Fortunately I Never Ate Any Of This Stuff Anyway

In the mood for a little salmonella, E. coli, roundworm, tapeworm, lungworm, Angiostrongylus cantonensis, or Listeria monocytogene? Check out MSN's Top 5 Menu Items Most Likely To Contain Parasites. Guess I better cut back on my escargot, sushi, steak tartare, and ham and pork sandwiches, huh?

Let's Talk Swine Flu

Honestly I'm already sick of hearing about it, and I really wasn't intending to bring it up, but I came across this fascinating article talking about the origins of the current swine flu and how its outbreak can be attributed to terrible conditions at CAFOs (that's Confined Animal Feeding Operations for you non-aggies). The writer says that it shouldn't come as a surprise that an outbreak like this has happened, as the conditions in these CAFOs are so bad, and the health standards within the meat packing industry so low, that it was pretty much inevitable that something like this would occur.

The CAFO located near the epicentre of the outbreak is owned by Smithwick Foods, a U.S. company. Take this description found in the article, taken from a 2006 Rolling Stone article:

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

I realize that these conditions are probably like those found in almost any CAFO, not just those in Mexico, and I really don't want to sound like I'm from PETA, but that description if fucking disgusting. Personally I would find it hard to give up meat (especially pork), but descriptions like these make me wonder if my vegetarian girlfriend isn't onto something.

Mmmm, Beeeer

I enjoyed this article about Sam Calagione and his brewery, Dogfish Head.

As a child I couldn't stand the taste or even smell of beer, but now I love it. At some point I started to dislike most sweet drinks-I even drink diet soda. Red wine is good, but doesn't equal beer as a sipping drink. Beer has an amazing flavor; I seem to recognize that I shouldn't like it, but do. So called "extreme beers" have attracted my attention of late, and I'm particularly fond of sour IPA's such as Stone Brewery's Ruination. I'll have to give Dogfish Head a try.

Sandwiches

If there's one thing I love more than vaguely obtuse economics talk and French theory, it's sandwiches! I've experimented with sundry ingredients such as kimchee, English muffins, and sriracha sauce. This article describes 7 interesting culinary stacks available in New York.

The "Sandwich Marguez au Harrisa": "Mr. Atif’s time at the Cordon Bleu served him well, but eventually his cooking circled back to the spicy, paprika-reddened merguez sausages he said he learned to make from the Jewish butchers of Casablanca. The merguez are made daily at the cafe, cooked to order and stuffed into crusty, grilled “petit pain” — “little bread” in Casablanca, a.k.a. Italian rolls in Queens — with cubes of cucumber and tomato, chopped green olives and a hot-pink, spicy, garlicky harissa, also made in-house. “I mastered it through many kitchens,” he said. Wine vinegar and extra oil emulsify Mr. Atif’s harissa into a tangy sandwich spread that takes a bow toward mayonnaise."

I think I'm more exited to try that sandwich than to see anything else in New York, and I'm pretty interested in seeing New York.

Current Music and Cooking

I've been listening to LCD Soundystem's Sound of Silver a lot. The singles, "All My Friends" and "Someone Great" are both excellent. James Murphy's songs can be a bit repetitive because of "dance" side of the "dance/punk" but they all have an interesting payoff in terms of lyrics or musical crescendo if you keep listening. Go watch the videos if you're interested.

As for cooking, I added some Serrano peppers to the meaty spaghetti sauce I cooked last night and topped it off with some grated Five Year New York Cheddar, which has a very sharp and pungent flavor. It was delicious and went great with the Cappuccino Stout I decided to try that night. California cuisine at its finest!

