It is claimed if you put a frog in water and slowly raise the heat, it will soon be the end of the frog. For the record, the frog tale is a myth. Maybe the same is true of alternate fake foods.
I do always enjoy your posts, Mark. This one was fun! I was a vegetarian for a bit in college a long time ago, but then moved to Austria where I was shortly going to be on the verge of starving because it was hard to find vegetables and even soup broth was all meat-based (things have changed in the interim). I was about to go vegetarian again some 15 years ago and happened to read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and ended up taking up hunting instead, which my parents had always done when I was growing up (we never had any other meat, too poor) but hadn't taught me. I've fallen on the side of trying to eat as locally as possible, not for any abstract reasons but because it seems to be the best way to take responsibility for what my family consumes in this world. Lab-grown food doesn't feel like that, though I understand the argument for lower impact when compared with industrially-produced food, especially meat.
Except for coffee. It's such a luxury to have access to it, and I'm so grateful. Coffee, lemons, and salt. I love those things and cannot get them where I live.
As always, although I never take it for granted, I LOVE YOUR COMMENTS. Thanks for the kind words about my writing. Your take on eating and adding the hunting is very cool! In my somewhat recent post https://markdolan.substack.com/biomass I didn't explicitly make my point that well. Plants and animals all come from the same tree. There are only about 500 amino acids on Earth. From that, and only that, all of the worlds proteins result (>200M). There is no magic to it, proteins are always and merely a bunch of amino acids strung together. In a rational and viable system the natural plants are the food chain for the animals. There is nothing wrong with eating a mix of stuff that works for you. The distortions are mostly the crazy practices we've instituted in industrializing the processes. I would stress that if someone develops some bioreactor that spits out cauliflower in four days I will be suspect. There are pretty easy ways to eat sensibly no matter what your preferences. There is just a subset of good stuff that doesn't make it into fruits and vegetables mostly due to heavy tillage, stripping essentials from the soil, killing the biome and artificially raising mostly the nitrogen with fertilizer made from oil. It's a good way to make lots of something but a bad way to make something that is good. By the time we get to animals we want to eat we feed them corn mostly to increase the weight fast. All of this is silly. I get some pushback sometimes because I love lamb. US ranchers have recently started raising lamb and they do it the same way they fatten cattle. Feed them lots of corn. Now there is another meat out there that is marbled like beef and is covered in wool. It is asinine. Eat a small New Zealand lamb chop. None of this is necessary and merely promotes obesity and vitamin, mineral and amino acid deficiencies. All of it is dumb.
Returning to happy talk. I love coffee and everything about it. I love smelling the fresh beans, I love crushing the beans, I love misting my coffee filter with water so that the coffee doesn't creep up the sides of the filter by capillary action, I love that first cup just as the beeper sounds and I love transferring the rest of it to a thermos so it stops cooking. Coffee is awesome. I hate when it is burnt or overcooked. For the same reason a steak of almost any kind is great medium rare, when it is overcooked it is just a tragedy just like burnt or bitter coffee.
Thanks for reading and your always fun comments Antonia...loved your Russian-inspired vodka hack for flakier pie crust!!!
I can't remember why the vodka is meant to work so well but I've tried it and it seems to, whether with lard or butter (I use lard when I have it).
I love coffee, too! So much. And it sounds like you'd get along with my dad and my brother-in-law, both of whom have roasted coffee for a living for many years and both of whom have subjected me to many, many coffee tastings. My dad was on the judging panels for Cup of Excellence for many years, which is a fair trade-type organization except it works directly with small coffee farmers to reward quality: https://cupofexcellence.org
Also, I lived in Australia for a couple of years and there's just no comparison with the lamb. You're right. It's ridiculous. The legs we got there were *tiny* by comparison. And so much better.
