Must Stop ... Eating ... Thin Mints

Writer's block tonight. Bloated on Thin Mints and Sopranos reruns.

Man, those frickin Girl Scouts get you every time. I stopped buying the boxes years ago, but every year somebody gives me one as a gift. WHY WHY WHY can't I just throw it in the trash? Why do I even open it? Because once I open it, it's all over.

A very kind friend at work gave me a box of Thin Mints. I didn't even notice I'd opened the box, and suddenly I looked over and half a roll was gone. Half a roll? That's 280 calories. There is nothing thin about that. I feel so guilty, that's the size of a lunch.

I guess I'd be Ok doing it for the Girl Scout's - except that those cookies could kill me.

Look at all this crap:

• Partially hydrogenated palm kernel
• Soybean and Cottonseed TBHQ -Tert-BUTYLHYDROQUINONE, a preservative
• Invert Sugar - Invert sugar, a mixture of glucose (dextrose) and fructose produced from sugar (sucrose). This one doesn't seem too bad. It's basically sugar and water boiled together. Tastes sweeter and moister than sugar.
  
• Cornstarch - extracted from corn in a simple 13 step process
  
• Soy Lecithin

I'd like to understand what each of these things is, but ugh, it's just too confusing.

And can I ask? Wouldn't it possibly be a better experience to make and sell cookies from scratch, baked with natural ingredients? Now those I'd definitely order.

Oh well, I'm sure the guilt will pass in time for me to enjoy another box next year.

The Chicken Came First (Eggs Part 2)

Back by popular demand, for all serious insomnia sufferers, the chicken. Don't worry, the egg post will come soon, but first I need to finish talking about how chickens are treated.

Last time I discussed the living arrangements of chickens. But what do they eat? What should they eat?

As far as I can tell, the answer is anything, including dirt, actually. Chickens are omnivores and dirtivores.

First, the pastured view. According to a website devoted to raising chickens traditionally, an ideal diet for a chickens consists of:

• Grass, up to 30% of calories if given sufficient space
• Protein - bugs in summer, but need supplements in winter (soybeans, fish - can chickens fish?)
  
• Grains - ideally a mixture of fresh grains, not just corn
• Lots of water

I'm a little confused by this website - it seems to be passionately devoted to chicken feed, but also sells traction pads for getting your car unstuck from mud or snow. Weird. I did look a few other places that seemed to have similar information, but this website is incredibly comprehensive on the topic of natural chicken feed.

Apparently most people also supplement chickens' diet with commercial feed or kitchen scraps, ideally greens, or grain, or just about anything edible from what I can tell, as it is hard for a chicken to get enough calories from foraging, especially during winter.

Can you believe this? Chickens that aren't free range need to be given grit or sand. Since chicken don't have teeth, they need something gritty to grind their food.

According to an article on a website called Mother Earth News (Have I been brainwashed yet?), one study found significant nutritional improvements in the eggs of pastured chickens when compared to USDA nutrient data for commercial eggs:

• 1/3 less cholesterol
• 1/4 less saturated fat
• 2/3 more vitamin A
• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
• 3 times more vitamin E
• 7 times more beta carotene
  

I'm starting to see in many places a similar theme regarding omega-3 fatty acids, which is this...

Your body needs a balance of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids (I think). The omega-3 fatty acids play an important role in many areas, including healthy heart and brain function and reduced risk of cancer. Omega-3s come from various sources, fish, nuts, etc, but most abundantly greens, such as grass and algae. Animals, like cattle and fish, that eat grass or algae have a much higher proportion of omega-3 fatty acids than do animals fed on grains, which are a source of omega-6 acids only.¹

So what about the other point of view? What do chickens in large industrial operations eat? In other words, what exactly is in commercial chicken feed?

