Day 34 - Matzah Egg, Tuna. Chicken

Ack, look! Two types of meat in one day! I didn't even realize until now.

Matzah Egg...what is it? Well, as you may well know, we're right in the middle of passover, so I had to do something with matzah. To make matzah egg, you soak a matzah in warm water, spread it with butter and salt, break it up into a bowl, and top it with a soft-boiled (free-range organic) egg or two. I botched it, for what is perhaps the fifth time, by not boiling the egg long enough. I almost always manage to do something wrong. You can find the recipe on my blog.

For lunch I made tuna salad with the canned stuff and mayonaise, then spread it on whole wheat matzah. Is that better than white matzah? Not much I guess. On the side I washed and peeled the rest of the baby carrots from the newest CSA.

We went to a pot-luckish dinner with some other families in the area, so I did not have much maneuvaribilty with what to eat. Simply put, I ate everything. Brisket, chicken, roasted potatoes, cilantro salad, spinach pie, steamed broccoli, sauteed mushrooms, cake, fruit, and probably a couple other things. We brought the cilantro salad. I think I'm welcome to the occasional dinner where I eat whatever I want...and at least everything was homemade and fresh.

In the conventional Gefen mayo was potassium sorbate (and EDTA, but you already know all about that). "Da !@#$ am I eating?"

Function: stops yeast from reproducing, effectively preventing fermentation or spoiling.

Used in: wine and grape juice to prevent fermentation. The more alcoholic the wine is, the less you need, so grape juice (or my mayo <__>) needs far more than a 14% alcohol pinot.

Structure: found in solutions as K+ ions and ascorbic acid.

Apparently, somebody tried to get potassium sorbate authorized as a seed coat for preserving soil elements (I couldn't say how that works) in organic production, but thankfully the review panel shot the chemical down as completely synthetic, which it is. According to one of the reviewers, who has a Ph.D. in food science and nutrition and a minor in biochemistry and is an organic processing consultant, organic inspector, and nutrition researcher, synthetic potassium sorbate production is not environmentally sustainable. The chemical can be derived from blueberries, anyways, so why make it synthetically?

Asparagus's call: if you know that the potassium sorbate you're eating is from blueberries, fine, go ahead. If you don't know, get something else to eat. And just so we're clear, it will probably be effectively impossible to know. Sorry about that.