Transplanting a Seattleite

It’s super windy, and I’m starting to wonder if yesterday’s bad mood and headache might have been related to the barometric pressure bouncing all over the place. Oh well! I asked R. to keep an eye on me today.

I’ve been thinking about how to avoid putting too many holes through that wall covering we are going to do in the pool room, and while I blogged about a couple ideas yesterday (floor to ceiling, that anchors to ceiling and stands on floor, or wall that limits wall pens to anchor points and stands on floor like a ladder rack), I came up with another one last night: No Drilling Required / Nie Wieder Bohren. They use a special adhesive, but I do not know how that will interact with the surface of the wall covering, and I also have some questions about weight limits (not doing grab bars, so not worried about that at any rate!). I think we need to do a mockup, where we install a sample on a wall, and then install the attachment points and rest a weight of some sort on it and check back in at a week / a month and see if anything has gone horribly wrong. We’ll still need to seal whatever we put on the attachment point, because if moisture gets in there, it can loosen the adhesive, but we at least won’t compromise the wall covering, which is a lot. Fingers crossed; I sent email to the builder.

I took another swing at making peanut butter. For round one, I just food processored some raw peanuts, and it took a while, so I added some oil and that helped but it still tasted really beany. I read a little about how to do this (online, duh) and so I roasted the raw peanuts and then food processored them and that helped a ton. However, still not as dark as I’m used to and still bean-i-er flavored than I’m used to, which points firmly in the direction of More Roasting Needed.

I find this absolutely hilarious, because of how this whole project got started, and the advice I received on FF along the way (from P, so it being hilariously not correct is expected. He’s a dear and he means well, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything about what he’s talking about). We tried the three ingredient cookie when it hit TikTok, and when randos online said you couldn’t use nuts you had to use commercial peanut butter I was like, LOL, no. And then I proceeded to make a ton of variations using the bulk nuts R. always has around for snacking on. Much yumminess ensued and also he started buying unsalted cashews because salted cashews from the bottom of the container resulted in cookies that were too salty even for him (he did eat them!).

Anyway. I never got around to making my own peanut butter, because at that specific point in time (harvest or coming out of pandemic or who knows what supply chain hell) it was hard to get organic valencia peanuts or their equivalent grown in the US. At least, at a reasonable price point! I could get cheaper unsalted valencia peanut butter of equivalent weight from Trader Joe’s. But now! Now I can get reasonable price point peanuts and I bought a big bag so Now Is the Time!

I’m learning, so I’m happy. Also, if there is a trend in my life, it is that Roasted Darker is definitely my preference.

ETA

No walk today, because we kept losing power on and off and we didn’t want to get nailed by something falling down on top of us. I did have a visit with M.

R. went through the paints and I listed the kids’ painting supplies. Then he went through the kids nail polish and tossed the dry ones and I listed that. I’m wondering if FB will bounce it on some kind of hygiene basis, but it seems like nail polish ought to be okay. We’ll see. The paint was immediately spoken for (pickup tomorrow). The guy with the clock wall came to pick up the Kikkerland clock, so that’s gone.

I listed the blue tool kit that I’ve had forever.

I took a plastic bin that freed up (one of the basket style ones) and replaced the lego tub in the closet that is holding hats and scarves. I’m trying to make sure that “holes” that open up around the house don’t start inviting new stuff into them. It’s going well, and it’s easier to see and use the stuff we are keeping, which is always nice.

I am recluttering as I go. I got rid of a ton of crappy scissors as part of the kids craft lots, so I ordered new kitchen shears (ours are terrible; they were a wedding present from someone who has since passed which made me reluctant to replace them but it’s past time) and new utility scissors.

I’m trying to fit the 25 lb bag of nuts in the pantry, and doing some rearranging in there. I was reminded of the brown mustard seeds, so I got them out, found a recipe for making mustard — which was why I bought the mustard seed bag — and then found the coffee, er, spice grinder. I cleaned the coffee grinder thoroughly (lots of cinnamon in there last time apparently) and then ground the mustard seed and added water from the fridge filter and stirred. It was a little thin, so I added a bunch more mustard seed powder it’s now hanging out in the fridge developing. I put a tiny amount of vinegar in, but I’m mostly waiting to see just how powerful this stuff is first.

