Lemon Chiffon Pie with Ginger Crust

I'm still debating if I should do a nutritional analysis on this. Maybe I'll wait until it's gone and the damage is done. Someone made a request for a special occasion, and I had a blast accommodating him, with ... chiffon.

You'll often see this pie made with whipped egg whites instead of the whipped cream I used here. I was going for the melt-in-your-mouthfeel and a blooming depth of flavor, fat be damned.


Ingredients

Ginger Crust

1 3/4 cups gingersnap cookie crumbs
2 tablespoons sugar
6 tablespoons butter, melted
1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger root (optional, but adds nice counterpoint to the lemon)


Lemon Chiffon Filling

1 envelope (0.25 oz.) unflavored gelatin (e.g. Knox^®)
1/4 cup water, room temperature

2 cups (about 1 tray) ice cubes

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons strained, freshly-squeezed lemon juice (about 6 lemons)
3/4 cup sugar
5 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons freshly grated lemon zest
1/8 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups whipping cream, chilled
1/4 cup powdered sugar

~~~~~~
Directions for crust:

1   Preheat oven to 340ºF.

2   Grind the cookies in a food processor. Wear earplugs if you're sensitive to loud noises.

Note: I used Mi-Del brand gingersnaps, just about the whole 10-ounce bag, and it took a couple minutes to pulse these hard little rounds down to little crumbs. (They soften after the crust is cooked and filled.)

3   Mix the crumbs and sugar in a medium bowl. Add the melted butter and mix until combined. Add the ginger root and mix until distributed. Press crumbs firmly along bottom and sides of a 9-inch glass pie dish. Bake for about 8 minutes; remove before it starts to darken in color. Cool.

Note: The crust can be made a day or two in advance of the filling. In fact, it's preferable to make it ahead since you want to fill a completely cooled and chilled crust.


Directions for filling:

1   Find a bowl big enough that a medium-sized saucepan can rest inside, along with a few cups of ice water. It's a good idea to use a metal bowl since it may experience wide changes in temperature suddenly. Add ice cubes and about 1 cup of water to the bowl. Set aside.

2   Sprinkle gelatin over 1/4 cup water in a small bowl. Let stand for 10-15 minutes to soften.

3   Whisk together lemon juice, sugar, egg yolks, lemon zest, and salt in the medium-sized saucepan. Heat slowly at a low temperature, whisking constantly, for about 8 minutes or until you just begin to see the sauce gurgling. Don't let it boil! Try not to let it rise above 160ºF.

4   Whisk in the softened gelatin until it's dissolved, about 1 minute.

5   Immediately place the warm saucepan into the bowl of ice water. Whisk every minute or two for about 10 minutes until filling has cooled. Transfer the cool filling to a large bowl and set aside.

Note: Be prepared for a little ice water overflow. One way to avoid this is to place the sauce pan into a bowl of just ice and carefully pour water into the bowl until it comes up the sides. The danger here is in contaminating your lemon curd with water.

6   Beat chilled whipping cream with powdered sugar in a chilled bowl using a chilled whisk until soft peaks form. Gently fold a few scoops of whipped cream into lemon filling until mixture is one color. Fold in the remaining whipped cream in stages, trying not to over-mix. Pour lemon filling into chilled crust, as much as will fit. Refrigerate pie for several hours until firm. Let stand at room temperature for about 20 minutes before serving.

Note: Don't worry if, as you pour filling into crust, it looks like it will creep over the sides. Pour slowly into the center and allow the filling to mound. The gelatin will set it into the shape you've poured.

Pour any remaining filling into a small bowl, refrigerate it along with the pie, and sneak spoonfuls of it whenever you open the fridge.

Enjoy!

Bottled Water in America

