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Sunday, July 31, 2011

7 Myths About Making Coffee

I really love the whole experience of making coffee: the aroma of a freshly brewed pot wafting through my house, the smell of it as I raise a cup to my lips, the warmth of it filling my body and the flavor—oh, the flavor!
But if you’re a coffee drinker, you know how much a bad cup of coffee can ruin the experience. Here are 7 coffee-making myths to watch out for to ensure you brew a perfect cuppa joe.

2011-07-28-coffee.jpg
Myth #1: Bulk coffee at the grocery store is the best product to buy.

Oxygen and bright light are the worst flavor busters for roasted beans. Unless the store is conscientious about selling fresh coffee, the storage tubes can get coated with coffee oils, which turn rancid, so be wary of bulk coffee from supermarket display bins. Your best bet to get the absolute freshest beans is to buy from a local roaster (or roast your own). At the grocery store, opt for coffee beans packaged by quality-conscious roasters and sold in sturdy, vacuum-sealed bags.


Myth #2: The best place to store your coffee is in the freezer or refrigerator.

Roasted beans are porous and readily take up moisture and food odors, so the refrigerator is one of the worst places to store coffee. Flavor experts strongly advise against ever freezing coffee, especially dark roasts. Optimally, buy a 5- to 7-day supply of fresh beans at a time and keep at room temperature in an airtight container.


Myth #3: Pre-ground beans taste just as good as if you ground your own coffee.

Coffee starts losing quality almost immediately upon grinding. The best-tasting brews are made from beans ground just before brewing.


 

Myth #4: Distilled water is the best water for brewing coffee.

Softened or distilled water makes terrible coffee—the minerals in good water are essential. Also bad? Tap water with chlorine or off flavors. Serious coffee lovers use bottled spring water or activated-charcoal/carbon filters on their taps.


Myth #5: The type of coffee filter you use doesn’t matter.

Bargain-priced paper coffee filters yield inferior coffee, according to the experts. Look for “oxygen-bleached” or “dioxin-free” paper filters. Alternatively, you may wish to invest in a long-lived gold-plated filter.

Myth #6: Boiling water is the perfect temperature for brewing coffee.

Beware the heat. Water that is too hot will extract compounds in the coffee that are bitter rather than pleasant. The proper brewing temperature is 200°F, or about 45 seconds off a full boil. (Most good coffeemakers regulate this automatically.)


Myth #7: A French press is a better way to brew coffee than drip coffee makers.

Not if you’re concerned about your health. Boiled or unfiltered coffee (such as that made with a French press, or Turkish-style coffee) contains higher levels of cafestol, a compound that can increase blood levels of LDL ("bad") cholesterol. Choose filtered methods instead, such as a drip coffee maker.

By Carolyn Malcoun, contributing food editor for EatingWell Magazine

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eatingwell/7-coffee-myths_b_911913.html

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Woman Wears Bikini To Wal-Mart!

I can't be the only one who heard a woman was kicked out of Wal-Mart for wearing a bikini and screamed FINALLY! As in, finally someone down in Bentonville, Arkansas clicked on the People of Walmart site and had to grab a barf bag. They're instituting a dress code! Ah, but that excitement was short-lived.
Sandy McMillin
The real people of Walmart, aka the folks who work there, claim Sandy McMillin's tale of being escorted out the store for showing off her string bikini-clad bod isn't quite on the money. The Oregon store's spokespeople claim she was never actually kicked out, that she caused the problems by being verbally abusive, and now they're bending over backward to apologize for her "frustration."
So there's no relief from the torture that is seeing a fellow bargain shopper in the produce section wearing something so skimpy I have to worry about curly hairs in my cabbage? Sigh. Here I was really hoping that Walmart was going to start caring as much about its customers with common sense as they do about the creeps who take advantage of the total lack of dress code. I'm not talking anything major here. Just a general health code-happy "no shoes, no shirt, no service" maybe?

The problem with the People of Walmart site is that it's as sad as it is funny. Because while we're feeling guilty that we're laughing at real honest to goodness people (and frankly, not ALL of the pictures are even funny -- some are just plain cruel), it proves there are a lot of folks who care more about themselves than common decency when they leave the house.

