you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Normally, I only buy Tropicana 100% juice (the carton with the photo of an orange with a straw sticking out of it), but when I saw this new “Trop50″ on sale for $2, I figured I’d give it a try. 50% less sugar and calories than regular orange juice sounded intriguing. And as usual, whenever I see a sale, I get too excited and forget to read the side panel.

Well, after having tried it, I can say it’s really bad. It’s thinner than normal juice and just doesn’t taste right. After reading the ingredients, I find out that the first ingredient is “filtered water.” Then orange juice, and PureVia, a sweetener made from stevia extracts. This product achieves its 50% reduction in sugar and calories by being diluted with water, then having a sweetener added to it. So, I was tricked by clever marketing again.

PureVia’s got a weird aftertaste that lingers for several minutes. It’s hard to describe, but to me, it’s got that bad aspartame quality. I’m never buying Trop50 again. It’s really awful tasting.

I know plenty of people who absolutely detest pickles, but I love them. I even drink the pickle juice. Disgusting, I know… I’ve loved pickles since as far back as I can remember, always saving the two pickle slices in McDonald’s hamburgers for last.

Growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I passed by the famous Guss’ Pickles every day on the way to school and marveled at all those wooden barrels brimming with pickles. They always looked inviting and intimidating at the same time. Inviting because I wanted to try all the different kinds. Intimidating because they just sat there, out in the open all day without refrigeration, for people to gawk at, poke, sneeze into…

Even though I love pickles, but I rarely buy them from the store. I’m quite a picky eater when it comes to certain things. I like crunchy pickles, whole. Most of the major brands in the supermarkets are made with color added and preservatives, or they’re sliced up for picnics. Many of the ones I’ve tried are sweet, too sour, or just too artificial tasting, and taking on a yellow tinge. The main problem is that most of them have just been sitting on the shelf too long and aren’t very fresh and get really mushy. One brand I do like a lot is Ba-Tempe Kosher Pickles, which I buy from time to time, made right here in Brooklyn. I learned how to make my own pickles several years ago. Now that summer’s almost here, cucumbers are back in season and plentiful. Here’s my version of kosher dills (kosher in the sense that they are made in the manner of Jewish pickles, not that they have been prepared under the supervision of a rabbi). Let’s get pickling!

My favorite cucumbers to use are kirbys. They are small and crisp. There are as many different recipes for dill pickles as there are stars in the universe, but mine is very simple. It’s just cucumbers, water, salt, dill, peppercorns, and garlic. Lots of dill and lots and lots of garlic.

I put as many kirbys as can fit inside a jar, then stuff some whole dill sprigs in it, crushing and snapping the stems to increase the surface area. I coarsely bash up some garlic chives (about 1/4 of a bulb), and put them in the jar. If the husk is still on, I don’t bother removing it. Then I add sea salt and peppercorns, and fill the jar with cold tap water until the cucumbers are submerged. That’s really about it.

I leave them out for several days in room temperature to allow for some fermentation from the bacteria present on the cucumbers. This is probably a huge health code violation, but I’m still alive. This causes some acidification and souring, and changes the color of the cucumber from hunter green to a duller olive drab. After 3-5 days, I put the concoction in the fridge.

In this photo, I’ve reused the brine from my first pickle batch. The water at this point is quite cloudy from the fermentation of garlic, cucumbers, spices, and dill.

reusing a Ba-Tempte pickle jar

More cucumbers in a large kim-chi jar

This one went straight into the fridge. No room temperature fermentation period. Refrigeration retards bacterial activity, so this is an experiment to see how differently this turns out.

Before and after

A cucumber that has been in brine for 3 wks vs a new, unpickled kirby.. a little too fermented.

here’s a recipe from About.com that uses vinegar and a hot process, quite different from mine. Ingredients also include sugar and onions.
http://video.about.com/kosherfood/Homemade-Kosher-Pickle.htm

Today, I made a healthy choice by selecting a can of corn with no added salt. I like to put corn in my ramen. Late night munchies attacked and my can of corn was all I could think of.

….man! oh man, salt-free corn sucks! I had forgotten since the last time I bought no-salt corn how much it sucked. This is the last time I choose healthy corn! (..or until my next memory lapse). The choices were: 1% USRDA of sodium per serving (healthy corn) vs. about 15% per serving. There’s 3.5 servings per 15 oz can, so I put the salted one back on the shelf. The salt-added corn, ironically, was cheaper by a few cents.

