JBG Organics volunteering

Just so you don't miss the takeaway: Please think about what you eat and how it got there. Try not to waste food. And use less plastic/throwaway packaging whenever you can. 

The other day I didn't have to head into my internship because my coworkers were out of town for a meeting. I decided to sign up to volunteer at Johnson's Backyard Garden farm because when you volunteer for 5 hours, you get a box of veggies. I also have become more curious about farming since my mom grew up on a farm, going back to Kansas for my grandpa's funeral reminded me that I wanted to get a better sense of what it entailed, and visiting California for work and seeing the farms and fresh food pushed me the extra mile. I understand farming conceptually, but I have very little experience with the actual labor and science of it.

I worked at the greenhouse, which meant that I started out by seeding Kohlrabi into 46 little planters with 128 little seeds. There was this little suction board with 128 little holes on it, and I shook the seeds out until there was one in each and then poured off the extras. Then I set it on top of the tray with some soil in it, turned off the suction, and then set everything back up again. Repeat 46 times. Once the seeds were all in, I got my hands real good and dirty filling up the rest of the planter boxes (excuse my incorrect terminology) until they were level with the top. I made a grid on the pavement of all the planters so that we could water them a few times. Because I was doing winter seeds, the greenhouse guy took them back to store in a cooler until it was time for them to actually start growing.

My next task was to weed out in the greenhouse itself. This got... hot. It was about 100 degrees while I was working (8 am - 1 pm), which meant, I'm guessing, that the greenhouse was 110+. I certainly felt it. I got a bit woozy in there, especially being in jeans and such. The planters covered the floor of the greenhouse, so in order to get back and pull weeds, I had to drag out a row hop over alternating clear patches I created, and balance while I pulled weeds and then came back. I did not love it, but I think it was because I was getting tired and very hot. It was nice to get a big bucketful of weeds though, in terms of seeing your work make a difference. That was definitely one bonus of the work as a whole. I was a bit surprised at how many dead butterflies, moths, and crickets there were, but it made sense once I thought about how enticing it would be in there but then hard to get out and then very, very hot to survive in. I also pulled weeds outside around the greenhouse, and while it was a big relief to have some wind movement and less humidity, the direct sun wasn't too much of a break.

My last little task was to move out some peppers that had grown up enough that they were almost done with the greenhouse. I set them out on this pallet area so they could get some water while they adjusted to the sunshine and spent more time in the greenhouse (I think) before they got sent full-time to the fields. Good luck little guys!

Finally, at 1, after drinking two 32 oz gatorades and my water bottle, I picked up my veggies (transferring them to my reusable bags, of course) and headed home. Phew! My neck and back were very sore, and I was pretty excited for my shower. I think I will definitely volunteer again when my schedule allows (and perhaps when it is a little cooler) to get experience in the sorting/loading space as well as out in the fields for a harvest or something.

More than anything, it really made me appreciate even more how much, I mean an incredible amount, of work goes into every single thing I eat. I already work so hard not to waste and to buy exactly what I'll eat, whether at the grocery store or restaurants, but this was further incentive to do my best. And it also made me feel like food was so cheap even though sometimes I bemoan prices in my head while I shop. I know organics and local foods are sometimes a little more expensive, but you're paying to have people take care of your food, and people just need a little bit of money. And as the guy I worked with said, JBG was great because Johnson pays a little more than minimum wage. Where would we be without people farming our food, and yet they only get minimum wage most of the time? I'm not going to get into the politics of it all and subsidies and all that headache, but I do think there are serious, sad problems with our value system of work in this country (and probably around the world). Farming and education are two of the most important jobs that exist, the end, and while teachers make more, there is such a low level of respect and tribute paid, financially, to those absolutely integral jobs.

Please think about what you eat and how it got there. Try not to waste food. And use less plastic/throwaway packaging whenever you can. 