I'm paying more for it, I believe it's healthier than what comes from my tap (which is municipal, not from a well), but the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says it might not be. It conducted a 4-year review of bottled water and concluded:

" ... there is no assurance that just because water comes out of a bottle it is any cleaner or safer than water from the tap. And in fact, an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle."
- NRDC, Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?

How do you know if what's in your bottle came from a tap? It won't be evident, but you can look for the phrases:

• "From a municipal source"
  
• "From a community water system"

Don't be fooled by a pretty label. A couple labels the NRDC found:

• "Spring Water" (with a picture of a lake surrounded by mountains on the label) -- Was actually from an industrial parking lot next to a hazardous waste site.
  
  
• Alasika™ -- "Alaska Premium Glacier Drinking Water: Pure Glacier Water From the Last Unpolluted Frontier, Bacteria Free" -- Apparently came from a public water supply. This label has since been changed after FDA intervention.

Their report was published in 1999, but it's the most recent large-scale analysis to date that I've found. The disturbing part of their report describes how bottled water is subject to less stringent regulation than tap water.

The FDA is responsible for bottled water at the national level, but their rules "completely exempt waters that are packaged and sold within the same state." (I just checked my bottle of Deer Park Spring Water and all the sources listed are within my state.) They also exempt all carbonated water and seltzer. Even when FDA rules are in force, they don't subject bottled water to the same testing frequency and purity standards as tap water.

As a result, the NRDC found about one-third of the waters they tested were contaminated with synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic.

If you're going to "spend from 240 to over 10,000 times more per gallon for bottled water" it's worth having a look at how your favorite water fared. Below is a snippet of their test results. Click the chart to see the full report.

SUMMARY OF NRDC'S TEST RESULTS
Bottled Water Contaminants Found
(Click the chart for full report.)

Hunger

My interest in life is nutrition, the good, the bad, even the ethereal - the things that nurture us that aren't food-related. Today¹ I'm thinking mostly about the bad. In my little part of the US, obesity is often the face of bad nutrition, or malnutrition. But I realize in other parts of the US and the world, starvation is the face of malnutrition.

I've studied some of the repercussions of food restriction - on a micro scale, inside the body. It wasn't until I read Sharman Apt Russell's Hunger: An Unnatural History that I became aware of starvation's effect on a macro scale. Her chapter on how hunger shapes cultures is absorbing, at least it absorbed me.

About anthropologist Colin Turnbull's 1965 visit with the Ik, a group of Africans "who were living and starving near the northern border of Uganda and Kenya", she writes:

"Literally, it was every man - and every woman and child - for himself. Husbands did not share with wives, nor wives with husbands, nor parents with children, nor children with parents. Cooperation became maladaptive. Only the strong, the selfish, and the predatory survived."

Russell's discussion of Mao's China in the early 1960s, its association with "the biggest famine in recorded history" and the social changes adopted by the people to survive were hard to read.

The book doesn't just describe the anthropology of hunger. Besides involuntary or externally-caused hunger, Russell writes about voluntary fasting, what it does to the body, and how it's been used throughout history to make personal, spiritual and political statements. She also discusses the challenges to refeeding - economically, socially, and physically (and I thought the starvation part was bad).

It's a little book, a fast read, informative, and sometimes harrowing.

