Got milk?

Milk prices have gone out of sight. We don't buy as much with the grandson moved out of the house, but I just about need a guarantee that every drop will be consumed before I bring another gallon into the house. The price of cheese has escalated as well. My favorite 2 lb. bag of grated cheese is nearly $9 now. Needless to say, I monitor its use quite closely.

So imagine my surprise (and secret pleasure) when I ran across this article in the New York Times about the dairy glut that we are now in the middle of. Seems other parts of the world have developed a taste for dairy, thanks in part of the spread of McDonald's, and that (along with drought in New Zealand and Australia) produced high demand for American dairy. And that, my peeps, made for reduced supply in the US. Ergo higher prices for us.

The economy is in the tank globally as well as locally. This is bad, yes. Really tough times are ahead for all of us. Still, I couldn't stifle a little spark of happiness when I realized that there was actual hope that dairy products might eventually become affordable here in the US again. Milk, cheese, sour cream, ricotta, cottage cheese, mozzarella, parmesan--these are all basics in my kitchen. In normal times, I could only occasionally afford a taste of anything more exotic. I can't be unhappy that the home market will get a break for a while. I doubt we will be able to afford those exotics anytime soon, if at all, but it will be nice to get back to a more normal supply of affordable dairy products.

If that sounds a tad callous in regard to the income and well being of American dairy farmers, do note that we have price supports for dairy. The USDA will buy much of the surplus produced and put it into food programs for the poor, meaning more protein and Vitamin D for them, and continued production in the dairy sector. The high prices for the rest of us was a by-product of globalization. Lower prices will be a by-product of the collapse of the market. Dairy farmers will still get paid, just not so much.

Pumpkin Fail 1

Now I know why my parents never let me have a pumpkin to carve at Halloween. It always seemed like a wasteful thing to do anyway, but still a lot of people seem to have fun with it. Who knew those suckers were so tough?

First, there's the shell. It's not a rind or skin. It's a shell. A hard one. It took all of my strength to cut through the outer covering with a chef knife. I went straight in and then tried to cut around the middle. I had to saw with the knife and finally just gave the whole pumpkin a strong tap on the counter. Part of it was nicely cut, and part of one half was pretty ragged, but I got the thing opened.

Then, there's the innards. All the recipes say "clean out the seeds and strings." How hard could that be? I reached right in and started pulling. Yuck! The strings are tough, impossible to break, hard to cut. And everything is slippery.

Finally, there's that instruction: "remove the skin." Huh! I tried a potato peeler, as instructed, and darned near ruined it before I quit. I then tried a knife, finally hitting upon the idea of cutting each section in smaller pieces and then paring the skin off. At the same time, I more or less peeled out the remains of the strings from the inner surface.

I got one-fourth of the pumpkin cut into three large sections for baking (skin on). The next fourth was cut into smaller sections and then cleaned up for boiling (skin off). The next two-fourths are still laying on the kitchen counter. I think that half of the pumpkin will go in the trash unless I grow a new wrist. My wrists went numb while I was carving, and they still ache with remembered pain. I have my doubts about cooking this monster.

Pumpkin ideas

I am curious about how one can use pumpkin without making a pie or bread or soup. Those are mostly the only recipes that I can find. However, I did run across a reference to Eat.Drink.Better and its list of "beyond pie" recipes for pumpkin. The hummus and the curry sound most interesting to me.

The pumpkin interests me because its so big and, usually, comparatively cheap. One pumpkin is a lot of food! As a healthy food choice, it seems like this would be a good way to round out the diet with fiber, taste, and variety. It would also, I'm thinking, be a good way to get more pumpkin seeds!

The proof of its value will, however, be in the pudding--or the hummus and curry.

Fennel ideas

I'm still working out how to work with fennel. In the course of my reading, I ran across this list of serving ideas from the World's Healthiest Foods site:

• Healthy sautéed fennel and onions make a wonderful side dish.
• Combine sliced fennel with avocados, and oranges for a delightful salad.
• Braised fennel is a wonderful complement to scallops.
• Next time you are looking for a new way to adorn your sandwiches, consider adding sliced fennel in addition to the traditional toppings of lettuce and tomato.
• Top thinly sliced fennel with plain yogurt and mint leaves.
• Fennel is a match made in Heaven when served with salmon.

