02.28.09
Posted in Environment, Health tagged BPA at 11:50 pm by kyrias
If you haven’t yet heard of the toxic effects of BPA, or Bisphenol A, then a short list is that it is neuro-toxic and thought to cause: birth defects, cancer, infertility, obesity, and early puberty, among other observed effects.
The unfortunate news is that because it’s used to coat almost all cans to prevent the food from reacting with the metal — almost everyone has unsettling levels of it in their body, because apparently American’s have a diet that is 17% canned.
This means that we’ll probably be looking at more canned food from Eden Organics as they are the only company that uses cans with a baked on r-enamel coating. They do say that “due to the acidity of tomatoes, the lining is epoxy based and may contain a minute amount of bisphenol-A, it is however in the ‘non detectable’ range according to independent laboratory extraction tests. The test was based on a detection level at 5 ppb (parts per billion).” I’m not quite sure if the lining is under or over the enamel coating. Probably under?
However, I guess that rules out canned corn. Or tuna. Or anchovies.
Also disturbing is that buying the more expensive sauce in glass jars doesn’t solve anything because there’s also BPA in the metal lids.
It’s also in your dental sealant.
Your Tupperware…
Sheesh, when did eating become a study in toxicity avoidance?
Update! Eden Organics has BPA baked in with the enamel. So it’s not safe after all!
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02.27.09
Posted in Ethics and morality tagged tipping at 2:34 am by kyrias
I was just reading an article that was talking about how waiters and waitresses are being under-tipped as a result of the declining economy.
Personally, I always tip at least 15% for normal service. It is my opinion that if you can’t afford to tip, just stay at home.
It’s interesting though. My parents haven’t lived in the US for more than a decade. So their idea of a good tip used to be that 10% is extraordinarily generous. I had to tell them that what with being in Boston and inflation, 15% is better if you don’t want spit in their food.
Even if you think that wait-staff should be paid a normal wage and shouldn’t have to rely on the tips of patrons — that’s quite another thing entirely. The fact is that you’re essentially cheating the waiter out of income if you don’t tip at all.
However, what really surprised me was that this article claims that 20% is the norm and 25% for good service.
I have to admit, I just about swallowed my tongue.
What? 20%? Have I been under-tipping this entire time while feeling smug about doing the right thing?
I did some Googling and it seems that 15% is still the accepted standard. Perhaps it’s just the usual NYC hyper-inflation at work here.
Mayhaps I’ll just stick to my 15% — until Emily Post tells me otherwise.
So — how much do you tip usually and why?
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02.26.09
Posted in Cooking, Environment, Ethics and morality tagged meal planning, sustainable meat at 2:07 am by kyrias
Part of my problem of eating meat sustainably and locally is that I don’t own a car or have ready access to one. The other part is not having a large enough freezer.
This means no driving out to farms which only sell their products on the premises. This also means not being able to just drive home half a cow at cheap prices and have a place to store it.
Of course, if I wanted a bit less options and slightly higher prices than what I’d get for ordering half a cow, I could go with Lionette’s. I’m pretty damn envious of those people who keep blogging about getting half a sheep for less than 3 dollars a pound. I don’t know if Lionette’s is still willing to deliver, but even if they are, I’m not able to make the minimum order to get free delivery. When money is tight and you’re already buying more expensive meat, those delivery fees can add up. $10 can potentially buy me another two meals worth of meat. If I tried to get enough meat to make the delivery worthwhile, I simply don’t have the room to store it.
Of course, I could walk down and schelp it myself — but honestly, the thought of lugging around meat and having it sit at room temperature for an hour or more gives me the shivers. Not a huge deal in this weather, but when warmer weather rolls around, we’re going to have issues.
Although, if I could afford free delivery, it would be another good reason to meal plan. That way I can just order next week’s meat supply and have it delivered every Friday.
At any rate, I’m going to work on documenting just how much meat Caesura and I go through on a weekly basis. Hopefully this will help in eating more mindfully, resulting in a fatter wallet and less consumption.
At the very least, we’re going to have one vegetarian meal a week. Not much, I know, but considering I really only have one vegetarian recipe that I make — it’s some place to start.
On that note, why is pre-shredded mozerella cheaper by the pound than a big block of cheddar cheese at Stop and Shop? That totally goes against all I’ve been taught about how to shop.
