Mental Masala

The Migration is On: A New Post at Slices of Blue Sky

2016-12-08T12:30:00.000-05:00

Sequence by Richard Serra (while it was at Stanford)

Another post is up at Slices of Blue Sky: "Cocoa...Might Well be Called the Vegetable Egg", a quick look at a 1915 advertisement for Ghirardelli Ground Chocolate that has some optimistic thoughts about the nutritional value of cocoa.

Big News - Mental Masala Is Moving!

2016-12-04T12:25:00.001-05:00

The eastern span of the Bay Bridge

Mental Masala is moving!

The new home for my 11+ years of blogging is Slices of Blue Sky. Today marks the first 'official' post: Fun with a Victorian Slang Dictionary.

After attending the International Food Blogger Conference in July, I resolved to move my blog to a place where I would have more control. I also decided that it was time to pull the plug on Mental Masala and find a new name. So, with help from my Adeline Yoga Studio classmates over after-class coffee and pastries, a great book on naming*, and some blog posts on naming**, I worked for a few weeks to find a new name that also had other useful characteristics (domain availability, etc.). With NameChk, Thesaurus.com, and The Free Dictionary open in a browser, I brainstormed dozens of ideas, typed them into a spreadsheet, and ran many through various tests — some names lasted a few days, others only a few minutes. Eventually, I had my name: Slices of Blue Sky. I set up WordPress on the newly obtained domain, configured it, and copied my archives to the new site. Soon, internet magic will be redirecting Mental Masala links to the new site.

To ensure you join the migration, please update your bookmarks, your RSS feed (the new feed is http://slicesofbluesky.com/feed/), and your Bloglovin subscriptions. I also set up Slices of Blue Sky accounts on Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram if you are using those applications.

Notes
* In the difficult renaming exercise I found great advice in a book on company naming called Hello My Name is Awesome, by Alexandra Watkins of Eat My Words
** Especially helpful were posts in the Blog Naming category at Nose Graze.

TV as Demolition: When the TV Show "Emergency" Filmed in Compton

2016-11-13T10:45:00.001-05:00

Screenshot from "Survival on Charter #220"

One of my less productive minor obsessions is with the 1970s TV show "Emergency." It began when a saw a bit of an episode set in San Francisco, which led me to buy a set of DVD that included the episode when "Emergency" filmed in San Francisco so I could learn the details of the episode. That required watching the whole episode, unfortunately, which was not fun (it is not outstanding television).

The DVD set included an episode about a plane crash called "Survival on Charter #220". As I watched the episode, I became curious about its "making of" story — huge explosions in the middle of a city aren't common, even in Los Angeles. I knew that it was filmed in Compton, California (Los Angeles County), but how did they pick that location? Was it also a training exercise for the fire department? Were the buildings already slated for demolition?

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Faster than a Speeding Broccoli — "Superfood" in Book Titles

2016-11-06T10:15:00.004-05:00

The Superfood Google Ngram was interesting, but I still had a superfood itch that I needed to scratch: what about superfood in book titles? The University of California's Melvyl tool (part of Worldcat) was my tool of choice and I searched for superfood* in book titles (the * to cover superfood and superfoods). The catalog contained more than 600 records [1] — too many to easily analyze, but fortunately the left column of the results page listed the number of books from each year, so a chart was a natural next step.

"It's a Berry, It's a Grain, No, It's a Superfood!" - A Superfood Google Ngram

2016-10-30T13:53:00.001-04:00

My recent post on the superfood called moringa got me wondering: has the term "superfood" been used for a long time? Or is it a recent thing? I went to the Google Ngram Viewer to get an answer. Ngram Viewer displays the frequency of use for a word or phrase in Google's massive collection of digitized materials, and therefore gives a rough sense of the term's popularity over time. You can look at one term, compare multiple terms, combine terms, and more — it is quite amazing. I had some fun comparing ketchup and catsup a while back, finding that ketchup has crushed catsup since 1980.

Up, Up and Away with Superfoods (in the 2000s)

I went to the Ngram Viewer, typed a broad search term ("superfood + superfoods + Superfood + Superfoods") and set the boundaries to 1900 and 2010. Here is the result:

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A Word Cloud About Insects as Food (Entomaphagy)

2016-10-23T10:15:00.000-04:00

For a little while, I was collecting articles about Insects as Food. I thought it would be fun to feed them into a word cloud generator, so I piled the articles into a giant text file, made some small adjustments and pasted the text into one of the free on-line cloud generators. I used WordItOut because it was user friendly and allowed a good amount of creative control.

The word cloud shown below was built using text from 33 articles (over 27,000 words) from a variety of mass-media sources like magazine articles, newspaper articles, blog posts at media websites, and trade publications. They aren't a random sample of news coverage and are probably somewhat cricket heavy. Before submitting the text, I edited the source material to remove plurals from certain top-ranked words (e.g., crickets -> cricket, insects -> insect, etc.).

Cricket is the dominant word since they are the "it insect" of the moment in the U.S. and Canada — they are fairly easy to raise and easy to incorporate into processed foods. The next tier of words includes protein (the most prominent nutritional feature of insects), farm (when a new farm opens, it gets press, especially in farming areas like Iowa or California Central Valley), and flour (converting dried insects into flour is a popular way to bring them to our plates). Interestingly, the word sustainable is in one of the lower tiers, even though it is a major emphasis of insect promoters. Climate and greenhouse (as in climate change and greenhouse gases) don't make an appearance at all on this word cloud.

""Insects as food" in the news"
Click on the link above to see this word cloud at WordItOut. You may also view it on this website if you enable JavaScript (see your web browser settings).

Insects as food word cloud made with WordItOut

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Moringa Leaves and Other Emergency Food Plants of Pacific Islands

2016-10-16T11:20:00.000-04:00

Let's start this post with a bit of fiction:

It's 1944, you're a bomber pilot in the United States Navy, flying missions over Southeast Asia. It's a dangerous job, but you've got a great crew: there's Knute, a.k.a., "Swede", the navigator, a quiet, big-hearted 18-year old blonde kid from northern Minnesota; Tony, the bombardier, a tough-talking street hustler from Brooklyn who's really a Mama's boy; Larry, the tail gunner, a farm boy from Kansas; Bobby, the co-pilot, a laid-back kid from California; Leonard, a.k.a. "Glasses," the radio operator, a nerdy college student from Vermont, who operates the radio. Everyone picks on Leonard because he'd rather read books about Southeast Asia during off-duty hours than hit the bars.

On one mission, you hear an awful sound to your left: the sputter, sputter, sputter of an engine going out. Your plane starts losing altitude, and when it's clear you won't make it back to the carrier, it's bail out time, and soon you're parachuting onto unknown territory. You have a general idea of where you are and where you need to go to reach safety, but your emergency rations aren't enough to feed you on your long journey to safety.

That nerd Glasses might be your life line. One of his interests is botany — he's always looking at plants on the base — and so his flying kit includes a book called Emergency Food Plants and Poisonous Plants of the Islands of the Pacific. And so now the crew knows which plants are food — and which are poisonous — as they make their way across the jungle to a safe haven.

The little fictional lead-in above sets up one of my recent finds in the Internet Archive (via Flickr Commons). While looking in the Flickr Commons, Google Books and Hathi Trust for images of the Moringa oleifera plant, I ran across an ink drawing of the moringa plant in a book from the U.S. War Department that was published in 1943 (I also found the beautiful 19th-century painting that I used in my post about Moringa Leaves). Reading the introduction, I learned that the book was written for members of the U.S. military to help them survive on their own ("live off the land") if they were separated from their unit or escaped from a prisoner of war camp.

