An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
Posted in environment, food, history & archaeology on Dec 18th, 2009
From Hurriyet Daily NewsAncient seed sprouts plant from the past.
A 4,000-year-old lentil seed found during an archeological excavation has germinated, exciting scientists as the event might lead to invaluable data for comparisons between the organic and genetically engineered plants of today. It would be the first seed from very old times whose genes were never [...]
From The Atlantic: In Italy, Eating Gets Graded.
The day my daughter’s kindergarten teacher called me into her Italian classroom to tell me my child was failing lunch, I knew I had run up against the great continental culinary divide. As an American married to an Italian, I’ve lived off and on in Italy for years, [...]
From Science Daily: Ice Cream May Target The Brain Before Your Hips, Study Suggests.
Blame your brain for sabotaging your efforts to get back on track after splurging on an extra scoop of ice cream or that second burger during Friday night’s football game.
Findings from a new UT Southwestern Medical Center study suggest that fat from [...]
Posted in food on Sep 19th, 2009
Got grapes? Try this Winemakers’ Grape Cake recipe from globalgourmet.com. The intro:
Come September, I prepare this cake often, taking advantage of whatever clusters of grapes I can find on our vines after harvesting. At Chanterduc, we grow a mixture of Grenache, Syrah and Morvedre grapes, each of which contributes its own personality to the wine [...]
Today’s Globe and Mail tells the story behind Célestin, a restaurant in Toronto run by a paraplegic chef.
It could be said that the unusual bond was formed between the two men because Mr. Shannon broke an unwritten rule in the legal profession, the one that says lawyers aren’t supposed to become emotionally involved with clients.
Less [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Mar 23rd, 2009
From the Times Online: Old beer’s secret is ale at sea.
A Scottish brewery claims to have produced the first authentic India pale ale (IPA) in almost 200 years by ageing the beer aboard a trawler in the North Sea.
BrewDog, a Scottish micro-brewery based in Fraserburgh, has used an original recipe to produce the ale, which [...]
Posted in food on Feb 26th, 2009
From Harold McGee in the NYT: How Much Water Does Pasta Really Need?
Some time ago, as I emptied a big pot of pasta water into the sink and waited for the fog to lift from my glasses, a simple question occurred to me. Why boil so much more water than pasta actually absorbs, only to [...]
From the Beeb: Hope over peanut allergy ‘cure’.
A group of children with peanut allergies have had their condition effectively cured, doctors believe.
A team from Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital exposed four children to peanuts over a six-month period, gradually building up their tolerance.
By the end the children were eating the equivalent of five peanuts a day. [continue]
(Link [...]
From Time.com: Vertical Farming.
Dickson Despommier became the guru of vertical farming because his students were bummed out. A professor of environmental health at Columbia University in New York City, Despommier teaches about parasitism, environmental disruption and other assorted happy topics. Eventually his students complained; they wanted to work on something optimistic. So the class began [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Dec 27th, 2008
From the L.A. Times: When the woolly mammoth ran out, early man turned to roasted vegetables.
Long before early humans in North America grew corn and beans, they were harvesting and cooking the bulbs of lilies, wild onions and other plants, roasting them for days over hot rocks, according to a Texas archaeologist.
The evidence for this [...]
Posted in food on Nov 18th, 2008
From the New York Times: 12-Year-Old’s a Food Critic, and the Chef Loves It.
Everyone’s a critic, and apparently it’s never too soon to start.
That’s why David Fishman, an Upper West Sider who turned 12 last month, decided to take himself out for dinner one night last week. His parents had called him at home to [...]
Posted in food on Nov 14th, 2008
OK, who has a microwave oven? I don’t, so I’m relying on you to test this recipe and let me know how it goes. From howto.wired.com: Make cake in a mug.
You’re working at home and your mind starts to wander to snack possibilities. There are probably some prepackaged, good-until-the-next-millennium baked items in your cabinet, but [...]
From the New York Times: Dry-Ice Martini and Electric Cake.
When does a recipe become a science project?
Is it when the compulsion to create an edible electrical circuit keeps a cook up all night, wrapping Twizzler string licorice in pure silver?
