Tag: food

Tom Kha Yum: my favorite Thai soup combo

There’s this girl woman I’d known since before she was born. I met her mother when she was pregnant. After my daughter was born, though, we fell out of touch. She moved out of state about eight years ago.

Due to the magic that is Facebook, we reconnected. She’d come back to the area a short time ago. We e-mailed and phoned, then met for dinner at a Thai fusion restaurant in Albany called Kinnaree, which, as it turns out, subsequently received a rave review in Metroland, the local arts weekly newspaper.

First thing she does is order two different soups and two extra bowls; apparently, she orders this a LOT, since the waitress is totally familiar with the routine. Tom Kha is a “spicy hot soup… made with coconut milk, galangal, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, and chicken, and often contains straw, shiitake, or other mushrooms, as well as coriander leaves.” Tom Yum is a “basic broth is made of stock and fresh ingredients such as lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, lime juice, fish sauce and crushed chili peppers.”

While each of these soups were quite fine, they were SO much more delicious mixed together. I’m a big fan of mixing other items. Orange juice is OK, I love cranberry juice, though it can be a bit tart; they are so much better together. I’ve already explained my obsession inclination to mix cereals.

Slightly off topic, there are ways to combine foods to create complete protein.

The Lydster, Part 107: The Twizzle

We have the complete box set of the Dick van Dyke Show, and we’ve watched all of Season 1 and about 40% of Season 2.

Interesting to hear what others say about whether the Daughter looks more like your mother or me. It seems that if you knew my wife better, like mother, like daughter; if you knew me better, she favors me.

Personality-wise, she is likewise similar to whichever parent is most familiar to the observer.

My wife can explain in her (non-existent) blog how much they do together, besides watching Dancing with the Stars.

Conversely, I am pleased that she has taken to liking two of my favorite cultural phenomena, listening to the music of the Beatles and watching the classic television program, The Dick Van Dyke Show. Re: the latter, we have the complete box set, and we’ve watched all of Season 1 and about 40% of Season 2. Her favorite episode is What’s in a Name, the show in which Ritchie, Rob and Laura’s son, discovers that his middle name is ROSEBUD; she can recite his full middle name, Richard Oscar Sam Edward Benjamin Ulysses David. She also likes the one about the walnuts.

My least favorite show was about a dance craze called the Twizzle, a blatant ripoff of the Twist fad. The Daughter likes it a bit more than I.

In fact, she invented a drink she calls the Twizzle:
1 cup kefir (or flavored yogurt)
1 banana
1 cup milk
1 cup frozen fruit
1 ice cube
love

Blend together.

It’s GOOD!

Hostess: the mostess, for a few

I boycotted Hostess from about 1970 until the Vietnam war was over in 1975.

For me, the issue of the Hostess Brands snack food line apparently going under – I can’t believe that someone won’t buy this venerable line – isn’t the loss of Ding Dongs. It’s that, apparently, the company had “manipulated” its executives’ pay–sending its former chief executive’s salary, in particular, skyrocketing- in the months leading up to its Chapter 11 filing, in an effort to dodge the Bankruptcy Code’s compensation requirements.

Yet the stories I hear on the nightly news talk about the failure of the company to come to an agreement with the unions. Implicit in that is if it weren’t for the greedy unions, we’d still have our Twinkies. Maybe, just maybe, it was the unions who were offered a bad deal, and are now getting a bad rap.

I have a peculiar history with Hostess. During the Vietnam war, the product line was owned by ITT, and ITT built stuff that helped the war machine. So I boycotted Hostess from about 1970 until the war was over in 1975. Truth is, I never much liked Wonder Bread all that much, and after I started eating whole-grain breads, Wonder Bread was inedible. I liked Twinkies, though. Finally, after a half dozen years, I tried a Twinkie again; I thought it was AWFUL, pure sugar. Had my taste buds changed, or did my previous political antipathy make it taste bad? But I still liked the fruit pies when I tried them again, though I preferred the ones by Drake, which had a fun commercial to boot.

Mark Evanier made some interesting points. “They came out with ‘100 calorie’ packs of their Twinkies and cupcakes… but the experiment caused me to swear off their products for good. The size of a Twinkie that got the calories down to that acceptable number was so small as to be unsatisfying and it made me more acutely aware of how many were in the full-sized version.” Other brands did the same thing, and I had the same reaction. As for Wonder Bread, “by the time they did offer a ‘whole grain white,’ it felt insincere on their part.” Absolutely!

I’m not planning on buying up some Hostess products. Despite the cliche, they WON’T last forever like styrofoam.

 

Foolishness over Our Food Supply

The results show that the dominant causes of food price increases are investor speculation and ethanol conversion.

