March 10th, 2011 by Chris Eng

I love this more than words can say.

October 14th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Just FYI. But really, if we’re going for outlandish lies, I prefer mine to be a little tastier and easier to swallow. Like so:

Mmmmmmm… Still, let’s try to keep the “bacon emissions” down to a minimum, okay, folks?

August 22nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

First off, apparently TIME is reporting on unsustainable farming practices. It’s nice to see that this is a topic which is finally filtering over to the behemoths of the mainstream media, and in a decidedly readable form, too.

Then there’s the various Victoria-area entrepreneurs who have started making a go of their own small-scale local/organic grocery stores. Yeah, I know it’s Victoria and you expect this kind of thing to come out of Victoria, but still–it’s pretty rad. If you live in the area, be sure to give them a shot.

Finally, there’s the new KFC Double Down. Seriously–scope the nutritional information on this thing. Y’know, when Burger King introduced the Enormous Omelet Sandwich, I felt perversely compelled to try one. This, I’m pretty sure I can skip.

August 13th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The last two times Carla and I have been to the supermarket, we’ve bought a beet. We like beets–they’re tasty and provide a nice earthy accent, especially grated on top of salads. Both times, our cashier has rung our purchases through, gotten to the beet, started at it blankly and asked us, “What is this?”

“It’s a beet,” Carla responded cheerily, both times.

The girl we ended up with on the second occasion was not fazed by this response. “What do you do with it?” she asked.

“You eat it,” Carla responded, just as cheerily, proceeding to go into the various ways which it could be cooked and/or eaten raw.

Okay, so, I know that society’s eating habits are changing and things familiar a generation or so ago have become strange and dropped out of our eating habits, but has the next generation (because both cashiers were probably 21 or younger) become so out of touch with produce that it can’t identify one of the most common root vegetables? Also, is it out of line to think that supermarket employees should be able to recognize such, or at least not brandish a look of extreme bafflement after being told what it is? These are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.

August 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
(Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0679314837

At some point, my aunt asked me to review something happy in order to help assuage my cousin, who apparently is going through what I went through a year or so ago and is suffering a bit of the “PEAK OIL IS HAPPENING TO US AND CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO COLLAPSE AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE IN A ROAD WARRIOR-LIKE WASTELAND!” And my mom, after I handed her my copy of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (because I thought she might appreciate the info therein), asked, “This isn’t going to make me depressed, is it?”

Yeah, I guess there’s a lot of gloom and depression mixed in with environmental books nowadays, because (depending on who the author is) it’s either too late or almost too late to fix things in the world, and while that may be the actual state of affairs, it’s not exceptionally heartening to have it repeatedly hammered into your skull. This review, then, is for my cousin, mother and anyone else who may want to read a book review of something inspiring a certain degree of hope.

The premise of The 100 Mile Diet is simple: a couple decide that all they’ll eat for a year are those things which can be produced within a 100 mile radius of where they live. The premise provides ample opportunity for elitism, snobbiness and hard-linery to proliferate in the book and could have easily turned into a proscription for Righteous Living, but it is miraculously devoid of more or less any of that, instead making its case as a sensible suggestion. This is a marked difference from the usual doomsaying environmental bestsellers who seem to think that telling you “IF YOU DON’T LIVE YOUR LIFE THIS WAY, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” is a practical and non-alienating course of action. In fact, without trying to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT: they make it through the year), at the end of the book they go back to eating some of the things they weren’t allowed to. But that’s essentially Alisa Smith and JB McKinnon’s point: for all of us to move into an ethical future is for all of us to live as ethically as we can and do the best we can; not to embrace some unrealistic hairshirt environmental dogma which requires us to martyr ourselves for unattainable goals that nobody else cares about.

No, there is no coffee grown within a hundred miles of Vancouver (which, coincidentally, is where I’m from and where Smith and McKinnon are based). But there are free trade and ethical choices you can make in your coffee consumption. Or black tea. Or chocolate. Because again, no one is asking you to be a monk—just do what you can. What the book does encourage, though, is putting in the footwork and not giving up in your quest for viable alternatives. By putting themselves in a situation where they couldn’t bend the rules, they were forced to keep looking for things like wheat, which—despite the lack of grain farmers on BC’s coast—they eventually found. Yes, we who occupy the Vancouver/Victoria area tend to be a little spoiled in our options, because most things can be grown in our neck of the woods, but wherever there have been permanent settlements of humans, there have been the means to thrive locally. Of course, that equation has become pretty skewed with the rise of the metropoli—you can’t feed a city of 1,000,000+ on purely organic, locally raised food (not under our current structure, anyway)—but the general principle is sound.

But why, you wonder to yourself, would I want to eat locally in the first place—what’s the point? Well, there are a few of them.