Also, if it really is this ridiculously easy, I really am never going to buy mustard for myself again. Finding no salt mustard is a pain, and then there’s the plastic containers, and this would appear to be a way around that. I expected it to be hard, and it may yet be difficult getting the flavor right, but I’m actually not that picky about mustard. I like all of it.

ETA: FF was fun, altho it ended early.

I picked up A. from school and chatted with H. on the drive home.

I made a chocolate cake. Einkorn is really odd in general, and while the cake turned out fine, I think I would use the Frederick white now that I have it. I made a frosting using cocoa butter, caster sugar (both of those nearly used up now) vanilla and orange juice. It tasted like a white chocolate bar, which I never have because there’s usually milk products in that.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I worked some more on the tour / presentation for the metal artist. As I was looking at pages in Procore, I finally realized the proposal for the ramp in the pool area: wood frame, wood surface, SlipDoctor coating. No. My first choice would be Forbo Coral in almost any of its variations. (Which I should also plan on putting by the stairs down to the pool deck.) That would ensure that water from the pool would mostly be collected before getting out to the stair / elevator lobby and anyone arriving at the pool deck would have anything stuck on their wheels or feet removed. We’ve had a forbo coral mat by the front door for several months now and it’s fine on bare feet and cleans up great and is fantastic at grabbing dirt. If someone gives me too much trouble about that, I suppose we could lay down some RubberCal Ramp Cleat. I could threaten people with that.

I woke up to a much clearer nose etc than recently and also snow! I do not know if these are related.

I had an enjoyable FF last night.

I finished read The Icarus Plot by Jenny Schwarz, which was short and enjoyable.

I also finished reading Shattering Dawn by JAK, which ties a bunch of Jayneverse elements together as it wraps up the trilogy. Delightful!

T. came by today to get his jersey for the follow-on program to NVUB. Unfortunately, he misread the email that said ASRHS as ABRHS, so he’ll try again at the correct location next week. In the meantime, I fed him breakfast and we chatted. As a result of the chat, I suggested that he might reach out to JK, who he recently saw in NJ, about some zoom or in person cooking lessons. JK and T. are getting along really well, and JK is both an excellent cook and a patient teacher, so I figure this might work well for both of them.

I cut up the really big squash (butternut) and put the pieces on sheets in the oven to roast. Then I pulled the thawed center cut beef shank and oxtail out of the fridge and had T. ask R. whether he intended two stews or one. Apparently one. So I browned the meet, deglazed with red wine and put some carrots and celery in, returned the meat, added a bunch of the package of thyme I still had around from T-weekend, rinsed the red wine split and put the water from that in. Rinsed a basically empty tamarind paste bottle with hot water and put that in. I attempted to put the pot into the oven with the squash, but I had to remove a rack for it to fit (and it doesn’t fit at all in the top of the Duo with the lid on). So I transferred all of the squash into the baker and was able to fit the baker and the stew onto the bottom rack.

I think I’m going to clean the counter next. I was thinking I’d work my way through the new lessons in Duo music today — and I may yet — or watch TV with A., but apparently what I’m doing first is a lot of cooking.

ETA: Today’s exercise was shoveling the driveway.

ETA: We went out to dinner with the Bs at Tavern in the Square. Fun! We tried to take the Subaru, but it was completely nonresponsive. This is probably my fault in some way. We took my car instead.

ETAYA: I had delightful phone conversations with A. (normally we chat on Tuesday evening) and with C. C. has been doing genealogy, and we almost certainly are distant cousins! Exciting developments!

Horrible, gooey precipitation fell out of the sky. Not enough to close schools, however, school dismissed early due to a power outage. We brought A. to Fusion for assessment testing. She did Mindprints today. She had some issues with the Penn Conditional Exclusion test, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on there. Turns out if you ignore the feedback on that test, It Matters. She also had issues with the N-Back test, but in that case, it was purely a matter of processing speed (for her, that is).

