Food porn: First tomatoes of the season

I just took this picture of my ripest tomatoes a few minutes ago. I think it's an Early Girl. I've written before about home-grown tomatoes. As I write this and look at the picture on the screen, my mouth is watering. From some time in July through August and into September, we will be taking high doses of lycopene, but it looks like we'll get our first dose by mid June. 

Flower porn: Meyer Lemon blossoms

The next crop of Meyer lemons on the hoof.

Worst foster system nominee: No Muslims allowed

In Maryland, the foster care system has refused to allow a woman to be a foster parent because she is a Muslim and therefore won't have pork in her house, which violates the kid's right to eat pork. No, really, that's what they said.

We are denying your application because of concerns raised by statements made during the home study interview, specifically your explicit request to prohibit pork products within your home environment. Although we respect your personal/religious views and practices, this agency must above all ensure that the religious, cultural and personal rights of each foster child placed in our case are upheld. Your statement indicates that there could potentially be a discrepancy between your expectations and the needs and personal views of a child placed in your care.

As Ed Brayton said on his blog, where I found this, "Unless they also refuse every vegetarian and every Jewish person, this is pretty clearly a matter of discrimination."

As the current expression says, I am gobsmacked by this. How could any person with normal cognitive abilities imagine that putting a foster kid in a house that does not serve pork (or coffee, or Coca Cola, or okra, or brown rice, or Skittles, or any particular food) is harmful to the kid? How can they construe the first amendment to the constitution to mean there is a religious, cultural, or personal right to eat pork?

Does it mean that a Muslim or Jewish kid cannot be put into a Christian, Buddhist, Hindi, or atheist home, because they might see other family members eat pork?

Whoever made this decision should be given a nice job somewhere where he or she* won't be forced to make constitutional judgments.

*I first wrote "he, for it must be a he," and then I remembered Michele Bachmann.

The taste of fat

We used to think there were four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. Then umami was discovered, which is the taste of meat (okay, protein-rich foods, and it's in mushrooms and tomatoes, too). Now researchers say they have discovered a sixth taste, fat.

What's more, as with other tastes, some people are more sensitive to it than others, and the most sensitive tend to avoid it, as broccoli supertasters avoid broccoli.

You have to assume this is genetic, and it may explain part of how obesity runs in families. Some people just do or don't like the taste of fat.

So what does this mean for a child care provider or early childhood educator? You'd think there would be some application, but I can't think of one. I guess you could offer really fatty foods to kids to see how much they liked them, and then only let the kids who don't like them have them. That would get you a worst provider nomination.

No, I think the implications are more pharmaceutical than child developmental. I'm sure they will be looking for ways to use this to make low fat food taste good or high fat food taste bad to a particular person.

As long as they don't touch my chocolate.

Pie in the sky, with diamonds: genetically designed diets

This sounds like some researchers sitting around after a few beers fantasizing about how they are going to change the world, and we're all going to have personal jet packs, except this could be true. They're talking about parsing the human genome to figure out what kinds of nutrients trigger what genes to turn on in people with which alleles, to design a personal diet to keep one's genes firing on all the healthiest cylinders.

One thing they're looking at specifically is a relation between type 2 diabetes and a gene that determines one's sensitivity to bitter taste. (I assume that's the one where supertasters hate broccoli.) Several plants affect cancer. Wolfberry, a Chinese fruit, affects vision.

I have two reactions to this:

• It's another example of how cool science makes our lives better
• No way I'm going to follow any diet that doesn't involve food that tastes good to me. If I can saute it in bacon fat, I'll eat it.

Another good thing about chocolate

Eating chocolate reduces the likelihood of having a stroke. Two especially good things about it are that:

• The amounts they are talking about are amounts a person might eat, an ounce or two a week, not like some of the studies where you would have to eat your body weight in something to get any good out of it.
• It's dose related. Two ounces a week protects better than one ounce.

That's good enough for me. I'm doing a similar long-term study at my house, though I'll admit to "administering" more chocolate than they did in this study. My partner and I are the subjects, and the cats are the control. So far, none of us has had a stroke.

Food porn: Meyer lemons again

This is our new Meyer Lemon. I think this is its third crop. The photo was taken last weekend. I was planning to do a major harvest this weekend, but it's raining. Let's see: lemon pie, lemon bars, lemon tarts, lemon fudge, lemon slices on baking fish, lemonade, margaritas. I made up lemon fudge, but I'll bet it would be good. I wonder how you would make it. Maybe I'll experiment.