I am a cooking and baking nerd and I thrive on the science. When you add fat to flour, there is a heat releasing reaction and the flour begins to melt which causes the fat to not be distributed evenly. Cold icewater or even better vodka (I suppose) with an even lower freezing point allows bits of fat to float around and distribute in the crust so it can be flaky and have air pockets. I hope that doesn't spoil the magic :)
I did a post about Albert Peet a while back. Probably the progenitor of Americans drinking decent coffee. Before him, I'm sure most everyone was drinking robusto beans and now we've shifted to arabica beans or a blend. Coffee science is FUN! Another person on the comment thread (Charlotte Rains Dixon) and I dialogued about coffee. I recommended a light book we read in my history bookclub. It was fun and described the importance of coffee and wine and other beverages in world history.
I did a post a bit ago. It has gotten to the point where "American" lamb is nearly 2x the size animal. This, of course, leads to the very same dangerous food contamination issues we face with beef in the US AKA downer cattle and chickens with breasts so large they collapse their legs...it is all cruel and unnecessary. The American lambs are almost 2x as much meat salvaged -- it's like pretending an NFL Lineman is a "normal sized" human. While I do not know it, I would assume that sheep, like cattle, have GREAT DIFFICULTY digesting a corn diet so they have problems especially during the final fattening.
I did not know that about fat and flour! I suppose my brother-in-law knows (he was a chef for years before becoming a coffee roaster), but it's something new to me. Doesn't spoil it at all. :)
I'd forgotten about Peet's. What a change that was, when coffee culture started to improve ...
Fake meat is just another processed food which is tough on the digestion and horrible for any organ not working at its optimum. (Kidneys, ahem.) I drool when I see a cow. I actually once had a holistic doc tell me to eat steak tartare. Meanwhile, I just made a batch of beef bone broth. Yummy and good for everything in the body.
Thanks for reading and commenting! I agree about the fake meat!!! Processed food is so recent in our diets it is definitely not a great choice. I think in a large grocery store, about 75% of the products contain components of corn, soybeans or both. Soy is healthy as a whole food for most people but extracts as emulsifiers and thickeners in almost everything in a box is not so sensible. For some of us the risk factor is cholesterol. I mostly figure eating reasonably sourced meat, fruit & vegetables and washing them is about all there is to eating healthy. I would imagine if there are digestion issues, it gets a lot more complex! Having worked in a biz adjacent to food production, not a fan of final finished cattle on a feedlot. Americans associate highly marbled meat as quality after only 50 years of conditioning. It is doubtful any of this is long-term sensible. The grain strips the essential goodness of the grass in their diet in short order. This is mostly why the livers of 99% of the cattle raised for beef are in bad shape at slaughter and only 'good' for pet food and feed. It is also why beef is no longer a food high in Omega 3 & 6 fatty acids -- the corn strips this from the animal and reverses their lifetime of eating what a ruminant is supposed to eat (grass & pasture). I've only had steak tartare a couple of times. Not much can go wrong from one animal. Industrial beef production means ground beef in bulk can be traces of 100s of animals. That's why we have to overcook it. Industrial processes are what have created the crazy risks and need to overcook. Total ignorance of beef bone broth. Something to learn about maybe!
You are VERY kind. You are also very smart IMO re: grass fed. Most of my posts are now tagged and I always have a blast writing about food. One of my favorite readers & writers, Anne Kadet, refers to them as silly food fights. I think the food ones are generally funny and informative. Since I LAUGH each time I read your posts you might enjoy an old post about dumb kitchen gadgets https://markdolan.substack.com/i-want-that -- thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Great read about the food gadgets. Why are posts tagged? I once bought a counter top chicken roaster. It worked great but when it came time to move across country we gave it away. It was huge and impossible to pack.
Some people tell me they are never sure what I will write about and maybe that's not a compliment at all :( -- I decided to tag the posts and include them on my HomePage. So if someone stumbles on my Substack and likes Food they have one place to click -- Not sure it is important at all, maybe just OCD -- My wife and I sold our home of thirty plus years so it's toss, store or regift time in our lives. Lucky you being smart enough to pass along the chicken roaster!!!
