Cheap Therapy

Over the last week I’ve ploughed through Michael Pollan’s book about the rise of Nutritionism, and why, despite so much dietary research, people eating the “Western diet” are less healthy than ever.

The book is “In Defense of Food”, where ‘food’ is actual stuff that is grown, rather than produced in a factory.

Perhaps the major revelations for me were

• how lobbying allowed manufacturers to avoid having to put the word ‘imitation’ on their product labels. And how lobbying lead to Nutritionism. Because it’s not something produced by cattle ranchers (who vote) that’s bad, it’s saturated fat, or other non-industry-specific components
• that optimising a food for a long shelf life means removing nutrients from it, which means that people need to eat more of it to get the same nutritional effect
• roller milling of flour (as opposed to grinding between a traditional mill’s grindstones) results in the nice white flour that doesn’t go rancid. Of course the problem with this is that it also removes the nutrients! Thus there was a sudden outbreak of dietary deficiency related illnesses and they had to fortify the flour. But have have food scientists missed out anything that has long term effects. Who knows?
• you are what what you eat eats - intensive agricultural methods using synthetic fertilizers are reducing the micronutrients in the soil, and thus in the food

Pollan’s a journalist, and his style is very approachable. Definitely worth a read if you are the sort of person who eats!

Taste.com.au are running a competition to find Home Cook of The Year, you’ll need a winning weeknight recipe that your family loves.

• A relaxing weekend in Mandurah
• Planning an interstate trip
• Wrangling FileMaker, MySQL, PHP, qpopper and postfix.
• Bilby getting much more talkative. Many more words and signs (miming juicing an orange to indicate she wanted OJ!) Long involved soliloquies, if only I could understand what she was actually saying…
• Colds all round Mounds of tissues
• Car serviced.
• Got a call from my ISP claiming I was DoSing someone. Oops (No, it was not a virus)
• Most excellent engagement party with many good friends.
• Baked a Jaffa Marble Cake and a vegan Apple and Almond cake (I was out of walnuts).
• Got a ladder for my birthday. Used it to clean the gutters.
• Got many birthday wishes from people, thankyou, it meant a lot.
• Had a close friend ring up on my birthday to ask me how to send a break from telnet. This was good for the amusement value of him forgetting my birthday at least.
• Watered trace elements into the plants.
• Saw Da Vinci’s machines. Had forgotten how much of it was weapons research.
• Indian buffet.
• Saw Dr. Jones.
• Read Moondust.

Anyone got any good cake recipes they can recommend from experience? Bonus points if they a) use apples, and/or b) are vegan.

It’s not a cake, it’s a South Australian Heritage Icon.

After having a nap until 5:30, Jamie wakes up and realises it’s time to start cooking the fish lasagne recipe from my bestselling cookbook (Hint, This is the wrong decision to make
After 2 hours of prep, Jamie is out in the backyard knocking lemons out of the tree with a rake by torchlight in the freezing cold. This is preferable to being in the kitchen to the chorus of “I’m hungry” (or the alternate chorus of “I want to be in the kitchen”).
At around 9pm he gets to eat dinner (the upside being, alone with his partner as his child had to be put to bed earlier with an alternate dinner).
On the plus side, the bechamel sauce did turn out well, even if it did involve boiling prawn heads, bacon and vegetables.

With thanks to Skip for the tipoff, here’s Cooking for Engineers.

Lets see…

• Send build to the clients (after returning from the pub)
• Housewarming
• Shopping for storage, DVD’s, Jeans without extra holes (2 pair, yay!)
• Shopping for groceries
• Shopping for the groceries I forgot
• Fish and Chips
• Bunnings for reticulation
• Parents for computer support
• Create spices, paneer cheese (for future reference, 2L of milk gives around 387g of curds) and curry

This one doesn’t look too bad, Chow and Chowhound.com

Why is it that we “beef up” something, but don’t ever seem to “chicken up”, “prawn up” or “veggie up” something? Or perhaps we’d “chicken down”, “prawn down” or “veggie down” something