La Vida Locavore - Recent Comments

It was briefly all the rage...

atdleft — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:38:30 GMT

When Marilyn Manson was drinking it all up at The Palms when it became legal in 2007, but it seems to be a fad that died out quickly... At least here in Vegas. I sometimes see it on restaurant wine & spirit menus, but that's it.

Oh jeez, we have a crisis on our hands...

atdleft — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:29:04 GMT

Mr. ELV thinks he doesn't like Vietnamese food. I think he hasn't tried "the real deal" in Little Saigon. However, this does confirm something I just didn't want to believe... It really IS difficult to find good pho in this town!

St. Germain liqueur

count — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:17:39 GMT

I came across the absinthe information while researching something I noticed in a liquor store recently, St. Germain liqueur, which was released to the world in 2007. Might be interesting, but if it goes for $35/759 ml, looks like about $15 might be for the bottle.

absinthe

count — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:08:35 GMT

The George W. Bush administration did not do only bad things. Yeah, I was surprised to discover that.

From the Absinthe wiki:

On March 5, 2007, the French Lucid brand became the first genuine absinthe to receive a COLA (Certificate of Label Approval) for legal importation into the United States since 1912,[39][40] following independent efforts by representatives from Lucid and Kübler to topple the long-standing U.S. ban.[41] In December 2007, St. George Absinthe Verte, produced by St. George Spirits of Alameda, California, became the first brand of American-made absinthe to be legally produced in the United States since the enactment of the ban.[42][43] Since that time, other micro-distilleries have started making small batches of high-quality absinthe in the U.S.

How does a person drink absinthe?

How to Serve Absinthe

I've never tried it. I don't know that I want to buy a bottle, but I'll look around for a place that serves it the traditional (French) way.

Never again

count — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:41:12 GMT

Never again will I take good rye bread for granted. If someone gives me a loaf, I will fall to my knees and offer bountiful thanks.

Onion scapes

count — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:32:29 GMT

Joanne has discussed garlic scapes, so I thought "Why not onion scapes?" Sure enough,

onion scapes

I found a few small onions just beginning to bolt, with tight-closed buds (walla walla sweets that missed harvest last year). The onion scape is hollow and pretty much the same as the leaves. The onions were still sound (fully bolted onions are gross) so I just sliced the entire thing and sauteed slowly in olive oil. All parts were really good. Added pecorino romano, grated lemon peel, black pepper and dressed pasta with it.

This probably isn't information that is useful in a practical way, however. From ONION PLANTING:

Flowering -- Abnormal For Onions; Normal For Garlic
Most folks want to grow onion bulbs NOT onion flowers! What causes bulb onions to send up flower stalks? Flowering of onions can be caused by several things but usually the most prevalent is temperature fluctuation. An onion is classed as a biennial which means it normally takes 2 years to go from seed to seed. Temperature is the controlling or triggering factor in this process. If an onion plant is exposed to alternating cold and warm temperatures resulting in the onion plant going dormant, resuming growth, going dormant and then resuming growth again, the onion bulbs prematurely flower or bolt. The onion is deceived into believing it has completed two growth cycles or years of growth in its biennial life cycle so it finalizes the cycle by blooming. Flowering can be controlled by planting the right variety at the right time. Use only transplants that are pencil-sized or smaller in diameter when planting in early spring or always plant seed, NEVER transplants, in early fall in Texas Zones III - V (USDA Zones 8 and 9).
DON'T plant garlic in the spring! Bulb formation in garlic occurs in response to the lengthening days of spring, and bulbing and maturity are considerably hastened if temperatures are high. In addition to these requirements, the dormant cloves (divisions of the large bulb) or young growing plants must be exposed to cold temperatures between 32 and 50 degrees F. for one or two months in order to initiate bulbing. Plants that are never exposed to temperatures below 65 degrees F. may fail to form bulbs. With fall plantings, the cold treatment is accomplished quite naturally throughout the winter, but a spring planting spells disaster in Texas Zones III - V (USDA Zones 8 and 9)
What To Do About Flowering?
What can one do if flower stalks appear? Should the flower stalks be removed from the onion plants? Suit yourself but once the onion plant has bolted, or sent up a flower stalk, there is nothing you can do to eliminate this problem. The onion bulbs will be edible but smaller. Use these onions as soon as possible because the green flower stalk which emerges through the center of the bulb will make storage almost impossible. Seedstalk formation (bolting) of garlic is not induced by exposure to fluctuating temperatures, as is the case with onions, which means that a wide range of fall planting dates is permissible for this crop. Seedstalk formation is also not damaging to garlic since the cloves are arranged around the seedstalk and will be removed from the dried seedstalk. Conversely, the edible onion bulb is penetrated by the seedstalk which is hard when the bulb is harvested, but prematurely decays causing loss of the entire bulb in storage. When the tops become yellowish and partly dry, garlic is ready for harvest.

