James Bond's Hangover Cure

Pasta with mushroom sauce

Food Diary (December 30, 2011)

Breakfast: Cornflakes

Lunch: Pasta with mushroom sauce

Dinner: Lentils and rice, rolled oats with banana and coconut

Baking/sweets: Chocolates

The lunch I had today reminded me of one of my favourite mushroom dishes - reindeer with mushroom sauce. Strips of reindeer is cooked with morels or chanterelles in a creamy sauce. If you get the opportunity to try this, don't hesitate. Its magic served on a plate, with a side of mashed potato.

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Camemberu

Bak kwa nian gao - sweet glutinous rice cake with dried BBQ pork

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: Forbes

I have previously summarized a few articles on hangovers cures. Perhaps this is a good time to refresh our memories. This article presents interesting information. If you are expecting a hangover anytime soon there is hope.

The National Institute of Health advises the following “drink slowly, on a full stomach, and have a glass of water between cocktails. Oh, and don’t drink so much.” We all know that but we don’t always follow it. Here are some other options:

The Prairie Oyster: After a heavy night of shaken-not-stirred martinis, James Bond revived himself with prairie oyster which is a mix of raw egg, worcestershire sauce and hot sauce

Hair of the Dog: The idea of having another glass of whatever you were drinking the night before to ease the symptoms of a hangover is an ancient one, dating back at least as far as Shakespeare, if not earlier. It works, or maybe delays the hangover for sometime.

Greasy Food: In the United States it’s a cheeseburger and fries on the way home from the bar, in ancient Rome it was deep-fried canaries. The Irish have a full cooked breakfast, consisting of fried eggs, bacon, sausages, black pudding, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, and buttered toast. There’s actually a little science behind this remedy. Researchers at Newcastle University in the UK found that the carbs in the bread and amino acids provided by the protein in the meal can actually ease hangover symptoms.

Soup: We all know the curative powers of chicken soup for relieving from cold and flu, and its magic extends to hangovers as well. In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the dish of choice is menudo, a stew of cow’s stomach, hominy, and chilies. In India, mulligatawny soup is prescribed, a spicy mix of split peas, curry, and coconut milk. These concoctions not only help you rehydrate after a night of heavy drinking, but they’re full of carbs and protein to help you speed up metabolism of the alcohol.

Hangover Pills and Potions: There are a number of them on the market but they probably aren’t very effective. A study by the British Medical Journal looked at eight placebo-controlled studies of available cures and found no compelling evidence that any of them worked.

Caffeine and Aspirin: this one might actually have some effect, especially if you have a really bad headache. Alcohol makes the blood vessels in your head swell, hence the pounding pain. Caffeine, on the other hand, is a vasodilator, which means it reduces the size of the blood vessels. As for aspirin, well it’s a pain killer. Skip the Tylenol, though. As your body metabolizes the alcohol in your system, it can increase the toxicity of tylenol, doing a number on your already taxed liver.

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White Chocolate Coconut Lava Cake and Bacteria Burgers

White Chocolate Coconut Lava Cake

Food Diary (December 29, 2011)

Breakfast: Rolled oats with raisins, sunflower seeds and flax seeds

Lunch: Chickpea pilaf

Dinner: Brussel sprouts with pasta, hummus

Baking/sweets: White Chocolate Coconut Lava Cake

If you like white chocolate and coconut, there is no reason why you shouldn’t like this lava cake. Its quite delicious, there’s nothing more to say! The recipe is available here. As you can see the cake was slightly underbaked, hence the lava really flowed generously, a bit too generously. Still very delicious, but I will complain, I am human after all.

Chickpea pilaf

  

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Yummy Chunklet

Red Velvet Chocolate Blossoms

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source:NY Times

A study earlier this year by a nonprofit research center in Phoenix analyzed 80 brands of beef, pork chicken and turkey from five cities. The study found that 47% of the meat contained the bacteria staphylococcus aureus and that 52% were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. In layman’s terms, when you go to the supermarket to buy one of these brands of pre-ground meat products, there's a roughly 25 percent chance you'll consume a potentially fatal bacteria that doesn't respond to commonly prescribed drugs.

If you use pre-packaged ground beef to make a hamburger, it's probably best to cook the meat through rather than keeping it rare. Even antibiotic resistant bacteria can be killed by sufficient heat. Alternatively grind your own meat or have your trusted butcher do in in front of you! Or go to McDonalds or other fast food chains, they seem to be safe.