Food porn: Meyer lemons

It's Meyer lemon time of year, and our newest tree is loaded. You probably know this, but a Meyer lemon is a cross between an ordinary lemon and a mandarin orange that was discovered in China by a representative of the US Department of Agriculture in 1908. Mr. Meyer knew what he had.

Wikipedia merely says of its culinary value that "The fruit is yellow and rounder than a true lemon with a slight orange tint when ripe. It has a sweeter, less acidic flavor than the more common lemon ... and a fragrant edible skin."

Sweeter, less acidic doesn't say the half of it. The difference between a Meyer lemon and a grocery store lemon is like the difference between

• Kalamata olives and California canned black olives
• Parmigiano-Reggiano and the stuff in the green can
• Raw sugar and processed sugar
• 1982 Mouton Rothschild and Gallo Hearty Burgundy
  (I happily drank the latter in college, and luckily bought a case of the former when they hit the market in 1984 or '85, because I was being paid far beyond my worth then. I still have two bottles left, plus a few similar bottles.)

It's not just that one is better than the other. It is that one has a complex taste and the other does not. While a Eureka lemon adds sourness, Meyers add taste.

Our Meyers are just coming in. We've been picking a few, but the photo above is our first real harvest of the season. Magazines are full of Meyer lemon recipes now. This weekend my partner made a lemon pudding cake thing that was spectacular, and chicken thighs with lemon juice, zest, and slices and a pile of middle-eastern spices. Scrumptious.

Of all the fruity things we grow, Meyers are the one we don't let a single one of get away. While they're ripe and still on the tree, we use a lot in cooking, of course, and make lemonade for the kids and margaritas (the best in the world) for ourselves. Sometimes I squeeze a glassful, add half a teaspoon of salt, stir, and sip like a liqueur.

Then when the huge crop is full ripe, I harvest it, squeeze them, and freeze either 2 cups (for lemonade in our-size pitchers) or 1.5 cups (for said margaritas) in quart-size baggies. They stack nicely. I also keep a cruet of the juice in the refrigerator to add a few drops to glasses of water or tea.

The only problem with Meyer lemons is that their extreme juiciness makes them hard to handle if you want something to squeeze into tea or on fish. A eureka lemon lets you control a squeeze, but a Meyer falls apart and gets juice all over your fingers.

The wikipedia article said the skin was edible. I haven't tried it, except as zest. I'll have to try it.

One of our eureka lemons has a sucker coming up from below the graft that has huge lemons with extremely thick skin, perfect for Indian pickled lemons. I've given them to an Indian friend's mother in the past, but I think I'll be pickling some of them soon. The recipe calls for filling the jar with lemon juice. I wonder how it would be to use the thick-skinned lemons for the pickles but use Meyer lemon juice for the pickling. I think I'll probably find out.

Christmas dinner

I cooked a goose for Christmas dinner. I just realized I forwent the opportunity to announce dinner by saying, "My goose is cooked!" I may never forgive myself.

It turned out to be easy, and it came out good. I read Julia Child's directions in The Way to Cook and those on America's Test Kitchen website. (Link to recipe requires paid subscription.) I guess I should have picked one or the other, but exigencies (such as my apparent early-onset dementia) made me sort of combine them. I steamed it for 45 minutes on top of the stove and then roasted it for a couple of hours, covered and then uncovered. It was perfect. It looked just like the picture in the book.

I guess because of the dark meat, goose is as forgiving as chicken thighs, which are hard to overcook. This was wonderful. I made a pan gravy with the de-fatted drippings and flour and added the chopped, sauteed liver. Veges were roasted carrots, fingerling red potatoes, and thick-sliced fennel. Apple cider for the old and young, and champagne for the rest of us.

Last night's sauce

I cook freestyle, gathering inspiration by looking through the refrigerator and cabinets. Last night I browned some skinless, boneless chicken thighs in olive oil and then added chicken stock, some Martinelli's apple cider left over from Thanksgiving, and some ground cumin, garlic powder, ground chipotle, and nutmeg. Simmer until done, remove chicken, and reduce pan liquid. Over brown basmati rice with roasted veges.

Eating fast really does make you eat more

So that's my problem. Eating fast slows the release of hormones that make you feel full, so you keep eating. They naturally tested it by taking blood samples every so often when people were eating fast or slow and checked for levels of the satiety hormones.

