Great Planet Money podcast on why lard fell out of favor.

In celebration of Girl Scout cookies’ imminent arrival, a chart. I am thinking perhaps they forgot to include my own Samoas consumption, surely it is enough to edge out Thin Mints?

Visualizing Atlantic overfishing:

Holy shit.

This is going to come in very handy: 101 10-minute recipes from The Minimalist.

Oh man, I totally gotta try Spaghetti with Fried Eggs. Sounds awesome, and what could be simpler? I found it via The Minimalist Chooses 25 of His Favorites, compiled because Bittman’s weekly column is closing up shop.

My push to have donuts declared the Breakfast of Champions probably won’t get anywhere, so I’m turning to oatmeal. I’ve been loving two oatmeal dishes I concocted—Blueberry Pie Oatmeal and Egg Fried Oatmeal—and wanted to share them with you.

The Oats

Both dishes start with the oats. No quick or instant oats for us, it’s steel cut or nothing, and Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats are the way to fly. The only non-Scottish oat to win the Golden Spurtle, and the Scots know their oats. Yummy. They take awhile to cook though, so I usually make a big batch and then reheat each morning. They don’t seem any the worse the wear to me, but a Scot may beg to differ. Anyway, this makes me about a week’s worth:

1. Bring six cups of water to a boil.
2. Add 2 cups of oats (half the bag, so next time you can just add the other half) and half a teaspoon of salt to the water, stir, and reduce the heat to low.
3. 10 minutes later, stir.
4. 10 minutes later stir again and remove from the heat.

Eat some and put the rest in the fridge.

Blueberry Pie Oatmeal

Who doesn’t want pie for breakfast? It’s not really pie, but it tastes like a dessert and it’s all healthy stuff, and it’s ridiculously easy:

1. Stick a ripe banana in your cereal bowl and mash it up with a fork.
2. Add some Wyman’s frozen blueberries to the bowl. These, as near as I can tell, are a million times better than any other frozen blueberries.
3. Add some oatmeal (if leftover add some water) and heat in the microwave for a minute or two (depends on how much you’re making).
4. Stir in some cinnamon (I add a teaspoon) and eat.

Egg Fried Oatmeal

Much like you make fried rice with cold leftover rice, you make this oatmeal with cold leftover oats. Very easy, despite my making it look like a lot of steps:

1. Mince a garlic clove.
2. Start heating your pan.
3. Get out your cold cooked oats, vegetable oil, soy sauce, and 2 or 3 eggs.
4. Scramble the eggs in a bowl.
5. Wait for your pan to get hot enough.
6. Add a tablespoon or so of oil to the pan and swirl it around.
7. Saute the garlic for a few seconds. I tip the pan to the side and saute the garlic in the pooled oil, otherwise it burns.
8. Add the eggs and scramble.
9. While the eggs are still pretty wet add some oatmeal.
10. Pour soy sauce all over the oatmeal.
11. Stir fry, breaking up the oatmeal and eggs and just generally mix everything together real well. You can kinda flatten everything out and let it sit for a bit to make a little crust on the oats, before scraping it up, if you’re into that kind of thing.
12. When it’s hot enough for you and the eggs are cooked enough for you, stop cooking, put it in a bowl, and eat it.

Thank you Chris Kimball, regarding cooking times:

But it was Chris Kimball, editor of Cook’s Illustrated, who cut to the heart of it. “Utter bullshit,” he said when I asked what he thought of cooking times. Kimball is no slacker; CI, as its devoted readers know, has a well-earned reputation for accuracy. They’ll bake a chocolate torte 500 times before publishing the results. Yet Kimball doesn’t include start-to-finish times in his recipes; he rejects outright the notion that they can be measured with precision. “Thirty-minute recipes are never 30 minutes,” he says. “It’s marketing.”

Nobody tell this guy to move the prep counter closer to the cooking surface, that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. (via kottke)

Mountaintop Bakery! Gotta plug my friend Malik’s bakery because she makes such awesome stuff:

Mountaintop Bakery specializes in baking delicious, whole grain, homemade desserts. The bakery prides itself on supporting regional farmers and businesses by using as many local ingredients as possible, including flour, butter, eggs, maple syrup, milk, yogurt, and seasonal fruits and vegetables. We are committed to environmental sustainability and only use only compostable or recycled packaging. Everything we bake is made in small batches and shipped to you the same day
for guaranteed freshness.

Currently failing to resist toffee brownies for breakfast.

I say graham crackers + Nutella + Fluff = s’moes (faux s’mores). Mmm!

You Dropped Food on the Floor. Do You Eat It? A taste:

(via swissmiss)

Cool Tools links up some no-knead bread resources, and the comments come alive with alternate approaches. I’m definitely going to have to try the recipe suggested in brad’s comment.