Also, tell me what kind of veggies I got! I'm not 100% sure about exactly what's what, so I welcome any insights. 

poached eggs

I love eggs. I love them in the morning or at lunch or at night. I love them poached, scrambled, and fried. I love them any time. This isn't a new Dr. Seuss rhyme I'm trying out (but what do you think, is it a hit?), but it is really the truth. I eat a lot of eggs, from breakfast tacos to eggs on toast to scrambled eggs with polenta (cheesy grits?), they are my go-to meal option. It's got good cholesterol, protein, some fat, and it always tastes good.

I think poached eggs are a somewhat intimidating way of cooking eggs that a lot of people either don't know how to do or don't want to do for some reason. It's so easy! and healthy! and takes pretty much the same amount of time as normal eggs. Yes, you have to boil water first but seriously? Anticipate your meal by 5-10 minutes and fill a skillet with water. You can handle this, I'm sure of it. Plus you get a nicely cooked white (important to me) with a deliciously runny yolk (also important to me) an no guilt!

I have a new cooking guru, thanks to my boyfriend's obsession with him, and it's Chef John from Food Wishes. Here's his entry about poached eggs and below, the video! I'm excited to know that I recently learned that you use some vinegar to help them stay together. I still love Alton Brown as my official on all things cooking. Plus he's quirky and nerdy and goofy. I love him. I will say that I just crack mine in and they look the same, so don't stress if you don't have the ramekins, etc. Both Chef John and Alton Brown say pretty much the same thing in their videos and it's along the lines of what my dad always did when poaching my eggs, thus the way I do it. It's simple! Give it a try. I did learn from them both, though, that you can save them up to 8 hours in cold water! Who knew?!

Tonight, I made a little sandwich for myself with a poached egg, avocado, tomato, and cheese on an english muffin. It was good but to be honest the hot and cold mix wasn't the best. It was sort of pretty though. I still loved it anyway.

knife skills

My friend emailed me this knife skills video by Jamie Oliver, and it is super great. It is only 5 minutes long, but it gives some really good pointers. As Eryn knows from being my sous-chef, I am definitely not an impressive lady with a knife. I can get by, but I definitely need practice and have wanted to take a knife skills class for the past year so that I can feel confident in what I am doing in terms of that. But alas, I haven't gotten around to it yet (also, they are a little prohibitively expensive at about $50 a pop).

But this little video seems to go over the basics well and quickly, with an eye on safety, and I think it will definitely help me out.

facts about chocolate

My dad sent me an email the other day with these facts about chocolate, so I thought I would copy it here to pass along some fun food facts.


Five Facts About the Origin of Chocolate: Ray Major

1. Chocolate is fruit
“Cacao beans are seeds found inside the fruit or pod of the cacao tree. Roughly 500 cacao beans will produce one pound of bittersweet chocolate. To put this into perspective, it takes two men one day to harvest and prepare enough cacao to make 120 pounds of dark chocolate — a labor-intensive process, but well worth it!

Nearly 95 percent of the world’s cacao can be found +/- fifteen degrees from the Equator. Anywhere there is a tropical rainforest cocoa can grow. And, every growing region in the world produces its own unique flavor.”

2. Chocolate is like wine — it has terroir
“Genetics of the planted varieties affect cacao flavor, as does the care and techniques used in fermentation and drying the beans, and environmental influences of the growing region — what vintners call ‘terroir.’

Cacao from Pará State, Brazil — for example — has notes of pear, green apple and white wine. Beans from Indonesia have bright acidity and citrus notes. Panama is characteristically earthy and spicy with a strong chocolate flavor. What you like really depends on what you are looking for in your chocolate and how adventurous you are.”

3. Blending beans gives the best flavor
“Each type of cacao has a very unique taste, but few have a complete flavor profile from start to finish. Madagascar beans have citrus, fruity front notes that then tail off in complexity; Ghana beans start slowly with big notes of chocolate in the middle; and Trinidad beans have licorice, tobacco, leathery notes that linger on in the end.

If you combine these three, the flavor profile stretches much longer in your mouth than it otherwise would by itself. The blend will make a more complex and interesting chocolate bar.”

4. The meaning of percentages
“The number you often see on premium dark chocolate bar labels is cacao content; the percentage of the bar that is derived from the cacao bean in the form of chocolate liquor, cocoa butter or cocoa powder.