The only thing I could find was a few ingredient lists taken from commercial feed on our trusty Traction Pad website. On the websites for these particular feeds, I wasn't able to find ingredient lists. According to Traction Pad:

FeatherCrest Brand contains many of the ingredients already discussed, grains, etc, but it also contains a lot of strange sounding ones. I assume that most of these are vitamin and mineral supplements. One ingredient which is self-explanatory is poultry fat. That seems strange to me - I know chickens are omnivores, but I don't think they are cannibals by nature.

To summarize all of this random information, it seems to me that there is no definitive answer - chickens will eat just about anything. A free-range chicken will ideally get plenty of access to grass and bugs, but will probably not be harmed by some supplemental grain, veggie and meat scraps. It doesn't sound to me as if there is such a thing as 100% grass/bug fed eggs as most chickens need a little more, so I shouldn't be suspicious if I hear that a free-range hen is getting a little corn (as opposed to a free range cow).

Commercial chicken feed seems to be a bit mysterious, but what you can probably assume is that it isn't as diverse as a diet consisting of complex, natural ingredients such as bugs and grass, and therefore is probably not giving a chicken everything it needs to be in top shape, especially omega-3s. Plus, there may be any number of bad things in chicken feed as well, like chicken fat.

After all of this investigation on habitat and diet, do I really know what I want in a chicken?

MWF seeks FR hen, or maybe 2 - likes to roam and peck. Eats bugs and grass, but a little corn is OK too. Must get out and exercise, enjoy the fresh air and blue sky. Must be in a committed relationship to a caring farmer, not interested in living together, just want you for your eggs.

^{1 http://www.eatwild.com/healthbenefits.htm}

Eating Real Food Hits the Big Time

Woo hoo - this blog is famous. If you search google for "Hoarding Potatoes," I'm number 1!!!!!! I'm number 4 for "Irish Brown Bread Breakfast of Champions."

Homemade Yoghurt

No, I haven't returned to the chicken topic yet. I'm keeping my readers hanging in suspense - "So what DO free-range chickens eat, I'm just dying to know?"

I feel that I must keep my blog current - in other words, when I've tried to cook something interesting, I'll post an update about it. I'll fill in with the more classic, timeless entries on other days.

So, I'm still trying to use up milk, as you know. I thought I'd try yoghurt. Why? A few reasons

• My son likes yoghurt - unsweetened yoghurt mixed with fruit or applesauce and sprinkled sneakily with wheat germ. I know someday he'll discover sweetened yoghurt, but until then he's getting the sour stuff.
• We go through quite a bit of yoghurt and I feel guilty about the containers. I'm trying to reduce my container purchases in general and yoghurt has been one of the last to go. These are especially unethical because while they are recyclable, I'm ashamed to say that I don't recycle them. I know, I'll probably go to hell for that. Here is the dilemma. Plastic tubs are the only container that can't be recycled curbside, which means that I would have to make a special trip to the recycling center across town to drop them off. I tried for a long time to save them, but the reality is that I never make it there. It seems crazy to make one special trip just to drop off yoghurt containers. I don't understand why Type 1 plastic bottles are picked up for recycling but Type 1 plastic tubs aren't. I would like to do a blog on the mystery behind this, but that seems a little off topic. Oh, and the lids aren't recyclable at all. What's with that? Bottles are an easy shape, tubs are a harder shape, and lids are just an impossible shape to melt down?? For a while, I saved tubs to use for freezing chicken stock. That alleviated my guilt for about 2 months, but if I save any more then I'm just denying the inevitable fact that they'll someday go in the trash. After all, I'll probably never make 8 quarts of chicken stock at any one time. Hmm, this rant is probably worthy of its own paragraph and not a mere bullet point. I'm sure my sister of the successful piecrust (also a writer) will correct me on this.
• Third reason for making yoghurt (in case you've forgotten the subject of the list) - it doesn't matter if I blow it because I've got a lot of milk to get rid of.