And McMillin is clearly one of them. She says it was 95 degrees, so she threw on a skimpy bikini top (which she'd bought at Wal-Mart, natch) and a pair of shorts. Fair enough, but it was 95 degrees when I took my daughter to a swimming class last week. I stood in the sun for an hour wearing a t-shirt and shorts. I was hot (I was outside), but fine. She was walking into an air-conditioned store. Putting a shirt on was hardly cruel and unusual punishment. But it is common courtesy. Bikinis are for the beach. Not for buying your groceries.

http://thestir.cafemom.com/in_the_news/123836/gross_bikini_clad_woman_doesnt

Friday, July 29, 2011

American Airlines Pilot Assauted By Passengers

MIAMI (AP) — A man punched an American Airlines pilot who kicked him off a flight from Miami, and he and his brother then attacked the pilot again before bystanders tackled the brothers in the terminal, officials said Thursday.

Baez brothers punched pilot July 27.jpg

Jonathan and Luis Baez, both of Las Piedras, Puerto Rico, were arrested at Miami International Airport. They had been aboard American Airlines Flight 1755 bound for San Francisco on Wednesday night, according to an arrest affidavit.

While the plane taxied away from the gate, a flight attendant noticed 27-year-old Jonathan Baez was sleeping and had not buckled his seat belt, police said. She tried to wake him, but she told police that Baez was unresponsive and appeared to be intoxicated or on drugs.


The pilot turned the plane around and returned to gate D51. "As we always do with these things, we'd much rather deal with it on the ground than in the air," American Airlines spokesman Tim Smith said Thursday.

The pilot and flight attendant then woke up Baez and told him to get off the plane, police said. "He was apparently barely compliant at that point," Smith said. "He was exhibiting symptoms of intoxication. He was not walking well when he went up the aisle."


Luis Baez, 29, decided to join his brother as he was being escorted off the plane. As the brothers walked toward the aircraft's exit door, they became belligerent, and Luis Baez told the pilot, "When you fly to San Juan I will have you killed," according to the arrest report.

 The brothers walked off the plane, but then Jonathan Baez returned and punched the pilot in the face and hit the flight attendant in the shoulder when she tried to intervene, police said.


Both brothers attacked the pilot again in the jet bridge and chased him in the terminal, according to the arrest report.

Other flight crew members and passengers held down the brothers until police arrived.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

That's Not Trash, That's Dinner

LAST week in Chelsea, Mich., as people wilted and vegetables flourished in the intense heat, Anne Elder ran through some of her favorite summer ingredients: pearly garlic “rounds” that flower at the top of the plant in hot weather, the spreading leaves of the broccoli plant, yellow dandelion flowers that she dips whole into batter and deep fries.

“When kids visit the farm, we give them cornstalks to chew,” she said. Like sugar cane, the stalks contain sweet juice. 



For Ms. Elder, who runs the Community Farm of Ann Arbor, the edible vegetable begins with the sprouts and does not end until the leaves, vines, tubers, shoots and seeds have given their all. 

If home cooks reconsidered what should go into the pot, and what into the trash, what would they find? What new flavors might emerge, what old techniques? Pre-industrial cooks, for whom thrift was a necessity as well as a virtue, once knew many ways to put the entire garden to work. Fried green tomatoes and pickled watermelon rind are examples of dishes that preserved a bumper crop before rot set in. 

“Some people these days are so unfamiliar with vegetables in their natural state, they don’t even know that a broccoli stalk is just as edible as the florets,” said Julia Wylie, an organic farmer in Watsonville, Calif. The produce she grows at Mariquita Farm is served at Bay Area restaurants like Delfina, Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse.
At some large farms, she said, only the florets are processed for freezing or food service; the stems are shredded into the chokingly dry “broccoli slaw” sold in sealed bags at the supermarket.
(A much better way to treat broccoli stalks: cut off and discard the tough outer peel, shave what remains into ribbons with a vegetable peeler, scatter with lemon zest and shards of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese: all the pleasure of raw artichoke salad with half the work.) 

Mariquita Farm also runs a flourishing Community Supported Agriculture (C.S.A.) program and sells at farmers’ markets, where, Ms. Wylie said, she has become expert at holding shoppers’ hands when it comes to stem-to-root cooking. She reminds them that even the thick ribs of chard, beets and other greens soften with braising (most kale stems, though, are too fibrous to eat). She encourages them to cook the leaves that sprout from the tops of radishes (they have a delicious bitterness) and offers a traditional French method of baking fish at high heat on a bed of fennel stalks. 

