annabelle

Aha! I knew something was missing from this season. Ron is one e-vil dude, isn't he? I'm awaiting some hapless douchebag of a cocky cook to microwave him a cake so we can watch Ron turn him into a mouse. I love this show.

I think everyone who has taken the time to become a member here and to post on this and other matters about our food supply is certainly concerned about our food and how it is treated before it comes to us. Most of us don't have the luxury (or drudgery, depending on your POV) of having a hobby farm and the leisure time to devote to pure pursuit of what passes for wholesome food through friendships with a local source of veg, fruit, meats, et al. Most people do indeed rely on their supermarkets for the bulk of their foodstuffs. I am grateful for the supermarket. It may not be all that, but it's clean, it's well-stocked and it's convenient. And most of all, it is a time-saver. Convenience foods are always going to be suspect, in particular fast foods, per your Chicken McNuggets example. It is a conflux of cheap foodstuffs indifferently prepared by substandard workers in shoddy conditions. A perfect storm for corruption on a number of levels, but that's another thread.

I believe we are talking about two different kinds of sausages, rotuts. I was speaking of fresh sausages that were often filled with meat and "fillers" that could include sawdust. There is some fascinating literature about life in the tenements of NYC and London before there was a crackdown on adulterated foodstuffs such as the aforementioned sausages and milk that was often diluted with chalk and water before the turn of the last century. You are, I believe, referring to cured sausages or charcuterie, are you not? Salamis and such? These were uncommon in the Indian Territories were my family settled after the Civil War. To the point of pink slime, the producers have been caught out, and quite frankly so has our public schools system and by implication this administration and the FDA (See, Scoop, we're not so far apart ) for their willingness to sell this sludge to be served to school children. There is a backlash and who knows where this stuff will end up? I hope it is not in feed for livestock or pet food. Time will tell.

It does, doesn't it? Sausages have always been a foodstuff of the poor, and for good reason. It's cheap and nasty, unless it is a premium sausage such as our elders never ate. As for nitrates and nitrites? My great-grandparents pretty much lived on salt pork that was packed in barrels and they lived to a ripe old age and had large amounts of children. I doubt that most people today eat nearly the amount of salts that they did. I, too would like the answer to your last question re: ammonia break-down products. Is the ammonia shed in waste? What is its impact on the vital organs?

Doubtless it is food grade petroleum, Scoop. The same stuff that is used in lip balms, cosmetics, and balms like Vicks Vaporub and Metholatum. Any cosmetic must be digestible, so it's not like manufacturers are mixing Wynn's motor oil into food. As gfweb and I were discussing above, there is the potential for great danger to the public from the pink slime. As he says, prions are little understood and deadly in all cases. One infected animal could potentially infect a massive amount of pink slime and in turn who knows how many children. Various E. colis are bad enough and often deadly. Prions are always deadly.

I don't believe it is. It was all still pretty new when I was learning about it. Anything that crosses the blood-brain barrier is bad, bad stuff, though.

Thanks, that's what I thought. If I recall correctly, the fear of MC was from the practice of feeding, well the pink slime, to cattle in their feed, was it not? In the UK, I believe there was a fear also of cross-contamination with sheep, as well.

No takers? First round of three, the ingredients are: strawberry toaster pastries and pepitas. The inspiration? A goldfish. Candy is the second round and cake is the third. edit: My mistake on the third round, I had thought it was chocolate.

Food Network has launched the second season of "Sweet Genius" on Thursdays at 10:00 EST, 9:00 CST. If you haven't seen this show last year, you are in for a treat! Please give it a try. It's weird and wonderful. Enjoy!

I've seen "apple pie ala mode with ice cream" on a menu before.

Panko crumbs. I bought a huge amount of them with some Amazon Rewards I needed to use up. I can't get them here in Tiny Town, so it is nice to have a source. They are packed by Well-Pac. If it's good enough for restaurants, it's good enough for me. Dried Cherries and Blueberries. I bought a kilo of each for about $17 a piece. It was a promotion around the holidays.

I believe it was some microbiologists who labeled "pink slime". There is not much danger of any of them going into Public Relations. gfweb: I thought that Mad Cow hadn't been found in the US? I may be mistaken, but I thought it was only in the UK. The prions will gitcha if'n ya don't watch out!

Even worse, tikidoc, I learned yesterday that it is centrifuged at 100F. The is nothing like optimal temperatures for bacterial growth and thus the need to add ammonia. For our own good!

There are a lot of them NOW Old biker chicks with angel wing tats or some kind of ink on their calves or biceps. It's one thing Gramps has a tat he got in Vietnam, but Grandma? Yeesh. I really hate to see pretty girls with half-sleeves, I don't care how cool to them it seem at the time. As much as I was pulling for Bev to win, I'd wince every time I saw her left arm.

