Drink Deep from the Well of Knowledge

I was thinking today about how removed we are from the food we eat. Do we even know what half of it is? If the corn lobby, nabisco, and kelloggs went out of business tomorrow, would we have any idea what to do? Could you recreate them at home? Let me think of what I ate today:

Granola - what the heck is granola anyway? Some type of grain, I guess, but I’m not sure what kind or what’s been done to it.

Soy milk - how the hell does that happen? Someone plants a soybean seed, it grows, someone picks it… I’m lost after that step.

Chicken noodle soup - I think I can handle the chicken part, and I have made homemade pasta, so I have a good idea of how that happens (flour, egg, water, salt?)

How about a saltine? How would you make one of those? cheese?? It just seems sort of sad how out of touch I am with this basic human function - gathering and producing (or even understanding) food.

Which leads me to the subject of this post. What is vinegar? Well, like wine, it’s basically fermented whatever. It can made from wine, or grain, or other things. It’s basically a type of acid. I will never forget the day I asked my mother in law if she had any wine and she pulled out a bottle that they had opened a year previously from her cabinet. As I sceptically said “I’m not so sure that’s still going to be good….” she uncorked it and the very pungent smell of vinegar wafted through the air. That was.. as they say.. an aha! moment.

As with all matters, I will refer you to the good folks at wikipedia for more information on the subject, but I did want to highlight a few uses for vinegar (I’ve become less ambitious since I first named this post 5 minutes ago):

 – salad dressing - mixed with oil (ok, you knew that one, right?)
 – way to get cat pee smell out of stuff (I’m trying this tonight so I’ll let you know!)
 – the Chinese use it for all kinds of interesting things… including stopping the spread of SARS… who knew?
 – a great way not to catch flies? (or so the Southern saying goes)

Just FYI - as a way to get back in touch with my own personal food chain, I’m making attempt #2 at making mozzarella this weekend. I’ll keep you posted. So THAT’S what curds and whey are. : ) So gratifying to finally be able to understand nursery rhymes (at the age of 33)!

When I was about 12, I somehow got addicted to Hostess Lemon Pies. I was kind of a picky eater and I didn’t like cherry flavored things or strawberry. I ate lemon flavored everything. I’d only eat lemon flavored yogurt (which back them was pretty hard to find). I was addicted to the suckers, even when we lived in Japan and you could taste every nautical mile of the frozen/melted/refrozen/melted journey over the ocean. Yummy. Sort of like lemon flavored wet cardboard.

That was back before nutritional labels, and like all good neurotic American pre-teens (or tweens as I’m told they are called now), I was obsessed with my weight. I actually wrote to Hostess (with a pen and paper…yeah… old school!) and asked them to send me the calories and fat grams. I got this Xeroxed sheet in the mail that informed me that they had an obscene amount of fat and calories…more than I could have ever imagined. In my mind it was 900 calories and 20 grams of fat (though now they say it’s only 500 and something calories). 

Anyway, so I gave up my beloved lemon pies. Lately though, I’ve been thinking about them. I’ve gotten into 2 random conversations about Hostess pies. When my sister came in town and the topic somehow (was it fate? synchronicity? karma?), we decided to go find some. I didn’t even know they still sold them. I guess I don’t frequent gas stations much..which is true, as I’m a big fan of pay-at-the-pump (or anything else that can help me avoid human interaction). First gas station we went to… pure gold. Slightly different wrapper than I remember, same great taste. Yum-E. Then we repeated the exercise the next day. I’m trying hard not to make it a habit. One day clean so far.

So what this post is really about is that there are a whole boatload of flavors out there. I, of course, am still going to stick to my refreshing lemon, but you should know that there is also pineapple (only in Hawaii…no, just kidding… ha ha, like they use fresh from the Dole plantation pineapples…hee hee), blackberry, apple, French apple, strawberry, and the ever popular cherry.

Their website (http://www.hostesscakes.com/fruitpies.asp) also has some tasty serving suggestions…like heating them up and serving them a la mode. Now, I never thought of that. Honestly, I’ve never thought about eating them any other way then peeling off the wrapper and stuffing it in my face as I peel out of the gas station parking lot. But it’s certainly a thought. Maybe for thanksgiving dinner… paired with a Drake Funny Bone perhaps?