2023 Vancouver

 We took it easy driving back from Whistler to Vancouver, stopping first at Shannon Falls Park to see the waterfalls which were very visible from the road, only to discover that there were several waterfalls we had passed if we'd known about them. Then we stopped at Horsehoe Bay for a good look at Bowen's namesake island.

We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant at Richmond and then to my surprise the kids wanted to go to the vancouver aquarium. In retrospect we should have had lunch near Stanley Park and saved the 1.5 hour round trip commute! Traffic in Vancouver was very slow.

The Vancouver aquarium was small but very well done, and we had enough time to experience the 4D shark movie, and the touch-based hands on lab. After that we checked into the hotel and then went to dow

ntown Richmond for dinner, where we returned the rental car.

The dinner was great, but the kids wanted Boba, so we walked to the nearest Boba place and along the way saw a supermarket. Going in, I saw Lay's Octopus Ball chips as well as Beef Wellington flavor'd chips, which I'd never seen before! Clearly random Vancouver supermarkets stocked stuff that made Ranch 99 look like Safeway.

The Day's Inn at the Vancouver International Airport was impressive --- the lodging was good, but the breakfast was far better than many much more expensive restaurants, as was the hotel's attention to detail and shuttle service. It's not in a great location but we were there for only one night anyway. I checked in on the flight while at the aquarium and booked another security appointment.

The last morning, we zipped through security in quick order, cleared customs and were at our gate in 30 minutes. The only snafu came when our overpacked luggage got flagged as being too big so we had to check the bags.

Bowen asked to come  back to Whistler again, a far cry from his stance at the start of the trip where he was threatening to boycott the classes. But when I asked if he'd give up his birthday present for another Whistler trip this year he said No. But he asked to give up his Costa Rica school trip in exchange for a Whistler trip next year instead. I guess that means we'll be coming back to Whistler some time.

Review: Envy Apples from Costco

I'll admit that when I first saw the "envy apples" demo cart at Costco I was very skeptical. I've tried all sorts of Apples over the years, and basically, only the Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, and Fuji Apples are up to par. From Costco, I think only the Fuji were worth the money. The expensive Honeycrisp apples, for instance, tasted like crap.

The Envy apples, however, blew me away. One bite just sent me into heaven. There's a hint of honey and everything else about the Fuji which I loved. It's crispy and yummy. I  bought a dozen and took it home. When Bowen tasted one, he couldn't stop eating and I think we went through 2 apples in one sitting.

Highly recommended. If you see it at Costco, get a box. You'll be impressed.

Review: Nutrition Made Clear

You probably already know everything that's in the course, Nutrition Made Clear. For instance, In Defense of Food, summarized everything in one sentence: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. But those books tend to be written for English majors: there's a huge amount of text devoted to the author's personal foibles, etc., while being tremendously short on facts or how you should approach the entire process.

Nutrition Made Clear is a good antidote for the typical nutrition book. It's very focused, and while it does make use of anecdotes (in the form of case studies of patients she's seen, or members of the Rice football team), goes mainly for the facts and what we know (and don't know) about nutrition.

She's brutally honest about her profession, noting that over the years, nutritionists have shifted from the vitamins and minerals approach to whole foods approach, mostly because the many ingredients found in fresh fruits and vegetables (phytochemicals) have many beneficial properties that have yet to be extracted, understood, or properly studied, hence the advise to "eat all colors of the rainbow." She also notes that coffee and tea also have similar properties, which are also not well understood --- though in the case of coffee and tea, the tannins also have some adverse interactions with certain minerals (in particular, coffee and tea reduces iron absorption --- don't drink coffee while eating your oysters, for instance!).

Sprinkled throughout the lecture series are several tips:

• Nutritionists used to think that you have to eat complementary vegetable proteins to make a whole protein in the same meal (e.g., rice and beans). Now they think it only has to make it through your stomach on the same day to make the whole protein.
• Use cast iron frying pans to increase iron absorption in during normal cooking. The contamination properties of cast iron frying pans can really make a difference in adding iron to your body!
• Omega-3's beneficial properties for people at risk of heart attacks also thins the blood. So don't assume that a little is good means more is better. Too much Omega-3 could thin your blood so much that you could have trouble clotting! In particular, don't combine with blood thinners.
• Most people who successfully lose weight and keep it off eat breakfast every day! Don't skip this meal if you want to lose weight!
• Moderation is key. Too much of anything could cause problems. But in general, your plate should be 50% vegetables, 25% meat, and 25% whole grains. She provides detail and color as to why eliminating carbs entirely might not work out.
• Calories in vs calories out is not obsolete!
• People think that exercise doesn't work when it comes to losing weight. This is wrong. It mostly doesn't work because people out-eat their exercise. A 1 mile walk (2000 steps) is 100 calories burned. It's very easy to go for a 1 mile walk, and then come back and eat  a bar of chocolate (280 calories), and then you've out-eaten your exercise and then some! If you actually want to control your weight, you need to exercise half an hour a day, every day! If you want to lose weight, you need to bump it up to at least an hour a day, every day! (By the way, this explains why step counters actually hurt some people when it comes to weight loss -- that 10,000 steps is only 500 calories, which is trivially easy to out eat) Conversely, this explains why I practically have to force-feed my companions chocolate and ice cream during the Tour of the Alps. It's substantially much harder to try to eat 3X your normal calorie intake.
• Other benefits of exercise (such as reducing risks of heart attacks and diabetes) only work for 24 hours after the exercise. So treat exercise like a pill you take every day.