I looked up a few recipes, and they're all basically the same. Bring a quart of full fat milk just to a boil. Let it cool to about 120⁰F, then stir in 2 Tbs of yoghurt. Leave it in a bowl, covered with a towel, at a warm, but not hot, temperature (85 to 120⁰F) until it sets, usually 10-16 hours. Refrigerate as soon as it sets or it will turn sour.

That sounded pretty simple. Except that I had to plan out my timing. In order not to have too much yoghurt sitting in the fridge, I wanted to have just a little bit left in my last store purchased container.

As luck would have it, my husband did the grocery shopping on the weekend before the big experiment, and he bought ... the WRONG kind of yoghurt.

What is the wrong kind of yoghurt, you might ask? Every yoghurt has different cultures and therefore tastes slightly different. My yoghurt will (I hope) taste like the yoghurt I choose as the starter.

For the last, I don't know how many, million weeks, we've bought Straus Family Creamery European Style Organic Plain Whole Milk Yoghurt. It's thick, creamy, not too sour, a little sweet. The texture is wonderful. It's not local and the cows aren't pastured (please see the comments section where I was set straight on this incorrect statement!), I'm ashamed to say, but I buy it anyway because it is just the best. This is another reason why I want to make my own.

On this particular week, my husband did not buy this yoghurt, but instead bought Horizon Whole Milk Plain Yoghurt, which I just do not like. I find the texture weird and quite tangy. What to do, what to do.

I decided to proceed anyway. At least I'd save myself a container for one week.

It was actually pretty easy. I just had one mix up, I started at about 2pm, which meant that I should start checking it's progress at midnight. I did consider for one moment that it might be worth getting up in the middle of the night to check, but that seemed extreme for yoghurt that might not even taste good. All in all, it sat for about 18 hours. I put it in the warming drawer of our oven on the lowest temperature with the door slightly ajar. Unfortunately I accidentally turned it off before going to bed, so I think it cooled down to about 60 overnight. That might have been a good thing given how long I left it out.

When I checked it in the morning, I could not believe it, it had set perfectly. And guess what, it tasted exactly like Horizon yoghurt, not that nice, but edible. For some reason, my husband is scared to eat it, but my baby and I have been eating it for 2 days now and haven't gotten sick yet. Given my success rate lately, I'll call that a winner.

Next week, I'll have to sacrifice one more plastic container to see if I can replicate the Straus flavor. And I may try making ricotta as well!

Crunchy Brown Rice Pudding

I've decided to take a short break from my chicken and egg series. I'm sure this will be disappointing to my huge reader base (Hi Nicole, Hi Jen). Ok, it probably isn't huge, but I think it was bigger before my chicken habitat post. My husband was actually not able to finish it. I am mystified that he didn't find riveting my discussion of caged vs. cage-free vs. free-range hens.

Anyway...

I have a 19 month old baby. In general, babies drink a lot of milk. This baby drank a huge amount of milk until about 3 weeks ago. As you might guess, I took great pains in making a milk choice for him. I'm not completely resolved in my decision (there will, of course, be an entry about milk and cows sometime), but for now, we get milk delivered weekly from the Longmont Dairy. It's local, it's fresh, and it comes in glass bottles, so there isn't any waste.

For a while, I thought this was great, until I realized, what do you do if you don't use all the milk? Normal grocery-store-milk-buying-folk would only buy what they need and go to the store again mid-week if they needed more. But when you have it delivered, you really need to predict what you'll need.

So about three weeks ago, my son went on a milk strike. Now one would think that I would simply call the dairy and have the milk stopped. That's what an organized person would do. Unfortunately all my organization gets used up at work, which is why I keep forgetting to call. Three weeks later, our fridge has 4 gallons of untouched milk. I pumped breastmilk for my son for eight long months. Every time I open the fridge, I remember that and think about the work those cows put into those 4 gallons of milk. I just can't bring myself to throw it away.

So what can you make with a whole cowload of milk?