If an extra dark chocolate bar label reads “82% Cacao,” that means that 82 percent of the formula is derived from the cacao bean. You can normally assume the remainder of the percentage to be sugar.”

5. Cacao vs. cocoa…there’s no real difference!
“The vernacular can be confusing, but cacao and cocoa really mean the same thing. The Latin word for cocoa is cacao, so most European countries use this term while English-speaking countries have adopted use of the familiar word cocoa, as in cocoa powder.

In the artisan chocolate industry, cacao is generally used in reference to anything mentioning cacao in its raw form — the tree, bean or seeds, nibs, percentage.”

icing: just keep mixing

Not that I am an expert, but I thought I had a word of helpful advice to people trying out baking. Icing is a little intimidating. As described in the post about butter from a scientific/cooking perspective, it really does matter what temperature it is at when it goes into the recipe. Whenever I have made icing, especially the first few times, I always have a little panic attack.

How will all that confectioner's sugar and that hunk of relatively hard butter become fluffy icing?

Oh NO! It just turned into clumps. Well, now I guess it is sort of sandy looking.

And then, bam. Somehow, when I zoned out or something, it became icing.

So it is a little bit like what Dory says in Finding Nemo, which I recently watched with my students, "just keep swimming, swimming, swimming." When it comes to icing, yes, that relatively solid butter and all that sugar will turn into icing. Just let the mixer do its thing and a couple of minutes later, it really will turn into the texture of icing.

I took a few pictures of making icing today (note: I think it was my favorite icing so far, for the chocolate cupcakes with vanilla icing) throughout the process to prove that it really does magically come together. So have faith in your appliances and just keep mixing...

sugar

I have had these two tabs open on my browser for a couple weeks now, so I decided to just get the entries done for both at the same time. Also, I didn't really cook tonight (other than mistakenly making too much pasta and just deciding to gorge myself anyway), so I'll substitute my cooking for the week with interesting information and articles. Hopefully someone appreciates that in addition to pictures and my commentary on food, which I am particular to because I like good visuals and hearing myself talk/write. I digress!

My friend Jess had this article linked on her facebook, which is the site I get most of my news and information from, sadly. So thanks, friends, for posting things so I learn about the world. I read books, though. Anyway, so I read the article on New York Times and found it pretty interesting. I mean, the general overall theme is that we eat wayyyy too much sugar and it is potentially a lot worse for us that our brains are rationalizing. A lot worse, keywords being: diabetes, obesity, heart problems, cancer...

The thing I liked most about the article was getting some interesting facts; I really like facts. And good visual aids. Both are in this entry, so scroll around and find what you like. Or read it all, I tried to make careful selections! Or go read the whole article and understand it more fully.

Things I would like to specifically highlight, in case you, dearest readers, are too lazy to read the whole article yourselves:
[Is Sugar Toxic? by Gary Taubes]

