Merlin Mann is one of my favorite bloggers. He had me hooked years ago with 43 Folders, when I was obsessed (along with the rest of my geek circle) with Getting Things Done. Today, I found this talk — How To Blog — on Kung Fu Grippe, his personal blog, and the slide shown above. It may be the best advice on blogging I’ve seen:
Find your obsession.
Every day, explain it to one person you respect.
Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick.
Get better.
Pretty simple advice, but it sets the bar very high. I have it printed out and taped to my desk where I’ll see it every day. Only time will tell if I get better.
And “Starting a blog to generate traffic is like learning ventriloquism to meet girls.” is the second-best advice I’ve heard in a long time.
About eight years ago I tried the Atkins Diet. I lasted for almost a year, but I knew early on that I was doomed to fail (the result of all diets that can’t be be described as “eat less, exercise more”) when I failed to embrace the snack consumed by all hardcore Atkins-ites: the pork rind.
Pork rinds are low-carb and protein-rich — the perfect Atkins food, fat content be damned. They’re not nearly as popular in New England as they are in other parts of the US, which meant that a bag purchased at a supermarket was inevitably full of almost-stale rinds. And once you’ve tasted the greatest crispy pig skin ever cooked, you’re loath to lower yourself to buying bags with the word “Bubba” on them.
I tried making my own with skin left over from my homemade char siu pork, but they were an abject failure. I didn’t discover this recipe until I had resigned myself to living a rind-deprived life, mocked by more competent chefs.
A few days ago, while watching the “Bacon!” episode of Unwrapped on the Food Network, I saw a segment about Lowrey’s Microwave Pork Rinds (pictured above). From what I saw, the product behaved exactly like microwave popcorn: toss the bag in, zap it for a minute or two, open the bag (avoiding the faceful of steam), and chow down on hot, fresh pork rinds.
I tracked down a bag (OK, a few bags) and tried it for myself. Much to my surprise, it worked exactly as advertised: fresh, hot, (and very salty) pork rinds in less than two minutes.
Since they weren’t fried, the fat content was only 2 grams per serving. In fact, the nutritional information proved this snack was rather benign: only 60 calories, 1 gram of carbs, 9 grams of protein, and 350 milligrams of sodium per serving.
Fortunately, I won’t be eating more than a bag on any given day. Even though my brain knows I’ve consumed relatively little, my stomach and taste buds still tell me “Dude, you just ate a bag of pork rinds.” I’m conditioned to know that a little rind goes a long way.
Besides, now that I have a working recipe, you know I’ll return to the fryolator to snatch victory from the jowls of defeat.
As the era of the music CD draws to a close, artists attempting to sell physical products have been forced to become more creative. Those that succeed have figured out how to add value to the package, usually though the inclusion of “bonus material” like a live DVD, or an illustrated book, but that “value” is often bloated or just plain boring.
I have written previously about my fondness for music-making gadgets, and have even tried my hand at music-making. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered the self-titled CD by a musician named Moldover. The disc label looks like a printed circuit, but the disc holder insert is a printed circuit:
After a bit of experimentation, I discovered that in addition to having the track info etched into the circuit traces, the board is a working light-activated theremin. The left edge has sensors at either corner and a switch to engage the circuit. The right edge has a small speaker, a battery, and an output jack. You play the board by holding the button down and moving your fingers over the two sensors, or by moving the board closer to or farther away from a light source. A blue LED in the hub provides visual feedback.
Moldover explains and demonstrates his new CD in this promo video:
Nice case, neat-o instrument, but what about the music? It’s electronic-based, covering a wide range of styles. I’ve been listening to it at least once a day, but I don’t know that I would have found it without the buzz about the clever package. So in that regard, Moldover has succeeded.
For reasons completely unrelated to the music, I think of XTC’s “Cross Wires” whwnever I play or play with the CD:
When you’ve got Crosswires
Everything is Buzz Buzz
Everything is Beep Beep
The tomatoes are gone and the apples are taking over, which can mean only one thing: farmer’s market season is drawing to a close. A long weekend with dinner invites, a fridge still full of veggies, and a work week that forced me to prepare a lot of quick meals made today’s trip was lighter on purchases than usual: a strawberry-rhubarb pie, more granola (mmm… granola), raspberries, Jonagold apples, red gold potatoes, cucumbers, and a ham steak.