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Moringa Leaves, One of Today's Superfoods (Unusual greens, Part 8)

2016-10-09T10:02:00.001-04:00

It's been almost 10 years (!) since I last updated my "Unusual Greens" series — I haven't been exploring markets like I used to and the places I shop almost always have the same few greens (chard, kale, rapini, etc.). Today's featured greens are Moringa oleifera leaves (a.k.a. drumstick tree, horseradish tree, Tree of Life, Miracle Tree [1]). I found them in a round-about way.

I occasionally attend the Slow Money Northern California meetings to learn about new methods of funding or investing in small businesses (like Credibles). At the most recent meeting, samples of a food bar from one of the past presenters (Kuli Kuli) were offered, so I took one. "Moringa Superfood" is prominently written across the middle of the bar, and it turns out that Moringa is the key ingredient in Kuli Kuli's plans for "Nourishing you, nourishing the world." (The bar was OK, a bit high in sugar and with a slightly dissonant grassy undertone.)

At the following week's Berkeley Farmers Market (Tuesday), I noticed that one of the farmers had bundles of moringa leaves for sale. I bought a bunch, and, when he asked me "What are you going to do with them?", I was unable to give a good answer because I didn't know. When I got home, I started hitting the books and internet to find out more about the ingredient.

Painting of moringa oleifera leaves, pod and etc.
from Flore médicale, 1815 (!)

Eleven Years of Mental Masala

2016-10-02T12:36:00.000-04:00

While updating my post list the other day, I realized that it had been almost exactly eleven years since my first post on Mental Masala. My first real post was The Indian Restaurant Menu, in which I tried to understand why almost all Indian restaurant menus in the U.S. are nearly identical.

For the remainder of 2005, I went in many directions (as usual), with the following posts being my favorite from the first few months of Mental Masala, eleven years ago:

The Strawberry's Long Journey: the commercial strawberry has an amazing history that spans continents.
Curry Leaves: the story behind the word "curry."
Is My Blog Burning #20 - Apricot Souffle: my attempt to cook one of Alice Waters' very early recipes. My post was a contribution to a long-gone blogging event called "Is My Blog Burning?" (One of the tools that we used to keep track of the posts was the Technorati tag IMBB. Anyone else remember Technorati tags?)
Slashfood's Pumpkin Day - Pumpkin with tomato, tomatillo, and chipotle sauce: A perfect Autumn recipe for the days when tomatoes, tomatillos, and pumpkin are all in season. It is also great with butternut squash. (Anyone else remember Slashfood and their blogging events?)
Oak Tree Galls: a fun look at a quirk of nature, the formation of galls on oak trees and how humans use them.

My ersatz editorial calendar is full of great ideas, so stay tuned for the return of "Unusual Greens," new charts, some posts about food in ancient Rome, and much more.

To close, here's a song by Fairport Convention with an appropriate title, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?":

Composted and sung by the great Sandy Denny, the song was first released on Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking. (1969). Richard Thompson was a founder of the group and provides superb guitar work on this track (I'm a big fan of his long post-Fairport Convention career). Outside of this amazing song, the album is only OK, with some weak tracks.

For a Fairport Convention album that provides much better examples of Sandy Denny's amazing talent, Liege and Lief (1969) is the one to grab: "Reynardine," "Farewell, Farewell," "The Deserter," "Crazy Man Michael" are all outstanding. Another Sandy Denny high point is the epic 10+ minute "A Sailor's Life" on the early 1990s compilation of Richard Thompson's work, Watching the Dark. It starts with a dreamy somewhat a capella introduction, and at about 3:33 the pace quickens as we hear the story of a search for a missing sailor, building to a few minutes of a stormy instrumental (with Richard Thompson on lead guitar, I presume).

Random link from the archive: Revenge of the Orchard

Millet Production and Use

2016-09-25T10:54:00.002-04:00

Millet plants at UC Berkeley's Gill Tract

This is my second post about millet, a class of grains that doesn't get much attention. The first post gave some background on millet and UC Berkeley's Millet Project, and can be found here: The Millet Project Looks at the Nutritious, Drought Tolerant, Gluten-Free Grains Called Millet.

After learning about the Millet Project, millet's attractive features, its history, and how people eat it, I wanted to find out more about this fascinating group of plants. Where is it grown? Who eats it?

Since this was an international question, I pointed my browser to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and found their statistical collection (FAOSTAT). (For domestic U.S. statistics, I usually start at the USDA Economic Research Service or National Agricultural Statistics Service).

Millet In Three Charts and One Map

In this age of globalization and homogenization, millet is one of a few staple foods that has a sharp geographical concentration: it is the primary staple along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. And with this concentration, millet is a minor grain on the world stage: in 2014, only 27 million tonnes were produced, compared with 741 million tonnes of rice, 729 million tonnes of wheat and 1,038 million tonnes of maize [1] (1 tonne = 1,000 kg = 2,200 pounds).

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The Millet Project Looks at the Nutritious, Drought Tolerant, Gluten-Free Grains Called Millet

2016-09-18T12:39:00.001-04:00

Millet inflorescences at UC Berkeley's Gill Tract

I can get quite nerdy about ingredients (see my ingredients category), so when one of my newsletters told me about an upcoming event called The Millet Project at the nearby Gill Tract, I knew I did not want to miss it.

When I think of millet, I think about the pale yellow spherical grains I see at the health food store or in bird feed. But when an agricultural specialists think about millet, they think about a group of plant. This was the first thing I learned at the event: millet describes a bunch of different plants, and it isn't a botanical term, but an agricultural one. Millets are annual grasses with small seeds, generally including the grain labelled millet in the U.S. and Europe (the proso variety, Panicum miliaceum), its close relatives (like Enchinocloa frumentacea,called shanwa in Japan), teff (Eragrostis tef, also spelled tef and t'ef,the staple grain in Ethiopia and Eritrea), and sorghum (great for making alcoholic beverages). The Millet Project has a page on millet taxonomy that includes photos of some varieties.

Although millet doesn't cross my mind often, if asked to stir up memories of millet, I actually have a few pretty strong ones: fun dinners with my graduate school housemates eating piles of injera and spicy stews at Ethiopia Restaurant on Telegraph in Berkeley, a delicious sorghum molasses gifted by a fellow food blogger, or a delicious millet-fortified bread baked by a housemate.

Thrills at the Millet Project

The Millet Project is an interdisciplinary research project at UC Berkeley that hopes to "establish a knowledge base about the feasibility of growing millets in Northern California, the drought tolerance of millet, and best-practice protocols for farmers on how to grow different types of millet." The team is running experiments in Berkeley and working with farms across the state to get practical experience in California fields. Their 2015 research work is described in a post by undergraduate researcher Ramji K. Pasricha (super-short summary: at the Gill Tract in coastal Alameda County, pearl millet was more resilient to water stress than Japanese or foxtail millet).
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Visiting a Pear Orchard Triggers Interest in Fruit Crate Labels, Part 2

2016-09-11T11:14:00.000-04:00

This is part 2 of a 2-part series about fruit crate labels. Part 1 is here.

