DJ Food, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Lemonheads, The Jam, Pearl Jam, Oran “Juice” Jones, Hot Chocolate, Cream, The Soup Dragons, Captain Beefheart, Coldcut, Babe Ruth, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Lightning Seeds, Krust, Pizzaman aka Norman Cook, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Lemon D, Cocoa Bros., Green Jelly, Smashing Pumpkins, Meat Puppets, The Specials, The Cure
From Aunty …
The Dutch government is banning the sale of all magic mushrooms after a series of high-profile incidents involving tourists who had taken them.
Tourists, eh ?
Figures.
The Netherlands is famed for its liberal drugs policy, with marijuana openly sold in licensed cafes.
Magic mushrooms, more properly known as psilocybe, contain the psychedelic chemicals psilocybin and psilocin.
The psychedelic mushrooms found natively in the UK are known as Liberty Caps.
Currently in the Netherlands the sale of dried magic mushrooms - in which the psychoactive chemicals psilocybin and psilocin are stronger - is banned but fresh mushrooms are allowed.
This is because it is more difficult to ascertain how much of the chemicals fresh mushrooms contain.
Calls for a re-evaluation of the drug grew after a 17-year-old French girl jumped from a building after eating magic mushrooms during a school trip to Amsterdam in March.
Other incidents involving the drug have included an Icelandic tourist jumping from a balcony and breaking both legs and a Danish tourist driving his car wildly through a camping ground, narrowly missing sleeping campers.
“It’s a shame, the media really blew this up into a big issue,” said Chloe Collette, owner of the FullMoon shop, which sells magic mushrooms in Amsterdam.
She said all the incidents had involved magic mushrooms in conjunction with other drugs.
Mixing drugs generally skews the picture of the problem, for example many deaths attributed to MDMA are largely not caused by MDMA at all, but as a result of something else the user has taken. MDMA however makes a better headline.
Users of fresh mushrooms experience effects ranging from giggling fits and intensification of colours, lights and sounds to, more rarely, hallucinations. Negative effects can include vomiting, and anxiety.
As always, responsibility and maturity are the order of the day.
Aunty reports …
A vegan couple have been sentenced to life in prison by a US court over the death of their malnourished baby.
The baby died six weeks after birth after being fed a diet largely made up of soy milk and organic apple juice.
Defence lawyers for Lamont Thomas and Jade Sanders said they had starved their child unintentionally by adhering to a strictly vegan diet.
This is a tragic story and should never really have come to pass, one might say looking at the biology, milk production in the mother and high lactase production in the child, that milk is essentially, and essential, for babies. Most health studies are unanimous in claiming breast milk is best, though milk from other sources can also substitute, commercial babies milk is generally full of nutritional additives to compensate. On a side note, pasteurisation of milk destroys Phosphatase which is essential to calcium uptake. I would not suggest feeding raw non-human milk to a child.
The Vegan Society says on their web pages …
The first food for a vegan baby should ideally be breast milk.
Breast milk is a complete natural food and contains everything a baby needs. Many benefits are conveyed to the baby by breast milk. It contains antibodies which help protect baby from coughs, colds, chest and stomach infections and breast fed babies are less likely to develop allergies. It is quite probable that breast milk contains substances needed by growing infants that are not even known to be essential and are not included in infant formula.
From Wikipedia
The normal mammalian condition is for the young of a species to lose the ability to digest milk sugar (lactose) effectively after the end of the weaning period (a species-specific length of time often equal to roughly 3% of lifespan). In humans, lactase production usually drops about 90% during the first four years of life, although the exact drop over time varies widely. However, certain human populations have undergone a mutation on chromosome 2 which results in a bypass of the common shutdown in lactase production, allowing members of these populations to continue consumption of fresh milk and other milk products throughout their lives.
What this also shows is that milk consumption in adults is not necessary.
The article continues …
But prosecutors in the US city of Atlanta said the couple had deliberately neglected their child.
“No matter how many times they want to say, ‘We’re vegans, we’re vegetarians,’ that’s not the issue in this case,” Prosecutor Chuck Boring is quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.
“The child died because he was not fed. Period,” he said.
Wait … Prosecutor Chuck Boring ?
You can not make this shit up.
Crown Shakur weighed 3.5lb (1.6kg) at the time of his death in April 2004.
that probably indicates quite a low birth weight, although it’s claimed that a vegan diet during pregnancy can result in low birth weights, I’m getting the strong feeling this couple didn’t have a clue what they were doing. The Vegan Society has some guidelines.
