Food Fables Friday: A Good Harvest

Blackberries

Fortunately, there are still some blackberries left to eat. These went very well with yogurt.

A Good Harvest

My tomatoes are finally ripening and I found a zucchini and eggplant so I made a ratatouille last night. I picked an onion and carrot and lettuce to have with it. A complete garden meal - except for the grated cheese. Nom, nom, nom. It was the super fresh vegetables that forced me to cook dinner last night, despite jet lag, they looked so yummy. The alternative would have been to eat some processed food like substances from my freezer.

Garden Fresh Ratatouille

Ingredients

Fresh from the garden:

1 onion sliced

3 cloves garlic minced and pressed

1 carrot sliced and chopped

1 aubergine/eggplant sliced and diced

1 courgette/zucchini sliced

3 roma paste tomatoes quartered

basil chopped

lettuce and cherry tomatoes for salad (optional)

Not garden:

2 tbs Oil for frying

Black pepper

1 cup Water

1 tbs Soy sauce

Grated cheddar cheese (optional)

Procedure

1) Fry on low onion for about 3 min and add garlic and basil.

2) After another couple of minutes add the carrot and aubergine.

3) Once the aubergine is softish add the tomatoes and courgettes.

4) Fry for about 5 - 10 minutes (depending how soft you like your veggies).

5) Add water and soy sauce. Flavor with black pepper to taste.

6) Once the water boils, simmer for ~1 minute.

7) Serve with grated cheese, bread and green salad.

Enjoy!

Food Fables Friday: Harvest

Blackberries

Finally the day I am leaving for two weeks I get to eat my first blackberries with my breakfast.  Oh, well the birds are going to have a feast.

Tastey Tuesday: Garlic

Garlic 2008

I just harvested my garlic.  I have lots as I grew enough for a friend as well as myself.  Garlic is very easy to grow.  You can even use supermarket cloves but you may get a better yield if you try some of the more noncommercial varieties.  I grow two types of garlic: Chesnok Red which is a hard-neck garlic and Kettle River Giant which is a soft-neck garlic.

Chesnok Red on left; Kettle River Giant on right

The Chesnok Red is the better grower in my garden but Kettle River Giant is tastier. Hard neck and soft neck garlic are two different sub-varieties and refers to how the stem grows; in the picture above you can see that the garlic on the right has a more flexible stem.  Earlier in the year, hard neck garlic produced scapes or spires which were great to fry in oil.

I plant garlic on from year to year by keeping and planting them in the fall; in my area you are meant to plant them by Columbus Day; so I have been growing these two varieties for over 5 year now. Perhaps I shouldl try a new variety next year?  I did have to buy garlic for the first time since 2002 to eat this year from Feb onwards, but that was the first time in years and hopefully, if I am organized, I won’t have to buy any more for years to come.

When I cook, garlic is one of the main ingredients - a typical main course is prepared by frying onions and garlic, adding herbs and then adding vegetables.  I also love to roast garlic gloves to spread on bread.  I once dated some one who did not like garlic.  That relationship did not last very long!

Garlic is considered to have many health benefits.  It has been suggested that garlic consumption was one of the reasons (ref) for the French Paradox (if there is such a thing) as allicin in garlic is hypothesized to reduce serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels but this effect of garlic is still under discussion.

Thirsty Thursday: Cow’s Milk and Juvenile Diabetes Link

Overlooking some one’s Scientific American on the plane home last night I saw the heading “A Milk-Diabetes Connection” which brought back memories of evangelical vegans arguing that milk was bad for you and lead to the development of diabetes. 

Tasty Tuesday: Broccoli Soup with Lemon Grass and Garlic Chives

Tasty Tuesday posts will not always be recipes. Sometimes they might be about interesting food science research on taste or flavor or related topic.

I probably eat more broccoli than any other vegetable (mushrooms are fungi and garlic is a herb) and I am very much in a soup mood at the moment. So I made broccoli soup. Last night I ate it warm with cheddar and tonight I had it cold with yogurt. It was tastier tonight, but that might be due to the fact that the flavors developed over night.

In my older recipe books, from the 1980s, broccoli rarely features. I don’t know if this is a US vs. UK difference or food fashion.

I have been finding it frustrating to find recipes listed by their herbs. For some reason my garden is being prolific with herbs - I am overwhelmed with oregano, chives, thyme, rosemary and lemon grass. I almost have too much parsley and soon basil will be prolific as will coriander seeds as the cilantro earlier in the year has, with permission, bolted. So to help other people in the same situation, I named with recipe after the herbs I added.

Broccoli Soup

Ingredients

Broccoili - 1.5 heads including stems. Chopped up small

Oil/butter/marg for frying

1 onion chopped

A handful of chopped garlic chives*

two stalks of lemon grass

2 medium - large potatoes peeled and chopped

water or stock (I used water and then added a tps of yeast extract after cooking)

pepper

parsley, yogurt or cheese (optional toppings).