"Accidental Artifacts"

In the excellent Pat Jacobsen's Millennium Guide to Fruit Crate Labels, the author calls fruit crate labels "accidental artifacts." It's a good description. They were never meant to be collected, put into price guides, or hung on a wall. They were created to sell fruit, to build or maintain a brand, to be used to label a crate and then be discarded. Yet an active collector community has evolved, libraries build collections (some holdings in California libraries), and many websites and antique stores sell labels. They are actively sought by private and public collectors: Jacobsen reports that in 1992 there were $250,000-300,000 in label sales (in 2016 dollars, that's $428,000-514,000, via BLS Inflation Calculator); individual collections have sold for $250,000 (early citrus labels) and $51,000 (Washington apple labels).

Most of the spare or obsolete labels were destroyed: tossed in the trash, burned, used as scratch pads in the packing house or at the farm. But some survived. They were forgotten in the back of warehouses; or saved by employees because they looked nice or for sentimental reasons; or saved as a record of who you worked for or with. Some design houses kept archives of their label work, or had boxes full of extra labels. Discoveries still occur now and then: a box in the loft of a packing house, packages in the bottom drawer of a dusty file cabinet, a file folder in an attic.

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Visiting a Pear Orchard Triggers Interest in Fruit Crate Labels, Part 1

2016-09-05T10:44:00.001-04:00

(Disclosures: the farm tour was a pre-conference excursion arranged by the International Food Bloggers Conference. Although I paid to go on the excursion, it is possible that California Endive or the California Pear Board provided some subsidies to reduce participants' costs. In addition, I received a discount on the registration fee in exchange for writing three posts about my experiences at the conference.)

The second half of the farm excursion organized by the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC) and California Pear Board was a visit to Stillwater Orchards, a pear farm in Courtland, California (the first half was California Endive Farms).

Like most July days in the area, the skies were clear and the temperature was high. The sun was almost directly overhead, but shade could be found under some of the pear trees (which are generally not very tall to simplify harvest). The conference attendees had a chance to talk with the farmers about pear growing, followed by a delicious lunch beneath a 100+ year old sycamore tree that included a salad with pear and endive, and pear crisp.

Seeing the Stillwater logo on the marketing material at the orchard (which must be many decades old), I started thinking about fruit crate labels — the labels that farmers and packers attached to their fruit crates before they were shipped to markets near and far. I had a bunch of questions: Where did these labels come from? How long were they used? Who designed them?

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"Bobber's Regret": Becoming a Flapper Could Be Stressful

2016-08-28T14:40:00.000-04:00

Not wanting to learn to take high-quality photos for my blog, I often rely on the vast collection of public domain or Creative Commons materials on the internet to illustrate my posts (and frankly, sometimes I think it's more fun to see a picture of a 1940s valentine with a squash and ear of corn than a wonderfully composed picture of a bowl of zucchini-corn soup).

I typically start at The Commons at Flickr which has been the source of many of my best finds (like the aforementioned valentine). The Commons are a work in progress, as participating institutions have loaded a massive quantity of images to the site, often without having any useful information about the image — in some cases, they are hoping that visitors to the Commons will help identify and tag their materials. Consequently, what might seem to be a simple search will sometimes lead you to unexpected treasures.

"Bobber's Regret"

I was searching for something recently and none of the results were even close to what I wanted. But one of them caught my attention: an ad for piston rings in the Saturday Evening Post. I clicked through and found my way to the magazine's cover page. It was striking: a teary-eyed young woman with a bob haircut gazing in a hand mirror. To her right we see the cause of her tears: a pile of her hair. She must have just finished the major haircut and is suffering from what I call "Bobber's Regret."

Summery Pseudo Stew of Zucchini, Tomatillos and Corn

2016-08-20T00:14:00.001-04:00

Valentine (ca. 1945) from Deseronto Archives

Summer produce won't be around much longer, so I've been eating summer specialties as much as possible. Last Sunday, my focus was zucchini, tomatillos and sweet corn, which I combined in a "pseudo stew." I'm calling it a "pseudo stew" because it was too liquid to eat on a plate, not thin enough to be a soup, but didn't quite feel like a stew. I ate it with rice that week — I suspect that it could be a good filling for tacos, burritos, or quesadillas.

These days my cooking is a little unfocused, so it doesn't take much to get me moving into a certain direction. The inspirations for the pseudo stew were a tweet from Simply Recipes about sauteed zucchini; a new carbon steel skillet that I purchased from Food52 that is naturally non-stick and loves high heat; and summer produce.

In the end, my pseudo stew came from the adaptation and merging of three recipes:

Sauteed zucchini with gruyere from Simply Recipes (note that the dish also makes great filling for crepes)
Pan-roasted corn: Part of a several year-old recipe from Mark Bittman at the New York Times
Roasted tomatillo salsa: One of the foundational recipes in Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, sometimes used as a stand-alone salsa, sometimes thinned so it can be added to other preparations (my version is here)

The basic idea was to make three simple preparations and combine them for the final dish: 1) broil tomatillos until soft, then puree with chipotle puree; 2) sear zucchini (adding garlic at the end); 3) pan roast sweet corn.

To be sure, a similar pseudo stew could be prepared with much less effort: simmer tomatillos in a little bit of water until soft, then puree with immersion blender; add zucchini, corn, chipotle puree, onions, garlic, and cook until the vegetables are tender; garnish and serve. This would certainly work, but the flavors wouldn't be as complex.

For the zucchini and corn, you'll get best results with a pan that can get very hot and is relatively non-stick (like carbon steel, a wok, or a cast iron skillet). The goal is to have a good amount of color on the vegetables.

Recipe: Pseudo Stew with Zucchini, Tomatillos and Corn

Ingredients
6-8 small to medium zucchini
2 cloves garlic
3 ears sweet corn
2-3 cups (480-720 mL) whole tomatillos (about 15 medium)
1 t. (5 mL) or more chipotle chile puree (see note below)
1 t. (5 mL) salt
Chopped cilantro leaves
Toasted pumpkin seeds (optional)
Crumbled queso fresco or queso anejo (optional)

Method
Prepare the tomatillos: Turn on the broiler. Peel the paper husks off of the tomatillos, wash them, and put them in a single layer in a broil-safe baking pan (use one with sides since there will be juices running). Place under broiler. Broil until blackened on one side, then turn (different sized tomatillos cook at different rates, so you might need to turn them at different times, and remove them as they finish cooking). Puree the chipotle chile puree and roasted tomatillos (and any juice that was exuded) in a blender or with an immersion blender. Put the puree into bowl that will be large enough to hold the zucchini cooked in the next step. Set aside.

Prepare the zucchini: Choose a pan that can hold all of the zucchini, corn, and tomatillo puree, ideally one that can be used over high heat. Cut the zucchini into bite-sized pieces — cut small zucchini in half lengthwise and cut into slices; cut larger ones in quarters lengthwise and cut into slices. Mince the garlic. Heat a pan over medium-high heat. Add 1-2 tablespoons of oil. Add the zucchini and saute, stirring frequently, until some of the pieces are browned, a few minutes. Add the garlic, stir, cook for about 30 seconds. Scrape the cooked zucchini and garlic into the bowl with the tomatillo puree. Add 1 teaspoon salt. Stir to combine.

