Food Blogs (313)

News today that 2 employees of the Mars Wrigley factory in Pennsylvania fell into the chocolate tank and emergency crews had to cut a hole in the side of the tank to get them out.
One of the workers had to be airlifted to the hospital.
Inquiring minds want to know... how did they get into the tank?
Details are sketchy.

Story link:

Pre-ground coffee tastes flat and bitter.
Prove me wrong,

Ingredients required....
Cow peas.... 25 grams only
medium size... potato.
medium size... cauliflower
bell peppers... just one
green onions.... little

butter for tempering..
spices as per ones wish
nutmeg little bit at the end
makes the soup real yummy

corn flour
2 teaspoon only
mix it with soup
when hot
with the cow
peas.

boil the potato
and cauliflower
do not cook
too much of
the cauliflower
little crunchy
will be tasty.

this soup recipe... require
cutting the vegetables very
small sizes.

cow peas
4 spoonsful
powdered
or cooked
in a cooker
5whistles

that is 25 grams cowpeas
half litre water.


tempering
needs only
butter for
frying the
spices...
pepper salt
bell peppers
green onions
garlic green
chilly cut into
small pieces
fry all in
the butter
mix with
well boiled
potato slightly
boiled cauliflower
cowpeas well
mashed watery.

adding the garnish of spring onions.

in the last just before
finishing...
Grate about a pinch of nutmeg in the soup.

that is all.... have it... with a nice
crusty multigrain bread
enjoy...

I usually spend my weekends at the county park about 6 miles from my home. The route is a well traveled road with businesses leading out to farmland. Often, I've found people selling things on the side of the road... usually food.
On Saturday morning you can find a pickup truck in a driveway with small crates of corn harvested from a local farm. A few months ago, I bought a case. $20 for 50 ears of corn. It was the freshest corn I've had at a price much less than the grocery store. I was giving corn away as it was coming out of my ears!
Get it... the corn was coming out of my ears.

On the other side of the road is a string of warehouses and in the parking lot, a cooking trailer similar to the ones used in county fairs where a few women sell hot dogs and drinks. Next to them is a pickup truck filled with watermelon.
Both vendors have canopies to shield them from the blistering sun.

Down the road is a larger concession/catering truck with a walk-up window. It's in a clearing where cars can easily park to get food.

Last week a couple came to the county park with a small hotdog stand selling drinks, chips and hot dogs. They showed up again today and moved long the country part seeking signs of life!

Last year, coming back from a jobsite I saw a guy who had several large ice buckets and he was selling seafood. He owns a seafood shop and when they bring in too much catch, he sells it on the street... better prices than the seafood market and fresh.

I'm not sure what the local laws are for street vendors, I know in Hollywood, the rolling cafeterias are licensed. They also have their territory marked out. A Spanish woman (with 5 children) and her mother were cooking Empanadas and selling them from the trunk of their car, selling to the factories in the area, but they got flushed out by the 'roach-coach' drivers as it was taking away from their business and for sure the woman and mom were unlicensed.

Since COVID, I've been wary of buying any prepared foods from a street vendor, The corn and watermelon purchases are safe in my book. Also, they return every weekend so if I had a bad purchase, I'd have a chance they would make good on a re-selection!

Roadside vendors... gotta make a living.

Organic food promises to be healthier and more sustainable.

The European Union plans to reach organic production on 25 percent of its agricultural land by 2030, up from 9.1 percent in 2020. The United States, in contrast, isn’t putting big bets on organic, which still represents less than 1 percent of total American farmland. Instead, the USDA promotes climate-smart agriculture by investing $1 billion in regenerative commodity pilot projects. But which is the better move?
Organic requires too much land
Organic farming isn’t more climate-friendly than conventional agriculture when looking strictly at emissions. In a comparative analysis of the environmental impacts of different agricultural production systems, Michael Clark and David Tilman at the University of Minnesota found that “organic and conventional systems did not significantly differ in their greenhouse gas emissions.” But that’s not all that matters.
Land use is organic’s achilles heel. The analysis concluded that organic farms require 25 to 110 percent more land to produce the same amount of food than conventional systems because organic yields are lower. That’s terrible news for the climate because land use comes with a so-called “carbon opportunity cost.”
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When not used for farming, the same land could host natural ecosystems such as forests and grasslands that store much larger amounts of carbon than agricultural soils. But agriculture keeps taking over more and more natural ecosystems instead of returning fields to nature, thus continuing to fuel the climate and biodiversity crises.
The resulting need to limit agriculture’s land use — alongside profitability concerns — keeps many farmers and environmentalists laser-focused on securing high yields. Advances in breeding, pesticides and fertilizers, machinery and farm analytics have led to an impressive yield increase over the past decades. For example, global soy yields have increased by 150 percent since 1961. Organic yields couldn’t compete with such rapid advancements, hampering its growth.
Carbon costs aren’t the only concern
Why hasn’t this yield disadvantage deterred organic’s advocates and practitioners, including European legislators?
One reason is that organic farming offers many other social and environmental benefits. BIPOC workers and rural communities suffer disproportionately from unsafe pesticide use on conventional farms. Organic soils tend to be healthier, increasing their resilience to extreme weather events such as floods and droughts — an essential consideration as the impacts of global warming will intensify over the coming decades. In low and middle-income countries, moving to industrial agriculture doesn’t tend to deliver an overarching improvement in local communities’ social, economic and environmental conditions.
Many practices that are branded as regenerative have been cornerstones of organic agriculture for decades.
Organic is also a more transparent way of promoting climate-smart farming. Many practices such as crop rotations, intercropping, cover cropping, reduced tilling and composting that are now branded as regenerative have been cornerstones of organic agriculture for decades. Organic farming is clearly regulated, third-party verified and labeled for consumers.
While the system certainly has flaws, it seems to me that it would be much easier to continue building on organic to support climate-smart practices rather than inventing a new regenerative ecosystem of regulation, enforcement and communication. I wish more food brands embarked on that path.
Other experts argue that the land use difference isn’t (or doesn’t have to be) as large as these studies estimated and question the dominating “feed the world” narrative. They argue that we need to consider the proper evidence to realize organic’s superiority. Many indigenous communities and smallholder farmers wor

