Sheryl Kirby

Food, Life and the World at Large

Archive for January, 2009

There Probably Is No Bus, Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Ride

January 30th 2009 - Posted in Life, spirituality, The World at Large, toronto
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I was gleeful at the news yesterday that the TTC had approved the atheist bus ads that have been running in the UK. And then less impressed by the response from both the media and the public.

How is it that when a Christian organization runs an ad on a bus, we’re all supposed to accept it as their right to free speech, yet when an ad runs supporting another belief system, it’s “disgusting”? The TTC has stated that it would be illegal for them to refuse the ads but added a caveat that they would consider removing them “if there are complaints”. And how long will it take before complaints are filed?

The group behind the ads, the Freethought Association of Canada, simply wants to open a dialogue, yet so many people have already come out with small-minded comments that preclude any kind of conversation.

Which, from a personal standpoint, is part of why I became an atheist in the first place. Because most organized religions seem unable to accept differing points of view, and have been brainwashed taught into thinking that only their version is the right one, that only the people who follow their doctrine will make it to the afterlife – without even knowing if an afterlife exists. They can’t all be right, can they? The logical conclusion then (and note I’m stressing the word logical here) is that the probably isn’t a God. And yet – the world hasn’t stopped spinning. Imagine that.

The Lights Are On, But No One’s Home

January 23rd 2009 - Posted in government, health and nutrition, in the news, Life, wtf?
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Without being too preachy about it, I consider myself to be an environmentalist.

Since the early 90s in fact, the last time it was cool to go green.

I’ve been using the same cloth bags to carry my groceries home since that time. I don’t use a clothes dryer. I don’t drive a car. I don’t travel especially much in general. I use things until they break down and then I have them repaired if possible. I put a sweater on rather than turn on the heat. I eat a mostly vegetarian diet (at home, at least) and I buy local produce whenever possible. My environmental footprint, while not as small as it could/should be, it about 1/4 of the average North American’s,even when you take into consideration that I will not give up my incandescent light bulbs.

Yeah, I know – compact fluorescent bulbs are supposed to be the Western world’s easy, no-fuss solution to cutting back on their energy usage. Environmentalists talk about them like they’re the second coming of Jeebus and governments are drafting legislation that would require their use, with incandescents being phased out.

Now, studies are showing that the compact fluorescent bulb could be emitting UV radiation. Sitting too close to one could give people a sunburn. There’s talk of issues with exposure to electromagnetic fields.

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Dream On

January 19th 2009 - Posted in Food, health and nutrition, homemade is better, milk and dairy, people are silly, products, what's in your food?
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One of the really fabulous things about summer is that it keeps me out of the supermarket. Buying all my fruit and veg, cheese, eggs, honey and the small amount of meat we cook at home from local farmers is time not spent trolling the aisles being tempted by junk food. In the winter though, when most of the markets close, my weekly excursion to the local grocery store is fraught with peril. I do my best to stick to the perimeter, although needing flour or dried beans or toilet paper always calls for a trip down the aisles, but sometimes those supermarket folks get sneaky and move the processed food over by the real stuff.

Which is how Greg and  I happened upon a giant display of boxes of Kraft Dream Whip. We approached the row of boxes with caution. Arranged behind a selection of wizened, tired-looking California strawberries, we understood that it was meant to be an impulse purchase – the temptation of berries and cream (an allusion to, if not an actual taste of, summer) in the midst of a barren winter’s deep freeze.

Greg tentatively plucked at a box, flipping it over to read the instructions. “How do you make real whipped cream?” he asked.

“You uh.. whip some cream. With a bit of sugar and maybe some vanilla.”

“Huh. To make this stuff you need to add milk and vanilla,” he replied.

“Then what’s the point? Why not just buy cream if you have to buy milk anyway?”

Greg read over the ingredients. “Mmmm… hydrogenated vegetable oil,” he said. “This is full of trans fat.”

He put the box back and we wandered through the store, griping about the crap that people will eat to save a few bucks. But if you’ve got to add milk and vanilla anyway, it can’t be that much of a savings over buying cream, so what is the allure of foods like Dream Whip? You still have to whip the stuff – it’s not a time saver in any way. It’s not a convenience food that can be made just by adding water. So what makes it so popular?

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You Can’t Eat Just One

January 15th 2009 - Posted in Food, homemade is better, recipes
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A few years back, food bloggers went all wacky for homemade microwave potato chips. I remember making the things, and while they were good, they were a bit of a pain in the butt. Basically you sliced a potato, sprayed the slices with non-stick spray and laid them out on a plate and microwaved them for 5 minutes. Problem was – some microwaves are more powerful than others, and if you had a not especially powerful one, it often took 7 or 8 minutes to get the chips crisp. Given that you could only do one plateful at a time, it could take half an hour or more to make a small bowl of chips.

I always knew you could do something similar in the oven, and figured that it would probably take about the same amount of time. So over the past few days, I’ve been experimenting. It’s crazy cold outside, and my body wants comfort food and that generally means chips – or French fries. But it’s still January and I’ve been mostly good about keeping to the resolutions, so I wanted to avoid the greasy salty bagged potato chips from the variety store. These have a bit of oil, just to keep them from sticking, but I’d still count them as being healthy – leave the skins on and they even have fibre.

And – they’re really good. Not nearly as greasy as fried ones, but still crisp and satisfying. And way cheaper than a bag of crappy junk food chips.

My next project is to play with some other root vegetables; sweet potato chips, beet chips, parsnip chips… definitely cheaper than those bags of root chips from the health food store. And probably better.

