Posts Tagged → food
It’s berry season!
For about 150,000 years we humans have been hunter-gatherers, living a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle that follows the migrating animals and the growth of plants our bodies can eat.
Edible plants were a huge component of hunter-gatherer food, easily dried and carried, many of them lasting well into October and November after plants have gone dormant in most places. Unlike meat, dried edible plants do not easily rot, or attract nibbling animals.
Among edible plants, fruits and wild berries reign supreme.
That is because fruits and berries contain an unusual mix of carbohydrates, sugars, minerals, and vitamins, all of which are necessary for survival. Especially vitamin C, a crucial ingredient in a healthy human body (think scurvy).
The fact that wild berries taste especially sweet and supplement other foods with extra flavor is a big draw.
Sweet-tasting foods rarely occur in Nature.
Blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, huckleberries, wineberries, and many others grow abundantly here in Pennsylvania and across the Eastern US.
Plains Indians like the Lakota, Pawnee, and Comanche made a mix of red meat and berries called pemmican. Ripe berries were turned into a big mush and then worked into meat strips. Usually the mixture was dried on wooden racks in the open air and sunlight, and the dried slabs and sticks were then put under the horse saddle to be worked and broken down into what we would call jerky today.
“Jerky” gets its name from the gentle jerking motion of the horse saddle, as horses step forward. The motion slowly breaks down the meat fibers, making them easily chewed and digested.
So here we are, a bunch of sedentary Americans, mostly eating out of cans and bagged frozen foods.
One antidote to this somewhat unhealthy arrangement is to go outside and do stuff.
Hike, walk, sit and read or sit and chat with someone face to face, fish, canoe, grill out, etc., so many easy outdoor activities.
A really easy outdoor activity is berry picking. Sure there are some thorns, but so what. The benefits are fresh, delicious, healthy berries that are not sprayed with chemicals, or bagged in plastic bags, or frozen. The whole family can do it. Go find a field edge, and bring some hard containers, and start picking.
Humans have been berry picking in that Summertime window of opportunity for a really long time. So long that it can be measured in ice ages come and gone, ice sheets advancing and retreating. That is a lot of years.
If we have been doing that activity for that long, you know it is good and natural. That the whole family can do it, and then make pies together afterwards, makes it all the better.
Just watch out for poison ivy!
The things that make life fun
Music, family, food, friendship, art derived from craftsmanship, Nature, aesthetics, and so on are things that make life fun.
The best things in life are free, and aren’t really things: Love, friendship, trust, integrity, honesty. We can have as much of these as we want, and very often they only require giving a little to get a lot in return.
I am not Italian, but when I used to hang out with Italians, I finally learned what “food” really, truly is. Restaurateur Andy Zangrilli of State College trained me in two of his restaurants as a line chef, from salads to sautee, when I was fresh out of high school. Andy owns Gullifty’s and other landmark restaurants around Pennsylvania, and prided himself on making all of his food from scratch, including pickling and smoking his own pastrami and corned beef, as well as making his own prosciutto and some cheeses. It had to be done just right, or not done at all. And when the food was done right, it was like hearing angels sing. As a dad and husband who enjoys cooking, I try to bring some of Andy’s amazing recipes to life in our own home. No complaints yet!
Today’s news was just filled with all kinds of rich targets: RyanCare vs ObamaCare, news that an Israeli teenager has been arrested for committing the lion’s share of the email and phone threats made against Jewish institutions across America over the past months (and NOT “white supremacists”), my old Penn State chum and good friend Seth Williams being indicted for bribery as DA of Philadelphia, and so on.
Never at a loss for words or strong opinions, I would naturally have more to say on these subjects than I should. And you know what, this is also the PA Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs spring conference, too, and I will be going to that. So I guess that is where I am going to let the mind and written word go next.
Wildlife biologist Ben Jones of the PA Game Commission will be speaking tomorrow night, a can’t-miss opportunity for those of us who love nature, wildlife, and conservation. I will be joining a lot of friends and colleagues this weekend at this gathering, and that’s what I am going to focus on here:
Enjoy your friends and family, my friends. Life is so precious and yet so tenuous. At my age, we all too often see good people gone in a blink of an eye. People who brought us smiles, and laughter, joy and love, warmth and companionship. These are treasures, though we cannot weigh them out or count them. Yes, there is a time for ego, debate, values, culture, and possessiveness, and anger, and hurt, and revenge, and so on, but this weekend….for me it’s about friendship.
It is one of those “things” that make life worth living. For a tiny price, it can be had in truckloads.
Why are there syllables in my bread?
The other day I made the mistake of looking at the the ingredients label on the bag containing a loaf of sliced bread I brought home from the Giant store on Linglestown Road.
Can you believe the chemicals and additives and preservatives that are in that loaf of bread, according to the label? These are seriously long, serious-sounding, polysyllabic words that I have trouble pronouncing, no matter how long I have to spell them out slowly.
Words this long do not belong in the human body.
It made me wonder, Why are all these syllables in my bread?
Shouldn’t bread just be something like flour, water, salt, sugar, eggs, baking powder, maybe some fresh yeast, plus fire? For the past five thousand years, bread has been successfully made with slight variations on this theme of basic ingredients.
One of my kids has a health issue, and for most of her life it was treated with scary chemicals.
One by one, the chemicals stopped working. We were left with few options.
