Midtown Delights

Hanging out at Midtown Coffee in Quincy, Ca. Rainy day. Reading, drawing, and this:



Coffee:
Ethiopian dark

Grub:
Cherry turnover

Found at C.A.N.

Found a can of this at C.A.N.:


It's delicious, smoky, and hot, man! I've been adding it to spice up my fixin's and I've learned to moderate it.

Chipotles are smoked jalapeno peppers. The adobo sauce usually includes the following ingredients:
cumin, paprika, coriander, fennel, yellow mustard, garlic, onion, ancho, pasilla and Mexican oregano.

In case you want to geek out on it, here's some background info on Chipotle Adobado

Chipotle, which comes from the Nahuatl word “chilpoctli” with "chil" meaning chile pepper and "poctli” meaning smoked (was originally “pochilli”). Morita means “small blackberry” in Spanish.

The ancient civilization of Teotihuacan was the largest city/ state in Mesoamerica (located north of modern day Mexico City). The original habitants of Teotihuacan smoked chiles hundreds of years before the Aztecs (1345-1521) did. This "smoke drying" process was initially used for drying meats but they found that smoking allowed the chiles to be stored for a long period of time. Teotihuacan is actually the Aztec name for the city, which translates to "Place of the Gods" as the original name has not been deciphered from surviving name glyphs (unique marks that collectively add up to the spelling of a word) at the site. Chile historians believe that the Aztecs also smoked jalapeno peppers because the fleshy, thick walls of the jalapeno were often difficult to dry in the sun and tended to rot.

Jalapeños are named after the town of Xalapa (often spelled as Jalapa) in Véracruz State (although no longer commercially grown there), and are also known by the names cuaresmeños, gordo or Lenten chiles. In Veracruz jalapenos are called “chiles gordos”, in Puebla and Oaxaca they're are called “huachinangos”. In its dried form, the traditional chipotle chile (known as chipotle “meco”) is a dull tan to deep coffee brown in color with a wrinkled, ridged surface. It is usually 2” to 4” long and 1” wide, with a medium thick flesh.

A Spanish friar living in Mexico in the 1500s wrote of a dish he ate in Cholula (modern day Puebla) called "teatzin" which had a sauce made from chipotle and pasilla chiles that was used to stew Lenten palm flowers and fresh jalapeno chiles.

After the fall of the Aztec Empire (1345-1521), smoked chiles were found mostly in central and southern Mexico markets of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla and Veracruz.

(from spicesinc.com) 

Today's Breakfast of Champions

Coffee: San Francisco Bay French Roast beans (Costco)

Adulterated with:

1. Kirkland Organic Virgin Coconut Oil
2. Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter (unsalted)
3. Richi Turmeric Ginger Chai

Grub: homemade chocolate chip cookie (thanks Margaret)

My New Solar Oven

I usually don't like cooking in the Summer. Heats up my kitchen. Since I don't have A/C I want to avoid this. Here is a solution. It's kinda fun to play around with different food stuffs to cook. So far mostly it's been veggies and chicken.





It's just a glass tube, vacuum sealed with a dark coating, a simple reflector and a tray that slides inside the tube.

I'm also experimenting with cooking times and placement of the oven in my yard.

Found at C.A.N.

This seems tragic to me.

Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted. 

• Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food. 
• Global quantitative food losses and waste per year are roughly 30% for cereals, 40-50% for root crops, fruits and vegetables, 20% for oil seeds, meat and dairy plus 35% for fish. 
• Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes). 
• The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tonnes in 2009/2010). 
• Per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-eastern Asia, each throw away only 6-11 kg a year.

Here's the source.

Found at C.A.N.

Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food — respectively 670 and 630 million tonnes. 

Found at C.A.N.

I occasionally work for a local food bank called Community Action Network. It's a great service to a community that has people in need. They distribute food for free to folks that need it. I like to help out and I get some free food. I'm amazed how much overproduction of food there is floating around. The are a lot of canned goods, but loads of fresh foods too. Much of it is approaching expiration. If you go look you can find surprises there.

Food losses and waste amounts to roughly US$ 680 billion in industrialized countries and US$ 310 billion in developing countries.