The Urban Pantheist

Over at tumblr I got involved in a conversation about taste and specifically supertasters. Some folks were saying that being supertasters made it so that they were physically unable to enjoy beer. Being someone who enjoys beer, well I had to jump in:

I do love me some beer, but I put in long hours of acquiring the taste.

From an animal behavior standpoint it’s easy to acquire the taste for things like beer: each bitter sip is rewarded with sweet sweet euphoria (and physical dependence) that gets better the more you drink. My mouth waters whenever I hear the sound of a bottle being opened, or the rush of air into the opened vacuum of a cracked open can.

I acquired the taste for coffee the same way (plus some well-placed sugar-shaming by a friend at my first attempt at drinking espresso). Now I need a little creamer to keep the stuff from making caustic burns in my belly, but sweetener ruins the bitter flavor I appreciate.

Never really acquired: chocolate. It has to be sweet as fuck (hot cocoa I like, and some super sweet chocolate candy) or leavened with something salty–Reese’s peanut butter cups alone justify the existence of the cacao plant in my opinion. Must not be enough of a drug effect on me to counter the bitterness: I find most chocolate to taste like unsweetened baker’s chocolate, and chocolate cake, pudding, and ice cream are sad travesties to my taste bud. The black part of Oreo cookies taste like ash to me.

So maybe I’m a supertaster? To say cilantro tastes like soap to me is to pay it an unearned compliment. Basil and things made with it (ugh pesto) taste like acrid sewage. Too bad there’s no bitter green herb with a self-reinforcing euphoric drug in it

...

ANYway, Alexis jumped in to say that if I was a supertaster I wouldn't eat broccoli (I mostly eat it when its soaking in Chinese Restaurant syrup) and another friend also told me nah. That's fine, being a supertaster sounds kind of annoying, and I really like to put hot sauce on everything anyway.

Grillmaster Tom, on the Cape making the superdogs.

In honor of the fact that I'll be seeing Chris Hardwick (the nerdist) entertain Boston at the Wilbur in an hour in a half, I'll quickly share a nerdy thing that I've been momentarily obsessed with.

Alexis and I have been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently (all star treks are on netflix instant btw). At the beginning of one episode they showed a child eating oatmeal. All the food on the space station is made by the replicators--machines that use transporter technology to generate food and other items from a stored bank of matter (I read up on them today). Presumably this means not only can you procure ANY food you can think of (or have the schematics or software for) but that the machine could be programmed to alter the nutritional content of the food.

If I had access to a replicator, I might say "Tea, Earl Grey; hot," once or twice, just to work on my Patrick Stewart impersonation, but most of the time I'd be saying stuff like "Masamam curry tofu, medium spicy, with pineapple chunks." Or I'd say "Crunchberries, large bowl with lactose-free milk!" Since the machine is generating the food--it never grew, it never lived, it was never killed or harvested--you could say, "veal cutlet, breaded, with dolphin sauce" guilt free. Hell you could have big bowl of baby monkey hearts, if that's your thing (those guys that are black on one side and white on the other eat baby monkey hearts, look it up).

But I would live on DS9 for a long long time before it occurred to me to say "Oatmeal, lumpy, too hot on the inside, slimy and cold on the outside." (This describes every bowl of oatmeal I've eaten.) I brought this up with some of my coworkers, and five out of six of them said the same thing to me: "I love oatmeal. What's wrong with oatmeal?"

...

"Spaghettios, room temperature, from the can."

Make it so.

Here we are at Inn Magnolia! We got this opportunity because I'll be leading a mushroom walk the Inn is sponsoring, next week.

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This was the dirt-facing surface of a pumpkin that grew from one of our triffid-like garden dominating pumpkin vines. I could see that it was already compromised by some other pumpkin grazer on the top side, and was starting to rot. I was quite surprised to see termites (members of our one New England species, the eastern subterranean termite) burrowing in. Seems kind of lazy for an animal specially adapted to eat wood cellulose to take on pumpkin flesh, but who am I to criticize a creature for taking the easy route?

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Last Friday, the zoo hospital staff hiding in a darkened air-conditioned room.

( vixen and wieners )

I am going to share this cake recipe partly because it's the most delicious cake I've ever eaten and partly because I want to close the document off my desktop. There's no baking but you have to leave it over night. Like all delicious things it contains unconscionable amounts of sweetened condensed milk, butter, egg yolks, an sugar:

1 can condensed milk
1/2 lb. butter
1 cup sugar
4 egg yolks
1 can nestle cream
1 pkg. marie biscuits
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla or rum

cover can of milk in water
boil covered for 2 hrs - do not open until ready to smother cake.
cream butter and sugar
add egg yolks
add vanilla or rum
fold in nestle cream
line a bowl with wax paper
dip biscuits in milk and layer with butter cream mix (appx 4 layers)
refrigerate overnight
invert onto platter and cover with caramel

Pumpkin Cucurbita sp. Probably C. pepo but possibly C. pepo x maxima

Last fall, shortly after Halloween had passed, some farm donated a huge amount of pumpkins to the zoo. Pumpkins are fun novelty enrichment items for the zoo but they have to be judiciously used because they are relatively high in calories and sugar. There were so many donated that before they could be all used, they began to decompose and create a mess (to say nothing of the potential pest problem) in the area where they were stored. I took home a few, to use as fun novelty enrichment items for our home animal collection.

The dogs ripped them apart and carried them around and had a grand old time with them. Visiting wildlife foraged on the seeds, scattering them about. This sprout underneath our picnic table was a complete surprise. It's nice to see a native cultivated food plant volunteering in the yard.

The pumpkins we used were squat dense things that would require the skills of a stonemason to make into jack-o-lanterns. Smooth-skinned sugary pumpkins for carving and pie making are cultivated from a wild squash Cucurbita pepo. Massive, bumpy, state fair, Cinderella's carriage pumpkins are cultivated from a relative, Cucurbita maxima. Pumpkin cultivation, like all plant cultivation, involves selecting strains and hybrids with desired traits. The pumpkins growing in my yard were almost certainly chosen for decorative traits--unusual skin color and texture--but the flesh and seeds are still edible (we roasted up some of the seeds).

While researching this I discovered that there was a recent kerfuffle regarding warty pumpkins. One seed producer developed a strain of consistently and copiously warted pumpkins and applied to patent it. (This strain was named "Super Freak" by the seed company.) Rival seed producers came out of the woodwork with their catalogs and documentation to protect their own specialized lines of bumpy gourds. The trait of warts on a Cucurbit was thought to indicate a distinct strain dating back to the 18th century. The patent was rejected in 2009 so if our yard pumpkins turn out to be warty we won't be risking a lawsuit.

4th of July cookout at friends house in Jamaica Plain!


The traditional American dish of steak and tofu with avocado sauce, mushrooms, and fruit salad.

Five years ago today:


My dear friend rockbalancer at Drumlin Farm is happy to take over ownership of my cockroaches as I depart to work at the zoo. These days she blogs about urban nature in Los Angeles!