Make a cappuccino, ghetto style

So, I recently got a copy of Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking”. Reading the chapter on milk foams inspired me to make this cappuccino recipe. It wouldn’t fool a Barista, but it looks and tastes better than what you get from a domestic espresso machine with its pathetic steam nozzle.

You will need: A way of making good, strong black coffee, such as a stovetop moka pot, and some ground espresso beans.

Some full fat milk, a jam jar with lid, a microwave oven.

Put the coffee on to brew. When it’s nearly ready, pour about 1 inch of milk into the jar, put the lid on and shake it as hard as you can for about 1 minute. This makes it frothy. Now remove the lid and cook it in the microwave for about 40 seconds on full power, or until it starts to foam up more. This cooks the foam and stabillises it, while making the milk nice and hot, as the steam from an espresso machine would do.

Finally combine the coffee and foamed milk in your favourite mug. You can put the milk in first and pour most of the coffee down the side, and use the last little bit to make a pattern on the foam.

The Darwin Diet

We’ve had the GI Diet, the Atkins Diet, and a hundred others. But what if Charles Darwin wrote a diet book?

Well, ever since “Man… descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped“, until the discovery of fossil fuels, human populations were limited by competition for resources. What that presumably meant was that, just in order to survive, Man had to eat everything and anything he could lay hands on. So there’s the Darwin diet right there. Eat anything you can lay hands on if you want to live.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t fit well with a post-industrial society where fossil-fuelled machines do all of our manual labour for us, and the market economy brings us a cornucopia of processed foods designed for profit. Yes, people complain about McDonalds, but it’s exactly the foodstuff you’d expect a free market to produce. Looks nice, tastes nice in an addictive, trashy kind of way, cheap to mass-produce, and who cares what it does to your health. McDonalds don’t, because they don’t have to pay for your healthcare.

The amazing thing isn’t that some people are fat, as the media keep telling us. It’s more remarkable that some people are still thin, while they have the chance to consume everything and do nothing, and the evolutionary mandate for it, too.