Among her favorite neglected greens are the big, sweet leaves that grow around heads of cauliflower — leaves that supermarket shoppers never see and recipes never call for. She cuts them across the ribs, then sautés them with minced onion.
“It’s like a silky version of a cabbage leaf, with a hint of cauliflower,” she said.
At this time of year, cooks around the country haul home full bags from the farmers’ market or a weekly box from a local farm but also wonder how to make the most of their produce. Eating more vegetables, being spontaneous in the kitchen and celebrating the season are the aspirations that lead people to join C.S.A.’s. But many find that they don’t know what do to with boxloads of melon, tomatoes, onions and leafy greens, not to mention their stalks, tops, peels and stems. 

“I joined a C.S.A. because I wanted to be frugal and I thought it would force me to be creative in the kitchen,” said Megan Smith, a learning specialist in Brooklyn. “But it generated a huge amount of work and all this debris.” 

Much of what is tossed out is edible, but not everyone greets the opportunity to recycle food scraps as an exciting food adventure.
“When you mention using them for stock, that’s when people start to roll their eyes,” said Ronna Welsh, a cooking teacher in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who chronicles her adventures with chard stems and watermelon rinds on her Web site Purple Kale Kitchenworks, in a column called “Otherwise, Trash.”
Her students are the kind of home cooks who make the extra effort to go the farmers’ market and support local agriculture, she said, but whose schedules and lack of skills cause them to feel stressed by a refrigerator full of raw ingredients. 

Ms. Welsh likes to generate recipes for trimmings, she said, because using up everything satisfies some of the same urges that fuel the desire to be a better cook. 

“When you spend $40 at the Greenmarket, the pressure starts right there,” she said. “You feel more invested in the carrots you buy from the farmer than the ones you buy at Key Food. You feel sentimental about them, you have more respect for them.”
Ann Arbor, with its thriving farms, gardens and greenmarkets — including a new one this summer that is held in the evening so that working people can shop — is a fertile source of stem-to-root ideas.
“People know that nasturtium flowers are edible, but the leaves are also great salads and the seed pods, if you pickle them, make a wonderful substitute for capers,” said Kevin Sharp, an outreach manager at the People’s Food Co-op there, one of the oldest in the country.
He substitutes the palm-size leaves from stalks of brussels sprouts in recipes that call for collard greens, cooks the leaves and shoots of sweet potatoes and battles a bumper crop of asparagus by making a sweet relish from the woody ends. 

Lindsay-Jean Hard, who works at a new farm-to-table Web network called Real Time Farms, said that she chops the leaves atop celery stalks to make a pungent, fluffy celery salt.
Last year, hundreds of homeowners around Ann Arbor joined a local 350 Gardens Challenge, a global climate-change initiative that includes “visible food production” (like a garden in an urban front yard) as one of its engines for sustainable food.

One of those homeowners, Erica Blom, a graduate student who says she eats everything from apple cores to potato peels, especially if they come from her own garden, has embraced the slight bitterness of her homegrown carrot tops, mincing them as a garnish like parsley and using them in salads.

Modern chefs have long embraced a nose-to-tail approach to meat, but recently they have been looking at the plant kingdom with a predatory eye. One of the most adventurous is Andrea Reusing of Lantern in Chapel Hill, N.C. 

“It came from a curiosity about flavor, more than a need to use things up,” she said, referring to stem-to-root recipes she has tinkered with. “But of course that’s a benefit, and something our ancestors were very good at.”
She has infused wine with peach leaves, toasted the seeds of watermelons and taken a hammer to cherry pits, cracking them open to unleash the kernels’ sweet almondlike perfume into panna cotta. The recipe is included in Ms. Reusing’s new book, “Cooking in the Moment.” 

(But as good as it is, this dessert should be eaten in moderation. Cherry pits, like peach leaves and apple seeds, contain minute amounts of cyanogens, compounds that can produce the poison cyanide. Other plant parts can also contain small amounts of toxins, so be cautious when eating them. The central number for the American Poison Control Centers is 800-222-1222.) 