Drinking whole milk to stay thin

This is weird. "Eight-year-old children who drink full-fat milk every day have a lower BMI than those who seldom drink milk. This is not the case for children who often drink medium-fat or low-fat milk."

So the skinniest kids drink whole milk. Next larger size kids don't drink milk. Fattest kids drink medium- or low-fat milk. Whole-milk kids weighed an average of 4 kilos less, 9 pounds (less than no milk or skim milk?).

Researchers are scrambling for a reason.

"This is an interesting observation, but we don't know why it is so. It may be the case that children who drink full-fat milk tend also to eat other things that affect their weight. Another possible explanation is that children who do not drink full-fat milk drink more soft drinks instead," says dietician Susanne Eriksson, author of the thesis.

The scientists also discovered a difference between overweight children who drink full-fat milk every day and those who do not. Children who often drink milk with a fat content of 3% are less overweight. The thesis shows also that the children eat more saturated fat than recommended, but those children who have a high intake of fat have a lower BMI than the children with a lower intake of fat.

Let me repeat that last independent clause: "those children who have a high intake of fat have a lower BMI than the children with a lower intake of fat."

Again Rule 1 rears its head: Everything is more complicated than you think it is. Maybe Eriksson's conjectures are right, or maybe some other weird thing is the reason, but it certainly is counterintuitive.

Food porn: Home-grown tomatoes

Every year I plant around 10 tomato plants in late February or early March. Our local informal NAFTA representative tills the ground, and I go to Home Depot for tomatoes and the few annual herbs we grow (most are perennial), plant them, and install the drip system. We get our first tomato around the 4th of July, and from sometime toward the end of July through August, we have an amazing bounty. The picture above is one picking last August. Then it tapers off, and we get one or two tomatoes a week sometimes through the following January.

We eat enough tomatoes in August to suffer from lycopene overdose. We eat them sliced, as soup, roasted, baked-stuffed, in salads, in tapenades, and as an ingredient in any dish where we have room in the pot. Imagine a leg of lamb or pork roast cut up in chunks, slow-roasted for hours with onions and tomatoes, with carrots and potatoes tossed in for the last 45 minutes. Then boil down the liquid for a sauce.

Curry cures cancer

Sort of.

Scientists based at the Cork Cancer Research Centre in Ireland treated oesophageal cancer cells with curcumin – a chemical found in the curry spice tumeric.

They found that curcumin started to kill cancer cells within 24 hours. The cells also began to digest themselves, according to the research, published in the British Journal of Cancer.

I sure hope this turns out to be true, because I love curry. I wonder if the incidence of oesophageal cancer is lower in India than in, say, Switzerland.

God I love Google. A search on "esophageal cancer rate india" turned up a page that says:

Esophageal cancer is a relatively rare form of cancer, but some world areas have a markedly higher incidence than others: China, India and Japan, as well as the United Kingdom, appear to have a higher incidence, as well as the region around the Caspian Sea.

So my speculation was wrong. Again. It's a good thing I have a high threshold for embarrassment about being wrong.

Maybe it's because eating curry isn't the same as rubbing it on a cancer cell. I guess I should have said I hope eating curry turns out to work as well as rubbing curcumin on cancer cells in a lab dish, but apparently it doesn't. Or maybe the high rate in India is because so many people there smoke. Maybe if they didn't eat curry, they'd all be talking through tubes in their throats. I wish it weren't so complicated. That's the first rule of life: Everything is more complicated than you think.

Kitchen tool I wish someone would invent

When you slow cook some ribs in a dutch oven in the oven, you can end up with a quart or more of liquid, which you naturally pour the grease off of and then boil down the rest to a cup or so for use in some sort of sauce. In the boiling, you concentrate the taste by driving off most of the water. Unfortunately, you also drive off most of everything lighter than water, too. I wonder how it would taste if only water were removed.

I'd like to see someone figure out how to boil pot liquor and capture everything lighter than water (presumably everything that boils at a lower temperature), and return it to the pot, and let only the water go off into the atmosphere.

On seeing canned California olives in someone’s kitchen

You know you’re not going to be close friends when that  happens. They just don't understand.

It is a law of nature that when there are two examples of a food type, and one is in its minimally processed state and the other maximally processed, the minimally processed tastes better. It has more kinds of natural stuff in it and fewer added chemicals; it is more complex. Some of these are obvious.