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02.25.09
Posted in Environment, Ethics and morality tagged Children, eco-friendly at 12:13 pm by kyrias
I was poking around a site for larger families and came across this post responding to vitriol against larger families.
I do think that having children is bad for the planet.
I also think that eating food flown in from China and meat that comes from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations is bad for the environment, and I still do it anyways.
Unless any one person can manage to be absolutely sustainable, not bloody likely in the U.S, really, they’re in no place to be hating.
Which I’m not. It’s fact that having more children places a greater burden on the earth. So if you choose to have more children, then it’s simple fact. As for those people who get all enraged about more children, one could very well ask him or her if they’ve managed to go entirely off the grid, vegan, and walk to work every day to an office which is entirely green.
We all make choices. We all have to live with the consequences.
That said — there was a funny line about how the poster wonders ” if these people who are so against big families believe in using abortion as a form of birth control.”
There’s a lovely strawman argument for you.
No, certainly if you still manage to get pregnant after having your tubes tied, which has happened before, you should take it as god’s will for you to have that child.
But if you’re not using reliable birth control, which includes condoms, actually — then wtf? She also mentioned that she knows of at least one unintentional child.
Wait, at least? Shouldn’t having one pop up unexpectedly be a good cue that there was something wrong about the way they were doing things? As in, perhaps we should have our tubes tied and use condoms for good measure. Or perhaps we should both be sterilized.
Lastly, if it’s not about replicating your genes — then why not adopt? Not that it’s omg mandatory for people who want more children to adopt, but with all those homeless children in the world, why the need to have ones from your own loins? You’d have more kids to love and mother as you wanted, unhappy children will be given a home, and you often get less flak from rude idiots.
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02.24.09
Posted in Environment, Ethics and morality tagged Children, Environment at 10:39 am by kyrias
Whew. Nothing gets the dander up of people faster than telling them that their having kids is bad for the environment.
Well. Perhaps not nothing. Being a Neo-Nazi might get you a slightly fiercer gut reaction — but I don’t think even misogynist comments have the ability to rile as much as that little sentence does.
It’s true though.
Consider diapers. ABC news states that over the first few years of life, a baby will go through 3,796 diapers. That’s a lot of plastic, chemicals, fiber, shit and urine we’re talking about. Even if you use cloth diapers, arguably much greener, there’s still the additional water, electricity, detergent, and resources used to treat sewage. Of course, the more eco-friendly method is “elimination communication” where you learn the signs that your child is ready to go and then hold the child over a toilet or basin.
Then there’s the food, water and energy use required because of having one more person in the house.
Speaking of food, even if the parents are vegan, recycle, bike to work, etc etc — there’s nothing they can do to ensure that their child will grow up to follow their foodsteps. I have no intention of starting a debate about how far the apple falls from the tree, but it’s just simple fact that you just can’t force someone to eat vegan if they don’t want to. Worst case scenario, you have a child who is mostly carnivorous, loves his SUV, can’t bear to part from her hour long showers — what do you do?
I really love how people see it as their God-given right to reproduce. Talk to the average person on the street and you’ll hear indignant shrills of: “We’re not in Communist China here!”
Alright. So you live in a country where it’s legal for you to have as many children as you want. Quiverfuls of children, in fact.
There’s a couple of responses I want to debunk here.
“If I live lightly, I can have as many children as I want because we’ll be consuming less than the average wasteful American.”
*whistles* Talk about a loaded statement there. The fact is, even if you live lightly, most people will never get the ecological footprint down to where it needs to be. Add in children, and you’re even deeper in the hole. Some people think that so long as they do whatever the mainstream thinks they need to do in order to be “green”, then they’re not a burden on the earth. Wrong.
In Radical Simplicity they take a good hard look at what it means to live on only one acre of land, resource speaking. We’re talking about a one room house that is insulated out the wazoo that needs to be built in an eco-friendly manner. Preferably with human labor and renewable materials. Grow your own food and eat extremely locally — as in preferably within 100 miles if not less. Live off the grid and walk or bike everywhere. Forget appliances, do everything by hand. Thinking about education? The wasteful habits of most schools makes that pretty damn unsustainable if you really start looking.
So, really, if you truly think that you can “make it all better” by shopping at Whole Foods, buying organic detergents, etc — you’re wrong.
