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Everything posted by Adam Balic
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Given the choice I would rather a few little friends then a bowel resection and colostomy bag for life, but don't get me wong some of these parasites are very very bad news. So the ideal thing would be to work out what they are doing and how they are doing it, then mimic effect.
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Your hands don't have to be 'dirty' to have a healthy bacterial population. Scratch and itch and you have a nice innoculum, just waiting to invent yogurt. I would think that yogurt and similar products were invented independently several times in different places, but older Arabic recipes refer to it as "Persian Milk" indicating that they knew of it via another culture.
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May not matter in terms of the anti-inflammatory response, but it would be better not to have some of the more nasty types. Joel Weinstock is using whip-worms, which in low doses in healthy people do very little that is nasty.
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I don't think that it would involve anything exciting. Microbiologists tend to think of everything waist down as been 'contimated' with faecal flora. The same would be true with vaginal flora. Don't wash your hands for a few weeks, dip them in a bowl of milk in a warm climate and Eureka, you have invented Persian Milk (yogurt). Or something like it. I imagine that mostly it wa just nasty, but once in a while the culture present would have ended up producing something tasty.
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Not sure if they are the total answer either, but the system is giving some interesting data. This is from Joel Wienstock at the Uni. of Iowa Cetainly allergy free children in Africa develop allergy after removal of their worm burdens, so it is an interesting idea. We shall see were it goes.
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I would think that issues with mould are a modern idea. Proberly didn't cross their mind when the cheese got mould, not to eat it. Especially considering how much effort and resources are tied up in a chunk of cheese. Infact they could have equally though "Good, the cheese has got that blue stuff on it that means that it will not go all slimy and stinky, the like that stuff little Urga ate just before she died". More curious then the origins of cheese are the origins of yogurt. Many yogurt bacterial cultures are also vaginal flora.
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yeah - that paper was 1999 right? and by all means keep up the good work with your research. that is an interesting question re: why the increase in celiac disease lately - i think still we eat a lot more wheat/corn now than we did in say 1900 because of the advent of processing food on a large scale, and Mr. Kellog et al. interesting thing, on a purely empirical basis - my roommate when i first met her was lactose intolerant. but as we've been living together for the last year or so, she has starting getting very bloated nad uncomfortable it seemed no matter what she ate. i advised on cutting out gluten, and sure enough, that's bene the culprit. she has no health insurance, so there's no definitive diagnosis of what's going on, but it was interesting to see theory in practice. for me autoimmune disorders are of particular interest because i've got autoimmune thyroiditis. It worked for me, too. There's way too much theorizing and not nearly enough real testing of basic principles. The standard American diet has never been tested, it's just considered ok by default. Yet if you give up something that bothers you, you're challenging the status quo, and threatening our way of life. If not eating wheat makes my symptoms go away, it does. If the theoreticians figure out a mechanism for this, so they do. If they don't, it's not up to me to sacrifice my lifestyle to align to the current paradigm. Eh yeh, I would not have thought I that have to say that if you have celiac disease then you should cut gluten out of your diet. Also, don't run with sissors, I can't stress this enough. Also, the "Western diet" doesn't equal an American diet. It is much more diverse then that, but there is still an overall increase allergic and auto-immune disorders. One in four Americans will develop some type of gut inflammation for most it will not be serious, so will require their large intestine to be removed in sections. No matter how much wonder white these people are eating it wouldn't even come close to the amount of bread eaten by some historical and extant cultures that lacked a high incidence of bowel disorders. So gliadin and WGA may be the trigger, but they are not an explanation. So if you have celiacs diesease don't eat bread, but for the population as a whole avoiding bread proberly won't protect them from other autoimmune disorders. So some research into underlining causes is proberly OK.
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Interesting paper (although a bit out of date ). I have not doubt that autoimmune diseases have increased in Western countries or countries that have taken up Western lifestyles. I think that diet most likely has in important role as well. But, I'm not sure at what level and what maybe true in one instance may not be so for another. Celiac disease has increased quite a bit and certainly gliadin (on of proteins that make up gluten) is the trigger and it is quite possible that WGA causes gut inflammation, which leads to the gliadin crossing the epithelial barrier. But, Westen cultures have been eating wheat products for a relatively long period, in some cases actually more in the past then at present, so why the recent increase in Celiac disease? The same pattern is also true of other auto-immune diseases. No, the cause isn't 'we eat wheat products', it is something more subtle then that. When I work it out I will let you know, until then please keep sending in your donations.