R. made Loaf the other night. This is the food product previously known as Meatloaf, and it does involve meat, but the volume of vegetation is so huge it seems wrong to call it Meatloaf, so we just call it Loaf. I had a Loaf sandwich for lunch. For dinner, I made a pizza, and because I ate the last of the pepperoni the other night, I put some broken up bits of Loaf on it, along with the last of the pre-cooked mushrooms, some cashew cheese, chopped dates, tomato paste, herbs, etc.

It was Yum.

My pizza crust at this point is just bacon grease on a pan, and then sourdough straight out of the crock spread out using a spoon, a spatula, my fingers, whatever, and then some oil on top to help shape it. It is completely weird how well this turns out. Looks a mess going on but looks great coming out and tastes awesome.

ETA:

I realized that it’s been 3 weeks since I pulled A. out. And currently, it looks like she’ll have her first day in class at the 4 week mark. Not bad, given that when I took that first day off, I had no plan at all. And it’s not like there was school each of those days (Good Friday, for example, but also two late start days, and today was a surprise early release, and next week there’s another holiday day). Further, she’ll be attending school during the week that ABRSD takes off in April, and we’re working on her summer school plan. This will net out no loss and possibly slight advancement, at least that’s what it is looking like currently. Not that I care!

I don’t and never have watched GBBO. I have very, very, very limited awareness of its content, other than that it involves baking and is a competition. I recently bought (for $1.99, and I’m really regretting the purchase) Ruby Tandoh’s _Cook as you are_, and I kept having questions about who the target audience is for this book (I’m pretty sure it’s not me!) and one way to try to get an answer to that question is to better understand who the author is. The author had (has?) (an) eating disorder(s) and participated in GBBO in their younger years. Also, the author is/was very active on Twitter and elsewhere and threw down during the height of the namecalling years. I don’t know if it helps answer my question, altho all that does confirm that the target audience is definitely Not Me.

Anyway. I then had a question. Is eating disorder + participating in GBBO a normal combination?

Let’s google!

Ruby Tandoh
Steph Blackwell
John Whaite

Also, there was a huge Thing involving Prue Leith, one of the judges, making comments that were regarded as potentially triggering of people with eating disorders. Further, there are some things out there in which people with a history of disordered eating got better by watching and baking along with GBBO and/or who celebrated their recovery by watching and baking along with GBBO.

I don’t know what to say? I mean, I tend not to watch … anything, but I _really_ tend not to watch cooking shows, because I just find the put it in the oven and immediately take out the pre-cooked one so impossible to deal with. (TikTok cooking does not bother me nearly as much, also, it is shorter.) Worse, baking nearly always has milk products in it, and substituting around the milk products in most baking recipes is a pointless exercise. I understand that GBBO has been showing whole grain recipes, so, yay to that?
‘

When I was looking for the dishwasher manual the other day, I found the food processor documents (including a DVD!). In the food processor documents, I learned that the hole in the pusher has a purpose: to drizzle oil for making mayo. Who knew! R. knew, that’s who. He’d seen it on a TV show.

So I had to revisit the immersion blender vs. food processor question, but this time making use of the hole.

I parked a funnel on top of the pusher so I could avoid making an enormous mess pouring out of the measuring cup (should I have used a liquid measuring cup with a spout? Yes! Yes I should! I may poke around the cabinets and see what we already own along those lines next). If I did this a lot, I would just pour out of the jug of oil and know about when to stop. But that doesn’t matter right now.

This _does_ make making mayo in the food processor much more idiot proof. However, that pusher is white, so it’s really kinda tricky to see what the level is in that. I still think the immersion blender is a better choice. Also, the immersion blender is still far easier to clean up than the food processor.

R. commented that maybe if you were making a _lot_ of mayo the food processor would be better, but I’m not going to experiment with that, because I don’t need a lot of mayo. However, there are hard batch size limits with the food processor bowl, and not with the immersion blender, so probably even on batch size, the immersion blender wins.

Also, I understand what you can do with the food processor much better now, having read the manual. I’ll be doing some experimentation with the slicer wheel, which currently _still_ has on it the sticker it shipped with to keep the person opening the box from also opening up a vein.