Focus, attitude and energy? That's what coffee is for. No mushrooms needed. I do like mushrooms, a lot, actually, but where they belong, in salads and stir fries. I'm a fan of Beyond Burgers and Impossible Burgers but I've read articles stating they are not all that good for you. And I still love meat. Always will.
I think you capture exactly why the emulators are rarely a great choice. I eat the Impossible burgers RARELY but they are mostly a bridge to none at at. I still eat meat occasionally but less and less as time goes by. For me and my family history focusing on little or no cholesterol is sensible.
Fake coffee is working on a problem that is not a problem. Thanks as always for reading and taking the time to comment.
Just have to chime in again, because: "fake coffee is working on a problem that is not a problem." Brilliance! You can take away my meat, my wine (though I'd fight you on that), but never, ever, my real coffee!
I am with you on coffee and wine also!!! Great book -- easy read -- "The History of the World in Six Glasses" by Tom Standage -- a fun history book! -- coffee and wine are two for the six!
Literally half of my family is employed in the specialty coffee roasting business, so absorbing coffee into my system is probably in my blood -- and mushrooms are, too (being half-Russian over here), but there's no way I'd want to combine them!
Go to the website. They are the most curated and stupid reviews ever. Ford could have used this sort of social media full court press when it was selling Pintos.
One more thing...it was after reading a bunch of silly reviews that I realized this was just diluted coffee with not quite as much caffeine -- silly stuff -- in some ways like your affectation for half-and-half. If you love cow udder stuff, why not go with the full concentrated version? -- one of these days I'm gonna buy a brick of that Bustelo stuff and see how much almond milk I need to dilute it :) -- I love a good experiment!
Food arguments are the best -- I remember MANY YEARS ago at a southern bbq -- two grown men in an animated argument about how to slice something -- I love it! -- they had been cooking this meat for HOURS and were pickled themselves from the hot sun and it was important to them to argue about slicing the meat!!! Most of us just wanted to eat :)
Thanks for reading and commenting. I am glad you have stuck with me! I love a good food fight also. I use half and half in a coffee shop sometimes but could never manage to use a whole container! It is great for the same reason that lard makes great doughnuts. For everyday needs, just don't need lard or half-and-half. I suppose if my dog were a show dog, half-and-half and lard would contribute to a shiny coat though. Way back when living in Central California I used to get a kick out of the back of the grocery store, The kick plate under the meat freezer always had a row of 5 gallon tubs of Rex brand lard. Authentic Mexican cooking ya know. I loved seeing it in peoples carts. Not dissimilar to big containers of ceiling paint at Home Depot. I am going to check if it is still sold here in the Hispanic markets. I would guess yes. If I were a social media person, I would imagine it would be possible to create a TikTok craze of using lard as suntan lotion. A non-kosher tanning aid.
YUM. I also recently learned that using ice-cold vodka instead of water kicks the crust up another notch, whether you use butter or lard or some other fat.
The professor who guided my undergraduate research at University had a FABULOUS saying. "It's not magic, it's chemistry Mark!" Good old freezing point depression for an even colder crust! This seems the sort of trick we expect from a woman with some great Russian history!
Lucky you!!! My maternal grandmother cooked with lard -- old school -- I am SURE all the GREAT pie shops I frequent know your brothers "secret" -- PS grandma was a LARGE woman
1. I haven't tried the Beyond Burger and don't plan to - it's too expensive, plus I am really not into the idea of "bleeding" fake meat. I know it's just beet "blood," but apparently bleeding food is still yucky, imho. 🧛♂️ There's enough bean, nut, veggie, and soy based patties out there already.
