Category: Food and Drink

Categories
Drink Opinion

The Wine Whine

Over the years, I’ve worked at some very nice restaurants that have expensive wine lists. I’ve sold lots of bottles costing hundreds of dollars, even a bottle of wine for $1,500.

I thought a $1,500 bottle couldn’t possibly be 100 times better than some wines selling for $15 a bottle; or could a $150 bottle be even ten times better? Wine prices seem to be driven higher mostly by scarcity.

Expensive wines tend to be from smaller vineyards and over time there’re fewer and fewer bottles for sale as they’re consumed or squirreled away. Then the mystique increases around certain wines driven by reputation as well as the expectation of goodness that comes with a price that high.

Over the years I’ve attended lots of wine seminars, some were informative and others a lot of foolishness. But the situation with wine often becomes one like the king that has no clothes. Everyone has to go along with the highest status person’s opinion in the room.

I’ve been listening to the Freakonomics Radio audio podcast. It’s really good. If you enjoy “This American Life,” you’ll like this show, the hosts even sound the same. Anyway, each show digs into a different subject attempting to shine the light of reason on that subject’s often unexplored nooks.

One show asked “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” The short answer is just what I’ve always thought, no. And most of the “experts” don’t have much more sophisticated taste buds than the rest of us. Sure, they’re up on region and varietal names, know who’s who, and how to describe what a particular wine tastes like. But, when it comes to choosing which wine is which in blind tastings they don’t do too well. Have a listen.

Some of the best advice I’ve heard about wine is to drink what you enjoy and to try branching out and try different types of wine.

And who buys a $1,500 bottle of wine? No idea who he was, but he just drank a couple of cocktails, not the wine, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy them.

Categories
Food and Drink kitchen Things tools

What are the Kitchen Essentials?

What do you absolutely need to have in a kitchen? What are the cooking tools you use daily?

My girlfriend is a very good cook who enjoys cooking. So she cooks great dinners every night, I’m very fortunate. I still cook during the day but the dishes are mundane. Between what I use for cooking and what I see that she’s used as I’m cleaning up, I’ve come up with a list of what we commonly use in our kitchen. This is our personal tool box:

An 8″ chef’s knife. It’s made by Global and we’ve had it for 5 years. In a supporting  role is a steel for maintaining the knife’s edge. The steel is old and I don’t know the brand but I use it every couple of days to maintain the knife’s sharp edge. We also wash the knife after using it and store it in a slot between cabinets to protect it. This seems to work; we’ve never sharpened it and it’s still wickedly sharp. And this 8″ chef’s knife is really the only knife either one of us uses for cooking.

12″ and 8″ Teflon saute pans. These guys get used so much that they’re replaced every year or so. The brand doesn’t seem to matter, they still wear out.

A bamboo spatula. We’ve had it forever. It’s what we use in the pans and for most stirring and severing too.

10″ Tongs. They’re as useful and used as often as the spatula. Ours has a built-in locking mechanism to keep them closed when they’re in the drawer.

Lemon squeezer. Very common in Mexico and it gets used a lot by us, mostly for limes which seem to get used in many dishes.

Large and medium size Pyrex mixing bowls. We use them for…mixing, and sometimes serving too.

14″ and  8″ cutting boards. For the last three years we’ve used boards by Epicurean. They’re thin manmade wood based cutting boards that are eco-friendly as well as knife edge friendly, you don’t want too hard a cutting board.

Scissors. Medium duty and sharp, they’re probably why we get along so well with just one knife.

Wine opener. A double hinged waiter’s friend type. No reason to use any other type, having been a waiter for many years I’ve used these to open hundreds of wine bottles, ‘nuf said.

Pepper grinder. Fresh ground pepper is good and we use it in almost every dish. We’re happy with an 8″ model by Peugeot that sports an all steel grinder, if you flip it, it’s like looking at the scary beak you see after you turn an octopus upside down.

Food storage. This system works really well. There are three different heights of plastic storage containers, they can nest into one another when they’re not being used and (that’s not all!) they all use the same size screw-on top. Very tidy, convenient, and easy. We turn away any other storage vessels approaching our shoreline, that’s how beloved the system is. Freedom from Tupperware chaos.

Appliances we use all the time are: a gas stove, microwave, blender, Cuisinart food processor, and once a week, every week, I use a Toddy cold drip coffee maker to make coffee for the week. We’re starting to use a Crockpot more and more.

The dishwasher is about 5’9″ and tips the scales at 70 kilos (about 155 lbs) and runs on meat and vegetables.

Categories
Books Food and Drink Health

Eating Way Back

Stylewise, where on the timeline of human existence are you eating? I came across this diagram and think it’s great distillation of what lots of people are trying to figure out about their health.

