Anger Burger

I’m not sure if I am alright with eating palm oil.  Jesus, I’m turning into such a goddamn hippie.  But palm oil is very highly saturated, almost as bad for you as animal fats, and the production of it destroys rainforests as often as not.  Basically you’re eating a hamburger from McDonald’s is what I’m saying.

Now: Nutella.  Nutella cracks me up.  I love that this chocolate-nut spread is marketed as a healthy snack for kids, it’s so European and sideways that I am inclined to grant them whatever lunacy they ask me to believe.  Each time I see an ad for Nutella showing a mom “tricking” her kids to eat this “nutritious” snack of Nutella on toast I shriek with glee — do kids need convincing to eat toast?  I mean, at least with the Hidden Valley Ranch commercials is shows kids chowing down on vegetables while eating  profoundly unhealthy buckets of ranch dressing, you know what I’m saying?  Of course all of this is moot, because Nutella is fucking delicious.  You could be smearing it on gravel for all me or those kids care.

And then we’re back at the palm oil; America is the only country to have Nutella made with modified palm oil.  Everyone else gets vegetable oil.  And sugar!  Oh man does American Nutella have a lot of sugar in it.  If you’re lucky enough to find actual imported Italian Nutella then you should ignore this entire blog post, otherwise read on.  I want to eat Nutella and about once a year I convince myself that it’s okay to buy a jar.  However!  The internet has once again come to my rescue, because Nutella?  Is pretty stupid easy to make at home.

The most annoying part by far is roasting and peeling the hazelnuts themselves.  I paid about $6 for a half a pound of raw hazelnuts, which means this homemade stuff isn’t going to be any cheaper than buying Nutella from the store, but it’s not much more expensive either.

And is it worth it?  Ugh, yes.  I’m sure my neighbors heard me yell “NUTELLA!” as I stuck spoonful after spoonful of it into my mouth.  And better than Nutella, even!  A good pinch of salt and things are starting to look bad for my “Eat Less Sugar If Possible” plan.

Gianduia Cream
if you can find cheap, peeled roasted hazelnuts, that’s great, but I’m betting you can’t.  and if you don’t have a food processor, a blender will work but will take a little more patience; you’ll need to continually scrape down the sides and possibly need a few drips of flavorless vegetable oil to encourage the blending process.  the cream will keep at room temperature for some time, but if the weather is warm you may want to compromise the fine, almost runny texture by refrigerating it rather than let your gianduia cream go rancid.

1/2 lb. raw hazelnuts
3 T. high quality baking cocoa (not Dutched)
3.5 oz. bar high quality milk chocolate, melted
scant 1/2 C. powdered sugar
1/4 tsp. salt or more to taste

• In a 400° oven, roast the hazelnuts on a baking sheet for about 10 minutes, or until they just barely start to smell roasty.  Do not over-roast them!

• Meanwhile, melt the milk chocolate and set aside.

• When the nuts are barely toasted, carefully (hot!) and in small batches rub the skins clean of the nuts by vigorously agitating inside a clean kitchen towel.  They will still require you to hand-rub almost each nut to get the skin off, but it’s a satisfying process.  You won’t get them all clean – about 20% won’t give up their skins no matter what you do, but that’s okay.

• In a food processor or blender, grind the hazelnuts into a fine paste, until the nuts start to look wet from the oil they express.  Then add everything else and blend for 2-4 minutes, or until quite smooth.  It will never get totally smooth, but I like the fine graininess of it.

• Pour into 8oz ramekin or jar and try to keep from eating it entirely in the first 10 minutes.

Last week I talked about successfully eating a salad and the small ticker-tape parade that resulted.  Well!  Let me tell you.  All is still right with the world, because my body sent me an email re: it still doesn’t like fiber.

Specifically, I went out to acquire the most nutritious cereal I could find, the Ezekiel sprouted grain cereal.  I have some hesitation in buying Ezekiel products (specifically: taking nutrition suggestions from a work of fiction causes much eye-rolling on my part) but until there’s an atheist sprouted grain cereal I’ll have to make do.  And maybe it was the burning of righteousness in my bowel, but most likely it was the fiber: this did not go down well.  Crohn’s monster say NO.