So, in general, you know all this. But it's very nice to have someone spell it out for you (such as eating an extra slice of bread a day - 50 calories more) adds up to about 10 pounds of weight gain a year. The lecture series lays it out in stark terms.

Anyway, I enjoyed the series and would recommend it to anyone, even if they think they already know everything there is to know about nutrition.

Review: Anova Precision Immersion Circulator

When Amazon offered the older version of the Anova Immersion Circulator for $100, I jumped on it. The latest version (which is not the one I'm reviewing) cost $180, and has bluetooth and app integration. As someone who's been doing sous vide for a while, I consider those apps superfluous and was happy to save the money.

The first thing I noticed was how huge the circulator was. You definitely need a fairly tall pot (at least 6" deep, and probably not much more than 12" deep), and it's substantial in weight, though obviously takes up much less room than my Sous Vide Supreme Demi.

Using it is fairly easy: you fill a pot with water (keeping it between the min and max line), clip in the clamp, touch the screen to turn on (not at all obvious at first), set the temperature, push the start button, and go! It's noisy enough if you've got nothing else in the kitchen turned on, but if you're doing even a little stir fry or the dish washer is on, you're not going to hear it. That said, it is quite a bit noiser than the Sous Vide Supreme Demi.

It heats up very quickly (much faster than the Demi, not surprising given the 1000W spec), but is also much less power efficient: there's a motor turned on all the time circulating the water, and because no pot you have is going to have a lid that's compatible with the immersion circulator, heat escapes from the top (as well as the sides, since most pots are conductive), and so the machine has to work quite a bit harder than the Demi.

That last bit is important, because it also means that it's not quite unattended operation the way the Demi is. Because water will evaporate from the pot, you have to drop by every so often to top off the water if you have a long running recipe (e.g, 72 hour short ribs, or 24 hour duck confit).  And because there's a motor running, if you stick creme brulee in bowls and dump it into the pot, the bowls will move around and clink clink all the time, which is actually quite noisy.

Because we live in a hard water area, I find myself being obsessive about scaling on the device. Since there's a motor in the device, you don't want scaling to get so bad that it impacts the performance of the motor. I do my darnedest to wipe off all the water before putting it away, and never let it air dry.

The advantages are: it scales much better than the Demi (you can always buy a bigger pot, or a huge laboratory tank if you're going to make food for 20-30 people), and it's significantly more portable, even in its factory packaging with foam and everything. Furthermore, the temperature is significantly better than the Demi's since the circulator maintains a nice even temperature while the Demi depends on convection. In practice, however, you're unlikely to notice the difference in food produced by either!

Regardless, I found it great having 2 sous vide devices available in the kitchen: you can now prep Duck Confit one day and have steak for dinner still, or prepare both chicken and steak for one meal. I'm also much more likely to bring the device along on trips (though unfortunately it's only rated for US voltages!).

If price is a non-issue, and you can only have one device, I'd still recommend the Sous Vide Supreme Demi as the one to get. But given the price difference between the two, I'd recommend the Anova Circulator (at almost 50% the price even at full Amazon pricing) unless you have a severe objection to noise in the kitchen for long recipes. And compared to the DIY devices I've tried, it's no contest: the time savings are well worth the price, especially if you're able to (as I did) find it at a discount to the retail price.

 Please see my Modernist Cuisine post for recommendations for other essential tools to accompany the immersion circulator.

Review: Excelsteel 18/10 Stainless 4 Non Stick Egg Poacher

I love onsen eggs coming out of the sous vide machine, but unfortunately, I'm the only one in the family who does, and it does take a long time to cook. I remember Xiaoqin liking the poached eggs in the eggs benedict she ordered once, but not the sauce. I do enjoy it as an occasional treat, so I bought the specialized egg poacher on Amazon.

My first impression upon receiving it was how small it was. That's an advantage both in shelf-space, as well as in cooking. The small pan takes relatively little water and boils quickly, getting your eggs poached fast! The transparent cover is great: you get to see your eggs whiten, and then become opaque, letting you know when to remove them.

I like my egg yolks soggy, so a minute or two after they've turned opaque, I use tongs to remove one and then eat it that way. The rest of the family seems to like their yolks much more cooked (or in Bowen's case, with no yolk at all), so I then turn off the heat and let the eggs simmer some more.

Clean up is effortless because everything is non-stick, and extraction from the cups is also easy, once you've seasoned it. The manufacturers recommend non-stock spray, but I just take a stick of butter and swish it around the cups.

The bad: the tray holding the cups is super thin stainless steel. Get even a bit of egg on it and it'll discolor. No change to functionality, but if you're the type who likes their cookware pristine, this won't stay pristine for long. Fortunately, I'm not one of those.

Recommended.

