What I’m reading, what I’m keen on

Per NPR’s recommendation, I’m putting The Fortune Cookie Chronicles down as a “to-read” book in my Goodreads profile. It looks awesome, especially because it’s about food and exploring one’s heritage as an Asian-American.

Right now, I’m reading Kim Sunée’s Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home.  It’s wonderfully written, although sometimes Sunée has a way with words that seem too fanciful for me, too much like the poet she seems to be.  I still have a bit more to go until I complete the book, but an interesting thing to note is that at the end of many chapters, Sunée includes recipes, often those which pertain to the point in her life at the time: whispery eggs with crabmeat and herbs, croque-madame, Jansson’s frestelse, chocolate cake with mascarpone-chestnut cream, kimchi soup.  In sharing these recipes, the author shares part of her history, her personal food memoir, along with the written words of her life and emotions as she finds her place in the world.

Kim Sunée has a website, which includes a lovely blog and a travel & food section, which I hope to explore should I ever find myself in the cities… and with the money to back up my appetite and aspirations.  Any and all who may care to sponsor my dream, please contact me!  I will write a book and include you in the acknowledgements!

The Big Beef Recall

My father told me about this, as I’ve been kind of out of it lately, but right now the United States is in the midst of the largest beef recall in this nation’s history.  143 million pounds of beef is being recalled from California company Westland/Hallmark, which has a plant in nearby Polk county.

Interestingly, there are some shoulder-shrugs, as much of the meat has already been eaten, per this BBC News article.  But still, “downer” cattle–cows that are visibly sick or ill and therefore unable to walk themselves to down the line to slaughter–are at a higher risk of BSE, aka mad cow disease.  Should one diseased animal get into the meat grinder, the meat from such an animal could infect an untold amount of processed and packaged foods consumed in homes, restaurants and school lunches.

If you are curious as to what exactly the video shows, you can watch it here (I’m having difficulty with the code… or with WordPress), although you have to know the video depicts very graphic scenes, including animals being shoved with forklifts, shocked with electrical prods and blasted with high-pressure water.  It is wrong on two counts: one for being inhumane, and another for being in your food.  I agree with Wayne Pacelle, president of the US Humane Society, who stated, “A recall of this staggering scale proves that it’s past time for Congress and the USDA to strengthen our laws for the sake of people and animals.”

Interestingly, the good folks at GOOD Magazine released their new March/April issue with a surprisingly apt feature on the American beef industry.  You can see a related video on their website: Happy Meal.

Vegan bakey-bakey

A recent Kitchen Window article from NPR entitled Vegan Valentine has a trio of delicious-looking recipes, with the Chocolate Cake with Chocolate “Butter Cream” looking especially fantastic. Along the same vein, I recently ordered a book through the library, The Joy of Vegan Baking, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, and I’m looking forward to receiving it. The website has a few sample recipes, including another chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Really, you can’t have too much of a good thing.

In any case, I’m excited to get the book, although it might be a while, since I’m ordering it through the library and it could take as long as a month. At least I’ve found some people online who give it the thumbs-up; The Joy of Vegan Baking has been endorsed by Eat Air - A Vegan Food Log, and the photos they have up of their concoctions look yum, especially the cookies shaped like squirrels and acorns. I want squirrel-shaped cookie cutters. It would be even cooler to have squirrel and blue jay cookie cutters, then I can have the cookies fight each other, like I’ve seen them do in real life. Really, I think the two species have arboreal turf wars; I saw a blue jay chase a squirrel away outside my window before.

Anyway, I’m not vegan, but I’m interested in vegan baking because I’ve known a few vegans, and it seems to me that one of the hardest things about being vegan is dealing with baked goods: Does it have eggs? Does it have milk? Honey? Gelatin?

In the past, I’ve done my own vegan experimentations with some successes, like my Cinnamon Vegan Banana-Blueberry Cake, but also some misses. A batch of biscuits I made with vegan butter came out ghastly, which I suspect may have been due to the softness of the vegan spread in comparison to real butter in the same temperature–and the soy flour may have had something to do with it as well. Also, I can’t help but be annoyed with some vegan substitute products which, upon close inspection, hardly seem like suitable substitutes. I was using Tofutti’s Sour Supreme sour cream substitute in the “Cinna-gan-nana-berry Cake” until I read the ingredients, which included partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Apparently, the company now makes a non-hydrogenated version, but good luck finding it at Publix. My question is: Why don’t they just make the regular version non-hydrogenated? Should vegans really have to choose between dairy and trans-fats?

