A Week in Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia 4

Found in Old Town Alexandria's Bistrot Lafayette , the seafood was all fresh, not frozen, and excellently handled in a Chardonay and garlic sauce that left every bit well seasoned and tender. I ate the accompanying creme brulees, one lemon and one espresso, too quickly to take a snapshot of them.

A Week in Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia 2

My second, and equally satisfying, experience with Ethiopian food. The entrees ordered come on injera, a pancake-like sourdough flatbread, with more injera for one to pick up food and eat with. Here I have five vegetarian dishes around beef that was exquisitely caramelized without being too sweet. Too bad that I can't have coffee anymore; Ethiopian coffee appeared to be just as exquisite.

Wikipedia on Ethiopian Cuisine

Experimental Treat: Basa Fillets and Sticky Rice

A few weekends ago, as I recovered from switching between nights and days, I felt up to cooking and decided to try something new to me but very old to Viet Nam: sticky rice and steamed fish.

I love "glutinous" rice and have loved it since childhood. It's stickier than jasmine rice due to a higher amount of amylopectin, not gluten, and it's prepared in any number of ways, both savory and sweet. I've had it dyed red (wedding colors) with plums, white topped with peanuts and sugar, the famous "mango and sticky rice" way of Thai restaurants, and as a portable pocket stuffed with mushrooms, green onions, and select meat. However, it has always failed me when I've tried to make it. Traditionally, it's soaked for hours and then steamed. I've tried shortcuts with rice cookers and saucepans, to no avail. It always comes out burned at the bottom, soggy at the middle, and too hard and uncooked on top. EW. Perfect sticky rice, in my mind, should be firm but not hard, clear, and well hydrated. The solution was to finally use the wok that Sunny'd gotten me last fall, along with accompanying bamboo steamer, line them with banana leaves, and steam. Perfecto! Sticky rice for a side to the main course, and then mango and sticky rice for dessert.

To top it off, I ran across a fish I hadn't heard of at the organic market I shop at. "Basa from Vietnam" was the title. A quick wikipedia search showed that it's a catfish analogue that Mississippi Delta farmers are offended by because it's taken up quite a percentage of the domestic catfish market, so the lobbied to have it labeled as "basa" instead. They've got a point. I'm not really convinced that there are significant numbers of aquafarms in Vietnam that would hold up to US inspections. However, I slapped the fillet on a banana leaf, drizzled it with sesame oil and some ginger, and steamed it, and it came out perfectly. Yum.

References:

1. On Food and Cooking, the ultimate food science reference
2. Wikipedia on Basa

The Mommy Diet

After discussing it for quite a while, Sunny and I stopped birth control on December 1st. A month later we're pregnant, which alleviated quite a few worries. Now we're trying to figure out how to optimize my health while the prototype human being develops inside of me. Now I've always been short on exercise, and I love food, so making healthy choices in terms of that is high on our priority list. The babies in the Newborn ICU whose mothers had raging, uncontrolled diabetes haunt me. An infant of such a mother can have just about ANY defect, and that's not going to be my baby.

Research on nutrition and diet has always been unsatisfying because it is impossible to completely control someone's diet. You can't really make two hundred people eat exactly the same diet for years in order to truly study the effects of a diet. Add the insurance liability of studying pregnant women, and the end result is that I view a lot of the dietary advice for expectant mothers with skepticism. For instance, the March of Dimes website suggests that 12 ounces a week of fish that may have mercury is safe. How do they know that! I love salmon both as sushi and as gravlax, and now I'm avoiding both. I have blatantly ignored any advice about soft cheese containing a dangerous amount of bacteria. I figure that as long as it is made from pasteurized milk, and it's made from a reputable dairy, I can handle it. I am unhappily avoiding raw oysters, but cooked clams are still on my radar!



The food restriction that really breaks my heart is the restriction against coffee. I love coffee. I associate it with good moments from my childhood and great moments from college. Have you ever had Vietnamese-style coffee? It's drip brewed slowly to extract all of the essence of the ground beans, and an inch of sweetened, condensed milk adds creamy lipids and wonderful sweetness. It's better than a daydream and sweeter than cutting class. Now to hear that caffeine can make for smaller babies and have possible, subtle psychological and neurological effects on the baby is scary. But it's a possible, and I love coffee. An occupational concern is also that I use coffee deliberately to perk me up at the end of a long night on call. Otherwise I run the risk of making bad decisions or one of those desperate let-me-sleep-damnit decisions. My current solution is to switch to hot chocolate, which is a bit too sweet, and avoid caffeine except for those situations where I really need it. Not a satisfying solution, but I don't have enough evidence to give it up entirely, or to keep drinking it blithely.