2. I love food, but with IBS I have to watch out for nutritional boobytraps - just last night I ate some delicious fresh cherries which caused my belly to abruptly swell up like a balloon! Simethicone to the rescue!!!!!!! I hate when that happens. 😂
3. All of the above!
Interesting post - the food pornish image of the steak makes me think that you've raised mischievous sons (and that's a good thing).
IDK what the sausage is made of. I only know what it is posing as. Almost made me hurl.
1. I did not know the Beyond was using beet juice. I have tried the Impossiible version. It actually contains heme (as in hemoglobin). It is a bit unnerving. I did a post about it titled "Heme". I buy a pack of them in the late fall when the grill is no longer a thing and have one occasionally during the winter to scratch the itch. 2. Sorry to hear it. I just bought cherries and they are a favorite for me. My son N lives and works in Omaha. Probably the best place to get a consistent steak if that is your thing. I imagine lots of high-end steakhouses are resellers.
It's strange to think about plant based heme. I've tried seitan, both homemade (horrible! But that might just due to a gap in my abilities) and store-bought (okay), and it is definitely not the kind of fake meat that one would throw on a plate as a big lump and enjoy. It's good cooked up as little pieces (so it can develop a bit of texture) and well sauced, as in some Chinese "wheat meat" dishes. But if someone hoped to trick a carnivore with that pale mound of gluten... not going to happen! 😂
Ah the comments -- I am not sure what seitan is. I am a cautious mover toward less meat. It seems from reading about it maybe worth a try as it is low in carbs which is my primary problem and gluten is no issue for me. If I could eat pasta all the time I would but my head would explode these days. Think I'm gonna find a restaurant and give it a try. If I like it maybe will figure out how to use it. BTW that absurd sausage in the photo is claimed to be a seafood sausage -- it's hard to believe that is a thing -- people are crazy
Seitan is good stuff, if it's done right, and super high in protein because of the gluten (most of the carbs are rinsed out in the seitan making process).
I googled seafood sausage and it is indeed a thing - most of the images looked much more appetizing than the things in your photo, but not something I'd try either. Granted I stopped eating fish and other critters at the age of 17, so I had a rather immature palate, but I have very fond memories of fish sticks.
Another master class in why the comments are where the action is!!! For many years when I have gone to a Chinese restaurant I have always liked mock duck -- b/c of YOU, I realize that mock duck is seitan -- WOW! Not sure all the extra stuff in mock duck is so good for me though but now I realize I've liked it all along!!!
As for seafood, I have always loved it -- my theory is early Catholics just liked seafood so they pretended from the beginning it wasn't meat so it was okay to have it every Friday -- genius!!!
It sounds like you have been on this food journey longer than me!
I always thought that the Church okayed fish (but not meat) on Friday to help the Italian fishing industry, but apparently it's not true ( I googled before posting, so I wouldn't pass along a falsehood). Apparently nobody knows the reason, but this guy had a nice theory: "A couple of years ago I stumbled upon an intriguing explanation as to why we eat fish on Fridays but not meat. The explanation comes from the 15th century, from one John Myre in his Liber Festivalis: 'For when God, for Adam’s sin, cursed the earth and the land, he cursed not the water; wherefore it is lawful for a man to eat in Lent that which cometh of the water.' To put it differently, we eat fish as a reminder of God’s mercy. Ponder that and try that answer the next time someone asks you about your fish sandwich." (https://ct.dio.org/item/4950-hey-father-why-do-catholics-eat-fish-on-fridays-and-when-did-this-start.html).
I've been a vegetarian since 1978 and have been dealing with IBS for the past 10 years or so. We all have our personal food journeys. 😊
Where would you find side tracks like this but in the comments?
I do always enjoy your posts, Mark. This one was fun! I was a vegetarian for a bit in college a long time ago, but then moved to Austria where I was shortly going to be on the verge of starving because it was hard to find vegetables and even soup broth was all meat-based (things have changed in the interim). I was about to go vegetarian again some 15 years ago and happened to read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and ended up taking up hunting instead, which my parents had always done when I was growing up (we never had any other meat, too poor) but hadn't taught me. I've fallen on the side of trying to eat as locally as possible, not for any abstract reasons but because it seems to be the best way to take responsibility for what my family consumes in this world. Lab-grown food doesn't feel like that, though I understand the argument for lower impact when compared with industrially-produced food, especially meat.
