Hummusgirl's Blog

Baked potatoes are pretty healthy, but when you have french fries and potato chips taking over the country (and maybe the planet for all I know), than we really should try to salvage some nutrition from them.   I have been loving sweet potatoes, which I read have more nutrients than regular white potatoes.  However, when I wikipediaed it, I found that they’re both pretty similar, with the only major difference being that sweet potatoes (30 mg) have more than twice the amount of calcium than regular potatoes (12 mg).

Did you know that the man who “invented” the Russet Burbank potato (that would be Luther Burbank) got famous because of it back in the 1870s.  He got really lucky because he found an abnormal potato with a seed pod and cultivated that into the Russet potato we know and love today.  Russett potatoes are the main potato used today, most of that which goes into fries and potato chips.

Another factoid is that more potatoes are grown in China, Russia, and India than the United States.

I was reading this book called, “An Edible History of Humanity,” and it was talking about the corn laws in England from the mid 1800s.  The so-called “Corn Laws,” referred to the mercantile system of England when corn producers didn’t want to have to compete with corn producers from other areas of the world.  It was repealed in 1850 in part due to the great famine in Ireland.  It’s kind of funny how I’ve never heard of corn laws in the US and we produce double the amount of corn than the second highest producer (China).

There are, however, soybean and potato laws in the US.  A controversial potato law from 1929 that was deemed unconstitutional and monsanto has specific laws regarding seeds with soybeans.  But maybe corn is so controlled by the government that we don’t know what goes on on those fields and factories.  Maybe they don’t want you to know, but just keep preaching that corn is wholesome (I believe this actually).  I mean, its been around for thousands of years so maybe it can’t really be anymore messed up!

I like to buy my food from local sources.  I have hand-picked strawberries, black berries, green beans, and cherries at local farms.  At my local dairy farm, I buy milk, eggs, butter, and ice cream straight from the source.  Now some may say that they are vegan, but I say I can’t afford to eat veggies, fruit, and other extreme vegan products all the time and I really don’t have the stomach to cook with them a whole lot either.  Some people are on the Atkins diet, but meat is expensive so I eat it sparingly because everything in moderation.

I buy my tahini and pita bread from my neighborhood Middle Eastern store, Oasis and my dried chickpeas, walnuts, almonds, produce, and the occasional samosa from a Patel’s Indian grocery store on the freeway.  I have even ventured the 5 miles away to an elite farm to buy grass fed milk, nitrate free bacon, and other gourmet groceries.  But then they closed, probably due to their elitism and I now shop at less expensive places.

But the food experience that is by far the richest for me is Arnold’s Way.  Arnold’s Way is a hippie commune of a place that makes and sells raw food products.  They make banana whips and green smoothies (with pureed kale, dates, bananas and apples), but mostly I just buy their raw food like bananas, apples, avocados, kale, spinach, dried mango, sunflower seeds, olive oil, honey, dates, and many other pure foods.  Every time I go there I always feel like I’ve traveled back to the 1960s and am at some folk rock concert.  Everyone there is celebrating peace and love and food it’s a place that feels so separate from corporate America.

But every food store has its place and I find that Whole Foods is good for things that I can never find anywhere else like cheeses, incredible produce, and bread that I could pay 10 dollars a loaf for and still not feel guilty about eating that many carbs.  One time, I was making my way around my local supermarkets looking for pumpkin because I found out there was this big freeze on pumpkin.  At Whole Foods, they were out, but the clerk suggested I try making sweet potato cookies instead and I made some for him.  Ah, food and flirting, what a perfect combination.

I know I haven’t written any posts in awhile, but was working on food writing not related to hummus so I didn’t think the topics would gell.  These posts that I’ve written are very personal to me and were written with a lot of thought.  For anyone still out there, my name is Joan S. Faulkner and I have a degree in journalism and was trying to mesh food and comedy into that to get my point across. Thanks for reading!

If beef and chicken have been tainted with so much because of hormones and corn fed cattle, then maybe lamb is the better meat for us because it’s been raised under more humane practices.  Maybe it’s more respected than beef or chicken because it’s not in more restaurants.  It’s rare, and when you don’t have something that often, you appreciate it more than if you had it every day.