Back to the story …
Sentencing the couple, the judge said the murder verdict made the life sentence mandatory.
Jade Sanders told the judge: “I loved my son - and I did not starve him.”
I think murder seems a little strong, manslaughter would have probably been more accurate, but then again as vegans, and even more importantly as parents, they should have done their background reading. Needless to say, although it could be argued this is Darwinism in action, I do feel very sorry for them for the loss of their child.
Mahalo to Jessica for bringing this story to my attention.
From Aunty …
A cockatoo at a wildlife sanctuary has spent a fortnight trying to hatch a bowl of chocolate eggs.
Pippa has been protecting the chocolates at Nuneaton and Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary since she was taken outside, put on a table and saw them.
Her owner, Geoff Grewcock, said: “She went straight over, climbed on the creme eggs and that was it. She thinks they’re her eggs.
“Until she clicks they’re not real eggs, we’ll just leave her there.”
Mr Grewcock described her as “very, very protective” and she had been through a “maternal stage”.
He said: “She picked an egg up and threw it at a photographer with her beak as if to say ‘leave my eggs alone. They’re mine’.
“She’s got so much character it’s unbelievable. She hates men - we’ve had a builder in who had his neck bitten. We had to prise Pippa’s beak off his neck.
“When she attacks you, she attacks your ear lobe - she goes straight through them. We do free ear piercing here.
“She’s ever so comical - always has been.”
“This week I have been mostly eating” …. Jabuticaba.
The fruit is purplish black, with a white pulp; it can be eaten raw or be used to make jellies and drinks (plain juice or wine).
Traditionally, an astringent decoction of the sun-dried skins has been used as a treatment for hemoptysis, asthma, diarrhea, and gargled for chronic inflammation of the tonsils. The fruit is 3-4 cm in diameter with one to four large seeds, borne directly on the main trunks and branches of the plant, lending a distinctive appearance to the fruiting tree. It has a thick, purple, astringent skin that covers a sweet, white, gelatinous flesh.
The name is derived from the Tupi word Jabuti (tortoise) + Caba (place), meaning the place where you find tortoises.
The pulp and juice is delicious and sweet, similar to a grape, but more to my taste. The skin is quite bitter and I have tended to spit them out along with the seeds. I would be interested to try beverages, especially alcoholic, made from the fruit, these include licor de jabuticaba ( liquor ) or vinho de jabuticaba ( wine. ) Pie and or Crumble would also be worth a try.
UPDATE : Jesee’s diets on YouTube.
Some serious ‘ono Pesto from 101 Cookbooks …
most of what you see here is made by machine, usually a food processor or hand blender. This holds true even if it is homemade. Don’t get me wrong, it usually tastes good, but because the ingredients aren’t hand chopped you end up with an texture that is more like like a moist paste and there little to no definition between ingredients.
chopping all the ingredients by hand and not blending them is key because this prevents the ingredients from becoming a completely homogenized emulsion or paste. When you dress a pasta with a pesto that has been hand chopped the miniscule flecks of basil will separate from the olive oil in places, you get definition between ingredients, and bright flavors pop in a way they don’t when they’ve been blended into one .
Genovese pesto is famous in part because it is often made with young, small basil leaves.
if you are serious about making good pesto, get a good, sharp (preferably large, single blade) mezzaluna, you’ll need it. Chopping the ingredients will take twenty or thirty minutes. Whatever you use to chop, make sure it has a sharp blade or the basil will turn dark.
The technique here is: chop a bit, add some ingredients, chop some more. I think part of the reason she does it this way (instead of chopping everything all at once) is because some things get chopped into oblivion, while some not as much - it encourages specturm of cut sizes throughout the pesto contributing to the overall texture. All told, the chopping took me a leisurely twenty to thirty minutes
You’ll notice this recipe doesn’t have any added salt (just the saltiness from the cheese), make sure your pasta water is well salted if you are going to use this pesto on pasta or the overall flavor profile will fall flat.