The pie is for our dinner hosts tonight, the potatoes will become potato salad for Monday’s pulled pork barbecue, and the apples are for a classic tarte tatin, which will be one of next week’s posts. Say tuned.
Photographer Irving Penn died yesterday. Anyone with even a passing interest in modern American design is familiar with his work. He transformed fashion photography from overcrowded set pieces to minimalist abstracts that focused on the clothes and the models themselves. The photo above – one of his most well-known – is of Lisa Fonssagrives, who became his wife.
There’s not much I can say about Penn that isn’t said better in his obituaries, but I couldn’t let his passing go unmentioned here, especially after my last post about General Foods. Penn composed this photograph in 1977:
The title? Frozen Food (with String Beans). The building blocks? BirdsEye frozen vegetables and fruits, of course.
Jell-O® put me through college. I wasn’t a door-to-door Jell-O® salesman, but I was the son of a General Foods (GF) employee – Dad programed IBM 370 mainframes for the warehouse inventory systems in assembly language – which made me eligible for a corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship. All I had to do in return was spend my summers working at the General Foods research center in Tarrytown, NY.
I’m writing about this because I experienced another Proustian flashback after reading some of the recent entries in my friend Terra Cholfin’s The Joy of Jello Project, a through-cooking blog in which she tackles all of the recipes from the cookbook of the same name. Her recent struggles with Cool Whip reminded me of some of the research conducted at the lab in which I worked.
But first, a minor but necessary digression: The gelatin-based dessert product that General Foods has made so ubiquitous is officially named Jell-O® Brand Gelatin Dessert. It is a rigorously protected name and trademark which is enforced in the most litigious manner possible, lest it become lost to common usage like so many other product names of the past (aspirin, flashlight, trampoline, etc.). The lesson is beat into every employee’s head every day: even the signs at the cafeteria counters say “Jell-O® Brand Gelatin Dessert.”
So, despite my visceral conditioned response to Ms. Cholfin’s misspelling of the product name as “Jello” – minus the hyphen, the capitalized “O”, and the registered trademark symbol – I have enjoyed reading her adventures in recreating dishes invented by GF company drones with the express purpose of selling more of their products. Some of her recent attempts have required the use of another GF stalwart, Cool Whip. And that’s where one of my food research stories begins.
Cool Whip, as you all probably know, is a non-dairy dessert topping that is meant to replace whipped cream. It’s sold frozen in plastic tubs which you thaw out to use. The ingredient list includes water, corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated coconut and palm kernel oil (CPKO), sodium caseinate, natural and artificial flavor, xanthan and guar gums, polysorbate 60 (glycosperse), and beta carotene. The sodium caseinate is the most important ingredient, even if it’s not the most predominant.
Casein is the primary protein found in milk, it’s what left behind after all of the water is boiled off. If you’ve ever heated up milk, the skin on the top is formed by coagulated casein. It should come as no surprise that Elmer’s Glue is made by Borden, a dairy company; their unused milk products are converted to casein-based white glue – no part of the milk is wasted. When casein is processed with an alkali solution, the end product, sodium caseinate, is water insoluble and cannot be denatured, which makes it an ideal ingredient: it can be stored indefinitely with no ill effect. The caseinate for Cool Whip came from New Zealand, where it was produced as a sheep’s milk by-product.
During my first summer at GF, working in the Proteins lab (part of a long hallway of labs named after nutrition textbook chapters: Fats, Oils, Carbohydrates, Flavors), I learned that there was a potential problem with the Cool Whip secret formula. The company wanted to change caseinate suppliers, so they had ordered a small shipment of the new material to whip up (heh) some Cool Whip, only to discover that it separated at the end of the process. My job, along with another intern, was to figure out how to vary the formula to make a stable Cool Whip with the new caseinate.
It was the most boring project imaginable, an experimental protocol that could have been laid out on a spreadsheet had one existed (I was at GF in 1979 and 1980). Every day, we would change the amount of one ingredient and make a new batch. We had a benchtop with a row of ten Waring industrial blenders (higher-speed motors and stainless steel mixing vessels), which we would fill up with five formula variations (always run in duplicate) and crank into a froth. Various measurements would be made: viscosity, micelle size (a micelle in this instance was a suspended oil droplet), color, and, most importantly, time to separation. Variations with longer separation times were promoted to the next round, in the hope that further tweaks would eliminate separation altogether.