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Shocked

January 14th 2009 - Posted in government, pets, The World at Large, toronto, wtf?
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I walked along Queen Street yesterday, searching the sidewalks for hydro plates. They’re plentiful, but inconspicuous, one of those things you never even notice until you go looking for them, but then they’re everywhere. A 10-inch round metal disk, set into the outer third of the sidewalk about 4-5 feet from every hydro pole so workers can access wiring for each street light, they’re unavoidable as you walk down the street.

And Toronto has somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 of them, all of which they plan to check for what they’re calling “stray voltage” after a 2nd dog was electrocuted yesterday from stepping on one with wet feet.

As a dog owner, this scares the beejeezus out of me. Particularly in the fact that they call it “stray” voltage because it’s not always there to find. After the first dog was killed in November, all the poles and plates in the area were supposedly checked, but the spot where the dog was killed yesterday was across the street from where the first incident took place. That metal plate was checked and was found to be fine with no problems. So how can we trust that any of these plates are safe?

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Eat Your Almonds

January 8th 2009 - Posted in cookies, Food, recipes
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I know it’s not technically possible, but anyone looking in my cupboard would swear that I have all the almonds from the state of California. I know, I’m exaggerating, but it does seem that way. See, I’m still working through the swag from the almond event I went to back in November. The almond slices and slivers are unopened but I started to get concerned about the 3 pounds of almond flour.

Nut flours tend to go rancid pretty quickly – all that exposed surface area. So after a couple of attempts at macarons (I lied – so NOT as easy as you would think, those things are fussy!), I figured it was time to track down some other recipes that use almond flour or ground almonds.

I found this recipe in Gregg R. Gillespie’s 1001 Cookie Recipes where there are 57 recipes with “almond” in the title. These are “Almond Cakes III”; not to be confused with Almond Cakes II or VI, or almond cookies, almond crisps or almond crescents, all of which offer multiple recipes with their own Roman numerals.

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Duck, Duck, Goose

January 7th 2009 - Posted in Food, in the news, politics, products
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I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of foie gras. Part of my job requires that I generally eat what is put in front of me, and I’ll eat the stuff if I have to, but it’s never something that I’ll make an effort to search out.

Despite having an opinion on just about everything else, I actually have no opinion on the issues surrounding foie gras production. On the one hand, it seems weird and cruel, but on the other, those duckies sure do come running at dinnertime. I figure it can’t be any worse than the conditions that most of the western world’s meat is produced in, so any issue I have with fois gras would be more to do with farms that are more of a factory setting instead of a happy organic free-range kind of place.

Peta has recently issued a challenge to chefs to come up with a “faux gras” product, offering a $10,000 prize to the recipe that most closely resembles the real thing. Now sure, it’s Peta, and they can’t let it go without getting in a few jabs, calling foie gras the “delicacy of despair”, but the reaction to the contest has been just as childish.

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New Year’s Resolution – Find a Better Word Than Foodie

January 5th 2009 - Posted in books, Food
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How To Be A Better Foodie
Sudi Pigott
Quadrille Publishing Limited, 2006, 304 pages

I hate the word “foodie”. I use it, but only grudgingly, because there’s really nothing that fits better. “Gourmand” and “epicurean” are too pretentious; “food lover” just sounds weird, and everything else is awkward. But I find the term simplistic and twee. After all, who isn’t a foodie these days? Everyone loves to eat – with the exception of that small percentage of the population who consider food to be fuel and eat to stay alive – so anyone who eats and enjoys the process is a foodie by default.

So I’m not sure why I picked up and purchased How To Be a Better Foodie by UK food writer Sudi Pigott. Probably the fact that is was $10 helped, because I was pretty sure the book would annoy me. And I was right.

There are lessons to be had from How To Be a Better Foodie, although few of them are specifically about food. The first one is – the times, they are a changin’ – which means a book written in 2006 at the height of the pre-economic meltdown consumer frenzy (especially in the UK) often doesn’t translate well to a recession three years later when, even if you can still afford it, custom-made Poilâne bread flown in from Paris probably looks pretty gauche, and foodie tourism to various dining meccas are out of reach for all but the wealthiest of eaters.

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What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?

January 5th 2009 - Posted in Food, recipes, vegetarian
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I can’t believe I didn’t think to put the two together before. Baked beans are a traditional down east dish that I ate regularly as a kid, and still make a couple of times a year. Served up with real brown bread (bread made with molasses, not whole wheat bread), this is a perfect dish on a cold Saturday night in the winter. Also traditional on a cold winter’s night is a glass of rum, and the flavours here combine really well. I was a little heavy-handed with the rum in my test batch, thus the restrained 2 tablespoons in the ingredients list, but rum lovers can add up to a quarter of a cup. Just be warned that not all the alcohol burns off, so these beans have a bit of a kick to them.

I used Sailor Jerry spiced rum because I have seekrit aspirations to be a hipster, but mostly because that’s what I had on hand. But any decently flavoured spiced rum would do.

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the Intimidating Mustard

January 3rd 2009 - Posted in events and festivals, Food, products
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I am intimidated by a jar of mustard.

It’s no secret that I love good food and that I love trying new products. But I’m also a bit of a tightwad, and I’m all about value for money, even before we came into “tough economic times”.

When Greg and I were at the Gourmet Food and Wine Festival in November, we got separated at one point and I eventually found my husband in front of a booth called Made in France. He was sampling products and as I approached, turned around and pointed a mustard-laden pretzel stick in my direction. “Try this! It’s got truffles!!” he exclaimed.

Indeed, it was one truffly mustard, and it made me swoon.

The other mustards on display had prices on the jar. $6 each. That’s a bit of money for mustard, but they were all good, so we asked for a jar of the stuff with truffles and the nice man wrapped it up and bagged it and handed it to me before saying, “That will be $18, please.” The sharp intake of breath from both of us made a startling noise. But once we had our wits about us, we had to make a decision, and fast.

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