Posts Tagged ‘cooking’
Was it cooking that made us human?
Cooking is something we all take for granted but a new theory suggests that if we had not learned to cook food, not only would we still look like chimps but, like them, we would also be compelled to spend most of the day chewing.
Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive. The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon.
It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors’ diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase. Meat – a more concentrated form of energy – not only meant bigger brains for our ancestors, but also an end to the need to devote nearly all their time to foraging to maintain energy levels. As a consequence, more time was available for social structure to develop.
Nigel Slater’s tender tomatoes
You must have some quick and easy [or complex] tomato recipes.
Sharing is OK.
Shock revelation of sources of South Asia’s Brown Cloud
Daylife/AP Photo by Sucheta Das
A gigantic brownish haze from various burning and combustion processes is blanketing India and surrounding land and oceans during the winter season. This soot-laden Brown Cloud is affecting South Asian climate as much or more than carbon dioxide and cause premature deaths of 100 000s annually, yet its sources have been poorly understood.
Uh, if there’s anyone who doesn’t have a clue about the origins of this Brown Cloud they must work either in newspaper publishing or for one or another government of half-wits.
In the journal Science Örjan Gustafsson and colleagues at Stockholm University and in India use a novel carbon-14 method to determine that two-thirds of the soot particles are from biomass combustion such as in household cooking and in slash-and-burn agriculture.
Brown Clouds, covering large parts of South and East Asia, originate from burning of wood, dung and crop residue as well as from industrial processes and traffic.
These findings provide a direction for actions to curb emissions of Brown Clouds. Örjan Gustafsson…leader of the study, says that the clear message is that efforts should not be limited to car traffic and coal-fired power plants but calls on fighting poverty and spreading India-appropriate green technology to limit emissions from small-scale biomass burning. “More households in South Asia need to be given the possibility to cook food and get heating without using open fires of wood and dung” says Gustafsson.
South Asia has to deal with the worldwide whine – based in Wall Street and Washington, DC – which uses the Brown Cloud as an excuse for reactionary nationalist politics.
Some of us recall exactly the same brown cloud over Glasgow and London when they still were urban centers of cesspool-level air quality – because half the population cooked and heated in their homes with open coal fires [as does China, today]. It took decades but the “Auld Reekie” syndrome eventually dissipated with access to sufficient electricity and gas for cooking and heating.
No doubt Asian nations will achieve the same.
A cookbook with a lot of balls!
Lamb Eggs. Rocky Mountain Oysters. Spring Roe. Cowboy Caviar. Montana Tendergroins. While the rest of the world dreams up user-friendly names for dishes cooked with testicles, Serbian chef Ljubomir Erovic has no such qualms, as his widely-blogged Testicle Cookbook – Cooking with Balls vividly confirms. Ljubomir, who also runs the ever-popular World Testicle Cooking Championship is a man on a singularly testicular mission…
On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the charm of a recipe that begins “wash penis clean and pat dry” (stew with bull penis) or the romantic appeal of heart-shaped turkey testicles, and the instructional videos scattered throughout the pages show Erovic to be a man of great charm and unbridled enthusiasm…
And so I head up to the the halal butchers of London’s Green Lanes to track down my ballsy bounty, strike lucky in the first shop I enter, and return home to rustle up some pizza. The recipe is pretty straightforward – a basic dough, tomato paste, chopped onion, chopped red pepper, cheddar cheese and the testicles – but it’s not an altogether happy result. The slices of testicle are wet and soft, and their delicate flavour doesn’t match the rest of the dish. My suspicion is that Erovic has created the recipe to lure in the less adventurous diner, as if to pretend that these lamb berries are a perfectly normal ingredient.
I have more luck with my second dish, the battered testicle fritter. The nads are first marinated in lemon juice, parsley, olive oil and pepper before being fried in a simple batter, and the results are stunning, like miniature, elegant Wiener schnitzels. Emboldened, I’ve set next weekend aside to try Testicles A La Dime Vuk from Kratovo, a bold concoction that attempts to marry “5 pairs of testicles of castrated pigs” with Komovica grape brandy.
Mmmm-mmmmm.