We must have gone through thousands of formula permutations with only limited success. I finally asked the lab manager what the difference in cost was between the old and new caseinates. When he told me it was just a few pennies per fifty-pound bag, I was dumbstruck. The company was spending more on research salaries than they would lose if they stuck to their original supplier. Then I realized that we were engaged in a game of “What if?” What if GF could no longer obtain the original caseinate? What would have to be done to the formula to continue manufacturing Cool Whip?
It was all a mater of scale: GF made millions of dollars on a product that was mostly water and air, that cost twice as much as homemade whipped cream. They were intent on squeezing every penny of profit out of something people really didn’t need.
And that was my first revelation about industrial food production in America. GF was immensely profitable: almost all of its money came from coffee, the rest from processed convenience foods, and a fraction of a percent from the BirdsEye frozen vegetable group. The healthiest thing they sold made them the least amount of money.
I didn’t return to GF for work after that summer, I took a research job at a lab at MIT instead. It’s almost impossible to have a home completely free of GF (now Kraft) products – check out this list to see what I mean – but I can say with confidence that I haven’t had Cool Whip in the house for decades. As for Jell-O®, well, there’s always room for it.
I missed the other, more important, food movie this summer: Food, Inc.. Fortunately, my membership at the Museum of Science got me an invitation to a private screening that was followed by a panel discussion, with the whole event being sponsored by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.
All I knew about the movie beforehand was what I had seen in the trailer:
If it looks and sounds to you like a mashup of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you wouldn’t be that far off the mark. Food, Inc. hits the high points of both books, but adds a more human face to the issues. No time is wasted establishing the movie’s main points during the brilliant opening title sequence:
The film’s trajectory is predictable, but no less disturbing from familiarity with the information. We start with visits to farmers who grow chickens for Tyson and Perdue, move to Michael Pollan’s explanation of how most food products now contain a corn derivative, and then to the giant feedlots where most of our meat is raised.
We meet Barbara Kowalcyk, mother of a child who died from eating a hamburger contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. She’s in Washington, D.C., speaking to her representatives about the progress of a bill to create a law requiring tougher standards for meat inspection. Her sysiphean task is heartbreaking – no child should have to die from a hamburger – but, as yesterday’s New York Times article proves, the meat packing lobby will do anything in its power to prevent inspections, lest they have to spend a few more cents per pound to make meat safer.
We are then given a tour of the Beef Products International (BPI) plant, where we see their “product” being created. What is the product? According to BPI’s proud owner, it’s “hamburger meat filler cleansed with ammonia to kill E. coli in beef patties.” At the time of the filming, BPI’s product could be found in 70% of all frozen beef patties, but they were hoping to get that number up to 90%.
With that horror fixed in our minds, we are then introduced to this family:
You can see them in the trailer as well, the mother talks about not being able to afford vegetables. Their plight is meant to illustrate the food industry’s continued efforts to pack the cheapest food with the worst calories, all derived from fats, sugars, and other carbohydrates. The results of the family’s diet are predictable: the husband has diabetes, so money that could be spent on healthy food has to be used for his medicine. There’s a heartbreaking moment in a supermarket in which the younger daughter wants to buy some pears, but is told she can’t because they’re too expensive at 99 cents per pound.
Right after the bad news reaches this decrescendo, we finally get to meet a sane person: Joel Salatin, the hero of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He owns Polyface Farm, an all-organic operation in Virginia. Every sentence he speaks is a dose of much-needed common sense, but we quickly learn that his wisdom came from hard-fought battles with the food machine.
He’s what every small farmer should be or aspire to be: someone who cares about what he grows, who wants to feed people, make a decent living, and not have any dreams of building a farming empire.
There’s more, much more, but the most surprising section of Food, Inc. happens at a Wal-Mart, where Gary Hirshberg, CE-Yo (get it?) of Stonyfield Farm, has convinced the chain to stock his organic yogurt, in response to customer demand. It’s here that we see the most effective way to change our country’s food policy: not through toothless regulations, but through the supermarket. As Hirshbeg says: “Every time you scan a product at a cash register, you’re casting a vote.” There are very simple ways to modify your food buying and eating habits that will send a powerful message to food producers.
Of course, the self-selected, invited audience to a Cambridge science museum didn’t need much convincing, which rendered the panel discussion after the movie somewhat superfluous. We heard from Jessie Banhazi, whose company Green City Growers build backyard farms in the Boston area. She apologized for choosing the worst possible summer to get started, but hoped that more neighborhood groups would become interested in community farming. We also heard from Jody Adams, chef at the award-winning Rialto restaurant. She explained that she has always used locally-sourced ingredients whenever possible, because she likes knowing were her supplies come from. If it adds to her food costs, it’s a loss she’s willing to take.