Earlier today, I started making yoghurt. It's growing as we speak. I'll update tomorrow on the deliciousness and nutritiousness of my homemade yoghurt.

Then I had another brilliant idea... rice pudding. My son loves rice, and he loves dessert! I'll get milk in him yet, by making him rice pudding.

Using my trusty Ballymaloe Cookery Course cookbook, I got started.

Now this is a pretty simple recipe, which I will paraphrase. Put 2 oz short grain white rice, 1 oz sugar and a knob of butter into a pie pan. Pour over 1 pint of boiling milk. Bake at 350 for 1 to 1.5 hours until the skin on top is golden and the rice underneath is cooked and creamy.

The only white rice I had was arborio rice for risotto. What the heck, I'll see if I can make it with brown rice and just cook it longer. That'll give it the added bonus of being secretly whole grain. Surely an hour and a half is long enough to cook brown rice. I know white rice only takes 10 minutes as compared to 45 for brown rice, but I bet the extra time in this recipe is just to make the milk thicken up and isn't actually needed to cook the rice. In the back of my mind, I heard the haunting advice my sister (of the successful piecrust) has given me many times, "Don't make substitutions to a recipe until you've tried it at least once."

Using a scale to measure out the rice, I realized that 2 oz of rice is a tiny amount, about half a cup. This couldn't be right. Brown rice normally cooks with a slightly greater than 2 to 1 water to rice ratio. Surely 4 to 1 would make rice/milk soup. So as I measured out the rice, I threw in an extra handful, or maybe two. Probably about 3/4 cup rice in all.

I popped it in the oven. An hour later, I looked in - very nice. Golden layer on top, carmel, bread-like smell. I thought I'd better check the rice's progress. To say that it was crunchy was an understatement. You couldn't actually tell that it had started cooking. Is the boiling point of milk lower than water? That possibility hadn't occurred to me. It's too late to turn back now. Just keep cooking it.

An hour later, the layer on top is no longer "golden." More like burnt umber - I don't actually know what color that is, but the burnt part sounds accurate. Uh oh, the milk is completely gone. And the rice is definitely not cooked yet. Maybe I should have used the recommended quantities.

I added quite a bit more milk (I have some to spare), kept cooking and checking.

After 3 hours, I finally decided to throw in the towel. The pudding had cooked so long that the rice on top had dried out and gone crunchy. Or was that the dark, dark brown milk crunching - I couldn't quite tell. The rice underneath was pretty much cooked - albeit al dente style.

I pulled it out with just enough time to give one hastily blown-cool bite to the intended baby recipient before putting him to bed. Thumbs down - bummer.

At least I made a dent in the milk. Even better news, as I was looking for the recipe to reference for this post, I found a recipe for homemade butter. I'm Definitely going to try that. Unfortunately it uses cream instead of milk. Hmm, now I just need a recipe for making cream from milk.

The Chicken Came First (Eggs Part I)

The next food I've decided to try to convert to eating "real" is the egg. Because I don't eat a lot of meat, I do eat a lot of eggs, and I love them. In this, the first of a series on finding and eating completely natural eggs, I'm attempting to discover how to grow an egg the way nature intended, or more specifically, what does a chicken eat and how should it live? So in order to find out how to eat a good egg, you have to start with the chicken.

The first question I wanted to answer is how a chicken would ideally live. I started by reviewing a number of sites from small farmers and owners of backyard flocks. From this I gathered that healthy, productive hens need:

• Shelter - According to one small farmer in Vermont, a small flock needs 4 square feet of shelter per bird.
• Heat - if the coop isn't heated during the winter. Contrary to my horrific images of crowded cages, the chickens actually do need to be crowded into a small enough space in winter to keep warm. This farmer said that a minimum of 10 seemed to work well for them.
• Perches
• Roosters - "If you don't have a rooster, the hens will lay eggs, but one hen will stop laying and starting acting like one." What do the big producers do with that hen??
• Outdoor space, and a lot of it. Hens will quickly turn even a large yard to dirt. Their natural diet includes a large quantity of fresh grass, so they need to be able to roam freely in order to graze the amount they need.