1 large bunch of basil, leaves only, washed and dried
3 medium cloves of garlic
one small handful of raw pine nuts
roughly 3/4 cup Parmesan, loosely packed and FRESHLY GRATED
A few tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil
Start chopping the garlic along with about 1/3 of the basil leaves. Once this is loosely chopped add more basil, chop some more, add the rest of the basil, chop some more. I scrape and chop, gather and chop. At this point the basil and garlic should be a very fine mince. Add about half the pine nuts, chop. Add the rest of the pine nuts, chop. Add half of the Parmesan, chop. Add the rest of the Parmesan, and chop. In the end you want a chop so fine that you can press all the ingredients into a basil “cake” - see the photo up above. Transfer the pesto “cake” to a small bowl (not much bigger than the cake). Cover with a bit of olive oil, it doesn’t take much, just a few tablespoons.
You can set this aside or place it in the refrigerator until you are ready to use it. Just before serving give the pesto a quick stir to incorporate some of the oil into the basil.
Makes ~1 cup
Those not into Parmesan, do not fear, nutritional yeast appears to be the substitute of choice, and in similar quantities ( anywhere from 1/4 to 3/4 cup, ) however I would certainly experiment if I were you, then let me know as I’ve never tried it.
UPDATE : In October of 2003, I posted a blog entry entitled “Secret Basil Po-lice”. You will notice some strong correlations to the article reproduced above. Unfortunatly the original link to the article pointed to by the post no longer seems to return anything useful, but I managed to find a cached version.
“That’s why they call it pesto, not presto,” snapped one woman at another.
My ears perked up. Pesto, that aromatic marriage of fresh basil, raw garlic, toasted pine nuts, virgin olive oil and grated cheeses is so divine we can’t be too surprised when its preparation provokes controversy of theological intensity. But by piling a thousand bunches of basil into a towering, fragrant heap at the front of my farmers’ market stall I had sought to stimulate comment, not a spark a foodie fight. I moved in to mediate.
The brittle-voiced woman in the dark-blue power suit arguing for a human touch was right, of course, technically. Pesto is a cognate with pestle and derives from the Italian verb pestare, which means to pound. Presto means fast, quick, soon, prompt. Experts agree that the most luscious pesto is made in a mortar by hand, laboriously grinding clean basil leaves into a paste with the other savory ingredients.
Powerful food processors driven by unlicensed ignorati can reduce delicate basil leaves — presto — to an unappetizing mulch.
But the milder tempered lady with the wide blue eyes had a point. “Who has that much time?”
I lept into the discussion, appealing for compromise and invoking higher authorities. “Even Marcella Hazan and Alice Waters include instructions for how to make pesto with a machine in their cookbooks. I like the Chez Panisse approach where, for preparing large volumes of pesto, blenders are used to roughly chop the bulk of the leaves and then the other ingredients are massaged in by hand. Sort of the best of both worlds.”
The purist focused her attention on me from behind dark glasses.
“Which of these basils are correct for pesto?” Her voice had softened from a snap to a snip. Behind her, smooth-leaved Genovese basils lay with ruffly, broad-leaved Napolitano basils. Tiny-leaved fino verde basil bunches spooned with yellowish-green lemon basils. Deep purple opal basils glowed apart in dark contrast.
“Pesto is a Ligurian creation,” I answered. “
Genovese basil can be considered a classically appropriate choice for pesto since Genoa is the capital of Liguria, but other sweet basil cultivars can serve admirably. It’s not as if there is a Ligurian Secret Pesto Police come snooping to see if you are mechanically flogging the wrong basil into presto.” “Maybe they’re so secret you don’t know about them,” suggested my purist.
“Perhaps,” I countered, “but then their time would best be spent raiding chain-store deli counters that dishonor Liguria by trafficking in ersatz prestoid emulsions that only hint at the real thing. Here, shake and sniff!”
I handed each woman a bunch of Napolitano basil. Ms. Convenience looked with pleased surprise at the huge Napolitano leaves, some larger than a man’s palm. Both women inhaled. Great. Breathing basil fumes can mellow almost anyone.
“Napolitano is a sweet basil but to some folks it lacks the clovelike complexity of the Genovese,” I continued. “The large leaves make pesto preparation easy but as with any basil you want to remove the stems before you grind because they can impart a distracting bitterness.”
Ms. Pure’s eyebrows arched above her dark glasses. “Of course, if Neopolitan basils are too sweet and mild for your tastes to work well in pesto you can always try piccolo fino verde,” I said, shaking a bunch to release the volatile aromatic oils. Ms. Convenience hung on to her Napolitano.
“The leaves may be tiny but they pack the richest scent.”
