Pancakes!

I found someone selling a pancake maker for $1 on Craigslist last month in Center City. I lugged that pancake maker from 13th St. all the way back to my apartment. Last Saturday, I dragged the pancake maker all the way back to NJ.

I don't need a pancake maker, obviously. I don't care if my pancakes are rectangular or cloud-shaped, or if they're a tad burnt. I just figured that $1 is a nice price to pay for a non-stick electric saucepan with 4 circular compartments. In college, I can now fry eggs, make pan pizzas, create grilled cheese sandwiches and heat up cookies, all in my room! Which will be very nice.

At the urging of my sister, I made pancakes today. I was going to follow this recipe completely, because I do want to try Drop Scones. Unfortunately, my brother had finished the milk last night. So, here's the modified recipe that worked out alright and yielded dry pancakes. Next time, I will definitely follow the above recipe, but since I appeased my sister, all is well.

Ingredients - 20 pancakes
250 g self raising flour (it has salt included)
25 g sugar
4 eggs
170 g raspberry yoghurt (which includes 26 g sugar)
30 g water
25 g melted butter
vanilla (to appease my sister)
frozen blueberries (to appease my brother)

Look at how pointy the tip of this egg is!

Method
1. Sift dry ingredients.
2. Melt butter and add all wet ingredients.

3. Scoop 1.5 tbsp (2 tbsp is okay. 3 is tolerable.) of batter onto pancake maker and let it cook until it poofs up and looks cooked. This takes about a minute.

Things I'm going to have to change next time to make myself happy:

1. Use 200 ml (whole?) milk, of course, instead of the yoghurt-that-no-one-eats-but-my-mum-buys-it-anyway-due-to-advertising-and-familiarity.

2. No vanilla or blueberries. I want to make perfect plain pancakes before I start with the flavourings.

3. Don't melt the butter. Cut the butter in. I really don't like melting butter. The smell is putrid, it looks like adipose tissue, and I might as well use oil if I want to melt butter! I guess it's just preference.

4. Use less sugar and less butter

5. No water.

Taste of Penn Part IV: Nancy's

This is part of the series about the Taste of Penn.

"What makes you special?"

My question. I really need to come up with a better, less cliche question, but that's all I had for the Taste of Penn. I really didn't need to ask, though, because Nancy's dairy honestly tastes different.

The cottage cheese actually tasted like something! It was tangy. Flavourful. Sour. The cottage cheese I get at Costco/Shoprite is usually much more mild tasting, and perhaps even bland, which is the way I like it because I'm not a huge cottage cheese fan. This cottage cheese, however, was thick and distinctly - may I say it - "gourmet"!

(no picture unfortunately)

I tried some of the yoghurt and it was also extremely sour-tangy. The fruit was also apparently homemade. I don't think I'm used to the strong taste, because I've grown up eating milder, sweeter yoghurts, but for those of you who want to try stuff with a zing, or who are dairy fanatics... this takes the cake. I mean, this takes the parfait.

I had never had kefir before, so I don't have anything to compare with this kefir. Maybe kefir is an acquired taste but I just thought it was okay.

The representative to whom I talked emphasised the whole organic thing, with cows from Oregon, and the presence of live cultures in the products. One thing that never made sense to me was that if we are digesting the foods we eat, how much of the probiotics (i.e. live bacteria) actually get to our small intestines intact? They'd have to survive a pH of 2 in our stomachs! According to my past two nutrition classes, research on this has been (what a surprise...) two-sided, with no conclusive evidence of probiotics aiding in digestion in the small intestine.

Dude, I love Yakult and yoghurt so much though, purely for the taste, and not for the probiotics component, that I'm not too concerned with this (apart from the fact that it's a huge advertising gimmick).

Coconut milk?

This kind of irks me.

Sure, the company cuts out all the legality/truth issues by saying "It is theorized that...", but the mere fact that the statement "coconut provides all of the required natural properties for survival" is blatantly printed on there makes me wonder whether companies sell food for our health or for our money.

Actually, scratch that; every single company probably sells stuff to get our money. Even those ones that boast organic-ness, and wholesome-ness, and we're-gonna-make-you-live-longer (so we can sell more of our stuff to you!)-ness. I realised this a few days ago when I was looking at various food companies' websites (Campbell, Pepsico, Aramack, some local candy company...etc) for internships over the summer. They want managers and marketers. They want people who are going to get degree in management or marketing. MANAGEMENT. Not biology, not chemistry, not food science, or culinary arts. No. They want Whartonites.

Now I'm wondering if I should transfer to Wharton.

They want teams of people who can market their product. Who can persuade the public. Who probably don't know what's in the food and how those ingredients/chemicals affect the body, but it's alright; as long as they market that food out and prevent the company from bankrupting, everyone wins!

So this brings me to the marketing style of this coconut milk yoghurt.

First, with regards to macronutrients, coconuts are a poor source of protein, and contains a lot of fat. This makes sense, since they're seeds, and seeds need a ton of endosperm for energy to grow after germinating. Coconuts also do not have chlorophyll (they are seeds. Seeds don't have chloryphyll. They don't need chlorophyll, since all their energy is derived from the endosperm, which came from the mother plant, the palm...). This means that various antioxidants, vitamins, and micronutrients are missing too. There definitely is not any beta carotene, which is a source of vitamin A. (Does coconut flesh look yellowy/orange to you?) Without vitamin A, humans have issues with eyesight (specifically, hardening of the retinas, and poor night vision).

Also, I don't think that there is enough zinc, molybdenum, selenium, and other trace metals because...of the environment and the growing soil... Also, where is the calcium!?