The article in NY Times is quite long and detailed. If I understood the article correctly, the Food and Drug Administration is doing something about it. They are aware of the health risks of administering antibiotics to healthy farm animals and in 1977 they proposed to withdraw its prior approval of putting penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed. In other words they had plans to not allow use of antibiotics in animals feed. FDA’s procedures require it to issue two “notices of opportunity for a hearing”. These were put on hold by Congress until further research could be conducted. In the meantime the industry was allowed to continue using antibiotics. This issue was on hold until two weeks ago when FDA decided not to fight against this antibiotic use. They are requesting the meat industry to voluntarily comply. FDA has less money than the meat industry so guess who will win?

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Frittata and The Craziest Fast Food Crimes Of 2011

Frittata

Food Diary (December 28, 2011)

Breakfast: Toast

Lunch: Frittata

Dinner: Sweet corn soup, bread

Baking/sweets: Toscatårta (Swedish Almond Cake), chocolates

Sweet corn brought back a food memory, a positive one. I spent a year in board school. Boarding schools are not known for their food and this one was no exception. There were very few highlights. One of them was sweet corn. We were served corn on the cob which we used to make sandwiches – white bread, corn, lots of butter and salt. This was magical. And yes I count this as one of the highlights. I can count all the highlights using my fingers and still have many spare fingers.

The ‘lowlight’ by far with a unanimous (or even consensus) vote was beef olives. I think even the chefs hated it. Now that I think of it, even stray dogs kept their distance when beef olives were served, they must have a sixth sense, or a good sense of smell. Beef olives may sound great but thats where it ends. It looked like dehydrated rocky mountain oysters, and maybe also smelt and tasted like it. I haven’t tried rocky mountain oysters yet, not the real thing anyway. I think many of us boarders are forever traumatized by beef olives. One day I will make it. 

I don’t know how the chefs succeeded in screwing up food so well. I am sure they had good intentions. The most logical explanation I can come up with is that this was a strategy to motivate us to study hard so we would not have to hang around for longer than necessary. This strategy worked, we studied hard, because we saw light at the end of the tunnel, and there surely were no beef olives dangling at the end of our tunnel. Jokes aside, the chefs were really kind ladies.

Moving on to a totally different issue. I am grateful to whoever invented the refrigerator and freezer. This Toscatårta  was sitting in the freezer, all I had to do was to take it out and eat it frozen. Now its all gone.

Toscatårta

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Smoky Wok

Fragrant Soy-Caramelized Prawns

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: Huffington Post and various other sources

An interesting round-up of “The Craziest Fast Food Crimes Of 2011”.

Drunk Driving at Taco Bell: A customer was so drunk that he passed out after receiving the tacos but before he was able to eat them. The cops arrived, woke him up and requested his I.D. Instead of reaching out for his wallet to get his license he pulled out a taco and started eating. I guess he was still drunk.

Selling Fake iPads at McDonald's: At McDonalds a lady was approached by two guys who offered to sell her an Apple iPad for $300. She only had $180 which they accepted. The iPad turned out to be a block of wood, in a Fed-Ex box.

Shooting Out the Window at Taco Bell: Taco Bell again. A guy was so mad that his crunchy beef taco went up in price, he shot at the drive-thru window with his gun. It didn’t end there. He waved a pistol and an assault rifle in the parking lot, and then went to a motel room, where he barricaded himself, sparking a 3-hour standoff that lasted until police lobbed tear gas inside and the man surrendered. No one was hurt. I wonder if he regrets not accepting the 50 cent price increase instead of going through all the drama

Selling Babies at Taco Bell: Taco Bell yet again. A mom tried to sell her 3-day old baby boy for $500. Now we know the offer price for a 3 day old boy. No sale was concluded so we don’t know what the market price is. I am guessing some parent(s) would offer to pay money to someone to take their children way, especially when they are misbehaving.

Beating at McDonald's: Two teenage girls violently attacked a transgender woman in McDonald's allegedly for using the women's bathroom. All this was caught on camera by a McDonald's employee who was laughing during the attack. He didn’t laugh for too much longer, he got fired. Eventually a customer stepped in to stop the attack. 