Other Mommy diet resources:

• Food Standards Agency in the UK


• American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology patient handout


• Kid's Health patient handout

White Sands National Monument and Trinity Test Site

This weekend, Sunny and I took a day trip around southern New Mexico. We started by heading to the Trinity Test Site, the site of the first nuclear device explosion in the world. It was pretty anticlimactic. The whole of the original crater has since been filled in by dirt, so none of the fused sand is visible except for some pieces in a display case. There are also some historic photographs, including an aerial view of the site that includes a view of the site of the 108-ton TNT explosion they used as a calibration so that they could measure to force of the atomic detonation. These pictures were interesting, though only a brief nod was given to how devastating the force of an atomic explosion is on life and non-living structures. The picture of the sign is at the gate to ground zero. I thought the distances were interesting given that the flash was seen from Albuquerque, and windows were broken in Alamogordo during the explosion.

Then, we went to the White Sands National Monument and sledded on the gypsum sand dunes until we were tired, and hiked a bit. Sledding in October! Hiking in bare feet (not us, though I was tempted)! On our way back we looped through Las Cruces and drove by the future home of the nation's first spaceport. Since I'm starting a food section to my blogging efforts, I'll have to mention that La Cocina, a restaurant in the town of Truth or Consequences and one that was well reviewed in a Frommer's travel guide, was awful. Billed as New Mexican, their enchiladas and chile rellenos were awful, my prime rib was unevenly done, the Blue Moon (on tap!) lacked an orange slice, and their “authentic” New Mexican chile wasn't even hot.

• Trinity Site web page: http://www.wsmr.army.mil/pao/TrinitySite/trinst.htm
• Trinity test on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_site
• White Sands National Monument: http://www.nps.gov/whsa/
• Don't eat the food: http://www.roadfood.com/Reviews/Overview.aspx?RefID=3912

Brief Check-In: Food Blog

So my newest project is to tour Albuquerque in the pursuit of food. Good food, that is. In brainstorming with Sunny, I've come up with a list of various food tours I could work on, including oysters on the half shell, flan, sushi, pho, microbrews, mead, and more to come. Yesterday we went to a local Red Lobster and tried shrimp, lobster, crab, and oysters. It was a decent baseline for what uninformed persons might consider good seafood, but I'll never go there for seafood again unless someone twists my arm. More on that later. Email me with any suggestions for a topic!

Cheers, Truc-Ha

Iron Chef: May 2007 = Strawberries

What is "Iron Chef"? Iron Chef has been described as a "game show", though I tend to disagree based on the fact that creativity and inspiration are what win the day, not just blind chance and regurgitation of facts. Iron Chef is a Japanese television show with the whimsical premise of an eccentric gourmand who has Iron chefs and guests chefs face off against each other. In each episode an ingredient is chosen as the theme for a meal of multiple courses. Crazy dishes as well as hilariously voiced commentary make this show entertaining, though unfortunately no DVD's of the show were available the last time I looked. If I could just subscribe to the Food Network, I'd actually watch TV.

At medical school, 5 of us started having themed cooking nights about four times a semester. While none of us ever went as crazy as squid ice cream, it was a fun way to get together and enjoy each other's company in a homey fashion. We never got around to having a competition since most of our houses didn't have enough kitchen space, but good times and good conversation were abundant. Since experience and good conversation are especially valued by Sunny and I, I'm hoping to continue the tradition in New Mexico. An added twist is to try and make the theme ingredient something seasonal. At some point in time we might add something like a conversation topic, and this last meeting we did a bit of origami. Hopefully Iron Chef will expand beyond the demesnes of Truc-Ha and continue even after I move on and out of Albuquerque, but I'll have three or more years to establish it, so we'll see.


