday stuff. [3]

Now, that's just what we eat. We have this ridiculous mentality that we ought to be "getting our money's worth" when we buy food, by which is always meant "get a lot of food". Listening to people talk about food, it's almost like they've totally lost the ability to gauge the value of a meal by anything other than the poundage and the price. It's nearly impossible to get an appropriate serving size at a restaurant without ordering off the seniors menu or getting an appetizer as an entree.

Many of us also were raised to "clean our plates" and not "waste" food. If we don't finish those ginormous portions, we're somehow bad people: wasteful as restaurant patrons, ungrateful as guests. I'd yell at my parents, but they got this from their parents, who got it from the Great Depression or something. I guess our weight problems can be blamed on Herbert Hoover. What a jerk.

So... It's screwed up that a journalist can make a handsome living selling books whose main thrust is "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." But he makes that living because people don't know it, or at least haven't internalized it. Where would we get it from? Our parents didn't get it from their parents. Our government gets hammered by industry lobbyists and lawsuits whenever it tries to give it to us (when it bothers to try -- thanks ADM!). For every half hour of a helpful TV program like Good Eats or even The French Chef there are multiple hours of loud colorful ads for Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs and the latest incarnation of "corn chip sprinkled with flavored salt". And anyone who tries to take responsibility for changing it is derided as an elitist, a nanny-stater, or just a busybody. Not to mention the enormous pushback we're seeing in the Internet's near-worship of bacon. [4] Phew!

Now, I'm one of those people that I'm ranting about: at 30, I'm overweight (I lost twenty pounds over the last year, and am still overweight), I get precious little exercise (I manage to injure myself almost every time I try. Go me.), and as a result I already have a cholesterol problem. And I'm at an advantage, too: I'm an educated person here, lucky enough to have the free time to exercise and the spare (!) cash to buy quality ingredients; I know how to cook, I know how the human body works, I understand the basic concept that if you consume more calories than you use, you gain weight. But I like french fries, I like beer, and I do reject the notion that I should only consume those things if I make them. And I live in a part of the world that gets bitterly cold, making it unpleasant to spend time outside.

In other words, I have every reason to want to claim that this is a hard, nigh-unsolvable problem... but it's really not. It just sucks to consume less than I can: to eat less than I can, to drive less than I can, to take less vacation time or play fewer video games or buy fewer gadgets. Self-restraint sucks, and I resent it... but I have to admit that it's kinda important.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, so maybe he'd say that it's a good thing than an unexamined life is likely to be short. And short it will be: The undisputed point is made over and over that what we eat, and how we eat, and how much we eat, is killing us. My dad always says, you gotta die of something. That's true, the current mortality rate is and will likely remain 100%. But it's really fucking embarrassing to be dying of this.

[1] I originally wrote "country" here, but Oliver makes the point that we share this with other English-speaking countries, and are exporting it around the world. I've heard it said that we got this eating culture from the British, but it doesn't really matter where it came from.

[2] The closest we probably come to celebration cuisine is the Super Bowl, when it seems sometimes that we have a hard time being noticeably worse than normal. Though, not too hard a time. (...wow, that looks tasty...)

Somewhat perversely, it seems sometimes that our holiday feasts are healthier than our everyday meals: we may eat a lot at Thanksgiving, but the ritual meal of turkey, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, &c. is probably better for us than, say, your average Chinese takeout order. A lot of holiday parties I've been to for Christmas and New Years have had food that's more celebratory, but the "stand around, chat, and snack" model often results in eating less of it, as people eat more slowly and get a chance to feel full.

[3] The exception that comes to mind here is Indian food. The British have done a number on it, but it's pretty easy in most decent Indian restaurants to get a good healthy meal where the vegetarian options aren't pathetic. Sure, the cream-bases sauces and stuffed breads are prominent on the menu, but the good stuff isn't buried. For that matter, Japanese cuisine seems to have been imported more or less unmolested. Teriyaki's turned into a sugary mess, true, and ramen has been transformed from an often-sublime experience into a deep-fried salty disaster, but sushi, soba, and donburi have arrived mostly intact.

[4] ... which is, admittedly, pretty awesome. And really, I think the pushback is less against the notion of eating healthy than it is against the notion of ALWAYS eating healthy. Just as it's not healthy to eat mostly celebration food, I think it's just as unhealthy to never eat it. Too often a "healthy" meal is presented as a joyless one: an ultimately unsustainable tactic.