 

There’s an appeal for CARE’s 2011 World Hunger Campaign going on – tax-deductible at least in the US. And I find it absurd.

Not that they are making the appeal, but that they HAVE to. How is it that there is a food crisis?

Part of it is elucidated in a study by the New England Complex Systems Institute entitled The Food Crises: A quantitative model of food prices including speculators and ethanol conversion [PDF].

From the abstract:
Recent increases in basic food prices are severely impacting vulnerable populations worldwide. Proposed causes such as shortages of grain due to adverse weather, increasing meat consumption in China and India, conversion of corn to ethanol in the US, and investor speculation on commodity markets lead to widely differing implications for policy. A lack of clarity about which factors are responsible reinforces policy inaction. Here, for the first time, we construct a dynamic model that quantitatively agrees with food prices. The results show that the dominant causes of price increases are investor speculation and ethanol conversion. Models that just treat supply and demand are not consistent with the actual price dynamics. The two sharp peaks in 2007/2008 and 2010/2011 are specifically due to investor speculation, while an underlying upward trend is due to increasing demand from ethanol conversion.

In other words, greed, and insanity.

Read also The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2010: Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises [PDF] from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization: “FAO estimates that a total of 925 million people are undernourished in 2010 compared with 1.023 billion in 2009. Most of the decrease was in Asia, with 80 million fewer hungry, but progress was also made in sub-Saharan Africa, where 12 million fewer people are going hungry. However, the number of hungry people is higher in 2010 than before the food and economic crises of 2008–09.”

There are also, increasingly, water shortages. Frankly, those TV ads such as One Million New American Jobs: The Benefits of Increased Access to Domestic Oil & Gas, touting the Canadian tar sands oil that would have been too dirty for the US government to buy, under legislation signed by George W. Bush, make me even more nervous. Allegedly cheaper oil, but at what cost to the water supply?

As Blog Action notes:
“Food is something that we all share in common but is distinct to each of our cultures. The way we produce, distribute and consume food is crucial to our shared future, and the unhealthy imbalance of food scarcity in developing world and food over-abundance in the developed world is unsustainable for us all.”

Take the quiz.

Eating in Canada

The Wife’s favorite place to eat was Tim Horton’s.

I read in our AAA guide that Toronto, Ontario, Canada is a city of over two million people, and with five million in the metro area, which is about one-seventh of the entire population of the country. There are over 100 languages spoken there, and we heard more than our fair share. So, with such rich cultural diversity, why did we manage to eat at a Subway subs restaurant?

Part of it was convenience.  There is a Subway just across from the Royal Ontario Museum, it was about 6 p.m., and the Daughter was hungry. Part of it was her peanut allergy; going to some Chinese or Thai restaurant, which the Wife and I might have gone to on our own was not really practical due to the likelihood of the use of peanut oil. And the Daughter, a least in part because of peanut allergy fears, just isn’t a very adventurous eater. Oh, that particular Subway had no spinach, only lettuce; I prefer the former on my sub.

Convenience factored into eating at some of the attractions we were visiting. BTW, there’s a Nestle freeze pop, sold at the Toronto Zoo, made in a facility where peanuts are used. Did not anticipate that.

The one night we went out to dinner, we walked to the gay part of town, not unlike New York City’s Greenwich Village, and ate at the Rainbow Café, only five or six blocks from the hotel. The biggest problem with the place that, though we were inside, smoking was allowed outdoors, and a door was open; actually, more like a bay – it looked, on the side, like a three-car garage, with a section up.

The Daughter’s favorite place to eat was a place (a chain?) called the Golden Griddle. We ate dinner there one night and breakfast another morning. It was a clean, safe place. And Lydia got a toy at the end of the meal. And speaking of toys, I think it was Wendy’s hamburgers, where we stopped leaving town, at which the toy in the kids’ meal was a 30-second timer and some cards for charades; I loved that.

The Wife’s favorite place to eat was Tim Horton’s. We’d started seeing them in western New York, but the donut shop was ubiquitous in our travels. There was a dinky place in our Toronto hotel, which we never went to, except that she verified was not peanut-free. But as we were leaving town, she got a couple of donuts and an iced coffee and loved the freshness and taste.

This took place on the road from Peterborough: we stopped at a place that had Tim Horton’s, Burger King, something called Pizza Pizza, and another place. The Wife stood in the lengthy TH queue to get me a fruit smoothie and herself a couple of things, while I stood in the shorter BK line for food for the Daughter. I was finished with getting my order, while Carol was STILL in line. She got distracted by the fact that a whole family suddenly showed up to order in front of her and she managed to forget my drink. By the time she realized this, the TH queue was even longer than it was when she entered it. She did make it up to me, though, buying me a smoothie –it WAS good – at our stop 6 kilometers before we crossed the border back into the United States.

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