Review: Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Costco package

I was intrigued by varying reviews of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee, but the priced seemed prohibitive. Costco, however, sells a package where you get 4 pounds of blend and 1 pound of pure coffee for about $60, so I figured it was worth trying once just to see what the most expensive coffee bean in the world tasted like.

The pure Blue Mountain Coffee is pretty good. There's not much of an aroma when you grind the beans, but the taste is very pure. There's almost no bitterness, and there's no need to add milk or sweetener in the coffee: you should just drink it black. In fact, add milk and it doesn't taste as good as the cheap stuff. You can get this for about $30/pound if you don't want to buy it in a package.

I expected the blend to be a step down, being at most 5% of the good stuff. In reality, however, it has many of the characteristics as the pure stuff, with a little bit more bitterness, but not enough for me to want to add milk or sweetener. At $9/pound, it's not bad if you're in the habit of drinking the coffee black.

I think I do enjoy coffee with milk, however, so I'll probably go back to the $5/pound cheap costco coffee in the future.

Review: Hario Mini Mill

Lots of people raved to me about the benefits of grinding your own coffee from coffee beans rather than buying pre-ground coffee. It sounded like a good thing, but I wasn't willing to spend the big bucks that the electric burr grinders cost, nor did I really want to devote counter space to something that wouldn't necessarily get daily use, given that my experience with coffee enthusiasts seems to be that they'll rave about any minute changes in coffee, while I'm simply not that sensitive.

The Hario Mini Mill, at $25, seems worth a try. Sure, it's a hand grinder, so it'd take longer to grind, but on the other hand, the extra couple of minutes is just not a big deal, and if it doesn't work out I'm not out too much money. I bought the Major Dickason's blend, a highly rated coffee now on sale at Costco's for about $13 for a 2 pound bag. The net result is that this isn't quite an apples to apples comparison, since I was using Gaia's Organic pre-ground before.

The first thing I noticed was the aroma. The coffee beans definitely smell quite a bit more than the pre-ground. If you're into smells, this is probably the biggest difference between pre-ground and grinding your own. I'm not into smells.

The grinder's fairly easy to use. Set the grind, then pour coffee beans into it, and then grind. The grinding is very fast about a minute or so, so it's really not a big deal as far as your daily routine is. The big difference here is that grinding your coffee sets the coffee grounds much looser than using pre-ground coffee and scooping it using the Aeropress scoop. The result is you get much less coffee grounds out of 2 scoops of beans than 2 scoops of pre-ground. This makes a big difference, so while I was filling up the Aeropress to level 3 with 2 scoops of pre-ground, for a similar strength of coffee I'd only fill it up to 2 with my own grind.

The resultant coffee smells much stronger than the pre-ground stuff, and the coffee is very smooth. But the taste? I'm sorry, I just cannot tell the difference. If anything, I think the Major Dickason's doesn't taste as sweet as the Gaia pre-ground, but I cannot tell whether it's because of the difference between the coffees, or because the grinding makes the coffee worse.

I bought a can of the Kirkland Decaf (48ozs at $13), and the big difference seems to be that the pre-ground stuff is much harder to push through the Aeropress than the self-grounded coffee. And honestly, if you took away the grinder and made me drink the kirkland decaf, except for the missing caffeine, I'm not sure I'd prefer the self-ground coffee.

I'll keep the grinder, if only because a lot of variety of coffee beans don't come pre-ground, and I really don't feel like grinding it at the Costco grinders which don't ever seem to get cleaned. At $25, it doesn't seem unreasonable. But if you're a casual coffee drinker like me and aromas don't do much for you, I don't think I'd believe any of the coffee enthusiast's enthusiasm about self-grinded coffee. The smell thing is all the self-grinded coffee has going for it. It makes zero different to the taste as far as I'm concerned.

The biggest difference, I think is that the bother of grinding might make me drink less coffee, which isn't a completely bad thing (I'm at one cup a day).

Review: Gobble Dinner Service

In the past, there's  been plenty of food startups, from kitchit to gastronauts. None of them have addressed what I consider the best possible market: busy parents. We ran into Gobble and decided to give them a try, since they were promising fast meals that were done right.

The idea behind Gobble is this: you get pre-packaged, pre-prepared gourmet food delivered to your door in refrigerated packages. Each box comes with 3 meals, and you're in a subscription service, so you can cancel any time. Each meal comes with a preparation card, and it takes about 10 minutes to prepare each meal, and you'll be done. It's a nice concept, though as with all sorts of food, everything depends on the execution.

The central premise behind any kind of delivered food service like this is Sous Vide. Since the food has been already vacuum-packed while cooking, it's an easy step to simply go the next step to freeze it and then deliver it to your door. The biggest problem is that most people don't have a sous vide setup, so I was curious as to how they did the reheating.

It turned out that about only 2 out of 3 meals are done via sous vide. The fish and seafood dishes have ingredients that are so easily cooked that stir fry does it. The other sous vide meals are finished via either stir fry, or a searing step followed by an oven. This last method means that Gobble cheated on their marketing: it takes way longer than 10 minutes to pre-heat the oven and then for you to stir fry and present the meal.

