Vaguely missing the South

I have told the story before about ambling to the bus stop one morning in Atlanta and finding myself behind two good ol' boys talking about dining at an acquaintance's house. Topic of discussion was apparently the protein portion of the meal, a possum that allegedly resembled a cooked chihuahua. At the time I was intrigued, but not intrigued enough to intrude on their conversation and ask how it tasted. 

I had no idea then (and still have no idea) just how one went about acquiring a recently deceased opossum in a metropolitan area like Atlanta, although I suppose it was possible to trap one on the patios of the apartment complex. We had a possum visit our patio occasionally. I remember thinking back then that the beast looked like road kill without ever having been flattened out on Buford Highway. I felt no desire to terminate it, toss it in the crock pot, and slow cook the beast. I mean, possums eat ticks. Who in their right mind wants to eliminate a beast that vacuums up ticks?

So what has me thinking about cooked possums today? I've been working on a new exhibit at the museum, a nod to Hunting and Fishing in Baraga County. The exhibit will include a cookbook published by the US Department of Agriculture's Cooperative Extension Service in 1943. During the war, meat was rationed. Beef was hard to come by for the average cook so the Extension Service decided to promote Good Eating from Woods and Fields. 

Good Eating has recipes for various wee beasties one doesn't see front and center on the dinner table very often these days. Granted, squirrel is still popular at wild game feasts (an event many sport hunters' clubs hold occasionally as a fund raiser). It's also a traditional ingredient in Brunswick stew, although modern recipes usually don't mention it. Today's cookbooks (and Google recipe search results) usually list chicken or pork as the meat of choice. But when was the last time you heard anyone talk about roasting a woodchuck? (Not a bad choice, incidentally, if one is ever lost and starving in the wilderness. Woodchuck has a lot of fat so just like porcupine would be a high energy food.) 

According to the S.O., skunk is edible, too, if you know how to handle it. He occasionally reminisces about the time back when he was young, he and his father stopped to visit with some geezer living the carefree bachelor life in a shack that had been part of a lumber camp. The dude invited them to dine with him. The S.O. did not recognize the taste; his dad told him later it was skunk. Whether or not it was is debatable, but apparently it was a possibility. Somehow the Extension researchers missed skunk as a culinary delight; there is no skunk meat loaf or skunk goulash in Good Eating.

There is, however, raccoon meatloaf and raccoon goulash. And more. Raccoon can be used in multiple ways.  As it happens, I once knew a source for acquiring the main ingredient (one raccoon) for those recipes. Whenever we drove from Atlanta to Hemphill, Texas, to visit the Younger Daughter we'd pass through a town just west of Vidalia, Louisiana, where the proprietor of a retail establishment there advertised regularly that they had "fresh coon today." The establishment was one of those typical deep South gas stations/convenience stores/god knows what places that look like it hasn't been open for business since the Eisenhower administration but locals will tell you serves the best fried chicken in the county (or, it being Louisiana, parish). We never stopped. Another opportunity lost; somehow I doubt I'll ever see another "fresh coon today" sign board. 

Which means I've never done a test drive of the following recipe. However, if you happen to have a source for a recently deceased raccoon, the US Department of Agriculture believes (or believed, 78 years ago) that this is edible:

Fricasseed Raccoon

8 Servings 

Cooking Time 2-1/2 hours 

 

1 raccoon 

2 tablespoons salt  

1/2 teaspoon pepper  

1 cup flour  

1/4 cup fat 

2 cups broth  

1. Clean raccoon and remove all fat. Cut into 8 or 10 pieces.  

2. Rub with salt and pepper and roll in flour.  

3. Cook in hot fat until well browned, add the broth, cover and simmer for 2 hours or until tender.

Still channeling Mary Berry

Sort of. A few weeks ago I spotted Almost Vegetarian, on the New Books shelf at the library. The book looked intriguing. It wasn't 100% vegetarian, just kind of targeting people who are leaning toward including more plant-based dishes in their diet. It includes recipes for chicken and fish but no red meat.

Flipped through it and discovered it included some intriguing options, like leek and fennel flan. I had a hard time wrapping my head around that one. Now I know intellectually that a flan can be savory but years and years of encountering flan only as the dessert version, the sweet custard with the caramel sauce that's a staple of Mexican restaurant menus, had me doing a double take at the idea of making a flan with leeks.

Not that I have much personal knowledge of leeks. I've never cooked one. I just know they look like green onions on steroids.

I'm also not super interested in turning into a vegetarian. I do, however, have a number of friends and relatives who won't eat anything that might be smarter than they are. I figure it's good to have a few vegetarian and/or vegan recipes in the repertoire as a just-in-case we ever invite any herbivores to dine with us.

So I checked the book out, took it home, skimmed it, found a fair number of recipes that looked like they might be edible. You know, stuff that could function as a main dish, variations on savory pies. I scanned a few pages, printed out the recipes, and then decided to try the Carrot Pie.

On one level the Carrot Pie didn't seem much different than the lanttulaatikko (Rutabaga Casserole) that's a favorite Finnish Christmas holiday meals dish. Smashed carrots, nutmeg as a spice, On another, it did include cheese and was supposed to be wrapped in a crust. A free form crust, a crust that would be rolled out but not placed in a pan. I'd have to shape it up and over the carrot filling without anything to support it. Having seen some of shaped crust disasters on the Great British Bake Off (which has mutated into the Great British Baking Show, lost Mary Berry, and acquired two rather odd hosts in the process, but that's a topic for a different post) I was not particularly optimistic about dealing with the crust.

Turned out I worried for nothing. The crust is a yeast dough and easy to work with. It's actually a rather good crust. I could see using it for homemade pizza or calzones. I'm not sure I'll ever make it again to enclose a carrot pie, but you never know. Maybe I'll freak out the family the next time there's a holiday meal. You know, tell the daughter and grandkids that, yes, I'll bring a pie. Oh, and by the way, it'll contain carrots.

Making the pie wasn't especially difficult. It did end up looking a little odd, but going by the description in the cookbook it wasn't destined to look like something in a case in a French patisserie. Free-form crusts are always a bit rough looking, kind of like a preschooler's first attempts at working with modeling clay.

As for the taste? Also a bit odd. Not bad, just different. I don't think I'd actually want to have it as a main dish, but for a side? Sure. And the crust is good.