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Are these any particular type of lectins? "Lectin" is a term for different classes of proteins that bind carbohydrate moieties and they are in pretty much everything, although some types are more concentrated in certain plant types. Legumes are pretty much full of them for instance, so if not eating cultivated grain due to lectins, what about legumes? well each grain has it's own lectin - ie wheat's is wheat agglutinin? i think is the name of it. they haven't come up with very exciting names for them it seems. and of course kidney's beans have another hemo-agglutinating factor or some such name. i don't eat legumes too much either. i mean if you go back and look at our paleolithic ancestors diets - if they came across oats or wheat, it was a rare thing and they might have taken advantage of it, but it was seasonal, and it was by happenstance. another thing that re-inforced this for me, in particular, is that recently i found that Indians are apparently practically genetically disposed to type 2 diabetes. (i don't know all the details - but i'm curious if it's morseo in the north or the south.) The North beign wheat-based, wheat lectin apparently mimics insulin, thereby messing with insulin receptors. That's me at No.2 place. The "gal" in "galectin", just means it is a galactose binding lectin. I am just curious as I have worked with them a little bit and I haven't heard of people avoiding them. I mean they really are in everything from snail mucus to sheep to beans. Some of them can be damaging to health, Ricin is a lectin and it is one of the most powerful toxins about. Some nut lectins are responsible for nut allergies etc, but I'm not sure about the paleolithic diet thing. Our paleolithic ancestors wouldn't have come across "wheat" as we know it as it didn't exist. I'm thinking that they didn't live as long as us either and they were full of parasites. Some of the work I do is based around the idea that the recent increase in allergies etc, is due to the lack of worm parasites. If you want to avoid chronic bowel diease or allergies, you just need some worms, but this doens't mean that getting a dose of schistosomiasis is a good thing.
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I think that "zucchini centenaria" is Sechium edule, which are the fruit of a vine, but not really related to zucchini/gourds etc. I Australia they would be called "chokos" and I think they are from Mexico originally.
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Are these any particular type of lectins? "Lectin" is a term for different classes of proteins that bind carbohydrate moieties and they are in pretty much everything, although some types are more concentrated in certain plant types. Legumes are pretty much full of them for instance, so if not eating cultivated grain due to lectins, what about legumes?
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There has been some discussion on these previously {Link}, they are neither cucumber or zucchini, rather gourds. Quite common in Sicily. Alexander - nice post, I was in Lipari earlier in the year and it was very nice to be reminded.
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Actually, not all proteins are equal (wold you rather eat a bowl of bean curd or hair for instance ), they are made up of different amino acids. Humans can't manufacture cetain amino acids form scratch so they have to come from the diet. It is proberly easier to eat a cow as they are helpfully made of similar stuff to humans, but you can get complete amino acid coverage from a vegetarian diet. Certain plants tend to lack some essential amino acids, but this can be covered by eating other plant types. Corn and beans is a good example of this type of complementary diet.
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THANK YOU !!! I've been saying this / asking this for years. But the way I ask it is even more troubling (to me). It's not just that they do all of that to extract the liquid, but the fact that they knew that the liquid contains caffeine (or at least they knew it contains a stimulant, if they didn't know its name). So how did they know that? And though it's not food, think about tobacco. How did they know that it has a calming agent, and that the best way to extract that is to dry the leaves, burn them, and inhale the smoke? My point is, why don't we dry coffee beans, light them on fire, and inhale the smoke when we need a pick-me-up, and at the same time roast the tobacco leaves, pour boiling water over them to extract something, and drink that liquid when we need to relax??!! I've been asking these questions for years, and nobody ever gives me an answer! Take some ground coffee put it in a pipe and smoke it. I doubt the effect will be as pleasant as a cup of coffee (I think caffeine would be heat labile at these temperatures). Even now some types of coffee are not filtred as such, so it is simply a slurry of ground beans. The decision to roast or not isn't carved in stone either. So at the basic level, you have a been which you eat and it makes you feel perky. The development from this to Starbucks, didn't happen all at once so think of little steps. Finally, I bet that if it wasn't for some cultures/religions probition of alcohol, we wouldn't be drinking coffee so much.
