Sometimes I’m irreverent and I take the easy way out. Here’s how…
June 15, 2005
Granitas shown clockwise from 10 ‘o clock; duoi uoi nuoc hot e (let’s just call this, banana and acceptably gelatinous seed drink), ice coffee, green tea tofu, lychee soda, passion fruit&juniper berry&ume boshi, mango tofu. Center; guava disk.
The motivation behind this granita sampler was the desire to make some recipes that involved little more than ripping open a can of Chinese soft-drink, freezing the contents for two and a half hours and then giving it a good scratchin’.
(Please read more… )
debra at 14:30 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
Space food
June 14, 2005
(image courtesy of ESA Directorate of Human Spaceflight and Alain Ducasse)
A former colleague of mine, aerospace engineer Alexander van Dijk, sent me this link about chef Ducasse and his staff developing food for manned missions into space. Check out the space food experiments from the directorate of human spaceflight right here. The article talks about aiming to produce 40% of the food locally for astronauts on long term missions. The nine basic ingredients that ESA plans to grow on other planets are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and spirulina, a blue-green algae, very rich in protein (65% by weight), calcium, carbohydrates, lipids and various vitamins.
Although I love to develop recipes based upon a highly restricted diet as much as the next guy, I really miss seeing bean and seed sprouts in the descriptions Ducasse experiments. it’s so easy to do and you have within 4 days food healthier than when you just had a hill of beans.
debra at 12:56 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Hibiscus flowers
June 12, 2005
One million years ago, when I was a little girl, I had a piano teacher called Miss Pierce. She was an elegant and graceful woman, and ancient, as far as I was concerned. She was the secret girlfriend of Mr. Greenjeans, from the chilluns’ TV show, Captain Kangaroo! We lived in a university town full of orange and date orchards on the edge of the desert, and Miss Pierce was probably one of the few people there that fulfilled for me, in her own weird and spinster way, the notion of what it is to be ‘fabulous’.
I used to arrive at her strangely decorated house (entirely too much yellow) for piano lessons with my neighbour Michelle, who was even more of a tomboy than I was. The two of us played so rambunctiously that Miss Pierce decided to give us ‘lady-lessons’ at no extra charge. We agreed to the lady-lessons because we just loved listening to Miss Pierce blather on and on about table manners and gentlemen as we sipped hibiscus tea and nibbled girlscout cookies, all the while kicking eachother surreptitiously under the table.
Miss Pierce liked her hibiscus tea incredibly sour but I never added sugar because my parents had indoctrinated me to think that sugar was ‘White Death’, and I was trying to get my head around enjoying sour things. Hibiscus flowers in their wet form, alive and still on the tree, are forever connected in my mind with my father and his battle against vast herds of aphids on his hibiscus trees. But hibiscus flower in its dry form and as a tea still reminds me of my piano teacher, Miss Pierce, patiently battling to turn me and Michelle into ladies.
Today I’m experimenting with using hibiscus flower as a souring agent in a batch of quick pickles and a vegetable broth intended for a summer borscht although 12°c doesn’t really qualify as summer.
(Please read more… )
debra at 14:25 | Comments (10) | post to del.icio.us