• If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.
• Lustig’s use of the word “sugar” to mean both sucrose — beet and cane sugar, whether white or brown — and high-fructose corn syrup. 
•  In the early 1980s, high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in sodas and other products in part because refined sugar then had the reputation as a generally noxious nutrient. High-fructose corn syrup was portrayed by the food industry as a healthful alternative. It was also cheaper than sugar, which didn’t hurt its commercial prospects. Now the tide is rolling the other way, and refined sugar is making a commercial comeback as the supposedly healthful alternative to this noxious corn-syrup stuff.
• The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form — soda or fruit juices — the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.
• In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers.
• To be precise, the F.D.A. reviewers said that other than its contribution to calories, “no conclusive evidence on sugars demonstrates a hazard to the general public when sugars are consumed at the levels that are now current.” This is another way of saying that the evidence by no means refuted the kinds of claims that Lustig is making now and other researchers were making then, just that it wasn’t definitive or unambiguous.
• In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn’t changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic.
• During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not. The atherosclerotic plaques in the Americans were attributed to the fact that they ate high-fat diets and the Koreans ate low-fat. But the Americans were also eating high-sugar diets, while the Koreans, like the Japanese, were not.
• The context of the science changed: physicians and medical authorities came to accept the idea that a condition known as metabolic syndrome is a major, if not the major, risk factor for heart disease and diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimate that some 75 million Americans have metabolic syndrome. For those who have heart attacks, metabolic syndrome will very likely be the reason.
• Having metabolic syndrome is another way of saying that the cells in your body are actively ignoring the action of the hormone insulin — a condition known technically as being insulin-resistant. You secrete insulin in response to the foods you eat — particularly the carbohydrates — to keep blood sugar in control after a meal. When your cells are resistant to insulin, your body (your pancreas, to be precise) responds to rising blood sugar by pumping out more and more insulin. Eventually the pancreas can no longer keep up with the demand or it gives in to what diabetologists call “pancreatic exhaustion.” Now your blood sugar will rise out of control, and you’ve got diabetes.
• The question is whether they’re “chronic toxins,” which means “not toxic after one meal, but after 1,000 meals.” This means that what Tappy calls “intervention studies” have to go on for significantly longer than 1,000 meals to be meaningful.
• One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.
• Now most researchers will agree that the link between Western diet or lifestyle and cancer manifests itself through this association with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome — i.e., insulin resistance. 
• The cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both.
• If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. 

butter

I can't remember how I got a hold of this article, but to whoever shared it with me: thank you! I found it pretty interesting. I have come around to the idea that butter is not so bad. I don't really eat a lot of it directly, though I buy myself slightly expensive President slightly salted butter for my toast (it is the ONLY salted butter in the grocery store in Bulgaria, even though there are about 12 different kinds). I do use butter quite often in cooking, and then I go for the cheapest saltless butter. I don't know if we have margarine here, but I wouldn't use it if we did. Even before reading this article, I figure it was better to just use real butter and try to exert some self control towards how much I actually ate of what I made (I am still working on it, somewhat successfully).

The article is on the New York Times and is about butter and cookies, two things the world agrees to love to eat. Through my brief experience as something of a cook, I have definitely learned to follow the directions in recipes. So often I am complimented on what I cook, and almost every time I feel like I have cheated people a bit because all I did is what I was told, and sometimes not even too well in that I skip some ingredients because they are unavailable or I forgot them or what have you. I have learned that the biggest challenge in most cooking endeavors is just getting the ingredients and doing the damn darn thing. Once you do that, things likely work out pretty well. But one key part of following the recipe instructions is doing exactly what it says to do with the butter, at least as far as its original condition entering the recipe. And it is better to just give it a minute than to put it in the microwave.

So, some fun facts from this article [Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies that Sing, by Julia Moskin]:

• The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh, good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for granted, and home bakers often miss.
• Butter is basically an emulsion of water in fat, with some dairy solids that help hold them together. But food scientists, chefs and dairy professionals stress butter’s unique and sensitive nature
• For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.
• Warm butter can be rechilled and refrozen, but once the butterfat gets warm, the emulsion breaks, never to return
• For clean edges on cookies and for even baking, doughs and batters should stay cold — place them in the freezer when the mixing bowl seems to be warming up. And just before baking, cookies should be very well chilled, or even frozen hard.
• Butter should be creamed — beaten to soften it and to incorporate air — for at least three minutes. “When you cream butter, you’re not just waiting for it to get soft, you’re beating air bubbles into it.”  When sugar is added, it makes more air pockets.
• And those air bubbles are all that cookies or cakes will get. “Baking soda and baking powder can’t make air bubbles. They only expand the ones that are already there.”

I definitely don't follow all the rules well, but I have learned to use butter at the consistency described in the recipe. I also have learned that butter will turn into something soft and fluffy if you just trust the automatic blender. Yes, you put in ever so slightly soft butter into a bowl with some sugar and set it on mix, and you just see clumps of butter flinging itself around with sugar crystals and think my laptop will soon be forever ruined this will never become a light and fluffy mixture. But keep it up, tiger, and three minutes later, it is ready to rumble and continue on its way to being a delicious cookie or icing or cake or whatever.