Food, Ethics & the Environment

Princeton University has the audio from a conference, held last November, concerning ethical food on its podcast feed. Since they're Princeton, they were able to coax a number of the big names into speaking on the panel. The first session features Peter Singer, professor of Bioethics at Princeton, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation. Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating, and Gary Nabhan, speak in session two. They discuss healthy eating and local/regional foods. In session three Becky Goldburg, Gidon Eshel, and Paul Shapiro talk about collapsing fisheries, climate change, and animal welfare. Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilema, and Bob Langert, McDonald's Vice President for Corporate Social Responsibility, talk in session four, while session five is dedicated to a panel from the Princeton community and the discussion of their own strivings for ethical food practices. All in all it is an excellent introduction to issues regarding the ethics of our food system, and a number of the speakers give good suggestions for individual action on those fronts.

Shortbread

When I was a kid my mom had some sort of party (Tupperware?) at the house. We kids had to stay in our room, but our dad sneaked back bars of shortbread for us. No shortbread has ever tasted as good as those clandestine cookies, but that doesn't keep me from trying every once in a while. I usually use the basic Scotch Shortbread recipe from The Joy of Cooking, so here it is with some variations garnered from Chocolate and Zucchini.

Ingredients

• 1 cup/227 grams salted butter, somewhat softened
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 2 cups flour, or substitute 1/4 cup with cornmeal or rice flour
  
• pinch of salt (if needed)
• insides of a vanilla bean, or zest from a Meyer lemon (optional)
  

Equipment

• mixing bowl
• whisk
  
• big spoon
  
• 9x9 baking pan or near equivalent
• fork

1. Preheat oven to 325˚F/160˚C.
2. Cream the sugar and butter with the whisk or a fork.
3. Mix in the rest of the dry ingredients. Unless it's hot the dough should be somewhat crumbly and stiff. If not add a little extra flour.
4. Press the dough into the pan and prick it with the fork every half inch or so.
5. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes until golden.
6. Cut into bars or wedges immediately upon removing from the oven. Cool completely before removing from the pan.

Options: Chocolate chips or nuts, pecans especially, are nice with short bread. You can mix them into the dough, or press them into the dough after you prick it with a fork. That's my preference. You can also sprinkle crystal or turbinado sugar over the top before baking. These make a great breakfast with hot chocolate or tea, if you plan on having a sluggish morning.

More options (added 27 April 2008): I'm experimenting with lavender sugar, which I intend to add to this recipe if it works out. However, a pinch of lavender added to the butter and sugar while they're mixing mixing makes for a lightly lavender flavored shortbread, which is just delicious.

Healthier (‽) Powdered Sugar

We try to avoid refined sugars so that when we do use sugar we can at least pretend it's not doing us any harm. Powdered sugar was the major stumbling block, but no longer.

Ingredients

• 1 cup unrefined sugar (evaporated cane juice, demerara, turbinado)
• 1 tsp cornstarch (this reduces clumping)

Equipment

• blender or food processor with a spice attachment, or coffee mill

1. Pulse.
2. And pulse.
3. And pulse, and pulse, and pulse.
4. As the sugar becomes a powder its cohesion increases, and it will begin to climb the sides. If it starts to hit the top of the spice attachment, that's probably good enough. In the picture above it's almost to that point.

Options: I wonder if you could do this with sucanat? Or granulated maple sugar? That would be weird.

Tomate Frito

This is a typical Spanish tomato sauce, and it was all I used when I lived in Spain. When I couldn't find it back in the States I sadly put it out of my mind hoping that the inferior, over-sweet flavor of Hunt's or Hill Country Fare would again become familiar. I don't know why it never occurred to me to make it myself. Probably the fact that tomatoes are outrageously expensive in the States, while I can get 3 kilos for 25 ฿ (about 70¢) here in Thailand. I'll have to talk J's Papa into growing more Brandywines for me (no one there likes to eat them since they look lumpy).

Ingredients

• 3 kilos/6.5 lbs of ripe tomatoes
• 5 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp evaporated cane juice
• 1 garlic clove
• a sprig of parsley or basil

Equipment

• 2 sterile quart jars or 4 pint jars
• large pot
• sieve
  
• knives and stuff
• blender
  

1. Seed and chop the tomatoes. Save the seeds so you can strain the juice back into your chopped tomatoes.
2. Add the oil to the pot, then the tomatoes and everything else. Don't bother chopping the garlic or parsley.
3. Heat to a boil, stirring and mashing the tomatoes occasionally.
4. Reduce heat to a low simmer and cover for 30 minutes. Continue stirring and mashing.
5. Run it through the blender, and mix the results (it will take 3-4 batches) for the sake of homogenization.
6. Can the results. Since this is an acid food all it needs is 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

Options: You can render a chopped onion or two in the oil before you add the tomatoes. Some recipes call for a dash of pepper. Use this like you would any tomato sauce. You'll never go back.