The recipe(s):

Dough for Savory Pie

1 teaspoon dry active yeast

1/2 cup tepid water

1/2 teaspoon dry malt or sugar

3/4 cup all purpose flour

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon salt (I only used 1/2 teaspoon; I do reduced salt in everything I cook)

1 large egg, slightly beaten

3 tablespoons nonfat sour cream (screw the nonfat; I used the real thing)

In a small mixing bowl, stir together yeast and water. Let sit until frothy, about 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients. Make a well in the center and add the egg, sour cream, and yeast mixture. Stir to make a soft dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead briefly until smooth. 

Clean the large mixing bowl and return the dough to it. Cover with plastic wrap or a light towel and place in a warm spot until doubled, about 45 minutes. Use the dough for Savory Carrot Pie. 

Savory Carrot Pie

1 recipe Dough for Savory Pie

3/4 pound (6 to 7 medium) carrots, peeled and sliced

2 bay leaves

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

1 cup fresh orange juice

2 cups water (or to cover)

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Pinch ground nutmeg

Pinch dry marjoram, crumbled

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1 cup part skim ricotta cheese (screw the skim, use the real thing)

1/2 cup grated imported Parmesan cheese (don't be a snob; no one's going to notice you used the cheap pre-grated store brand when it's mixed in with everything else) 

Prepare the Dough for Savory Pie. 

In a large saucepan, combine the carrots, bay leaves, ginger, orange juice, and water to cover. Bring to a boil, turn the heat down, simmer until the carrots are mushy, about 20 minutes (it'll probably take longer). 

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pick out the bay leaves. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the carrots to the work bowl of your food processor. Puree in pulses so the carrots don't become watery. Add the cinnamon, nutmeg, and marjoram, and process briefly to blend. Transfer to a mixing bowl and stir in the egg, ricotta cheese, and Parmesan cheese until thoroughly combined. 

Roll our the dough on a 12-inch square piece of parchment paper into a round 10 inches in diameter. (Parchment paper is amazing. Why wasn't this stuff around 50 years ago when I was first learning to bake? It makes clean-up so much easier.)  Pile the filling in the middle and spread it out leaving a 2-inch margin all around. Bring the dough up around the sides as though you were going to encase the filling but leaving a window 6 inches in diameter at the top. Crimp the dough around the sides to hold it in place. Transfer to a baking sheet or preheated baking stone and bake until the crust is deep golden and the filling is set, about 40 minutes. If the crust browns before the filling has set, cover with foil, lower the heat to 300, and bake about 10 minutes more. 

Theoretically Carrot Pie has 388 calories per serving. The recipe as prepared supposedly serves 4. Based on just how filling it is, I'm thinking it serves 4 only if this dish is served at Eid al-Fitr or you're cooking for lumberjacks. I'd guesstimate 8 servings would be more accurate. 

If I make it again I'll cut back on the ginger for cooking the carrots as it was kind of overwhelming and eliminate the marjoram entirely. And, as noted above, the crust is quite good. Maybe I will work up the ambition to make some calzones one of these days. 

Mutant vegetables

Is it cauliflower? Is it broccoli? Web sites I consulted couldn't agree other than to note it is a plant in and of itself and not some strange product of genetic modification. I spotted a head of romanesco at Econo Foods yesterday.

It turns out Ecclesiastes is wrong. There is something new under the sun, at least for me. I had never seen one of these strange, alien creatures before. As I stood there admiring its weirdness, one of the produce minions gave me a pep talk about how delicious it would be roasted with some olive oil, garlic, maybe some salt and pepper. . . the next thing I knew it had crawled into the shopping cart.

Tonight we feast green stuff. Verdict tomorrow on just how edible something that looks like it should grow on Venus tastes.

Note to Kid: See, we do know that vegetables other than potatoes exist.

Another installment in the ongoing series Why Businesses Fail

Also known as The Stupid, It Burns.

A while back the good people of Arizona approved a ballot proposal to raise the state minimum wage. Proposition 206 mandated that the state minimum wage, which had been set at $8.05 per hour, would increase to $10 in 2017 and will be raised incrementally to $12 per hour by the year 2020. If Proposition 206 hadn't passed, the minimum wage would still have gone up this year but only by a dime to $8.15. Arizona law already requires, thanks to a proposition approved in 2006, that minimum wage be adjusted annually for increases in the cost of living.

Naturally, many business owners had the usual reaction to this change in the law. They freaked out. They did a lot of posturing about how it was going to drive them out of business while all sounding as if each was a special case subjected to increased costs that none of their competitors had to deal with. This is typical. I've blogged about it before. The self-centered business owner totally ignores that fact that if he's having to pay his dishwashers or his widget assemblers an additional $1.95 per hour, so are his competitors down the street. The competitive playing field is still level; no one business has suddenly gained or lost an advantage over any other. It may be true that in the short term he or she will have to eliminate a position or two while they figure out how to compensate for the added expense in payroll, but it's going to be equally true that every other business is going to be doing the same thing.

So how have various businesses responded? Well, I've noticed a couple interesting examples lately of What Not to Do. Both examples are restaurants. In the case of one, a steakhouse, they've tacked on an 18% surchange to every meal to, as they helpfully explain, help pay for the increase in the minimum wage. Holy wah, the stupid, it burns.

You're telling me that because you're now paying the dishwashers in the kitchen $10 an hour instead of $8.05, my $25 steak dinner is now going to cost me $29.50? Joe Shmoe washing dishes gets an additional $1.95; No Longer Loyal Customer gets hosed to the tune of $4.50. It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that charging every customer in the place an 18% surcharge goes way beyond compensating for a higher payroll cost. Plus, of course, no one particularly enjoys hearing a business owner whine about being so frelling stupid that they can't figure out a way to cover added expenses without standing up and screaming to the world that they're asshats who would prefer to pay their employees nothing at all if only they could figure out a way to get away with it.

Second example: ate at a local place that has a lot of vaguely Mexican food on the menu. I say vaguely Mexican because Safford has apparently suffered from the influence of having way too many snowbirds with timid tastebuds wintering around here. So far all the "Mexican" places we've tried have served salsa made with chilis that seemingly achieve the impossible: score a negative number on the Scoville scale. But I digress. Naturally, the establishment of which I speak does the bowl of corn chips and some salsa as an automatic freebie on the tables. Except the chips and salsa are no longer free. The server made a point of saying that if we wanted a second bowl, we'd have to pay for them. They've also stopped doing free refills on drinks. Why? Because minimum wage went up. Not quite as annoying or as in your face as the surcharge, but still annoying, particularly when the astute diner recognizes that chips and soft drinks are some of the items on the menu with the highest profit margins. A throw-away cup for a soft drink costs the restaurant more than the soda it contains. It costs the restauranteur literally pnnies to refill your Coke when the glass runs dry.