Elephant garlic

count — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:17:15 GMT

I was doing a bit of followup of our discussions about garlic, and found this about elephant garlic:

Garlic and Elephant Garlic

Elephant Garlic
Giant, or elephant garlic was re-discovered in 1941 by an American nurseryman, Jim Nicholls, who found it growing wild in the gardens of an abandoned settlement called Scio in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Scio had been colonised by immigrants from the eastern Balkans in the 1860s. The "herb", as it was regarded locally, was called Scio's Giant Garlic.
Nicholls collected about 12lbs of it and bred selectively from the larger cloves. Over a period of twelve years he established a large, very hardy, disease free strain which he started selling commercially in 1953, having registered the name 'Elephant Garlic'.
I believe that elephant garlic is the cash crop of the future. It is six times the size of normal garlic, but occupies the same amount of land and gives a yield of six to ten tons to the acre. It is slightly milder in flavour than standard garlic.
Quite a lot of entrepreneurs capitalised on it, so Nicholls now refuses to sell it to other commercial growers - or to export it. A very inferior strain is now grown commercially in Chile - Safeways sell it - but the heads (head is the correct term for a whole garlic bulb) have generally been treated with a chemical growth inhibitor.

I don't know anything about growth inhibitor chemicals, don't know what types of chemicals are used, but in reading up on rice, I learned that rice is sometimes soaked in bleach (sodium hypochlorite solution) for 20 minutes, and then rinsed thoroughly, before mechanical planting. This is to eliminate something that might inhibit germination, as I recall. I wonder if soaking growth-inhibited elephant garlic in bleach would restore at least some germination potential.

I wonder if Nicholls is still alive, or his company has passed to the control of others. I'll look it up.

Elephant Garlic flowers are very pretty. Another cash crop?

jay

RiaD — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:45:53 GMT

you got mail....

I'm a bleeding heart liberal from the midwest

Something The Dog Said — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:03:21 GMT

who is white. I know I don't know when things are bigoted or racist like people who are actually discriminated against, so I have to err on the side of caution.

bigoted

count — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:01:19 GMT

How could it be bigotry to attach an ethnic appellation to one of the greatest grain products of all time? I cried when Silber's Jewish Seeded Rye Bread disappeared from the Baltimore scene.

Gullible

count — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:45:27 GMT

How could anyone present both sides of the story based on an uncritical reading of a press release? You linked to a letter-to-the-editor or an op-ed piece, not a journal article, and no information is presented about the study itself except the children were in

National School Lunch or Child and Adult Care Food programs

They weren't limited to school lunch and breakfast programs. And what did the study allegedly find?

a reduced risk of obesity at age 5

Big whoop-de-do. How about Grades 1-12?

Federal Food Policy And Childhood Obesity: A Solution Or Part Of The Problem?

The article is secreted behind a pay wall and the abstract is uninformative, but the abstract does say

Our findings indicate that food assistance may unintentionally contribute to the childhood obesity problem in cities with high food prices. We also find that subsidized meals at school or day care are beneficial for children's weight status, and we argue that expanding access to subsidized meals may be the most effective tool to use in combating obesity in poor children.

Aha! Urban food stamps are the problem!

Gullibility is a terrible thing.

Subsidized meals could be part of the solution if quality is improved, no argument about that.

In support of your point, did you read the comment directly above yours? Full texts of those articles are available at the links.

no but now I am interested In B Bad

LeeN — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:59:24 GMT

I LOVE Mad Men. I follow Betty Draper on Twitter. MM does an amazing job of dealing with serious issues in an interesting and compelling way. Just watched the first season in order.
Oh and I love the period music they weave in...

This study is directly contradicted by another...

jcdwyer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:56:41 GMT

A study published two weeks ago in the national policy journal Health Affairs directly contradicts this study. It found that young children receiving free school meals had a lower risk of obesity relative to their peers:

http://www.chron.com/disp/stor...

Please tell both sides of the story!

Oy "good" rye is like "jazz" the

Something The Dog Said — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:54:24 GMT

spectrum is wide and deep. I have a great NY Style (sometimes called Jewish, which I find bigoted) but it is not the easiest bread to make. I have a triple rye bread (only for those that love rye) and some others that have higher or lower levels of rye flavor. I am not familiar with Kvass, what is it supposed to taste like?

well the emergency payments

Jill Richardson — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:41:56 GMT

were expensive so they changed it in 2002 to this goofy countercyclical payment thing.