Sometimes you feel like a nut.

So last Sunday I went on an expedition. I was determined to find the perfect peanut oil. I was determined to buy like a gallon of it to keep in my pantry. I usually only buy oil a couple times a year. We use a little bit at a time, but just in case you need to use a half a cup for a recipe or you want to fry, I like to have a big jug on hand.

Apparently those days are over.

Early Sunday morning I loaded up Thing 1 and drove to Fairway. I left Thing 2 and DH (who has been very sick recently) at home to rest.

For those of you who don't live in Manhattan, Fairway is a locally owned grocery store chain that has recently gone from three stores to I think 7 and maybe more. They have prepared foods, all the conventional varieties and a great selection of organics. Their organics range from everything from fruits and veggies, canned goods, frozen goods, brand name prepared foods to their own store brand of beef, free range eggs and even grass fed organic milk from a dairy farm in PA (The most local source of dairy I have EVER been able to find outside of the farmer's market and even that is 2 states away). They also produce/ import their own store brand varieties of everything from oiled packed sun dried tomatoes to whole bean coffees to fresh baked baguettes. I tend to buy their store brand items because they are slightly less expensive, high quality and they turn through them really quickly so they are fresher.

Fairway has organic olive oil bottled under their store brand label that is imported from Italy. One liter costs $11.99. The conventional variety costs $8.99. That is an increase in price of 33%, but I feel good about it and I don't burn though it all that quickly. Unfortunately they don't import any other oils under their store brand, so I was forced to look at national names.

I was not surprised to find that there was row after row of 'Vegetable Oil' and a long row of 'Canola Oil'. Down on the very bottom shelf I found one enormous gallon jug of peanut oil. Success! At least I thought. This peanut oil was a very inexpensive brand that listed nothing about how the oil was produced. I though for sure they used a hexane solvent to get at those nuts. I put it back.

The only other company even offering peanut oil was Planters. I have always liked that little peanut guy with the top hat and the monocle. I have a positive impression of the Planters company (apparently a division of Kraft Foods and even Nabisco-I am pretty sure all industrial food companies are owned by just one big conglomerate, but I haven't found the smoking gun yet. Just kidding, I don't want to get sued for libel!) But I figured if there was anyone offering pressed peanut oil, it would be from the company that produces nuts specifically.

On a side note I like companies that only do one thing. I like it when a clothing company sticks only to doing clothes but maybe does different brands. I like furniture companies that resist the temptation to make sheets and vases, you know? So I appreciate that the Planters product line sticks pretty close to nuts and their brethren.

The only problem with this oil? The bottle didn't say whether or not it was expeller pressed or solvent extracted. That was a red flag. Usually when a food product has the attribute that is the prize of the moment, it will be visible. Maybe they won't post it on the front, but other expeller pressed items I have come across have pretty sizable type on the back of the product calling out why I should pay more money for their product. I bought the small bottle anyway thinking the best of the company.

Next I did exactly what I would encourage anyone to do. I went to their website to do some research. Not only did I not find out anything about the method of extraction, they didn't even have peanut oil listed as a product!! They must not make a lot of peanut oil. So I moved onto phase 2. I emailed the company to ask them how they obtained the oil.

I received a response the next day that read as follows: "...Kraft Foods purchases oil used in our products from well established food oil manufacturers that use refining processes to clean and otherwise prepare the oil for food use as required by FDA regulation and good manufacturing processes." Ummm....I could have guessed all that.

I wrote them back and used more specific language. They actually wrote me back same day, and spilled it. They pressed first and used solvents on the remainder. Sigh. It stinks that I bought the bottle before I checked into it. However, I am really pleased that they did in fact come clean with me about what kind of process they used. I think half the issue I find with processed food is the lengths at which the food companies go to try and hide how they are doing business.

On a brighter note, a dear girlfriend of mine was at Whole Foods the other day and called me to say that they had organic, unrefined, expeller pressed peanut oil there. Hopefully it will not cost $45 a bottle once I find the time to get there. Perhaps this is a worthy project for the upcoming weekend.