“Our childrens’ potential for positive impact upon the world is limitless.”
Oh please. Potential schemential. Your kid will probably not grow up to be one of the Columbine shooters (oooh, I went there), but don’t kid yourself that your child will become the next Mother Teresa. The simple fact is, regardless of the maybe 1000 people who your child will come to know and love and have their lives change — unless they’re Gandhi or Mozart, whatevs.
Not a huge friggin’ deal if they never existed.
1000, is, by the way, a massive over-estimation. Look at the average funeral. See if there’s actually 1000 people crying their eyes out because this person who was so amazing died.
Potential is nothing if left un-used and the fact is that most people have enough to do with living their own lives without having to worry about living out their potential for positively impacting the world.
No, having more energy-leeches is not considered a positive impact unless you’re positive they’re giving birth to the next Beethoven.
Very simple equations here, people.
People = use resources in unsustainable manner= bad. Remember, in today’s world, it’s almost impossible to be sustainable.
Having more kids = more people.
Therefore, having more kids = more people = bad for the planet.
As for those assholes who want to tell me that their right to have more children means that the environment can go suck it?
Well, you know where to stick it.
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02.23.09
Posted in life tagged fetishes, pens at 1:24 pm by kyrias
Azora has her own brand of beloved pens. So she understands the “my pen, must use my pen,mine!” obsession.
Perhaps I carry it a bit further than she does, but oh well.
I think that it was Anne of Green Gables fame who fertilized the seeds of pen elitism, however, so I lay it all at her doorstep. She once said that her pen must be just so in order to write, and especially to write love letters. That stuck with me throughout all the years and has something of the light of truth around it.
So, my pens.
I love the uni-ball Signo Dx pens, the 0.38 ones.
They’re just thin enough that I can write complicated Chinese characters without lines running into each other, and they aren’t so delicate as the 0.05 ones I used to love. Those, you could ruin by dropping it on the ground.
These, you can ruin by dropping them, but it’s not as definite and at least the pen nib doesn’t bend in half from impact.
For day to day use I love the green-black. It adds just a bit of color, but is somber enough that people won’t sit up and take notice. I usually use the blue-black for work as the lovely tint is faintly reminiscent of suits and pin stripes, yet still manages to not be stodgy.
Pure black is just a bit too boring.
And wouldn’t you love to edit with this gorgeous maroon? Or take notes with this lovely golden colour for important points? Mayhap you prefer purple?
What I would like to try at some point is this brown black, perhaps it will become a new favourite.
At $2.25 + shipping they’re not exactly cheap, but try them out some time, perhaps you’ll come to agree that writing with inferior pens is a waste of effort.
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02.22.09
Posted in Cooking, Produce and products tagged roast chicken at 4:52 pm by kyrias
This is the most visually unfriendly blog I’ve seen in a while. I’d say the most visually unfriendly ever, but then I’ve seen what horrors people do to their MySpace pages.
- The multiple little columns that wraps the text so frequently is just annoying. Call me whiny, but the amount of back and forth I was doing started getting on my nerves, fast. Mostly because it exacerbated my ADD to where I sometimes couldn’t link up the sentence in my mind when I was going back and forth. Not to mention when I’d go down a line or up a line by accident and then had to re-read.
- Then there’s the teeny tiny text. I could, and did use CTRL+++ until it was large enough to read comfortably, but then that just emphasized the irritatingly painful fact of how one thought was split up into three parts because of the tiny columns.
- They really could have just deleted the “Food I’m loving right now” column on the far right. It’s not hugely amazing enough to warrant a column by itself. For that matter, the blogroll column could be shifted to below the “about” column and it would have done well enough there.
It’s otherwise a good blog that I’d enjoy reading, but the format put the shudders in my soul.
On a happier note…
Roast chicken is one of those things I’ve never like experimenting with because I don’t like white meat and there’s a disconcertingly large amount of it on a whole chicken. I’ve also found it hard to get it to where the dark meat was cooked but the white meat hadn’t already given up the ghost and was heading towards being jerky. Then there’s how it seems very difficult to get the spices to penetrate the meaty part without having the skin being unedible for all the spice on it.
As I got a craving for proper roast chicken though, I decided to try again.