I read in a book about meats that the reason lamb isn’t used as much in the US is because settlers realized that with more pasture land they could raise cows/cattle better than lambs.  A lot of other countries accept lamb much more heavily than we do according to wikipedia.  This strikes me as funny because lambs seem so much more innocent and image-friendly than cattle, yet India treats cows as sacred and don’t eat them, yet eat lamb. 

In America, we seem to not care where our meat comes from and offer no sacred ceremonies to the animals we kill, yet take great pride in putting animals in a celestial light, while not holding up our end of the bargain that we don’t treat them right.

I cooked lamb because it’s widely accepted in the rest of the world, but not here.  It turned out really well.  It tasted silky, yet the chicken I made was pretty tasteless and tough. 

If we feed corn to cattle, chicken, and pigs here, maybe if we do decide to industrialize sheep/lamb, we could feed them beans or chickpeas.  Then they’d be like a Middle Eastern tradition. 

So I was in a family pizza style restaurant the other day and had to have a bacon cheeseburger because I didn’t want fast food style beef.  I wanted real beef.  So I felt like a real American when I ate it because vegetarians are pretty scarce in this country so when you are one it must suck to see the bias meat has with the USA.

I had a McDonald’s burger a couple days later and while it was still good, it wasn’t as thick and tasty as the family restaurant and I respect my meat when it’s all natural. 

In this country, it seems that meat is both respected and feared.  We want it because we’re kind of designed for it, but too much of it can be a bad thing.  When you bite into that hamburger, you forget about the bad parts of your day and focus on  the fact that have manged to take part in a sacrifice that’s not really accepted anywhere else in the world.

If African Americans were farmers as slaves and there are still black farmers around, would any Islamic African Americans be farmers?  Because their ancestors were probably farmers in Africa.  So if people in the Middle East were hunter gatherers a long time ago, and African Americans did all the work for white people for a couple hundred years, then maybe Islamic African Americans feel a kinship with their Islamic people from way back when.  Maybe they want a connection with their past, which is why they have donned the customs of Islam.

If Islam is ancient, than maybe tradition has been played around with so much, that it’s ok if American African Americans take this religion and make it their own.  People throw riots in the Middle East just as African Americans get caught in chaos here.  Coincidence?  Maybe not.  Maybe all those years of social injustice have reached the breaking point.  And many of the people in those ethnic groups are still struggling. 

It’s interesting that African cuisine is generally healthier than the soul food that African Americans have come up with here.  Maybe soul food is partially responsible for fast food.  Maybe it’s our way of coming to terms with our slavery past since we can’t bear the thought of being racist anymore, we just eat our way to forgiveness.

If all African Americans turned Islamic, I mean the original Islamic, not some schism of that religion, what would they eat?  Pork is against the Islamic religion, so maybe since we produce way more chicken and beef than pork in this country, Muslims have an easier time eating.  What if there was a cuisine just for Muslim African Americans?  Would they accept authentic Muslim food, or are fast food joints ok with them?

But because a lot of countries have Muslims, I wonder if immigrants that come to the US from those countries have a harder time finding food that meets their restrictions than in their homeland.   Because it seems like the US is notorious for taking advantage of people’s food decisions and turning them into people without a past.

Why do we not use more hot peppers in fast food?  We have tons of hot sauces to choice from, but is our fast food spicy? Not really.  Gosh darnit, we even have Taco Bell, which has a picture of a hot pepper on its website and I don’t remember breathing fire from their food last time I was there. Because when we say something is spicy in America in terms of fast food it usually means it’s not really.

Spicy in fast food means that we want a little kick to think we’re doing something drastic to our palates but really it’s just fake spicy when the ethnic restaurants have more spiciness to them.  And it seems to me that spiciness is a more masculine trait because I read that spicy food makes us eat less and I also read that women are more apt to be heavier in this country than men.  Bon Appetit!