A. has been helping me out with some baking lately, and she has had some questions. Some of those questions are ones other people have asked me about, and mostly, they come down to, “How do you know that modification is going to work?”

I am rarely this unable to answer a question. I have very detailed specific answers to specific modifications, but when people are interested in the general answer, I’m flummoxed. I am _not_ going to braindump all the mods I have ever successfully made to recipes! It’s a lot! Currently, my answer to this question is sort of the story of my life told through the lens of things I have cooked, and that is also a lot, but is at least narratively of more potential interest.

Anyway.

I have mentioned to A. that cookbooks actually generally include some information for how to modify a recipe, so I got out one of the few cookbooks we still have in the house to show her how a general purpose cookbook is typically put together. We looked at the front matter, including the inside of the cover (front and back) and the explanations about assumptions and kitchen equipment and pictures of what “diced” means vs. “minced” and how to measure and all that stuff.

Then I wanted to show her how difficult it is for me to cook out of a general purpose cookbook without extensive modifications. (I also showed her Jane Zukin’s cookbook, and how that demonstrates that the substitutions visible in those recipes — milk free margarine for butter for example — made it clear to younger me that I could make those substitutions in any recipe. With the possible exception of hollandaise sauce.) We started paging through the appetizers, which always tend to have a good amount of cheese in at least some of them, but we were using America’s Test Kitchen as our sample cookbook (it is my husband’s and he likes the show), and we started just shouting Cheese! every time a recipe called for it. Butter and milk I can substitute around easily, but cheese is much trickier and the recipe is much less likely to survive in a recognizable form (or taste even remotely like the original). Sour cream has pretty successful faux versions, but I don’t like either the original or the ersatz, so I just don’t make dishes that rely upon that flavor. Ever. I knew I didn’t like this cookbook, but I was kinda shocked by how few recipes in that appetizer section I could have made in any form at all (and all the ones I _could_ have made were ones I already knew how to make).

Also, holy shit, their chicken satay marinade AND dipping sauce _both_ include ketchup. What a New England cookbook!

We then did roughly the same operation on Better Homes & Garden (my general purpose cookbook). We noticed that the If you don’t have this you can use that in a pinch for ATK is about 90% milk products substituting for other milk products. But BH&G only has a few substitutions of that nature. Also, I prefer BH&G’s solution for no cake flour.

I don’t really look at general purpose cookbooks any more, partly because google and partly because I’ve mined that vein pretty thoroughly. I am sort of curious now what a general purpose vegan cookbook would look like, tho. This probably calls for a trip to the library and/or a bookstore.

ETA:

Implausibly, ATK has a “Vegan Cooking for Two” cookbook that _might_ be really awesome. I have downloaded the sample and will look at it later.

ETAYA:

OK, well, I downloaded the sample, and it’s actually decent. Cookbooks being cookbooks, and this being a genuine general purpose cookbook, it’s mostly NOT recipes — it’s equipment and shopping advice and charts for what recipe will help you use up whatever thing you’ve got leftover (because this is a for-two book). They like the Braun Multiquick immersion blender and the Breville smart oven, so I have to give them credit there. I don’t love that they are pro-nonstick, but *shrug*. They have a generally chill approach to Will You Get Enough Protein. They have a straight down the middle approach to faux butter/cheese/yogurt/meat/etc. As one would expect from ATK, they are picking broadly available, non-crappy options for everything.

There’s a real chance I will actually buy a copy of this thing and read it; it seems to be good. (No, I’m not about to become vegan. Come on! I’ve been answering this question for 30 years now, and the answer now is the answer it has always been. Bacon.)

