Reformed Meat – Yes, You Are Eating It
Have you ever noticed how perfectly and uniformly formed the chicken is in the Chicken Tacos at Chilis? How the chicken in the chicken sandwiches at Olive Garden Feel in your mouth? I think there are a lot of preformed meats on our menus at some of the larger chain restaurants:
Meat Additive May Make You Sick
Meat glue, also called transglutaminase (nothing to do with so-called pink slime), binds together bits of meat into what looks like a prime cut. But: When not handled properly, meat glue can seal in E. coli and other bacteria present on raw meat. Self-defense: Check package labels—glued meats must include the words “formed” or “reformed.” Glued meats are commonly used in high-volume restaurants and banquet facilities. To be safe, eat meat cooked well-done.
Source: Suzanne Havala Hobbs, DrPH, RD, is a clinical associate professor in the departments of health policy and management and nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dauphin Island and BBQ!
We got up early, remember? We worked up an appetite walking through the bird sanctuary and exploring the park and environs. One last stop to see those butterflies and we really need to get something to eat.
Fortunately, we passed just the place on the way in . . . Dauphin Island BBQ 🙂
My friends, this is not a fancy place. There is no indoor seating. You order at a window, and grab your plastic utensils, and then you wait for your name to be called. You can fill little cups with condiments, including, of course, Tony Chachere’s special spices, and then you sit at a picnic table and eat out of a styrofoam container. This may not be your style. We like all kinds of styles 🙂
By the time we decided, cars loaded with grandparents, children, lots and lots of children, parents, aunts and uncles, cars and trucks and big RV’s started pulling up and people crowding into Dauphin Island BBQ eager to eat. Clientele lining up:
We got there just in time. We got a good picnic table in the shade. I tried to order oysters, but since Isaac, oysters have been hard to come by. I had fried fish. It was hot and it was delicious.
AdventureMan ordered the pulled pork and said it was delicious:
Not elegant, but tasty, filling, and delicious. As you drive onto Dauphin Island, turn left and watch for this . . . umm . . .lighthouse. Dauphin Island BBQ is located just past this lighthouse-looking building.
If you want to stay on Dauphin Island, there is one Motel, several condominiums, and many rentals. One place to look for beach rentals is Trip Advisor. Trip Advisor also has a few hotel/B&B listings here, but be sure to tell TA to arrange by distance, or you may end up in Gulf Shores or Fairhope, LOL!
The one motel, Gulf Breeze Motel, is nothing fancy, but it is the best there is. Reviewers on Trip Advisor say ‘it’s not the Ritz’ but the prices are reasonable, and people seem to like it.
“I Want to See How they Handle the Israel Problem.”
AdventureMan zipped left across three lanes of traffic and into a parking lot.
“What are you doing?” I hollered, hanging on for dear life.
“Jordan Valley restaurant has a new sign up, a big map of the Middle East, and I want to see how they handle the Israel problem,” he answered.
That explains everything. No, really, it does. We’ve been married for a long time, I know what he means.
“Very clever,” we both agreed.
AdventureMan’s Garden
It’s all about rebirth, transformation, and new life. Gardening is a discipline, and a spiritual endeavor. You can plant the seeds, you can tend the process, but only God can make those seeds grow and flourish.
AdventureMan is so happy. He loves his garden. No, he doesn’t love weeding (does anyone?) but he loves the feeling of satisfaction when he looks at a formerly weedy bed and sees that it looks great now. His moonflowers are starting to bloom, his tomatoes are starting to ripen, we are using 8 different kinds of fresh basil, he has bounteous peppers, enough to share generously – life is good.
Tomatoes and more tomatoes!
An abundance of jalepenos!
Pear tomatoes coming along:
This is one of his butterfly gardens. We have all kinds of butterflies coming through, laying eggs, and hatching into butterflies – Monarchs, Gulf Fritillaries, Sulpher, Brown Beauties, many that he can name that I can’t!
He has been accepted into the Master Gardener’s program and is about to dazzle me with all his gardening expertize! 🙂
Ichiban Pensacola – YUMMMM!
We knew we were in the right place – the parking lot was packed. Our son and his wife had told us they like Ichiban for sushi and Japanese food, so we thought we’d give it a try.
