Not citrus, but papaya. Papain is even commercially extracted from the fruit and sold as a meat tenderizer.
I remembered a stupid one today: mix olive oil with butter to fry stuff, since olive oil can get hotter without burning, so you get the best of both worlds. Not true, as it’s the butter solids that burn, which are still present, and will still burn at the same temperature, no matter what other oils you add.
Also, a lot of people assume that you should only buy Extra Virgin, because the rest is for poor people (I haven’t looked hard, but I think it’s a lot harder to find lower grades as well). While the EV might taste better, that doesn’t mean the other ones are useless, having a higher smoke point for one.
It’s a fact that hippies love hemp as well as it’s more potent friend. The supposed benefits you can read about are quite amusing and self-deluding. Not a food myth, but: the idea that hemp can replace many products like wood pulp paper is overblown.
Cecil mentions in that article, “But whereas the Mountain Dew/shrinking testicles rumor was confined largely to teenage boys …”, and that reminded me it was a Korean woman who was always warning me about Mountain Dew. (Well, she was ethnically Korean. She was adopted at birth and raised in the USA.)
That sounds … satisfyingly plausible. The olive thing was something I always wondered about: “Who figured out that soaking these inedible fruits in poison would make them edible?” (Kind of like when I read the process for turning coca leaves into cocaine - “Who figured that out?”
“Sexy Italian Chef” Alfredo Caldo Freddo explains the differences:
(Erm, sorta NSFW - visible male buttocks)It’s not necessary to soak olives in lye to make them edible. The simplest process for treating olives is oil curing. All you do is mix ripe olives with salt. Over time the salt draws out the water, and a lot of the bitter compounds with it. I suspect this process was developed as a way to preserve olives until the oil could be extracted, and that the first edible olives were oil-cured.
I went on a tour of the Winchester Mystery House near San Jose, CA. Sarah Winchester, whose father-in-law had invented the Winchester repeating rifle, built the weird house that now has over 1000 rooms. She lived on the royalties of the rifle, but she also had an olive-processing business. The guide said that olives are soaked in brine for five months!
There are a few poisonous species of crustaceans, but by and large, anything common and with enough meat on it to be worthwhile, is edible. Not all of them taste great, as I understand it.
Huh. I had no idea that olives off the branch were inedible. Ignorance fought!
Mountain Dew was just reintroduced to Thailand after an absence of decades. So far, I don’t notice a difference, but maybe I’ve not drank enough.
I wonder if that came before or after the concept of salting meat to cure and preserve it? I can’t help but think one inspired the other, but I don’t know which would have been first.
Maybe that’s why Ms. Winchester’s operation used brine instead of lye.
This! I have an aquaintance who claims to be a vegetarian (he’s really a pescetarian but doesn’t like to admit it) and is horrifed that I use real butter to cook eggs and on my toast. He claims that he will only eat “clean” food – partly defined as containing no animal fat. His preferred diet consists of – wait for it – popcorn, organic apples with peanut butter, brown rice and Wheat Thins crackers, all washed down with lots of coffee. And he wonders why he’s overweight and feels like crap most of the time.
Obviously he’s just not drinking enough coffee.
I’ve read that people used to chew on the coca leaves for their buzz. I assume they figured out how to process them from there.
Still do. It’s apparently a very low high.
I’ve been doing some unrelated reading. From what I can tell, vegetarianism isn’t that big in Theravada (the sect followed by the vast majority of Thai people), compared to other forms. It forbids only a few types of meat that most of us don’t eat anyway, so an orc converting to Buddhism would have to give up manflesh. Other meat is supposed to be not killed on your behalf (I’m not sure how that works).
Of course, that doesn’t explain meat eating in Mahayana countries.
If you find out who it was, give him a call. You can assume he’ll be awake.
Moving from IMHO to Cafe Society,
Wheat flour always has to be sifted so that the measurement will be correct. (Taught in middle school.)
Cheese wrapped in wax paper won’t get moldy as fast as if you wrap it in plastic.
There’s no difference between organic and “conventionally farmed” veggies. While this may be true for some veggies, my lips only touch organic celery - the flavor is noticeably better to me.
Eating miso protects you from radiation.