I have everything on hand except the plain yogurt and fresh mint. I have to break down and try something, don't I?

A new way to look at carbs?

Sometimes I wander over to the world's healthiest food site to look at whatever they are posting as their food of the week. My most recent visit was drawn by the article called "A new way to look at carbohydrates." The article does a nice job of explaining some fairly complex (to me) ideas about what a carb is, what's in a carb, and how various elements in carbs work in the body.

I was intrigued to read about "resistant starch," since I'm always looking for ways to toss out some of the total carbs in food. I already try to toss out fiber, knowing that it's not digested and, therefore, will not affect blood sugar or weight gain (or loss). Resistant starch is, however, something that I sadly fear I cannot toss out. It looks like we will still get the effects of starch from this part of the carbohydrate, but on a kind of delayed reaction. Our body will digest it (and make us sorry that we ate it), just not right away.

Oh, please, correct me if I'm wrong!

New year, new food

We have been venturing out of the traditional foodways of my family for a while now. Once upon a time, this was just an attempt to discover new tastes and sample the delights of the world. Some of those dishes and foods were adopted as things we wanted to continue eating, so My Prince and I already dine on a diet of foods that would be alien to most of my family.

Lately I've been actively seeking healthier foods to add better nutrition to our diet. I've particularly been looking for lower carbohydrate foods that are higher in fiber. Over the past year, three new foods have made an impression: quinoa (see "Return to Central Market"), edamame (see both posts on edamame here), and jicama (see my jicama posts here). Only the latter two have really stuck in our diet. Quinoa is harder to find here in Austin and impossible in our regular shopping haunts in Houston. (Yes, I could drive 20 miles out of the way to get it, but I tend not to do that for anything except raspberry tea.) Edemame and jicama, however, are on our plates at least once a week, sometimes more.

I have three more new foods ready for review right now. One is really an herb: rosemary. I know I've tasted rosemary before, but I have never cooked with it. Now I have the promised rosemary bush and am making my first efforts to incorporate it into my cooking. Fennel can be used as both a vegetable and an herb. Haven't tried it yet, but look forward to trying. Pumpkin is not exactly new. I've had pumpkin pie all my life. I've even made a couple. I've never tried fresh pumpkin, though. I'm going to try my hands at cooking the seeds and making a couple of dishes from the fresh pumpkin that have nothing to do with pies.

Happy New Year!

Well, it's time for our New Year's Resolutions, isn't it? If we do as many of us have done in the past, we are just setting ourselves up for failure by trying to make too many changes too quickly and too grandly. Better we should make fewer resolutions and make them more manageable, perhaps even measurable.

I'm thinking that I need to lose weight. Of course, I've been needing that forever, but I'm getting more and more worried about the consequences of carrying all of this extra weight around one my aching feet and knees (so far so good on the hip joints!). So I need to set a weight loss goal that in the next 365 days I will lose X pounds. If I keep with the recommended pace for healthy weight loss, I would shoot for 1 pound per week, or a total of 52 pounds in the coming year. That seems like a lot to me (even though I know that it is only a part of the weight I need to lose). I think it will be hard to do. Thinking that, I could just simply wander away from the goal.

So I am setting an arbitrary goal for my New Year's Resolution: 20 pounds. Anyone can do that, even me!

Setting a goal is, however, not enough. I have to have a plan for reaching it. The only plan that works is: eat less, do more. I need to cut more carbs from my diet and do more walking. Since walking hurts, that last part will be a challenge, but I have to try. Even once around the block once a week will be more than I have done. And cutting carbs will involve actually counting them in the first place, i.e., having a carb budget.

Twenty pounds might turn into 52 later on, but making the changes needed to lose those 20 will certainly be hard enough. Let's hope I'm up to the challenge.