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adam, i like that even in your "translation" the cook still gets to "smite" the goose. mongo Eh yes, I'm afraid I have this terrible defect where I find words like "smite", "thy" and "maiden" terribly attractive and tend to use them if given a chance.
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Mostly died out I think or re-invented itself as post-post-post modern "Gelee". The highest concentration of aspic dishs I have seen of late is in Paris. Lots of very 19th century looking boned and stuffed quail coated in aspic and cones of aspic filles with seafood and greenery to look like mini-aquarium.
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Thank you for your kind comment, I think that they liked the dish well enough. "Le Menagier de Paris" (Goodman of Paris) is an interesting book because it one of the few of its time that goes into a lot of detail over amounts of ingredients (was written for a very young wife of an older man, the wife as an orphan is thought not to have much idea about running a household, hence the book). Some translations are not very good though as they don't go accurately translate the older measurements into modern volumes (eg. A 'quartre de Paris' is nearly two US quarts, best to know these things when follwing the recipes).
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I don't bother to peel shrimp at all that much unless there is a special request. I eat the shells anyway. More flavour too and out side of places that are lucky enough to have there own shrimp fisheries, those farmed tiger prawns/shrimp need all the flavour help they can get. As for the last tail segment, well it looks much better and it's not such a big deal is it? It's just not that hard really, I'm mean leaving a shrimp tail on the side of a plate is hardly splitting the atom or trying to find an English word that rhymes with "orange".
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The only source for this word I can find is from "The Forme of Cury" (oldest collection of English recipes), so it is proberly Anglo-Norman Frenchy talk for a small pot or a pot with three legs. Very common before modern range type pots. Legs prevent the pot from tipping over.
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Yes I have read this as well. My guess would be that the origins involve both the name of the spice and the French word, I would lean towards the latter, but that's just a guess.
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This is more easy to read: Don't recognise the recipe looks to be Medieval? 13th-14th century? Looks quite tasty.
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This is the best fishmonger in Edinburgh and the quality of their fish ranges from the amazing to the mediocre. I don't have any problem with fish identification and rarely buy fillets, so I don't worry about tricks of the trade. If I see a problem I tell them as well, at another fishmonger I paid a small fortune for some pilchards (now popular as sardines, they are infact the same fish species, one name says "Holidays and Sun", the other says "Cat food"). Half of these turned out to be Horse Mackeral, a revolting fish. I noticed before leaving the store and told the fishmonger wat I thought of that. "John Dory" is considered a bit of an English fish in Scotland according to a fisherman I spoke to, so even if they catch it tends here it tends to go South. This is a problem in Edinburgh where there are many English, some of which proberly want John Dory. The fishmonger could sell "'Seacat' (local name for Wolf fish):it's like John Dory", but no body would buy it. In effect the consumer gets a very superior fish for a cheap price, the problem with the names is I see it is as much an issue with the general ignorance of the buying public as with the practices of the fishmongers.
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Well technically it is a galantine. Another slight anachronism, in 13th- 17th century England 'galantine' refered to a red coloured spiced sauce, orginally containing 'Galingale' (yes the same stuff used in Thai cooking. In the 18th century the word came back from France attached to the preparation that we are know familiar with. May's recipes aren't in modern recipe format, they assume that the cook knows many of the details of how something should be done and in many cases are more inspirational then instructional. The are a few 17th century recipes for forcemeat that refer to the use of cream, so I made a basic chicken moussline forcemeat (from the TIMELIFE series actually, so still historical ) and stuffed the chicken with this after adding: Artichoke hearts, preserved ginger, barberries, green herbs, pistacio nuts and interlarded bacon (=streaky/pancetta), flavouring was ginger, mace and cloves.
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I assume that you are talking about this Wolf fish, if so it is a really delicous fish and relatively unknown. He in Scotland and the North-East Atlantic it is relatively common, but ask most people about it and they will never have heard of it. My fishmonger sells it as "John Dory", what sort of an idiot buys 60 cm long John Dory fillets. Delicious, boneless fillets of a excellent size, a really terrific fish. I also get the heads for free and use them in Singapore fish head curry.
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It tasted very fine thank you. Because of the format I doubt anybody would have picked it as being Ye Olde Cooking without being told.