This time I rubbed it all over with generous handfuls of Montreal spice rub, stuffed it with more garlic cloves and a lemon, and rubbed it over again with celery seed powder.
Then, per instructions by the Interwebs, I left it in the fridge overnight, uncovered, so as to get the skin to dry out as much as possible.
This morning, I roughly cut up potatoes and carrots to make an impromptu rack for the chicken, drizzled olive oil over it all, sprinkled some salt on, and tossed to cover. I also poured about a cup of water onto the bottom of the pan so the vegetables wouldn’t scorch.
I pulled out the chicken, dotted it with butter, set it up on the vegetables, and put it into a oven that had been preheated to 500 degrees. After 10 minutes, I turned the heat down to 350. I figured that the heat lost from opening the oven would be regained faster if I had the heat turned up higher and it would crisp the skin nicely.
About an hour and a half later, I pulled out the chicken and tested it. The juices ran clear, but when Azora cut away part of the thigh, it appeared to still be somewhat red at the bone. I pulled the wings off to eat, because they were done, and stuck the chicken back in for another half hour.
In retrospect, I could have kept the chicken in there for another half hour, because the meat was just slightly underdone. Not so much as to be even pink or bloody, but it had the texture of not being entirely well-done. However, it was pretty good as is, if one didn’t think too hard about food poisoning. Still, considering it was about a 8 pound bird, the 20 minutes per pound at 350 degrees sounded like it would have made it a bit too dry.
Noting, however, that we ate the drumsticks first, so perhaps the breast was well-done at that point.
The potatoes and carrots had a lovely flavour from being cooked in chicken drippings, olive oil, and butter. Next time I think I’ll put in more carrots because the roasting really did wonders for them.
I will make up a spice rub myself next time. The Montreal spice rub was tasty, but a bit on the salty side, so I could have done with mor spice but I was afraid that the salt would have made it inedible.
Not a bad turnout for my first roast chicken.
Next time, we’ll see how I can adapt the beer can chicken recipe so it turns out just as well.
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02.21.09
Posted in life tagged anti-social awkwardness at 9:45 pm by kyrias
I tried to pan-fry the whole mackerel today. I think that it wasn’t quite done on the inside because of how thick it was. Perhaps next time I’ll ask them to fillet it for me to make for easier cooking. It probably didn’t help that the fish itself was slightly too long for my pan and I had to decapitate the fish halfway through so it would lie flatter and hopefully cook better.
We also went to a house party today.
I didn’t know it was a house party. To be perfectly honest, if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have gone. When Azora mentioned a “spicy food party” and that she had heard of it through Mac and his girlfriend, I had the misconception of wide roomy areas with college students bearing food who might or might not know each other.
You know. The sort of venture where you can strike up a conversation around something concrete, such as the food they made, with people who aren’t already very intimate with each other and therefore slightly stickish to each other. Also, the sort where you can discreetly make your goodbyes if you’re bored without people taking notice.
Well, this venture had that last bit. But that was about as much parallel as I got.
This was actually a house party involving something close to at least 50 people in a normal sized house.
Even worse, Mac and said girlfriend who knew the host didn’t show up at all, and I felt like an intruder because we clearly didn’t know anyone. It would have been much less awkward, I think, if they had been there to introduce us to people, so to get the ball rolling.
As it was, the host wasn’t expecting us, and I stood around for about 2 minutes feeling extremely ill at ease until I escaped outdoors to play with the children.
For 4 hours.
I’m painfully shy, and I don’t like large amounts of people in small spaces.
I can try getting over myself in terms of small groups of people and hanging out, but I don’t know if I want to try being able to mingle with large amounts of people without an introduction since my first reaction is to run screaming into the night.
On another note, I met a fascinating young woman today. Fascinating in the sort of “oooh, bug under the microscope” way. I didn’t like her though, and caught myself saying mentally, “little bitch” a couple of times.
Perhaps I’m just jealous. Most likely I am.
She had that sort of half imperious, half coy, flirtatious manner that implied that she would grow up to be the sort of woman I absolutely detested. The sort that have men eating out of their hands, see women as competition, and who sees everyone as means to an end.
Bit harsh? Perhaps.
But then she managed to cement my decision to tell everyone outside of my current group of friends that my name is Kyria. She kept sing-songing the Romanization of my Chinese name in a way that was massively reminiscent of the kind of hazing I went through as a child.
