Sometimes you learn about new things from unusual sources. I first heard about brown rice almost 30 years ago from a fellow named Minor Lyle. Minor was a street person who’d blown his mind in the ’60’s taking one too many acid trips. He was prone to rambling soliloquies on various topics, but every so […]
A recent news story announced the discovery of the oldest human meal in the Western Hemisphere, and it wasn’t hamburgers. Cooked and partially eaten seaweed was found at a 14,000 year old site in southern Chile. Archeologists found no fewer than nine species of seaweed and marine algae in the hearths of the most ancient […]
My last two columns talked about miso and seaweed respectively. Both are staples of Japanese cooking. This week I will complete the trifecta by discussing soy sauce, known in Japan as shoyu. Perhaps no item is as ubiquitous at Japanese tables, where high quality shoyu is treated with the same sort of reverence that some […]
When I was a kid, I memorized several poems by Ogden Nash. I enjoyed his offbeat sense of humor, and the fact that his poetry rhymed. One poem I remember goes like this: “One cantaloupe is ripe and lush. Another’s green, another’s mush. I’d buy a lot more cantaloupe, If I possessed a horoscope.” Cantaloupes […]
Normally we think of taste as a purely subjective matter. Whether people like or dislike a particular food is considered a function of whether they have eaten it before, and whether they like the sweet or sour or bitter flavor that everyone agrees that the food possesses. There are exceptions. Take cilantro. Cilantro is a […]