The other problem I had with them was the delivery. The service uses On-Trac, which has a history of extremely late deliveries to my home. Indeed, the first delivery was so late that our Gobble meal turned into Pizza take out by the time the van driver showed up at my home. I called customer service and they apologized and gave me a $10 credit, but if I'd had hungry kids and a hungry wife, $10 wouldn't have come close to making up for it. There's also the problem of picking up the old container. I have no idea when they intend to collect them or if I'm supposed to throw them away.

As for value for money, the cost of the meal is about $12/person. This is approximately about the cost of eating out, except you don't have to tip. The variety of meals are decent, though the portion size ranges from barely adequate to substantial. It's very clear that each meal is sized not by calorie needs but by how much each ingredient costs: the chicken dishes are substantial, the beef dishes are usually supplemented by beans, and the seafood dishes would not keep a teenage boy well-fed.

The meals are decent, though everything is Americanized, so the curry tastes kinda bland and the chili is very mild. But it's all been very good, though not as good as if you went all modernist cuisine on it.

In any case, since we do have a sous vide machine, I'm not sure we'll continue after a month's trial, but I can recommend them to people without sous vide machine. It's also a nice way to get recipe ideas. In any case, if you do want a referral code for a trial e-mail me and I'll arrange for you to get one. Or you can just click through above if you're impatient and do without.

This is one of the few services that I think deserves success, and serves the South Bay quite well. Recommended.

Review: Soy Sauce for Beginners

I picked up Soy Sauce for Beginners as part of the Kindle First program. For one, it's a book about food. Secondly, the author's from Singapore, where I grew up. Any book from a Singaporean about food has got to be good, right?

One of the smartest people I know once said to me, "There are only two types of people who like Singapore: women, and foreigners." It's a deep insightful statement if you know Singapore well, but unfortunately, it's clear that Kirstin Chen doesn't share that insight. The novel is about Gretchen, who at 30, discovers that her husband has been cheating on her and moves back to Singapore to take a break from her disastrous marriage.

She then plunges into her family business of making soy sauce, not as a relief from the mess of her life in San Francisco, but as a burden. Her white friend from her Stanford days joins her, and she starts dealing with her mother's alcoholism, dating as a soon-to-be-divorcee, and possible return to San Francisco. This could all have been interesting, but Gretchen engages in all the stereotypical behavior of an Asian woman you could think of, and no, Chen isn't making an ironic statement about it: she's just oblivious.

For instance, Gretchen only dates white guys. This is pretty common, but she's also oblivious enough to be proud that she was the first Asian woman her ex-husband dated. She's then devastated that he cheats on her with another Asian woman. Her white friend in Singapore gets a lot of attention (as white people would), and Gretchen is appropriately jealous of her, but also without insight.

The references to food, the use of Singlish, and notes on the culture are somewhat appropriate. They're also divorced in general from how non-rich people live in Singapore. There's a deep assumption that people get around in cars, which of course, isn't true in Singapore or any major Asian city. There's no reference to the mass transit systems there, nor is there any reference to a single sympathetic Asian man other than the protagonist's father. This gives you an idea of how skewed Chen's world view is.

I should note that most Asian American fiction is essentially a body of work by Asian American women: very few Asian men are represented, so to some extent this is accepted and standard for a novel that's considered "literature" or "literary fiction." But life is short and you only have so much time for so many novels, so why read yet another standard Asian American novel?

Ultimately, the ending is predictable, as though written for a Singaporean audience, in complete contradiction, of course, to the author's real actual life. I wanted very much to like this book, but I'm afraid I cannot recommend it as a good use of your time.

Review: Whirlpool 1.9cu ft Over-The-Range Microwave

My wife was unhappy with a crack in the microwave door, so we decided to replace the microwave with a different model. I'd become increasingly unhappy with the LG products in our house, so we made a point to avoid LG this time. The big feature that drew me to the WHM32L19AS was the big fan: 400CFM!

400CFM is big enough that you can feel the difference when you turn it on. There's less grease on the ceiling from cooking, there's smoke all over the place, and the machine is quite powerful. Reheating food used to take much longer than it does now.

The big downside is the reliability of the machine is suspect. After less than 6 months, it's already been broken. And not a cheap easy broken-ness, but a magnetron breakage. I asked the repair man how much it would have cost to fix it, and the answer was around $300, which meant that it would have been cheaper to buy a new one than to fix it. I asked how long he expected the new magnetron to last, and the answer was: "I've seen them die as quickly as in 6 months to a year." He added that the over-the-range hood microwaves get all the grease that used to be on my ceiling, and that when he pulled our magnetron it was very greasy.

Great. Just great. Why not just seal the darn thing better? My LG lasted much longer and had no problems. Worse, both the installation and repair was incredibly poor service. I'm no longer buying any products from Lowe's.

Not recommended. Next time, I'm just going to get a separate hood and a combi-oven microwave instead.