The Ant In My Thai Food

Just a few days ago, I found myself eating a reasonably satisfying plate of Thai Chicken Fried Rice in a local establishment that shall remain nameless. I did not have much time to dine, considering that I needed to be on my way shortly, and thus I was chowing down at a rather brisk pace. Which is why the sight of an ant crawling up the piece of cilantro on my plate didn't give me as much pause as it might have otherwise. "Hmmm," I thought to myself. "Should I say something? Or should I just flick it off and keep eating? Maybe it's not the restaurant's fault. Maybe he just crawled onto the plate from the table. Hell, maybe he was in my own hair, and maybe I was the source of the ant, not the restaurant." Since I really didn't have any time to waste, I simply flicked the ant off and continued eating. I could not avoid parsing the remainer of my food very carefully with a fork, of course. But on the whole, one bad ant doesn't spoil the whole bunch, as they say.

Two ants, however, might be more likely to spoil the bunch, which is why the second ant really threw me for a loop. Again, he was crawling up the cilantro, and again, I attempted to flick him off. I tried hard to justify my continued consumption of this meal. "Maybe it's the same ant," I thought. "Maybe I thought I flicked him off before, but I didn't." Any more time wasted at this table and I would be late. And the truth is, the rest of the fried rice still looked pretty good, and I was still hungry, and hey, I was paying for it, so I might as well do my best to clear the plate. I couldn't help but sense a small itch in my throat. Maybe an ant was crawling around the entrance to my esophagus. Suddenly I had visions of a frat boy ant, joyously swinging from my tonsils, drunkenly slurring "Louie Louie," having the time of his life. I tried to swallow with extra vigor. I drank excessive sips of water. Eventually I just figured, "Hey, extra protein." I left a reasonable tip and hightailed it out of there.

Call me generous.

The Impulsive Donut Purchase

It was supposed to be a routine stroll through Albertson's on a Sunday night. I was there for a few items, and a few items only: onions, zucchini, bell peppers, olive oil, milk. No frills, no gratuities.

Suddenly, there they were: Entenmann's chocolate-covered donuts. It hit me in the gut, right off the bat. Just from the picture on the box, I could already feel them sliding sweetly into my mouth. A voice cried out in my head. "Aw, whaddaya need those for?" it said pointedly. "You know you're only gonna eat one and then you're gonna be sick." Maybe so. Maybe it would only be a foolish waste of my money. But it was too late to turn back. I'd already tasted their fluffy goodness in my head, and I'd be damned if I let caution stop me now. I picked them up and threw them in my cart.

Finally, after a scrumptious dinner of black bean soup, I opened the box. With trepidation, I grabbed the first donut. It was just as I'd hoped: soft, tangy, expansive, sugary. Thrilled by having read my appetite so successfully, I reached for a second one. It was then that I began losing momentum. The voice inside my head was right; I couldn't even eat two of these things. Midway through the second donut, I maxed out.

The refrigerator came through, in the clutch, to save the day.

I Cooked The Pasta Too Long

It's funny the things that bother you sometimes. Even though pasta is usually just the "too tired to cook a real dinner, let's just cook pasta since it only takes ten minutes" kind of meal, I have to say, I do enjoy it more when it's just the right texture. But achieving this balance proved too daunting of a task for me this evening. I had one bag of macaroni pasta which was only about 1/3 full. I wasn't sure that would be enough to satisfy my hunger, and I've learned from too many disturbing nights that if I don't make enough pasta, I'll be too hungry to fall asleep and I'll just have to cook something else later on anyway, so I always try to make too much rather than too little. So I decided to open up the bag of lasagna-style pasta, and put a little bit of that in there as well. But you see, here came the tricky part: the maraconi needed to cook for 8 to 10 minutes, while the lasagna needed to cook for only 6-8 minutes. Simple enough, right? Well you see I was so cocky about my abilities in this area that I didn't even time it, I just sort of estimated. Somewhere along the line I must have miscalculated. Maybe I got the times mixed up. I was so sure that I had it. But no, the macaroni ended up way too soggy. It had been a long time since I'd really had soggy pasta, and it was a shock to realize how unsatisfying it could be. The meal still served its purpose, but the sogginess has strengthened my resolve to get it right the next time.