Prepare the corn: Clean the pan used to prepare the zucchini (or pull out another clean one). Cut the kernels off the corn cobs, being sure to scrape the cobs with the back of the knife to extract as much corn as possible. Heat a pan over medium-high heat. Add 1-2 tablespoons of oil. Add the corn and cook, stirring occasionally for a few minutes until the corn is cooked and browned in places. Turn down the heat.

Assemble: Add the zucchini-tomatillo mixture to the corn. Stir well, then simmer for a few minutes to meld the flavors. Adjust the salt as needed.

Serve and Garnish: Serve with rice or tortillas. Garnish with chopped cilantro, toasted pumpkin seeds and crumbled cheese (like queso fresco, queso anejo, or sharp cheddar).

Variations: Pan-roast a few cloves of garlic, mince, and add to the tomatillos before pureeing. Saute some sliced onions with the zucchini. Add minced raw or pan-roasted green chiles. Add diced roasted poblano chilies.

Note: to make chipotle chile puree, buy a can of chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, open it, and put the contents in a blender or food processor. Process until smooth. For long term storage, wrap and freeze. The puree stays soft enough in the freezer so that you can easily slice off what you need. If you also keep tomato paste in the freezer, be sure to label the chipotle puree so you don't mix up tomato paste and chile puree.

Image Credits
Corn & squash valentine (ca. 1945) from the Deseronto Archives's Flickr collection, no known copyright restrictions. Photos of the evolution of fresh tomatillos to salsa by the author.

Random link from the archive: Recipe: Flourless chocolate-almond cake

Keeping an Open Mind about Insects and Other Sustainable Foods

2016-08-14T17:52:00.000-04:00

(Disclosure: I received a discount on the registration fee in exchange for writing three posts about my experiences at the conference.)

One night, the beef tongues in Chef Cesar Cienfuegos' kitchen started speaking to him. They told him "There must be a better way, you need to start thinking differently."

It was a special night in the University of California, Davis (UCD) dining halls — one of the nights when the kitchens prepare an unusual entree that is featured in every dining hall. That night it was beef tongue ramen, with Dining Services preparing enough so that 3,500 bowls could be ladled out across campus. It required over 200 tongues (about 650 pounds in total), a quantity that led Cienfuegos to think, that just "one night, one meal, one recipe" uses so much animal flesh, there must be alternatives.

This story launched a presentation by Cienfuegos and co-presenter Ben Thomas (from the Community Alliance with Family Farming, who also has worked with UCD Dining Services) at the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC) entitled "Why Insects are the Next Super Food that will Save the Planet - A Chef's Perspective".

Sustainability Concepts

Although the headline topic was insects, Cienfuegos and Thomas wanted to explore a range of food sustainability ideas that included these four concepts:

By products and "waste": An example of this is flour made from the remnants from wine grape pressing (the Whole Vine company is a nearby producer)
Low impact ingredients: insects are a prime example, as life cycle analysis shows that they produce protein with relatively low greenhouse gas emission and water use
Underutilized ingredients: "trash fish" (less marketed fish often caught with more desirable fish) and nopales (cactus paddles, which grow readily with little water in California and other arid places)
Positive impact ingredients: edible nitrogen fixing plants, edible cover crops like burdock (another example would be farmed oysters, which clean the water as they grow)

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

2016-08-07T20:29:00.002-04:00

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

With the demise of so many blog reading and following tools (Google Reader, Bloglines, too many RSS readers to count), I'm going to try Bloglovin.

Growing Belgian Endive is "A Really Wacky Process" - Touring California Endive Farms

2016-08-07T18:04:00.001-04:00

Spotlight on endive in the forcing room

(Disclosure: this farm tour was a pre-conference excursion arranged by the International Food Bloggers Conference. Although I paid to go on the excursion, it is possible that California Endive or the California Pear Board provided some subsidies to reduce participants' costs. In addition, I received a discount on the registration fee in exchange for writing three posts about my experiences at the conference.)

You might have spotted Belgian endive in your local supermarket and thought "yet another salad green, nothing special." But you'd be wrong. Belgian endive is an amazing vegetable that requires significant agricultural ingenuity to grow.

I learned about Belgian endive on an excursion to California Endive Farms in Rio Vista, California, organized by the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC). The bus ride from Sacramento to Rio Vista was enlivened by an engaging explanation of endive by Rich Collins, the founder of California Endive Farms (who provided the memorable quotes that make up the title and subheadings in this post).

Collins started with a pronunciation lesson: the plant we were going to see must be pronounced "ahn-deev." The other pronunciation, "n-dive," is used for field greens like curly endive and frisee, and it is important to keep them separate. A mnemonic that came to me today is to think "diva" when speaking of Belgian endive ("ahn-diva"): it requires a lot of pampering, but in the end you get something great. The tour group took the pronunciation guide to heart, and for the rest of the conference anyone who referred to Belgian endive as "n-dive" was quickly corrected — including one of the speakers, who was demonstrating a recipe that involved placing a dollop of chicken salad onto an endive leaf and said "n-dive."

Growing Endive is "A Really Wacky Process"

In the mid-19th century, a Belgian farmer was drying some chicory roots in his cellar over the winter so he could roast them and use them as a coffee substitute. When spring brought warmer temperatures, he discovered that some of the roots had sprouted an ellipsoidal head of leaves. He tasted them, liked them, and realized that this process could be controlled. And so a new food product was created. These days, there are numerous producers in Europe, but California Endive Farms is the only producer in the United States.

Growing endive is a little like growing mushrooms, but instead of starting with spores, you start with a root (to learn about mushroom farming, check out my post about a tour of Far West Fungi). Growing the root is the most 'normal' part of the process: farmers sow chicory seeds in the field (about 50 varieties are commercially available, California Endive grows 5-8 each year). Fortunately for endive farmers, chicory is a vigorous grower (Collins called it a weed, and noted that it grows all over the region), so it is not too difficult to produce the root.

After around 5 months, fields are filled with sturdy plants held in place by a mature root that is about the size of 12 ounce bottle of beer. The harvest crew digs up each root, cuts off the leaves (about 16-20" in length), removes thin tendrils, and puts them into boxes. Around 40 million roots are produced per year in several fields. The greens are left in the field to compost in place, or might be disked into the soil to speed the process.

At the California Endive facility, the root is trimmed again with more care (it is important to have just the right amount of green top on the root and have it be even) and then placed into cold storage, where the root hibernates at a temperature around freezing (our visit to the cold storage room was quite bracing after the 100 F heat of Rio Vista). The entire season's harvest of roots are placed in cold storage and held until they are needed, thus allowing year-round production of the product so when the market needs endive, roots are ready to go.

Roots ready for trimming (left), roots and frost in the cold storage room (right)

A "wall of endive" in the forcing room

The next step is mushroom-like. Roots are pulled from cold storage, placed in growing medium trays, and moved to a dark, cool, humid room where a flow of water and nutrients revives the root — darkness is necessary to create a "blanched" endive that is as pale as possible since green leaves are more bitter. One bud forms on each root and within about 3 weeks the endive is market-ready. It seems simple, but our tour guide was emphatic that the forcing room is "more of an art than a science" — getting the right temperature, water flow, nutritional composition, and so forth can be challenging.

When the buds have grown to market size, the forklifts roll in and carry the trays to the neighboring packing house, where the endives are removed from the roots and packed and shipped (two of the biggest customers are Trader Joe's and Whole Foods).