<homer> Mmmmm…. s’moreffles... </homer>

I really like this sushi etiquette graphic Swissmiss posted, especially in combination with reader Emily’s comments:

Oh man, I wish I could do my cooking life over, with this knowledge in hand: whether or not the food sticks to your stainless steel pan is a matter of proper preheating. Bonus: you will learn how water can roll around on a hot pan without vaporizing instantly.

I don’t think anybody has topped this Fannie Farmer waffle recipe from 1896. Light and airy with just the right crisp. Don’t be put off by the fact that you have to make it the night before. It only takes 10 minutes tops, and it’s oh-so-worth-it:

• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1 package active dry yeast
• 1 stick butter
• 2 cups milk
• 2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1. In a large bowl, put the yeast in the warm water, and let stand for five minutes (or just while you complete steps 2 and 3, roughly the same thing).
2. Melt the butter in a pot.
3. Add the milk to the pot and stir it around until warm.
4. Pour the milk/butter mixture into the yeast/water mixture and add the flour, salt, and sugar to it. Mix it up. It will be kinda watery; don’t worry.
5. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand at room temperature overnight.
6. In the morning add the eggs and baking soda, stir it up, and get waffling!

P.S. Makes something like 8 or 9 waffles on our round iron.

P.P.S. You can do straight margarine/butter and soy milk/milk substitutes for the dairy allergic. Not quite as good, but still yummy.

Since it’s unlikely I’ll get to the Shake Shack anytime soon, I am totally taking a crack at making the Fake Shack the next time I’m in the mood for burgers.

NYTimes, Pathogens in Our Pork, on the appearance of MRSA in our food supply:

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

Attempts to change this have been blocked by agribusiness, as you can only pack animals into crowded, unsanitary conditions if you pump them full of antibiotics.

This is why you’re fat. Is it wrong to drool?

Siggi’s skyr rocks. You couldn’t ask for better ingredients (PDF). It’s not at all like the oversweetened crap every big commercial manufacturer churns out. Sure, I like oversweetened crap, but this is a much better choice.

Todd Levin on wine:

Drinking wine is like reading. There are only a select few of us who know how to do it; those of us who do find it boring and disgusting but continue because we think it might impress pretty girls. Many of us even need to do it in order to fall asleep, wake up in the morning, or escape from our loveless marriages, but most of us wouldn’t be able to recognize a good bottle of wine or book even if it was being smashed repeatedly against our faces to extort an unpaid gambling debt.

Nice usage of “you miserable cur,” too. I need to work “cur” back into my arsenal (although I think it pairs slightly better with “contemptible”).

I'm quite late with this one, but here's Michael Pollan's Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief (written pre-election). One excerpt can't capture 10 pages of goodness, but I was struck by this bit:

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope -- thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy -- for trucking food as well as pumping water -- is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the "Garden State" next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, "Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient."

• A little pick-me-up to watch before your next workout: Nike Courage. I can't link to the high-quality version directly, so don't forget to click the "watch in high quality" link by the lower-right corner of the video.
• Interesting summary of the health benefits of eating coconut. Caught my eye because it was only a couple days ago I saw this post lauding coconut water as "nature's perfect sports drink".

Cooking for Eggheads by Patricia Gadsby:

"Cooking eggs is really a question of temperature, not time," says This. To make the point, he switches on a small oven, sets the thermostat at 65°C, or 149°F, takes four eggs straight from the box, and unceremoniously places them inside. "I use an oven in the lab; it's easier. But if the oven in your kitchen is not accurate, cook eggs in plenty of water, using a good thermometer." About an hour later--timing isn't critical, and the eggs can stay in the oven for hours or even overnight--he retrieves the first egg and carefully shells it. "The 65-degree egg!" he announces. The egg is unlike any I've eaten. The white is as delicately set and smooth as custard, and the yolk is still orange and soft. It's not hard to see why l'oeuf à soixante-cinq degrés is becoming the rage with chefs in France. (Salmonella can't survive more than a few minutes at 60°C, or 140°F, so a 65-degree egg cooked for an hour should be quite safe.)

Next, This turns up the oven thermostat to 67°C, or 153°F, and after waiting a while for the eggs inside to reach that temperature--again, he's casual about the timing--he retrieves a second one: "The 67-degree egg!" At this temperature the yolk has just started thickening up--some of its proteins have coagulated, but the majority have not. "Look, you can mold it," he says, scooping out the yolk and manipulating the pliable orangey-yellow ball like fresh Play-Doh. He tries to mold a heart, then settles for a cube.

Just clearing a bit of a link backlog:

• Ross Enamait on genetics VS hard work.
• Michael Pollan op-ed: Weed It and Reap.
• Art De Vany: impressive results from a 54-year-old convert.
• The Performance Menu has a bunch of articles online. Check the month links down the left sidebar.

