Cooking food makes us human

Anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human believes that the discovery of cooked food led to evolutionary changes resulting in a smaller and different digestive system based on a higher-quality diet, mainly relying on cooked meat. In an interview on NPR's Science Friday (text and audio), Professor Wrangham explores concepts such as the digestive costs of food, the benefits (or lack thereof) of raw diets, and a distinct preference in Great Apes for cooked food over raw.

Here's an interesting excerpt:

But here's the thing. Nowadays, we look at people, and we find that if people go onto a diet of raw food, then something peculiar happens -which is that unlike every other animal, they do not thrive in terms of getting really adequate energy. And there is a pretty clear reason for this, which is that our species has a very odd type of digestive system.

It's less than two-thirds of the size of the digestive system if we were a great ape - like a chimpanzee or a gorilla - in relationship to our body size. And so we have somehow, and for some reason, adapted to having a small gut - and we also have small teeth and small mouths - all of which indicates that we, as a species, have adapted to a diet which is very high quality, and we don't have to put large amounts through our gut and retain them and ferment them for many, many hours.

Hat tip: Slashdot

You are what you eat

From a picture collection of fridges on good.is

Awesome breakfast idea: Gravlax

I has a version of this for breakfast at Benny's Bistro the other day.



It was delicious. It had a base of potatoes covered with a very strong dill sauce, spinach, egg, and lox.

According to wikipedia:

During the Middle Ages, gravlax was made by fishermen, who salted the salmon and lightly fermented it by burying it in the sand above the high-tide line. The word gravlax comes from the Scandinavian word grav, which means literally "grave" or "hole in the ground" (in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Estonian), and lax (or laks), which means "salmon", thus gravlax is "salmon dug into the ground".

That sounds a little adventurous, but I think I'll try to find a recipe and try it on a weekend.

Time for something a little less healthy

How do you improve on grilled cheese sandwiches? Replace the bread with angel food cake and the cheese with cheesecake. See how on CakeSpy.

Why we love spices

I read a great article in the Economist about spices recently.

Here's an exerpt:

But for the real “heat geeks”, even that is too tame. Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, recently added a new pepper to its vegetable shelves: the Dorset naga. Inhaling its vapour makes your nose tingle. Touching it is painful; cooks are advised to wear gloves. It is the only food product that Tesco will not sell to children. By the standards of other chilies, it is astronomically hot. On the commonly used Scoville scale (based on dilution in sugar syrup to the point that the capsaicin becomes no longer noticeable to the taster) it rates 1.6m units, close to the 2m score of pepper spray used in riot control. The pepper that previously counted as the world’s hottest, the Bhut Jolokia grown by the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University, scored just over 1m. That in turn displaced a chili grown by the Indian Defence Research Laboratory in Tezpur, which scored a mere 855,000. The hottest habanero chilies score a wimpy 577,000.

The naga, originally from Bangladesh, was developed commercially by Michael Michaud, who runs a specialist online chili supply firm in south-western Britain. Having spotted it in an ethnic-food shop in the coastal town of Bournemouth, he bred a dependable and much hotter strain and had it tested. “I sent the powder to a couple of labs. They didn’t believe the reading. They thought they had made a mistake,” he recalls. Jonathan Corbett, the buyer who handles (cautiously) specialist chilies for Tesco says that the naga makes a standard hot curry “taste like a bowl of breakfast cereal”.

The naga has been a runaway success. In 2007, a Tesco outlet in Newcastle in northern England was supplied with 400 packs for a pilot period that was intended to last a month. The entire stock sold out on the first morning. According to AC Nielsen, a market-research firm, demand for hot chilies across all British retailers rose by 18% in the last year. At Tesco, the growth has been 29%. Demand for the naga has been so high that it has been forced to sell unripe green ones, intended for sale early next year. Tesco’s supplier is Britain’s biggest chili farmer, Filippo Salvatore. Based near Biggleswade, he is also a leading light in the Bedford Sicilian Association. He is hurrying to grow more.

Tesco is one of the world’s largest retailers, with outlets in both continental Europe and North America. But Mr Corbett says that his colleagues have no plans to stock the naga elsewhere, for example in the firm’s Fresh & Easy chain in America. “Tastes in the UK are hotter,” he says. That may be true, though the chili-eating milieu is certainly bigger in America, where the calendar is dotted with events such as the rumbustious Fiery Foods and Barbeque Show (in Albuquerque) and the more academic 19th International Pepper Conference (which took place in September in Atlantic City, concluding with a barbecue).

APFrom pain comes pleasure

For connoisseurs though, the macho hullabaloo about ever-hotter chilies is distasteful, even vulgar: rather like rating wine only according to its alcohol content. Steve Waters, who runs the South Devon Chili Farm, says even the idea that the spectrum runs on a simple one-dimensional axis between “hot” and “mild” is misleading. He prefers the more complex Mexican matrix, which categorises chilies both by heat, and whether they are fresh, dried, pickled, or smoked. Any of these can produce big changes in flavour: he highlights the Aji (pronounced ah-hee), a Peruvian chili, which “ripens to bright yellow, with a strong lemony taste when fresh, very zesty. When dried it picks up a banana flavour.”

Update: This is crazy

An Indian mother is set for an entry into the Guinness World Records after eating 51 of the world's hottest chilli in two minutes.

Guinness World Records accepted in 2007 that the ghost chilli was the world's spiciest at more than one million Scoville units, the measure of spiciness, twice the heat of its closest rival.
A standard green chilli has about 1,500 units.

Virgin Atlantic's 'Culinary Journey of Hell'

Here's a funny email about plane food I just read over on wired.

Dear Mr Branson

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it.

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in.
I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn't custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.
I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this.Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.

Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.

By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation.

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.

I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.

Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on.

I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel.

Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.

My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations. Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.
Richard... What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.

So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.

As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and begging for sustenance.

Yours Sincererly,XXXX

From Fresh Pumpkin, Pumpkin Pie

So...after moving in with John he let me fill his beautiful back yard with a pumpkin patch, great for me and for mowing the lawn...not great for bocce ball. Anyway, when fall came and we had five pumpkins I decided to take full advantage. Of course we gutted the pumpkins roasting most of the seeds and saving a few to plant next summer. Next we cut jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. Luckily this year Halloween was on a Friday since it took me almost an entire day to break down the pumpkins for the flesh... hard work when you're doing more than one. Then with anything that was left, we put it in the compost. Definitely a green job.

Anyway, here's the recipe...it's the best pumpkin pie I've ever eaten. It's very mild and creamy. Delicious.

So without further ado, here's the recipe:

Ingredients

1 medium pumpkin

1 12 ounce can of condensed milk

2 eggs, lightly beaten

3/4 cups of brown sugar

1/2 tsp each, of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt

1 pie shell, lightly baked (make your favourite (I like the recipe on the tenderflake box) or cheat and buy a premade one)

Directions

Scoop out the seeds and stingy bits from the pumpkin. Cut it into chunks leaving on the peel.

Steam the chunks for 20 - 25 minutes (or boil them in about an inch of water if you don't have a steamer). Allow to cool.

In the mean time bake the pie shell so that it's lightly browned.

Remove the peel. Mash the chunks and drain any excess water.

With mixer on medium combine mashed pumpkin, evaporated milk, eggs, brown sugar and spices.

Bake at 400°F for about 40 minutes.