Conventional wisdom, more and more, is finding fault with industrial, modern foods like Twinkies, 20 ounce servings of sodas, and trans fats and so conventional wisdom advocates eating in ways similar to our great-grandparents’ style, featuring whole grains, beans, etc. That’s a big improvement and you’ll probably get healthier because you’ll be avoiding industrial and processed foods. In the diagram above that’s going from the red area backwards into the yellow area.

But, the diagram isn’t to scale. The green area representing most of mankind’s existence should be 200 times(!) longer than the yellow. Most of our genetic make up has evolved accommodating the foods we encountered for a couple of million years. During that time as hunter-gatherers, before agriculture, we wouldn’t have been eating much in the way of grains, legumes, and sweets. And there’d have been zero processed foods.

Like most Americans, I drank the low-fat Kool-aid. After a while though, cracks started appearing. There’s the growing obesity problem that started taking off in the 80’s. And people seem to be getting unhealthier every year.

Several years ago I noticed the a low-carb resurgence. Then I read some of the early Paleo literature from Loren Cordain,Ph.D. which was intriguing but I wasn’t convinced.  And then a few years ago I heard an NPR interview with Gary Taubes about what his investigations indicated. But It wasn’t until I read Taubes’  “Good Calories Bad Calories” a couple of years ago, that I really came around to re-evaluate the standard American diet.

Gary Taubes is a top science writer at the New York Times. The book isn’t a breezy read. It’s the nature of the material combined with the thoroughness needed to challenge the accepted wisdom. But it’s worth the read if you want to dig deep. Fortunately, Taubes has just come out with the more accessible “Why We Get Fat.” One of the main ideas is that easily digested sugars drive insulin secretion in our bodies. Insulin then signals our bodies to store excess sugar as fat. Taubes says obesity is not a disease of overeating but a disease of fat storage, insightful but hard to wrap your head around.

For a couple of million years we usually didn’t have easy access to simple sugars and grains. Our bodies and big brains are fueled by sugar (glucose), so we crave it. But it wasn’t until the past few generations that easily digestible sugars became such a dominant part of our diet. We should be following the “smart money” arrow above all the way back to the green, hunter-gatherer area of the diagram. I’m not saying to re-enact the way we once lived as hunter-gatherers. Instead we need to learn what it is we’ve evolved to eat. Because you’re not what you eat; you’re what your DNA does with what you eat (to paraphrase Art DeVany).

It can’t be worse than current situation. If you go to a public space, it’s easier to see unhealthy folks than to spot healthy ones, which seems to be the opposite of the way it should be.

Categories
Drink Food and Drink Things Time Savers

Cold Drip Coffee

Have you heard of “cold drip coffee” before? If you like drinking coffee, here’s a way to make great tasting coffee that has a few advantages over the regular way of making coffee.

I use a Toddy cold drip coffee maker. It consists of only three parts. There’s the soaking container, a filter that fits in the bottom of that container, and a glass carafe to drain the coffee into. The plastic soaking container is about the size of a large popcorn bucket from the multiplex. The bottom of the soaker has a bottleneck for the felt filter that’s about the size of a large cookie. This bottleneck on the soaker’s bottom also fits the mouth of the glass carafe for draining the coffee when it’s time.

I’ve been making cold drip coffee for years, it’s really simple. First, after inserting a filter in the bottom of the soaking container, add about two liters (quarts) of room temperature water. Next, put in a pound of coarse (not fine) ground coffee on top of the water; but don’t stir in the coffee grounds, let the ground coffee soak into the water. That’s it, now allow the mix to soak for between 12 and 24 hours. Then pull the small plug on the bottom of the soaking container and let gravity drain it into the carafe. You’ll get about a liter and a half of delicious coffee concentrate that can last three weeks in the fridge.

Put the concentrate into the fridge and spread the grounds on your garden (or in the trash). Take out the filer and give it a though rinsing under the tap before putting it into the fridge for the next time. If you rinse the filter well and refrigerate it in water, you’ll be able to use it for months.

The cold drip coffee is also about 60% less acidic than brewed coffee because no heat is used to make the coffee. The flavor profile will be richer and less bitter-tasting than brewed coffee. There even a bit less caffeine too. The system was developed in 1964 by a chemical engineer at Cornell University.

There are all kinds of uses for the coffee concentrate. You can dilute it or not (I don’t) to the strength you like,  then ice it or heat it (stove top or microwave), or use it in recipes calling for coffee.

There are hundreds of coffee houses and cafes using cold drip coffee for their iced coffee. I even sell Thai style iced cold drip coffee here in Mexico at the fledgling farmers’ market on Saturday mornings in our little town.

