A flaky buttery tart shell gets dressed up with garlic, juicy ripe tomatoes, and tasty cheese. Basil leaves perfectly complement the sweet tomatoes. Add a little green salad drizzled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a dash of salt and pepper, and you’re good to go!
I got the recipe from this book
Bon appetit!
Wooohooo! Beginning next month, produce shopping in the EU will be elevated to a whole new level of excitement. After years of very strict and very detailed regulations on the size and shape of basically every fruit and vegetable sold in stores across Euroland, the sexy curved cuke is about to descend upon the Old World.
According to EU regulations, cucumbers and a host of other fruits and vegetables are categorized into different classes, with only the top class making it onto the shelves of stores. This, so the good people in Brussels reasoned, would ensure a truly egalitarian shopping experience from London to Warsaw. It also had the truly unegalitarian effect of keeping prices for produce high, and of wasting mountains of non-conforming produce outcasts. In a seemingly triumphant victory of man over nature, the size, shape, color, weight, height, width, diameter, and general appearance of such innocents as cauliflower, plums, celery, leeks, spinach, and cucumbers were decisively defined as either up to standard or swine food. Bureaucratic as this may sound, one can only speculate about the dreamy minds that penned down these regulations. For example, one finds that “Extra Class” cucumbers must be “well developed” and “well shaped and practically straight”, with the “maximum height of the arch: 10mm per 10cm of lenght of the cucumber”.
All those romantic notions were put to an end last November when the EU’s Agricultural Commissioner, who goes by the lush name of Mariann Fischer Boel decided it was time to deregulate. Twenty-six (26!) fruits and vegetables are now de facto liberated and free to grow however crooked, curvy, wobbly, knotty, and natural they want. Some poor specimen were not so lucky though. Take the shy pear for example. The Official Journal of the European Union Commission Regulation (EC) No 86/2004 of January 15, 2004 classifies pears into three categories, with size being determined by “maximum diameter of the equatorial section”. Of course, nobody had the heart to get rid of such poetic classifications. The fact that Extra Class pears “must not be gritty”, however, was clearly the work of an underpaid assistant lacking both imagination and charisma…
Bye bye, straight cucumber!
Today is my friend KC’s birthday, so I thought we’d celebrate with something special. Happy birthday, KC!
A flash in the pan! Zucchini, tomatoes, yellow bell peppers, scallions, and garlic. Sauteed with olive oil, thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper…and a dash of aged balsamic vinegar for good measure. Nicely accompanied by crispy oven fries. Add a nice piece of grilled meat if you feel carnivorous. Bon appetit!
Milk and dairy products are some of my favorite foods, so lactose intolerance has always struck me as a particularly awful affliction. No more milk with my chocolate cookies? Unthinkable! Well, the other day I found out that it’s not the lactose intolerance that’s the affliction, but the lactose tolerance!
According to the latest genetic research, all humans were originally lactose intolerant. The enzyme that’s responsible for the digestion of lactose ceases to be produced in the human body once children are weened off of breast feeding. Based on genetic studies of bone fragments, neolithic Europeans were all lactose intolerant. This, however, changed drastically with the advent of agriculture some 7,000 years ago. Humans discovered that the milk of their cows was a great source of nutrition that provided much needed sustenance. Initially, drinking cow milk caused my neolithic ancestors great pains, badly bloated stomachs, and a lot of diarrhea.
Enter evolution and the process of positive selection. The ability to drink milk provided humans with an enormous nutritional advantage. Scientists have figured out that humans who became lactose tolerant were able to raise ten times the amount of offspring than those who weren’t. Guess who lived to see their great-grand children romp around in the dark forests of central Europe? You guessed right. The lactose tolerant bunch. A single mutation had turned the neolithic farmers of Europe into dairy lovers. The mutation responsible for lactose tolerance is located on the gene that produces the lactose “digesting” enzyme. As a consequence of this mutation, this enzyme continues to be produced even when humans are no longer breast fed. Similar mutations on the same gene were found among herding tribes in Eastern Africa, where they developed about 6,800 years ago.
The rapid spread of lactose tolerance among neolithic Europeans and the close association with the development of prehistoric agriculture is one of the most convincing examples of the power of evolution. In only 400 generations, a lactose intolerant population in central and northern Europe became almost 100% lactose tolerant. The chart below illustrates the worldwide distribution of lactose intolerance today. Not surprisingly, areas with predominantly European ancestry have the lowest rates of lactose intolerance.