I’ve been bolting flour to make bread, because it’s really clear that if I want that kind of bread, I’m going to have to get some / all of the bran out. I have a really nice drum sieve (looks like a tambourine, without the jingle-jangly bits and with a mesh) that I was using with a silicon “lid” to cover it while tapping in a bowl that it sat in pretty well. That worked, and didn’t create a lot of airborne particles. However, it was noisy and it was time consuming and kinda tedious. After extensive online research, I realized that more or less everything in the kitchen with a motor that accepted attachments had a sifter attachment and the only one I wanted was the one that attached to my new Bosch Universal Plus. (I looked at the one that went with the KitchenAid I had recently moved along to a new home, and was quite happy I’d never bought it). I had to wait for it to be back in stock, and also, it came with a very fine mesh and I didn’t want one that fine. I bought the mesh I wanted directly from Royalux, and once it arrived, I ordered the sifter itself from Pleasant Hill Grain, where I had a $30 gift card from buying the Bosch Universal Plus. However, with the $30 gift card, my order total was low enough that I was a little bit away from free shipping. I _was_ going to order grains, but they sell other kitchen tools as well so I asked my husband if there was anything he wanted for the kitchen, and started listing possibilities. He went with vegetable peeler (you can never have too many, he says).

I have been peeling vegetables for at least 40 years at this point. I’m good at it. I’ve used a lot of peelers, my own, and ones at other people’s houses. I’ve replaced mine and curated mine so that I know I already have better peelers that many, many, many other people. This particular peeler is a brand I have mad respect for (Kuhn Rikon), as I had bought their manual spice grinder and of the various spice/pepper grinders I have owned it is probably my favorite. However, it is a handle type I’ve only had bad experiences with. So this was an adventure!

It is easily the best vegetable peeler I have ever owned.

https://pleasanthillgrain.com/kuhn-rikon-swiss-metal-peeler

I am reasonably certain that the other peelers by this brand will be equally good. I know it’s not the handle type because I normally hate that handle type. They have some other handle types (I have no idea whether they are in stock or not).

The sifter works fine, altho like all machinery in the kitchen, is moderately annoying to clean up after. Like all kitchen machinery, it’s best used for larger projects.

I’ve been making mug cakes for a minute, and the general idea there is stupidly simple and reliable. I have not, however, attempted to branch out from that, even tho I distinctly remember seeing entire cookbooks devoted to how you could cook any damn thing in the microwave. So I’m like, what is the intersection of sourdough and microwaves, anyway? Basically, I’m continuing to run the combinations of everything I already have.

I poked around to see what other people are doing in this space, and it is quite interesting! Hanging onto the steam coming off the baked item and/or cooking with steam along with the microwaves appears to be the dominant theme. I had planned on using custard cups lined with baking cups, since my english muffin rings are metal, but then it occurred to me that I actually own silicone muffin “tins”. I also own a collapsible silicone container with the steamer button/knob on the top (push in to seal, pull out to let steam escape). I’ll keep poking at this and maybe do some experiments later today or tomorrow.

Also, the Bosch sifter attachment is now broadly available, including at Pleasant Hill Grain. They emailed me a $30 gift card when I bought the Universal Plus. I can’t find the 40 mesh replacement screen for the Bosch sifter at Pleasant Hill — in fact, I’ve _only_ been able to find it at Magic Mill / Royalux, which I am honestly just not sure about. However, because the 40 mesh part is comparatively cheap (a little over $22 including shipping), and the sifter attachment is relatively expensive $99, unknown shipping, less a $30 gift card amount if I buy it at Pleasant Hill). Since I don’t think the sifter is useful without the 40 mesh screen option, I’ve ordered the 40 mesh from Magic Mill and am going to wait and see if it ever shows up. Fingers crossed.

Piano teacher came in person today! Weather and health of all parties allowed delightful human interaction! I offered him a cookie, and he says it is good.

T. went to martial arts. He’s apparently in the process of asking his extensive social network at school and restaurants and so forth for opinions about Fitchburg State. He’s busy figuring out how he can live on campus, continue to go to martial arts, do his job at the movie theater, etc. while also attending college. Obviously, I would kinda prefer he be okay with commuter school to start. OTOH, I don’t care very much. He says he’ll want his own car and one with more range than the i3. While this is a _solid_ thought process, I am also feeling mildly overwhelmed. He is still on board with doing a super senior year in part or in whole. I _am_ really glad that he’s liking one of the possibilities I came up with. I have no idea how to calibrate this choice on the safe/stretch scale (I think it’s a stretch, but I don’t have any fucking clue how the disability-included part of the application process works anywhere, much less at Fitchburg. It’s possible that with disability factored in, this isn’t a stretch.), but at least no one is saying, that is never gonna work find a different school.