Iced coffee is what we make most often at home. I usually premix the coffee with milk and Half and Half in a two liter bottle. Drinking coffee doesn’t get any more tasty and convenient than that.

Categories
Food and Drink Happiness People

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?

Thanksgiving is over and hopefully you had a nice celebration with your family.

But now after recovering from Thanksgiving, who’d you invite to dinner if you could invite any five people you wanted?  Narrowing it down, let’s say they have to be alive too. Here in this part of Mexico the weather is getting nicer by the day. The evenings are a pleasant blend of dry and cool, perfect for eating dinner outside on a patio with friends.

So, if you were going to have five living people over for dinner who would they be? I know who I’d invite. Here’s the list, in no particular order, I’d like to meet them for dinner separately or in a group setting: Christoper Hitchens, Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Gilbert, Alain de Botton, and Seth Godin. There’re other people I’d like to invite too, but for now these are for the first dinner party.

Why these particular people? Well, I’ve heard all of them speak publicly and enjoyed listening to what they had to say. Most have written interesting books and are keen observers of people.

Christopher Hitchens Christopher Hitchens is one of the top intellectuals and debaters trodding the planet. I’ve written about him here. He has cancer and may not make it another five years (but I’d have included him on my list anyway).

Michelle Obama Michelle is the invitee I know the least about. But I’ve seen her speak and her background and current situation are fascinating. She attended Princeton and Harvard Law and practiced law afterwards. Then of course there’s that whole White House thing. Plus since she’s not a politician, she can be unguarded and open.

Elizabeth Gilbert Honestly, at first I’d dismissed Elizabeth a few years ago; ignorantly thinking her popular “Eat,Pray, Love” was a chick lit book. Then I saw her speak on TED and in a PBS series and I changed my mind. Then I read the book too and liked it.

Alain de Botton Alain is a sharp observer of modern life. Last year he was invited to spend a week at a desk watching, chatting with and writing about passengers in London’s Heathrow airport. His observations were even turned into a book so if he can convert a week in an airport into a book he’s got to be pretty clever.

Seth Godin Seth is an entrepreneur and blogger,  blogging about marketing and the way ideas spread. He’s blogged daily for years and it’s still interesting and current. It’s one of the blogs I never miss. He also has 12 best sellers that have been translated into 33 languages. Here’s a talk he gave last year at TED.

Next, what sort of food would I serve? I don’t know. I’d check with everyone to find what they each preferred and figure out something delicious everyone would like. I guess I’d have to feed the secret service guys too.

But really I’m most interested in the conversations that would happen.

Categories
Books Drink Heros People Uncategorized

An Atheist In The Foxhole

Christopher Hitchens has cancer. He thinks he won’t win and the cancer will take him.

Too bad. Of course it’s always too bad when someone dies from cancer. He’s been an enthusiastic, lifelong smoker and drinker and would no doubt say that he enjoyed the ride.

He’s a hero of mine. Not because of his lifestyle but because of his stances and defense of what he thinks is the way things are. A long time ago William Blake wrote “… create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Good advice, I think. Hitchens has never been shy about pointing out the enslavement foisted upon most humans by religions large and small.

Hitchens is an atheist. And now that he’s dying and thinks he won’t make it, he’s still unrepentant.  He’s only 61. With esophageal cancer that’s spread to his lymph nodes and lungs, he says he’ll be very lucky to live for five more years.

He’s an atheist in a foxhole; and he plans on staying one. Hitchens has gone on record about this now, while he has all of his faculties. If he is said to have had a last-minute conversion while he lie dying,  it’ll be due to him having lost his ability to think due to the cancer or its treatment.  Any claims of sudden conversion at the end will be due to having a diminished mind and not a sudden switching of sides because he sees the light. Because he’d say that religion is darkness.

As a controversial figure because of his views and  his wide exposure from his prolific writings and speaking, Hitchens has been engaged in conflicts most of his life. The title of his 2007 book is “God Is Not Great,” that’s a pretty good way to draw fire. It’s a good book too.

Hitchens has lots of experience in holding his own against what he considers bad ideas. I hope he can keep it up.

Categories
Clutter Food Living Abroad Mexico Stories

La Tienda

La Tienda means “the store” in Spanish. In Mexico, la tienda is usually a small neighborhood store that sells most of the things people need. There’s still one every few blocks in Mexico just as there were a generation ago in most cities and towns in the States.

When I was a kid growing up in New Orleans our tienda was Saladino’s just a couple of blocks from our house. It was snuffed out by mass culture before I made it into middle school. We used to buy candy there just like I see kids doing at tiendas here in Mexico. Those kids I see now probably won’t appreciate their little neighborhood tienda either until they’re older and it’s gone.