In any case, what the restaurant has done is taken two of the most visible and cheapest ways to curry customer good will (endless chips and free refills on soft drinks and coffee) and eliminated them, a truly dumb move when the competition hasn't done something similar. Again, the stupid, it burns.

So how would I, the ominiscient blogger, have dealt with the increased labor costs? First, of course, I'd have kept my mouth shut. Second, I'd have started preparing for it as soon as I heard the proposition passed and made various adjustments to the menu accordingly. No doubt some business owners were indulging in a fantasy that the state supreme court would rule the change illegal, but that hasn't happened, at least not yet. Besides, it was inevitable that wages would climb. Anyone thinking they'd stay static was living in a dream world.

Anyway, shifting prices up slightly across the board -- 50 cents here, maybe a dollar there -- would be a lot less noticeable than a huge honking extra charge tacked on at the end. People willing to pay $20 for a rack of ribs or a steak aren't suddenly going to turn vegan if the price shifts to $21.50.  Look for stuff you can eliminate. From watching Gordon Ramsey in action I know way too many restaurants waste food. They provide side salads no one eats and serve portions that are much bigger than they need to be. (Which could be the subject of a different rant: the unrealistic ideas people end up with concerning healthy serving sizes based on what they see heaped on some restaurant plates.)

A small example of eliminating waste: we've eaten at a couple of places locally that do the usual salsa and chips but with a small twist. They bring you the basket of chips and a small bowl. The salsa is in squeeze bottles so you can use as little or as much as you wnat; definite reduction in waste there. For that matter, restaurants could eliminate the chips and salsa entirely. People munch on them when the chips are staring them in the face, but quite a few wouldn't care if they vanished. It's always struck me as a little weird that restaurants would put out a free appetizer while also having half a dozen other types of appetizers listed on the menu.

I am thinking that I'll ask The Younger Daughter to keep an eye on how those particular businesses fare over the coming year. It'll be interesting to see if they're still around a few months from now. Their floundering attempts suggest their days are numbered, but you never know. Sometimes even the most inept business owners manage to survive despite their best attempts to destroy themselves.

As for finding some Mexican food that isn't so bland it could be served in nursing homes, I'm beginning to think that we'll have to venture south of the border. The Younger Daughter tells me that co-workers have mentioned there are good restaurants in Agua Prieta, although I'm not sure it's worth the hassle to go that far.

The last of the Missouri Mule Piss bites the dust

One of the times we campground hosted in Missouri we purchased a 6-pack of a locally brewed beer. I wasn't real thrilled with the purchase -- the beverage was an India Pale Ale and I've never cared much for IPAs -- but I'm not real keen on beer in general. I figured the S.O. was the person most likely to drink it, ergo, it was his problem if it turned out to be swill. At the time I made a joke or two about maybe the mule on the can was a warning, you know, truth in advertising as to where the liquid originated. The S.O. laughed.

He wasn't laughing long. Holy wah. The Missouri Mule Piss may win some sort of award for the bitterest beer we've tasted in a long, long time. He and the Kid managed to choke down most of it, but one lonely can migrated to the back of the fridge and sat there. And sat there. It became a well-traveled beer: north to the U.P.,  possibly back down to Missouri in the Guppy (we bought it in Licking so got it over a year ago), then back up to the U.P., into the cabin for the second time, and then finally down here to Missouri. We're just too damn cheap frugal to throw an unopened can of beer away. I guess in the back of our minds we were thinking sooner or later someone we weren't overly fond of would visit and we'd inflict the Mule Piss on that person.

I was also kind of thinking that maybe I'd try a Belgian beef stew recipe out of the cookbook I've been working my way through for the past almost 50 years. I got The American Home All-Purpose Cookbook back in 1969 with the goal of eventually trying every recipe in it. Never happened, of course. Never even came close. Still, every so often I open it and decide to try something we haven't had before, like the stew that includes a can of beer as an ingredient.

Today was that day. The Mule Piss is now simmering on the stove and I'm busy hoping that the various other ingredients mellow it enough that the end result is edible. Cookbooks always warn you not to use bad wine for cooking; the same is no doubt true of beer. I decided to live dangerously -- how bad can it be? After all, the cookbook just says "beer" as an ingredient, possibly because back when it was printed in the 1960s you didn't have much choice in what was on the shelves at the local Piggly Wiggly. They don't tell you to go search for an imported beer crafted by monks; apparently ordinary Pabst Blue Ribbon would do. Just for the heck of it, I Googled Belgian beef stew and discovered, of course, that the preferred variety would be a dark ale, not a pale one. Well, at least the Mule Piss is an ale, albeit one without much color.

The American Home recipe:

Carbonnades a la Flamande

2 tbs fat or pure vegetable oil
2 cups sliced onions
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tbs fat or pure vegetable oil
3 lbs chuck or round, cut in 2-inch cubes
2 bay leaves
1/4 tsp leaf thyme, crumbled
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 bottle or can (12 oz.) beer
1 envelope granulated beef bouillon
1 cup water
Chopped parsley

Heat 2 tablespoons fat or oil in large kettle or Dutch oven. Saute onion and garlic until soft and lightly browned; remove; reserve. Heat 2 additional tablespoons fat or oil in kettle; brown meat very well on all sides. This will take 10 to 15 minutes. Add onions, garlic, bay leaves, thyme, salt, pepper, beer, beef bouillon, and water. Bring to boiling; lower heat; simmer 1-1/2 to 2 hours or until meat is tender. Remove bay leaves. Thicken gravy, if desired, with 1 tablespoon flour blended with 1/4 cup water and 1 teaspoon vinegar; add to stew; stir until thickened and bubbly. Sprinkle stew with chopped parsley. Traditionally served with boiled potatoes. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Thinking about food

I've been reading Jane Goodall's book, Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating, for the past few days. The book came out about ten years ago so what she's saying isn't exactly new: eat local as much as possible. If you can't, avoid the conventionally grown produce that's either (a) traveled the farthest or (b) is known to be particularly bad for having pesticide or herbicide residue.

