What's for dinner?

[CheddarLimbo]

Originally Posted by ollie

It was jsut the two of us for Thanksgiving but we had friends over yesterday and we've cooked and consumed a fair amount of lovely food.
Thanksgiving meal was one of our own chickens, two types of stuffing (chicken liver, pork, garlic and breadcrumbs; apple and chestnut), yorkshire puddings, bread sauce, cabbage and yummy gravy. Yesterday we had slow-roasted pork with rice and cabbage. We also used the time off to do various prep bits: a huge batch of pork dumplings made and frozen and a couple of gallons of chicken stock.

Recipes, please?

I have a great stuffing I use for cornish hens that uses Amaretto soaked cranberries.

[ollie]

Sorry CheddarLimbo, I read your post a while back and asked the brains of the operation (my wife) for the recipe and got only very vague instructions (she has some magical feel for cooking and combines things seemingly at random without weighing or measuring and they come out great).

However, I was deputised to stuffing duty last night* so I can report a little more. Ingredients: two sausages, taken out of their skins (0.5lb?), a biggish chicken liver, a small amount of finely chopped onion (stolen from some other dish that was being made), an egg (we used a duck egg, but I doubt it's distinguishable from a chicken one here), salt, pepper, a generous pinch of dried sage and about the same volume of breadcrumbs as all the previous ingredients. Smoosh everything together, put in a pan/bird, bung in the oven, eat.

Her more vague advice was to make sure that you have good amounts of both fat and stodge, add an egg if you want a less crumbly stuffing, and throw in whatever flavours come to mind. Fatty pork was recommended as making pretty much all stuffings better---it binds as well as providing the fat, and it tastes good.

Tonight: chicken risotto.

*

[ollie]

At long last, we're picking up that half a cow this afternoon. Lots of delays towards the end and planned special meals (Christmas, New Year) have had to be replanned at the last second. However, the farmer has always kept us up to date and I guess one of the sacrifices you make by going so local and small-scale compared to the supermarkets is the lack of consistency and reliability that comes from a natonwide operation.

Anyway, 10+ cubic feet of top quality (I hope) beef. I'm happy.

[Church Monroe]

Originally Posted by ollie

Would you eat a dog? Chimp? Human? Presumably you have a line somewhere between acceptable and unacceptable. How (and where) did you choose to draw it?

Yes, Yes, Maybe... If I needed to, and there was some kind of Fallout or something...

Anyhoo, I am having Tostadas for dinner... My spell-check just told me that I spelled Tostadas wrong...

A Tostada is a hard corn tortilla with refried beans, ground beef, cheese, salsa, guacamole, and sour cream on it. Sometimes with lettuce, too...

[Gulp]

Some of the best science news I've heard in a while. Scientists are growing pork from stem cells. Don't get hung up on the current state of the technology. It's far from being complete or even presentable to the most open-minded, but the implications of being able to grow meat with using factory farms are profound considering how much damage modern farming does to the environment locally, the health of your drinking water, the health of you and your children, the impact on global warming, and the potential that someday you might actually be able to eat dinner "like an American" without having a guilty conscience.

Not to mention that whole "not torturing living, breathing, feeling creatures" thing that too few people care about.

[clancampbell]

Crab cakes! For those of you not fortunate enough to ever have one, you are missing out. Come to Baltimore for real authentic crab cakes, other areas have them, but I'm sure Baltimore has the best.

['Scaper94]

Papa John's.

[Einar's puppy]

Originally Posted by Gulp

Some of the best science news I've heard in a while. Scientists are growing pork from stem cells. Don't get hung up on the current state of the technology. It's far from being complete or even presentable to the most open-minded, but the implications of being able to grow meat with using factory farms are profound considering how much damage modern farming does to the environment locally, the health of your drinking water, the health of you and your children, the impact on global warming, and the potential that someday you might actually be able to eat dinner "like an American" without having a guilty conscience.