If other ethnicities like spicy food better than us what does that say about Mexicans here and their cuisine? They have obesity problems just like a lot of people here.  According to the book, Blue Corn, Chocolate, the chile pepper originated in Mexico.  Maybe I’m wrong, but when I volunteered at a Philabundance food pantry, I saw a lot of beans, and Spanish speaking people and other ethnicities taking the beans.  You don’t see a lot of bean dishes at Taco Bell (I always get the cheesy bean and rice burrito when I go there).

When I was in Hunan province in China, I saw tons of chili peppers laid out to dry.  I wonder if the thinking is that they’ll get hotter?  I bought some peppers from Pike’s Place Market in Seattle last summer and they did dry, but a lot of them got moldy and eventually, I had to compost them.  It seems to me they’d be better fresh than dried anyway.

I just made harissa, a North African dish made out of dried chili peppers, olive oil, and spices.  I had to buy the peppers dried because then you soak them.   I thought maybe I couldn’t find them dried, but Assi Plaza (the Asian superstore) had them, sure enough. To make the harissa, I took out all the seeds from the chili peppers once they had soaked and cut them up.  It was a lot of chili peppers, but then I put them in the food processor with olive oil and spices to blend.  I put it on pasta as a sauce and it was ok, but I wonder how it would taste with meat or with bread?

I was thinking, if chili peppers originate in the Americas and spread to the rest of the world after Columbus came over, then harissa must not be as old as hummus right?  Hummus was invented, supposedly, in the 13th century or so, according to wikipedia, and chili peppers have probably been around for at least 500 years because Columbus “discovered” America in 1492, so that gives the chili pepper lots of time to get around the planet.

It’s a condiment which I actually preferred over hummus because I love spicy food, but it’s not as widely available as other dips or spreads/sauces.  Maybe because we don’t like spicy food as much as other countries?  Or maybe we do like spicy food, but we like our calorie laden drinks better to soothe the throat.

We do have spicy chicken wings and meats, but with all those hot sauces, we have to use them on something! But what would it taste like to put chili sauce on vegetarian food? I always think of chili sauce as complimentary with meat, but it would be more beneficial to vegetarians because it’s all vegetables.

vegetarianism.  When I think of vegetarians or vegans I think of artsy people.  Or at least people interested in the arts and who care about the world.  I wonder if there are more poor vegetarians or rich ones?  Is it harder to be a vegetarian than a meat eater?  That seems like a definite yes answer, but maybe you get used to it and vegetables really are much more fun.  I like to believe that the rich people who are vegetarian would rather be living like the poorer people and that the poor vegetarian person lifestyle is better than any wealthy person because maybe they’re into cooking more. 

Having said that, I wish I was vegetarian.  But I tried that a couple times, and ended up eating candy, which probably has meat byproducts in it anyway.  I do, however, cook a lot of vegetarian food which I think is more exciting than plain old meat. 

You see, vegetarianism in America started around 1960 and what I didn’t know is that the Greeks are more responsible for this trend.  I just thought that the Indians, were semi-responsible for this trend.  What if the Indians tried to make all Westerners vegetarian? There are more Indian vegetarians (400 million or so) than the rest of the world combined, according to wikipedia!  It seems to me that the Indian way of being vegetarian is a spiritual and religious thing while the Western world seems to be a trend against the government and our monoculture society in general.

I wonder if our American vegetarian cookbooks would be really different if Hindus had their way?  Would we have more vegetables that we’ve never even heard of?  Would we use these Asian veggies much more than we do otherwise?  Maybe they wouldn’t be that much different because vegetarian cooking really has come around big time in terms of what you can do with it.

India, as I have heard and read about, is intense, but it’s a democracy for crying out loud!  There are so many issues facing a country in order for it to become a superpower and India has more or at least very different ones than the US.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if their was an Indian Market or Indiatown instead of the Italian Market or Chinatown?  Maybe this is why Indians have their own specialized grocery stores; because they don’t want things to get too commercialized.  How would one commercialize India?  Because every time I go into an Indian restaurant (which isn’t too often, but they’re memorable), I see authenticity everywhere! You don’t see that in every Chinese or Italian restaurant, but I wonder if you ever did see it in them?

