The Minimalist » Food

What to minimize for muffin cups?

Minimalist J — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 21:10:25 +0000

Saw these silicone muffin cups, and it brings up a recent debate here. We’ve always used paper muffin cups, but were debating whether it would be better to spray oil in a standard muffin tin. We hadn’t decided, but now there is this third option. So here’s the question: should we minimize silicone, paper or oil? I’m thinking we’ll still go with paper, but other opinions are welcome.

Via Treehugger.

The line between candy and medication is getting fuzzy

Minimalist J — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:18:18 +0000

The Seattle PI tells us that diet sodas may “make us fat,” but more oddly, CNN indicates candy manufacturers are starting to include things like caffeine, ginseng, and guarana in their products. I like the fact that the link at CNN has “fitness candy” as the descriptor.

“People need to realize if they haven’t been sweating and need to replace electrolytes, you don’t really need these products,” she said. The use of stimulants is an even greater concern because they can cause dangerous increases in a person’s heart rate and blood pressure, she added.

But Larry Graham, president of the National Confectioners Association, said candy makers are simply answering consumer demand.

“Manufacturers are looking for new ways to build healthful benefits into their candy,” Graham said.

I always thought the sugar jolt of a handfull of jelly beans would do the trick, but apparently I’m naive. I guess I’ll be reading the labels carefully on my next sugary snack, since I’m trying to (at least somewhat) limit my caffeine intake.

Baking bread today

Minimalist J — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:21:10 +0000

We’ve started baking our own bread, mostly because it is interesting, and we use exactly the kind of flour we want; it is hard to find good premade whole wheat challah, even at Fresh Fields. RecipeZaar has a decent challah recipe we’re modifying. We make four or so loaves at once, and freeze most of the dough so we can bake it when we don’t have time to make it from scratch. So we’re trying to learn about all the different kinds of flour, and were wondering how “Unbleached wheat flour with added germ” compared nutritionally to stone ground whole wheat flour. We came across this site, which seems to go a bit overboard on getting fresh flour:

What is the solution to this problem? Ideally, one should buy wheat in sacks, grind the grain at home and quickly bake it into bread.

Um, yeah. I think that might just kill the fun a bit. We’re trying to zero in on a tasty recipe that uses a minimum number of easily available, cheap ingredients and is really healthy, yet isn’t too hard to make. We’re zeroing in, but each experiment takes a while, so it’ll be a while yet. We’ve moved the challah to half whole wheat and are trying to reduce the oil next.