Monday, March 16, 2009

Day 8 - Bagel, Flatbread, Blintzes

I have on days and off days. Today, I'd say I tended to lean towards an off day.

For breakfast, I had a toasted onion bagel with plain cream cheese. Except for some obvious basics, like flour, onion, milk, and cultures, I don't actually know what was in the food.

For lunch, I had half of this bake-it-yourself tomato and basil flatbread from the freezer section at Trader Joe's. I had the ingredients, but I threw the box out and I don't really feel like running to the curb to get it back from the recycling bin. Before eating, I did make sure I recognized everything, which I did. Tasted pretty good, ahaha.

For dinner, I started with a salad with romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, steamed asparagus tips (leftover from my cream of asparagus soup, the recipe of which I got from a vegetarian cookbook), cucumber slices, and a oriental vinagrette. As a main course, I ate cheese blintzes from the frozen kosher section at Lucky. Seeing as they had quite a lot of stuff no-go on my diet (for instance, enriched wheat flour, modified corn starch, locust bean gum, and others), I am now inspired to make my own. I found a recipe in a Jewish American cookbook for blintz loaf, so hopefully I'll make that in the next couple of weeks.

Anyways, my mentioning locust bean gum brings us to the first daily segment, "Da !@#$ am I eating?":
locust bean gum- a polysacharide (a long chain made of sugars) made of the sugars galactose and mannose. It is extracted from the endosperm of the seeds of the carob tree Ceretonia siliqua, which grows in Mediterranean countries.
  • The ancient Egyptians used locust bean gum to bind the wrapping of mummies.
  • In more recent times is is used as a thickener in salad dressings, cosmetics, sauces, as an agent in ice cream that prevents ice crystals from forming, and as a fat substitute.
  • In pastry fillings, it prevents "weeping" (syneresis) of the water in the filling, keeping the pastry crust crisp.

2 comments:

K Lai said...

What's with the limitations? Jews have it bad enough starved of pork, but now it's eating "real food"? That's the dark side of the culinary world, man. People get so swept up in living it's like Kerouac wrote, everyone forgets "their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom."

Vegetarians are just a buncha squares who lack the palette to appreciate meat. But if you're going to look at what's "real food", that's just a bunch of swept up nonsense geared heavily towards nominalism.

You should give "Introduction to Zen Buddhism" by Danestz Suzuki a read. Be the dry turd on the streets!

Daniel said...

Yeah well it's a shame I have to resort to this in order to stay healthy.
Go cry ADM, McDonald's, and USDA a river. I'm not the bad guy here.

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