AnnaTheRed's Bento Factory

AnnaTheRed's bento factory is amazing. I've seen other sites showing some of the bento artwork other folks have made, but this one is my favorite because she often makes video game references.

The amount of labor involved in making them boggles my mind. It makes me realize how lazy I am when I cook. =(

The Miracle Fruit?

Apparently there's an interesting fruit that changes the way your taste buds perceive sour tastes into sweet. It would be interesting to try this some time. =) I should see if any of my friends want to do a tasting party with these.

Leaf Cuisine

Lunch with my friends went about as smoothly as possible. We ate at Leaf Cuisine, a raw vegan foods place. The food there is very interesting, since they emulate normal foods using only raw vegan ingredients.

One friend didn't like it. He ordered a "pizza" which was nothing like a pizza. Instead of a baked, dough crust, it had a cracker-like crust made of some pressed grain. Instead of cooked tomato sauce, it had some sauce made with dried tomatoes. Instead of cheese, it had some fake cheese sauce with approximately the consistency of mustard. Unfortunately, he was expecting something far more pizza-like.

My other friend was okay with her dish. She's vegetarian, so her expectations were probably more realistic. She ordered nachos which were fairly close to nachos. They were again made with some sort of cracker-like chips made presumably of corn meal but with herbs. Then they had good, normal guacamole and pico de gallo on them. Instead of sour cream, they had some fairly runny creamy sauce. Instead of cheese, they had that fake cheese sauce again. Then they had some sort of bean sauce designed to emulate refried beans.

The dish I ordered was pretty good, actually. I (wisely) ordered a dish that usually is served with mostly raw ingredients: a mushroom sandwich. The only thing a little unusual was that instead of bread, it had "mango bread," which seems like it's something like dried slices of mango. The innards of the sandwich were quite decent, so I enjoyed it.

I would be willing to go to that restaurant again. I'm pretty sure my vegetarian friend would too. My other friend, I'm pretty sure would not.

In any case, the lunch was not particularly dramatic, so things turned out to be okay.

Wasting Food

It annoys me to no end to see restaurants (and customers) waste food. The demand for food worldwide has been increasing faster than our ability to produce food has increased. Why are people so wasteful?

On several occasions, I've been in Chipotle, when the person ahead of me changed their mind about their order. The Chipotle employee was left with a mostly made burrito (or whatever) that he couldn't really do anything with so they just throw it in the trash. This rubs me the wrong way because I'm someone who has voluntarily given up eating meat for the sake of the world whereas the person right next to me not only is consuming meat, but is throwing meat straight into the garbage.

I understand that the restaurant would rather please the customer so the customer comes back again at the cost of wasting some food. However, it seems kind of silly that a customer could theoretically change his mind multiple times and waste many times the actual ingredient cost of what he purchases with no penalty. I'm not exactly sure what could be done except that the customers need to change their attitude toward food.

Allergy Warnings On Food: Useful And Silly

I fully understand why there is a need to have allergy warning information on food. For example, plain chocolate M&Ms can potentially have small amounts of peanut in them because they are from the same plant as peanut M&Ms. For people with the severe allergy to peanuts, this can be a life saver.

However, sometimes the warnings turn out to be just plain silly. For example, I purchased a package of "Chipotle Oven Roasted Peanuts" and the label, as required by law, warns: "Allergy Information: This product is processed on equipment that also processes other tree nuts or peanuts. May contain tree nuts or peanuts." I certainly hope the peanuts are processed on equipment that processes peanuts. And I certainly hope it contains peanuts.

Chipotle Is Not Owned By McDonald's!

Woo! I just found out a great bit of news. People had told me that the Chipotle chain of restaurants was owned by McDonald's and I had never really verified. Apparently, at the end of 2006, McDonald's let Chipotle split off. So my continued patronage of Chipotle is not putting more money in the hands of McDonald's! Yay. No more guilt about it.

Wasabi

I was recently curious about wasabi, that spicy green paste you get with sushi in Japanese restaurants in case you didn't know, so I snooped around a bit a stumbled into this article on wasabi. I had no idea that real wasabi was extraordinarily rare and expensive and that the vast majority of restaurants use a mixture of horseradish and green dye in its place. I mean horseradish and wasabi are closely related, but it was a tad disappointing to find out that I've probably never had real wasabi.

Real wasabi, apparently, only grows under very rare circumstances, namely they need to grow with clean, flowing water with a particular mineral balance. There are only a handful of places that naturally have the right conditions, but people grow wasabi with hydroponics now. I think I should make it a quest to find some place where I can try real wasabi. =)