Yuk, that doesn't belong in my food!

As a continuation from yesterday, in regards to vegetable oil, How do they get all that vegetable oil out of all those soybeans and corn kernels and rapeseeds?

If you are like me and assume the best, you would have visions of the seeds all being ground up and pressed to extract the oil, probably on some contraption in a factory that looks very much like a Dickens novel. Almost like Oliver Twist was sitting in the employee break room. I don't have a scientific mind or any scientific experience, so my solutions to problems are somewhat simplistic.

Well as it turns out, pressing through a machine called an expeller is one way of extracting oil. But as you'd guessed, it recovers only so much oil. The leftover waste of crushed up seed pulp still has a lot of oil into. So what the vast majority of manufacturers do is use a solvent made of a gasoline byproduct called Hexane (C6H14) to extract the oil. The process of using a solvent is much cheaper and more efficient than pressing the oils.
Hexane is a colorless liquid that evaporates pretty easily because of it's low boiling point (50-70 degrees Celsius). And if I am reading these websites correctly, it is the part of gasoline that smells like gasoline, because it is one of the first compounds in the gas to evaporate. Use of Hexane as a solvent has been deemed safe because the hexane is largely nonreactive with the food with which it is coming in contact. Hexane is also used in glues for shoes, leather products, roofing and textile manufacturing.

The seeds are crushed and then flaked into very small particles. That mash is combined with hexane and heated with steam. This process extracts all the oil in an oil and hexane solution.
That solution is taken away and the hexane is removed through an heated evaporation process. The oil is further refined and cleaned while the hexane is reused in another batch of mash.
Most of the hexane that is lost remains in the mash, or the leftover fiber and pulp of whatever seed was crushed in the first place. I didn't do a lot of research as to what happens to the leftover mash. I don't want to extrapolate on where it goes, I would bet that it is used in some industrial function.

I firmly believe that natural products are the way to go for my family. I don't want to eat anything that has had harsh chemicals used to make it. I also don't like the idea that it required me several days of research to find out how this food product ends up in my belly. Foods like this are faceless. You don't know who grew them, how they were processed or much else. These are foods that our great grandparents weren't cooking with a whole lot. Butter and Lard were much easier to render. And although olive oils and others have been made for centuries, Olives were not such a plentiful crop on the cold east coast of the colonial United States. Our food culture simply did not include olive oil because it wasn't available.

Today, I am looking for alternative oils. And there are alternatives. While I'd like to stay away from Canola, I understand that not everyone will find fault with it's GMO heritage. I have decided that I'd like to try peanut oil. It has a high smoke point and it is a food that in it's most basic state is edible. Cottonseeds, not so much.



Please read my blog tomorrow as I look for a peanut oil that is made without hexane solvents...








Notes:

Hexane. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. wikipedia.org 9 May, 2010.
Vegetable Oil Processing. Environmental Protection Agency. epa.gov. 10 May, 2010

What is a Canola?

This question was one of the first that prompted me to start this long journey of education and food discovery. The answers were shocking enough to me that it motivated me to start blogging, so that I can share my answers with anyone willing to click towards my page. Oil and it's process to the table will consume much of my postings this week. So if you like what you read today-stay tuned.

I have been cooking with vegetable oil and canola oil for years. In fact I can't remember having olive oil in the house until I was at least in high school. As an adult I use olive oil for about 80% of the cooking I do in my house. But there are certain applications that require something flavorless. I like veg oil for baking muffins, stir frying homemade Chinese food and our babysitter frys french toast in it (among other things). I also use a lot of butter. I really really love butter, and compared to my fellow Americans, I am not afraid of it in the least. But this post is about vegetable oil, not butter

At the beginning of this project I got to asking myself, as I had before without actually looking for the answer, "What is a Canola?" And for that matter, "If vegetables are fat free, how are they producing all this oil?"

You ready?

Vegetable oil comes from seeds. Kind of like nuts which we easily understand have a lot of oil. Vegetable oil is a generic industry term for any kind of oil derived from plant seeds, like corn, soybeans, cottonseeds or rapeseeds. What are rapeseeds? Yeah, more on that later.

