The Plastiki Expedition

[I thought it was time to bring this post back to the surface--it was originally posted May 19, 2009--because the Plastiki has now completed its cross-Pacific journey from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. Their website continues in their efforts to increase awareness about the massive waste stream connected with plastic bottles.]

I've written about a Japanese fellow who built a canoe out of recycled wooden chopsticks and the American dude who made a Viking ship out of popsicle sticks, but this boat (artist rendering at left) really takes the cake. (See how I distracted you with a food reference so you wouldn't notice that this post is just about boats?)

From March through August 2010, David de Rothschild (a self-styled eco-warrior and, yes, that Rothschild family) and a crew sailed 8,000 nautical miles from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat made of recycled plastic bottles (more than 12,000 of them).

Here's a part of their mission statement:

The Plastiki aims to draw attention to the rethinking of our everyday human fingerprints on the natural world and in turn capturing the world's imagination by telling a story; that of the pioneering and sustainable design process that created and built The Plastiki...

It is our aim to captivate, inspire and activate tomorrow's environmental thinkers and doers to take positive action for our Planet and to be smart with waste, ultimately we hope to inspire people to rethink waste as a valuable resource. One person's waste could be another person's treasure.

Check the voyage out on the Plastiki website or their Facebook page. Or follow @Plastiki on Twitter.

Purple carrot juice

Carrots used to be purple (read more about them here) and in the past bunch of years there has been a mini-trend to grow purple carrots again. The pigments that make the carrots' skin purple (the flesh is still orange) are a group of phytochemicals called anthocyanins. These self-same compounds are what make most berries deep red to purple, and are also (potentially) responsible for these fruits' health benefits. So if you add anthocyanins to the already extraordinarily healthful beta-carotene (the carrot's orange pigment), you have a pretty cool vegetable.

A number of juice brands—including Smart Juice, Bolthouse Farms, and Lakewood—are now using purple carrots to make carrot juice, as well as including purple carrots in other juice blends to boost their antioxidant power. Purple carrot juice has the natural sweetness of regular carrot juice with an undercurrent of berry flavor (from the anthocyanins).

Have you ever heard of a carica fruit?

The carica is a tropical fruit that grows in South America, principally in Chile. It is related to the papaya, which is why it is also called Golden Papaya, Mountain Papaya, or Chilean Papaya. The carica is also grown in Indonesia, though I'm sure they have their own word for it (carica certainly sounds like a romance language word).

As with many tropical fruits grown outside this country, strict import laws keep the fresh fruit from reaching our markets. But you can buy caricas that have been trimmed, seeded, and preserved in a very light sugar syrup. (Though they were available at Amazon for awhile, they seem to have disappeared. I'll keep looking for them. You might also find them in specialty stores that sell Southeast Asian foods.)

So what do caricas taste like? Closing my eyes and concentrating and trying not to get too complicated, I would say they taste like a cross between pineapple and pear. But to me the one distinguishing feature of caricas is their texture: They're chewy!











Here's what a carica shell liberated from its jar looks like. It's 3 to 3.5 inches long and about 1.5 inches wide at the opening (which I propped open with a toothpick because the fruits are flattened when they're packed in the jar). You could fit a generous 1/3 to 1/2 cup of something inside a carica shell. 

Beluga lentils

In the past couple of years, as research into the phytochemicals in food has really taken off, it has become clear that the foods with the deepest, darkest colors have more healthful compounds than their pale counterparts.

Enter the beluga lentil--a small, shiny black lentil named for its resemblance to caviar. Recent research at the Agricultural Research Service (the in-house research facility of the USDA) has discovered that beluga lentils' deep hue comes from natural pigments called anthocyanins. Anthocyanins, which are currently being studied for their health potential, are a group of compounds responsible for the reddish-purple color of certain foods, like raspberries, red cabbage and pomegranates.

The specific anthocyanin identified in beluga lentils bears the memorable name of delphinidin-3-O (2-O-beta-D-glucopyranosyl-alpha-L-arabinopyranoside). Quick, say that three times fast.

Science aside, beluga lentils are just neat to eat. They have all the other established benefits of legumes and are also quick-cooking because of their size. You may be able to find them at a gourmet store, or you can find them online at Indian Harvest (though they sell in bulk amounts) or Purcell Mountain Farms ($3.95 a pound).

Eat Your Books

You know how you see something that you've been dreaming of doing forever, but somebody else had the vision or the guts or the time or the whatever to actually go ahead and do it? Grrrr. Well, that's the way I feel about a website called Eat Your Books.

The website was born of a home cook's need to actually know what was in the 700+ cookbooks she owned. She found that, in spite of her giant library, when she was looking to cook something specific--a cuisine, a certain dish, a recipe featuring a particular ingredient--she turned to Google. Silly when you think of the fact that she (technically) had over 175,000 recipes sitting on her bookshelves. So she did something about it and started indexing her cookbooks and putting the information into a searchable database. The idea grew from there and now on Eat Your Books, there are almost 540,000 recipes that have been indexed from cookbooks (including books that are just off the press), magazines, and food blogs.

Since I have for years been planning on indexing all my cookbooks into a database, I am both extraordinarily jealous and in deep admiration of Jane Kelly, the brains behind the idea. There is a free membership that allows you to load your bookshelf with 5 books or you can pay $2.50 a month or $25 a year to have unlimited books on your bookshelf. This gives you access to the searchable database. There are also links for buying books in case you stumble across one that you wish you owned.

Chitarra pasta

Chitarra means guitar in Italian, and it is also the name for a piece of pasta-making equipment that resembles that stringed instrument (although zither would be a better match). Maccheroni alla chitarra or spaghetti alla chitarra are made by pressing a thin sheet of egg dough onto the metal strings, thus cutting the dough into strands (duh).
        The resulting strand pasta is squarish in cross-section and roughish in texture--as opposed to the roundish cross-section and smooth texture you get from pasta strands that have been extruded through a round hole. It is said that the rougher edges of the chitarra-cut strands allow pasta sauce to cling better.
       OK, enough food blah-blah. Here's the cool thing: The chitarra shown at left is handmade in this country (Pennsylvania, to be exact) by an artisan who has been making them for over 60 years. It has a hardwood frame and steel wires set into cast-aluminum anchors; it costs $50 from Fantes Kitchen Wares Shop.

Now, for you DIY folks: Here's a little instructional from a math professor at Columbia University in NYC on how to build your own chitarra.