Garlic, peeled and bagged

This is new at the local Nob Hill and turns out to be quite good. Melissas packages peeled garlic, 4 good-sized cloves to a small sealed plastic bag, a large resealable bag stuffed with the little packets. I’ve used it now (boneless leg of lamb, olive oil, minced garlic, dried rosemary smushed up in my mortar and pestle, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and lots of minced Melissas garlic—put it all in a plastic ziplock bag and refrigerate for a day or so, turning it regularly), and it works like a charm. Very convenient—though rather pricey. [UPDATE: Not so pricey as I thought: $2.99 while it’s still new. The plan is undoubtedly to raise the price later, once people are hooked.] It does taste better than the peeled garlic cloves that come in a jar. Just thought you’d want to know.

Caffeine content of various drinks

Via Boing Boing, here’s a chart of the caffeine content of various drinks. Here are the effects of various dosages.

Gratifying

Try googling this phrase

narcissistic personality disorder bush president

My little post is number 1! 🙂

Superfoods

From today’s WaPo, a list of superfoods:

‘Super Foods’

Here are 16 “super foods,” depending on which authority you choose to believe. I try to work most of these ingredients into my own cooking whenever possible, although I have to admit I don’t use much turkey or chocolate, and my efforts to develop a green tea habit have met with little success.

Black beans
Blueberries
Broccoli
Dark (not milk) chocolate
Oats
Onions
Oranges
Sweet potato (or pumpkin)
Salmon (preferably wild)
Soy
Spinach
Tea (preferably green)
Tomatoes
Turkey
Walnuts
Yogurt

Sources: 12 Best Foods Cookbook, by Dana Jacobi; SuperFoods Rx: Fourteen Foods That Will Change Your Life, by Steven G. Pratt and Kathy Matthews

Tomatoes (like spinach) are super only if cooked, as every schoolchild knows. So canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes—all superior to fresh tomatoes in terms of food value. And you get as much lycopene from red watermelon as you do from tomatoes. With beans, the darker the better, in terms of antioxidant content. Oats are most healthful (and tastiest) if cooked in the whole-grain form: oat groats, my regular breakfast. White tea is significantly better for you than green tea, though both are good—and both are brewed at lower temperatures than black tea. Farmed salmon is low in omega-3, the red color is from a dye, and salmon farms are highly destructive of the environment. I would say that wild salmon is infinitely preferable, even canned.

UPDATE: Missing from the above list: pomegranate juice.

UPDATE 2: Here’s a superfoods smoothie.

First veto from Bush

And, as ThinkProgress points out:

67 percent of Americans support embryonic stem cell research. The same percentage believes “It would be terrible if cures were delayed because of policies that make embryonic stem cell research difficult.”

As ThinkProgress also notes:

Bush made a statement at the White House discussing why he vetoed a bill expanding funding for embryonic stem cell research. (The media was barred from covering the veto itself.) Bush explained, “these boys and girls are not spare parts.” Watch it:

An embryo is not a boy or a girl. It’s a cluster of about 150 cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. The embryos funded by the bill Bush vetoed were “created for the purposes of in vitro fertilization…which are spare or in excess of clinical need and in every single case are slated for medical waste.”

Only about 10 percent of embryos are adopted — the rest are disposed of. Had Bush signed the bill into law, they could instead be used to develop potentially live-saving cures for millions of people.

This veto makes no sense to me at all: embryos are now going to be destroyed that instead could have been used for research that would save lives. Bush’s reasoning, if any, totally escapes me.

UPDATE: It’s not true that 10% are adopted. The actual number is three-hundredths of one percent.

Letterman: top 10 GW Bush video moments

Via Dan Froomkin’s column today.

The old-fashioned barber experience

This post offers a glimpse of one of those pockets which time seems to have missed—and in Santa Clara, heart of Silicon Valley, no less! Great description.

UPDATE: Oops. Bad link now fixed.

Wednesday cat-blogging: Megs in a basket

This is a small wicker dustbin, but Megs thinks it makes a great little… what? place to be?

Kitties are mysterious, no doubt about it. But they are endlessly fascinating to watch, an intriguing combination of predictable and unpredictable.