Overdoing the good stuff

I didn't think it was possible to overdo the good stuff until it happened today.

After finishing a calculus exam and a foreign language test, I came home to an empty apartment. Awaiting me: an array of wonderful ingredients and opportunities.

• an assortment of six bottles of fine craft beers ready for an experiment
• freshly picked feral baby garlic from the fringe of the UM-Dearborn organic gardens
• avocados ($1 per fruit)
• rosemary ($0.99 for a bundle)
• a "maple salmon kabob" ($5)
• a bag of "confetti potatoes" (hooray!) ($3)
• a box of mixed sprouts ($2)
• a container of salsa ($3)
• left over bread rolls in the fridge from about a month (perhaps more) ago



Neat, garlic from garlic!  Youth on Age!
In the background:
The Bean Facts man, Alfred Batshon
is our kitchen deity.

• and hot mustard (horseradish mustard) given to me from work by colleagues who ate out at a PF Chang's location

How exciting! I don't recall having so many quality, fancy, and fine ingredients in one place.

Plus, good drink pairings (including non-alcoholic drinks) with food taps into a broader interest of mine:
emergent properties in complex systems. What am I talking about?

Here's the tangent: With anything, we can appreciate something on its own, in complementary company with, or in contrast (counterpoint) with something else. In these instances, it's equivalent to adding one good thing to another.

Sometimes--a very rare and subtle experience for me--two foods together bring out a third sensation. For those who like business buzzwords, this is synergy. For physicists, this is the equivalent of a "constructive wave", when two waves combine to make a bigger wave. To life scientists and complex systems thinkers, this is the emergent property--you discover an outcome that's equivalent to multiplying two things together to get a tremendous result!

It happens a lot in nature and society: simple interactions may aggregate into something very different from what we expected (chemistry comes to mind, which brings us back to the reason for why we taste different things).

Unfortunately (back to the food), I didn't quite get to it. Simmering rosemary in the beer with a drizzle of olive oil worked out remarkably well in the pan as far as I could tell by their aroma.

However, between the salmon, its maple (syrup marinade?) flavoring, and avocado, these very rich and heavy flavors effectively dominated over any potentially subtle emergent qualities (this is the wave cancellation effect for physicists) that arose from the presence of rosemary and the Spicie Nicie ale (I'll say the ale wasn't as exciting as its label made it seem when I tasted it as-is, might have been the batch though). I could have paced my eating differently so that I could enjoy the more delicate flavors first instead too.

In any case, it was a very satisfying meal and I'm always struck by the paradox and phenomenon of luxury when indulging.

I really admire salmon--it's a noble fish (lobsters, though not fish, are also admirable, that's a different story to explain though). In the wild, many will hatch, grow up in fresh water, migrate into the ocean, and then return to fresh water to the place of their birth (found by scent!) to spawn before dying. Fish that do this are called anadromous--their bodies change so that they can adjust between fresh water and salt water. To eat something that works that much for the success of its species demands a lot of respect, and I always wonder if I've given my fair share of effort to merit a meal like that--even if I were the one catching it.

(aside: if ever the opportunity arises and I really needed a fish to survive, the most satisfying way to catch a salmon would have to be with one's own canines, unfortunately my canines might be too smooth for this to be a reality, and salmon are way too powerful to catch in that manner...maybe I'll turn into a bear someday)

Then of course, there's the very real question of privilege and poverty--there's a difference between buying salmon for $5 to enjoy over a few meals versus buying as much sustenance to hold one over for $5--i.e. a jug of milk and loaf of bread can make a difference for a hungry family.

I started eating before I remembered
to take additional photos.  I later
found the mustard and drizzled it on the sprouts.

Tiny note: the garlic was still very young, it fares better in a salad.

I was so hungry I started eating and
forgot about the potatoes until later too.

The potatoes turned out well, they went nicely with the sprouts and mustard. The salsa on the avocado was refreshing too. As good and luxurious as it was overall (even one of these items in a meal is a rare privilege for many people), there was way too much flavor going on at once for my taste buds and brain to figure out. I'd either have to sequence my meal better, or focus on just a few things. I'll call it "strategic eating" when faced with a smorgasbord of fine foods.

Ethical notes, some less appetizing than others:


When purchasing the fish, I was probably the only person who asked the fish vendor where it all came from, but he promptly searched his boxes and bags to find out for me. This salmon came from "Canada", which seems much closer to me than South America or the Pacific Ocean, but for all I know, it could have come from the West Coast. The Montery Bay Aquarium seafood watch has a guide for fish purchasers (see here for salmon) and frequently provides detailed reports on the fishing industry and its environmental impacts.

In retrospect, I don't feel so good about having salmon from ambiguous geographies, and likely won't be one to purchase it in the future.

Avocado comes from afar too.  On its own though, I suspect having several avocados would be better than having a salmon.  It's a plants versus flesh assessment: by default, plants need less resources to exist than do carnivorous things, plus imagine boating out to catch a fish, shipping/flying/trucking it to Michigan... this one was wild-caught, but farmed is almost certainly a more intensive a process when it comes to having people care for the fish and the places they're grown in--fish farmers frequently pack holding pens of fish with more fish than even the fish themselves are used to being around.  It can get messy when you consider what the requisites for making an artificial environment for fish can be--antibiotics, waste, uneaten food, etc.   Ahh, maybe this post's title wasn't overdone with the good stuff after all...