She also advocates eliminating dead animal flesh from a person's diet, but she doesn't push it, just notes that large-scale livestock and poultry operations can lead to some horrific conditions, both for the animals and the people working with them. If fewer people ate meat, the market for it would contract; fewer cows, turkeys, whatever would suffer; and the impact on the environment from liquified hog shit and other pollutants would be reduced.

Goodall might be right, but the average person isn't going to give up pork chops or steak because they're concerned about conditions at feed lots or in slaughterhouses. They don't care. They don't see Babe or Wilbur when they look at a package of pork chops; they see pork chops that for all they know or care were picked from a tree. Nope, if they cut back on the amount of dead cow they consume it's more likely to be because of sticker shock. Every time I go grocery shopping I find myself wondering how people with larger families manage to include much animal protein in their meals. I can remember when chuck roast was the cheap cut of meat. Not anymore. It costs as much per pound as t-bones did not many years ago. The S.O. and I are still carnivores, but we have indeed started including more meatless days in the monthly menu. Not because of some deep love for lentils that we've suddenly discovered but because we're on a fixed income and there's a definite cap on how much I want to spend at Larry's.

In contrast with beef, the prices on pork have remained comparatively low, with the exception of bacon. Bacon prices spiked during The Great Hog Shortage of a couple years ago and never did come back down. Pigs reproduce a lot faster than cattle so a piglet die-off one year is a short term problem, not one that lingers for years. There's only one problem with the pork at Larry's. It carries a Smithfield label. I was trying to avoid Smithfield before it became a Chinese company -- they had an appalling record when it came to how employees were treated, even worse than the usual dismal conditions in food processing -- and now they're a Chinese company I really don't want anything to do with Smithfield products. China has a remarkably poor record when it comes to food safety. I don't care if the packages are labeled born in the USA, slaughtered in the USA, as long as the company has any connection with China I won't buy it.

For what it's worth, I refuse to buy any sea food that originates in China or Southeast Asia. Between the allegations of human rights abuses (extremely young children working as virtual slaves on shrimp farms, for example) and the wretched sanitary conditions, I won't buy anything that's fish farmed in Asia. When I worked at the CDC. I edited a few too many research papers about parasitic diseases found on shrimp and fish farms in Vietnam. I've been thinking I'd like to have a pet again, but I don't particularly want it to be internal.

So, yes, Jane Goodall, I am practicing mindful eating. I read labels -- no high fructose corn syrup for the Mannikko household -- I try to avoid buying foods that are not in season, like grapes in the middle of the winter or pomegranates in June. We garden. I can. I have contemplated getting a few chickens (the coyotes would love me) and have thought about looking into buying a share in a beef steer locally. If we weren't being sort of seasonal residents, I might invest in some feeder calves myself. Food doesn't get much more local than when you grow it yourself. Would I be as mindful if we still lived in Atlanta? Sort of. Maybe. Does it count that when I bought fresh fish at Publix I wouldn't get the trout unless it came from a U.S. fish farm?

Was this a bucket list item?

Can I now say my life is complete (or close to it)? We had lunch at U.P. Chuck's bar in Kenton yesterday. We drive by the place all the time but it's usually not at a time of day when we're thinking about lunch. And even if it is the right time of day to be thinking about food, let's be honest. An establishment that features a drawing of someone upchucking on its tee-shirts doesn't strike me as being a place I'm real keen to patronize. But curiosity and hunger finally won out, so we pulled into the parking area alongside the building.

Note to anyone else who might contemplate stopping there: if you're driving a car, be careful when you park. The drop from the pavement on Federal Forest Highway 16 to the parking spaces is an abrupt one. You might not notice it in a truck, but in my little Ford Focus it felt and sounded like we'd just driven over a curb.

U.P. Chuck's is a typical small town bar. You kind of feel like you're stepping into a smoke-filled room even though smoking hasn't been allowed indoors in bars and restaurants in quite a few years in Michigan. I'm not sure what the building's original function 100+ years ago, but it's been a bar/restaurant/hotel as long as I can remember. The only thing that's changed on the exterior in the past 50 years is the name. There have been some updates to the interior: a new bar and tables in the past decade or so, but that's about it. The interior space was smaller than I expected -- the building is a decent size, but the actual main bar room doesn't take up much of the first floor. There is more space off to one side, but it looked like it didn't get much use, at least not in the summer. The lights were off and I got a vague impression of chairs stacked on tables. No doubt things get a lot busier during hunting and snowmobiling seasons. Most of the reviews on Yelp are from people who found it while hunting or sledding, although the place does get some summer tourists.

The menus we got handed were really short: just basic bar food like hamburgers, a couple of other types of sandwiches, a variety of deep fried snacks (the usual mozzarella sticks, mushrooms, zucchini, pickles, and whatever else Sysco sells breaded in humongous plastic bags), and pizza. This was a really good sign in place that had exactly one person working. I tend to get really suspicious when a small eatery has an elaborate menu -- that's a sure sign everything is coming off the Sysco truck pre-cooked and just gets microwaved in the kitchen.

Anyway, the S.O. ordered a Reuben and I got a cheeseburger -- a basic cheeseburger or hamburger is the test item I tend to order if we're eating someplace I've never been before. I figure if a place can make a decent hamburger, it's probably worth a return visit. So where did U.P. Chuck's fall on the decent burger scale? Kind in the middle. The burger was a decent size and it was cooked right -- sufficiently well-done that a person doesn't have to feel paranoid about E. coli or other food-borne illnesses but not so well-done that it's bone dry and bearing strong resemblance to a hockey puck. Normally it would fall into the really good category, but there was something ever so slightly off about the taste, like maybe the grill hadn't been kept as clean as it should be or the meat was hitting the end of its useful shelf life. Or maybe the cook decided to sprinkle on some seasoning I'm not used to tasting on burgers. Who knows? If I was a mustard user or had raw onions on the burger, that slightly off taste was subtle enough that I probably wouldn't have noticed it. Was it enough to keep me from eating there again? Nope, whatever the taste was it's been more than 24 hours and I haven't started upchucking. Still, the next time we stop there it'll be to try the pizza.

Downside to U.P. Chuck's: a couple moronic anti-Obama posters on one of the bulletin boards. I have a hunch this would be a good place to not talk politics because odds are Trump fans drink there.  

