Thursday, July 24, 2008

Fast lunches

Well, I was working from home the other day and I decided to cook myself something special.

So I took some leftover chicken breasts, pulled them into pieces, sprinkled them with my new found legal onion and garlic powders from The Spice House and then fried them in a little bit of olive oil until they were lightly browned.

Then I dipped the pieces in my homemade mayo. I had made a double batch and after it was done, I stirred in 1/2 tsp legal onion powder and 1/4 tsp garlic powder.

And I put a little honey on the side.

SO. GOOD.

I've also made honey mustard by mixing a bit of that legal Great Value mustard with honey. YUM!

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Recipe revision and legal mustard!

OK, so I want to let you all know that my new recipe for mayo is easily doubled in the blender, no problem! I will revise my "Stage 1 recipes" section to include this.

Also, Great Value mustard at Wal-Mart is SCD legal. I was surprised, too, believe me. Ingredients: Vinegar, water, mustard seed, salt, turmeric, paprika.

Have a great Sunday!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Egg drama

So, according to a certain egg supplier's web site, pasteurizing eggs does not kill salmonella.

From Eggology:

Pasteurization heats the egg to approximately 130˚F (any higher and the egg would cook), but heat won’t kill Salmonella until approximately 174˚F.

This is, as you might have suspected, not entirely true. First off, as I said in my previous post, salmonella dies when a product is heated to 150 degrees for 3.5 minutes. I also provided information in that post that tells us that salmonella does not only come from outside the hen.

This other site says that heating the eggs to 134 degrees for 3.5 minutes kills salmonella, too. And their eggs aren't cooking at that temperature either...so...

(feel free to insert your own rendition of, "Liar, liar, pants on fire...")

The USDA web site assures us, in fact, that any pasteurized egg product bearing the USDA seal has actually been pasteurized and all the salmonella beasties that might have been in it are, in fact, deceased. They have ceased to be! They are ex-salmonella!

Salmonella? Dead. Yes, dead.

Now, of course, that does not mean that salmonella cannot grow in a previously pasteurized product. There's still a chance that the product could become contaminated from something else -- like if you cut your rare hamburger in half and dip the knife in your newly made mayo. So, you still have to follow normal food safety precautions -- always use clean utensils, and pitch it after a week.

But we don't have to be slavishly brand loyal in order to stay safe from salmonella -- much as companies might wish it to be otherwise.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Safe mayo! No, really!

I have spent a while trying to figure out a way to make truly safe mayonnaise.

There is a risk of salmonella poisoning with any raw egg product. It wasn't always this way; salmonella used to occur only in fresh eggs that were not cooked right away. However, today, salmonella is getting into the eggs before they're even cracked.

People who are immune compromised (many children with autism, or anyone with an autoimmune disease) are going to have a harder time fighting off a salmonella infection, too.

There are a couple of ways I'd researched to make a safe mayonnaise. One was using a cooked mayo recipe. However, in the cooked mayo recipe usually used by the Pecanbread members, the cooking does not kill salmonella -- the mixture does not get hot enough. I stuck a thermometer in it to be sure and it never got up to 150 degrees, which is the temperature necessary to kill salmonella. Not only that, the temperature must be maintained for 3.5 minutes, which is impossible without cooking the egg.

Another way to ensure safe mayo is to use PH test strips, and make sure that the PH is around 3.5. An acid environment kills salmonella.

(I had a citation for that one, I did, but it makes you sign up for this service now. I will give you the link anyway HERE should you choose to check it out).

But let's face it - none of those ways are really all that easy. I want easy! I want safe!

You could also buy pasteurized eggs. However, none of the stores near me carried them.

I was about to give up! I was so mad!

And then I spotted a carton of liquid egg whites at the supermarket.

Ingredients: Egg whites

I was intrigued. They were cheap, they were PASTEURIZED (*choir of angels*)

But would it work?

YES! YES! YES!

SAFE MAYONNAISE WITH PASTEURIZED EGG WHITES

1/4 cup egg white (egg white ONLY in the carton)
1/2 tsp ground mustard
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp vinegar
3/4 cup oil (approximate)
ear plugs (you can thank me later)

Dump the egg white, ground mustard, salt, and vinegar into your blender. Put your ear plugs on. Turn the blender on to HIGH and start adding the oil slowly. How slowly? Add it at a speed where you think you will possibly never ever be done with the mayo.