Not to mention that whole "not torturing living, breathing, feeling creatures" thing that too few people care about.

Whoa. If this works, it could revolutionize the world. All they need to do, and I hate that I'm saying this, is make it cheaper than the farming we have now.

[Gulp]

Originally Posted by Einar's puppy

Whoa. If this works, it could revolutionize the world. All they need to do, and I hate that I'm saying this, is make it cheaper than the farming we have now.

That doesn't sound unreasonable. If it got the kind of subsidy money that some farming gets, then it could be great for combating world hunger. Of course, we're have to put up with politicians who think that if world hunger wants to be solved then it would solve itself with capitalism.

[Jormi_Boced]

[IMG]file:///C:/Users/Michael/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.png[/IMG][IMG]file:///C:/Users/Michael/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.png[/IMG]

[GreenLanturn]

Originally Posted by Gulp

Of course, we'll have to put up with politicians who think that if world hunger wants to be solved then it would solve itself with capitalism.

(First, I want to say that I know I'm under informed on a good deal of things, but I enjoy these sorts of things. Gaining the point of view of others is something I miss from my philosophy class.)

That's a matter of morality in my opinion. I, for one, have some opinions that will and did get me plenty of irritated responses in my past philosophy class, but I would never in my right mind even consider acting on them because they are simply immoral. Solving world hunger for example: I think the world needs to lose some population* like a percentage of it, I also think this loss would solve a few other things. My favorite part about that, is that as we introduce better technology we require less population; I am curious as to how this "shmeat" will affect the Earth's population if that day comes when it replaces farming. You can probably just assume that if we can produce 100% of our own food (I don't think we do now, do we?), we won't need the farming countries (I'm not sure how else to make that generalization), so we won't help them survive. On the other hand, since it's cheaper we may help them more.

I don't really have a finite response, but I just think there are more reasons than just crazy politicians for not wanting something that generally sounds like a good thing to do.

*Now, obviously it's wrong to just go about killing people "for the good of the rest of us/Earth", it's also wrong to decide who stays and who goes, but those who act on it can make that decision for themselves.

[ollie]

Originally Posted by GreenLanturn

Solving world hunger for example: I think the world needs to lose some population* like a percentage of it,

I don't think this is true currently from a purely food perspective. We produce sufficient calories to eliminate world hunger and then some, particularly if we stop feeding grain to meat animals and cars (as biodiesel). The problem is one of allocation.

However, going forward, I think you're right. The world's population is growing; global warming will (is) making crop harvests less reliable; the huge volumes of oil and other fossil fuels that drive the current agricultural system in so many fundamental ways (fuel, fertilizer production, air-freight, processed foods,...) are becoming harder and more expensive to procure.

Here's a nice article on some of the issues:

Originally Posted by Sharon Astyk

There’s a really good reason to take up the banner of justice here – and that is this – we’ve already proved that most of the richest and most important people in the world don’t mind seeing people go hungry as long as it doesn’t interfere with their accumulation of wealth. Having established that, why on earth would any of us think that they’ll mind seeing *us* go hungry?

Unless we grasp that equity is the central issue here, we will see a world where more and more of “us” and more and more of “them” are hungry, and where the lines between us and them are badly blurred. The good news is that we could decide that we care more about “them” than we do about other things, and focus *now* on justice, and on equity – on making sure that the world’s food goes ’round.

To approach the question from the other end, what's a stable carrying capacity for the planet? I've seen 2 billion suggested in a few places; less than a third of the current population. Assuming that such a figure is at least in the right ballpark, the question becomes can we manage to get ourselves there in a reasonably orderly way (over at least a couple of centuries) or are we, like every other species faced with abundant but eventually finite resources, heading for a crash. In other words, are humans smarter than yeast?

I worry that the answer is no.

(To try and prove myself wrong earlier this week I enslaved a yeast colony and am force-feeding them sugar so I can gleefully watch them die and drink their aftermath. )