Missing the point

So, I just cooked my takeaway salmon sashimi in a toaster oven. With the lemon, soy sauce, and wasabi that came with it, it was very tasty -- some of the best cooked salmon I've ever had. In retrospect, the very intense heat of the toast setting was just right for something like this.
(In my defense, I got back to my office and discovered that the sashimi was still mostly frozen.)

Incidental Food in Science Fiction

I've been thinking a bit about food in fiction. I read a lot, and I cook a lot, and so scenes with food stand out to me. When those scenes are done well, they can really add a lot to characterization and place.

Mysteries in particular tend to be remarkably full of food: You've got the gourmand Nero Wolfe, of course, but Robert Parker's Spenser has a much stronger relationship to his food. Parker's descriptions of food and cooking are quite remarkable, they're plainly written by someone who enjoys good food and knows how to cook. Poirot's habits as well extend to dining, though more often as a way to emphasize his foreignness -- and of course food plays a significant role in several cases as a vehicle for poison or in one case a ruby, or to show how many people sat down to dinner. Important stuff, but for the plot, not for the scene. (I find that Christie pays more attention to coffee than to food, anyway)

It seems to me that food can be a remarkably useful tool to the science fiction writer. But (and maybe my memory is selective here) it also seems to me that food in that genre tends to be super-important/significant, or not really mentioned at all. It figured in Stranger in a Strange Land, of course (in a way I won't give away), and food/drink generally in Dune and other harsh-environment settings. And then of course there's Make Room! Make Room! with its themes of starvation and overpopulation. (You may know it by its very loose movie adaptation, Soylent Green) Vegetarianism plays a similar role in many stories.

In all those, food was important -- too important for what I'm getting at, really. I'm trying to think of science fiction scenes where food made for a memorable scene, characterizing people or place, but not crucial. Anyone have any scenes like that come to mind?

Kitchen Gadget Idea

How come nobody's ever made a deep fryer using gallium instead of oil? It's liquid at cooking temperatures (but stays liquid for thousands of degrees), appears to be non-toxic, and doesn't look like it reacts with food or wooden spoons. (It does seem to be highly reactive with certain metals, though, so the cooking chamber would need to be carefully designed, possibly enameled)

It would be an interesting cooking medium. You'd want to avoid food that would really trap it in little pockets, but think of the benefits: no oils would seep into the food, it would have terrific thermal rebound, you'd get nice even browning. Further, handling it would be great -- because it stands such high temperatures you could toss it in a self-cleaning over and burn out any leftover food at 500 degrees. Plus, unlike many other things in the kitchen, it would be obvious whether it's too hot to touch or not: if it's hot, it's liquid, if it's cold, it's solid.

Ok, it would probably poison a whole lot of people. But there are always technical details to be worked out. Come on, people, we can do this!

Nut flours

L. and I were having dinner the other night, and noticed that the salad dressing we were using was much lower-fat than we expected for what we thought was a peanut butter-based dressing. This turned out to be because it used roasted peanut flour instead of peanut butter.

Since then I've been intrigued by this ingredient and its fellows (apparently it's the remaining cake from producing expeller-pressed oils, so pretty much any nut that's pressed for oil can potentially be flour) I'm still thinking about what I'd like to do with these flours, should I find them reasonably-priced. Obviously I'll have to experiment a bit to determine properties and texture, but I'm inclined to try making, for example, peanut butter cookies using them might be very tasty. I'm thinking that they'll get in the way in anything that really requires gluten development, but a coating for chicken or fish would seem to be quite reasonable. The lack of gluten development could also be put to good use in applications where it's undesirable, like cakes or streusel.

I've turned up a couple food journal articles on the subject, but mostly it's food chemists suggesting the use of these flours to bump up protein content. As for recipes, I seem to be mostly striking out -- the top hits all seem to be those obnoxious recipe aggregator sites, the ones that serve up a ton of links to semi-relevent recipes and a ton of banner ads.

The other obstacle I'm finding is that things like hazelnut meal are being mislabeled as flour. They do look tasty, but that makes it a little harder to find the real thing (which appears to frequently be much cheaper, but less common)

The Gross Food Movement

I'm surprised not to have seen an article on this subject before: The combination of Web 2.0 and the eternal appeal of, well, gross food has blossomed (eructated?) into an identifiable trend that we've probably all seen part of. These are the sites that get forwarded around, after all. Quick quiz: which of these links has been forwarded to you most often? Which are you more likely to forward to someone? Exhibit A, or Exhibit B?