The space issue sounds like it would make raising hens in large numbers difficult. So, what's the alternative?

One alternative is what I'll call PC hens (politically correct hens!). They make us all feel good because we pay a few bucks more, they have nice, humane sounding phrases and pictures of happy chickens on top (can chickens smile?), and you buy them at Whole Foods or similar patchouli smelling natural food grocers.

There are two commonly used terms for eggs laid by PC hens: free-range or free-roaming and cage-free. I don't know if there are any universal standards, but I found some interesting information from an organization called Humane Farm Animal Care that certifies producers as humane in their treatment of animals. They set standards for what can be called cage free and what can be called free roaming. Cage free live in a barn, whereas free roaming are in a barn with strictly specified, easy access to the outdoors. They do not certify caged hen producers.

You can browse their exact specifications for humane treatment (surprisingly interesting reading), which includes things like:

• They allow minimal beak trimming, but not de-beaking, in order to avoid "heavy feather pecking and cannibalism among laying hen flocks, which can occur in flocks of any size and any production system." It is more common in cage-free systems with large flocks. I wonder if this is the social structure that roosters help provide. I didn't read anything about pecking or cannibalism on any of the small farm sites.
• "All hens must have sufficient freedom of movement to be able, without difficulty, to stand normally, turn around, and stretch their wings; they must also have an environment that supports natural behaviors such as dustbathing. All birds must have sufficient space (including perches) to be able to perch or sit quietly without repeated disturbance."

Ok, so caging chickens is obviously incredibly cruel. Is it?

I found some interesting information from a producer called Sauder Eggs, which is a member of a group called the United Egg Producers. In this paper, the United Egg Producers Scientific Advisory Committee does a comparison of caged versus cage-free systems. The main benefits of cages seem to be

• Protection from predators
• Reduces pecking and cannibalism
• Easier monitoring for health
• Protects them from weather extremes
• Increases efficiency and production

Here is an interesting video from Sauder Eggs showing their production. I wouldn't say the hens look miserable, at least they weren't moaning and crying. How do you tell?

So, what to conclude from this investigation...

I guess my opinion is that hens don't want to be in cages. I don't know if it is a miserable existence for them, but I have to assume it isn't a joyous one, and if I'm eating the fruit of their loins, I'd like them to have a little joy in life, to experience fresh air, blue sky and other things that make life worthwhile.

It does sound like raising hens "real" is not easy on a large scale (rotating them through different pastures so that they have a constant source of fresh grass or giving them a ton of land). For me to have real eggs, I will have to go out of my way to seek them from a small producer because I don't think it is possible to raise truly free range hens on a large scale, although it's nice to know that there are some large producers out there that are adhering to a humane standard (more on one of these producers later in this series).

So that gives me an understanding of my options for choosing eggs by hen lifestyle. What about their diet? Stay tuned for part II! (OK, I said this entry would cover both habitat and diet, but I have to get to work tomorrow!)

Easy as Pie?

Mmmmm, pie. I love pie. I am one of those people that craves dessert, pretty much all the time. I usually count down the hours in the day until I have an excuse to eat some sort of dessert. I can't do it too early, or the craving will resurface before I go to bed, which means I'll want another dessert. I have a love/hate relationship with desserts. I love to eat them, but I hate to gain weight, so it's a thin line I walk between the two.