I remember being in a club once, queuing to use the bathroom. In front of the queue were two girls. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that girls were going to use the male bathroom. Male bathrooms, especially in clubs in the early hours of the morning, is probably dirtier. I felt sorry for their bad judgment but I suppose they were drunk, really drunk if they could not distinguish between a male and female bathroom.

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10 Types of Foodies

Herring potato salad (strange photo!)

Food Diary (December 27, 2011)

Breakfast: Rolled oats with raisins, coconut, almonds and flax seeds

Lunch: Herring potato salad (without beets)

Dinner: Lentils with bread and pasta

Baking/sweets:

I’ve been having some issues with blogger. Some of my posts refused to appear on blog readers such as dashboard and google reader. I am no techie but I found the following explanation and solution on a forum that worked for me. I hope you aren’t having any issues and if you are, maybe the following may work for you.

FeedBurner will not process an original feed from your blog if it is greater than 512K in size. (This limitation only applies to the actual size of the feed file itself and does not include any images or media files you may have linked to or embedded in your posts.) To get a feed larger than 512K back down to size on Blogger, you need to add a parameter to the address for your original feed's URL — the one that FeedBurner checks for updates in order to keep your FeedBurner feed current — that tells Blogger to shorten it to a specific number of posts. To add this parameter:

Sign in to your FeedBurner account.

Click the title of your FeedBurner feed on the My Feeds page.

On the feed management page that appears, click the Edit Feed Details

In the Original Feed Address field, change the address listed there from an example like the following:

Code:

http://myblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml

 OR

http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

to the following format:

Code:

http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=3

(Note that max-results sets the number of posts you want to have appear in your FeedBurner feed. Any integer value between 1 and 500 is permitted.)

Click Save Feed Details. Your changes are immediately applied and FeedBurner re-burns the newly shortened (or lengthened) feed.

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Gourmet Estorie

Pan Fried Foie Gras served with Miso Sauce and Black Truffle

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: ecosalon

ecosalon describes “10 Types of Foodies”. I am not a big fan of the term foodie and I probably don’t agree with the categories but I will put my prejudices aside. It is interesting that someone has taken the time and effort to put foodies into categories.

 

1.     I Made it Myself!: this refers to people (foodies!) that prefer to make items themselves. I wonder if exceptions can be made for store bought pastry, especially filo and puff?

2.     The Organivore: They like to shop at farmer’s markets, prefer authentic eateries that serve wine in Mason jars and asks questions such as whether the yogurt in the house-made tzatsiki is goat’s milk or cow’s milk and which local farm, exactly, it has come from.

3.     The Europhile: “I was eating Nutella before you could even buy it in the States,” they say, pronouncing the word “Nutella” in the European accent of their choice. This is the friend who’ll take you to French bistros because they’ll know exactly how to order. I guess you will naturally find less Europhiles in Europe. 

4.     The One Upper: “You like this calamari? Its nothing compared with the raw octopus I ate on my last trip to Southeast Asia”. They are always one better. I know a few people in this category, they try to be one up, not just in food but in every possible way

5.     The Snob: Soup is returned because it’s not the right temperature, wine pairings lacking “nuance” are rife, and if the meal does not begin with two pounds of freshly steamed mussels, you’re in for disaster.

6.     The Anti-Snob: “Foodie culture has totally taken over this city. At least there are still food carts keeping it real,” says the anti-snob while ordering a wood-fired pizza smothered in truffled gorgonzola, figs and prosciutto. Anything that’s served in a cart, from a trike or out of a small window – preferably in a back alley – is acceptable.

7.     The Avoider: refers to foodies avoiding things like gluten and dairy. The avoider follows the advice of the latest health book, they may not necessarily have the actual food allergies.

8.     The Blogging Food Pornographer: “Let me get just one more shot. Wait, can you move the fork just a little to the right? Can we change the lighting at all?”

9.     The Bacon Lover: “I don’t eat meat, except for bacon.”

10. The DIYer: They make most things at home. They are different from those in the “I Made it Myself” category. The DIYer is a little more low key with their cuisine, making things like kombucha, bean sprouts, pesto and ricotta salata.  

Recent Recipes

Toscatårta (Swedish Almond Cake),

Brunede kartofler

Coconut peanut butter

Popular Recipes

3-Ingredient Oatmeal Cookies

Polenta Bread

Afghan Cookies (Biscuits)