If it weren’t for the fact that she was around 12, according to Zack, I would have snapped at her that she really had kindergarten grade name teasing down pat.
She also claimed to have asthma and needed a time out just as Zack was about to catch her in blindman’s bluff. Then she made a point of stalking me to deliberately grab hold of me and trying to get me caught. Not in a friendly manner, but in a vaguely malicious manner that surprised me with its intensity.
Might just be my imagination, but it’s a good thing I’m not seeing her again.
Meh.
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02.20.09
Posted in Cooking, Produce and products tagged Boston local stores at 7:35 pm by kyrias
Azora and I went investigating fishmongers today.
I got a pound of farmed salmon from New Deal and a mackerel — if I had known that Courthouse was right down the road and had Alaskan salmon, I would have gotten it there. Neither store had cod with skin — supposedly no one wants to buy cod with skin now. I think it’s a blooming shame, because crispy fish skin is actually pretty tasty.
If I bought the cod with skin, the fish would have been one meal, and I would have stir-fried the minced skin until it was crispy and made fried rice with it. Now that I know that they throw out the skin, maybe I’ll ask them to save it for me in the future. Can’t imagine they’ll charge me full price for something they usually throw out, so I might get to benefit from other people not knowing the joys that is crispy fried fish skin. On the other hand, doesn’t sound too good, does it? 
Oh well, more for me. 
The salmon is going into salmon fried rice to stretch it and I think I’m pan-frying the mackerel with a bit of garlic and oil. I think a pound of salmon at $15 a pound will make enough fried rice for 8 people. Not bad, right?
As for the mackerel, it’s my first time frying a whole fish, so we’ll see how that goes. Near 4 dollars a pound, which isn’t bad, for what it is.
On our way there I also noticed the Mayflower Poultry store. They had chicken hearts for sale and chicken legs for 89 cents a pound if you bought 5 pounds. Needless to say, I snapped up half a pound of hearts and 5 pounds of chicken legs. They said that their chickens weren’t given antibiotics and weren’t fed animal byproducts. Although not organic or freerange, I think I’d rather give them my business than to Purdue or others of their ilk. The chicken hearts I had tasted very fresh and I’ll see if the chicken legs are just as tasty. Yelp has good things to say about their roasters, so that’s next on my list. They also have buffalo steaks and venison, very tempting indeed.
When I got home, I marinated the chicken hearts in Chinese cooking wine, 1 teaspoon salt, three scallion whites, and 5 cloves of minced garlic. About an hour later I strung three on skewers and starting cooking them — over the gas stove.
Unfortunately, even with soaking the skewers, the flame burnt right through the bamboo before the chicken hearts were done. This was when Azora came by, had one, and then had the brilliant idea of cooking them on the forks.
So we each took a burner, strung them up on the forks, and went right to town.
The verdict?
Tasty, but marshmallow toasting forks would have worked better. That’s going on the shopping list.
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Posted in Reviews tagged Whole Foods at 2:48 am by kyrias
There’s a ton of items that Whole Food’s carries, so I’m just going to be using Roman numerals as I go.
- The 365 fresh squeezed orange juice in a 64 fluid oz plastic container is good, but it’s a bit too sweet for my taste. I don’t think it’s necessarily worth the higher price tag. In fact, I’m slightly curious as to how “fresh squeezed” is different from the other options.
(3 stars)
- I did like the 365 fresh squeezed grapefruit juice in the 64 fluid oz container though. It was tart enough for my taste, yet it didn’t have the oddly bitter taste that so many other brands have. If I had the money, this would be a staple in my fridge.
(4 stars)
- Whole Food’s brand frozen pepperoni pizza was nasty. The crust was meh, the sauce lackluster and the pepperoni not only scanty but it also was faintly reminiscent of cardboard. Would never buy again.
(1 star)
- Whole Food’s frozen fruit is on average not bad, but I remember the Tree of life frozen fruit being absolutely amazing in smoothies. In contrast, Whole Food’s frozen cherries, blueberries, and strawberries are very lackluster in comparison. Almost tasteless, really. I could eat the Tree of Life frozen fruit straight from the bag, but I can’t do that with the Whole Food’s frozen fruit. Of course, Tree of Life was near three years ago, so this might not be as accurate as I would like.
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