You Can’t Make a Silk Purse…
This was the concluding dinner of a pretty mediocre week of cooking. I’m still trying to get a grip on the new school year schedule, soccer practice driving, other after-school activity driving, and the mom-homework-helpline. Given all of that confusion, my attention to cooking has been pretty minimal. I would like to eat something good, and feed something good to the family, but I’ve been lucky to just feed us something nourishing.
On Saturday we went to an away soccer game that was almost an hour away. That took up a good portion of the day. But to give equal time to Annie’s interests we went apple picking on the way home, and with the spectacular weather it was a good day to choose for it. We returned home on the later side, and tossed around the idea of heading out for dinner, but then fatigue and laziness took over and we decided to stay in. Therefore, it was my job to go freezer diving to see what I could dig out. I offered the girls the choice of fresh pasta fagiole or dumplings, and you see what they picked. So dinner was Trader Joe’s pork dumplings (a freezer staple for just this kind of night), frozen vegetables, and brown rice. Not shown in the picture is that I made a dipping sauce for the dumplings. The dinner filled bellies, but was pretty boring. In my general disgust with the meal, I plated Joe’s in the silly way you see in this picture. But it just goes to prove the old adage that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or a great dinner out of frozen food.
Goodbye Raw Cookie Dough
I don’t think many people could have missed the recent news regarding the recall of millions of salmonella contaminated eggs. If you’d like to read more of the details on this recall, you can find them on fellow About.com Guide Vince Ianelli’s Pediatrics Guide site. What I’d like like to share with you are the lessons I’ve learned from this situation:
Lesson 1: Mom, you’re always right. You know it, I know it, and now the world knows it. We should never eat unbaked cookie dough unless we used pasteurized eggs to make it. It doesn’t matter how tempting that chocolate morsel is peeking out of the top of the mound of dough. I used to believe that because I very carefully cracked the egg so that it didn’t come in contact with the shell, the salmonella wouldn’t get into my dough. Wrong, the salmonella is now in the egg, not just on the shell.
Lesson 2: Mom, here’s another point that you’ve been right about. Always wash your hands before, during, and after cooking. If you touch the shells or touch the raw egg and touch something else without washing up, you’ve possibly contaminated your kitchen with bacteria. It seems extreme, but salmonella poisoning is pretty extreme too.
Lesson 3: Don’t eat runny eggs in restaurants. Your eggs should be very cooked. Apparently a lot of the illnesses have been contracted in restaurants. I really don’t want to think about what goes on in restaurant kitchens, but it’s as bad as you might imagine.
Lesson 4: Save your food packaging. If you were one of the many people who transferred your eggs to your refrigerator door, you don’t know whether you have a recalled egg, do you?
Lesson 5: Okay, I’m going to get a little political on this one. There really is such a thing as a company that is too big. From what I’ve been reading on this recall, our country’s egg producers are limited to a very few that produce millions and millions of eggs. For the sake of argument, and to leave PETA out of this one, let’s put aside for a moment the feelings of those poor chickens in their lousy living conditions. On a simply pragmatic level, with all of those chickens living in such close quarters, it’s a no brainer that if one is ill it will be easy for the whole lot of them to be contaminated. Additionally, if one is fed tainted food, many are going to eat tainted food. And if one makes bad eggs, most likely they’re all going to be dropping bad eggs that will be distributed pretty widely through our markets. That’s simply the way industrial farming works. Practically speaking, smaller is better when it limits the potential scale of damages from a problem like this one.
Why Do They Have to Wreck a Decent Burger?
We stopped off for a fast food lunch during our drive to Chincoteague last week. In our opinion, Wendy’s is among the better fast food chains and where we choose to go when we have no choice but to go fast food for a meal. Joe and I chose the old-fashioned single burgers and I thought that I was really smart this time by asking them to leave off the mustard, which I love on hot dogs but hate on burgers. But I haven’t ordered a burger there in a while, and I forgot about the mayo! Yuk! Why do they have to slop on every condiment in the pantry when they assemble their basic burgers?
Is it really so hard to assemble a burger, lettuce and tomato on the bun, and then provide condiments to season according to individual taste? They don’t even have to provide those little portable packages for diners eating in the restaurant. They can offer pumps and paper cups for the mayo and mustard, just like they do for the ketchup.
But NOOOOOOO. My burger had to be spoiled by someone else’s idea of the perfect hamburger. What do you like to put on top of your burgers?