On a normal packing day, the crew handles 25-30 tons of roots, creating a major waste stream. Looking at those chicory roots, one might think: "Why not sell them to New Orleans coffee companies like Cafe du Monde for their famous chicory-infused coffee?" A good idea, but it wouldn't last long: with the current use of chicory in U.S. coffee, it would take less than one day for California Endive to meet the annual demand. So, like many other agricultural wastes (okara from tofu making, almond husks, etc.), they are sold as cattle feed (and someday might be part of a feed-blend for mini-livestock, i.e., insects?).

I made a flowchart that shows the process:

"When you are eating endive, you are eating chicory"

One of the quirks of Belgian endive is that it is not a "true endive" but is actually a chicory. The true endives are escarole, frisee and curly endive (which is sometimes marketed as "chicory" or "curly chicory"). In other words, vegetable names can be confusing.

Collins didn't tell us why the word endive is used in the U.S. instead of chicory. I would guess that that the early importers borrowed the French name since French cooking had such massive influence in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The vegetable goes by many names around Europe, as Elizabeth Schneider details in her invaluable Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini: the British call it Belgian or Brussels chicory, French-speaking Belgians call it chicon, Flemish-speaking Belgians call it witloof ("white leaf"). Wikipedia says that the Dutch also call it witloof and a German food glossary suggests that Germans call it Chicorée.

Eating and Cooking Endive

At lunch under a tree at the Stillwater Orchards pear farm near Courtland, we enjoyed two endive salads, allowing me to eat more than the American per capita average of 4 leaves per year* via a "red, white, and blue salad" of red endive, white endive, blue cheese and pears (a similar recipe is on the California Endive blog), and a grilled endive salad (which reminded me a little of seared radicchio).

Schneider's book has some clever quips about endive: "Happily, Belgian endive is far easier to cook, eat, and enjoy than to cultivate or refer to correctly in print," and "whatever method [of cooking] you choose, Belgian endive is likely to respond kindly." She follows these quips with tips on preparation, several pages of recipes, and a "Pros Propose" section with suggestions from professionals like Joyce Goldstein, Barbara Kafka, and Yamuna Devi. You'll also find plenty of recipes at megasites like Epicurious and NYT Cooking.

Other Posts about the Endive Tour From IFBC Attendees (and Press)

The Food Blog from the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources: Endive provided a career-long challenge to Rio Vista farmer/entrepreneur
Whole Food Bellies: Produce in Spotlight: What is an Endive?
Minnesota Farm Living: What I Learned at the Farm-to-Fork Food Blogger Conference
Sacramento Bee: Out-of-town bloggers take to Sacramento’s farm-to-fork approach
Plenty of great photos and comments at the #ifbc hashtag on Twitter

Note
* After saying that his "biggest competitor is ignorance," Collins noted that the average annual per capital consumption of Belgian endive in the U.S. is about 4 leaves. In France, it is 8-9 pounds.

Random link from the archive: 7 Year Bread (pumpkin pecan spiral)

Recipe: Simple Macaroni and Cheese

2016-07-17T10:59:00.000-04:00

Almost exactly one year ago, there was some commotion* in my tiny corner of the Twitterverse about a New York Times recipe from Julia Moskin for macaroni and cheese. There are a zillion mac and cheese recipes, so what caused the commotion? Uncooked macaroni. The recipe calls for uncooked macaroni to be mixed with milk, cheese seasonings, and blended cottage cheese, and then the whole thing baked for 60 minutes. Several in the Twitter commotion were highly skeptical, including me. But we were foolish to doubt the New York Times cooking team: the recipe was a success and has become a 'go to' recipe for me. And also is a lot easier to make than my previous favorite macaroni and cheese (from the now-gone Paper Palate blog).

The recipe wasn't quite right for me as originally written, so I have been making changes: four about ingredients, two about methods.

Cut it down: The first modification happened before I even made the first batch: I thought that 1 pound of cheddar cheese was too much, so I cut it in half.
Frozen: Next, I tried freezing the cottage cheese. The recipe calls for 8 ounces of cottage cheese and I buy it in 16 ounce containers, so I froze the extra 8 ounces and used it in a batch a few weeks later (after defrosting). It was fine — the freeze / thaw cycle didn't have any negative effects on the dish.
The whole story: Hearing so much about whole grains, it was worth trying a whole wheat pasta. The pasta cooked properly and made the flavors a bit more robust.
Choppin' lots of broccoli: The final ingredient tweak has been to add some chopped broccoli halfway through the baking time (when the mixture is gently stirred). The broccoli cooks nicely and adds nutrients and flavors.
Simpler combine: The original recipe calls for the milk, seasonings, and cottage cheese to be blended together, and then the mixture combined with the pasta and grated cheese in a large bowl. Instead of mixing everything in a bowl, why not pour the pasta and grated cheese into the blender jar and then mix it by hand? It's slightly challenging to get a uniform mix in the blender jar, but that can be corrected in the baking dish. (Of course, an immersion blender could also be used in a mixing bowl to blend the cottage cheese, milk and seasonings, and then the pasta added to that bowl.)
One tool, two jobs: A few weeks ago, I had a question while I was washing dishes after making the recipe: Could I use a food processor to grate the cheese and blend the ingredients, thereby cutting the 'wash list' by one? The answer is yes. Step 1: use the food processor's grater disk to grate the cheese. Remove the cheese and put it on the plate you are going to use for dining to save a dish. Step 2: switch to the blade and process the cottage cheese, milk, and seasonings. Step 3: add the dry pasta and grated cheese to the bowl and mix everything together by hand. Step 4: pour into the prepared pan.

Tracking Retail Cricket Flour Prices

2016-07-09T10:56:00.000-04:00


Person pointing at a chart (from the Internet Archive)

I have been following the field of entomophagy (insects as food) for a little while: watching the news, occasionally writing news roundups or more detailed pieces (see notes section). So I have been wondering, as news coverage has increased, new products are launched, and companies start scaling up their insect-rearing operations, what is happening to retail prices?

In early 2015, I started recording the retail price of 100% pure cricket flour at a handful of on-line stores (shipping costs were not considered). The results of these surveys are shown in the chart below.

Suppliers' prices vary significantly, with a spread of about 20-30% from the average. The retail price has been relatively stable over the period of study — the average retail price of pure cricket flour is about $40 per pound. These are not terribly surprising results. This is a newly developing market, and it takes time to scale up and optimize — the teams building insect farming infrastructure need time to acquire land and farming space, develop more efficient farming techniques, increase processing capacity, and build distribution networks. (And, of course, they'll need many more customers.)

My price survey has some deficiencies. The first is that it considers retail prices, while the major action in cricket flour is probably at the wholesale level (e.g., sales to manufacturers like Bitty Foods and Exo) and so it would be better to be tracking wholesale prices. These aren't as readily available, however. The second is about shipping: some companies offer free shipping for orders above certain amounts, others charge for shipping on all orders. For example, in the June 2016 survey, the low-price option charges $11 for shipping, the high-price option includes shipping, one company sets its free shipping limit below the price of a pound of cricket flour, another sets it above the price of a pound.