Soybean oil is probably the most common veg oil. It's the one you never see labeled on it's own in the grocery store. And there are a heck of a lot of soybeans grown in this country. Check the ingredients on a bottle of veg oil and it will probably say 'soybean oil'. But in some processed foods veg oil could be a general term for any oil that fits the bill, corn, soybeans, cottenseed, etc. All these oils are essentially flavorless and are interchangeable, so manufacturers look for the cheapest. It may be any of these depending on the season.

So what are rapeseeds? Rapeseed is a type of oil seed producing plant that is especially productive at producing oil. But the big issue is that naturally evolving rapeseeds produce an oil that tastes really gross. It has high levels of erucic acid. I am not sure if it's toxic, but it tastes gross. Hundreds of years ago, rapeseed oil was used for oil lamps in Asia and Europe. In the Second World War it was used in manufactering.
Well, as manufacturers usually do, a few scientists in the 60s and 70s in Canada got together and said, hey, we have an opportunity to really have a cheap plentiful supply of cooking oil that is low in saturated fat (the evil fat of it's day). But we have to work on this plant to produce edible oil. Through selective breeding they produced a rapeseed plant that produced edible oil. And the FDA pronounced it safe for consumption in the early 80s.
Now the problem is what do we call it? 'Rapeseed oil' doesn't sound like a best seller. So the scientists said, it's edible because we got rid of the erucic acid so let's call it CANada Oil, Low Acid. And canola as we know it was born.
Since the birth of Canola, scientists have tinkered with it even further. Now 80% of the canola oil on the market comes from genetically modified canola plants.

Tomorrow we'll discuss how they get the oil out of all those soybeans, corn kernels and rapeseeds. Then maybe you'll be willing to join in the land of peanuts. (Or palm, or coconuts....)

Notes:

Canola. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. wikipedia.org. 11 May, 2010

Vegetable Oil. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. wikipedia.org. 11 May, 2010

Recycling

It seems like the whole weekend was non-stop. DH was sick all weekend, the kids were squirmy. Trying to get everything done around the house is always difficult, but when anyone is sick things just get even tougher. We even had to cancel our Mother's Day plans, so that was a bummer.

But a Mother's Day gift! I got a more than an hour in the kitchen. Yes, I consider this a gift. Even while sick, DH kept the kids occupied while I got some quiet time to do what I love. I made meatballs. The below is a great recipe. It is easy, it freezes well and I have made some changes to a classic meatball to make it crazy easy.
I love meatballs because they make 'recycling' easier. There are all kind of things that you can throw into meatballs, leftover veggies (especially greens), cheese. They aren't as good as soup for recycling leftovers, but they are pretty darn good.
Fortunately too, the kids love them. Thing 1 eats the meatballs I make almost 90% of the time (factor out 10% for over snacking and not really being hungry for mealtime). And yesterday Thing 2 ate them for the first time. He shoved them into his mouth by the chubby fistful. This just makes a mama proud.
Tonight we had the leftovers. Cook Once, Eat Twice. The kids love them so much that I make them in sauce, but I also add them to an easy veggie soup by dropping the meatballs into boiling broth in which I cook veggies and orzo pasta. The kids, both of them, always inhale it!

You can make these with any ground meat. Beef is good, turkey is a little lighter tasting, and sausage is delicious too.

Lazy Mama's Meatballs

(It's best to have all ingredients at room temperature)
1 pound ground meat
1/3 cup of breadcrumbs (unseasoned are best) (ground day old baguettes are even better, they are drier than conventional canned breadcrumbs)
splash of milk
1/4 cup of parmesean cheese
2 beaten eggs
granulated garlic to taste
italian seasoning to taste
red pepper to taste
salt and pepper to taste
prepared tomato spaghetti sauce

Heat the prepared sauce on the stove top until simmering. Start with the breadcrumbs in a bowl, pour a splash of milk over them to wet the breadcrumbs, but just enough milk that it will all be absorbed, you don't want a pool of milk at the bottom. Let the breadcrumbs sit for a few minutes to soak up the milk. Add the ground meat, cheese and all the seasonings and an additional sprinkle of dry breadcrumbs. Mix thoroughly. Add the beaten eggs and incorporate. Use a tablespoon measure and make 1 tbsp size balls of meat. Drop the balls directly into the simmering sauce and let them gently simmer for 30 minutes or until done. Stir the pot gently so as not to break up the meat balls.