- Locally grown food is more nutritious. It’s not that organic produce has a bigger selection of vitamins or nutrients than vegetables grown on industrial farms, but local produce is generally picked much closer to its sale date than the stuff in your supermarket. Since produce accumulates nutrients as it approaches ripeness, it only makes sense that a tomato picked the day before it’s sold will be more nutritious that one that’s picked and shipped when it’s still green.
- Locally grown food is likely to be more ecologically sound. Some small-scale farmers use toxic pesticides and chemically-laden fertilizer, but not all of them do, and if you’re buying from the grower personally, you can ask what their standards and practices are yourself. Plus, on a very basic level, locally grown food is good for the environment because growing things benefits the environment. I hope I don’t have to explain this point.
- Buying local is also good for the economy—your local economy. It will probably cost more to shop that way, yeah, but if and when post-peak oil becomes a reality, food prices will start to go through the roof regardless, and I’d rather pay higher prices and support someone I know on a first-hand basis because I buy from them all the time than funnel my hard-earned food dollars into a faceless corporation’s coffers in exchange for some comparatively bland food.
- Which brings us ’round to the last (and possibly most) compelling reason: locally-grown food tastes better. It does. Seriously. Vegetables are delicious enough to eat steamed with maybe a touch of butter. Dishes in general require very little seasoning due to their nearly overwhelming natural flavours. No, the stuff we’re used to eating in packages isn’t what food is supposed to taste like—it’s a “good enough” approximation of a home-cooked meal. Somewhere along the line, though, we forgot what scratch-cooked food was actually like and accepted the food corporations’ assertions that what they were giving us was the real deal—besides, it was faster and even if it wasn’t excellent it was still, well, good enough. But the thing you have to prepare yourself for is that once you start eating local food, “good enough” isn’t good enough. You may keep eating it, but you’ll likely come to view it as filler in between the meals made with organic veggies and meat.

And what if you’re in a position where you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or its equivalent? The 100 Mile Diet also has buckets of inspiration to go around. Thanks to the non-preachy, non-guilt laden approach, you may find yourself inclined to do some gardening by the time you’re done… or bee-keeping… or cheese-making… or salt-distilling… or, for that matter, any combination of the above. None of these are impossible, and not all of them are necessarily very hard. We (as a culture) had most of the skills it takes to do those things up until 100 years ago or so—we’ve just forgotten them in the meantime. Smith and McKinnon have written a book encouraging us to reacquire them, and I’d encourage you to do the same. Moreover, I encourage you to do it for purely selfish reasons (on your part) but toward an altruistic end. You may or may not contribute to the ultimate salvation of our world by buying local food, but you’ll certainly contribute to the betterment of your diet and palate by doing so. To paraphrase Buckley’s, it tastes awesome and it works.

July 30th, 2009 by Chris Eng

While I was out GMing my campaign of Call of Cthulhu last night, Carla took an hour and picked a big ol’ tub of fat blackberries, which were immediately frozen and told to wait for the day (soon, blackberries, soon) when they will be turned into delicious smoothies. Lest you think Carla’s evening was more productive than mine, however, it should be noted I nearly killed two of the party members and left the entire group wondering whether or not they’d started a race riot in 1920s Harlem. So, you know, we were both productive.

Also, FYI, apparently yesterday was the hottest day in Vancouver OF EVAR. 33.8°C. Plus the humidity. Yeah, sweat-tastic. Glad I live in a basement suite.

July 22nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

I love IKEA. Love it. And putting aside any discussion of my relationship to big box shopping for another day (which I do intend to explore in-depth in the future), I have always appreciated IKEA’s general attitude, as well as their meatballs.

It’s tradition for my wife and I (as well as all our friends) to scarf down some Swedish meatballs every time we make the trip out to the suburbs and yesterday was no exception. However, instead of being presented with the standard ceramic plate/steel cutlery/glassware combination, this time we got paper plates, plastic forks and paper cups.

Now, it was Carla who brought up the fact that IKEA’s reason for using actual, washable dishes is because they’re trying to project a more bistro-like atmosphere as opposed to any environmental imperative, and I understand that in a slipping economy every dollar counts and paying full-time dishwashing staff isn’t the cheapest thing in the world, but there’s a cost for the disposable supplies, and part of the cost is my peace of mind. Switching over to disposable dishes will put a massive amount of refuse into our landfills. I’m not going to say it’s more than McDonald’s or any of the other fast food chains out there, but they’ve been using throw-away wrappers all along. It’s not great that we’ve become inured to that particular wastefulness, but it’s certainly what we expect from them. IKEA, on the other hand, felt like more of a haven away from that. Their furniture, while cheap, is kind of classy (well, more classy than any of the other furniture warehouses, if not necessarily better-constructed) and it felt like their cafeteria was striving for that, too—it’s not fantastic food, but it’s cheap and it’s respectable. And I’ve got to say that a lot of that respectability just flew out the window for me.