4 Months of Modernist Cuisine

It's been a while since I last posted about Modernist Cuisine, which is still my go-to book for cooking at home. For me, at least, it's significantly transformed my food preferences as well as the amount of cooking I'd do at home. I've done Creme Brulee, 72-hour short ribs, pressure cooked chicken adobo, and used the pressure cooker and sous vide machine far more than I ever expected to. I've applied to pressure cooker to even some of my favorite recipes outside the book, such as beef rendang and Japanese curry, to good effect---the time it takes to make those dishes have been cut down dramatically and the food quality has improved.

As for the Sous Vide Supreme Demi, I found myself appreciating it more after borrowing a DorkFood setup from a friend of mine. First, it's useful to have a second sous vide machine because while you have a 72 hour short rib cooking for 3 days, you might want to cook other stuff. But second, the slow cooker variants are slow! With the Sous Vide Supreme Demi, I can dump water straight from the tap into the machine and expect the machine to come up to temperature within 30 minutes even if it was ice cold water. No such luck with the DorkFood. You could pour boiling water into the slow cooker and still have to wait for hours for the temperature to come up if you're making Creme Brulee because most of the energy goes into heating up the cold porcelain of the slow cooker! The time saved from using the purpose built device has already paid for itself. Not to mention that DorkFood is loud!

By far the best recipe is the 72 hour short ribs. Those are to die for. If you've not had them, you need to try them. They freeze well, so it's not unusual for me to cook $50 worth of short ribs to freeze them for later use. The most common use for the sous vide machine has to be for chicken. At 66C for 2 hours, you can cook up the best chicken most people have ever tasted at relatively short notice.

All in all, I've found myself using the oven less and the sous vide machine has become the second hardest working machine in my kitchen. (In case you're wondering, the hardest working machine is the rice cooker!) Recommended.

Review: Wheat Belly

My doctor actually recommended Wheat Belly, or I wouldn't have picked it up. Cure Your Child With Food, for instance, already mentions that gluten, the protein in wheat, is the source of many digestion problems. That book reported loads of success curing kids by eliminating wheat and anything white from their diets.

The Wheat Belly proceeds to blame almost all modern ills on wheat and wheat products. As in Cure Your Child With Food, he claims that wheat has been so genetically engineered or otherwise manipulated that the nutrition in it is not something that your body can absorb or deal with, leading to a bunch of diseases ranging from diabetes to acne (!!) to early balding in men. The book is replete with anecdotes from his practice where the patient is miraculously cured after eliminating wheat from his or her diet.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. You see, Doctor Davis doesn't just recommend getting rid of wheat. He recommends eliminating all forms of whole grain and potatoes as well as the sugary fruits. Adopt his program wholesale and what do you get? The Atkins diet. If wheat was the all encompassing evil he claims it to be, then there shouldn't be any need to eliminate all the other foods, so this prescription basically undermines the entire first 2/3rds of the book!

Now, it could very well be that gluten sensitivity (not necessarily celiac disease) is far more prevalent than you might think, and that many people with irritable bowel syndrome could benefit by eliminating wheat. But if you're looking for proof that wheat is the culprit, then this book definitely does not provide it. That said, he does reference lots of interesting data, including Denise Minger's excellent debunking of the China Study. There's a lot of interesting information, though again, since he undermined himself in the last 2 chapters of the book I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to believe anything he says.

Not recommended.

Review: The Story of The Human Body

The Story Of The Human Body is written by evolutionary biologist and Harvard Professor Daniel Lieberman. It's not just a boring history of how your various body parts evolved, but it's also an exploration about how mismatch diseases come about: diseases caused by the mismatch between your relatively old genes and the relatively unusual state of civilization today.

Midway through the book (page 173), there's a list of mismatch diseases that hold a few surprises even for me. For instance, apnea, ADHD, OCD, and chronic constipation are all considered to be mismatch diseases. I'm very familiar with Apnea, and I was surprised to find it on this list. The explanation is surprising: if you grew up on relatively soft processed or cooked food, you didn't have to chew very much or very hard, so your jaw ends up being a bit too small, which is one of the conditions that causes apnea. Lieberman suggests allowing kids to chew gum a lot as a way to help correct this deficiency, and I wonder if Singapore's ban on chewing gum could contribute to a rise in the number of children who end up with sleep apnea in the future as a result.

Which brings me to another interesting point about this book. Because mismatch diseases have long lead times and are caused by conditions in which the child grows up in, but the disease itself doesn't show up until in late adulthood, this book also doubles as a parenting manual of things that you as a parent should do, but might not have realized are important. For instance, he suggests letting kids run around in bare feet as much as possible to prevent future incidences of flat feet. This goes against the norms of civilized society, and parents should take note. Other little tit-bits from this book:

• Growing up in a hot environment will cause your child to develop more sweat glands. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your point of view.
• Baby fat is not necessarily benign: even if the kid grows out of it, being fat at a young age causes your body to have more visceral fat cells, which can lead to being more easily fat as an adult.
• Myopia could be caused by spending too much time indoors, and insufficient variety of visual stimuli. Having a wide variety of visual stimulus is important for normal vision.
• If your kids get antibiotics, it might be necessary to follow up with a dose of probiotics to help the stomach flora return to normal.