Ms. Reusing spends a lot of time prowling farms in North Carolina, where, she said, she finds all sorts of renegade vegetable specimens. She particularly relishes the strange shoots that emerge when a garden has bolted from too much heat: cilantro flowers, broccoli seed pods and tough lettuces that cry out for creamy, rich dressings and bacon-fat vinaigrettes.
Her cooking often combines Southern farmhouse tradition with the flavors of Japan, Korea and China, rich sources of stem-to-root traditions. She buys from farmers who grow Asian varieties of turnips, soybeans and radishes; she has salt-cured whole daikons, pickling the white flesh and salting the greens with chiles. The leaves of the wasabi root, she said, have an oily, mustardy kick: she slices them thinly to use as a garnish for a Japanese-inflected pot-au-feu.
Other chefs are redrawing the sometimes arbitrary lines between vegetables, fruits and weeds. At Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream in Columbus, Ohio, Jeni Britton Bauer "milks" the first corn cobs of the local harvest, adding the sugary liquid to her basic ice cream mixture, and then swirls the buttery results with tart berries.
John Shields, the chef at Town House in Chilhowie, Va., festoons plates with chickweed and makes juice from wild grass. Last summer he harvested a crop of green strawberries, curing them in salt and sugar so he could serve them as dessert with soft drifts of whipped cream, cucumbers and marshmallow.
For Mr. Shields, stem-to-root cooking is a means to an avant-garde end. He worked in Chicago at Alinea and Charlie Trotter’s before making his way to Chilhowie, in a part of southern Virginia pressed up against the Appalachian hills. The lush wild and farmed land around the restaurant is, he said, the main reason for restaurant’s location, with unexpected vegetal pleasures that even the lushest urban farmers’ market cannot provide.
“I picked the flowers and shoots from the green bean plants at my farm this morning, and I am going to work with their sweetness,” he said. “In my kind of cooking, I wouldn’t really know what to do with green beans.”
 
At Your Disposal
Before you throw away your vegetable trimmings, consider some alternative uses:
CARROT, CELERY AND FENNEL LEAVES Mix small amounts, finely chopped, with parsley as a garnish or in salsa verde: all are in the Umbelliferae family of plants. Taste for bitterness when deciding how much to use.
CHARD OR COLLARD RIBS Simmer the thick stalks in white wine and water with a scrap of lemon peel until tender, then drain and dress with olive oil and coarse salt. Or bake them with cream, stock or both, under a blanket of cheese and buttery crumbs, for a gratin.
CITRUS PEEL Organic thin-skinned peels of tangerines or satsumas can be oven-dried at 200 degrees, then stored to season stews or tomato sauces.
CORN COBS Once the kernels are cut off, simmer the stripped cobs with onions and carrots for a simple stock. Or add them to the broth for corn or clam chowder.
MELON RINDS Cut off the hard outer peels and use crunchy rinds in place of cucumber in salads and cold soups.
PEACH LEAVES Steep in red wine, sugar and Cognac to make a summery peach-bomb aperitif. (According to David Lebovitz’s recipe, the French serve it on ice.)
POTATO PEELS Deep-fry large pieces of peel in 350-degree oil and sprinkle with salt and paprika. This works best with starchy potatoes like russets.
YOUNG ONION TOPS Wash well, coarsely chop and cook briefly in creamy soups or stews, or mix into hot mashed potatoes.
TOMATO LEAVES AND STEMS Steep for 10 minutes in hot soup or tomato sauces to add a pungent garden-scented depth of tomato flavor. Discard leaves after steeping.
TOMATO SCRAPS Place in a sieve set over a bowl, salt well and collect the pale red juices for use in gazpacho, Bloody Marys or risotto.
TURNIP, CAULIFLOWER OR RADISH LEAVES Braise in the same way as (or along with) collards, chards, mustard greens or kale.
WATERMELON SEEDS Roast and salt like pumpkinseeds. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/dining/thats-not-trash-thats-dinner.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=general&src=me

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The Way Men Grieve

In 1990, Sam and Gretchen Feldman cashed out on their share of a national chain of men’s apparel stores and retired to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. There, they devoted their time to volunteer work and an active social calendar. The following years were golden ones for the Feldmans, but in 2007 Mrs. Feldman learned she had cancer. She died a year later. 
The Feldmans had been married 53 years, and Mr. Feldman’s grief was palpable to friends who knew him as a buoyant, resilient personality.
“There was a huge hole in my life that no amount of activity could replace,” said Mr. Feldman, now 82. “And except for my two daughters, there was no one I could turn to for solace.” 

