An Historic Meal

I really just named that post that because I wanted to write "An Historic." Though this is pretty historic, nonetheless.

After realizing that sorbet was out of reach last night, I went out today and acquired a few new food processors - a blender and an ice cream maker. Yes, I'm really getting fancy now, it seems. I prepared a couple things pretty much simultaneously:

Strawberry Banana Smoothie

Ingredients:

Two bananas

Ten strawberries

3/4 cup of milk

3 Tablespoons of sugar

6 ice cubes

Wash and rinse the strawberries and cut their stems off. Toss everything into a blender and use the ice crush setting until the ice disintegrates a bit, then blend it all together nice and smooth. Easy, quick, and tasty!

Raspberry Sorbet

Ingredients:

Three cups raspberries

One cup sugar

Half cup water

One Tablespoon lemon juice

Put the water and sugar into a sauce pan and put it on a low simmer until the sugar melts. Stir it to allow the sugar to melt and dissolve into the water, and remove from heat to allow it to cool.

Throw the raspberries into the blender and puree them until they're reasonably smooth. Pour the result into a mesh strainer and crush the contents through the strainer into a bowl - a potato masher is probably best, but a measuring cup did in a pinch for me. Juice a single lemon for the juice and combine it with the raspberry juice, stirring it up a bit.

Get as much juice out of the raspberries as you can!

Combine the water and raspberry/lemon mixture and put it into the fridge to cool off. After it was reasonably cold, pour it into the ice cream maker and let it mix it up a little, and put the results into the freezer until it's nice and firm.

Finally, was dinner! We decided to make US Senate Bean Soup, famous for the fact that's it's been on the US Senate cafeteria menu for over a century. Unfortunately, apparently all the groceries in south Jersey seemed to be out of ham hocks, so we had to improvise.

US Senate Bean Soup

Ingredients:

Half a bag of navy beans

A dinner ham

Half a tablespoon of black pepper

A tablespoon of salt

Three stalks of celery

One small onion

One medium-sized potato

7 cups water

Two chopped cloves of garlic

A pinch of parsley

First of all, combine the Navy Beans with the water in a large pot. Heat it to boiling and then remove from heat. Leave the beans for an hour to let them soak.

While waiting for the beans to soak, chop up the celery, onion, potato, and garlic. Combine them all in a bowl with pepper and salt. When the beans have soaked enough, place the ham into the pot and put it over a simmering heat.

Hot Ham Water

Dana dicin' up the ham

Let this cook for about an hour and fifteen minutes, then remove the ham and dice it into small chunks. Put the diced ham into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients and mix them nicely before dumping them all into the pot with the beans and water. Continue to simmer the mixture for another half hour, or until the potatoes are nice and soft.

After the soup is done cooking, put in a pinch of parsley and a little more salt to taste. Ladle it out and enjoy! It was a lot better than even we expected. I got to eat the same soup the likes of JFK, Barack Obama, and Bob Dole ate! And Mitch McConnell... and John McCain... hmm.

Looks tasty

Anyway, I'd definitely recommend it!

New Culinary Direction

So over the last two weeks, Dana and I have set out to cook more than we have. Well, by that I mean cook at all. A couple of my friends suggested that we blog about what we're making. We've started with some really simple recipes, but hopefully we'll branch out soon enough.

Tonight we gathered some ingredients for raspberry sorbet, but then soon realized our biggest obstacle: I don't have a blender or an ice cream maker. So, we ended up with raspberries, sugar, and three pounds of lemons. So, in a stroke of brilliance, we decided to make some raspberry lemonade!

Needs:

Some large bowls

Citrus juicer

Mesh strainer

Pitcher

3-4 medium-sized lemons

One cup sugar

A dozen raspberries

A medium sized (8-10 cup) saucepan

First, put about six cups of water into the saucepan and mix in the cup of sugar. Heat until it boils for about two minutes, then remove from heat to let it cool. After it's reasonably close to room temperature, pour the sugar-water into a large bowl and put it into the fridge to cool it further.

While you're waiting for the water to cool off, cut 3-4 lemons in half and squeeze the juice out of them with your juicer. Place the mesh strainer inside a bowl and pour the pulp-and-seed-filled lemon juice into the strainer to separate out the juice. Place your dozen or so raspberries in another bowl and mash them up - I used a spreader, but a spoon would probably do in a pinch.

Once the water is nice and cool, pour it into the pitcher and combine it with the lemon juice and raspberries pulp. Stir it up nicely and repeat the process you did with the lemon juice - pour it through the strainer into another bowl. Return the newly seedless mixture back into the pitcher. Add about half a dozen ice cubes and return it to the fridge to cool off.

To serve, we poured about two and a half cups of the stuff into each of two mason jars. We added a couple more ice cubes to each mason jar and a splash of vodka in each just to make things interesting. Anyway, it turned out a nice, pretty pink color:

Voila! It could have used a little more lemon juice (it had a much stronger raspberry flavor than lemon), but it was pretty great. Tomorrow, we're aiming to make some US Senate Bean Soup. Wish us luck!