Then a researcher in Israel began a study, where kids with this health issue would go on a basic diet: No processed food, no canned food, no frozen food except what you freeze yourself. Everything fresh. No soda, no powdered drink mixes. Etc.
Guess what? She went into remission. It was attributable solely to the lack of processed food and the attendant polysyllabic chemicals she was otherwise ingesting when she ate “food.”
Today our friend Roberta came over, delivering Girl Scout cookies that only our boy can eat (well, I could easily eat them, but my body needs no extra calories or fat). We caught up in the kitchen over fresh coffee. Turns out she has changed her diet, and is feeling a lot better than before, plus she is lean and feeling energized.
What is her diet? No processed food.
Seeing that bread label got me thinking. Seeing my beloved child get better from a serious health issue got me thinking. Talking with our family friend of nearly twenty years got me thinking. Here is what I am thinking:
Syllables and food do not go together, unless it’s Italian. Certainly not in English.
Chemicals and food should not go together.
Chemicals are not food.
Chemicals and body health probably do not go together, except as a treatment for a serious health issue.
I just ate a pile of fresh carrot sticks. They were not nearly as satisfying to me, as they don’t taste great, as something processed. But it’s the beginning of something good. And it reminds me to start preparing seeds for the summer garden.
And one more thing: Giant also sells freshly baked bread. This bread lacks the preservatives of the bagged bread. It’s my new go-to bread, and as I do most of the food shopping for our family, it is what we are going to have going forward.
Giant Food’s punishing self checkout
Does Giant have self checkout to punish its customers? To prove that loyalty takes a long time to undermine?
It’s miserably time consuming, it never works, it hangs up, people standing in multiple lines waiting for help from a single clerk. Giant thinks they’re saving a few pennies in labor cost. But the truth is that Giant is following a traditional path to failure.
By building up customer loyalty, and then giving them less and less, many businesses have milked quality, alienated customers, and then crashed.
Another sign of cheapness is Giant’s slow conversion of name brand foods for its own generic label. But I don’t want Giant’s mediocre quality food. I’m willing to pay for better quality.
Capitalism 101 says our family begins shopping at the Wegman’s on the West Shore.
My antidote to the heat
Several years ago my family bought me a Hamilton Beach smoothie maker (model 56222) for Father’s Day, and it long past earned its price. It has a pour spout which makes smoothies a lot cleaner to make, pour, and drink.
Fruit smoothies are a summertime daily staple of our family, and they can be made lots of different ways, with all kinds of natural ingredients (fresh and frozen blueberries, strawberries, citrus fruits, etc), for far less money than you might pay at a Rita’s or other ice cream venue.
Here is my antidote to the heat:
1) One 20-ounce can of Dole pineapple slices in heavy syrup or in natural pineapple juice.
2) One cup of Cabot Greek-style lowfat yogurt, vanilla bean flavor.
3) A quarter cup of water
4) 2-4 tablespoons of granulated sugar (more or less to taste)
5) lots of ice cubes or crushed ice
…….Pour the pineapple into the blender, juice and all. Spoon in the yogurt. Pour in the sugar, to taste. Pour the water over the sugar to help it dissolve. Fill the blender to the top with ice cubes or crushed ice, and put the top on. Pulse or use the smoothie function for 30-60 seconds.
The sliced pineapple blends better than the crushed pineapple, oddly, at least in our machine.
Plenty of times we skip the yogurt and just use water and a splash of lemon juice, along with frozen berries. Other times an old, mushy banana with pineapple, or some coconut milk with pineapple, and suddenly you are into daquiri land… Depends on what you are in the mood for. They are all refreshing. The world is your smoothie!
And not to take away anything from Rita’s: When our clan is in the mood for a cold, icy snack, places like Rita’s have far more flavors than we can come up with at home.
Pickled eggs
Pickled eggs are a regional treat unappreciated by many otherwise redeemable connoisseurs from the flatlands. My wife and I relish them, our kids turn up their noses, and many other people ask “What?”
So here we go:
Using a gallon-size empty large glass pickle jar, I put in a can of sliced beets (plain, unsalted, if it can be found) with the red juice, 2-4 sliced onions of any color, thinly sliced rounds from 2-3 large carrots, and a dozen hard boiled, peeled eggs. Pickling solution is made to taste, usually a teaspoon of white sugar and a teaspoon of salt dissolved in a few ounces of warm water, dill, basil, and garlic to taste, about 8-12 ounces of apple vinegar, 1-2 ounces red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar, and top it off with warm water. Turn the sealed jar upside down and shake it for a minute.
Set it out on the kitchen counter for a few hours, and then refrigerate (or in the winter, put it in your cold mud room or outside enclosed porch, good natural refrigerators).
After a couple days, everything in that jar is begging to be eaten. After a week, it is a delicacy. We eat the eggs whole with the vegetables on the side, or I slice them up into salads that Viv and I eat for lunch.
Three cheers for Central Pennsylvania’s traditional foods!
Fall weather has its benefits
Cool fall weather has benefits: We sleep more comfortably at night, fewer bugs pester us, the lawn grows more slowly and requires less frequent visits with the mower.
Another benefit is that food left for several days inside a vehicle doesn’t go bad. For example, the half-gnawed apple that my son left in the back seat of the truck during a recent fishing trip wasn’t in too bad shape. After slicing off the gnarly chewed sides, I was able to have a healthy midnight snack of about 0.65% of a whole apple.
Thanks, Mother Nature!
Josh