Peter the eater
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Posts posted by Peter the eater
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My husband and I have both been vegetarians since our teens, in the 1970s. (met in 1994, married in 1996) This is probably our biggest green contribution.
We eat a lot of unprocessed foods like dry beans and vegetables. We try to eat up all the food we buy, freeze leftovers and make soups and stock from trimmings. I make a lot of foods like salad dressings, mustard, mayo and ketchup from scratch.
We compost and have a small garden.
I have used re-usable bags since I moved out on my own. I have a french string bag I got in the 1970's and Wild Oats cloth promo bag from 1988 that I still use.
I got CFC bulbs in the mid-1980s when they were first introduced. Two years ago we re-did the house in LED lights. My kitchen is now illuminated with about 35 watts of energy total -and the bulbs only get to about 108° -as opposed to the 50 watt (each) halogen bulbs that were here when we moved in which used a total of 300 watts of power and got to 435° each. (so, we don't use AC fighting heat from our lighting) (yes, I love my tempgun)
I do simple maintenance on the (circa 1996) fridge, cleaning gaskets and vacuuming the coils to keep it running well, although it will probably need replacing in a few years.
I clean with simple soaps and vinegar as much as possible.
I'd love to replace the stove with an induction topped model, but, cannot afford to replace it right now -plus I'd have to buy new pots, my copper cookware would not work!
I load the dishwasher up, and use it.
Most importantly, my husband keeps a small journal of when he changed filters on things or when we cleaned something, so we can do regular maintenance to keep what we do have running smoothly.
That's very impressive, Lisa. Small things like vacuuming the fridge coils make sense, I do it twice a year for hygiene reasons.
I run a full dishwasher but I don't run the dry cycle, which is apparently a real energy pig.
Nobody here has home air conditioning.
I make salad dressing and mayo, but is homemade mustard worth the effort? I think I know the answer.
What's a tempgun?
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There is no other way other than to say ahiru no tamago.
Hiroyuki, thanks again for answering my questions. One other thing about duck eggs is that they are only available in the late spring, around here anyways. I'm sure that could change if they became more popular.
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I'm a fan of tamago and I usually order it at the restaurants, occasionally I try to make it at home. Yesterday I made some using duck eggs and was pleasantly surprised. Are duck eggs a part of typical Japanese home cooking?
No, I don't think so. They should be popular in Chinese cuisine. How do they differ from chicken eggs?
Duck eggs are not very common in Atlantic Canadian food, which is a shame. I'm sure there's some economic reason.
Compared to chicken eggs they're larger, heavier, and around twice the price so therefore still affordable -- $5 a dozen as opposed to $2.50 a dozen. Duck yolks occupy more of the shell, the whites are more viscous, and the shells are twice as hard to crack. They taste similar but they're richer and more unctuous.
So I guess there's not a Japanese word for duck tamago?
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I had to look that one up. It's a charcoal air filter to keep your compost from stinking unbearably, no? Makes sense if you need one. I take my nasty stuff far away outside.
ETA better sentence structure
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I'm a fan of tamago and I usually order it at the restaurants, occasionally I try to make it at home. Yesterday I made some using duck eggs and was pleasantly surprised. Are duck eggs a part of typical Japanese home cooking?
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buy milk from a local dairy in reusable glass containers
That option is unavailable to me. I'd do it if I could, and if it wasn't stupid expensive. Dairy containers are the only non-refundable beverage package in my municipality -- all others come with a 5 or 10 cent deposit. You can get half of the deposit back if you take your empties to a recycling center.
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Molson makes Cold Shots in 250 ml (= 8.5 ounce US) cans. It's a pale lager with 6% etOH and tastes like strong Budweiser.
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For me this is about lots of small changes.
In terms of packaging and containers, I re-purpose as much as I can. Also since I do not buy many processed items- that alone eliminates loads of wasted materials and energy- a mind boggling mess.
Good point heidih. I'd rather just not bring the packaging home . . . although . . . that empty burlap basmati sack would make a handsome handbag.
There's lots of reasons not to buy processed food items -- including the packaging. Some of those waxy thick card boxes for frozen hamburgers, chicken balls, etc. look like fire-rated safes. Farm markets and bulk foods stores are good places to find less packaging.
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One thing we have done is switch from an electric conventional cooktop to a much, much more efficient induction cooktop. An added bonus is that it is also a much, much better cooktop.
It's a very nice way to cook. My next kitchen will have induction.
Energy consumption in the kitchen is worth looking at. The people at Oster® have created a tv show to showcase their appliances, and they have numbers to suggest energy can be saved by using the small more efficient products. I agree in principle, but going out and buying a dozen new kitchen gizmos cannot be the answer.
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While reading about Green Restaurants I wondered what efforts Society members are making at home to address these important issues. It's an enormous question -- every food decision we make has some effect or our environment. What we buy, when we buy it, how we bring it home, how we store it, how we cook, how we eat, what we do with the leftovers, the packaging, etc.
Some of these discussions are older than others. What are the good things, large or small, people are doing now?
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Very nice looking fiddleheads!
And I hear you on grit - I'm really sensitive to it. Kind of like getting a bit of shell in soft-boiled eggs...