Yum, wolf-peaches.

Spaghetti "Pad Grathiem"

The pollution here in Chiang Mai can wreak havoc on your body. Right now, at the height of the dry season with everyone burning the stubble off their rice fields, the air quality is wretched. Visibility is about 500 meters, and breathing the air is the equivalent of smoking 5 packs a day. Back when it started getting bad J began getting a rash on her legs. We asked around and a lot of people said it might be related to the pollution, but no one knew of anything that might help other than antihistamines. After getting the rash every night for a week, there was one night of relief, and then another. J realized that both days she'd eaten mu pad grathiem (pork with fried garlic, charmingly referred to as "murinated pork" on the menu) for lunch. Somehow the garlic neutralizes the toxins, allowing her to get an itch free night's sleep. Thus began the garlic fest, mu pad grathiem for lunch, roasted garlic on toast in the afternoon, spaghetti with garlic for dinner.

Jokingly we call this dish spaghetti "pad grathiem." Jami says that she originally got the idea from Nigella Lawson, which makes my heart sink. Most of her recipes are tasteless and bland, and after being betrayed by her ham in Coke and hopeless black beans, I no longer trust her. Every once in a while J will try to sneak one past me, and invariably I ask why a tasty key ingredient seems to be missing. However, according to J this one almost got left out of Nigella's cookbook on the grounds that it was too simple, and probably too tasty. Naturally my version has mutated somewhat, and is no longer a mere descendant of the original.

Ingredients

• enough spaghetti for 2 people
• a handful of sea salt of kosher salt
  
• 2 quarts of water
• 6-9 sun-dried tomatoes
• 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil
• 3-6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2-3 dried peppers, crushed
• salt to taste

1. Bring the water to a boil and pour some over the sun-dried tomatoes (they should be in a bowl).
2. Throw a handful of salt into the boiling water, add the pasta and cook it al dente.
3. Chop your garlic and crush your peppers.
4. Drain and rinse your pasta.
5. By now (about 10 minutes) your tomatoes should be soft. Chop them up, and reserve their liquid for stock.
6. Heat the oil in a skillet over low heat, and fry your garlic and peppers until the garlic is golden.
7. Add your tomatoes, coat them in oil, then add the pasta and coat it in oil.
8. Add salt if the pasta didn't absorb enough while you cooked it.

Options: This is an easy base to build on. You could add some finely chopped onions with the garlic and peppers, then add 1/3 cup of tomate frito, or two tablespoons of tomate frito and some cream. Maybe a little basil?

Nigella, non ti voglio bene.

How to Cut a Mango

Mangoes are a juicy, slippery fruit with leathery skin, and getting that skin off without turning your mango into an orange pulp can be a challenge. My favorite way to peal a mango is to: 1) find a tree full of ripe mangoes, 2) climb it, 3) pick a ripe mango, 4) bite it at very tip of the small end, but not all the way through, 5) peel skin off in strips with your teeth, 6) devour mango, 7) suck on seed, 8) descend tree, 9) wash face and hands. That technique may not be ideally suited to all circumstances, so you can use this trick I learned in the town of Esperanza in the Dominican Republic instead.

1. Begin at the back of the mango, next to the stem, slicing along the seed. Mangoes are bilaterally symetrical, and your mango should be laying on its side, looking for all the world like a bloated comma, as in the picture above.

2. Lay one half to the side and begin on the second.

3. Ok?

4. Peel the central portion. If you begin next to the stem again, it should all come off in one piece.

5. Slice through the flesh left on the seed on all sides, as seen above, cutting across until your knife hits the seed. Then slice along the seed, going with the grain (cuting from stem to tip) to liberate your cubes.

6. Score the remaining two pieces in a grid, being careful not to cut through the peel. Then invert the piece by pushing on the peel side, making two little exploded mango hedgehogs. This is a great place to stop if you're preparing the fruits for presentation. They are also easy to eat at this point.

7. Slice cubes off the two halves into a bowl.

8. ¡Se acaba, ya!

Rendering Lard

We miss flour tortillas something awful, and if we're going to make them right we need lard. I'm sure we could find some at one of the local, farang oriented stores, but store-bought lard tends to be hydrogenated, and therefore full of transfats. Also, our weekly market sells fatback and porkbelly for about 80 ฿ a kilo, not that you end up with a kilo of lard, since the cuts have a lot of meat on them (we just save it for fajitas). This recipe is for dry rendered lard.