If you don't have kids, there are lots of other fascinating topics that are relevant to you:

• Sitting is very bad for you.
• Human beings are basically the fattest primates around, but there are good reasons why.
• Why do men get prostate cancer?
• Why do you tend to get back pain as you age?

These questions all have lots of fun answers in Lieberman's book, plus a huge dose of evolutionary history which explains why if agriculture was such a hard life compared to being a hunter-gatherer, humans adopted it anyway.

Lieberman ties off the book with a bunch of policy suggestions as to how to prevent many of the mismatch diseases he describes. I have a very pessimistic outlook on those suggestions, as the long feedback cycle (40 years or so before diabetes begins to show up) ensures that much like global climate change, there's no real incentive for government to do anything about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it incredibly informative. It's very likely to be the best book I've read all year. Highly recommended.

Review: Modernist Cuisine at Home

Modernist Cuisine at Home is a cookbook. As such, it shouldn't be read end-to-end, but should be reviewed for the recipes it contains. However, it's more than a cookbook, since it's also an advocate for a different approach towards cooking, which is ideally suited for engineers and other folks (mostly men) who have little patience for acquiring skills associated with traditional cooking. I am just such a person, so the Modernist approach does have great appeal to me.

As far as I can see, modernist cooking has a few principles:

• Use of modern technology. This includes pressure cookers, sous vide machines, and blow torches
• Accurate temperature control. This could mean water baths, or simply an oven safe probe stuck into the thickest part of the meat.
• An emphasis on time efficiency. Minimum prep time, and "fire and forget" formulas.

I, on the other hand, was looking for the following:

• Minimum skill required, as well as prep effort. I can barely flip an egg over to make eggs over-easy. Anything more is just too much.
• Precise prescriptions. "A dash of baking soda" means nothing to me. I'd rather hear, "10g of baking soda."

To my mind, Modernist Cuisine at Home meets a lot of this criteria. Much has been made about sous vide, but I didn't have a sous vide set up, so I first tried the other recipes that were easy:

• Slow Baked Chicken with Onions (page 242). The first time I did this the results were amazing. The prep work is weird, using brine injectors and slicing onions thinly, but my wife (who usually hates chicken) liked it a lot so I tried again. The second time was a disaster. I had to throw it away. The inconsistency of the oven made me willing to buy a Sous Vide setup.
• Pressure Cooked Lamb Shank (page 234). The first time I did it the results were good, but marred by my pressure cooker being not up to spec. I splurged, upgrading to a $30 Presto pressure cooker, and the second time I made it it was nothing short of incredible. The meat just peeled off the bone when I lifted the bone up, and the resulting lamb curry tasted great. In fact, the store-bought sauce did not do the meat justice.
• Carrot Soup (page 178). Since my visits to Rosenlaui began, I've admired their soups. Since I had a pressure cooker now, I could use their recipe to see if I could emulate the creamy soups that Rosenlaui did. The resulting texture is nothing short of amazing. It's quite a bit of work, since you have to pressure cook the carrots, then blend them, and then add carrot juice. This is eliminating the final step. But the soup is incredibly smooth and generally good stuff. I liked it a lot, but Xiaoqin is in general not a fan of Western style soups, so I guess I won't be making this again.

All this convinced me that I should experiment with sous vide for a more consistent experience. It took a bit to figure out what to buy, so I'll list it here, in case you want to try it yourself:

• Sous Vide Supreme Demi. You don't need anything bigger, so don't waste your time with the other stuff. I didn't opt for a circulating bath heater, because the resulting decor would not please my wife. If you're single and cheap, try a manual rice cooker or crockpot and the DorkFood temperature controller.
• Iwatani Torch Burner. It burns butane cartridges you can easily get at Ranch 99. Easy on, easy off, and it doesn't look like industrial equipment.
• Seal-a-Meal Vacuum Sealer. If all you do is short recipes you can use zip-loc bags. You can also buy a package including the Sous Vide Supreme sealer, but the difference between reviews of this unit and reviews of the Sous Vide Supreme unit is huge, so I recommend buying this one.

With this, I experimented with the following receipes:

• Sous Vide Salmon (page 276). OMG. This is melt-in-your-mouth type salmon. I couldn't believe how good this was. Xiaoqin doesn't like cooked Salmon, but she found this acceptable. I'm going to have to try cod one of these days.
• Sous Vide Chicken (page 244). You know how baked chicken always tastes dry? The reason the Slow Baked chicken receipe works is because you inject the chicken with enough brine so it doesn't dry out. Well, by cooking sous vide, you don't have to do that and the results are amazing. Xiaoqin doesn't usually like chicken, but she liked this one so much she complained I didn't eat enough. Bowen doesn't usually eat meat, and he ate a third of a piece of chicken thigh by himself. This blew my mind.
• Sous Vide Prime Rib (page 194). This was relatively disappointing. Not because the result was bad, but because we'd had high hopes after the last two sous vide dishes. I didn't follow the instructions enough, and left the meat in the machine for 3+ hours instead of the recommended 50 minutes, because I read some other instructions on the internet. On the one hand, it was my loss, but on the other hand, it demonstrates the value of the book: the book's recipes so far out perform the internet, which is unusual.
• Sous Vide Duck Confit (pages 245-246). This was the most ambitious recipe that I tried from the book. It took about 18 hours of brining the duck legs in the refrigerator, and then about 27 hours in the Sous Vide machine. But it was excellent and better than some duck confit I've had in France! If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be able to make duck confit this good, I wouldn't have believed you.