Local or Organic or ????

As yesterday dawned I was pretty sure that I had a direct path ahead of me. Buy more organics and buy more from the farmer's market. But through the course of the day it became apparent that my clarity had become a little cloudy.

Although I have been shopping at the Inwood Farmer's Market for a couple of years now and I have loved the high quality food, I had never actually asked the question 'Is your food organic?' I just naturally assumed that because these farmer's were pursuing the avenue of selling their fare at the farmer's market rather than contacting a supermarket distributor, that they must be organic. I also see all the folks from my neighborhood that I know from the CSA, and I know that they prize organic foods like I do. Surely the fact that other health minded folks I know shopped there, that MUST mean that everything was organic!

I have known for sometime about the USDA organic program. I know because of Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, that family farms must pay a government certification company a lot of money to become certified organic, so they can stick that USDA ORGANIC logo on all their produce. Many family run farms simply do not make enough money to pay for the certification process, but their food is organic nonetheless. My CSA makes no effort to hide the fact that they fall into this category, and I always assumed that the folks at my farmer's market did too.

Well, I got to asking people. There were several stands that were obvious. Milk Thistle is labeled as organic, Bread Alone Breads too are labeled. The mill selling beans and flour are all labeled. The turkey however....the turkeys were not given hormones and antibiotics, but they did not eat organic feed. So they are not organic, even though theirs is a better practice than at most conventional animal farms. The apples are grown with both chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I have heard from my own CSA that growing fruits organically are especially challenging because there are so many other critters besides us that like fruit. Those buggies just get to it first. All of the vegetable stands sold veggies that were not sprayed with pesticides, but they all used chemical fertilizers. There was one exception, Hawthorne Valley Farm sells organic yogurts and breads and other delicious goodies. They are a not for profit biodynamic farm in Ghent, NY and they were selling organic salad mix. But that was it, no other veggies for sale. It was pricey, but I bought it.

So there I was at the market feeling a little lead astray. But not rightly so, none of these farms had ever lead me to believe that they were certified organic. None of them labeled their food with a misleading label. However I was blissfully happy to assume that they were organic when they weren't. But I didn't feel that I was left with much of a choice. I supposed I could have gone to my supermarket and bought all organic veggies that were trucked in from California. Those veggies would have been from upstanding but nonetheless factory farms like Earthbound farms who grow food in huge monocultures and manage to turn a huge profit. They are wonderful farms that started out small and grew through success. But I don't like that whole 3,000 mile trip that they make across country. Not only is it an amazing waste of gas, but I get fewer days to enjoy my food because it is older by the time it arrives in Manhattan. And the nutrients in food diminishes with each moment after it has been harvested. I have bought potatoes at the farmer's market that were in the ground 5 hours before I bought them (the farmer told me).

And furthermore, buying local means that my food dollar will stay within the economy of New York State. When I purchase a California grown carrot, my grocery store gets one chunk of my food dollar, a distributor or importer gets another chunk and that CA farm gets the last chunk. I am not sure whose chunks are big or little , but I know a thing or two about the wholesale industry, the profit is divided up amongst the people that connect your product to you.

Today I have decided that local is more important than organic. I was hoping that my choices would be more clear. I envisioned a big yellowish-maybe-slightly-orangish crooked carrot that had a pair of evil eyes that were red and swirling around. I would know NOT to buy that carrot because it was bad news. But the choices are not that easy. And it doesn't seem like anyone is talking about all this gray in the marketplace. They are just making black and white statements. Buy more of this and less of that. Eat this, and not that.