Also: I bought it in part because I wanted Grape Nuts.  Why not buy Grape Nuts?  Because I thought it had high fructose corn syrup in it.  Does it actually?  Well, no.  So, I’m a moron.

To greater success, I bought this:

I’ve been a little obsessed with nutrient-packing lately in the hopes that it’ll make me feel better.  I’m not sure what’s going on with my health right now, but I suspect my body is changing how it has an allergy attack.  Let me back up a little.

When I was a young teen I had demonic-level hay fever attacks, the kind where I’d throw up stomachfuls of drainage.  Sorry about that — were you trying to keep from gagging?  I should have warned you.  I missed school and became more of an introvert than I’d been previously, which was very.  Allergy shots cured me for over 15 years (great, considering the average period of effectiveness is half that), but lately I think I’m having entirely new symptoms; instead of sneezing, runny nose and post-nasal drip, I’ve developed just the post nasal drip and what I call “mysterious retardation.”  My throat is sore all the time from the drip, and my ability to focus is totally kaput: at night I can barely sleep and during the day I can barely wake.  I’m entering into the grey fog of not-quite-insomnia, which is leaving my brain good for little more than watching old Star Trek movies on Netflix and trying (and failing) to knit a dog sweater.  Not awesome.

Almond butter!  I’m getting to it.  So the allergy thing combined with the Crohn’s is no good at all, and part of this is a complete loss of appetite.  I sit down to eat a meal and halfway through am nauseated.  I don’t like it one bit, I tell you.  In an effort to combat this I’ve really stepped up the quality of my meals: more vegetables, more healthy oils, more protein.  Enter: raw almond butter.  Almonds lose nearly all their vitamin A during roasting, among other nutrients, and I like the taste of the raw ones anyway.   Also, it’s good for my IMPENDING  HEART ATTACK to pay $8 for a single jar of almond butter.  If I got the organic stuff I’d be paying $20.  UGH.

I can’t tell if its working yet.  I’m angry?  That’s a good sign, right?

I’ve mentioned gobō, or burdock root, here before, but I wanted to talk about it some more.  I feel like your high school counselor.  I’d like to talk to you about gobō.  Anyway, gobō is this long, weird root vegetable that sells for something dumb like 25 cents in Asian markets, making it a reasonable loss if you decide you don’t like it.  It’s very fibrous and nutritious and has a peculiar green flavor to it, sort of the way dandelions smell when you crush them, but with a sweetness.  Because it oxidizes very rapidly, it’s good to immediately submerge it in cool water after cutting.

Above here, I cut a single root into small chops (I don’t know what its really called, but it’s that thing where you cut pieces by rotating the vegetable and “sharpening” it like you would a pencil — it makes these rustic but evenly sized pieces) which Mike, the resident Viking, ended up not liking very much.  Too fibrous.  Traditionally, gobō is cut into matchsticks, which I think he would have liked a lot more.  Also traditionally, the gobō is then cooked with carrots to make kinpira gobō, a really lovely side dish.  But!  I can’t leave anything alone, so I decided to make purple sweet potato gobō instead.  Purple sweet potato, you say?

Called beni imo in Japan, I’ve seen this sold in two different Asian markets in the US (one in Washington and one in California) as “Okinawan Sweet Potato”.  The color alone makes it worth buying, but the flavor is great too.

So pretty!  The resulting mutated kinpira gobō I made was so dark that it wouldn’t photograph at all.  So, gigantic letdown on that story.  But it tasted good!

We ate it with rice and some black cod, my current fish crush.  I made a marinade of miso paste, gochujang (Korean chili paste), grated ginger and some water to thin – fuck recipes, just mix it together in small amounts until it seems edible.  The fish was then broiled until just cooked and topped with cut green onion and perilla leaf.  The Viking loved the marinade – don’t be afraid of the gochujang, it’s not as spicy as it looks.  Our favorite local Japanese restaurant serves everyone with an amuse-bouche of cold cucumber slices served with their own sauce of miso paste and gochujang, and it’s painfully, wretchedly addictive and predictably I can’t seem to get it right at home — mine is much too strong. Oh well.  I’ll have to just keep going back there to get it.

Can you tell I accidentally slept 10 hours last night?  I think I left my talons in bed.