There was a local bereavement group for spouses, but Mr. Feldman opted out when he learned it consisted only of women. 

“I just didn’t think women would relate to my pain,” he said. “And, frankly, I come from a generation that feels uncomfortable exposing our sadness and vulnerability to the opposite sex.”
The loss of a loved one is a profoundly heartbreaking experience, but it is not the same for everyone. Research increasingly suggests that men and women experience grief in different ways, and the realization has bolstered a nascent movement of bereavement groups geared to men throughout the country. Many of them are affiliated with hospitals and hospice centers. 

Concern about reaching men in grief has gained new urgency with shifting demographics. The number of men age 65 and older increased by 21 percent from 2000 to 2010, nearly double the 11.2 percent growth rate for women in that age group, according to census figures. As the gender gap in life span narrows, experts suggest that more men will be facing the loss of loved ones, particularly spouses. 

Many will be not be prepared for the experience. The loss of a spouse often is crushing for men physically as well as psychologically. In a 2001 paper published in The Review of General Psychology, psychologists at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands confirmed earlier data showing widowers have a higher incidence of mental and physical illness, disabilities, death and suicide than widows do. While women who lose their husbands often speak of feeling abandoned or deserted, widowers tend to experience the loss “as one of dismemberment, as if they had lost something that kept them organized and whole,” Michael Caserta, chairman of the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Utah, said by e-mail. 

The Harvard Bereavement Study, a landmark late 1960s investigation of spousal loss, found that widowers experienced the death of a wife as a multifaceted tragedy, a loss of protection, support and comfort that left many at sea. The men in the study relied heavily on their wives to manage their domestic lives, from household chores to raising their children, the researchers noted.
The grief of men is compounded, Dr. Caserta added, by the fact that so many have been reluctant to directly address real feelings of deep sadness; until recently, men were expected to be emotionally controlled and inexpressive. Simply persuading grief-stricken men to attend a bereavement group is still no small challenge.
“While there’s strong indication that grief therapy helps men, historically men generally don’t join groups,” Phyllis Silverman, a grief researcher and an author of “Widower: When Men Are Left Alone,” said in a telephone interview. 

There are also differences in the length of time men grieve, compared with women, and how long it takes to move on. An old axiom that “women mourn, men replace” turns out to be untrue.
“It used to be thought that men grieve acutely and heal more quickly, and that women grieve chronically over a longer time period,” said George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychology professor at Columbia University in New York.
But now, Dr. Bonanno said, many researchers believe that grief follows a more complex pattern in both men and women. 

“No matter what sex, we oscillate between positive and negative emotions, between waves of sadness about the loss and hope for the future,” he said in a telephone interview. “This can be frustrating for men, who often seek the ‘quick-fix’ approach.” 

Sherry Schachter, director of bereavement services at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx and a grief specialist for 25 years, said in a telephone interview: “While women grieve intuitively, open to expressing their feelings, men are ‘instrumental’ grievers. They’re not comfortable with talking about their feelings, and they prefer to do things to cope.”
In a men’s group she has run for the last few years, she said, “I never ask, ‘How do you feel?’ Rather, I ask, ‘What did you do?’ ”
In some cases, what men are doing is taking grief counseling into their own hands. Mr. Feldman started a biweekly bereavement group for widowers on Martha’s Vineyard, and two years ago spearheaded the Men’s Bereavement Network, a nonprofit organization seeking to establish and support grief groups for men nationwide. The network is helping to establish bereavement groups for men in places as diverse as DePere, Wis.; Clearwater, Fla.; and Danvers, Mass. 

At a recent peer-led gathering of the Martha’s Vineyard group begun by Mr. Feldman, eight men in their late 40s to late 80s sat around the dining room table at the home of the session leader, Foster Greene. Dr. George Cohn, a local psychiatrist, sat alongside, for the most part a silent observer.
A retired fisherman, at 85 one of the older members of the group, spoke in a low voice, looking mostly into his coffee cup. His wife of 54 years died in 2010. 

“I don’t know about you guys,” he said, quickly glancing around the table of men, “but for me it gets harder, not easier.” The other men nodded.
Later Dr. Cohn said, “Sometimes that’s all a man wants or needs — a sympathetic ear.” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/health/26grief.html?_r=2&hpw