“Oooh,” said Ms. Convenience, reaching past me for lemon basil.
“Yes, it’s lemony,” I said. “If you overlook the fact that lemon basil is a cultivar of Thai basil is actually makes an interesting pesto.”
“Maybe I am the Ligurian Secret Pesto Police,” remarked Ms. Pure.
“Then chiffonade the lemon basil and tumble it into a fresh fruit salad to hint at citrus and sound a savory, herbal note,” I replied.
She smiled. “And the purple basil?”
“For ornamental accents only where one seeks flavorful color. Don’t make a pesto with purple basil. Stick with the sweet basils.”
“You passed the spot check for today,” said Pure, dismissing me in a clipped voice. “But the department’s keeping an eye on you. Stay honest.”
I promised I would.
UPDATE : List of basil cultivars of which it is said of Genovese basil …
Ocimum basilicum ‘Genovese’ is an annual native to India, Africa, and Asia. One of the most popular herbs, it is now cultivated in all temperate climates throughout the world. Of all the basils to grow, and there are about 150 varieties, Genovese basil is one of the best because it yields 7 to 8 cuttings and makes the best pesto.
In Italy, it is considered a sign of love. When a woman puts out a pot of basil, it means she is ready to receive her suitor. In France, it is called herbe royale. In India, it is sacred, dedicated to Vishnu and Krishna. In Victorian times, it was sent for best wishes in nosegays called tussie-mussies.
Basil represents the essence of the summer garden. It is not hard to grow from seed, which germinates readily at temperatures between 75-85 degrees. Contrary to most cultivation information on basil, it does not mind slightly acid soil or partial shade. As a matter of fact, it will do best in an area protected from the wind and scorching midday sun. It likes rich, well-drained soil and will grow best in soil enhanced with well-composted manure. It hates cold and should be planted out only when night temperatures reach 50 to 55 degrees. If you practice companion planting, plant basil near tomatoes and peppers to enhance their growth.
Pinch it back early and often to encourage bushiness. Do not let it flower unless you want to let it set seed as this destroys the flavor and shortens the lifespan of the plant. Many save this “end of the season” basil, the one that is always trying to go to seed, for pesto. I suggest you try making pesto from prime leaves at least once, to compare flavors.
http://img.viacomlocalnetworks.com/images_sizedimage_065215102/xl
Aunty writes …
P&G won a $19m (£9.7m) lawsuit against four distributors of rival Amway over rumours tying it to Satanism.
The court concluded a 12-year lawsuit in P&G’s favour, after it ruled that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults.
According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo - featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars - was a symbol of Satan.
For its part, Amway pointed out that it had successfully defended itself in an earlier case connected with the rumours and brought by P&G.
It had also, it said, done everything it could to get the rumour retracted.
http://img.viacomlocalnetworks.com/images_sizedimage_065215043/xl
From Wikipedia …
The company received unwanted media publicity in the 1980s when an urban legend spread that their previous corporate logo was a satanic symbol. The accusation is based on a particular passage in the Bible, specifically Revelation 12:1, which states: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” Since P&G’s logo consists of a man’s face on a moon surrounded by thirteen stars, some have claimed that the logo is a mockery of the heavenly symbol alluded to in the aforementioned verse, and hence the logo is Satanic. Where the beard meets the surrounding circle, a mirror image of 666 can be seen when viewed from inside the logo, and this has been interpreted as the reflected number of the beast, again linked to Satanism. Also, there are two horns like a lamb that are said to represent the false prophet. These interpretations have been denied by company officials, and no evidence linking the company to the Church of Satan or any other occult organization has ever been presented.
Not only is there a restaurant in Sheffield called Polonium, but since the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, it has seen an increase in business.
From the Sun …
Boguslaw Sidorowicz, 46, is the Polish boss of the eaterie
He named the restaurant after his old folk group Polonium when he opened 18 months ago.
He said: “It was Marie Curie who discovered polonium and she was Polish. A friend suggested it as the name for the band.
“So that’s what we called our folk group, without realising just how poisonous a substance it was.
“I never imagined when I opened the restaurant that polonium would be a word on most people’s lips inside 18 months.
“When I saw the restaurant’s name in the papers — I thought someone had booked us an advert.”
For some reason this has got me thinking about the restaurant in London called Edible. Although I believe it has closed down now, you can still buy items from their online store.