Except for coffee. It's such a luxury to have access to it, and I'm so grateful. Coffee, lemons, and salt. I love those things and cannot get them where I live.
As always, although I never take it for granted, I LOVE YOUR COMMENTS. Thanks for the kind words about my writing. Your take on eating and adding the hunting is very cool! In my somewhat recent post https://markdolan.substack.com/biomass I didn't explicitly make my point that well. Plants and animals all come from the same tree. There are only about 500 amino acids on Earth. From that, and only that, all of the worlds proteins result (>200M). There is no magic to it, proteins are always and merely a bunch of amino acids strung together. In a rational and viable system the natural plants are the food chain for the animals. There is nothing wrong with eating a mix of stuff that works for you. The distortions are mostly the crazy practices we've instituted in industrializing the processes. I would stress that if someone develops some bioreactor that spits out cauliflower in four days I will be suspect. There are pretty easy ways to eat sensibly no matter what your preferences. There is just a subset of good stuff that doesn't make it into fruits and vegetables mostly due to heavy tillage, stripping essentials from the soil, killing the biome and artificially raising mostly the nitrogen with fertilizer made from oil. It's a good way to make lots of something but a bad way to make something that is good. By the time we get to animals we want to eat we feed them corn mostly to increase the weight fast. All of this is silly. I get some pushback sometimes because I love lamb. US ranchers have recently started raising lamb and they do it the same way they fatten cattle. Feed them lots of corn. Now there is another meat out there that is marbled like beef and is covered in wool. It is asinine. Eat a small New Zealand lamb chop. None of this is necessary and merely promotes obesity and vitamin, mineral and amino acid deficiencies. All of it is dumb.
Returning to happy talk. I love coffee and everything about it. I love smelling the fresh beans, I love crushing the beans, I love misting my coffee filter with water so that the coffee doesn't creep up the sides of the filter by capillary action, I love that first cup just as the beeper sounds and I love transferring the rest of it to a thermos so it stops cooking. Coffee is awesome. I hate when it is burnt or overcooked. For the same reason a steak of almost any kind is great medium rare, when it is overcooked it is just a tragedy just like burnt or bitter coffee.
Thanks for reading and your always fun comments Antonia...loved your Russian-inspired vodka hack for flakier pie crust!!!
I can't remember why the vodka is meant to work so well but I've tried it and it seems to, whether with lard or butter (I use lard when I have it).
I love coffee, too! So much. And it sounds like you'd get along with my dad and my brother-in-law, both of whom have roasted coffee for a living for many years and both of whom have subjected me to many, many coffee tastings. My dad was on the judging panels for Cup of Excellence for many years, which is a fair trade-type organization except it works directly with small coffee farmers to reward quality: https://cupofexcellence.org
Also, I lived in Australia for a couple of years and there's just no comparison with the lamb. You're right. It's ridiculous. The legs we got there were *tiny* by comparison. And so much better.
I am a cooking and baking nerd and I thrive on the science. When you add fat to flour, there is a heat releasing reaction and the flour begins to melt which causes the fat to not be distributed evenly. Cold icewater or even better vodka (I suppose) with an even lower freezing point allows bits of fat to float around and distribute in the crust so it can be flaky and have air pockets. I hope that doesn't spoil the magic :)
I did a post about Albert Peet a while back. Probably the progenitor of Americans drinking decent coffee. Before him, I'm sure most everyone was drinking robusto beans and now we've shifted to arabica beans or a blend. Coffee science is FUN! Another person on the comment thread (Charlotte Rains Dixon) and I dialogued about coffee. I recommended a light book we read in my history bookclub. It was fun and described the importance of coffee and wine and other beverages in world history.