I'm not much of a foodie, and have eaten at Michelin 2-star restaurants that I considered terrible compared to say, Kabab & Curry's. I've also eaten at Google's cafetaria during the good years (2005-2007), and could taste the difference when I returned to Mountain View in 2008 after a stint in Europe. I would say that this book has revolutionized my approach and expectations for home cooking, and I cannot imagine not using the sous vide approach for meats cooked home if I can help it. I justified my purchase of my above set up based on the idea that I could easily return it to Amazon if I didn't like it. Well, I'm not going to return those machines. Furthermore, when I first heard about the 72 hour short-rib sous vide recipes, I thought, "3 days to cook dinner? That's ridiculous." I will now admit that my thoughts about the matter now are: "how could I do without my sous vide machine for 3 days?!!"

I will now pay this book the greatest compliment I can: before I return this book to the library, I will either buy my own copy of Modernist Cuisine at Home, or the entire $530 6-volume set of Modernist Cuisine. Highly recommended. If you haven't tried it out, try it. If you're local and want to try it, talk to me and we'll work something out. And if you're an engineer who hates cooking and can't do anything right in the kitchen, you need this book.

Update: My 4-month retrospective.

Review: Funky Gourmet, Athens

I neglected to review Funky Gourmet during my Athens Trip Report. It was a bright spot in an otherwise not very stellar trip.

To begin with, the restaurant is in a house set in a neighborhood which not even taxi drivers can necessarily find. What you do is call the restaurant with your cell phone and have them talk to your taxi driver. Secondly, the house has no signage proclaiming the presence of a restaurant. What it does have is a little tag next to the door bell proclaiming the name of the restaurant.

Inside, the restaurant is beautifully decorated and the wait staff is attentive. This was my first Michelin-star-rated restaurant experience, though I've since been to higher-rated Michelin restaurants and have been unimpressed by them in comparison to Funky Gourmet. I've since decided that TripAdvisor ratings are a much better gauge of restaurant quality than Michelin ratings. Most Michelin-star rated restaurants are not very welcoming for families, but this one very tolerant of Bowen. They brought him his own plastic cups, and gave him as many straws as he threw on the floor. When the time came that he couldn't stay in his seat any more, they were happy to let him run around.

I have high standards for food, though I'm unimpressed by price and service. Funky Gourmet exceeded my expectations. The self-made pesto pasta was the best I've had anywhere, and the scallop impressed even my wife. The presentation of every dish was great, and the desserts (the 13 course menu had 3 of them) were nothing short of excellent. The early dishes had quite a bit of greek influence, while the later dishes (except for the desserts) were more conventional. The only miss was the mini-burger. All in all, a great restaurant/experience, and highly recommended if you're in Athens.

Diet and exercise don't work?

In the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder wrote:Stigma might be more bearable—an unpleasant way station on the path to a thinner, healthier life—if diet and exercise, the most prescribed solutions to obesity, worked. But they don’t. Qualification: if you eat less and exercise more, you’ll lose weight. But the chances that you’ll stick with that regimen are slim, and the chances that you’ll regain the weight, and then some, are quite high. A systematic review of weight-loss programs, by Thomas A. Wadden and Adam Gilden Tsai of the University of Pennsylvania, found that the evidence that commercial and self-help weight-loss programs work is “suboptimal.” People who diet often regain more weight than they lose.

I can think of two counter examples. A friend of mine at work was diagnosed with a heart problem. It was exacerbated by a sedentary lifestyle, and his doctor wanted to immediately put him on drugs. He said, "Wait, wait. Can I solve this with a lifestyle change? Change my diet and exercise?" His doctor replied, "That doesn't work. Statistically, nobody sticks with such regiments." My friend wasn't willing to give up, however, and told the doctor, "Let me try it for a month. If that doesn't work you can put me on drugs." This guy went from zero exercise to biking to work 4-5 days a week, hiking and running with his kids on weekends, and started cutting his portion sizes and eating more greens. A month later, his doctor pronounced him completely fit, and at little risk from his cardiovascular disease. Six months later, he was still going strong, and still biking to work nearly every day. Note that if this same man had lived outside California, he probably wouldn't be able to bike through the entire winter. If he had even lived in San Francisco, his bike probably would have gotten stolen within that time period.

Example two: In 2005, I was diagnosed with osteopenia. My doctor immediately put me on a regiment of calcium and vitamin D supplements, and I embarked on a program of hiking and weight lifting, that I continue to this day (it's been 5 years). My bones are back to normal, even though doctors and others were incredulous at the improvement.

The lesson, perhaps, is that if you're a Google engineer, all these rules of thumb about lifestyle changes not working? They're probably inapplicable to you. The question in my mind is: Is there an easy way to predict what kind of persons do well with this kind of diet/exercise regime, and what kinds of persons don't?