~~~~~~¹ World Refugee Day 2006

DuPont Fails to Give EPA the Slip

I accept most arguments people give in defense of my being described as fanatical. But just because I can be a little enthusiastic about the daily eats doesn't mean I'm going to throw away my non-stick pans, even if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did just settle:

"... the largest civil administrative penalty ever obtained under any federal environmental statute."
- EPA Settles PFOA Case Against DuPont for Largest Environmental Administrative Penalty in Agency History

A $16.5 million handover to the government is a powerful statement. It seems to have affected a few high-profile writers, namely Nora Ephron¹ and New York Times food columnist Marian Burros², both of whom in recent articles (See footnotes) have sworn to banish their Teflon-coated cookware for fear of personal negative health effects.

Curiously, the penalty imposed by the government did not address any consumer risk in cooking with Teflon-coated pans. It was levied against Dupont for failing to disclose information about risk of injury to the environment, and subsequently to humans, from a potentially carcinogenic chemical it uses to manufacture Teflon: Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA).³

Ms. Ephron notes that "PFOA is the bad guy here", with which I agree, but she seems to think it resides within the slippery surface of her frying pans and could thus be the cause of her early demise. I'm not sure how she arrived at that:

"It is noteworthy that PFOA is not part of the finished product of nonstick cookware or bakeware. It is only used during the manufacture of the product and only a trace amount of PFOA remains after the curing process. There should be no measurable amount of PFOA on a finished pan, provided that it has been properly cured."
- Wikipedia: Teflon

Even the EPA trumpets this:

"EPA wants to emphasize that it does not have any indication that the public is being exposed to PFOA through the use of Teflon®-coated or other trademarked nonstick cookware."

This doesn't let non-stick cookware of the hook though. It's true that harmful gases are released when the pans are heated, dry, to high temperatures. But that's true for cooking oils/fats too, which I've discussed here. Wikipedia's entry makes reference to a study that found heated butter was more detrimental to birds than heated Teflon:

"A 1973 study confirmed the FDA findings and found that a 4 hour exposure to the pyrolysis products of butter in an uncoated pan were 100% toxic to parakeets at 260°C whereas no deaths were observed for exposure to Teflon pyrolysis products until the Teflon coated pan was heated to 280°C."

I don't use non-stick cookware for much besides the occasional egg. But I thank my moon-and-stars pajamas that the FRE has built an exhaust fan in our kitchen which discharges all of my cooking bouquets to the outside.

Now if the movement to blacklist non-stick cookware was intended as a means to reduce demand for these products, thereby reducing their continued manufacture and concomitant destructive effects to humans and the environment, I'd be all for it. If that was the case, you'd want to boycott all the other products made with PFOA: Gore-Tex fabrics, machine lubricants, food packaging, printed circuit boards, and bullets to name a few. Since I fail to see those items mentioned in write-ups, I get the feeling this is based more on social trend than social responsibility.

~~~~~~
¹ Nora Ephron is a writer, director, Huffington Post blogger, and recent author of Farewell to Teflon.

² Marian Burros recent NYTs columns:
In Search of a Pan That Lets Cooks Forget About Teflon
As Teflon Troubles Pile Up, DuPont Responds With Ads

³ EPA Files New Claim Alleging DuPont Withheld PFOA Information

Pesticides in Food

The one food I've purchased in its organic version exclusively for the last 5 years has been strawberries. I read a while back that pesticides in conventional strawberries were through the roof. And their irregular surface made washing not very fruitful.

Since then, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) did a little more testing that resulted in their "Shoppers Guide to Pesticides in Produce". Visit their online report for details. Or download their handy wallet guide (pdf).

Choices

At the grocery store yesterday...

They had "Conventional" grapefruit, Sunkist^® I think, that looked something like this:
And they had "Organic" grapefruit that looked something like this:

Ok, that last pic wasn't entirely fair, but I didn't have my camera and couldn't find a better online representation. The organic were about half the size of the conventional and looked like roughed-up, petrified lemons. Well, maybe that's what grapefruit naturally looks like without chemical intervention.

Conventional:     $0.99/each
Organic:     $5.99/each

Domestication of the Fig

Man's first farming venture: Figs.

Nine preserved figs were recently found in the Jordan Valley. The discovery team estimated their age at about 11,000 years. Given the nuclear one-upmanship of late, today's organic matter may not last through the next few decades, let alone 11 millennia.

"We suggest that these edible fruits were gathered from parthenocarpic trees grown from intentionally planted branches. Hence, fig trees could have been the first domesticated plant of the Neolithic Revolution, which preceded cereal domestication by about a thousand years."
- Early Domesticated Fig in the Jordan Valley, Science Magazine, June 2.

"An 11,400-year-old fig found in Israel (left) may be the result of the earliest known form of agriculture, scientists say. The ancient fig is similar in size to a variety still cultivated in Iran (middle) but is considerably smaller than a more common Turkish type (right)."
- Photo and caption: National Geographic News
Early farmers were smart. Figs are sweet, calorically dense, travel well, can be dried for storage, don't need to be cooked, and come in individual serving sizes. Figs have it all over rice¹. For instance, you don't have to wade through leech laden waters to harvest them.

Everything I've read about the Neolithic Revolution (from what I can tell - the beginning of farming), until a few weeks ago had to do with its dawning in the Middle East. But Charles Mann, in his recent bestseller 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, discusses the existence of another independent Neolithic Revolution that occurred in Mesoamerica (an area between central Mexico and Costa Rica) "about ten thousand years ago, not long after the Middle East's Neolithic Revolution." And even a third one:

"In 2003, archeologists discovered ancient seeds from cultivated squashes in coastal Ecuador, at the foot of the Andes, which may be older than any agricultural remains in Mesoamerica."

It makes me wonder if squashes, not figs, weren't the output of man's first foray into farming. It also makes me wonder if referring to The Neolithic Revolution, assuming just one of Middle Eastern origin, isn't Eurocentric.

