Bits ‘n Bites

Hallowe’en may conjure up thoughts of candies and cookies, but after doing three cooking challenges in a row involving sweets, I needed a break. Luckily the Weekend Cookbook Challenge #21, hosted by mlb of Je mange la ville blog this month, was pretty liberal in how we tie our recipe to Hallowe’en.

After flipping through countless pumpkin recipes, most involving breads or muffins, I finally found something interesting in The Whole Foods Market Cookbook: Toasted Pepita Dip. It had some of my favorite ingredients, namely, jalapeños, cilantro, cayenne, cumin and lime. A pleasant surprise with this recipe was how low in fat pepitas are compared to other seeds and nuts (eg: 1/3 cup: sunflower seeds: : 24 g. fat; almonds: 24 g. fat; cashews: 21 g. fat; pepitas: 4 g. fat. from Whole Foods Market website)

The results were a nice, spicy, crunchy and refreshing dip. A nice change from the usual cream cheese (though there is some sour cream here) and artichoke, crab or spinach dips. Another keeper. Thanks for the challenge MLB!

An acrid smell emanating in the famed Soho district in London brought out a chemical response team from the London Fire Brigade last week. Passers-by were reporting a burning throat sensation as a result of the smell.

Steve Bird of The Times of London reported:

“As the ambulance service sent in its Hazardous Area Response Team Unit, firefighters wearing specialist breathing apparatus entered the deserted streets to seek out the source.
Soon after 7pm on Monday they emerged from the smoke carrying a huge cooking pot containing about 9lb of smouldering dried chillies.”

Turns out the chilies are used in the preparation of nam prik pao, “a super-hot Thai dip to accompany prawn crackers.”

The Thai Cottage restaurant’s chef, Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon, explained:

“I was making a spicy dip with extra-hot chillies that are deliberately burnt. To us it smells like burnt chilli and it is slightly unusual. I can understand why people who weren’t Thai would not know what it was. But it doesn’t smell like chemicals. I’m a bit confused.”

The owner then further explained that due to the rainy weather, the smoke hadn’t dissipated as usual.

I wonder if Chef Heston Blumenthal was in the area?…

(Image courtesy of Daniel Risacher/Wikipedia)

A recent story in the UK’s Daily Mail describes how Chef Heston Blumenthal monitored the effect of chili oil, being directly injected into his head chef via an IV drip, to determine the effects of spices on the brain. No picture of the resulting scan, from a “£5million MRI scanner” was offered in the article, but according to Blumenthal

“You could see all his brain cells light up on the screen and it helped me understand how chilli works.”

Now, if this experiment is not creepy in itself, Blumenthal’s confession to rigging the dosage definitely is:

“…I sneakily switched the dosage when nobody was looking so he was getting double the chilli the doctors deemed safe.”

This can’t be legal?….There’s experimentation and experimentation. There’s no mention if the head chef suffered any post-experiment trauma. I would love to know what his reaction was when he found out the switch in dosage…