Ingredients

• leaf lard (fat from around the kidneys and loin), or fatback (as much as you think you can manage)
  
• a tablespoon or two of water
  

Equipment

• knife
• chopping block
• a pan of manageable size
• a clean piece of muslin
• a sterile glass jar with a lid
• a rubber band
  
• oven preheated to 150˚ C, 300˚F
  

1. Chop the fat into small cubes, removing any meat, especially from the fatback. You can leave the skin on if you like, since it will fry and be delicious with a dash of salt.
2. Spread the fat evenly in the pan with some water, and stick it in the oven.
3. Cover the top of the jar with the muslin, attaching it with the rubber band.
4. As liquid fat begins to form pour it off into the the jar. This doesn't take that long, so keep a close eye on your lard.
5. Eventually less and less fat will liquefy, and you'll be left with a pan full of cracklings.
6. Cap your jar, and once the lard has cooled to room temperature place it in the fridge. Many people freeze their lard, but if you have a small quantity and will use it soon, don't bother.

Options: There are some instructions for wet rendered lard here, and some traditional recipes here.

On the Art of Whipping Cream, or "Just Knowing When"

When I told Jami she should help me write up some tips for whipping cream, her response was, "How? You just have to know." I guess you do, but since I don't, I imagine there must be a trick, or a secret word, that will allow troglodytes like myself to join the ranks of that mensa chrismata.

Ingredients

• 1 pint heavy cream
• 4-6 tbsp evaporated cane juice, to taste
  

Equipment

• a mixer with whisk attachment, or even a regular old blender

1. Add the cream to the mixing bowl or blender.
2. Mix on high, adding sugar 1 tbsp at a time.
3. The cream is whipped when it has enough body to stand up on its own without collapsing back into a liquid, but before it becomes dense. If you use a blender the whipped cream might tend somewhat to the butter end the spectrum.

Options: Skip the sugar and just keep mixing until you have butter. Try it just for fun. If you use confectioner's sugar instead, which contains cornstarch, it will help stabilize the cream, and reduce the risk of over-whipping.

Strawberry Mango Crêpes Filler or Pancake/Waffel Topping

Yum!

Ingredients

• 1 large mango
• 2-3 handfuls of strawberries, as many as you like
• evaporated cane juice, or sugar, as much as you like

1. Quarter the strawberries, or slice them into smaller sections if they're large.
2. Cut up the mango. There's an easy way to do it here.
3. Mix fruits in a bowl with the sugar. The sugar draws moisture from the fruit, making a watery syrup--so, the more the merrier.
4. Allow the sugared fruits time to sit. About 10-15 minutes.

Options: Any fleshy, juicy fruit should work treated like this: kiwi, papaya, peaches, apricots. If you try this with anything in the genus Rubus (blackberry, dewberry, raspberry, boysenberry, salmonberry) just bruise the fruits slightly by mixing in the sugar with a blunt instrument.

Mangoes are in the Anacardiaceae, along with cashews, pistachios, sumac, and poison ivy. Strawberries are in the Rosaceae along with peaches, plums, almonds, pears, apples, quince, hawthorn, the above mentioned fruits in the genus Rubus, and, of course, the rose. I used to think that the mango might be in the Rosaceae since it is a drupe with a structure much like a peach, but the taste of the sap in the skin should have helped me catch on to the fact that it is related to sumac.

Sweet Crêpes

We miss our nice crêpes pans. They're hidden away in a garage, missing us back, I'm certain. There's nothing quite like blue steel that has never seen soap. We've been having to use a crummy fry pan coated with flaking Teflon. Yuck.

This recipe is fairly standard, and probably came from Cook's Illustrated. Maybe. There are others that include more eggs, or less milk, or no sugar. This one works well for us.

Ingredients

• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tbsp water
• 1 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 tsp melted butter

Equipment

• a blue steel crêpes pan, well seasoned cast-iron comal, or other small no-stick pan
  
• a wooden crêpes turner (just make your own from a 3/16" x 2" x 10" piece of oak or ash)

1. Throw all the ingredients in a blender and pulse several times, then blend for about 20-30 seconds. Don't whip the eggs.
2. Alternatively, mix the liquid ingredients in a bowl then stir in the dry ingredients with a whisk.
3. Let the batter rest, covered, for an hour, or even overnight in the fridge. This allows the particles of flour to completely absorb the liquids.
4. Blend/stir the batter one last time before cooking the crêpes.
5. Heat your pan over medium heat, and wipe some butter into it with a paper towel. There should be enough butter in the batter not to need any more. If the crêpes start sticking whipe in a little more.
6. Pour one sloppy, sacrificial crêpe to get your swishing wrist in practice (you roll the pan to coat it with a thin coat of batter), and to make sure the heat is right.
7. I never measure out my batter, but a scant 1/4 cup should work.
8. Turn the crêpe once the edges begin to brown lightly by running the crêpes turner under the edges before going for the center. This is where a genuine crêpes pan will come in handy since the edges are so low.
9. Brown the other side lightly.

Options: We have yet to experiment with savory crêpes, when we do we'll post a recipe. These are great with all kinds of fillers. Lately we've been using fresh strawberries and mangoes. Homemade whipped cream is a must.

We'll hêv no more of your crêpe.