Everyday Systems

I know, I know, getting your news from Cracked.com is right on up there with getting it from the Enquirer.

Even so:
The Six Most Horrifiying Lies the Food Industry is Feeding You

And people wonder why I take the time to cook from scratch...

Thanks for sharing. Makes me happy to be vegetarian... will look out for fake berries and wood pulp in my food... : (

Basically, what it's saying is that processed food doesn't always have in it what it would have if YOU'D cooked it yourself.

Cook your kids soup from scratch, too.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44600724/ns ... ns_health/

I do make soup from scratch!

What I often do is serve a roast chicken one day, take some of the leftover meat for bento the next day for lunch, the plunk the carcass with a fair amount of meat still on it in a crock pot, simmer all day, then strain the stock, pick the meat off the bones, then add veggies and spices for a delicious soup. I call it either carcass soup or garbage soup.

We had some for dinner last night, and will probably have the leftovers or dinner again tonight. (My family loves carcass soup).

I just loooove the term Carcass Soup!

Cathy B

I cook from scratch, too, and make my own soups. I'm not sure why this is or why I do it, but the majority of the soups I make are vegetarian. Occasionally I'll add some meat, but not often.

Homemade soup is the best....and so is homemade bread....well....and homemade anything! lol...

janie

I agree! I have homemade soup in the fridge even as I type.

But I have six cans of soup in my cupboards even though they are ridiculously high in sodium for the following reasons:

1. Convenience.
2. Variety.
3. Canned soups are the lesser of convenience food evils as some brands have relatively few unpronounceable ingredients. Which do you want your 17 year old son eating? A grilled cheese sandwich and a can of soup or a hot pocket?

Plus when you make homemade bone broth you are getting a lot of great nutrients.

I love making soup and bread. We used to pay top dollar for gourmet organic breads. Then I started making our own. I recently figured out it costs us about $1.27 a loaf. Can't beat that.
Soup is another bargain. Like Noel said, one chicken 4 meals. Same can be done with a beef roast. We eat it as roast. Make sandwiches. Use leftovers for minestrone soup in the crock pot. Really stretches the old food dollar.
I am so pleased to see so many people interested in cooking from scratch. I am not as crazy cat lady as I thought.

Also, I do a lot of reading about food quality and the article in Cracked.com is in line with everything I have read about the quality of food in this country. Movies like Food 101 and Food Nation have been exposing the food industry for years. I got started on this topic working as a temp for a company that made plastic bottles and frozen meal plastic containers. One would think the main thrust of research for these companies would be making the container food safe. Here are some of the things I learned there:
Food stored in plastic absorbs the plastic depending on the amount of acid in the food. The reason tomato sauce turns plastic containers pink is that the plastic is degraded by the acid and leaches into the food.
One of my jobs was to smell and taste food made in these plastic containers to determine the plastic taste in the food. If food was stored in plain plastic, it tasted so strongly of plastic, you would never eat it. And if you heat food in the plastic, as with a TV dinner, the smell of plastic when you opened the microwave, would turn your stomach. So what do they do about this? They add scent and flavoring to the plastic as they make it. Butter, vanilla, fruit, onion, garlic etc. are all flavorings added to the plastic to cover up the smell. We were asked to rate the containers on residue plastic taste.
When I worked with Saran (as in Saran wrap, shrink wrap, covers on frozen dinners etc.), we were told Saran was extremely dangerous. We were trained to use masks if it ever started on fire. We had about 10 seconds to get to a mask before we could be subjected to harmful effects from the fumes. The US is the only civilized country where saran is still legal because of it's harmful effects.
Finally, an acid like orange juice or coffee left in Styrofoam for any length of time is extremely hazardous.

Since working there, we use glass containers to transport food to work and picnics and to store in the refrigerator. We NEVER use styrofoam anything and we take our own containers to restaurants for leftovers. We use waxed paper or covered dishes instead of saran and our only nod to plastic is ketchup bottles because even organic ketchup now comes in plastic.