Procedure

Fry the chopped onion in oil and fry for a few minutes. Don’t let the onion brown.

Add lemon grass stalks (don’t chop them you are going to remove them later).

Add garlic chives followed in rapid succession the potatoes, broccoli and water/stock.

Bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook until potato and broccoli, especially the broccoli stems, are mashable.

Remove lemon grass.

Blend; I use a stick blender (AKA immersion blender) and I blend until most of the bits are gone. About 10-20% might remain lumpy. It is really up to you depending how smooth you want your soup to be.

Heat again and add cheese.

Or if you want to eat it cold, chill in fridge until cold and add yogurt.

Decorate with chopped parsley.

Serve and enjoy.

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*You could use a clove of garlic instead, but then you would have to change the name.

Food Labels 3: Nutritional Facts Panel (Sort of Science Sunday)

I have been side tracked from my food labeling posts. The other parts are here:

1: Introduction

2: Organic

This post is about the Nutritional Facts Panel which probably the part that you know the best. It certainly is the part I look at first followed by the ingredient list. I love to know what is in food and also the amount of nutrients I expect to get from a serving.

Food Fables Friday: Tomatoes; the World Prize

It is time for me to resurrect my Food Fables Friday feature. (I do like alliterations.) Like the knitting project days (WIP Wednesday and FO Friday) FF Fridays will be posted when I have food news to share. Hopefully more often than in the past year. If you see any items you would like to be discussed in more detail add a link in the comments. Comments are sent to my email, so I know when they have been posted even it it is years after the blog post went online.

This week’s food news:

• More on the Tomato and Salmonella outbreak
• The 2008 World Food Prize winner were announced today

More on the tomatoes and Salmonella scare:

Barfblog reports that the number of people affected has increased to 228 in 23 different states with 25 hospitalizations. The last date some one reported getting sick was June 1 so it still is not clear if the contaminated tomatoes are all out of the circulation yet. You would hope so as tomatoes have a relatively short shelf life, but they can be stored in the right environment for longer than they last in our fridges or on our counter tops. There is still no news as to the source of the outbreak. Unsurprisingly there has been criticism leveled at the FDA for their slow response time and but as this NYTimes editorial points out:

To do its job, the agency [the FDA] is going to need even more resources — to hire more inspectors — and more authority, including to inspect farms. The country also needs a better way to trace exactly where food comes from — a “trace-back system” — so that health officials can identify the source of contamination quickly.

The FDA is notoriously underfunded and understaffed. Despite that fact that it regulates 80% of the food supply, the USDA does the rest, the FDA only gets 24% of the available money (ref). In a NYT opinion, Bad Cow Disease, Paul Krugman reminds us that over the last 20 years the FDA has been given more and more responsibilities; for example, Nutritional Labeling, Dietary Supplements, increased food imports while having a smaller workforce:

For example, the work of the F.D.A. has become vastly more complex over time thanks to the combination of scientific advances and globalization. Yet the agency has a substantially smaller work force now than it did in 1994, the year Republicans took over Congress.

The administration is not helping by appointing people to run the food inspection branches of the FDA and the USDA who have close ties with the food industry, giving the impression that the industry bodies are running the show:

Thus, when mad cow disease was detected in the U.S. in 2003, the Department of Agriculture was headed by Ann M. Veneman, a former food-industry lobbyist. And the department’s response to the crisis — which amounted to consistently downplaying the threat and rejecting calls for more extensive testing — seemed driven by the industry’s agenda.

One amazing decision came in 2004, when a Kansas producer asked for permission to test its own cows, so that it could resume exports to Japan. You might have expected the Bush administration to applaud this example of self-regulation. But permission was denied, because other beef producers feared consumer demands that they follow suit.

It is important that the food supply is safe but it is also important to put it all into perspective. Considering that the US population is over three hundred million and an average 81 people in the US die daily from gunfire and 40,000 people died in car crashes in 2004, getting sick from food is a low risk. Just uncomfortable at the time.

The World Food Prize: 2008 Winners Announced

Robert Dole and George McGovern were honored today by the announcement that they had won the 2008 World Food Prize. The ex-Senators were awarded this prize because of:

their inspired, collaborative leadership that has encouraged a global commitment to school feeding and enhanced school attendance and nutrition for millions of the world’s poorest children, especially girls.

Called the Nobel Prize for Food:

The World Food Prize is the foremost international award recognizing — without regard to race, religion, nationality, or political beliefs — the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.

It is great that the prize will be awarded, the ceremony is in October, to people who collaborated to encourage a different way of thinking about the food supply, so children get food and receive education at the same time.

Salmonella in Tomatoes

So I have been working hard at writing a lecture I am giving next week as part of our continuing education series and I totally missed the latest food scare of Salmonella in raw tomatoes until a friend just asked about it. I’m writing about Food Science for the Non Food Scientist and I totally missed this story. Hits head with hand and groans.