I did a post a bit ago. It has gotten to the point where "American" lamb is nearly 2x the size animal. This, of course, leads to the very same dangerous food contamination issues we face with beef in the US AKA downer cattle and chickens with breasts so large they collapse their legs...it is all cruel and unnecessary. The American lambs are almost 2x as much meat salvaged -- it's like pretending an NFL Lineman is a "normal sized" human. While I do not know it, I would assume that sheep, like cattle, have GREAT DIFFICULTY digesting a corn diet so they have problems especially during the final fattening.
I did not know that about fat and flour! I suppose my brother-in-law knows (he was a chef for years before becoming a coffee roaster), but it's something new to me. Doesn't spoil it at all. :)
I'd forgotten about Peet's. What a change that was, when coffee culture started to improve ...
Poor frog.
Fake meat is just another processed food which is tough on the digestion and horrible for any organ not working at its optimum. (Kidneys, ahem.) I drool when I see a cow. I actually once had a holistic doc tell me to eat steak tartare. Meanwhile, I just made a batch of beef bone broth. Yummy and good for everything in the body.
Thanks for reading and commenting! I agree about the fake meat!!! Processed food is so recent in our diets it is definitely not a great choice. I think in a large grocery store, about 75% of the products contain components of corn, soybeans or both. Soy is healthy as a whole food for most people but extracts as emulsifiers and thickeners in almost everything in a box is not so sensible. For some of us the risk factor is cholesterol. I mostly figure eating reasonably sourced meat, fruit & vegetables and washing them is about all there is to eating healthy. I would imagine if there are digestion issues, it gets a lot more complex! Having worked in a biz adjacent to food production, not a fan of final finished cattle on a feedlot. Americans associate highly marbled meat as quality after only 50 years of conditioning. It is doubtful any of this is long-term sensible. The grain strips the essential goodness of the grass in their diet in short order. This is mostly why the livers of 99% of the cattle raised for beef are in bad shape at slaughter and only 'good' for pet food and feed. It is also why beef is no longer a food high in Omega 3 & 6 fatty acids -- the corn strips this from the animal and reverses their lifetime of eating what a ruminant is supposed to eat (grass & pasture). I've only had steak tartare a couple of times. Not much can go wrong from one animal. Industrial beef production means ground beef in bulk can be traces of 100s of animals. That's why we have to overcook it. Industrial processes are what have created the crazy risks and need to overcook. Total ignorance of beef bone broth. Something to learn about maybe!
You’ve got a lot of good info to share. I only eat grass fed beef.
You are VERY kind. You are also very smart IMO re: grass fed. Most of my posts are now tagged and I always have a blast writing about food. One of my favorite readers & writers, Anne Kadet, refers to them as silly food fights. I think the food ones are generally funny and informative. Since I LAUGH each time I read your posts you might enjoy an old post about dumb kitchen gadgets https://markdolan.substack.com/i-want-that -- thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Great read about the food gadgets. Why are posts tagged? I once bought a counter top chicken roaster. It worked great but when it came time to move across country we gave it away. It was huge and impossible to pack.
Some people tell me they are never sure what I will write about and maybe that's not a compliment at all :( -- I decided to tag the posts and include them on my HomePage. So if someone stumbles on my Substack and likes Food they have one place to click -- Not sure it is important at all, maybe just OCD -- My wife and I sold our home of thirty plus years so it's toss, store or regift time in our lives. Lucky you being smart enough to pass along the chicken roaster!!!
Ah. Got it. Makes sense. You and wifey just sold your home too? You’ve got some immense changes going on. Hope you have time for your own healing.
Focus, attitude and energy? That's what coffee is for. No mushrooms needed. I do like mushrooms, a lot, actually, but where they belong, in salads and stir fries. I'm a fan of Beyond Burgers and Impossible Burgers but I've read articles stating they are not all that good for you. And I still love meat. Always will.
