California magazine blog

OCD for Vitamin E

I am a slave of habit, ritualistically repeating the same comfortable routine most days.  One of the more enjoyable habits was my daily spinach salad, brimming with tomatoes, cucumbers, and other healthy vegetables.  Eat a complex salad a day and they say you can you live to be at least 80.

But then spinach was removed from my life, contaminated with E. coli. I was devastated; iceberg lettuce is not spinach. As I grudgingly munched on watery lettuce, I dreamed of the day I could eat spinach again, in salads and omelets, steamed on the side of a chicken breast. I was Rain Man without his K-Mart underwear.

As if matters could not get any worse, wonderful news out of the FDA:

Less than a week after the Food and Drug Administration lifted its warning on fresh spinach grown in California’s Salinas Valley, a popular brand of lettuce grown there has been recalled over concerns about E. coli contamination.

Great, how am I supposed to eat a salad now?  Rain Man just got thrown out the window; now I’m Linus without his security blanket.

--Eugene

Burp alert

Today in the lemons-make-lemonade category of global warming, the BBC reports that Greenland is producing arctic icecap beer. Yes, you heard right, beer made from some of the purest water on the planet, hot off the icecap.

So, in theory, we can cool down from global warming by drinking this new variant of beer, a scenario sounds faintly cannibalistic, or something screwed up. (Sort of like parrots who eat chicken wings? Or like at the beginning of the Civil War, when people packed picnics and went to spectate at battles?)

But then, it got me wondering: if everyone drinks a lot of beer, they'll produce, um, a lot of gas. Warm gas.

Folks, I think we have another feedback loop on our hands...

--Meghan

Remember what we said about one part tequila?

One of the NYT's top emailed stories this week is about cocktail science, something that we really wish that Lawrence Berkeley Lab would get a move on.

According to the article, 1998 was the year of the cocktail invasion, though it's unclear if they mean for just one particular restaurant or for the boozing set at large. (Sounds about right for the latter.)

Here's a swig:

José Andrés and his chef, Katsuya Fukushima, include two cocktail courses in the 20-plus-course menu that constitutes a meal at Mr. Andrés's Minibar, inside the Café Atlántico in Washington. One is a whiskey sour topped off with a passion fruit foam; the other is a little spray can, from which you can mist as much mojito into your mouth as you like.

The pair are currently perfecting two new drinks, a "dirty" martini and a carbonated mojito "espherication." For the martini, they blend olive juice, vermouth and gin with xanthan gum and calcium chloride and drop it into a sodium alginate and water solution to form stable olive-shaped blobs. It is served as a lone olive in an empty glass; it reverts to a liquid state when popped into the mouth. The mojito is made with rum, lime and mint and shaped into a sphere through the same process, then carbonated in a pressurized container filled with carbon dioxide to mimic the bubbly mouth-feel of a real mojito.

Hmm, mojitos...Cezar...sunny late afternoon...and it is almost 6 o'clock...

--ML