Is it when a baker decides to bake 20 equilateral-triangle-shaped pecan pies for Thanksgiving, then attach [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Oct 24th, 2008
From discovery.com: World’s oldest cooked cereal was instant.
European diners around 8,000 years ago could enjoy a bowl of instant wheat cereal that, aside from uneven cooking and maybe a few extra lumps, wasn’t very different from hot wheat cereals served today, suggests a new study that describes the world’s oldest known cooked cereal.
Dating from between [...]
One of my fantasies has come true, but alas — for somebody else, not for me. Slashfood explains:
When a woman in Marino, a small Italian town south of Rome, turned on her kitchen tap, she got a spurt of wine instead of water. "Miracolo!" she shouted, and ran outside to tell others.
Word quickly spread, and [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Sep 26th, 2008
From The Times: City restaurant offers feast fit for a polar explorer.
He was the very model of the Edwardian gentleman explorer: the heroic trailblazer of the polar south and inspiration to generations of intrepid spirits. Sir Ernest Shackleton has never, however, provided much in the way of inspiration for London’s chefs.
To the men who followed [...]
Posted in books & lit, food on Sep 23rd, 2008
Now this is the kind of thing that makes the Internet worthwhile. From the Guardian: Library to share 14th-century royal cookbook online.
A rare medieval cookbook is to be digitally photographed page by page and the results uploaded to the internet for gourmands around the globe to study.
Forme of Cury, a recipe book compiled by King [...]
Posted in food, gardening, history & archaeology on Sep 23rd, 2008
From the Beeb: Romans ‘brought leeks to Wales’.
The Romans gave us roads, plumbing, wine and irrigation and now it seems they may have also introduced Wales’ unofficial icon — the garden leek.
The National Museum of Wales says the Romans probably planted domesticated varieties to flavour their stews. [continue]
Posted in food on Sep 21st, 2008
From the Univesity of Toronto’s alumni magazine: Lunchtime Express.
Students living in residence often reach year’s end with unused credit on their meal plans. Students Against Hunger (SAH) converts donated meal credits into bagged lunches for the homeless in Toronto.
Olivier Sorin, a former don at the Margaret Addison residence, recalls the meeting in fall 2003 when [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Sep 20th, 2008
I happened to notice this in one of our cookbooks, A Mediterranean Feast.
A medieval instrument for forming macaroni is still used today in Calabria. Ferrassoli or ferrazzuoli is a kind of pasta made with a device called a ferreti, a thin iron rod. A ball of dough is rolled as thick as a pencil and [...]
From csmonitor.com: A ‘miracle tree’ that could feed sub-Saharan Africa.
As a child growing up in India, I greeted the appearance of one particular vegetable on my plate with exaggerated distaste: tender seedpods from the moringa tree, locally known as "drumsticks." Imagine my surprise when I heard a health worker from sub-Saharan Africa describe this backyard [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Sep 12th, 2008
From The Guardian: Stone-age pilgrims trekked hundreds of miles to attend feasts.
Stone age people drove animals hundreds of miles to a site close to Stonehenge to be slaughtered for ritual feasts, according to scientists who have examined the chemical signatures of animal remains buried there.
The research suggests that Neolithic people travelled further than archaeologists had [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Sep 10th, 2008
From the Times Online: Another slice of magpie tart, please.
When the culinary arts began to flourish across Europe in the Middle Ages, British courts were as self-consciously enthusiastic as their Italian and French counterparts. Instead of wasting money on foreign wars, Richard II’s court was conspicuously lavish when it came to food and drink. In [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Sep 5th, 2008
From Science Daily: Significance Of Milk In Development Of Culture To Be Studied.
The capacity to drink and tolerate milk may have been of tremendous importance for the cultural development of Europe. In a major EU project, being launched today and coordinated by Uppsala University in Sweden, researchers will now study when and where this capacity [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Sep 3rd, 2008
From hallman.com we have a translation of a old Kwakuitl recipe: How to cook a whale found dead.
A kettle of water is set to boil on the beach, and the strips are boiled to render the oil. The oil is ladled off and stored in watertight storage boxes. Whale oil is best stored in the [...]