Thanks for a fun post!
I think you capture exactly why the emulators are rarely a great choice. I eat the Impossible burgers RARELY but they are mostly a bridge to none at at. I still eat meat occasionally but less and less as time goes by. For me and my family history focusing on little or no cholesterol is sensible.
Fake coffee is working on a problem that is not a problem. Thanks as always for reading and taking the time to comment.
Just have to chime in again, because: "fake coffee is working on a problem that is not a problem." Brilliance! You can take away my meat, my wine (though I'd fight you on that), but never, ever, my real coffee!
I am with you on coffee and wine also!!! Great book -- easy read -- "The History of the World in Six Glasses" by Tom Standage -- a fun history book! -- coffee and wine are two for the six!
I'll check it out!
Oh that is so funny to find out that mushroom coffee is just coffee with mushrooms!
I love to talk about food bc it is just so fun in the most trivial way. Esp arguments and fights about which foods are superior.
Being a life-long half and half devotee, I’d fight you on this almond milk thing, Mr. Dolan, except I just feel sorry for you.
Literally half of my family is employed in the specialty coffee roasting business, so absorbing coffee into my system is probably in my blood -- and mushrooms are, too (being half-Russian over here), but there's no way I'd want to combine them!
Go to the website. They are the most curated and stupid reviews ever. Ford could have used this sort of social media full court press when it was selling Pintos.
That's a heck of a description! 😅
One more thing...it was after reading a bunch of silly reviews that I realized this was just diluted coffee with not quite as much caffeine -- silly stuff -- in some ways like your affectation for half-and-half. If you love cow udder stuff, why not go with the full concentrated version? -- one of these days I'm gonna buy a brick of that Bustelo stuff and see how much almond milk I need to dilute it :) -- I love a good experiment!
Food arguments are the best -- I remember MANY YEARS ago at a southern bbq -- two grown men in an animated argument about how to slice something -- I love it! -- they had been cooking this meat for HOURS and were pickled themselves from the hot sun and it was important to them to argue about slicing the meat!!! Most of us just wanted to eat :)
Thanks for reading and commenting. I am glad you have stuck with me! I love a good food fight also. I use half and half in a coffee shop sometimes but could never manage to use a whole container! It is great for the same reason that lard makes great doughnuts. For everyday needs, just don't need lard or half-and-half. I suppose if my dog were a show dog, half-and-half and lard would contribute to a shiny coat though. Way back when living in Central California I used to get a kick out of the back of the grocery store, The kick plate under the meat freezer always had a row of 5 gallon tubs of Rex brand lard. Authentic Mexican cooking ya know. I loved seeing it in peoples carts. Not dissimilar to big containers of ceiling paint at Home Depot. I am going to check if it is still sold here in the Hispanic markets. I would guess yes. If I were a social media person, I would imagine it would be possible to create a TikTok craze of using lard as suntan lotion. A non-kosher tanning aid.
I was just home visiting family and in between all the food fights my little brother made a blueberry pie with a lard-based crust. Sooo good!
YUM. I also recently learned that using ice-cold vodka instead of water kicks the crust up another notch, whether you use butter or lard or some other fat.
The professor who guided my undergraduate research at University had a FABULOUS saying. "It's not magic, it's chemistry Mark!" Good old freezing point depression for an even colder crust! This seems the sort of trick we expect from a woman with some great Russian history!
You'd think it came from my Russian side but it actually came from my brother-in-law!
Lucky you!!! My maternal grandmother cooked with lard -- old school -- I am SURE all the GREAT pie shops I frequent know your brothers "secret" -- PS grandma was a LARGE woman
Hmmmmm.... is that seitan sauage by any chance?
1. I haven't tried the Beyond Burger and don't plan to - it's too expensive, plus I am really not into the idea of "bleeding" fake meat. I know it's just beet "blood," but apparently bleeding food is still yucky, imho. 🧛♂️ There's enough bean, nut, veggie, and soy based patties out there already.
