Beet greens for supper

I've never cooked beet greens before, and probably never would now except that I got a bunch of them in my CSA (community supported agriculture) box yesterday. Below are beet greens on the left, baby bok choy in the middle, and a humongous head of lettuce on the right. On the plate below, I've started to separate the leaves from the stems because the stems take longer to cook.

By the way, when I picked up the box yesterday, I had to ask why we were only getting beet greens. What happened to the beets? Well, these greens get pulled to thin out the beet patch. The beets are there, but they're tiny.

(Beet posing with spice bottle for perspective. Sorry about the blurry cell phone pic.)

The recipe included sauteed scallions and garlic (which also came from the CSA), then water and chopped beet greens. And it was MARVELOUS! Tasted somewhat like cabbage, but milder, and it picked up the flavors it was cooked with (onion, garlic and OIL). But a bunch (actually, 1/2 bunch) of beet green cooks down to about 1/4 of a bowlful.

(Beets posing with tea kettle for perspective.)

Yup, oily and good.


Oh yeah, last week Ward got a tick from the CSA box. This week he held it at arm's length and put it in the trunk.

Chain of Foods

The Toronto Star says university researchers tested the DNA of 100 supermarket and restaurant fish and found 25% was mislabeled. This isn't terribly surprising considering how many stops there are in our food supply chain, and how hard it is to tell fish apart once it's been filleted.

And speaking of Ontario, an outbreak of Listeria there has killed four people. Same story as we've seen here in the states with tomatoes and peppers -- huge recall, not sure about the source, large food company had to close to clean up anyway took a dive in its stock price. Our food safety really is much better than it was years ago, but it could be better still if only the industry would slow down a little, keep better records and do more training.

Here's a good example. NaturalNews reports the FDA wants to start irradiating lettuce and spinach to kill e.coli. The problem is irradiation may destroy nutritional value. I can see why the FDA is doing this -- bacterial outbreaks are deadly and very hard to trace. The last one was devastating to tomato growers before we found out that Mexican peppers, not U.S. tomatoes were the culprit. So a decision which supports business and kills a deadly bacteria seems like a win-win. Nutrition? Well, many people believe Americans already get a nutritious diet. But we don't, and the big win-win would be that modification to our food supply chain mentioned above.

What the World Eats

At the right is a link to my favorite blogs, including My Money Blog, which today has it's own link to a Time photo essay: What the World Eats. Here's the link: Time

Very interesting from a foodie POV. Although one family does not a country represent, I think the magazine tried to find consumers who were average for their areas of the world. Here's some things I noticed as I clicked through the photos:

1. All the world loves pizza.
2. And Coke.
3. Americans don't eat nearly enough fresh fruit and vegetables.
4. Britons do love their sweets.
5. The bigger the economy, the more prepackaged foods.
6. If you have two teenage sons you go through a lot of chips.
7. Germans pay an uber lot for food, and a good deal of it is in drink form.
8. Wherever you go in the world, a lot of people don't smile for the camera.

The most shocking thing was seeing the scant items laid out for the family of four from Chad. Outside of some bags of gain, they barely had the equivalent what might fall off of a Food Lion truck during packing.

Weekly Wrapup

From the Toronto Star: A investigative report turned up complaints against a moving company that held customer's goods for ransom until they got $1500 above the original estimate. They were clearly breaking the law, but felt they could get away with it because the police said it was a matter for the courts, the courts denied jurisdiction, and the attorney general referred it back to the courts. A sidebar says if it happens to you, contact the Ministry of Consumer Services. Yeah. Call the government. That'll speed things up.

From Morrisville: See that big, red "Sold" sign by the vacant lot next to Morrisville Square? The seller had advertised the property zoned as Office and industrial, but approved for high density residential. Morrisville's zoning map has no high density res' indications there. Was it just a sales ploy? I hope so, and I wrote to the Planning Director to find out.

Michale Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma warns about industrialized organic foods. I hoped he was just being an alarmist, but last week's recall of ground beef delivered to Whole Foods from Coleman Natural Beef shook me up. I bought ground beef from Whole Foods during the recall period. When I checked the label, I found I had fortunately chosen the local grass fed stuff. In July Full Circle dairy got a letter from the FDA for an infraction discovered five months earlier, which actually happened seven months before that (or a year ago).

From the homefront: The dogs are doing a great job in Pet Therapy training, and Poochy Boy started on Cosequin to relieve arthritis. Cosequin is supposed to work gradually, but Poochy has come alive during our morning exercise time.

Weekly Wrapup - The Weirdness of US

From yesterday's NC17: Tyson Foods recalled 51,000 pounds of frozen raw chicken breast tenderloin because it may have contained undeclared soy. Are we the only country in the world whose raw chicken breast actually contains other food?

From last week's N&O: IBM received $750,000 in incentives from Durham County to build their new cloud computing network center in RTP. The Center will employ 10 people. That's $75,000 in taxpayer money per employee. Worth it? Some old time IBMers I know said those 10 employees will be offshore folks working remotely. They may have been joking, I don't know.

From last month's AP: "An AP-Yahoo! News poll found that pet owners favor McCain over Obama 42 percent to 37 percent, with dog owners particularly in McCain's corner." Before I vote, I want to know how the numbers change when you include Cyber pets and Chia Turtles.

I was With the Program Until I Reached Chapter III-2

Deep into Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the author and I were on the same page (if you will) until I got to the chapter titled "Eat Food: Food Defined".

The book exposes the evils of our industrialized food chain, and this chapter revealed Pollan's full agenda -- to solely eat whole food. I think it was his reference to eating as our great-grandmas ate that flashed the amber light for me. I didn't know my great-grandma, but I imagine food was something she labored over up to six hours a day, every day, except the sabbath which she probably thanked God for each Friday as the sun went down.

I know I don't have to slaughter my own chicken or draw well water, but the thought of cooking everything from scratch, not to mention dealing with the shorter shelf life of whole food is daunting. I work, have hobbies, friends, and cable. My mental picture of a total dedication to whole foods is one where women's lib is set back 80 years.

I can see social advantages to some packaged food. The convenience frees us all to do other things. I'll probably keep my kitchen at around 80% wholeness, as long as the convenience foods on my shelves don't have high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats or any varieties of MSG. And I'll keep buying my meat directly from local farmers. Happy livestock don't cost me anything but a few extra dollars.

Sorry if I disappoint you, Michael Pollan, but you really hit a nerve with that great-grandma thing.