Raw tomatoes, especially raw Roma, have been implicated in an outbreak of Salmonella Saintpaul, which seems to be a particularly nasty version of Salmonella. Before you stop eating tomatoes NOW be aware that many types are not implicated in this outbreak. From the FDA:

The following types of tomatoes listed below are NOT likely to be the source of this outbreak.

• cherry tomatoes
• grape tomatoes
• tomatoes sold with the vine still attached
• tomatoes grown at home

The FDA also lists states from which tomatoes have been grown and harvested which are NOT associated with the outbreak.

One of my friends asked me for the solution and I said cooking the tomato would solve most of the problems. It seems that the FDA does not agree with me and recommends throwing away suspect tomatoes. There have been 12 outbreaks since 1990 that were associated with tomatoes, making up 17% of produce outbreaks.

It is interesting to consider where the problem might occur. Obviously, contamination can occur at anytime during the growing and processing of tomatoes, but how are fresh tomatoes processed?

Well, forget your ideas from home grown tomatoes. Most tomatoes grown commercially are determinate varieties which means all the fruit ripen at the same time. So the harvest can be fully mechanized - there is a mechanized harvester which cuts down the plant and shakes it to get the tomatoes to fall off. These are then sent to the processing plant where they are washed, graded and then stored at quite a high temp to prevent damage and poor flavor development. Some tomatoes are grown using a hydroponic system, which means that they are mineral rich solution instead of in soil.

It is still not clear whether Salmonella ended up inside the tomato, like E.coli O157 H7 did with the spinach. While for spinach, this was an clue to the source of contamination (cultivation water supply), the same cannot be said in this case as fruit such as tomatoes continue to take up water through the stem scar even after harvest.

Looking up for more information I came across this interesting blog: “Barfblog: Musings from the International Food Safety Network” where they have daily updates about the recent tomato scare. I have added it to my blogroll for future reference.

Food Science is Fun!

I saw this video over at the Chem Blog and just had to share it with you.

I’m adding it to my list of cool food science videos, along with the extreme coke & mentos fountain, walking on a bath of corn starch and corn starch behaving weirdly unless you know better.

Any other videos that proof that Food Science is just plain fun?

Garlic Chive Soup

I’m into green food at the moment. Last month was coriander hummus and this month is chive soup. It just happens that coriander was in abundance last month and chives are in abundance this and the coriander has bolted.

I had a recipe from the Guardian from 1994 by Richard Ehrlich* but appears that it is too old to be on line. I found a couple of similar recipes by searching for “Chive Soup”; you could try these instead: Potato, Cheddar and Chive Soup and Creamy Potato and Chive Soup. As I have more chives, I might try the former one later this week.

For the soup above, I decided adding milk and cream was totally unnecessary, so I took the vegetable stock soup I had made earlier (I am always doing this; I make veggie stock out of all the vegetable ends and remains I have and end up eating it as soup.) and added about 100 g garlic chives, blended soup and chives, and reheated it. I added Greek yoghurt before serving. I ate the first portion hot.

At first the soup tasted a little grassy, then the spicy part of the chives kicked in. I never considered chives to be hot spicy, but this soup was a little overpowering.

The second portion of soup was eaten cold with equal amounts for soup and yoghurt mixed together. This was the way to go.

My Version of Chive Soup:

Ingredients

1 onion chopped

1 carrot chopped

1 potato chopped

1/2 head broccili a little sad, chopped

stems from rest of broccoli chopped

Other sad veg from the veg drawer of your fridge (chopped)

water

bay leaf

oil

100 g freshly picked garlic chives

black pepper

cheese

Greek yoghurt

Instructions

Vegetable Stock Soup

1. Fry onion in the oil until slightly brown.
2. Add the bay leaf, carrot, potato and other veggies
3. Fry for about 3 mins add water
4. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to a slow simmer. Cook until carrot and potato are mushable
5. Remove bay leaf.
6. Blend (I used my stick blender)
7. Season with black pepper. Use salt too if you must.
8. Eat as veggie soup with cheese

Pause for a few days.

Chive Soup

Pick your chives and wash them.

1. Save a few stalks of chives for garnish. Chop the rest to 1″
2. Blend with vegetable stock soup (I used a food processor and just left it on for a couple of minutes)
3. Reheat soup for a few minutes
4. If serving cold, chill in refrigerator for at least three hours.
5. Serve with Greek yoghurt and chive slithers as garnish

Richard Ehrlich gave the advice that chives lose their flavor if cooked too long, so add them at the end.

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*I cannot find anything about Richard Ehrlich and he seemed to stop writing for the Guardian in the 2004. There is a book of his recipes from the Guardian. Perhaps his Chive Soup recipe can be found in there.