2. I love food, but with IBS I have to watch out for nutritional boobytraps - just last night I ate some delicious fresh cherries which caused my belly to abruptly swell up like a balloon! Simethicone to the rescue!!!!!!! I hate when that happens. 😂
3. All of the above!
Interesting post - the food pornish image of the steak makes me think that you've raised mischievous sons (and that's a good thing).
IDK what the sausage is made of. I only know what it is posing as. Almost made me hurl.
1. I did not know the Beyond was using beet juice. I have tried the Impossiible version. It actually contains heme (as in hemoglobin). It is a bit unnerving. I did a post about it titled "Heme". I buy a pack of them in the late fall when the grill is no longer a thing and have one occasionally during the winter to scratch the itch. 2. Sorry to hear it. I just bought cherries and they are a favorite for me. My son N lives and works in Omaha. Probably the best place to get a consistent steak if that is your thing. I imagine lots of high-end steakhouses are resellers.
It's strange to think about plant based heme. I've tried seitan, both homemade (horrible! But that might just due to a gap in my abilities) and store-bought (okay), and it is definitely not the kind of fake meat that one would throw on a plate as a big lump and enjoy. It's good cooked up as little pieces (so it can develop a bit of texture) and well sauced, as in some Chinese "wheat meat" dishes. But if someone hoped to trick a carnivore with that pale mound of gluten... not going to happen! 😂
Ah the comments -- I am not sure what seitan is. I am a cautious mover toward less meat. It seems from reading about it maybe worth a try as it is low in carbs which is my primary problem and gluten is no issue for me. If I could eat pasta all the time I would but my head would explode these days. Think I'm gonna find a restaurant and give it a try. If I like it maybe will figure out how to use it. BTW that absurd sausage in the photo is claimed to be a seafood sausage -- it's hard to believe that is a thing -- people are crazy
Seitan is good stuff, if it's done right, and super high in protein because of the gluten (most of the carbs are rinsed out in the seitan making process).
I googled seafood sausage and it is indeed a thing - most of the images looked much more appetizing than the things in your photo, but not something I'd try either. Granted I stopped eating fish and other critters at the age of 17, so I had a rather immature palate, but I have very fond memories of fish sticks.
Another master class in why the comments are where the action is!!! For many years when I have gone to a Chinese restaurant I have always liked mock duck -- b/c of YOU, I realize that mock duck is seitan -- WOW! Not sure all the extra stuff in mock duck is so good for me though but now I realize I've liked it all along!!!
As for seafood, I have always loved it -- my theory is early Catholics just liked seafood so they pretended from the beginning it wasn't meat so it was okay to have it every Friday -- genius!!!
It sounds like you have been on this food journey longer than me!
Yep, mock duck is seitan! 😂 And, yes, it is good!
I always thought that the Church okayed fish (but not meat) on Friday to help the Italian fishing industry, but apparently it's not true ( I googled before posting, so I wouldn't pass along a falsehood). Apparently nobody knows the reason, but this guy had a nice theory: "A couple of years ago I stumbled upon an intriguing explanation as to why we eat fish on Fridays but not meat. The explanation comes from the 15th century, from one John Myre in his Liber Festivalis: 'For when God, for Adam’s sin, cursed the earth and the land, he cursed not the water; wherefore it is lawful for a man to eat in Lent that which cometh of the water.' To put it differently, we eat fish as a reminder of God’s mercy. Ponder that and try that answer the next time someone asks you about your fish sandwich." (https://ct.dio.org/item/4950-hey-father-why-do-catholics-eat-fish-on-fridays-and-when-did-this-start.html).
I've been a vegetarian since 1978 and have been dealing with IBS for the past 10 years or so. We all have our personal food journeys. 😊
Where would you find side tracks like this but in the comments?