I'm behind on this, but it's a long article and I wanted to read it first before posting. If you haven't checked it out already, Michael Pollan's article, Unhappy Meals, is a must-read. Fascinating and engaging. I may have to check out The Omnivore's Dilemma.

I've heard great things about Dr. John Berardi's Precision Nutrition. He recently put up a Gourmet Nutrition Desserts booklet, available free through the holidays!

Introducing the Gourmet Nutrition Desserts, a 44 page dessert cookbook complete with delicious "Precision Nutrition approved" dessert recipes, beautiful photography, and hints on how to eat the foods you love without the gaining the fat you hate.

I'm going to have to try a couple of those this Christmas.

Takeru Kobayashi ("who once ate 17.7 pounds of pan-seared cow brains to win $25,000") won his sixth straight hot dog eating title, but from my casual following of this event, it seems like the gap is closing. What really caught my eye though was this (emphasis added):

Other competitors included 100-pound Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas, of Alexandria, Va., who once ate 65 hard boiled eggs in a little more than 6 1/2 minutes, and local favorite Eric "Badlands" Booker, a 6-foot-4, 425-pound subway conductor from Long Island who holds speed-eating records for pies and matzo balls.

Damn it, now I'll never be able to enjoy that Cool Hand Luke scene in quite the same way.

Great Smithsonian piece on our food supply, corn, and fertilizer:

For the great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological foundation: corn. It's not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it's not just the source of the flour and the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed foods; it's not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself--the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built--is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain corn. At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different items or SKUs (stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than the clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.

You just gotta click through to read the case for the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen being the most important invention of the 20th century.

Evil Tines at Smithsonian magazine:

In the 11th century, a Byzantine princess ate her sweetmeats with a forbidden object: a two-tined gold fork. At the time, the Church so opposed forks that after she succumbed to the plague, a Franciscan theologian called her untimely death "a just punishment from God."

That's fair.

After my sunflower seed butter post, I really should get you the rest of the way to a healthier PB&J (SSB&J, in my version). Alvaredo St. Bakery makes my breads of choice, and you can get 'em in Price Chopper and Stop & Shop (at least in MA). Check out the ingredient list on their multi-grain bread:

Sprouted Organic Whole Wheat Berries, Filtered Water, Wheat Gluten, Honey, Molasses, Organic Millet, Organic Cracked Wheat, Organic Corn Meal, Fresh Yeast, Sea Salt, Organic Oats, Organic Rye, Organic Sunflower Seeds, Organic Flax Seeds, Soy Based Lecithin, Cultured Wheat.

Definitely the tastiest mass-produced healthy bread I've encountered (I know a fair number of you will likely think the phrase "healthy bread" is an oxymoron). Here's the nutritional info:

Their sprouted wheat bread has another gram each of both fiber (good) and sugar (bad).

Last piece of a healthier SSB&J is the jelly. Smuckers makes a nice low-sugar strawberry jelly that doesn't use artificial sweeteners. It is interesting to compare Smucker's regular strawberry jelly (12g sugar), low-sugar strawberry jelly (5g sugar), and their "100% Fruit" strawberry jelly (8g sugar). Only "low sugar" lists "strawberries" as the first ingredient. Still, when I look at the ingredient list you gotta figure homemade low-sugar preserves are the way to go (like I'm made of time, though).

One of my favorite healthy snacks is a swab of nut butter, usually almond butter or, if I'm feeling particularly decadent, cashew butter. While they are tasty and great for you (esp. the almond butter; cashews are fattier), they are expensive (esp. the almond butter, which you would think had a fine gold powder mixed into it at today's prices). Enter sunflower seed butter! Definitely the closest match in taste and consistency to peanut butter, just about as cheap, and check the nutritional profile:

The above comes courtesy of Sunbutter. And here's a bonus for you folks with peanut allergies (like my four-year-old). Unlike all other nut butters (in my experience), it's actually possible to find sunflower seed butter that's peanut free (the nut butters always have the "processed in the same facility as..." warning)! And the taste really is close to peanut butter. If you eat it right off the spoon you can tell, but with bread and jelly it's almost indistinguishable. To a grown-up, anyway. Believe me, I know all about how infinitesimally picky kids can be when it comes to food.

Turns out, all these years I've been peeling my bananas wrong. Fer cryin' out loud, is there anything I do right?!

Two things I printed out for bedside reading:

• Richard Dawkins' letter to his (then?) 10-year-old daughter on believing (he's often too atheist for little ol' agnostic me, but is still compelling).
• Malcolm Gladwell on Project Delta and the quest for the perfect cookie.

I think I got both of these from Jason Kottke.

Chandra at Lick the Spoon on her brownie quest:

Listen. I have tried and tried and tried all the brownies out there.... I have made them from a box, I have made them from a bag, I have made the from scratch and I have made them after a good shag.... and still I have not found THE brownie.