Livestock prices from USDA Economic Research Service

If the industry grows significantly, real food data experts might step in. One group of food data experts is the staff of the USDA's Economic Research Service, which has built an amazing collection of data and reports about agricultural products and markets — data products like the aquaculture dataset "Statistics on domestically grown catfish and trout and U.S. imports and exports of fish and shellfish that may be products of aquaculture, such as salmon, shrimp, and oysters"; or monthly reports like "Monthly average price values at the farm, wholesale, and retail stages for selected cuts of beef, pork, and broilers;" or charts like the one on the right. I didn't find anything about insects as food at the Economic Research Service, but perhaps in the future the Service will be tracking the industry, publishing a monthly "Insect Outlook," and compiling data about "Monthly average price values at the farm, wholesale, and retail stages for selected species of edible insects."

Notes
My previously posted pieces about insects as food:

If you want to closely follow what is happening in the entomophagy movement, three great places to start are the Twitter feeds of @AnaCDay, @littleherds, and @4EntoFOOD (to name a few of the good ones that are out there). Ana C. Day also runs an entomophagy news collection service on the Scoop.it service.

Image Credits
Person pointing at a chart is from page 752 of "Illinois Agricultural Association record [microform]" (January 1944- December 1949) from Internet Archive's Flickr collection, no known copyright restrictions. Agricultural price chart is from the USDA Economic Research Service, not subject to copyright (U.S. Government product).

Random link from the archive: Annatto Seeds – An Ancient Dye and Flavoring with a Global Reach (insects are another source of dye, notably cochineal, which caused some trouble for Starbucks a few years ago)

A Visit to a Tofu Factory

2016-06-19T11:35:00.000-04:00

As I was writing the post about savory baked tofu, I remembered a piece I wrote for the Ethicurean about a visit to a local tofu factory (original post URL). With the Ethicurean archives being inaccessible, I thought it would be worthwhile to update the original piece and post it here. My visit was in 2010, so it is possible that there have been some changes to their procedures, but the piece still gives a good overview of tofu making.

Farmers markets are far more than a source of good food and a place to build a stronger community. They can also serve as incubators for food businesses — places where entrepreneurs can try selling prepared foods on a small scale or where experienced market participants can try out new products or recipes.*

One of the many food businesses incubated by farmers markets is Hodo Soy Beanery, a tofu-making company based in Oakland, California. The company was started in 2004 because the founders wanted better tofu than they could find at local stores, and figured that many others were also looking better tofu, so they started making their own.

The initial launch pad was a single farmers market. The next steps were additional markets and multiple restaurant accounts, like San Francisco's Slanted Door. In recent years, they have been selling in many supermarkets and have landed some major accounts (like supplying tofu to Chipotle to use in their sofritas offering). Alas, this success led to their withdrawal from farmers markets — the markets weren't worth the effort.

Soybean cooking equipment

Several years ago I toured the Oakland facility. It reminded me of a cheese factory, with stainless steel vats, tanks, and molds, but without the yeasty, cultured aroma that you find in a cheese factory. The equipment similarity is not surprising, because tofu is basically a soy cheese made by heating, curdling, and pressing. Although one could probably adapt some of the cheese equipment for tofu, the equipment in Hodo's plant was designed and built in Asia specifically for soy milk and tofu making.

Dry soybeans are the starting ingredient for all of Hodo's products. The beans are soaked in water for several hours to rehydrate them, then cooked under pressure. The cooked beans are finely ground and passed through two levels of filtration to separate the solids from the liquid. The resulting liquid is soy milk; the solids are generally known by the Japanese word okara. The soy milk can be bottled and sold or made into tofu or yuba. The okara is generally sold to livestock farmers (for much more about okara, see this post on Mental Masala).

Forming large blocks of tofu

To make medium or firm tofu, the hot soy milk is transferred to a vat. Coagulant is added to start the curdling process; in Hodo's case, it's calcium sulfate, a naturally occurring mineral that has been used by the Chinese for centuries. The mixture is stirred, allowed to curdle, and then the curdled mixture is poured into a cloth-lined porous mold. The whey goes down the drain.**

The curds are pressed to remove excess water using a weight appropriate for the grade — medium tofu gets one weight, while the firm tofu goes into a special machine for some serious squeezing. After the pressing is complete, the tofu is cut into blocks and transferred to cool water baths for storage until it is packaged for sale or transferred to the in-house kitchen to be made into one of Hodo's prepared foods, like edamame tofu salad or spicy braised tofu.

The process for silken tofu is slightly different because it is so fragile: soy milk and the coagulant are mixed in the consumer containers (e.g., pint-sized plastic tubs) and allowed to naturally set without any pressure. This process creates a smooth, delicate texture.

Hanging sheets of yuba

Yuba is the most distinctive product made by Hodo. It's a thin, rippled, pale-yellow, somewhat elastic sheet that is composed of soy proteins and lipids. To make the sheets, an array of shallow containers are filled with soy milk and steam heat is applied to the bottom. A skin forms on the cooled upper surface. After a short time, the skin can be removed by hand and hung to dry before packaging.

Yuba is subtle and delicate: some call it the "sashimi of tofu," and it was the inspiration for a piece in the New York Times Magazine by San Francisco chef Daniel Patterson (Coi, LocaL and other Bay Area restaurants). It is versatile, serving as a wrapper for a savory filling, as a pasta analogue, and as an addition to soups or salads, to name a few uses.

Although I'd love to see Hodo branch into other soy products like tempeh or soy sauce, they would need to make those items in a different facility because the organisms that drive the tempeh and soy sauce fermentation process could colonize the factory and cause all sorts of trouble for the soy milk and tofu production lines.

Further reading about tofu and the Hodo Soy Beanery:

A few of my favorite tofu recipes on Mental Masala: Trilogy of soy, Tofu Squares with Miso, Baked tofu, Vegetable stew with tofu.
Coverage of okara at Mental Masala: Okara hair care product, Okara sighting
Hodo's website has links to a variety of articles about the company and its products, including pieces in Atlantic Food, San Francisco Chronicle, and Oakland magazine.
When the Sacramento Tofu Company closed, Hodo purchased the factory (articles in Nichi Bei and Sacramento Bee)
Artisanal tofu in New York restaurants in the New York Times
An interview of Hodo's Minh Tsai at Sarah Henry's Lettuce Eat Kale
A New Yorker article on artisanal tofu making in Japan (abstract only for non-subscribers)
The Soy Info Center has a very extensive history of yuba and many other resources on soy foods (and also publish several books on soy foods).
If you want to try making tofu at home, Just Hungry has a two part series (1 and 2)

Notes
* Has anyone compiled a list of food companies that were incubated at farmers markets? Another Bay Area incubation success that I can think of off the top of my head is Tacolicious, a group of San Francisco Bay Area restaurants that got their start as a taco vendor at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.
** Okara and the whey from the tofu-making process are apparently useful as green cleaning agents. Tofu Cookery by Fusako Holthaus notes that okara can be used to polish floors and woodwork. The book recommends wrapping okara in a cloth and applying vigorously to a surface, but is short on details — should the okara be dry or moist? What kind of cloth is recommended? The Book of Tofu by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi notes that the whey can be used as a soap, and that they have heard of tofu shops using the whey to clean tofu-making implements and workers' hands.

Random link from the archive: Making up for travel by buying political activism instead of 'offsets'

Recipe: Baked Tofu

2016-06-12T11:35:00.002-04:00

Making tofu at Hodo Soy Beanery (2010)

One of my favorite things to cook is also one of the most unphotogenic dishes I know: the savory baked tofu from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant*. Although it has a monotone and bland brown hue, its taste is much more exciting: tofu's subtle flavor in the background, and a foreground of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, vinegar and sesame oil.**

The dish is quite easy to make: put the sauce ingredients into a baking dish, slice some tofu, add it to the pan, and bake. Sometimes I add sliced carrot or wedges of Satsuma sweet potato (a variety from Japan) to the pan and let the vegetables roast along with the tofu. Although it seems like a good idea at the time, it is rarely successful because the baking times are mismatched.