Like a lot of local establishments, there are framed photos (or photocopies of photos) of historic scenes hanging on the walls. Kenton used to be a good-sized town, thanks to a sawmill operating there. It was never a huge city, but it covered several blocks with businesses and houses. The main street had two-story commercial buildings for at least a block on both sides of the road; the town itself was big enough that it even had a wrong side of the tracks neighborhood, Finn Town. Finns were at the bottom of the social ladder back in the 1890s -- recent immigrants who spoke a stranger than usual language and practiced odd customs (e.g., sauna) -- so tended to end up clumped in the crappier housing. The photo above shows the main street in about 1910. I have no idea which one of those buildings is the current U.P. Chuck's (it might be the 5th one back on the left), but I do know that none of the other two-story structures have survived. And, considering how naked the hill in the background looks (that's a pretty thin line of trees) I think I know why Kenton faded into obscurity -- it's hard to keep a mill going once all the trees are gone.

Additional tourist information: there is a rustic (basic) US Forest Service Campground about 3 miles from Kenton, the Sparrow Rapids Campground. It has six sites and is free.There's also a nice wayside/picnic area on the north side of M-28 close to where the highway intersects with FFH-16.

Life's little mysteries

I've always kind of wondered what the point was of tracking the number of "followers" a blog has. Unless a person is blogging for money, i.e., someone is actually paying you to share your most profound thoughts and deathless prose, why would anyone care? Does it make any difference in the overall scheme of things, the course of a person's life, if they have a handful of people who actually read their blog, hundreds, thousands, or none at all?

I am musing on this topic because I happened to notice when I first logged in to the blog this morning that once again the number for my followers had fluctuated. I am moderately intrigued by the way that number goes up or down for no apparent reason. Did I pan someone's favorite author enough to tick them off? Did a casual follower suddenly realize that, holy wah, that woman is so far left on the political spectrum she makes Bernie Sanders look like a Goldwater Republican? Or did someone stumble across a blog post I did on a visit to a National Park and erroneously assume that everything I wrote was going to be part of a travelogue? The numbers dipping up or down seem unrelated to the frequency or subjects of blog posts and also don't seem to correlate with the occasional comment from someone who suggests that if I follow him or her, that person will follow me. Reciprocity in action. Or mutual ritualistic counting coup, depending, I suppose, on one's cultural frame of reference. It's another of life's little mysteries.

Skunk egg, Pizza House, West, Texas

Maybe if I'd monetized my blog or had started it because I had fantasies of it leading to bigger and somehow better things the concept of "followers" would mean more. As it is, the blog's  primary function has always been as a place to metaphorically doodle, to jot down thoughts that don't fit in letters and that I might stick in a journal, assuming I kept one. The fact it's allowed me to connect with some interesting, funny, and nice people both online and out there in the real world was a happy accident. After all, if I hadn't started blogging, the S.O. and I would probably never have encountered skunk eggs. I'm not sure just what the secret ingredients in that thing are, but for sure that is food you don't find on the average Upper Peninsula menu.

We have met the tofu tacos

How could anything go wrong when Po is on the package?

and they were actually edible.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that the Woman's Day February Month of Menus included a number of vegan options, including tofu tacos. I was intrigued -- both the S.O. and I have been the recipient of the "eat less red meat" talk from our primary care physicians thanks to cholesterol numbers that are less than optimal -- so I decided we'd try the recipe. It actually fell early in the month, but first Larry's had no tofu in stock and then there was the pepper problem. Larry's Market in Baraga is a nice small town supermarket, but it is small. It does have a surprisingly cosmopolitan range of merchandise, stuff you wouldn't expect to find in a store its size, but there are limits. Tofu was one of them.

That is, of course, until I happened to mention to someone working there that I had been hoping they carried tofu even though I hadn't been expecting it. Voila. The next time they got a shipment in from whoever distributes that stuff, there it was. Tofu. (Side note: Lord, please don't let Larry's be stuck with almost a full case of tofu just because one person wanted one package!) I had planned to wait until we got up to Houghton or Marquette but I no longer had to.

Of course, I still had to wait until we got to Houghton or Marquette because of the pepper problem. The recipe called for a poblano pepper. Like I said, Larry's is small. Fresh pepper selection there falls into bell peppers, jalapenos, and occasionally those bags with mini multi-colored sweet peppers. The recipe called for cooking half a red pepper and half a poblano and then garnishing with fresh jalapeno. Poblanos aren't a real hot pepper, but they do rank several slots higher than sweet bell peppers on the Scoville scale. Tofu is bland (to say the least) so I wanted a pepper with a little bit of a kick to it. Ordinary green bell peppers weren't going to make it into the frying pan. In any case, having cursed Larry's with a stash of tofu, I wasn't going to suggest they expand the pepper selection, too.

Well, as luck would have it, Marquette with its multiple supermarkets is between where we live and the town of Trenary. On our way home from the Outhouse Races on Saturday, we stopped at Econo Foods. Poblano pepper problem solved.

I made the tacos yesterday. They were a surprise. They weren't bad. I can actually see making them again, especially if an occasion arises where we have friends or relatives visiting who prefer not to eat dead animal flesh. The biggest issue (if you can call it that) was feeling a little weirded out because the crumbled and fried tofu had a texture and general appearance similar to scrambled eggs but a color and taste that was totally different.

Tofu Tacos with Romaine slaw

Finely chop 1/2 each small poblano and red pepper, 2 cloves garlic, and 1 small onion. Saute mixture in a large nonstick skillet with 1 tbsp oil for 4 minutes. Crumble 14 oz extra-firm tofu (squeezed of excess moisture) into the skillet and season with 1-1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp ground coriander, salt and pepper; saute until golden brown. Spoon into corn tortillas; top with sliced romaine and jalapeno. 

Gotta love the way they jazz it up by saying "with romaine slaw" when the "slaw" consists of some shredded lettuce.

Things I did different: I used a whole poblano and no red pepper and used medium firm tofu (it was the only option available) instead of extra firm. It's possible that if I'd had the extra firm, the texture would have been a little less scrambled egg-like. If I do this recipe again (or something similar) I'll use two whole peppers, not just one. It has also brilliantly occurred to me that a person could probably take ordinary taco seasoning and substitute tofu for the ground meat those seasoning packets tell you to use. I have a giant package of Sysco taco seasoning so one of these days I may experiment with it.

I am still mildly in shock. Holy wah. Tofu is edible. Who knew? 