Xianhang Zhang Returns!

Xianhang Cooks

After his last visit, I was very lucky to have more and longer conversations with Xianhang, including a long hike on Saturday, and he agreed to cook for us once more. This time, it's for the crew that's coming along for this year's Tour of the German-speaking Alps.

My kitchen was sadly under-equipped, even though the stove and oven was brand new. So we first started off the cooking expedition with a visit to the Restaurant Supply store to pick up pots, a frying pan, and various other utensils. I was so glad that someone with real expertise was helping me pick out stuff. I would have just gone down to Safeway and picked up stuff off the rack. Now I have a full set of mixing bowls, baking pans, etc.

Then it was off to Ranch 99 and then Whole Foods to pick up groceries, and upon returning home Xianhang basically started cooking up a Swiss-themed dinner in anticipation of the alps trip. We started off with sausage and polenta, followed by potato salad, then soup, and finally desert was a baked Alaska: a meringue topping off rocky road ice cream, which was on top of sponge cake, all baked in the oven (the first time we ever baked anything in my oven), followed with a sprinkle of strawberry sauce. All very yummy. Cynthia and Kekoa brought wine and plates (when I say under-equipped I mean it), Phil brought more wine, and we all had a great time.

Thanks, Xianhang!

Food Story 2

Growing up in Singapore meant that I really loved food, and always appreciated good food. However, I'm also cheap, and so never went to any fancy restaurants. It wasn't until Google that I actually had a formal, multi-course Western-style dinner.

By 2005, those of us who were on the Sarbanes-Compliance projects were deemed to be "done". At other companies, this might mean a bonus, but Google had something much better: in-house Chefs who could prepare a fancy meal on a budget. Many people think that the in-house Chefs at Google are an ostentatious perk that was an expensive luxury for employees, but in reality, I think the value Google got out of them in terms of extra work from employees and being able to run award-type events really cheaply meant that the culinary staff more than paid for themselves.

We sat down in a room near Charlie's (this room would eventually become the B40 gym), which had been laid out like a restaurant, complete with a special door from which food would arrive. I'd never seen table-cloths so white, nor had I ever had a place-setting with this many implements. I thought, "OMG, I'm in for a treat."

The first entrée arrived. It was a salad with dressing. I had been trained to get hungry by 6:30, and was starving, so I ate it with relish. Then came the Ceviche. That was really tasty too! Then came the sorbet. I was shocked. That's it? That was my fancy dinner? I was still hungry. "Oh well," I thought, "I can still go grab a burger at Charlie's afterwards." When the main dish arrived after the sorbet (it was Filet Mignon), I finally realized that the sorbet was a palate cleanser, not desert. The rest of the meal was fantastic.

Google ran many other "event"-type dinners. One of my favorites was the chocolate-themed dinner that Chris persuaded Charlie and the culinary team to run. That was a $20 dinner, but my goodness, you got $100 worth of food out of it. Another week, Google's culinary team ran the Cafe Crawl: visit all the Cafes in a week: Lea and I used bicycles to visit all the Cafes in one lunch period. The reward: a special meal, and a pass that let you skip to the front of the line for a week! Needless to say, I took advantage of that pass to get a huge amount of sushi.

Google cafeteria reached their height in 2007 --- when I visited Paris in 2008 for a culinary tour, I unfavorably compared some restaurants in Paris to Google's Cafe 5IVE, for instance. I was sad to return from Germany to discover that many of my favorite Chefs had left. Olivia Wu and Scott Giambastiani are still at Google though, and they still turn out meals that could blow your mind if you were used to the typical corporate cafeteria.

There's a talent war brewing in the valley over corporate Chefs, so hopefully, having great food as part of your compensation package will be more common.

P.S. I'm fasting for an annual physical/blood-test, and writing this post while fasting was a mistake!

Gastronauts Launch Party

Gastronauts

Nate Keller and Mirit Cohen were two of the most talented chefs at Google, so when they sent me an invite to the launch party for their food service, Gastronauts, I got very excited and immediately blocked off the evening.

The meal served was absolutely outstanding. When I visited Paris last year, I noted how various restaurants, despite being really good, were outdone by various Google cafetarias. Well, this restaurant won't be outdone any time soon, that's for sure. We started out with a mushroom bisque with toasted garlic and fried almonds, which was then followed by smoked salmon on a bit of bagel bread with fried capers and wasabi, were bedazzled by a triplet of fruit pairings --- guava with pear, cactus fruit with pear, and pomegranate on a grape jelly. The explosion in my mouth with the guava and pear pairing was an out of body experience. The main dish was ribs on polenta garnished with tomatoes with a chocolate sauce. I think I started salivating with the description and didn't stop until every morsel was off my plate and in my tummy. The desert was a pumpkin panna cotta, cream, and nutmeg, with a cookie. You had to take the panna cotta, add the cream, put it in your mouth, bite of a piece of the cookie, and then sip the nutmeg, a complicated sequence that paid its rewards in the form of a burst of flavor in your palate.

Mirit and Nate say they'll be launching a retail operation soon, so if you live in San Francisco, I think you should plan on a visit! Highly recommended.