~~~~~~¹ I like rice, I do. It's very good in its brown state, cooked al-dente, with a dusting of gomasio. But in my eyes, it can't compare to the joys of fig.

It's Organic Because the Government Says It Is

Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, writing in this morning's New York Times:

"Organic is just a word, after all, and its definition now lies in the hands of the federal government ..."

He provides an example:

"A few years ago a chicken producer in Georgia named Fieldale Farms persuaded its congressman to slip a helpful provision into an appropriations bill that would allow growers of organic chicken to substitute conventional chicken feed if the price of organic feed exceeded a certain level. ... But in what sense is a chicken fed on conventional feed still organic? In no sense but the Orwellian one: because the government says it is."
- Mass Natural, NYTs Magazine, June 4.

There's Mercury in Fish

Some fish have more, some less. But "nearly all fish and shellfish contain traces of methylmercury", say the FDA and the EPA.

That mercury is a result of global industrial waste. And it's not going to go away anytime soon.

If I had my druthers, I'd eat some type of fish every other day. But I've put a limit on my druthers because I get the willies thinking what mercury can do to my body. As a neurotoxin, it damages nerves, resulting in:

• Blurred vision
  
• Hearing loss
  
• Speech difficulties
  
• Tremors
  
• Memory loss, and other mental effects (irritability, depression)
  
• Kidney damage
  
• High blood pressure
  
• Heart attack
  
• Infertility

That's for adults. Infants and children feel the brunt of methylmercury toxicity. The EPA has classified methylmercury as a "possible human carcinogen". Willies, I tell you.

The best I can do, on a personal level, is choose fish with the lowest levels of mercury. How do I know what fish they are? The FDA/EPA has published a list of common fish/shellfish and their mercury levels.

It's by no means comprehensive or even accurate when you consider the age of their data and the challenges to its accuracy put forth by media and citizens' groups, e.g. the Environmental Working Group (EWG).

But it's a list. Associated with this list is a warning the FDA and EPA made jointly to all citizens in 2004. The warning is still in effect; if anything it's even more pertinent now. Do you know what the warning is? It advises women of child-bearing age and children not to eat certain types of fish and to limit consumption of others. Government¹ and industry must think everyone knows what these fish are, since they're resistant to having this information posted at, say, a fish counter where the bulk of consumer purchasing decisions are made.

I think the seafood industry is concerned that people won't buy fish with high levels of mercury.

Anyway, I think it's a great idea to post mercury information at seafood counters and in the canned tuna aisle. Oceana.org does too. They're a not-for-profit group of marine scientists, economists, lawyers and advocates dedicated to protecting the world's oceans. They're calling on grocery stores to voluntarily post the FDA/EPA Advisory. So far, Wild Oats and Safeway stores have agreed.

Here's Wild Oat's sign (Click for pdf):


Here's Safeway's sign (Click for pdf):