Cooking, I've observed, is an artform that can be 1) avoided 2) dreaded 3) practiced daily 4) mangled. I personally do a lot of survival cooking that I use shortcuts to make tasteful and somewhat healthful. I have a lot of excuses. Part of my problem is that I don't really enjoy grocery shopping; going to farmers' markets twice a month is a fun and community-conscious alternative, but it doesn't provide for the rest of the month. I could go on, but sometimes I think about the philosophy of the endeavor. A cornerstone of daily life, I've often used the preparation of a nice meal as meditation practice. I don't chop well or evenly, but if I concentrate, it gets better, and I relax. I have to concentrate on planning everything out so that the scallops won't be in the pan long enough to get tough, and so that the salad won't wilt. I don't tend to have side conversations, and the house is usually quiet, waiting for the meal. The results are very concrete as well as mental. At the end of the two hours of standing meditation, I have a yummy reward for my endeavors. Either that, or my attention wandered, and I'm scraping the burned part off the chicken. As any meditation student, I also try to educate myself. This is a great justification for trying the cuisines of many ethnicities, as well as spending time at gourmet joints like Graze (thumbs down) or Ambrosia (thumbs up). Thus, I think that anyone can develop themselves as a capable cook (and should), and I'm have a lot of fun doing it for myself and with friends.

References

Iron Chef article on Wikipedia

First part of an Iron Chef episode

A Cat's Life: Weight Management

Today Ulysses has gone to the vet for some dental work. Trust me he hated it, but I was also a little worried about it because he has gained quite a bit of weight over the last year. When I got him, he was 14 pounds and looked well. Now he is almost 19 pounds and is a fat, slow-moving cat.

Psychologically, many people tend to see the obese as people who lack brain power. The train of thought goes like this: if they were smarter, they'd make better food choices or at least do something so that they wouldn't neglect themselves and look like that. For doctors, we tend to cringe even more as these patients have more medical problems, come to see us more, hear us talk about weight loss, and often have a hard time getting anywhere with the root of their medical problems. As a pediatrician, at least I can often talk about weight maintenance, since your average overweight Caucasian 10-year-old really should weigh more than 140 pounds in a decade, and they just have to hold the fat until they grow into muscular adults. I hope.

Anyway, with Ulysses, he's not smart enough to understand that he needs to diet, and he's obviously failed to self-regulate his own intake. He loves food, and I can certainly empathize with that. I've tried a few different regimens involving a mix of canned food, AKA “wet” food, and kibble, or “dry” food. I used to give him a lump of wet food (1/4 of the can) in the morning and let him snack on as much dry food as he wanted through the day. Then, after a significant weight gain, I tried limiting the dry food. Then I tried halving the dry food and increasing the wet food. Last week he was on wet food only and ate about 1.75 cans a day, begging for more.

I've done some reading. First, there's the problem that cat food packaging, which unlike people packaging, does not necessarily list the absolute calories it contains, and how much of those come from fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Instead it lists percentages, without stating how those percentages were calculated. Because of this, you cannot compare the percent protein on a kibble package (33%) to the protein on a can (10%) and conclude that kibble has more protein, which it doesn't. Secondly, cats' metabolisms are geared to protein and a mostly meat diet, though Ulysses likes some grass now and then. Thus, a high carbohydrate diet gives them a metabolic state similar to adult diabetics. To give you an example of the health risks of that, an adult human diabetic has the same risk of getting a heart attack as the risk of a second heart attack in someone who's already had one. Not good.

To complicate it further, I can't bear the thought of him starving, so I can sympathize with those moms of obese kids who don't have the heart to make their kid diet. That won't stop me from doing it, but I really hate it. It also drives me up the wall when he begs too.

So the solution? The ideal solution would be to feed him only wet food a few times a day. It is not ideal for us because I work so much and there's often no one around to feed him more than once a day. I really hate to give him dry food again, but we may have to go back to it. The vet is going to give me the number of calories he needs (I tried to estimate using the formula we use for premature babies…obviously wrong), and I've written our current pet food supplier to ask them just how many calories are in their products. Based on that, I'll be able to calculate how much food he really needs. It still won't be the correct percentage of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but at least I'll stop overfeeding him for a time. Ulysses gets grumpy when he's hungry. I'm afraid I'll have to wear thick socks this summer or risk getting attack kitty marks on my calves.