Cooking Hacks and General Provisos
There is currently an article on the front page of Hacker News titled Dishwasher Salmon. It's a fun piece and my first comment was about Vincent Price, who apparently introduced the idea on TV in 1975.
Someone has told an anecdote about their father, a construction worker who would cook fish in the asphalt with which he was working. It's a fun anecdote and I chose to not be a buzzkill by talking about food safety in reply to it.
Instead, I replied with my own less dramatic anecdote about warming baby bottles on the radiator when I lived in Germany. As far as I know, that was perfectly safe at the time, though apparently these days there are concerns about powdered formula being contaminated with bacteria.
There are a lot of questionable food hacks out there. This blog is not likely to cover such things nor promote them.
I can recall someone talking about using an iron to make grilled cheese sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. Several of the comments in the aforementioned Hacker News discussion similarly talk about using car engines and other questionable sources of heat to cook food wrapped in tinfoil.
Let me note here that I do not even buy tinfoil. Even without analyzing the highly questionable nature of some of the suggested heat sources, all such stories are methods I would not use simply because it starts with wrapping food in tin foil and applying heat to it while it is thusly wrapped.
Well before I had children I read about the dangers of aluminum poisoning. Tinfoil is also called aluminum foil and I don't actually consider it to be food safe -- especially in situations where you are going to apply heat.
I also don't view cheap aluminum pots and pans as food safe.
Most of the time, I try to avoid using tap water directly for purposes of food preparation. I have at times made exceptions due to expedience, but I typically prefer to filter tap water. (Note to self: Start saying such things more up front on this blog and the haters are free to walk.)
In some areas, the pipes are lined with lead so using tap water in an old building can cause lead poisoning and there are microbes that can live in tap water, some of which are serious problems for human health, such as the one that causes amoebic encephalitis, a potentially deadly brain infection. A quick google suggests it became a problem in the US about a decade ago.
This blog will probably never get traction. The reality is that a lot of the health-related information here is not "standard wisdom" nor generally accepted views.
A lot of it is rooted in me dealing with a deadly medical condition and getting better in part by using diet and lifestyle, a thing I mostly talk about elsewhere.
Most people think I'm a nutter making that up. If you believe that about me, then this blog is probably not going to be your cup of tea.
I blog in part because I am seriously handicapped. It really doesn't do an adequate job of paying the bills and if I could find some means to adequately support myself, I might well abandon blogging. I have little in the way of audience and it often seems pointless. It's mostly a means to keep me occupied given my health situation.
On the one hand, I very sincerely believe that what I am saying has merit. On the other hand, I have no credibility and no means to solve that issue.
Few people are going to want to hear that you really need to be much more careful about water quality and many faucets are inadequate in that regard. In many cases, tap water isn't simply unsafe for infant formula, it's unsafe for food preparation for perfectly healthy adults.
Few people are going to want to hear that I worry a LOT about metal poisoning -- among other things -- and it strongly impacts what I am willing to work with, especially given this will be an inconvenience in the eyes of a great many people who will see aluminum foil as being given the blessing of the food industry, so why should I be a downer?
Me being a "downer" about such details is how I got healthier when the world says that cannot be done.
I see a need for better information in this space and I try to provide that. But the odds of it catching on and becoming the hot new thing seem very long against.
As long as I bother to write this blog, its popularity or lack thereof will not change how I write. I will write what I understand to be true and what makes sense to me and the world is free to continue to ignore me.
Someone has told an anecdote about their father, a construction worker who would cook fish in the asphalt with which he was working. It's a fun anecdote and I chose to not be a buzzkill by talking about food safety in reply to it.
Instead, I replied with my own less dramatic anecdote about warming baby bottles on the radiator when I lived in Germany. As far as I know, that was perfectly safe at the time, though apparently these days there are concerns about powdered formula being contaminated with bacteria.
There are a lot of questionable food hacks out there. This blog is not likely to cover such things nor promote them.
I can recall someone talking about using an iron to make grilled cheese sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. Several of the comments in the aforementioned Hacker News discussion similarly talk about using car engines and other questionable sources of heat to cook food wrapped in tinfoil.
Let me note here that I do not even buy tinfoil. Even without analyzing the highly questionable nature of some of the suggested heat sources, all such stories are methods I would not use simply because it starts with wrapping food in tin foil and applying heat to it while it is thusly wrapped.
Well before I had children I read about the dangers of aluminum poisoning. Tinfoil is also called aluminum foil and I don't actually consider it to be food safe -- especially in situations where you are going to apply heat.
I also don't view cheap aluminum pots and pans as food safe.
Most of the time, I try to avoid using tap water directly for purposes of food preparation. I have at times made exceptions due to expedience, but I typically prefer to filter tap water. (Note to self: Start saying such things more up front on this blog and the haters are free to walk.)
In some areas, the pipes are lined with lead so using tap water in an old building can cause lead poisoning and there are microbes that can live in tap water, some of which are serious problems for human health, such as the one that causes amoebic encephalitis, a potentially deadly brain infection. A quick google suggests it became a problem in the US about a decade ago.
This blog will probably never get traction. The reality is that a lot of the health-related information here is not "standard wisdom" nor generally accepted views.
A lot of it is rooted in me dealing with a deadly medical condition and getting better in part by using diet and lifestyle, a thing I mostly talk about elsewhere.
Most people think I'm a nutter making that up. If you believe that about me, then this blog is probably not going to be your cup of tea.
I blog in part because I am seriously handicapped. It really doesn't do an adequate job of paying the bills and if I could find some means to adequately support myself, I might well abandon blogging. I have little in the way of audience and it often seems pointless. It's mostly a means to keep me occupied given my health situation.
On the one hand, I very sincerely believe that what I am saying has merit. On the other hand, I have no credibility and no means to solve that issue.
Few people are going to want to hear that you really need to be much more careful about water quality and many faucets are inadequate in that regard. In many cases, tap water isn't simply unsafe for infant formula, it's unsafe for food preparation for perfectly healthy adults.
Few people are going to want to hear that I worry a LOT about metal poisoning -- among other things -- and it strongly impacts what I am willing to work with, especially given this will be an inconvenience in the eyes of a great many people who will see aluminum foil as being given the blessing of the food industry, so why should I be a downer?
Me being a "downer" about such details is how I got healthier when the world says that cannot be done.
I see a need for better information in this space and I try to provide that. But the odds of it catching on and becoming the hot new thing seem very long against.
As long as I bother to write this blog, its popularity or lack thereof will not change how I write. I will write what I understand to be true and what makes sense to me and the world is free to continue to ignore me.