Oceana.org is encouraging us to encourage our grocer to post the advisory. I know I won't be making any friends doing this, but I may raise the subject on my next visit to Whole Foods. I'll start with something like, "Can you tell me which fish have the most mercury?" Oceana.org has a whole Tell-Your-Grocer Kit, with sample letters, signs, and talking points. But I think I'll start small.

~~~~~~
¹ The state of California is an exception. They have a law requiring seafood counters to post advisories like this (Click for larger):

The Earth is the Mushroom's Gut

A more fitting title would be Vitamin D From Mushrooms, but I caved to the peculiar.

Good news¹ for vegetarians who wear sunscreen. Mushrooms may soon be able to satisfy humans' need for vitamin D:

"... a single serving of white button mushrooms - the most commonly sold mushroom - will contain 869 percent the daily value of vitamin D once exposed to just five minutes of UV light after being harvested."
- Light-zapped Mushrooms Filled with Vitamin D

That's a lotta D. It hinges on being a little too much D. The 869% of 400 IUs is 3476 IUs. Intakes of as little as 2000 IUs can result in nausea, vomiting, anorexia, hypertension, calcification of soft tissues (heart, lungs, kidney, blood vessels), and kidney failure. Children are especially vulnerable. Still, there's more of a problem with too little vitamin D in Americans' diets than too much. And with vitamin D's emerging roles in cancer and the immune response, techniques for boosting intake are worth exploring. Maybe they'll work out the dose issue before the buttons hit produce aisles. (Pictured is Cantharellus tubaeformisa, a type of chanterelle mushroom thought to be naturally high in vitamin D₂.)

The primary source of vitamin D in food is from animal tissue, which supplies the D₃ (cholecalciferol) form of the vitamin. There's some vitamin D in plants, in the form of D₂ (ergocalciferol), but the amount is, or was thought to be, a pittance compared to what liver, fish (an alternate reason to down some omega-3 rich salmon), and milk, especially fortified, provide. The biological actions of D₃ and D₂ in the human body are thought to be equivalent. Although cats, birds, and monkeys have been shown to discriminate between the two, favoring D₃.


More On Mushrooms

Mushrooms aren't technically plants. They don't intake carbon dioxide and give off oxygen as plants do. They intake oxygen and release carbon dioxide, like we do. They have no chlorophyll, so they don't photosynthesize for energy. Yet like us, they need photosynthesizing plants for food, and for the O₂ they give off. All of this and more makes a mushroom closer to an animal than a plant in taxonomy, but a mushroom isn't an animal either.

In fact, somewhere between the time I finished grade school and now, biologists created 3 more Kingdoms besides plants and animals. One of them is the Fungi, under which mushrooms, molds, and yeasts fall. The other 2 are Monera (bacteria), and Protista (algae, protozoa).

While trying to discover what in blazes mushrooms are doing with the vitamin D they make (I can't imagine it's being used to build strong bones), I ran across these fun fungi facts:

• Fungi digest food outside of their bodies. They release enzymes into the surrounding environment (we release enzymes into our gut) which break down organic matter from plants into a form they can absorb (also done in our gut). The earth is the mushroom's gut.
  
  
• The part of the mushroom we eat is actually its reproductive structure, which sounds a little freaky when you consider that fungi are closer to being animal than plant.
  
  
• One of the largest living organisms on earth is a mushroom. It's about 38 acres in size, weighs about 100 tons, and lives in Michigan. It grew from a single spore, and is thought to have been growing since the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago.
  
  
• Some fungi are carnivorous. "Predatory fungi [use] a remarkable array of trapping devices to attract, capture, kill, and digest [their prey]." (Wayne noted this in his comment on my previous post.)
  
  
• Some fungi are bioluminescent, they glow in the dark. This might make them attractive to night eaters - snail, cockroaches, crickets - giving the spores of those particular mushrooms an advantage in future germination. But it looks like science doesn't fully understand the glow-purpose.

No wonder people spend a lifetime studying these creatures.

~~~~~~¹ The news was reported at a poster session of the FDA's annual Science Forum in April (below), although coaxing mushrooms to produce vitamin D by exposing them to radiation was being studied for years. The part we still don't know is the extent to which humans can absorb vitamin D from a fresh mushroom.

FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and the Mushroom Council Collaborate to Optimize the Natural Vitamin D Content of Edible Mushrooms and to Examine their Health Benefits in Different Rodent Models of Innate Immunity.

Tree Trimming, Naturally

Been playing hooky. Feels great. Don't go tellin' nobody.

Here's a harbinger of a post to come. (See that green stuff growing next to the tree? That's what happens when you don't mow your grass.)