The salt accentuates the sweetness of the corn, and I think it enhances the texture too. The salt-free one just tastes bland and not very good eats. Adding salt now doesn’t improve the taste since the corn is cooked in a broth of its own juices. Putting corn in ramen is something I learned in Japan. Hokkaido, the northern island, grows a lot of corn and their Hokkaido-style ramen includes regional specialties like corn and butter. I remember not liking butter ramen, but I might need to try that again. Mmm… sodium AND saturated fat? How can you go wrong?

I’m seriously eying the smoked pork knuckles sitting in the fridge. I bought them for soup stock, but they look like they could use a friend right about now.

These are red shiso plants, growing happily in my backyard. Every spring, they sprout up on their own from seeds dropped by plants from the previous year. In English, they known as either perilla or beefsteak plants, although the only place I’ve heard these names used is in dictionaries and botany-related websites. I call them by their Japanese name, shiso. In Korean, it’s kkaennip, but I believe it’s a different cultivar than the plants you see here.

I love shiso and rediscovered kkaennip kimchi at the Korean eatery near my office. They marinate the leaves with too much salt though, so I decided to make my own lower-sodium version. Kkaennip kimchi is usually made with the green shiso, which has a much stronger flavor, but I had to subsitute.

Kkaennip kimchi is very simple to make. All you need is soy sauce, sugar, salt, a clove or two of pureed garlic, and some crushed pepper flakes. Don’t ask about measurements (I never measure). Use your judgement. If you want to cut down on your sodium, you can just submerge the leaves in soy sauce and they’ll turn out about the same. Refrigerate and the leaves’ll be ready in as little as 30 mins.

Here’s how they turned out.

Not bad. I went through this batch of in a few minutes. When I get some green shiso seeds, I’ll plant some and try again.

These are some chicken biscuits my mom got from a co-worker. She’s a pieceworker at a garment factory in Chinatown.

The dubious Japanese immediately drew my attention. The top series of words is “shoku-zai no mochi aji”, which means something I can only translate as “food-ful flavor”, to retain the spirit of the crappy Chinapanese. “Shoku-zai” is a rather sterile term meaning “ingredients”. It’s a word you typically find in a cookbook or the on the back of a food package, not on the front. If they wanted to say “flavorful ingredients”, they need to switch the words around and say “aji no mochi shoku-zai”.

front

The big black words are “shio meku no chiken”. Chiken is the transliteration for the English word “chicken”, so no problems here. I can only guess at what they are trying to say with “shio meku” though. “Meku” is just wrong because it is apparently slang for “masturbation”, as I’ve just learned from Jim Breen’s dictionary.. Thank goodness for the “Chicken flavour” written right over it, cuz I never would’ve figure out that this was a packet of chicken flavored crackers.

It needs a macron to make the word into “me-ku”, meaning “make”, as in the “make and model of a car”, so I guess they mean “salt flavor”. (Yes, in Japan, salty is considered a flavor.)

back

And goddamn it, this is NOT recyclable. No kind of plastic wrapper like this is (I once visited a recycling facility). Putting a recycling symbol on the back is just false information.

This is what they look like inside. I half-expected them to be shaped like little chickens.

It’s late at night and I’m hungry, so I ate the whole pack. The biscuits themselves taste alright.. .but not quite like chicken. And not at all like buffalo wings, like the photo implies. The rest of the Chinese words in that red ribbon I cannot read because they are too complex for my reading level, except for two words, “chicken” and “cracker/biscuits”.

.. one last thing, why is the chicken holding a lollipop?

These are some photos my mom took of our backyard garden. I uploaded them to Flickr. It’s a great site for storing family albums, snapshots, and whatever else you have. Very easy to use and quite fun. Thanks Yahoo!

top: winter melon
bottom: bottle gourd

Bottle gourds feature prominently in Chinese movies and videogames that have old bearded male characters. Usually, the gourd is filled with alcohol. Shun Di (Virtua Fighter), Gen Fu and Brad Wong (both of Dead or Alive) can be seen drinking from a bottle gourd during their victory or opening animations.

This is a pack of QQ instant rice vermicelli my dad bought. It is criminally misleading for the packaging to say 健康之選 (healthy choice). Not fried, so that means it’s healthy?! 151% of your sodium intake for one day in this little bowl.