When I think about the desserts I crave the most, the ones the rank the highest are sweet and fatty ... rich chocolate cake, pain au chocolate (dessert disguised as breakfast), and pie. Every kind of pie

Unfortunately, the reality is that most pie lets me down. As I picture the pie I'm going to eat, I think about biting into a buttery, tender, flaky, slightly sweet pastry. But most restaurants and stores don't sell pie this good, at least the crust doesn't measure up. This is when most people turn to their own kitchen, after all what sounds better than homemade pie

Actually, most pie tastes better than mine. I'm not an amazing cook or anything, but most of the time when I bother to bake something at home, it's better than what you can buy out. Perfect example ... chocolate chip cookies (Nestle tollhouse back of the bag recipe). They are delicious, and well, as easy as ... pie. Is that an expression? Because I don't get it. Pie is NOT easy

My pie sucks. Specifically, my pie crust is terrible. I've tried every recipe I can find. I've listened to all kinds of advice.

For a long time, I stuck with the Joy of Cooking's method. After all, six pages of 8 point font (no pictures) explaining how to make pie crust in painstaking detail. Surely if I follow their directions exactly, I can make "A light, flaky crust that shatters at the touch of a fork."¹ That sounds perfect.

Making pie crust seems to be this infuriating contradiction of mix, but don't mix too much. Add ice cold water to a crumbly mix of butter and flour, but don't add too much or you'll make it tough.

I thought I'd try their food processor recipe, which they swear by, to quickly zap all the ingredients without melting them by using my hands.

Strangely, every time I make it, I seem to need almost twice as much water as the recipe says. As mentioned, adding too much water is a big no-no, so I'm always afraid to add more. But when I go to roll the dough out (after carefully refrigerating for an hour, of course), it's basically a big pile of flour and butter. I get it rolled out into a beautiful circle, then the minute I pick it up, it falls apart into, well the big file of flour and butter that it is. This is usually followed by profanity and then tears.

Next, I borrowed The Perfect Pie from my sister, who makes great pie. An entire cookbook completely devoted to pie.

This recipe definitely sounded more promising. Instead of being just flour, butter, salt and water, it had more ingredients. "The egg yolk contains natural lecithin, which helps make the dough easy to handle, and the lemon juice or vinegar slows development of the gluten to ensure a tender crust."² My other crust (pile of crumbs) was definitely tender, but not at all easy to handle. This sounded better.

Although, I will say that this recipe calls for shortening (Crisco), definitely Not Real Food (NRF). I'll use butter instead.

Same results. Big pile of crumbs. Infuriating. My sister was there, she says I definitely need to add more water, whether it seems like too much or not.

Ok, finally, I thought I'd try my favorite, infallible The Art of Simple Food³ by Alice Waters. She can do no wrong, so definitely her pie crust will be great. It was back to the same basic ingredients as the Joy of Cooking, but she says to just mix it up with a fork.

Alright, I'll add enough water for it to stick, mix it gently with a fork, and voila, perfect, tender crust.

I first cut the butter and salt into the flour, until it resembled peas, just as instructed. I made sure my water was ice cold, then gently stirred it in until the dough just started to clump. Then I compressed it into a ball which I refrigerated for an hour.

As I rolled it out between two sheets of parchment paper, it definitely seemed more dough-like. I had a little flash of doubt when I noticed that there were patches of dough that seemed a little wet and sticky, but they passed when I was happily able to lift the dough into the pan without it falling apart. That was a first for me.



This particular pie was pumpkin, my last pumpkin of the season. I prebaked the shell, then put in the filling. When the pie came out, you might say it looked a little rustic. I couldn't wait for it to cool, mmm.

Alas, this story does not have a happy ending. This pie crust ranks down there as one of the worst I've ever made, not an easy feat. The crust was so hard, that when I tried to cut the first bite with the edge of my fork, I had to press so hard that the pie flipped off the plate face down onto my shirt. Note the whipped cream in the photo.

I've never been desperate enough to think this before ... maybe next time I'll see what Martha Stewart has to say.


¹ Rombauer, Irma S., Rombauer Becker, Marion, and Becker, Ethan. The All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking (New York: Scribner, 1997)
² Purdy, Susan G. The Perfect Pie: More than 125 All-Time Favorite Pies and Tarts (New York: Broadway Books, 2000)
³ Waters, Alice. The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2007)