Without doing more research and citing my sources (so, just knowledge from nutrition class that I actually remember right now...), the advertisement claim is debunked. Okay, my weakness here is that I didn't cite any sources.

No one can sue them, though, because of the first three words. However, this is something I will think of every time I look at this company. This, and the ads they put on Pandora.com. These two things irk me, and although I LOVE the soy ice cream they make (The mint chocolate one. Is. Simply. The. Best. Ice. Cream. Ever.), I don't feel much loyalty to them anymore.

Homecoming 30 October 2010

Those buns were advertised as warm. They were not warm, due to the wind. It was quite amusing. They also were super sticky [honey!], but too airy and uniform.

I know that this is a week late, but I've been really busy with studying, visiting BV, and doing homework, and somehow getting in 5-6 hours of sleep in per night. It's finally Friday, and although I do have a lot of homework to do, I'm going to update because this event I went to last Saturday was pretty amazing.

This was the Weiss Pavilion opening ceremony, and there were a lot of alumni there to see it since it was homecoming weekend. One day, I will protest the toast throwing tradition thingy...

The only reason I went was so that I could get a drawstring bag. The first 100 people, apparently, got drawstring bags. I also got a mint tin with mints and the Penn logo, which is pretty sick!!

There was also a lot of food. It was ridiculous. I have to say that the chocolate filled and sweet potato filled croissants were the best. The baked goods were cold, due to the freezing, windy weather, but they all tasted delicious and textured nevertheless.

They actually looked like savoury croissants, and I did want something savoury since everything else was loaded with sweetness. I did eat some quiche, before I realised there were cured pig chunks inside [ham].

This was a greek yoghurt, fruit and granola parfait. The blueberries and strawberries were used for the Penn colours, according to a girl I met at the opening. It was pretty awkward actually; at first, we just looked at each other, unsure of whether to talk or not. So then I said hi. And then we had a conversation, so that was interesting. I forgot her name though... oh well. I'll probably see her again, as I have with a bunch of other people who I thought I'd forgotten/they'd forgotten me.

I dislike hot apple cider. The fact that it's warm and sour kind of disgusts me. Cold apple cider, or frozen apple cider, on the other hand, is amazing. Note the cheerleaders in the glass. I should get better at photography.

This was a French toast chunk supersaturated with maple syrup. The whipped cream was amazingly fluffy and fat. It was literally a LOT of sugar...Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could've heard sugar crystals crunching...

Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush...

This morning, I got back from my blood test and decided to have some mulberry yoghurt. My friend JM has a mulberry tree in her yard, and she's been feeding us with A LOT of mulberries, which has been awesome since I have never had mulberries before. They're these tiny [as in, Centrum sized] berries that look like mini blackberries, but taste completely different. For one thing, they're not very sweet, and the texture is smooth, save the grittiness because of the puny seeds. My mum added some sugar to the mulberries to stop them from getting mouldy [after all, these are pretty wild mulberries. They aren't cultivated].

This was definitely a change from the typical strawberry or blueberry yoghurt. I'm not even that fond of strawberry yoghurt.

Anyway, now I'm consuming dried jujube berries [red dates, hong zao], because my mum says that they have a "high iron content" [well, not entirely true], which would help replenish my lost blood today. There's also a lot of vitamin C, of which I wouldn't mind having 400% the daily value, since I want to be extra protected against colds or illness, especially as I have Graves' Disease. I remember during the last few weeks of October, during college applications [2 E.A. and 1 E.D.], I basically consumed over 800% of my daily vitamin C every single day in the form of citrus, Centrum, granola bars/cereals, and Zipfizz [I don't know why my mum bought so much Zipfizz, way back]. That, coupled with a ton of caffeine, made my hands shake uncontrollably, and I felt exhausted and irritable. Luckily, I don't have to go through that again... until college...

My doctor told me to cut caffeine down, though, since I have Graves' Disease.

Yoghurt Oatmeal?

So... I had a track meet today, and as all runners know, carbs = vital for racing. In all honesty though, a 1600m race is not going to require 5 meals of 90% carbohydrates the day before and of. The 1600m is short enough that one could definitely chug 140 Calories [or even fewer, since 6-7 minutes of racing does not require 140 Calories] worth of sugar [a.k.a. candy!] However, since I love food, I always eat a lot before race day. Well, I eat a lot in general.

Even though today is Monday, I only had 1 hour of school because it was midterms, so I went to school to take the French midterm around 10. This meant that I could actually cook something for breakfast :D [Though in all honesty, I love cereal, toast, and sandwiches. I could live on that].

I made oatmeal. Usually, people add water or milk, but I decided to be adventurous and added yoghurt... I figured it'd be gooeyer. My method of cooking oatmeal? Dump everything in at the same time and stir it until it looks done, on medium to high heat. Gets done fast... and uses the least energy. I do not want to use fossil fuels to let the liquid boil, then add the oats, then add the fruit. *Kerplunk!* goes everything.

I cut up a whole apple [Pinklady, though I personally prefer Royal Gala Apples the most] and dumped it in, with the oatmeal and yoghurt. I also added a small cinnamon stick since I don't have powdered cinnamon at home [unfortunately - way back, when we went shopping for spices I got the cinnamon sticks because they looked cooler. Sigh.].

I'm guessing, [at most] 10 minutes later, I turned off the heat.

Looks pretty bland.
Tasted kinda sour... so I added stuff to it :) Dried fruit, chocolate powder. I know, I'm not traditional at all.

As for the track meet... didn't go so well.