One thing that fascinates me about Indian food is that it’s supposedly this big vegetarian country where I imagine most of the people don’t eat meat, but yet the cookbooks I have show a lot of meat dishes.  The cow is sacred to them and thus my fascination with India because they eat chickpeas and lentils a lot.  I don’t think you could find another country who worships as much as they do, but yet has all these conflicting ideas about caste systems and maybe they just want us to eat their Indian dishes with meat because they know that we butcher other country’s foods enough as it is. 

Do we forget about what the poor eat?  In honor of all the vegetarians in India, I made naan, a lentil dish, and a potato and yogurt dish.  The lentils and potato dishes were really spicy, which surprised me because I thought our spices were too old, but we ate it with rice, and it just smelled of authenticity.

I wonder if a lot of the women in India work on their food lifestyle all day?  I can just imagine the marketplace as one teeming with energy and smells!  Maybe in the marketplace, everyone has their place and the caste system doesn’t really exist.  That could be wishful thinking, but if you’re going to be prejudiced in India where everyone looks alike, the least you could do would be to learn someone’s different method of preparing food. 

I might like to learn how African Americans make soul food, as I have eaten it in college, or other ethnic dishes.  That’s the great thing about America; there’s so many different choices, so maybe if we all tried to cook different ethnic foods, we’d be more friendly with other immigrants.  Or at least we’d get the prejudices out of our system if we cooked different ethnic foods.

I like soy milk, but hate tofu.  Is that ok?  I understand that soy overrules chickpeas in 230 million tons of the stuff is grown in the world, as opposed to only 9 million tons of chickpeas, according to Wikipedia.  Soybeans are far more versatile than chickpeas.  I understand that and they’re probably more suited to vegetarianism than chickpeas.  But you can’t buy soybeans plain which could be a tragedy because all other beans you can buy in cans or in bulk somewhere. 

Soy is probably the vegetarian equivalent to corn and is more popular in Whole Foods than even that special Macrobiotic/ Middle Eastern section where hummus is, but maybe they will overstay their welcome.  Can you make a dip out of soybeans?  Is edamame just like soybeans?  We all know, or hope you know that soy sauce, tempeh, soy chips, soy burgers are very healthy, but they’re definitely in a different section of the store then corn infused products.

Soybeans also have more dietary fiber, protein, energy, fat, and anything else, in that I wonder why hummus is the fad right now?  I did not know that the soybean was introduced to the US in 1765 and soybean oil is used on cars.  Obviously, we have invested a good deal of time on this oilseed, not a pulse like what chickpea is called. 

I get disgusted when I see chickpeas plain, which may explain why soybeans by themselves are not to be found.  I can imagine roasting them just like the chickpea, but in the meantime, I guess I’ll have to settle for them in fake meats and milks.  I bow down to the mighty soybean in that chickpeas have a long way of genetic engineering to take on the food industry like the soybean has.

What are the ingredients in American made hummus that differ from Middle Eastern hummus?  We have so many food additives in everything I just assumed we had food additives in our hummus too, at least maybe in the less expensive brands of hummus.  The more local it is, the less food additives and more pure it is right?  But the Whole Food store hummus all had chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, and spices, just like mine!

I’m a Middle Eastern hummus virgin, so the fact that we are so competitive with food over here shows me that Middle Eastern countries are probably pretty afraid of us for a reason.  Maybe they do mess with their ancient hummus recipe in the Middle East.  Maybe it’s not as perfect as I think it is and dream it is.  But the Middle East is more fragile then we are and I have to support the country that is having the most trouble.  Could that be why we buy it?  Because we want to support a people who we think are less important than we are?  What is the psychology of food anyway?

What if the fast food people made hummus?  Heck, they opened fast food restaurants specifically for people in ethnic countries like India and the Middle East so surely they wouldn’t do a bad job of making vegetarian food for us here right?

So I checked out the ingredients in all the Whole Foods hummus and found that it’s all pretty much the same.  I was kind of surprised actually, because I just figured that our hummus wouldn’t even compare to the Middle Eastern ones.  But there was something called citric acid in there that I didn’t know.  I looked it up on Wikipedia and it was invented by an Islamic alchemist in the 8th century.  It doesn’t sound as bad as the chemicals we put into our convenience foods nowadays and since it was invented so long ago, it must be good for us right?