The McWetlog

Meg has lately been posting more and more food-related content on megnut.com — a change I’ve liked a great deal, being kind of interested in the subject myself — and today she’s made it official: her blog is now completely about food, and she’s doing it full-time. Always good to see another blogger trying to make a go of it, particularly when it’s someone I’ve enjoyed reading for years.

Never mind the Rachael Ray drinking game (which really ought to have something for “yummo!”); how about a drinking game for Chef at Home’s Michael Smith? Every time he says “flavour,” take a drink — I guarantee you’ll be blotto within 10 minutes.

They really should put the Scoville unit rating on packages of hot peppers. One of the hot peppers I bought just before Christmas, put into a chicken-and-shrimp stirfry, was enough to have us guzzle two litres of milk. True enough, I also added some chile and garlic sauce, but all I was tasting — all I could taste — was fresh hot pepper. Ow. One may well be sufficient for a huge pot of chile.

Roast duck
Originally uploaded by mcwetboy.

We’ve been meaning to try duck for a while: I’ve had it before, but never cooked it myself; Jennifer’s never had it.

Because of the holidays, ducks are more readily available at the supermarkets, so we picked one up today. Armed with a simple recipe from Brome Lake Ducks (though the duck did not come from them), we gave it a go. It turned out very well. We certainly liked eating it. Carving it, though, was a bit more complicated — Jen says it’s not like carving chicken or turkey at all.

I don’t know about you, but Kathryn Cramer’s family diet seems awfully sensible to me, especially in that it’s practical rather than absolutist: carnivorous but picky about which meats; organic where possible. And diverse. Could do a lot worse.

Now this is fusion: a Chinese restaurant in Greenland (!) that offers Chinese cuisine using Greenlandic ingredients. The duck and prawns are local; so’s the reindeer and walrus. I’m transfixed. Via Boing Boing.

Another round of wacky Japanese ice cream flavours, including whale, raw horseflesh (chunky!), seawater, garlic, and other non-sweet, repulsive-to-the-Western-palate flavours (via Boing Boing; see previous entry). Iron Chef devotees will not be surprised; on that show, everything can be made into ice cream.

In Slate: Milk: How a Wholesome Drink Became a Villain; via Megnut.

For the record, I don’t particularly like soy milk myself; thinking that I might be developing a milk allergy, I tried goat milk last year. Bit gamey. I’ve found, though, that the trick is not to overdo it on the dairy: the days of quaffing two litres each day are clearly over.

Wasabi is not the same as horseradish, says Bill Poser in an entry heavy on lexical analysis. But Westerners can’t tell the difference because we’ve never been given the real thing:

The real thing is expensive, and for it to be any good, it has to be freshly grated from the root. The result is that as sushi has become more popular, more and more of the “wasabi” served in the United States has been fake. It isn’t wasabi: it’s horseradish with green dye. Many people don’t know the difference between wasabi and horseradish because in their experience there isn’t any.

(via Languagehat)

A restaurant with a menu like this is the kind of place that would make Florence recoil in terror and give Jen (and most hobbits) tachycardia. Read Matt’s post about dinner at the Joel Palmer House in Oregon.