Flutterby™! : Now we're cooking

For a while we've been trying to cook one set of meals, but with Charlene's recent diet, our two sets of cooking have diverged. Even when we have the same meal, we end up doing it in two different pots so that we can have different cooking times and different spicings and saltings.

This, along with starting to get the kitchen to a usable space, means I'm starting to cook again, although there are things I avoid because they'll just be too much temptation for Charlene to have around, it's fun to play. So I'm back to reading the various "molecular gastronomy" blogs.

MarkV linked to Khymos, a website and weblog dedicated to molecular gastronomy.

Which brings me to molecular gastronomy in general. I recently picked up Twinkie, Deconstructed, Steve Ettlinger's romp through the ingredients in a Twinkie, from enriched wheat bleached flour, looking at the factories in Switzerland and China necessary for the production of that, to Delaware for Polysorbate 60 and the mines of Oklahoma for calcium sulfate. A good read, I've a few minor reservations, but I'll be passing this one around.

However in my recent push to understand more about what I eat, I've started to think a little bit more about the comment petronius made when I mentioned places to source some food chemicals: "Interesting....home-made synthetic food!" It's one thing to better understand what's going on in the kitchen, to replace lore with knowledge, ritual with effective tools, but I'm finding myself cringing from the idea of more of my food coming directly from petrochemicals. I don't, for instance, know if we've got an "obesity epidemic" in this country, but it seems like there may be something to the notion that replacing beet and cane sugar with high fructose corn syrup wholesale is doing something more than if those calories were just as available, only cheaper.