I love going to tiendas, just looking around at the wide range of objects for sale that have made it through a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” economic sieve. You find mostly grocery items; but tucked away in there you’ll see super glue, hanks of nylon cord, hair dyes, mesh shopping bags, medicines, and on and on. And it’s all shoehorned into a space the size of a McMansion’s bedroom.

Tiendas service a customer base small enough that you can still get store credit. Your tab is handwritten in a notebook; they know who you are and where you live.

My tienda is about a block from our house. It’s called El Indio, The Indian. More often tiendas are named after the owner with the English words “Super Mini” in front of the name. So it’s no surprise El Indio is usually referred to by the first name of the owner (Leo’s) by most of it’s customers.

Leo’s is open early and closes around 11 at night. If you hit it at the wrong time, checking out is like traffic in India, crazy and chaotic but some how it flows with stops and starts. Often, you’ll need to jockey for position at the checkout between a sweaty laborer buying ice cold Pacificos after work and a wobbly grandmother buying fresh cilantro for her familys’ dinner. It’s civil, but the Summer in Central Mexico in a tienda is a toasty place to be and most shoppers are keen to get somewhere cooler.

Because a tienda is usually close to your house it functions almost like a pantry – that’s a block away. You don’t really need to keep lots of supplies at home since whatever you might run out of is only  half minute away. So you wind up going to the tienda on almost a daily basis.

Which is fine by me.

Categories
Exercise Food Food and Drink Health Ideas Opinion People

George Clooney Spans A Lot of Time

This is going to be tough, to distill “paleo” into a short pithy post, but I’ll try.

Take George Clooney. If he spread his arms out wide, they’d span about six feet. Now, imagine his outstretched  arms representing the two or so million years humans have been around. With that in mind, the time since we started farming is represented by less than the length of his middle fingernail. So most of his six foot arm span is the time we were foraging for food. We’ve been hunter-gathers for most of our time since leaving the trees.

It’s estimated we’ve changed (genetically speaking) less than one percent since farming started around ten thousand years ago. That’s not much change. During all that time before farming started our bodies became fine tuned to what was provided by living as hunter-gathers.

For food, we would have sought out but rarely found much in the way of sweets, instead we ate animals, fish, leafy vegetable, berries and some fare like bugs and grubs that grosses most of us out . We aren’t adapted yet to thrive on our current diet of simple sugars, grains and dairy.

Currently, with our incredible successes as farmers, grains and simple sugars are cheap and widespread, fueling humans around the world. We’re like diesel engines supplied by fuel tanks of gasoline. We might occasionally add a quart of oil to the gasoline to make the fuel a little more compatible, but the little diesel engines aren’t running too well.

Apparently, preagricultural humans were felled by childbirth, infection and traumatic injury. And the ones who dodged those bullets, were taller, stronger and longer lived than our more recent ancestors who became farmers. Hunter-gathers didn’t suffer much from the diseases of civilization like obesity, heart problems and the cancers affecting us now.

Every account I’ve seen of healthy native populations encountering and then embracing a western style diet soon fell prey to the same constellation of ailments associated with the more technologically advanced population who introduced the refined diet to them.

This is a broad area to look at. But there’s good reason to do so. And most people looking at how our ancestors lived come away with insights on how to improve their lives today, and not by picking up a spear and eating grubs.

This is about the clues to the environment humans adapted to over the millenia. Look at “The Black Swan” author, Nassim Taleb, he’s erudite and urbane, spending his time (away from the outdoors) in cities around the world. But by paying attention to these clues from our ancestors he’s able to better live in his modern world. Wealthy enough to do as he pleases and travel often, he says “I was able to re-create 90 percent of the benefits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle with minimal effort, without compromising a modern lifestyle, in the aesthetics of an urban setting.”

This is a broad area for investigation. Humans are tool users and seem to not like rules. So here are a some of the take-away tools I think are useful:

Avoid sugars and grains and embrace meat, fish, leafy vegetables, berries and nuts. Skip meals sometimes. Sleep longer, in complete darkness. Become an occasional sprinter instead of jogging regularly. Get a little sun. Walk a lot. And finally, randomly do some brief but very intense exercise.

Here’re a few places to start looking if you want more information:

PaNu –  the site of a board certified MD with his thoughts about Paleolithic nutrition and modern life, a very good source to start with. He’s a busy guy, so his site is not updated very often but that’s ok.

Mark’s Daily Apple – this site serves up good solid information, but with distracting contests and self promotions.

Evfit – an old school website layout but chock full of good information.

This is a big subject I’ll revisit in later posts, I hope this was a useful introduction for you.