Multiculturalism on the dinner table

Curried Lentil Soup; photo from Woman's Day

Back in the 1970s when I was much, much younger and spent a good part of my day dealing with a couple of little barracudas, figuring out what to have for various meals was a definite annoyance. You know, it's bad enough that a person  has to cook 7 days a week, but meal planning on top of the kitchen drudgery? Not fun. Just about every cookbook aimed at novices (which I was) includes some sample menus but doing the same half dozen dishes over and over gets old fast. Then I discovered this wonderful feature in Woman's Day magazine: the month of menus. Something different for every day of the month. It wasn't always something I particularly wanted to cook and on a fairly regular basis I'd get annoyed by the food editor's assumption that every reader was going to easily find the same ingredients in their small town IGA that someone living in New York City could track down, but the menu at least presented possibilities. If the menu said something about fresh fish, it was easy enough to substitute some frozen cod.
Fast forward forty years. I'm still using the Month of Menus, and I still regularly curse the food editor for some odd ingredients -- farro? What the hell is farro?! -- but the menu still serves as a handy way to provide more variety on the dinner table. It has changed over the decades, of course. Back in the '70s it would include basics like meat loaf. It also included a suggestion for a simple dessert. A suggested Sunday dinner might be fried chicken with gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, and sliced bananas in orange juice. They had no problem including stuff like frozen fish sticks or canned fruit cocktail as ideas.

There is no way either of those items would make it on to the Month of Menus now. The menu makes concessions to people's hectic lifestyles but you're still going to do a lot of from scratch cooking. And the suggested desserts vanished in the '90s. Woman's Day still publishes a lot of dessert and snack recipes but apparently you're eating that stuff at other times of the day, not when dinner ends.

All of which brings me to the thing that caught my eye this month. Two things, actually, although the multiculturalism has been creeping in for a long time. Fusion cooking is nothing new to anyone who reads Woman's Day. They've been pushing stir fries of various types for decades, doing various Latin dishes, and introducing readers to the use of fresh ginger root, lemongrass, and other spices for a long, long time. The February menu includes a couple of curries, tofu tacos, feta salsa verde, and a number of other goodies that show just how far we've traveled since the 1970s fried chicken or basic spaghetti with a hamburger meat sauce. There is no hamburger, no ground beef in any form, on the February 2016 menu.

Granted, there are burgers. Turkey burgers. (I shudder at the thought, to be honest. Had we done burgers on that particular day, they would have come from a shredded cow.) In any case, red meat in the form of beef is almost nonexistent on the menu. It turns up about once a week. Pork, chicken, and fish make appearances more often. But what struck me was the number of vegan dishes. Yep, vegan. No messing around with halfway measures and simply going meatless -- the menu includes several dinners that I could serve to vegan friends with no worries. Like the tofu tacos, which actually sound pretty good. The way the tofu is prepared it might actually be edible. If I can managed to track down some tofu (Larry's doesn't carry it; apparently there aren't many tofu eaters in Baraga County), we'll test drive the recipe.

Woman's Day used to do Meatless Mondays as part of the menu. That feature has vanished; they've switched to a stealth approach. Which is fine with me. An occasional vegetarian or vegan recipe strikes me as a good idea, a sensible thing to do when beef can be a real budget-buster, especially when the resulting dishes don't make a person feel like they're sacrificing anything. We did a curried lentil soup (a soup that I'd be inclined to call dhal, but if Woman's Day doesn't want to be explicitly ethnic, that's their call) yesterday that is really good. I'm clipping the recipe; we're going to do it again. I have a hunch we'll probably save and repeat the other vegan curry, too. It uses chickpeas. I'm not quite as optimistic about those tofu tacos, but you never know.

Curried Lentil Soup

1-1/2 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1-1/2 tsp cumin

6 cups low sodium vegetable broth

1-1/2 cups red lentils

2 large carrots, grated

4 sprigs fresh thyme

1 tsp curry powder

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

2 bay leaves (optional)

1 cup light coconut milk

Kosher salt and pepper

Cilantro, for garnish when serving

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, covered, stirring occasionally for 6 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cumin and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.

Add the borth, lentils, carrots, thyme, curry powder, cinnamon, and bay leaves (if using); bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are just tender, 12 to 15 minutes.

Add the coconut milk and 1/2 tsp each salt and pepper; simmer for 5 minutes. Serve with cilantro if desired. Makes 6 servings.

I didn't have fresh thyme so skipped it (I was afraid powdered might be too intense) and used only one bay leaf (it was big). We also skipped the cilantro; I'm one of those people who thinks cilantro tastes really nasty and can't understand why other people like it. I really liked this soup. It was fast and easy to make, it's low cost, and it's a nice, hardy soup for a winter day. Best of all, because there's just me and the S.O., it made enough that I was able to put two containers into the freezer so we're getting three meals out of prepping for one.

As for farro, thanks to the magic of Google I now know that farro is a type of primitive wheat. It is being touted as a substitute for quinoa as it is equally nutritious. If it's showing up in Woman's Day recipes, one can only assume that it can be found at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to make it to Larry's.

The latest in the ongoing saga of what to put in my coffee

The giant jug of Sysco honey is now gone, which means I have an excuse to buy a normal-sized bottle from a local apiary. It also means that as part of the cupboard-clearing-out exercise I have moved to the next bottle of liquid sweetener in the cabinet: a 22-ounce jar of something called "Grand-Paw's Moonshine Syrup" from Helm Farms, the same source as the pure cane syrup I used a few months back.

Grand-Paw's Moonshine Syrup consists, or so the label tells me, of a mix of cane syrup and corn syrup. It is a much lighter color than the cane syrup and is also much smoother. There is, in essence, no discernible taste. It is sweet, in a very mellow, unobtrusive way, but other than that? It has less flavor than Karo syrup, if one can imagine such a thing. I have absolutely no idea what the calorie count might be on this stuff, although one would assume that it's similar to the calorie count for honey, i.e., higher than the calorie count for granulated sugar but not by much. Not that I care much; if I worried about calories, I wouldn't be using sweetener at all.

The one thing I have noticed that makes this syrup a tad different from the last two sweeteners I used as part of the cupboard-emptying exercise is it's really, really thick. I have no idea if that's a function of age (it has been in the cabinet for several years now) or if it's the way Helm Farms refined it. It's just obvious that compared to the honey and the cane syrup, it's got a high viscosity. It makes molasses look fast.