Orlando actually has a couple of vegan-friendly spots with baked goods. Earlier this evening I was at Dandelion, and there were vegan cupcakes in the display case. There is also Ethos, which I have yet to go to, but I’ve heard they have vegan baked goods as well, which their menu confirms.

If you want to try your hand at vegan bakey-bakey, there are quite a few online resources that put me to shame in how little I’ve buggered with egg- and dairy-free baking. The BBC has an article on New ways of baking with, guess what, a recipe for a chocolate cake, although this particular recipe is raising an eyebrow with its “2 tbsp tahini.” Tahini? Moving on, the Post Punk Kitchen has more vegan baking tips and recipes. Chocolate cake? Check. If you’re looking for recipes and baking tips, ChooseVeg.com has some, although one ought to be aware of the graphic photos of animal abuse on its home page (Aaah! The chicken has no eyes!), so if you want to go straight to the recipes, click here. Chocolate cake recipe? Hell, they have a video on making theirs.

Should you be too intimidated to bake from scratch, or if you really want convenience short of a drive to Ethos or Dandelion, Goodbaker and Black Sheep Bakery sell baking mixes on their respective websites, though I can’t attest for how good these are, having not tried them (thoughts, anyone?). You can go a step further and order vegan baked goods online for delivery. Go ahead and Google it or use the Kanye West search engine (I’m serious, it really exists), or go to Etsy and check out their vegan section in “Plants and Edibles.” Some of the Etsy photos for these foodstuffs are nothing short of sexy.

And on Valentine’s Day, who doesn’t want sexy food?

Food Sense article

I came across another WordPress blog with an interesting article entitled Freaky Fast Food Facts, and I’d like to recommend it to anyone who eats fast food on a big or little scale, as well as those of you interested in any sort of “food reform” in the United States. The blogger is Diane Carlyle, whose modus operendi can be read here:

As a certified health counselor, I know that good health has to do with more than just the food we eat. How much we exercise, how we handle stress, how we choose to nourish our spirit and our relationships, and even how much we laugh all have an impact on our health. What’s more, food or a dietary regimen that is beneficial for one person may not be beneficial for another!

With so much information out there - and with a lot of it seeming to change overnight - it can be confusing to know what to eat or what to do. Keeping up with the latest food recommendations, diets, health tips, and opinions is a passion of mine, and so I created this blog to be a go-to resource to find out what’s new, all of it tempered with a healthy dose of commonsense based on my experience and training as a health counselor.

So far, there are only two articles in the Food Sense blog, but I’m looking forward to seeing future writings, as I’m interested in this sort of thing, being a lover of food and all, and having read a bit of Marion Nestle’s books (but not enough, unfortunately) and seen Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me.

Counter Culture

Today I called in sick, and during my day of guzzling tea, dipping into my Pooh-sized stash of honey, playing Final Fantasy X-2 (oh, have I mentioned I’m a complete dork?) and generally festering around as a sick person does, I was reading an article in my latest issue of BUST magazine about Candacy Taylor’s multimedia project called Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress. The article features a small sample of Taylor’s work documenting the mature diner waitresses that bring us food and coffee, tell us about their ex-husbands and put up with our shit along the roads that criss-cross America.

You can see Taylor’s waitresses and read what they have to say about serving coffee and other things at CareerWaitresses.com. There’s even audio clips, which truly makes Taylor’s work “multimedia.” You probably won’t look at your local IHOP waitress the same.

Art that’s a Piece of Cake

There was a link to this article in my recent VenusZine newsletter, and I thought I’d share. It’s about Amy Stevens, an artist who takes photographs of rather over-the-top kitchy cakes she makes, some of which you can see in the little gallery in the article. The fabrics used as background for the cakes really take the whole piece up to a level of overload.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it? I thought so. Here’s the article from VenusZine: Avant garde confectioneries. You can see more of Stevens’ work on her webste, amystevensart.com, which isn’t just limited to her cake photos.