We all live in gray. I think the most important thing for each of us is to ask the questions and try and make your way though the cloud.

Waste Not, Want Not: Part I

If you are going to write a blog about eating healthier and staying on a budget you really have to tackle the subject of waste. Waste is something that most people in my generation are keenly aware of. Those of us who grew up in the 80s will always remember the anti-litter campaigns and the grainy images of the overflowing dumps and landfills on the nightly news as our trash problem slowly emerged as something that needed to be discussed.

A weekly trip to the grocery store with my family includes taking a list so that we can stay on a budget, but invariably we end up at least 15% over that budget because of all the items that end up in our cart that were never on the list. It is not the kids that clamor for these food items. They are really too young for that kind of begging, and our problem now is getting the kids to eat at all, rather than overeating. It is myself and DH that are swayed into buying things like Kashi bars and $7 per pound dried blueberries. Well, okay, it is mostly me.

At least once a month I have to throw away foods that have not been consumed. It is mostly leftover side dishes that didn't get eaten, the ends of a loaf of bread, or juice that now tastes acidic and turned. There are always wilted veggies and brown fruit that we throw away. I sometimes lovingly refer to my refrigerator as 'The Food Museum', because everything is neatly packed into tupperware and on display. Look but don't touch.

Andrew Martin of the New York Times wrote in 2008 that

"...Americans waste an astonishing amount of food-an estimated 27% of the food available for consumption, according to a government study...It works out to be about a pound of food every day for every American."

Martin reports that it breaks it down into the following categories for a family of four each month:

18.5 pounds of grains

10.5 pounds of processed fruits and veggies

24 pounds of fresh fruits and veggies

22 pounds of liquid milk

10.4 pounds of meat and fish

15 pounds of sweetener

8.6 pounds of oils

12.8 pounds of other foods (including eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, dry beans, peas and lentils and dairy other than liquid milk)

Now his numbers include uneaten restaurant food and food that grocery stores throw away because of spoilage (also think foods that are unspoiled but past their expiration date) but it does not include ready to eat foods that grocery stores throw away like rotisserie chickens and sandwiches and soup. So although you could step back from these numbers and say "I am not directly responsible for this", we are consumers within this industrialized food chain, so technically we are culpable.

Martin's numbers were right in the middle of what I found when I searched "Americans waste food" at Google.com. Some sites quoted more along the lines of 12% of the total food available while some more politically motivated sites quoted closer to 50%.

My current mission of shopping for unprocessed foods, I am hoping, will have 2 outcomes. One, That I will cook more often and eat higher quality things. And two, food will become less convenient so I will eat less of it. But I think there is a third thing factored into these two objectives, because I will be expending more time cooking I will be less apt to waste foods into which I have put all that effort. In a sense, food will become more valuable to me and my family. And for the Frugal Franny I am deep inside, I will save money in the process.

Isn't this what we all want?

Stay tuned this week, I bought ramps at the farmer's market and I am not sure what to do with them. And tomorrow I go in search of pressed peanut oil at the conventional grocery. I wonder if I will find it.

Works Cited

Andrew Martin. One County's Table Scraps, Another Country's Meal. New York Times Week in Review. nytimes.com. 18 May 2008.

Whole Wheat Pizza Crust

Okay before you just click away from the page because you read the title. Hear me out on this one. I had mentioned a couple of days ago that I had bought some whole wheat flour from a mill at the farmer's market in Inwood.

The Inwood Farmer's Market is located on Isham st between Broadway and Seaman. It is just a block up from 207th street. It is open every Saturday from 8am-3pm. The market is held every week year round and you can buy everything there, turkey meat (breast and ground among others), milk (whole, skim, 2% and cream), organic breads and pastries, of course seasonal produce and juices (some certified organic, some that just practice no spraying, etc), there is a fishmonger, pastured organic beef, sheep's milk cheeses, sustainable WINE (that's a new one), and my new best friends, the mill people. The folks representing the mill had various organic grain flours for sale, spelt, rye, whole wheat, etc. I have had only fair success with whole wheat flours in the past, so I opted for the 'Half-White' which has had half of the wheat germ removed. It was $4 for a 2 pound sack. They also had some dried beans, I bought black beans but they had garbanzo beans and navy beans and kidney beans as well.