And what else might I have learned from using this stuff? If we're in Texas and I see it on a farm stand or in a local market, ignore it. We do need to keep some syrup around as a just-in-case for my diabetic cat (if she starts acting more lethargic than usual or has a seizure following an insulin injection it'll supposedly be a sign that her blood sugar has dropped too low and I'll have to dump some syrup down her throat), but ordinary Karo will do just fine for that -- and it too has a shelf life of "forever."

The Moonshine Syrup is, incidentally, lighter in color than the photo renders it. 

The rhubarb experiments continue

I tried another rhubarb pie variation yesterday: rhubarb and pineapple. This time I will actually provide the recipe, which is from a sometime-in-the-1970's issue of a women's magazine. I clipped a whole bunch of rhubarb recipes back then -- Rhubarb Crunch, Rhubarb Betty, Rhubarb Flummery, Rhubarb-Apricot Soup, and many, many others -- and until now don't think I'd ever tried making any of them. Anyway, The Recipe:

Rhubarb-Pineapple Pie

Ingredients: 

All-purpose flour

Sugar

Grated rind of 1/2 lemon

Butter of margarineCo

1 egg yolk, slightly beaten

1 20 ounce can unsweetened sliced pineapple

1 pound rhubarb, cut in 1/2" pieces (3 cups)

To make pastry: Put 1-1/2 cups flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, and the lemon rind in a bowl. cut in 3/4 cup butter. Mix in egg yolk and work pastry together quickly using hands. Chill.

To make filling: Drain pineapple, reserving liquid, and cut pineapple into 1/2-inch pieces. In large saucepan, mix 1/3 cup flour and 1 cup sugar. Add 1/3 cup pineapple liquid. Cook over low heat, stirring, 3 to 4 minutes. Add rhubarb and cook gently 2 to 3 minutes, or until rhubarb is soft but still holds its shape. (Do not overcook.) Add pineapple and mix lightly; cool. Roll about two-thirds of pastry dough on lightly floured board. Fit in 9-inch pie pan, trim edges and press to edge of pan with thumb. Prick with fork dipped in flour. Bake in moderate over (375) about 12 minutes; cool. Pour in filling and dot with two tablespoons butter. Roll remaining pastry and cut in 3/4-inch strips. Adjust on pie to form a lattice. Press a strip of pastry around the edge. Back 15 to 20 minutes, or until lattice is golden brown. Serve slightly warm.  

Confession time: I did not make the crust as directed. There was no way I was going to make a crust that rich when the verdict was still out on the filling. What if the rhubarb-pineapple combination tasted like crap? I'd have wasted a stick and a half of perfectly good butter and an egg on a pie neither of us wanted to eat. So the pastry crust was a perfectly ordinary pastry crust (flour, shortening, and enough water to hold it all together), sort of. I did substitute lemon juice for some of the water I mixed it with. I didn't actually think the rhubarb-pineapple mixture would be inedible (we do have rhubarb-pineapple jam sitting in the pantry; we like it), but you never know.

So what was the verdict? Maybe it's because it had never occurred to us that rhubarb and pineapple could be combined in a pie, but the conclusion was, "This is odd." It tasted okay, it's definitely edible, and we will finish the pie -- but I'm never going to make it again.

Next up in Adventures with Rhubarb? I'm thinking about trying the Rhubarb Flummery, if only because "flummery" is kind of a nifty name for a food. You never hear anyone talk about making a flummery; it sounds like something out of a Jane Austen novel. Which may be why it sounds slightly more edible than the rhubarb-apricot soup even though going by the ingredients and instructions, they're the same type of food: a type of pudding that uses cornstarch as a thickener.

The cupboard cleaning continues

The cane syrup is gone. I've moved on to the Sysco honey. It looks remarkably dark, so dark in fact that the S.O. wondered what it was after I'd transferred some to a squeeze bottle, but it's really honey.

I have heard people claim that they can tell the difference in flavors with honey, that the honey from bees that have gorged themselves on one type of flower produce a honey that tastes different than bees that have indulged in others. I don't know. I've had commercially produced honey (the national brand names like Sue Bee) and honey from backyard hives and can't tell the difference. To me honey always just tastes like . . .honey. The Sysco "light amber" (which makes me wonder just how black "dark amber" would be) Grade A honey is no exception. It may be almost as dark as molasses, but it still tastes like honey.

I think I may have idiosyncratic taste buds, though, because when I went looking for the usual calorie comparison information the text said that although honey has more calories than sugar (23 per teaspoon opposed to 16) it's sweeter so you don't have to use as much. I've never found that to be true. To me honey isn't particularly sweet at all. It's not a bad taste, but it's also definitely not as sweet as either sugar or cane syrup.

The honey was a gift, too, an unopened jug that was among leftover supplies from a girls' camp in northern Wisconsin. I think I've mentioned before that an acquaintance works there as a maintenance person and ends up with a ton of various edibles every fall when they clear out anything and everything that might tempt raccoons or other varmints.

Playing with food

There are times when I really wish the county historical society museum had a bigger budget. Today is one of them. Usually it's because I'm indulging in fantasies about purchasing a first-class exhibit case or a specialized filing cabinet, e.g., a map case. Our display cases are a mix of different sizes and types because almost all of them came from retail stores that were going out of business or engaged in major remodeling. As for map cases? Probably not going to happen unless we get lucky with one of our grant applications. But I'm not fantasizing about either of those today. Nope. I'm wishing we could afford to buy fake food.

We decided at our meeting yesterday to proceed with editing our "kitchen" display area. We've got a corner that's got miscellaneous kitchen-related items: a Hoosier cabinet chock full of various gadgets, old cookbooks, old spice and baking powder tins, etc. There's a wood-burning Monarch kitchen range, an old ice box, an ancient refrigerator (from the 1920s; it still works), and a lot of other stuff. It's all neatly arranged, but it's basically just a collection of old stuff -- there isn't much of an attempt at formal interpretation. Depending on who the docent is on any particular day, conversations with visitors can range from explaining how a woodstove actually worked to listening to people reminisce about the Jewell Tea dishes their grandmother had.

The display also includes a farmhouse-style table that had four or five place settings on it, but it was't really set up for an particular meal. It was more like the last person to work with that area decided that it made more sense to have the table looking like it was set for a meal than to leave it empty. Well, at yesterday's meeting we decided to edit the exhibit. When we open for the tourist season in the spring, the kitchen area will have four place settings on it, each one representing a different era. One will, of course, be the pioneer days. The dishes will be basic whiteware and there will be a sample menu -- what people would have been likely (or able) to eat back around the time Baraga County was established in the 1870s. Another will be the 1930s, the Jewell Tea dishes era, also with a sample menu and maybe a recipe or two. One will be the present (or close to it). (I will fight the temptation to just do a couple crumpled napkins and an empty Burger King bag.) And one will be the melamine years.