My dad has high blood pressure and I keep telling him to read labels and not put so much salt in his cooking, but he doesn’t listen. I took a big red marker and circled the sodium content of the noodle and drew a big arrow pointing to it. I don’t know if he saw it. But everyone should read food labels. It’s literally a matter of life or death.

Look on the side of the can next time you have a V8. You’ll see that one 8 ounce serving of the juice contains as much as 590 mg of sodium! That’s 25% to 50% of your RDI (depending on how you calculate it– the RDI is an iffy range between 920-2300 mg)!

For something that’s advertised as being good for you, it sure is packed with a lot of unnecessary sodium, like most processed foods. Salt acts as a preservative to extend shelf life, but too much of it can shorten yours.

Drink 2 V8’s and you’re done with your salt allowance for the day. If you’re on a salt restricted diet, you’ll have to be especially careful with what you each during the rest of the day.
I confess to loving the taste of V8 (cold), but I avoid it because of all the sodium. A few months ago, I tried out a low sodium (and really ghetto) alternative. I had some extra cans of tomato sauce lying around and decided to drink them instead. I live in an Italian neighborhood, so whenever I go shopping, tomato sauce is always on sale.

Here’s how to make your own healtheir low-sodium V8 alternative (or in this case, V2) at any time, with just a blender. Dump a can of tomato sauce into a blender, add some salt, a stalk or two of celery, and water to dilute to a desired consistency. I like my juice really thin and usually add 3 or 4 parts water for every part of sauce. Add some ice cubes and a few drops of McIllhenny’s tabasco sauce and you’ll have a refreshing drink that’s much healthier and cheaper than V8.

I don’t recommend blending up too many vegetables, because the juice will start to get thick. But, if you have a juicer, you can juice to your heart’s content. with your favorite vegetables.

Whenever you can, choose fresh vegetables. That’s not always easy due to seasonal availability or cost. Or maybe you just don’t want to fuss with peeling and washing them. Storage is also another problem — leafy vegetables start yellowing and wilting if not eaten within a few days.

The next best alternative is frozen. They’ll save you time and money, and you can store vegetables like peas and carrots in the freezer for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutrients or discoloration. In fact, many frozen vegetables are just as good as fresh ones, if not better, according to many sources. Vegetables are picked closer to their natural ripe state and frozen to “lock” in nutrients and vitamins. Supermarket vegetables are typically harvested several weeks before they become ripe in order to survive the long journey from the farm to your local store, where they have to sit there yet for a few days more.

Try to avoid canned vegetables by all means! Processed food is usually not good for you, and loaded with salt or other preservatives. In this picture, you can see the bright green peas on the right which came with my frozen dinner. They look and taste like green peas are supposed to look and taste. On the left are peas from a can. They are very salty, mushy, and have an unnatural olive color to them.

It constantly surprises me how little some people know about food and basic nutrition. I used to tutor students at a community college in midtown Manhattan. A couple of students and I were discussing an upcoming presentation which had to include a visual aid. The professor had shown an example from a previous class: a drawing of a hamburger, box of fries, and a bar next to it, which reads 85%, or something like that. The students didn’t understand what that 85% represented. I told them it was pretty obvious.. a Big Mac isn’t exactly good for you. But they had no idea. One student said he just eats at McDonald’s. He doesn’t pay attention to what he eats. Of course, he’s skinny, so it doesn’t matter. Many of my students DO need to be aware of nutrition, because many are overweight and would be medically categorized as morbidly obese.
Starting in 1990, the government requires most food packaging to display a Nutrition Facts chart. The black and white chart you see today on all food packaging was redesigned in 1992 to make it easier to read.

And read it you should before making any food purchase. I find that once food enters my home, no matter how terrible it is for my health, I’ll eat it. If you’re like me, it’s best to know the nutrition facts ahead of time and not buy unhealthy food.

Pay particular attention to the Servings Per Container. Some products try to hide how unhealthy they are by reducing the serving size down to Lilliputian proportions. A can of soup may have 3 or 4 servings.

Next, pay attention to the Calories and the Calories From Fat. The less fat you have, the better.

Lastly, pay attention to the Sodium content, which is expressed as a percentage of your daily recommended intake (RDI). A typical can of Campbell’s soup has 2 servings or more, with 30% of your RDI of sodium! If you eat the whole can, you’ve consumed 60% or more of the total amount of salt considered healthy for you by some food experts.