I mean, the meatballs are good, don’t get me wrong—but if you’re going to dollop a bunch of guilt on top of them next to the lingonberry sauce and I’m going to have to worry about what I’m doing to the environment before I go and buy my cheap picture frames and DVD storage boxes, well, I’ll buy the meatballs frozen and take them home to cook. At least I know in my house they’ve got a part-time dishwasher. His name is Chris Eng, which I understand is half-Chinese for ‘common sense’.

February 18th, 2009 by Chris Eng

So, I did it. I actually baked my first cake. And you know what? It was pretty kick-ass.

Here’s me, before the mixing and baking commenced:

 
And here’s the cake after I took some of its still warm deliciousness and slammed it in my facehole:

So, first things being first, I preheated the over to 325 (or slightly below because our oven is really small and heats up too much).

Then I sifted 3/4 cup of cocoa, 1 1/4 cups of all-pupose flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt together, like so:

 
Next came the fun part (or at least the messy one): chopping and splintering 8 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate:

 
Unfortunately, very soon thereafter I came down with an outbreak of Chocohand:

 
The chocolate was put into a bowl with 12 tbsp of butter and that was put into the microwave until it was all one glorious, gooey mess.

Meanwhile, 4 eggs were getting cracked into a bowl:

 
And after 1 1/2 cups of sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract were added… THEY WERE ASSAULTED WITH GREAT VIGOUR!

 
Then comes the stage when the chocolate mixture is whipped into the eggs, which is also the stage when your wife tries to surreptitiously lick the chocolate spatula without you noticing:

 
After you’re done scolding your wife and after she’s done cleaning the spatula, you add 1 cup buttermilk to 1/2 tsp baking soda. This is whisked into the chocolate. Then the dry ingredients (from way back in the beginning) are whisked in and the mix is ASSAULTED WITH GREAT VIGOUR!

 
When the batter becomes smooth and glossy, pour it into a buttered 13-inch baking pan. And, just so you know, this is what awesomeness looks like before it goes into the oven:

 
Bake the cake for around 40 minutes (basically, until you can insert a toothpick in the centre and it comes out dry). While you’re waiting, why not do the dishes? The less mess you have kicking around when it’s done means more time to sit there and eat cake. Also, have you got something better to do?

 
When the cake was done the top had puffed up and created an air hole underneath the crust. This had no detrimental effect on the cake, but the crust did make for a tasty, crispy chocolately snack, which we ate while we waited for the cake to cool.

 
I’m not going to pretend I had much (if anything) to do with the icing—that was Carla’s purview—but it was delicious and egg nog flavoured. And when it was done we put it on the cake:

 
Then we ate it. The end.

January 9th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Well, my goal to get better at cooking has gotten off to a good start. On New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d celebrate by making dinner for Carla (an event that happens much too infrequently). So, early on in the evening we went to the seemingly only supermarket in the city that was open (the SuperValu at 1st and Commercial) and I picked out some ingredients. We trundled them home in the snow and with just a little bit of effort I managed to put this together:

It's chorizo, zucchini, mushrooms and peppers in a tomato sauce served over rice, with oysters. I did the actual cooking but Carla hung out and helped me with the fiddly bits, like how to get the best results when frying sausage, which spices to add, and at which points to put in what vegetables. Those are the things which (in many ways) simply require memorization and which I don't have the background or experience to know. For instance, putting the zucchini in at the beginning (I did not do this) will give you a main course that is, for want of a more perfect phrase, seriously friggin’ gross-ass. Carla knows all that back to front and was happy to impart her wisdom.

And when all was said and done, it ended up pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Still pot/pan food is kind of what I’m good at already. If it can be chopped it up and simmered on the stovetop, I can improvise with it and come up with something tasty (even if I do need advice now and then), so I wasn’t really stretching my wings too much with this one. What is really daunting to me, and which will be the focus of my next personal challenges, is the range. I want to start making broiled and baked things, both sweet and savoury. I’m going to start with a cake this month. I’ve never made a cake before and I figure it’s a good introduction to baking. I’m sure I’ll move on to gougères and spanakopita next month.

While we’re on the subject, though, I did make my first loaf of bread the other day. Okay okay, it was in the bread maker, but still—first loaf! And edible! Tasty, edible bread! At home! In, like, ten minutes (of prep time)! And I don’t have to bug Carla to do it! No, it’s not like it was ever a complicated procedure, but it’s one of those things that you have to be shown and I just never quite got around to asking. But I’m on the cooking path now and I will work my magic with the bread maker. And someday… someday I will make bread without it!

But, y’know, in the meantime I’ll whip up some cake.