Hypnodog

He knows.

AAAAGH

Why does the east coast suck so much? There are literally no grocery stores open after midnight here. WHAT WILL I DO IF I WANT GRAPES AT 3:17AM?!

Seriously I wish there was one. I want to pick up bread and milk.

King Corn

I'm sure everybody who's lived in America at any point is familiar with high fructose corn syrup. Virtually every product on the market today which contains any sweetener at all also contains HFCS rather than actual cane sugar. I've been interested in exactly why this happened for awhile now, and thought I'd share some research and thoughts on here.

Before the 1970s, high fructose corn syrup was basically unheard of. Products contained mainly beet or cane sugars, which were generally imported from several countries around the world. The United States keeps nearly all sugar it grows locally, in addition to very large imports of the commodity. This was a perceived problem in the early seventies. Imports were expensive, and importing this large amount of cane and beet sugar was a necessary evil that caused food prices to stay fairly stable. A man named Earl Butz was appointed as the Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon. The goals of the administration included reducing the amount of money the average American spent on food. This would allow them to consume more in the other areas of their lives, stimulating the economy. So how exactly did they decide to do this?

Butz was well known for encouraging a monoculture attitude when it came to farming. That is, he wanted farmers to plant their entire field with the same crop. Now, anyone who's up on their nineteenth century Irish history knows one of the big problems with monocultures - vulnerability to a single pathogen or other irritant. This is circumvented quite well by new farming technologies such as pesticides and genetic engineering, making the issue nearly moot.

Nearly.

Now, what crop did you suppose Butz and the USDA decided to focus on? What crop is the one you're most used to seeing when driving through rural areas in practically any state, in particular the nation's breadbasket? Corn, of course. The United States grows nearly half of corn worldwide. This is mainly because of extensive use of high fructose corn syrup; for this reason, the corn you see growing in most fields is engineered to be perfect for this purpose.

High Fructose Corn Syrup has recently surpassed cane and beet sugar in American consumption.

Modern field corn is different from sweet corn. It has a distinctly chalky taste, as it has sacrificed the majority of its nutrition (proteins and minerals) for starch, which makes it more useful for being broken down. This is not a unique phenomenon to corn - most crops now are engineered not for nutrition, but for yields. Under Nixon and Butz, farms were encouraged to buy and sell in bulk. Subsidies, which had been based on the size of farms in the past, were now based on yield. While this may seem reasonable at first, if one looks at the practical effects, it means the more efficient a farmer is in growing crops, the more money the government bestows upon him. Thus, it's no longer a goal to farm nutritious or high quality crops, but rather to grow as much as possible.

The shift in governmental policy coincided with the rise of big agriculture business. Farmers were advised by the USDA to "get big or get out" by Butz, and the end of feasibility for the family farm fast approached. Large corporations were able to purchase chemicals and equipment in bulk, saving them millions. Small and family farms struggled to keep up with the ridiculous efficiency of these titans, and were quickly forced to tap out of the business for good. In turn, the corporations used farming techniques like genetic engineering to increase the size of their yield (and decrease the nutrition of their crops) and thereby increase the size of their subsidy check.

Americans noticed that the quantity of food went up for their dollar while completely blind to the quality rapidly diminishing. Obesity has since become an epidemic as the demand was increased by the supply. Larger portions of cheaper, less nutritious food were offered to the masses; more food was necessary to supplement that lack of nutrition. Hence, obesity has become America's most prevalent health problem. People not only now have extremely high caloric intake, but the computer revolution has caused sedentary lifestyles to become the norm.

And it's no surprise that when the makers of the documentary King Corn had their hair tested, they averaged 56% corn in composition. The documentary sees two college friends and their quest to know the corn industry inside and out. In the process, they move to an Iowa farm to grow an acre of corn, receiving $28 in Federal subsidy for their effort. The two plant 31,000 kernels of corn in eighteen minutes thanks to modern technology; they spend about two hours farming over the entire year. Of course, owning a thousand or fifteen-hundred acres requires far more effort, but not nearly as much as it used to. The film is amazingly informative and I highly recommend it.

The corn watertower in my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota.

Condolences

Been a hectic day thus far, but things have finally cooled down enough to allow me to post on here, even very briefly. I was running around trying to do things I've never done before, which is always fun, especially when I screw everything up and have to undo and redo everything! Woo!

Anyway, some sad news from this morning. Brian, my partner in crime/mentor caught wind this morning that his father passed away sometime last night. Thus, this week may be a lot more busy than I've been anticipating. Never fear, though, since Kevin will be around and will cover the stuff I won't be here for, namely the 4am stuff that there's no way I can make it in for after working until midnight the night previous.

Hopefully Brian and his family are doing alright after the sad news. At the very least I hope the funeral offers him a bit of closure.

EDIT: Lame. Somebody ate half of the Chex Mix stuff I brought in for a snack today. =(