You could probably just set the tofu block into the baking pan and wind up with an OK result, but you'll get much better flavor if there is more exposed surface area to roast and absorb the sauce.

As I thought about describing how I like to slice the tofu, my descriptions soon became hopelessly confusing, so I made simple drawing to help explain. The drawing below roughly replicates the dimensions of a standard piece of tofu, with the primary dimensions represented by 1, 2 and 3***. I prefer the pieces of tofu to be relatively thin, so I like to make one cut on side 1, two cuts on side 2, and two cuts on side 3 to give 18 rectangles. Of course, more pieces means more turning.

Recipe: Baked Tofu
Adapted from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant

16 ounces (453 g) tofu, firm or extra firm, cut into rectangles, triangles or other shapes

3 T (45 mL) soy sauce

1.5 T (22.5 mL) rice vinegar

1.5 T (22.5 mL) sake or rice wine

1 garlic clove, minced or pressed

3 t (15 mL) grated ginger

4 T (60 mL) water

3 t (15 mL) sugar

1 T (15 mL) toasted sesame oil

Preheat oven to 375 F (190 C).

Combine all of the ingredients except the tofu in a shallow baking dish [8" x 8" or larger (20 cm x 20 cm)]. Add the tofu pieces and turn a few times to coat the surface. Bake for 30-40 minutes, turning the pieces every 10 minutes. There is no fixed point when the dish is "done," so you can decide that it is done based on how much sauce is left, the color of the tofu, or that it is time to eat.

Notes
* Some other great recipes in Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant include Groundnut Stew, Capetown Fruit and Vegetable Curry, Beurek with Parsley-Cheese Filling, Berbere (a spice mixture), Niter Kebbeh (spiced clarified butter), and the two W'ets (Ethiopian stews that use the Niter Kebbeh).
** Good, but not good enough or original enough to submit to Food52's best tofu recipe contest

*** Most blocks of tofu seem to be the same size. How long ago was that dimension chosen, and how was it chosen? Might there be a centuries-old Chinese or Japanese specification that was adopted by makers in the U.S.?

Random link from the archive: Tempura at Ten-Ichi

Mr. Monk and the San Francisco Goofs

2016-06-05T12:12:00.001-04:00

It's time again for some digressions about obscure television topics.

The long-running series "Monk" from USA Network was set in San Francisco but it was rare that an episode had a strong connection to the city. That was probably in part by design since it was primarily filmed across the Los Angeles area (an urban back-lot at a studio, Long Beach, the Santa Monica pier, LA's Union Station, etc.), with strategic stock footage of San Francisco and rare location shoots in San Francisco. When there was something specific to San Francisco, it was often weird.

The Newscast Background
Early in "Mr. Monk and the Wrong Man" (S6E8, IMDB page), there is a shot of a San Francisco newscast with a picture of the northeastern part of the city projected behind the news reader that shows the Transamerica Pyramid on the left and the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge on the right). When I rewatched this episode recently, I thought: "That doesn't look right." Here's a screenshot from that newscast:

Screenshot from "Mr. Monk and the Wrong Man" (S6E8)

Something isn't right about that background. While you try to identify the flaw, let's switch to the subject of Richmond (or The Richmond District).

The Bad Girlfriend's House in Richmond (or The Richmond District?)
"Mr. Monk and the Bad Girlfriend" (S6E4) has some confusing geography. Captain Stottlemeyer's girlfriend (a wealthy real estate agent named Linda Fusco) supposedly lives in the city of Richmond (at 12:41, Lt. Disher points to the city of Richmond on a map to indicate Linda's city of residence). During a visit to Linda's house, the Captain arranged to have an illegally parked truck in front of her house towed away. Later in the episode, we find that the truck has been towed not to a Richmond lot, but a San Francisco Police Department lot. Why would the city of Richmond tow a truck across the Bay to a city of San Francisco lot?

Linda is a key suspect in the episode's marquee crime, and her alibi is based on timing: she claims to have been too far away to have committed the crime. Therefore, the time it would take Linda to travel from her house (in Richmond or the Richmond District) to the city of Novato (north of S.F. in Marin County) was so important that the writers had Mr. Monk and Natalie recreate the journey. The annotated USGS map below shows the locations:

Using Google Maps to get directions from the two Richmonds to Novato, they appear to be more or less the same, given random effects of traffic and traffic lights:

Richmond City Hall to Novato: 26 minutes, 22 miles (35.9 km)
San Francisco's Richmond District (Park Presidio and Geary) to Novato: 29 minutes, 25.6 miles (41.47 km)

When you start from the Richmond District, however, you get to drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, which is always a thrill (the scenery around the Richmond-San-Rafael Bridge is quite nice, but the bridge is oppressively utilitarian).

My guess is that the writers were thinking of San Francisco's Richmond District — a mostly residential area between Golden Gate Park and the Presidio — and that there was some confusion during prop preparation and/or filming. On most maps (like the one above), the text for the city of Richmond is much larger than the text for the Richmond District (if it is even marked). Linda is supposedly a superstar real estate agent, so I'm not sure why the writer's didn't pick a elite and well known San Francisco neighborhood like Pacific Heights or Nob Hill instead. Perhaps Richmond is an inside joke like Vinton Street?

Richmond Train Routing
"Mr. Monk is Up All Night" (S6E9, IMDB page) has a quick mention of Richmond as Monk is waiting in the "Caltrain Station" while searching for a mystery woman (it's actually Los Angeles' Union Station — San Francisco doesn't have any grand train stations). There's a strange broadcast over the station's speakers: "Local service for Richmond and Burlingame, Track 12" (24:33). That's a weird broadcast, because there is no Caltrain that makes that run (Caltrain doesn't go to the East Bay), there is no Amtrak that makes that run (Amtrak runs on the eastern shore of S.F. Bay with bus connections to S.F.), and BART goes from the Peninsula to Richmond but not as far south as Burlingame (Millbrae is the southern terminus).

Dumpling Digression
Coincidentally, as I was writing an early draft of this post, the food scene in the Bay Area had Jonathon Gold fever, as the documentary City of Gold was playing and Gold was making several appearances in the area. In a quick interview with Eater S.F., he made a similar Richmond / The Richmond slip-up, though in this case he actually was referring to a place in the City of Richmond: "Daimo has the best wontons anywhere in the U.S. It’s in that Chinese mall in the Richmond. It’s pretty good, but [the restaurants in there] switch around a lot." Perhaps this one was a transcription error.

Back To the Newscast
Have you figured out what is wrong with the newscast background? The image is reversed! When looking at San Francisco from the north, the Transamerica Pyramid will be to the right of the Bay Bridge, not to the left like the newscast background shows. It's weird — perhaps an intentional "Easter Egg" for viewers? Or a necessary tweak to allow the inset photo to appear on the right side of the screen while maintaining a full view of the Transamerica Pyramid?