On the bright side, the sprouts came from a place in Michigan that starts with the letter "I", the garlic was definitely local and organic.  

Armchair Science with Ian: Smokey roasted flavors and ecology

Watson or Crick (of DNA fame, I believe it was Watson but won't look it up right now) was known to be an armchair scientist--he postulated ideas, made a few theories, wrote them down, and eventually others began to prove them empirically (even many decades later) without him having done any of the legwork for which the scientific community was known to hold in high esteem (and still does).

Culinary science questions come to mind frequently enough that I begin to answer them myself, and the answers are so sensible and sound to me that I'm almost convinced that I could pose them seriously to other people. Keep in mind that I'd be happy to write well researched essays about these questions. However, there are three issues:
1) I rarely have time to sit in an armchair, especially since I often commute between cities.
2) As a student, it's very likely that I'm already writing essays about something else for the certification of my educational degree. It's also very likely that those essays concern science, and require research to back up what I say to my professors and/or peers.
3) I've forgotten what the third issue was in the first place leaving me feeling even more exposed to academic criticism!

So I'll pose musings of varying length to whomever wishes to read here--without doing the detailed research...for now. But I have to admit that I do find some satisfaction in learning whether or not these ideas are true or at least partially correct, so someone please let me know.

Here's my most recent idea, with a story as backdrop to how it came forth:
Smokey Roasted Flavors and Prairie Ecology

wild carrot (Daucus carota) comes from Europe, likely escaped from someone's garden or field after being introduced into the U.S., and is commonly found in open spaces like prairies and fields. Keep an eye out for it around May if you're anywhere in Northeast United States.

At this time of year, most of these plants have finished with their flowers and gone to seed. The seeds are small, it quickly spreads, and appears intimidating to weed out when it gets really tall during the summer (especially because it attracts so many potentially upsettable Hymenopterae--insects like wasps, bees, and ants). At this time, most of the wild carrot has dried up and today I pulled lots of it out of my parents' vegetable garden (it had successfully dominated 1/3 of this garden), piled it up, and decided it would be reasonable to burn with the intention of scattering the ashes over the garden to help recharge the soil of its nutrients. Even though it dry and burned in a controlled space, I was still surprised that the wild carrot caught fire so quickly.

***

I later went inside to have a chicken soup, and added mesquite smoke. Somehow, we have neurons devoted to the pungent aroma and, important to this discussion, flavor of smoke. Some things taste better with the right amount of smoke. Why though? This brings us to the age old question of how and why we humans came to cook our food.

The earliest humans or their ancestors likely lived in African savanna habitat--prairies (mostly grass with a few trees scattered here and there).

I recall that many early peoples and even current day people will intentionally burn grasslands every few years (though perhaps for differing reasons now).

I think the first hominids to eat cooked food didn't cook their own food--it (wildebeest, whatever) was simply in a burning grassy area during a fire.

When did they start hunting? Is it more likely that they learned to use fires as traps? Or is it simpler to catch the meal and then cook?

Possibly later, humans learned to use fire for agricultural purposes, but for those who benefited from recognizing burned things by smell and the taste, perhaps there was something substantial to it. We can reason that cooking can sterilize foods, and by not getting sick from what you eat, you have the opportunity to live longer and proliferate future generations. Over millions of years (sorry, the archaeological clock in my mind is probably way off--I forget the evolutionary timeframe of human beings at the moment), inborn into most folks who could detect these scents and flavors had developed some liking to them. Perhaps because they were 1) good at detecting fires and could get away, survive, etc. 2) more likely to eat things that were almost guaranteed to be sterile and therefore capable of surviving and reproducing.


* * *
...Lessons learned from not completing this post: Write what's logical first, then give the story. Otherwise, you could lose both! Now that I'm revisiting this post, I think I've covered what I wanted to say, but I frankly don't remember if I captured the story telling and arguments I wanted to put forth as well as I had once planned.

Bah, craisins--try rose hips instead.

This weekend the Student Environmental Association went to Waterloo State Park for a cabin outing.

I like to point out that rose hips are edible, are high in vitamin C, and as such can help a fellow in preventing scurvy. As you may suspect, Michigan's largest state park in the lower peninsula has rose bushes (possibly wild) in its area, and I pointed them out to Duke and Amit.

However, I never ate the rose hips. Maybe in the past I tried some in the backyard from domestic roses and didn't fancy their flavor when I was younger. More likely it's because there's a bottle of Ester-C made from rose hips and other stuff in the medicine cabinet, and each pill has a horrible hay fiber texture with an unpleasantly semi sweet/sour medicine cabinet taste if you don't swallow them soon. That said, I don't take vitamin C pills frequently.

Anyhow, Amit and Duke were fascinated and decided to try it out despite my disclaimers and warnings (good for them!). Better still, they really enjoyed them and started eating all the ripe hips off of the bushes.

I finally decided to try them and realized they were indeed pleasant, like dry craisins (minus the coloring and high fructose corn syrup) with a hint of rose in the aftertaste. Mind you, this is early mid-winter in Michigan, so the hips were dehydrated, but they were certainly delicious.

I'd like to experiment with the native wild roses on the Estate grounds at UM-Dearborn next to see if they bear a similar taste.