I was at work today, and me and a co worker were in a disagreement about whether a meal at 5pm is called dinner or supper. I say dinner, and he refers to it as supper. I know a lot of country folk use the word supper, but us city slickers refer to it as dinner.

So I'm told, only in America do adults drink milk. That doesn't happen in other countries/cultures. Okay, I could believe that statement.
I like milk and limit it's intake. Fat free milk is too bland so I drink 2% milk.
There is a sophisticated coffee system in my office that pumps refrigerated milk into a heater for different coffee styles. It uses whole milk... if not, you cannot get the frothy top on cappuccino or whatever exotic selection you choose.
They ran out of milk so I bought some during lunch.
I didn't want hot coffee. Instead of sending my selection to the heater, I poured cold milk to black coffee. Yeah, I like it better.
Whole Milk...

While I am unemployed, I am on government benefits. That means limited spending on things that aren't bills. I make a HUGE batch of a certain dish (this case, sauce for pasta), and then I take 4 scoops of each, and bag it. I then let it cool down and place them in the freezer.

The last time I did that, I had meatballs for a month straight.

Anyway, I try to limit my spending as to not run out of money. Nothing worse than running out of money 5 days before payday, with nothing to eat.. I have avoided that every month by cooking a huge batch and freezing it. This month, it was going well. Until I remembered my family's annual Easter lunch. 15 people will partake in the feast, and we each have to bring an item of food. I am in charge of bringing the most important thing - bread. With the inflation hitting here, everything gets more expensive. From fuel to food. Thanks, Biden.. Anyway.. The price of bread has skyrocketed these past few weeks, so it gets expensive to buy bread for the entire family. I ended up with seven packs of bread, which took a sizeable amount of money. It HAS to be enough. If it isn't, there's a McDonald's right next to where we are having our Easter lunch. But generally, I am pretty good at judging how much bread I need to get in order to make sure everyone are well fed.

Will I spend more money before the end of the month? Well.. It depends.. I have enough food for two weeks, which makes it close.. I have a bunch of chicken wings in the freezer, as well as some one person meals. Even those one person meals have gone up in price. They are usually super cheap, but in these inflation times, everything is expensive.

No, she wasn't my aunt, but her death bears great significance. Breakfast won't be the same without her. I do pancakes once a month and the large box I had was empty last week.

I headed over to WalMart to buy another box and Aunt Jemima disappeared. In her place were boxes by Pearl Milling Company. I never heard of them before this. They have the audacity to say Original. Original what? Original copies of Aunt Jemima?

I'm annoyed by this... So what's next?
I guess you'll be saying Uncle Ben died too...


The death of Aunt Jemima...

I often buy Hummus when it's on a BOGO sale. That's Buy One, Get One aka (also known as) two for one. 2F1 or a 2fer sale.

Hummus Ingredients: Chickpeas aka Garbanzo beans.
Lots of the brands have different spices added including many with Tahini.

I didn't know what Tahini was so I looked it up.
Tahini is ground Sesame seeds. Actually, it's Sesame and oil.

I'm afraid to ask what oil they use in Tahini as I rudely found that vegetable oil doesn't come from a vegetable, it comes from Soybeans and Soybeans are Legumes... technically classified as a group of plants whose seeds grow in enclosed pods, like peas and peanuts.

So now, I'm buying containers filled with a mixture of alternate names that is high in fat, carbohydrates with protein... and (get this) is considered healthy!

Depending on the brand, it's $5 for a 10 ounce cup.