I knew I wanted to make a pizza, but I did not have a good pizza crust recipe. And I like a certain kind of crust. I found on my Google search all manner of pizza crusts. some with olive oil, some without, some with honey, some that let the dough rise and some that were quick to put together and make. I finally, after reading a dozen, settled on one from the website http://www.easypizzacrusts.com/ I really hope that is someone's blog out there because I can't imagine paying a fee every month to support a website like that. They do have a lot of good recipes and some good tips about how to make the pizza better.

At first I was scared that if I chose a recipe designed for whole wheat flour that it would be tough and cardboardy like healthy food should be (c'mon, you know you feel that way too). But I decided that would be the one to try.

Okay--Attention! Parent Tip: The dough has to stand for 20-25 minutes. It is really easy and quick to add all the ingredients, so do that while the kids are doing something like watching TV where they won't move around too much since you'll be sticky and pulling them down by the ear as they are climbing up the bookshelves will be difficult. Let it stand while you do something that requires your full attention, like bathtime. And if it ends up standing longer than 25 minutes it doesn't really matter so much anyhow, it won't taste or act any different. I got my dough kneaded and rolled out and dressed just as I was going in to put Thing 1 to bed tonight. It went into a 400 degree oven and I went in to put him to bed. by the time I got out I had this gorgeous pizza waiting for me all hot and delicious. My toppings? Baby spinach, onions, olives, some leftover spaghetti sauce, and chucks of that peppercorn chevre I mentioned from last night. Then I dusted the whole thing with Parmesan cheese and black pepper. I don't do a lot of cheese on my pizzas partly out of habit since that heavily copyrighted diet where you track all your food units assigns a particularly high measurement to cheese. And now, I just don't eat a lot of it. But my life is no worse off, and I still do eat cheese when I really, really want it.

The pizza came out beautifully! But a couple things to note: I think I didn't knead it long enough (rushing through it because your kids are screaming will do that to you). The dough was very tender, but that's not such a bad thing. I just expected it to be much chewier. I'll knead it more next time. Also, I am fuller than I usually am after pizza even though I ate less. I have been making homemade pizza for years, but I always buy a store-bought crust. I can put away some serious slices, but I always feel like I have never eaten enough with the white flour crusts. This crust was tender, the wheat flour had a nice nuttiness that paired well with the chevre, and all that extra fiber filled me up. My first experiment was a success! I always thought pizza crusts were really hard. Yeast is a very intimidating ingredient. But it shouldn't be.

I have a feeling that Thing 1 will be eating some of this tomorrow (if he doesn't notice that I put spinach on it).

Whole Wheat Pizza Crust

1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour

1 pkg instant yeast (.25 oz)

1/2 tsp salt

8 oz water, warmed to 110 degrees (i used the hottest tap water I could get out of my tap and it was fine)

2 tbsp veg oil (I used olive oil)

(I also added a squirt of hone, about 1 tsp--sorry for bastardizing your recipe easypizzacrusts.com!!)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Prepare pizza pan by spraying with non-stick cooking spray (i just lined the pan in foil) Combine all dry ingredients, except whole wheat flour, into a large mixing bowl. Next, add liquid ingredients and gradually add whole wheat flour, until dough mixture becomes stiff and hard to stir. You may not have to use all the whole wheat flour. However if the dough mixture is still too moist, feel free to add more all purpose flour to stiffen the dough. Cover the bowl with a clean towel and set aside for 20-25 minutes, allowing the dough to rise. Empty dough out onto a clean, floured surface. Knead by had 6-8 times, it may be necessary to add additional flour to the surface to keep the dough from sticking. Roll into desired shape and thickness. Place rolled dough onto prepared pizza pan, add favorite sauce and toppings. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes, depending on crust thickness. (Whole Wheat Pizza Crust. easypizzacrusts.com, 7 May, 2010)