Sydney Oland

My thesis is going fairly smoothly so far (actually a little ahead of my self imposed schedule) but it's amazing how the technique of marinating can be applied to writing.  In order to marinade something you steep it in a highly seasoned mixture until it takes on the desired flavour.  When it comes to writing, and I'm assuming the same technique can be applied to many other things as well, things go far smoother when you let things sit for awhile and settle, marinade.  Or I guess an even better metaphor would be the practice of letting a freshly cooked piece of meat sit for a few minutes to let the precious meat juice settle back into the meat.  If that stage of the cooking process is rushed once the meat is sliced all the juices run out and you're left with a dry, far less tasty piece of meat.

It's very important that I have a moist, tasty thesis so it's going to rest for the weekend.  The current plan is to take a red pen to it sometime next week. Then take it to Prof. Glick (my adviser) the first week of August for more fine tuning.  Ah the humbling process of editing, nothing quite like it.

(The above lyric is from the song SpottieOttieDopalicious by Outkast, big tune.)

I'm making jook (aka congee) for breakfast today using David Lebovitz's recipe.  It's not quite ready as I type this, I"m trying to let the falvours get to know one another as Lebovitz suggests in his recipe.

This is a very exciting breakfast option for me.  I like the idea of porridge, jook is essentially a rice porridge, but I'm not a huge fan of sweet things and especially not in the morning.  I've added frozen peas, dried mushrooms and garlic scapes to my jook, just stuff I had on hand.  It's a shame that I didn't go out and get some ginger and dried shrimp but if this goes well then those can be for next weeks batch.

It's a big recipe so in a perfect world I could make this Monday morning and then have it for the rest of the week.

Here's a picture of its process.

JOOK

Recently I've been getting into fermentation, which even as I type this seems like a weird thing to be 'into'.  Two weeks ago I started a batch of Mexican pineapple vinegar, from Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, I tasted it on Sunday and it's almost got a vinegary taste.  It needs another week or so of fermenting on the counter I think.

When I was last home to Toronto for a visit with my Omi I told her about my experiment with making vinegar, she laughed at me and told me that this was how they made vinegar when she was a child.  She's eastern European, so they didn't use pineapple but other kinds of fruit.

It's funny to me that my Grandmother moved to Canada more then 50 years ago to give her family a better life, and a generation later I'm making vinegar the same way she did on a rural family farm in the 1930's.

I'm not sure what that says about me that I feel the need to try and make my own vinegar instead of spending 1$ on a bottle at the store, but it certainly felt nice to give my Omi a good chuckle.

I've been spending a lot of time with offal and meat in general because of my new project www.eatingnosetotail.com.  Right now I'm making a tongue and I'm going to serve it with Fergus Henderson's green sauce.  The recipe for this sauce called for half and quarter bunches of various herbs.  So now I have a surplus of beautiful herbs in my kitchen.

I decided to make risotto for dinner tonight, and having no stock in the freezer I decided to make a vegetable stock with some of the herbs, the top of a giant leek, the peelings from two carrots, a few cloves of garlic and some extra already chopped onion.  For good measure I threw in some peppercorns and a few fresh bird chili's.  My apartment smells heavenly right now. 

Thank god it's summer, because I'm being reminded how much I love vegetables.  And with my latest project making my life fairly meaty it was really good to be reminded how wonderful a meal from the garden can be.

I did not throw up on the podium.  Awesome.

I actually really enjoyed my panel, the other two papers were really interesting.  I was the second of three papers, and although the tips of my fingers were tingling all through the first paper when it was my turn I actually felt pretty good.  The first few paragraphs were a little shaky, but once I found my stride at about page three it was pretty smooth sailing.

Alice Julier, who mentored me through this paper was there to watch, and my good friend Lilly (www.consuminglilly.com) was also in attendance.  There were about thirteen people total who watched me give my paper, any more and I think I would have been way more nervous.  The paper itself needs a little bit of tweaking to make it ready to be published in a journal, the possibility of which is incredibly exciting!

The rest of the conference was really interesting, there was a ton of really fascinating research, as well as a few flops.  All the people I met were wonderful and I find myself back in Boston ready to get my thesis done.  There are some very important questions I need to answer surrounding my thesis, like how long it's going to be as well as how long I am going to take to to write it.  The timeline question being really important becasue of my immigration status.  I need to answer these questions by the end of the week.

Looking forward to going to next year's conference in Indiana.

I'm leaving on Thursday for the conference in Pennsylvania.  Last week I was excited but felt pretty confident overall, this week I'm definitely nervous.  Still excited, but nervous too.  Nauseous excited would be the most apt description.

Being my first conference, and having a history of being a particularly bad public speaker I've been reading my paper out loud for the last few days.  I am just this afternoon starting to feel more like myself when I read it aloud.  Funny how writing something and speaking something can feel so separate.   After all the tweeking my paper has gone through (Thanks Alice!) I'm pretty confident in it, which feels good.  The paper is on gender dynamics in professional and domestic kitchens.  Which seems  to me like a topic that I would not necessarily have done my best work with, so this paper was a nice surprise. 

When I ignore the fact that I have to speak in a room filled with strangers I'm really excited about spending a few days surrounded by food academics.  It's going to be  interesting to see what other people are researching, and talk about where people think the field is headed.

I just hope I don't throw up on the podium during my paper or something mortifying like that.

Wish me luck.

For those of you who don't know me outside of the interweb, I'm tall.  Above average for sure.  In my teen years I briefly had the nickname "Freaky Tall".  Although I have tall on both sides of my family it seems that a lot of my peers are also taller then their parents, and many are taller than their grandparents (even taking pre-old age shrinkage into account). 

Last year I read a paper which pointed out how the current generation of young people in Asia are much taller then the generation that proceeded them.  This article makes the argument that the generation that is taller was brought up with better nutrition than their parents.  As these countries became more industrialized their citizens got more access to and more rounded diet, and the extra calories and nutrients they received in their peak growing years made them taller then the generation before them. 

Nature is a key part of this; more nutrients = more growth.   But what about nurture (nature's counterpart in the procreation process).  The want to give your children better then you had as a child is one of the ways in which you nurture that child.  What better is to the individual is defined by the culture that person associates with.    An example of this is  people who choose to feed their children a vegetarian or vegan diet, their decision is one that they've arrived at because of their culture (religious in some parts of the world,  perceived health reasons in another and for ethical reason in others).   It is their culture that is informing their choices, not nature.  North America's childhood obesity rates, are part of these changes as well.  Parents are not deliberately hurting their children by overfeeding they are trying to make their children happy.   It's just that the foods that their children want are deviously unhealthy (although that could just be my naive opinion not being a parent myself.) These changes in people's physical appearance have to do with what they eat and these changes are drastic because the changes in how we eat are drastic.

With changes in agriculture and food cultures happening so rapidly we are seeing the affects the youngest generations more immediately, not spread out over many generations.  In the case of people being taller then their parents it's a neutral thing, but when it comes to childhood diabetes and obesity rising at such an alarming rate it becomes a negative thing.

The core that unites all of these issues is parents wanting to give their children something better.  More nutritious food is better, more food is better, an alternative diet is better.  What we are beginning to see is the long term effect of better.