Brava, Jaymes! I think it is awfully easy to dismiss Marilyn as some old granny from East Egypt, ND who, as you said, is pecking out her reviews on an old manual typewriter. With carbon paper between the sheets. It's part and parcel of the whole dismissive attitude to a good three-quarters of the country that doesn't live in major metropolitan areas that are adjacent to the sea and above the Mason-Dixon line. I bet she's one hell of a bridge partner, too.

I did NOT like the Moto guys. I'm with Grayson and her "Who is this guy?" about Chris. Possibly it is just because I'm in 50's but I don't understand the tattoos, the goofy haircuts and those disk things in the ear lobes. Haircuts grow out, but why disfigure yourself? Especially the women. And, yes I know it has nothing to do with cooking, but I'm tired of the tattoos and piercings as well as the non-stop bleeping of the swearing. Werdna: Sweet Genius, with Ron Ben-Israel starts tomorrow night on Food Network. It's a dessert competition that is every bit as weird as the original (Japanese) version of Iron Chef. I love it.

Since I haven't lived there since 1989, all I have is Tarantino's. I don't know if they are still there or not. Thnere were a couple of others further into town, but on the water by the Star of India. San Diego was not a destination foodie town then. All of the "good" restaurants were in La Jolla and Del Mar and I can't remember their names, either. I know they were very expensive, $200 and up for a couple, and that was 25 years ago.

It sucked. There are plenty of sucky Italian restaurants in San Diego that are more than 30+ years old, have waterfront views and crappy food. They were there when I lived there in the 80's.

Thank you, Heidi.

rotuts, there was a thread here a few months back (I am not good with the eG search function, sorry) about the Chicago Public Schools and their decision to ban home-packed lunches. There is evidently only one school district in Chicago, so the ban is citywide. It was bad enough when little kids were pilloried, figuratively, for bringing peanut butter sandwiches because somewhere a child might have an allergy. Yes, there are children with terrible nut allergies, but let them eat in the classroom or something, don't punish the whole school. Anyone who has had a child who went through a stubborn food choices period (and haven't we all?) knows what it's like to have a kid who won't eat anything except peanutbutter, or in the case of my middle son, ham and cheese sandwiches, for a couple of years. I had read that the Los Angeles Schools were planning to do the same along with many others. There is a poster here who was in charge of school lunch programs for many years. I can't remember her name, but she had a lot of terrific information. Tikidoc: My teen's high school has the same breakfast program. It's either all sugar (doughnuts) or all fat (sausage, bacon, sausage gravy) or cereal. He's a cereal eater or a bacon and eggs kid, so I don't worry about him too much in that regard. I do remember getting into it with the lower elementary school about their crappy meals when he was in kindergarten and we decided he was going to pack his lunch. We've been following the pink slime story in the news and he's as appalled as we are about it.

Here's an explanation of what happened: http://appliedrationality.blogspot.com/2012/02/tempest-in-lunch-box.html The issue is that a school, that is tax payer funded, has overstepped itself in confiscating homemade lunches in a number of school districts, not one incident in particular, but the whole idea. If I want to send my kid to school with a bag of candy bars, that is my business, not the schools. Schools require that all students who are enrolled in public schools in the US complete forms about their eligability for the federal school lunch program, regardless of whether or not the child will ever eat a meal at the school or is eligable for a free or reduced lunch. I taught public school for a number of years and I'd rather my children ate something that I had packed from home (and I did do so for many years and it wasn't candy bars, either) than whatever happened to be on the menu that day. Especially now that we know about the pink slime.

You're not argumentative or combative, Rob. I agree about Jamie Oliver and most other cooks, chefs and politicians who are not trained as dieticians passing along pseudoscience as fact. Too many people latch on to an idea about food and/or its preparation and ride that hobbyhorse for all the little guy is worth. Children and adults have different dietary needs. Pregnant and nursing women have different dietary needs than their mothers and grandmothers. The elderly need to eat differently than a young man who in turn eats differently than a middle-aged man. There's no one size fits all diet plan. About the water as a sanitizer idea, I'll run that one past my supervisor at the hospital lab.

But I don't think connective tissue would be pink. And I don't see any benefit to adding connective tissue to ground beef unless you're looking to add gelatine. But surely, no one here has a problem with gelatine. It becomes pink with the addition of ammonia. It is not pink in color, but rather a greyish-brown before the ammonia is added.

From what I understand about the pink slime, it is not actually beef, it is connective tissues that are added as an extender. Personally, if I feel like I need an "extender" in beef, I would add oatmeal in the time honored tradition of stretching meat to feed more people. I don't want to eat ammonia, either. LindaK, I believe that beef tea is a boullion, at least it is described in one of my elderly cookbooks as such. It is in a chapter about feeding convalescents and invalids.

Why make "fake" cherries at all?