Keep adding it slowly, until the mixture starts to emulsify. If you look inside, at the beginning you will be able to see right to the bottom of the blender. Staring at the blade is kind of scary, so look away now and then.

You'll notice a difference in the sound as the mayo starts to glop together. Keep adding the oil slowly until it has glopped together to the point where you can't see the blade anymore - or if you can, it's intermittent.

Then stop the blender and you will have mayo! Safe mayo! Germ free mayo!


I know, awesome, right?

Keeps for about two weeks, but mine never lasts that long. You can make a second batch right after the first if you want, but give the blender 5-10 minutes to cool down. Running it at high speed warms things up and it could make your mayo end up a bit thinner than you'd like it.

Enjoy!

NOTE: MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT GET LIQUID EGGS. JUST THE EGG WHITES. Why? Because there's about a billion ingredients in liquid eggs, but egg whites are only whites. Huh. Why do they do that? See what this page says:

Liquid eggs are frozen in a blast freezer at -23°C. When thawed, whites and whole eggs are free-flowing, but freezing gelatinizes straight yolk. Therefore, yolk is combined with sugar, corn syrup, glycerin, phosphates or salt to ensure it stays fluid.

Ew.

So yeah, egg whites for the win!

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Hey kids, time for your daily dose of statins!

Hey kids, it's time for your daily dose of statins!

You have got to be kidding me.

This explains cholesterol rather well, including some information on the LDL subtypes, which your traditional doc has probably never heard of.

My parents are on statins, and I now make sure they take CoQ10 in order to at least undo some of the muscle damage done by taking the drugs. More on that from Ron Rosedale's article here.

By the way, my cholesterol was checked after a couple months of being on the SCD diet. It was slightly elevated. My 'traditional' doctor lectured me on diet, without bothering once to ask what I was actually eating, mind you.

I'll bet my diet was better than his by a long shot.

I don't think for a second that we should be giving our kids cholesterol lowering medications. Bottom line -- we need cholesterol, as it is essential for all sorts of body processes. Children, who are growing and changing, need it even more.

Statins are, in my opinion, a big cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry, who, as you may have noticed, don't exactly have our best interests in mind.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Robit blog! Robit Robit Robit.

Well, it appears that my blog has been locked by spam-prevention robots. Apparently they thought I was also some sort of robot spaminator. So I am making this post as a draft, and once they decide I am not a robot, then it will go live.


Me.


If I were a robot, I would like to look like that one -- all blocky and cool. I'd be low tech and proud of it. Lots of brute strength, not too many brains, because let's face it -- my body is not the greatest (the whole arthritis and autoimmune disease keeps me in a perpetually mid- to low-functioning state), but my brain is OK. I'd like to flip the two and see how that goes for a while.

Spicy

So, I recently received confirmation from The Spice House that their garlic and onion products are 100 percent pure, no additives.

This is AMAZINGLY good news. Yes, I've already ordered a ton. I used to use dried onion and garlic like it was going out of style.

I threw in a little ground celery seed and ground rosemary to celebrate. :P

Outside of onion and garlic, most spices can be presumed safe. My dad used to work for Griffith Laboratories, a food service company that sold a lot of products, including spices, in bulk. Generally, spices won't have any additives or extra ingredients, because if there were, it could possibly muck up trade recipes, which are incredibly precise. Garlic and onion are a bit more foggy because they do tend to clump when they sit around for a while, so it's always a bit of a mystery whether there's an anti-caking agent or something that shouldn't be there.

I also ordered more probiotics, and I'm making yogurt now, so we're in good shape I think.

I'm trying to not eat any of the almond butter for a while to see if it helps me pull out of my mini-flare. I know I eat too much of the stuff anyway, but this will be hard. Sigh.

My next doctor appointment is still a couple of weeks away. I've got time. I just need to keep remembering my supplements! That is the hardest part for me, because the S. boulardii is in the fridge. Jeffrey is going to try to help me though.