San Francisco from Alcatraz Island, from Paul Kelly on Flickr

"Between the Bridges," from Images by John 'K' on Flickr

To further see for yourself, point Google Earth to 37°48'31.93" N 122°24'08.86" W, eye altitude 625 ft; or go to Google Street view, drop the viewer on Alcatraz Island, and spin around until you can see San Francisco; or take a look at a few more photos from Flickr: by Mike Lewis, by Doug Sandquist, by Harvey Quamen.

Image credits

Map from USGS with annotations by the author. San Francisco Quadrangle, 1:100,000-Scale Series (Topographic), 1978 (N3730 - W12200/30X60) from USGS Map Locator & Downloader
Photo of San Francisco from Alcatraz Island from Paul Kelly's Flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License
Photo of Between the Bridges from Images by John 'K''s Flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License

Random link from the archive: The Temper-Spoon, a device for temperature measurement while stirring

Recipe: Seed and Oat Cakes

2016-05-28T10:23:00.002-04:00

(Updated 10/15/16 with new photo, 10/23/16 with new archival art)

Back in February, the San Francisco Chronicle's Food+Home section had a feature article about using seeds in the kitchen. Written by Amanda Gold, the article recommends looking at seeds as a healthy and tasty addition to your diet, in savory and sweet applications.

Always looking for healthy, homemade snacks, one of the recipes caught my attention: multi-seed cakes made from a blend of seeds mixed with oats, honey and oil, then baked into clusters. I had all of the ingredients in my pantry so I gave the recipe a try. The mixture didn't stick together — it was like trying to form cookies using damp granola — so I was apprehensive. Will these hold together? But almost miraculously, something happened during baking and cooling that turned the loose blobs into self-supporting cookie-like objects. (What exactly is happening to hold everything together? There is no egg, no water, nothing binder-like.)

Sunflower by Anselmus de Boodt

Since making the recipe a few times, I've learned that it's essential to let the cakes fully cool on the baking sheet before trying to remove them — they firm up as they cool, turning from mush to crispy cakes.

I imagined that I could simplify production by spooning the mix into a muffin tin. Production was certainly simpler, but the results were poor: the bottom burned and/or stuck, while the top didn't brown properly because there was too little heat circulation to the top of the cakes. (I haven't tried a silicone muffin container yet, which might eliminate the sticking problem, but might not improve the tops.)

Flax from Flore Medicale

The seed and oat cakes are becoming one of my favorite snack foods. They are healthy, delicious (crunchy, toasty, just a little bit sweet), almost of the ingredients can be bought in bulk (thus reducing packaging waste), and are proving to be highly adaptable. The last time I made them I was short on some of the seeds, so I swapped in peanuts and finely shredded coconut with great results. Now I'm adding a few tablespoons of coconut to each batch.

I like to use a scale when baking, so my key contribution to the recipe's evolution 'in the wild' is to add weights for each ingredient so that making the mixture can be a "pour and tare" operation.

Recipe: Seed and Oat Cakes

Adapted from San Francisco Chronicle's Seed and Oat Cluster recipe (which uses the Super Seed Raw Blend)

50 g shelled pumpkin seeds / pepitas (4.5 T)
60 g sunflower seeds (4.5 T)
20 g chia seeds (2 T)
25 g flax seeds (2.5 T)
25 g sesame seeds (2.5 T)
100 g rolled oats (1 cup)
1/2 t kosher salt (2 g / 2.5 mL)
25 g oil
84 g honey
Optional: 3/4 cup dried fruit (175 mL)

Preheat oven to 350 F (175 C). Prepare a baking sheet with a non-stick liner like Silpat or parchment paper.

Stir the seeds, oats, salt, honey and oil together (plus dried fruit), being sure to fully coat oats with the oil and honey. Spoon onto the lined baking sheet, about 2 tablespoons each. Push loose seeds and oats into the blobs, then press lightly to hold together. Bake 15-20 minutes. Cool completely before removing from baking sheet.

Image credits

Painting of flax plant from Flore Médicale, Volume 4, by F.P. Chaumeton, Chamberet et Poiret, illustrated by E.M., illlustrated by E. Panckoucke and P.J.F. Turpin, published by C.L.F. Panckoucke (Paris), 1820 (on Google Books, original from Ghent University)
Photo of Sunflower by Anselmus de Boodt (ca. 1600) from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Random link from the archive: Choc-ing the Rubicon

Three More Old Postcards of San Francisco: the Golden Gate, Fort Point and Sutro Baths

2016-05-15T11:56:00.001-04:00

This post has a few more old San Francisco images from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. The first two of postcards were taken before the addition of a major landmark, and the last was taken before the destruction of a major landmark.

Before the Bridge
The first photo is an undated postcard from the early 20th century, the pre-bridge Golden Gate glows at sunset. Unfortunately, the image is not terribly distinctive and to be honest, it doesn't jump out to me as the Golden Gate — it could be any stretch of coastline. Even Ansel Adams' famous photo doesn't shout "Golden Gate!" I think that's the power of the bridge — it became such a critical part of the landscape that it's hard to think of the setting without it. (The Golden Gate wasn't named for the gold fields that lay to the east of San Francisco, but after the "Golden Horn" in Turkey. For the full answer, see my earlier post called How the Golden Gate Got Its Name).

Postcard showing the Golden Gate, early 20th century (NYPL Digital Collections)

The next photo, marked "Copyright 1904", is a view of Fort Point with Marin County in the background (today part of the Marin Headlands section of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area). These days, the Golden Gate Bridge towers over the fort, giving Fort Point a unique vista of the bridge (it might be the only piece of land where the public can be somewhat underneath the bridge).

Postcard of Fort Point and the Golden Gate, early 20th century (NYPL Digital Collections)

Inside Fort Point underneath the Golden Gate Bridge

Sutro's Baths: A Long-Gone Swimming and Amusement Palace
The next image shows Sutro Baths, a massive entertainment complex located on the western edge of San Francisco (roughly at the end of Geary Blvd). In the early 20th century, the Sutro Baths were one of San Francisco's top attractions, with several huge public swimming pools (somewhat like the "plunge" to which Buster Keaton brings a date in The Cameraman) and museums of curiosities and wonders. As time went on, popular tastes changed and expenses far outran revenues (it took a lot of energy to heat the frigid Pacific Ocean to a tolerable temperature), leading to its closure. During demolition in the 1960s a massive fire destroyed what remained. Today the site is a modern-day ruins that is open for exploration as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (and also serves as a starting point for a trail along San Francisco's northwestern coast). In recent years the most exciting event at the ruins was the appearance of a river otter ("Sutro Sam") in the ponds.

Detail of a postcard of Sutro Baths (NYPL Digital Collections)

Plenty of history about the baths has been written or filmed, like a page at the National Park Service, the film Sutro's: The Palace at Lands End (highly recommended), and several books (e.g., Sutro's Glass Palace and Lost San Francisco).

Ruins of Sutro Baths, 2012 (from Flickr user jtu, CC-2.0)

Advertisement for Sutro Baths and Museum,1923 (California Historical Society)

Image Credits

Postcard images from The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1898 - 1931. Links to the pages at the NYPL: Golden Gate postcard, Fort Point postcard, and Sutro Baths postcard
Photo of Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point by the author
Photo of Ruins of Sutro Bathsfrom jtu's Flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License
Photo of Sutro Baths and Museum Advertisementfrom California Historical Society's Flickr collection, no known copyright restrictions

Random link from the archive: Learning to control my temper: making dipped chocolates, part 2