As we were seated in our little booth at Ichiban, with cubby holes for our shoes, and a well for our feet, we looked at each other and had the same thought – how is it we have never been here before? We love this place, even upon entering. Friendly greeting, gracious service, full of people eating plates of delicious food, nice atmosphere – how did we miss Ichiban?
There is a stylized salmon design on the tabletop; a sure winner for a gal from the Pacific Northwest. I can hear Japanese being spoken in the kitchen, and the food . . . the food is the closest I have come to food from a little Japanese restaurant in Seattle. They even have salmon teriyaki on the menu, and bento boxes! I am in heaven.
We had a pot of green tea, and we ordered bento boxes.
If I have one tiny complaint, it is this: there is too much food! Each Bento box came with a full sushi roll. This is the California roll:
Here is a menu of all the different kinds of sushi they have available.
I had the bento box with chicken teriyaki. It came with a good sized bowl of miso soup, which I love, cucumber salad, an asparagus salad with shrimp on top, an egg roll and two delicious little fried beef dumplings. Everything was tasty. Each taste was separate and delightful.
AdventureMan ordered the Bento Box with Shrimp Tempura:
There was so much food! We ended up bringing home a lot of salad and our main courses. I’ve never seen so much food in a bento box.
We are impressed that Pensacola has such a great Japanese restaurant. No wonder people are keeping it a secret!
I love it that on their menu, they have Sushi for Beginners. 🙂 If you have never tried Japanese food, Ichiban Pensacola is a great place to start. They can guide you on some menu choices, and make sure you have a delightful initiation. If you already like Japanese food – see you there.
Trial Run: Lessons Learned
We have most everything put away now, a real pain in the neck, but we keep in mind that it is not as much a pain in the neck as losing everything, or having to hack a hole in your own roof to escape a flood which completely ruins a house so you have to rebuild and live somewhere else while you are rebuilding. It’s even a lot easier than having a window or roof or garage breached, and the resulting damage from wind-driven rain, or just sheets of rain.
Today has had higher gusts of wind and frequent showers, and an occasional breakthrough of Pensacola sunshine.
We know how long it takes to put on our window protection – and take it off. We know how long it takes to clear all the potential flying objects out of our backyard. We know a couple vulnerable points, and that it’s going to be expensive to get a fix big enough to give us complete protection. It’s a gamble.
Here is something else I know, very valuable.
I know that I can keep hot coffee and hot water HOT for five days.
This great thermal jug from Qatar had coffee still warm after five days – not hot, but warm.
This little thermos from Starbucks kept coffee very warm, but not hot:
And this is a large thermos/ server I found in Kuwait and used for three years for large groups of ladies. Six years later, it is still working great. I poured boiling water into it on Sunday night, and on Thursday afternoon, it was still almost boiling hot. It was hot enough you can use it to make soup, which is just what you need to be able to do when you have no electricity and need to fix something that can warm you up.
The WINNER!
African Sweet Potato Peanut Soup
This is another wonderful recipe I found on allrecipes.com. My sweet daughter-in-law told me about allrecipes.com, and once I signed up, they started sending me recipes every day. Not all of them are of interest to me, but most of those I have tried have been really good.
We LOVE this soup. It is delicious, and easy to fix. While it is an African recipe, we find that many of the most delicious Southern dishes are similar to African dishes, probably because there were so many African ex-pats brought to the USA and settled in the South a few hundred years ago. Their legacy lives on in Southern cookbooks.
African Sweet Potato and Peanut Soup
Ingredients
• 1 tablespoon good olive oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger root
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 pinch ground cloves
• 3 medium tomatoes, chopped
• 1 1/2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 1 carrot, peeled and chopped
• 4 1/2 cups chicken broth
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup chopped unsalted dry-roasted peanuts
• 1 pinch cayenne pepper
• 2 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter
• 1 bunch fresh chopped cilantro
1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Saute the onion 10 minutes, until lightly browned. Mix in the garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cayenne and cloves. Stir in the tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrot, and continue to cook and stir about 5 minutes.