Favorite quote from the article: "It’s a middle finger to the Michael Pollan and Alice Waters types, an assertion of the American birthright to consume in deadly quantities."

My own experience with the, er, movement, is more hands-on than some of you might expect. Never mind that I am still utterly convinced that my idea for deep-fried butter is a good idea [1], I am more reminded of my adventures in grad school with deep fat frying. The pinnacle of that was my lab's Iron Chef contests, particularly the "Fake Cheese Battle", which I handily won. I have to admit, though, that it's not the only bad culinary idea I've benefited from.

So that's my confession. Surely some of you can top that?

[1] The idea of deep fried butter is this: you freeze half-sticks of butter, then dust in flour or corn starch, batter, and deep fry. Then you set it on the table at dinner, and crack it open to spread on bread. Then pretend not to notice when people start snacking on the leftover breading.

Too slow!

I stopped by the grocery store with a brilliant idea yesterday, but it was just too late -- the ramps are gone!  I will have to leave it to someone else to attempt ramp pesto.

(Ramps, for the regrettably uncultured, are sort of a cross between garlic and green onions.  I think they're technically wild leeks.  They have long broad leaves that are a bit fibrous but have a wonderful garlic flavor, which I intended to pair half-and-half with basil for the pesto.  I'm not sure pine nuts would have stood up to it, though.  Pistachios might work better)

About the Jake

Every week, L. and I go to salt hill, the local Irish-style pub. There's live music, a handful of friends periodically join us, and they have very good food. On the menu is a particular item, the Jake -- a bacon cheeseburger with a fried egg on top, with hand-cut fries on the side and mustard for dipping. Oh, it's good. It's damned good.

But the best thing about it is that I almost never order it. I make up my mind before going, nearly every week, "Tonight, what sounds really good is the Jake. I will have that." My arteries then groan in protest, but I ignore them. But then I sit down, and I have a good Irish beer, and I start to think to myself, "Self, maybe I'll be good tonight. Instead of splurging and having the Jake, I'll show virtue and restraint and instead have..." and then order fish and chips, Irish stew, cheesesteak, or any number of other things.

As good as the Jake is, then, its primary virtue is in being the worst thing on the menu, and yet an object of great desirability. It absolves guilt by its very presence on the menu, so long as you first give it its due respect - it would not do its job nearly so well if I did not walk in the door intending to order it every Tuesday.

This post is brought to you by the number 5: 5pm, that is, the time at which I started feeling hungry and remembering that it's Tuesday, and salt hill day. And what sounds really good tonight is the Jake. I will have that.

Well, would you?

So, would you eat a glowing lollipop?  

When you're done with that link, I recommend looking through the rest of the site.  Lersch is an engaging writer with a good sense of what's interesting and a strong science background.  His discussion of the sous vide process is worth reading.  I've tried it and it is fantastic.  However, I would show caution in selecting a plastic bag for the recipe -- use something that is intended for high temperatures, like the ones they sell for roasting fowl.  (Who the hell would roast a turkey in a plastic bag anyway?)

Good Eats

At long last, Netflix has seen the light and gotten a season of Good Eats. For those of you who have not seen this show, take a look at the coffee episode. Even if you don't like coffee, it's interesting and entertaining. (Or maybe not; I don't actually have any idea what it's like to not like coffee. I might as well be saying, "Even if you have three heads and see X-rays, it's interesting and entertaining." Watch it anyway.)

In some ways I feel like I've moved on from the show. I really enjoy watching it when I can, and I feel a great deal of affection for the series. But Food Network has done such a poor job of making new episodes available for those of us who do not get cable, that I've moved on to other sources of cooking education and entertainment. Most of these sources are books, but if you like Indian food, I recommend Manjula's Kitchen. (She's totally revamped her site, by the way, and made it much more useful)

While I watch Good Eats when I can, then, I find that I almost never make the recipes in them anymore. There are a lot of factors in that. Having found other sources is one factor. The other major factor is that I don't cook for myself anymore, and so I don't really have the luxury of sitting at home to watch an episode, and deciding that that's what I want for dinner that night. My waistline has thanked me for this change, but planning means relying increasingly on a smaller set of recipes liked by everyone involved. I find that a lot of the recipes on the show, while they require planning, do not often survive planning for too long: it's hard to tell what we'll be in the mood for, or how tired we'll be.