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Links LUPEC |
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Hello! It feels like I have been out of the loop forever--very busy making food for the people. All kinds of people, all over the place. And shopping for the food for the people, and going to school to learn how to make sure the food I give to the people is completely safe and won't result in the dreaded FOOD BORNE ILLNESS.(what we in the biz call FBI) I am VERY glad that I am going to this class, it is extremely informative and I will feel so cool when I have my Food Protection Manager wallet card, but I have to admit that it has already turned me into a bateria-phobe. I had a little existential moment at the begining of the class when the lecturer was talking about the horrors of leaving the Thanksgiving turkey in the oven over night full of stuffing and then not heating it up and leaving it on the table all day...there were audible groans from everyone in the class but I could not help thinking--did anyone in your family DIE from eating the turkey? Did anyone's Thanksgiving get so ruined by the "hershey squirts" as she so colorfully put it that they refused to eat the turkey again? My guess is no. So my feeling is that while YES, you have to be extra careful when you are serving food to the public which they are paying for, alot of the work of food protection is based in extreme paranoia. I have always been a compulsive hand washer and food heater anyway, so there are only a few things I need to change about my personal habits. Alot of the stuff was just common sense, and some of it seemed so obvious to me that I had to rethink the concept of common sense. However, I did get to think long and hard about the fact that we as a society have become so sensitive to the slightest little disturbance that a bacteria on a melon from mexico(which in mexico they could slice open and leave sitting on the windowsill and come back to hours later and be fine) could make someone in the US who has treated themselves to constant preservatives and lots of antibiotics so ill they need to be hospitalized. I am very intrigued by this sort of radical germ theory---but trust me, I have enough on my plate right now. I am not going to rush out and become a microbiologist on top of it. Yesterday I spent all day plugging recipes into the Mastercook program. This thing rocks my world. I put in a recipe which serves four, and with a click of a button it will not only convert it to serving 150, but also make me a shopping list organized by section of the store in which the ingredient is found. Eventually I can plug in costs of each item and Mastercook will tell me, to the penny, how much it costs to make a single carrot-spinach pakora. I heart Mastercook. A lot. I was also able to design my own cookbook in which to store all my precious candymaking secrets (as Willie Wonka would say) and if I like I can design a cover for it and different kinds of paper and print it out. Life is real good. However, it is almost as addictive as free cell, so I have to force myself to step away from the Mastercook in order to ACTUALLY cook something. Right now, I need to step away from the diaryland in order to roll some grape leaves. Carry on. |
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