2. Pour chicken broth into the saucepan, and season the mixture with salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 30 minutes. Add peanut butter.
3. Remove the soup mixture from heat. With a blender wand, blend the soup and peanuts until almost smooth. Stir in fresh cilantro. Serve hot.
My Halal Kitchen by Yvonne Maffei
Just in time for your Eid celebrations, a blog called My Halal Kitchen, with some of the most amazing and delicious totally halal recipes you can imagine.
Here is what the author has to say about herself:
Publisher Bio
Yvonne Maffei, MA graduated from Ohio University with a Bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies and a Master’s degree in International Studies, where she specialized in international education, journalism and health. She has lived and traveled abroad in various regions throughout Latin America, Europe, the southern Mediterranean and North Africa as well as the American foodie cities of San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Yvonne has been cooking and writing since she was a pre-teen and always wanted to turn her passion and hobby into something more. When one of her recipes was published in Cooking Light magazine, it was all the inspiration she needed to make a necessary life and career change. After years of being a school teacher, she decided to re-angle her teaching platform from the classroom to her blog where she began writing about halal food and cooking and thus began a new career out of writing about food, travel and healthy, halal living. Today Yvonne writes and publishes MyHalalKitchen.com, a blog about halal food and cooking. She currently teaches cooking classes, gives lectures on healthy eating, and consults schools on how to source healthy, halal ingredients and create tasty healthy and halal recipes for their school lunches. She resides in Chicago, IL.
Her recipes are clear and easily understood, and her illustrations are beautiful. She also provides resources for halal-standard foods, and fresh dairy and produce.
Gulfarium in Fort Walton Beach
It’s going to be a rainy morning, but not a problem – we’re going to the Gulfarium in Fort Walton Beach. It’s expensive – even with our senior discount our tickets are $18.95 EACH! But the happy toddler is under three, so he goes in free.
Feeding the Manta Rays:
Feeding the penguins:
Feeding the Turtle:
Gulfarium Bayou Area:
Heron:
After visiting the Gulfarium we left, just as the clouds broke open and deluged us. We took refuge at Big Daddy’s BBQ and Thai Food which serves a large and happy population at Hurlburt Field and Eglin AFB. We had seen the funky looking place every time we take Highway 98, but this is our first time stopping there. It was a great stop on a very rainy day – the food was hot and tasty; the restaurant low key, and fine with children. They had lots to choose from, a buffet or you could order off the menu.
We get back to our beach place just in time for naps – all of us! Taking care of a 2 1/2 year old is exhausting! By the time we get up, the sun is shining, the surf is up and it’s beach time!
Hopjack’s Filling Station, Pensacola
This is all about the power of the press. This morning, as I checked my news online, I saw an article about a restaurant area in East Pensacola Heights, and it mentioned several restaurants, including Hopjack’s Filling Station, which our son had told us about.
“Today, I want to go to Hopjack’s!” AdventureMan announced after having read the Pensacola News Journal, and off we went.
Hopjack’s Filling Station is all about beer. I wish I had gotten a photo of the 33 taps for their beers on tap. Next to the 33 beers on tap, there is a huge refrigerator case, an entire wall of cold beers in bottles, so many I have no idea how many there are. And across from that wall, on the opposite wall, is another wall of beer.
They also have food. 🙂 There is a cold chest full of hard-to-find cheeses, and not a huge menu, but a very very cool menu, a big city kind of brew-pub menu, with international offerings at reasonable prices:
I ordered the Duck Panini with the garlic aioli (really, a garlic mayonnaise) (“garlic aioli” is like saying “shrimp scampi” or “Vista View” LOL)
And AdventureMan ordered the Caprese Panini, which had a balsamic vinegar reduction that was divine:
And, of course, we both had beer :-). If you don’t know what you like, they have little tasting cups. I had a dark beer, just a tiny bit sweet, called Rogue, and AdventureMan had something he hoped would approximate a good German Pils, but he says we are going to have to go back and keep trying until he finds it. 🙂
Hopjack’s Filling Station will have a grand opening Friday, August 10, with wine tasting as well as beer sampling. Go welcome them to the neighborhood.
(I really want to go back and try their Belgian frites with aioli!)
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