Our friends think we are crazy for all the precautions we take about these things but we have our reasons. My husband worked with chemicals for years and so did I. We both developed exactly the same kind of lymphoma in our later years. The doctor said that was really unusual 2 unrelated people in the family would develop the same type of cancer. Maybe not, is our thought. We asked her about working with chemicals and she said there is some thought out there that this type of cancer is related to chemicals and pesticides. Hmmmmm.

Pangelsue2 wrote:I recently figured out it costs us about $1.27 a loaf. Can't beat that.

I currently live in Bulgaria and you can get fresh baked bread (from the same day) at the supermarket for 0,90 $.

One of the reasons I started making bread was because I'd picked up a loaf of artisan-type bread and wasn't happy with the price. Then I wandered down the baking aisle at the store and realized that a bag of flour was much cheaper and I could make lots of loaves of bread from it. I put the bread back and the rest is my bread-making history.

Mmm, I like homemade soup and bread more than anything else!

That's why I don't make bread very much. I would just end up turning all my N-days red.

Soup is easier, though, since I have to heat it up.

I would like to make some bread, though. Maybe I'll make that my reward for clearing off all the necessary horizontal surfaces in my tiny apartment...

Somehow making the stock in the crockpot never occurred to me. It makes it seem so much more reasonable to do since it can just be left the next day while I'm at work. I love it!

Mark Bittman's Shared Meals, Shared Knowledge. His piece about Junk Food is good, too.

wosnes wrote:Mark Bittman's Shared Meals, Shared Knowledge. His piece about Junk Food is good, too.

Wonderful article.

I clicked through to the recipes on the $5/person (real food value meals) and I am putting corn potato chowder on the menu for this weekend, made with a carcass soup base.

The potato corn chowder sounds tasty. I usually make Bittman's Basic Corn Chowder with corn cob broth. It's tasty! For some reason I can't get the link to post, so here's the recipe:

Basic Corn Chowder
Yield 4 servings
Time 30 to 40 minutes

For maximum efficiency, strip the corn and get the cobs simmering in water first; then chop the onion while the oil is heating, and peel and chop the potatoes as the onions are cooking. At that point, almost all of the work is done.

Ingredients
4 to 6 ears of corn
1 tablespoon butter or neutral oil, like canola or grapeseed
1 medium onion, chopped
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tomatoes, cored, seeded and chopped (optional)
1 cup whole or low-fat milk
1/2 cup chopped parsley (optional).

Method
1. Shuck corn, and use a paring knife to strip kernels into a bowl. Put cobs in a pot with 4 cups water; bring to a boil, cover and simmer while you continue.

2. Put butter or oil in a saucepan, and turn heat to medium-high. When butter melts or oil is hot, add onion and potatoes, along with a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion softens, about 5 minutes; add tomatoes and cook, stirring, for another minute or two.

3. After corncobs have cooked at least 10 minutes, strain liquid into onion-potato mixture; bring to a boil, then lower heat to a simmer. When potatoes are tender, add corn kernels and milk, and heat through. Taste, and adjust seasonings. Garnish with the parsley, and serve.

Variations
Corn chowder with bacon and cream: In Step 2, substitute 1/2 cup chopped bacon for butter or oil; cook over medium heat until it renders some of its fat, then add onion. In Step 3, use heavy cream or half-and-half in place of milk.
Curried corn chowder: In Step 2, use oil, and add 1 tablespoon each curry powder and peeled and minced ginger to the onions. In Step 3, use sour cream in place of milk; garnish with cilantro in place of parsley.

I'm not sure why, but I've never used the tomato in this recipe. I like the basic and the variation with bacon and cream. Good stuff!

I know that my husband and son would love the bacon and cream version. Thank you!

Blithe Morning wrote:I know that my husband and son would love the bacon and cream version. Thank you!

It's my favorite -- and why I only make it a couple of times yearly!