And you know what goes with the melamine years? Jello salad. Jello salad in all sorts of bizarre combinations. Jello salad that doesn't just sit there passively on the plate waiting to be slathered with Miracle Whip. Jello salad that sits on the serving plate staring at you defiantly and daring you to get out the serving spoon.

I guess we'll muddle along with the full-page color ads from Woman's Day or Good Housekeeping, but, holy wah, I wish our budget was big enough to buy a fake Jello salad.

Food fads and the gullible

I have written before about food fads, things that are promoted as being better than whatever it is we're used to eating and of course cost a whole lot more. I've found another one. Agave nectar.

Back when I still worked at the Centers for Disease Control, one of my colleagues began pushing agave nectar as a substitute for sugar. I'm not sure why. Supposedly because the agave nectar is sweeter than sugar, you'll use less of it. If the reason for using agave nectar is to cut back on calories, you'd better hope that to your taste buds it seems a whole lot sweeter because when you start comparing calories on a teaspoon to teaspoon basis sugar wins. Sugar has 16 calories in a teaspoon; agave nectar has 20. Anyway, at the time the agave nectar was being pushed by my colleague, I humored her, used it in my coffee, and thought to myself, "Okay. Not bad." So the next time I was at Publix I looked for agave nectar.

Remember the quinoa experience? Well, agave wasn't quite as much of a sticker shock eye opener, but at the time it struck me as fairly pricey for the amount the bottle contained. However, back then (this was about five years ago), agave was a recent arrival on supermarket shelves and Dr. Oz (who's apparently never met a food fad he didn't love) was pushing it on his show. He has since back peddled. For various reasons (market forces? economy of scale?) the price has dropped; it is now cheaper ounce for ounce than honey. It is, of course, still a lot more expensive than cane sugar.

Like the quinoa, the agave nectar was a gift. I have a friend who works at a summer camp that caters to rich kids from Chicago; every year when the camp shuts down at the end of the season the staff have to completely empty the kitchen. Anything that is perishable, might attract varmints (e.g., raccoons), or would be ruined by freezing is removed. Some of it goes to area food pantries and some goes home with the maintenance guys who in turn pass some on to friends and family. Last year I was the recipient of several boxes of quinoa, probably because I actually knew what the stuff was (or was the only one who was willing to try it). This year it was a bottle of agave nectar.*

Unlike the quinoa, the agave nectar is actually edible. It's nicely innocuous. When I dump it in my coffee or tea, I can't tell the difference between using it and using ordinary sugar. Am I using less in terms of total amounts than I would if it was the usual teaspoon of sugar? Who knows. It's hard to do a side by side comparison when agave is a liquid and sugar is a solid. Is there an advantage to using agave instead of sugar? I'm not sure. I've heard some people tout it as being more "natural," but from what I've read the process most commonly used for extracting it from the agave plant is as highly industrialized as the process involved in making high fructose corn syrup. There's a lot more involved than just crushing the plant and boiling the resulting sap. There is a type of traditional agave nectar that comes much closer to the type of processing used for traditional cane syrup, but that's not the agave nectar you're going to find on the shelves at a typical Kroger.

In any case, whether traditionally produced or cranked out in an industrial refinery, the sugars in agave are primarily fructose, which, as other writers have pointed out, puts agave a whole lot closer to being just another form of high fructose corn syrup than it does to anything that's actually good for you. High fructose corn syrup has gotten a bad reputation for a reason: research has shown that the human body does process fructose differently than it does sucrose. High amounts of fructose in a person's diet can contribute to the development of metabolic syndrome, i.e., that lethal combination of weight gain and type II diabetes. So why on earth would anyone think agave nectar would be a healthy alternative to ordinary sugar?

I have heard that hard core vegans like agave nectar because it doesn't involve animals in any way, shape, or form. They substitute it for honey because they apparently view honey as off limits because it's bee vomit and therefore an animal product. Well, cane sugar, beet sugar, maple syrup, and Karo syrup have always been 100% non-animal products, so why agave would suddenly look more appealing than any of the non-fructose loaded alternatives baffles me. It has to be yet another triumph of marketing cancelling out common sense.

Of maybe it's just that magic "organic" seal on the bottles. Who knows. It's a mystery.

*I get other stuff, too, but it's not as much fun to write about a giant unopened bag of Kellogg's Froot Loops or the institutional-size jug of stir fry sauce. Unlike the quinoa, the Froot loops did not end up in a bird feeder.  

Incan grits

Several years ago I did a post on diets and eating and people's relationships with food. At the time, I lifted this quote from the New York Times: 

“The kitchen was full of weird ingredients like quinoa and kale."

I remember thinking at the time "What the heck is quinoa?" I'd never heard of it, so I looked for it the next time I went wandering through Kroger. Question answered, but it raised another one: why tell people to eat quinoa when most consumers are going to look at the price tag and blanch? I have since heard various "experts" opine that one way to solve the obesity epidemic among poor people would be to get them to eat quinoa instead of rice or pasta. Maybe it's a good idea from a nutritional perspective, but I did a quick cost comparison using the prices on Amazon. If I can buy 60 pounds of macaroni noodles for what it would cost me to buy 9 pounds of quinoa, why should I go for quinoa instead? Especially when, let's face it, quinoa isn't a particularly appealing food. I'm willing to bet that in Peru they feed it to the llamas.

I finally tried quinoa today. We were gifted with a free box of Inca Red certified organic quinoa. My curiosity has now been satisfied. Straight out of the box, it looks like bird seed. After it's been cooked, it looks like bird seed that's been left out in the rain too long. It was like eating grits, sort of. Like grits, it has no discernible flavor. It just sort of sits there like a bunch of softened BBs on the palate. On the other hand, grits can be made edible through the application of generous amounts of butter, salt, and pepper. I'm not sure what would help quinoa.   

You know, I sometimes think there's a special division in marketing for the various food companies that devises "healthy" foods with high price tags that are specifically targeting that segment of the market -- the owners of Volvos in the parking lot at Whole Foods perhaps -- that associates "high price tag," "organic," and "tastes like crap" with "must be good for you."