Lastly, we heard from Hirshberg, who reiterated his capitalistic solution: vote with your wallet for better food, and buy organic products whenever possible. There wasn’t much time to discuss the co-opting of the “organic” label, but he closed the event with a perfect take-away line:
It’s pouring today. Bad news for the market vendors, good news for me: no dogs, strollers, or bicycles to trip over, no lines to buy what I need. Peaches are gone for good, more apples are appearing, and the fall crop is in full swing. Time to steer the menu toward soups and stews.
This week’s treasures include fresh eggs, ciabatta, chocolate banana bread, celeriac (celery root), brandywine and heirloom cherry tomatoes, rainbow chard, gala apples, and orange cauliflower.
How will I spend the rest of this rainy day? Reading, drinking tea, and making stock from the bone collection in the freezer.
Hey, Dave, we have an extra spot in our campaign tonight. Why don’t you roll up a character and join us?”
“Sorry, I’m going out with my girlfriend.”
“Oh, yeah. Forgot about her. I gotta get me one of them someday.”
And that conversation, repeated over four years, is why I never played Dungeons and Dragons in college. It wasn’t until three years later that I played my first campaign, a homebrewed adventure written by one of my housemates. He felt it was essential that I have some D&D experience if I was going to continue writing interactive live roleplaying games (another story for another time).
Despite my mercifully brief brush with one of the oldest time-sucks, I must have been incubating a low-level infection for more than 25 years. What other cause could explain my inability to resist this offering from Jones Soda?
I ordered a 12-pack of Spellcasting Soda, which arrived today. Despite the clever names – which would probably mean a lot more to me if I had a copy of the Dungeonmaster’s Guide or Monster Manual – the contents are just some of the straight-up flavors Jones is known for:
Dwarven Draught – Root Beer
Potion of Healing – Black Cherry
Sneak Attack – Cream
Eldritch Blast – Green Apple
Illithid Brain Juice – Grape
Bigby’s Crushing Thirst Destroyer – Cola
I need to figure out which one to drink to give me the courage to order this year’s Holiday Pack. Turkey Gravy or Candy Corn soda, anyone?
I feel like a traitor. I have declared here that Julia Child is the reason I can cook today, but I waited more than two months to see Julie and Julia. Part of the delay can be attributed to finding someone to watch He Who Will Not Be Ignored (difficult in the summer when all of our college-student sitters are away), but part can also be blamed on my reluctance to have Julia tainted by a sucky movie. And the suck potential was there right from the release of the trailer:
It has “Nora Ephron Secret Chord Progression” stamped all over it: Meryl Streep plays an overbearing woman to Stanley Tucci’s sweet, even-tempered partner, contrasted with the creatively stifled ingenue (with darkly handsome but resentful boyfriend/husband) trying to make her way in the big city – and throw in the Annie Hall lobster scene for good measure. But, unlike The Devil Wears Prada, Julie and Julia had a lot to recommend it.
So, after a dinner or perfectly roasted garlic-rosemary chicken with roasted fingerling potatoes and yellow beans, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I made our way to Harvard Square to take in the film. I still wish I could have watched the biopic waiting to be made from Child’s My Life in France, which would have to include Streep’s note-perfect performance as Julia (an illusion broken only if you caught a glimpse of her platform shoes). But, since this was based on the book based on Julie Powell’s blog, we had to slog through her angst-filled days working as a cubicle jockey. I had to remind myself that I was watching a moviefied version of her life, and that she was the pioneer of through-cooking, someone who could schlep home and still bang out a ‘graph like this:
Julia Child wants you – that’s right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end secretarial job and nothing but a Stop-n-Shop for miles around – to master the art of french cooking. (No caps, please.) She wants you to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste alright. She wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life.
I found myself making snarky comments (“She’s using the wrong knife,” “Don’t make aspic on a hot summer day”), and then Ephron sucker-punched me. She revealed the boeuf bourguignon moment, not once, but twice. It’s the touchstone dish in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a dish that if you make once you will make for the rest of your life. We got to see both Julie and Judith Jones, Julia’s editor, make the dish, and I knew exactly how their “a-ha” moments felt.