There's probably a hard-coded genetic message inside us from the caveman days saying "don't eat sand or rocks".
Those clams are so tasty and affordable -- next time I'll give them a 48 cornmeal buffet, separate the siphons more carefully, and rinse the meat thoroughly. Most of the delicious clam juice winds up in the steaming broth, so from there it can be recovered by decanting.
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Fiddleheads sauteed in butter with garlic and onion . . .
combined with steamer clams . . .
served on egg noodles:
The steamer juice is perfect for finishing the fiddlehead pan sauce, along with flour and vinegar. The clams were filter-feeding on corn meal in the fridge overnight but still a tiny amount of grit remained. It's amazing how a few grains of sand in your food can have such a negative impact.
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Fiddleheads are 4 to 6 dollars a pound and they've been available for a week and a half now. We had a bunch for dinner -- hours later I'm still considering why I like them so much. They look unusual, they taste fine, and they represent the start of summer. Same goes for rhubarb.
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The easiest thing to do is take a bite of the raw eggplant and see if it's bitter. I find that with a really bitter one, even salting doesn't really help, so I compost them and start over. I gave up salting them years ago.
Exactly right Lisa. The small ones I buy are never bitter: dwarfs, globes, snakes.
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I loved reading this account of Dorks in Charge. Lots of people have their own Gino and Julian, I know I did. It just made me leaner and meaner, without losing my religion.
My favourite line:
All the waiters wore tuxes, by the way, and carried napkins over their arms. No socks or underwear, but they had tuxes. -
Bump.
Where are they? It's mid effing May.
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That's right gang, I cracked the Davinci Code for making pop-tarts at home!
Rob, we know you're a genius . . . but . . . isn't a real pop tart like a real hot dog? It tastes good, it reminds us of reliable food from long ago, but it can't be truthfully reproduced without a giant factory with an assembly line and Quality Assurance team?
Your toaster pastries look really, really delicious. Are they pop-tarts?
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No, not Guinness! Way too assertive for mussels. Maybe if he were braising some short-ribs. I'll echo my support of Hoegaarden as a good choice.
Stouts and Porters are excellent for mussels, just use less.
An oz. of Guinness per lb. of mussels is good, and it leaves you with more to drink.
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I watched the preview. I'll be passing on this one. Just judging from the short bit I watched, they seem to have reduced Julia Child to a caricature. And the Julie character (I say "character" because I don't know how much of "real life" made it into the movie) seems like a moron.
That may be a little harsh. I never met her, but the Julia Child I know comes from reading many books and watching all ten years of The French Chef (on dvd) and most of Juila and Jacques: Cooking at Home (on PBS). Meryl Streep's portrayal appears faithful to me.
The Hulu clip is unavailable outside the US, but YouTube is here.
<edit for spellling>
In what way was it harsh? The character Meryl Streep portrayed, as seen on the preview, is little different from the character Dan Akroyd played on SNL. Granted, we are only seeing snippets of the movie, but from what I saw, Julia Child was no deeper or more complex than a pot of boiling water, and to top it off, from the trailer I got the feeling she was merely a silly woman who wanted to cook. I think there was a lot more to her than that. (And am I to believe she gave a raspberry to some lady who told her she had no talent for cooking?)
Poetic license, blah blah. Julia Child was a real person, and if the trailer is an indication of how she is portrayed in the movie, then she deserved a more respectful portrayal than that (but if the movie were true to her life, it never would have been made into a movie--certainly not enough of a hollywood-esque life to entice the masses).
I watched the clip again, and I still think "moron" may be a little harsh. Child is a woman of unusual talent, personality, size and voice. I haven't seen Silkwood since I was a teenager but I know Streep and Ephron can work well together. If there's a problem it's with the lightweight Ephron, not the best-actor-of-her-generation Streep.
I guess the clip wasn't enough to make me wince and get angry -- maybe I'll watch it one more time to be sure. I'm not much of a romantic comedy chick flick kinda guy. I can think of many, many other preferable writer/directors.
There's a good A&E bio piece from shortly after her death.
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I watched the preview. I'll be passing on this one. Just judging from the short bit I watched, they seem to have reduced Julia Child to a caricature. And the Julie character (I say "character" because I don't know how much of "real life" made it into the movie) seems like a moron.
That may be a little harsh. I never met her, but the Julia Child I know comes from reading many books and watching all ten years of The French Chef (on dvd) and most of Juila and Jacques: Cooking at Home (on PBS). Meryl Streep's portrayal appears faithful to me.
The Hulu clip is unavailable outside the US, but YouTube is here.
<edit for spellling>
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My fish guy sells/gives salmon heads/carcasses, depending on his mood and what's available. I make stock, it's awesome. Omega three jelly:
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All this talk of Thai in Toronto has me nostalgic for my first Thai experience in my home town -- is Young Thailand still around? I know they moved to Church Street for a time, and maybe opened other restaurants? I haven't lived in TO for 8 years, they were the first and only option for a while. I still have their cookbook.
Sriracha
in Ready to Eat
Posted
I'd always assumed the stuff was Vietnamese because it's on the tables at the Vietnamese restaurants I go to in Toronto. Now I know better.
I didn't know about the many varieties of sriracha: garlic, onion, galangal, lemon grass and ginger. Wow.