[ETA: T. and I got him registered for Lovelane 5K and for Team Verge spring Sundays only. That’s fine, but then we also talked through his availability for his job. Then he wanted to know whether he’d be doing summer school / ESY this year. And I legit started laughing. ESY generally starts after July 4, operates T, W, Th only, fewer hours than the regular school year, and wraps up a little over a week into August. I went over his summer plans. There are literally no days of ESY that he will be able to go. Made that decision simple!]

Theme of the day is “Ultraprocessed Foods”, so this could be a heavily edited post. I have been thinking about the nut-sugar-egg-plus cookies, and wondering what happens if, just as a for instance, one were to food processor dates or raisins in place of the sugar. Obviously, we are moving into no-bake territory (lots of easy things to find there) and also into the Nutrition Bar category (but those are just cookies, we know that!). I have been able to find some people doing what I propose to do (using flax seed as egg replacer but acknowledging that a “chicken egg” works, too), so that’s promising.

As I was thinking about the cookies, and What Are Cookies (Special, and a category of Special which includes some fat and some sweet and is small and attractive and quite probably round and typically baked but served cool and held in the hand to eat and not expected to generate so many crumbs that a plate or even a napkin is required and can be stored at room temperature and so forth. None of these are mandatory, but they are all generally expected so violations have to respect the expectations and justify themselves in terms of the framework) and why is the flour/sugar/butter thing so dominant when the nut-sugar is a super effective replacement and the many, many, many other thoughts, I realized that cookies are very much an “ultraprocessed food” in the sense used by Ashley Gearhardt in the Speaking of Psychology podcast I gave up on (https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/food-addiction ) and which caused me to abandon “ultraprocessed food” as a category, because I Hate Purity exercises.

I’ve never been especially good at making cookies, and there are so many problems with so many of the vegan butters, not least of which is the sodium present in so many of them, but mostly because people really _love_ the taste of butter and I sure don’t _love_ any vegan butter the way people love butter. This may be more about me than about the vegan butter, but if the major appeal of a cookie is butter, then I am just not that interested.

I also get fairly annoyed at people who condemn commercial food products, then turn right around and try to recreate them at home and don’t see the irony or weirdness of the whole exercise. I’m completely fine with people having a hobby of making an ersatz whatever at home (honestly, I sometimes benefit from their efforts, if it helps me get enough of a running start to make a whatever without milk products that I can eat, when I cannot eat the commercial whatever because it doesn’t exist in a dairy-free form). But some of the things being condemned in the commercial food product are just replicated in the home product. There is nothing magical about “home” cooking per se; if you reproduce an industrial process at home, then …

So that brought up the obvious question: how do people concerned with “ultraprocessed foods” (however defined) relate to things made at homes with “food processor” or similar item that reduces particle size, or a juice that makes smoothies or whatever.

Early on in this search, I stumbled across this:

https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2019/ultraprocessed-food-healthy-recipes.html

Which is pretty standard replace this with that, and has all the problems of making a bunch of work for _someone_ to create an expensive one or a few of something that you can buy for super cheap in large quantities. But the comments thread also included these:

“2Papa
SEPTEMBER 27, 2019
norlisowski. That’s what wives are for. I’ll be out cutting the lawn.

JonathanM526377
NOVEMBER 4, 2022
Reply to 2Papa
Thatsounds like a rude post. I guess I’ll go in and help warm up her oven. Take some extra time on that lawn…

2Papa
NOVEMBER 5, 2022
Reply to JonathanM526377
Dream on, and on, and………

That says _so much_ about what it is like to be 50 and above in 2019 and later. I mean, the original comment is from 2019, the initial response from 2022, _and the offending commenter_ replies _a day after_ the years later response. It all feels like exactly the kind of shit we watched these characters do in college, at bars, at company parties and so forth over the decades. And now, they’re doing it in a comments thread on AARP, on a post about eat-this-not-that.

The wikipedia entry for ultraprocessed foods, unlike Gearhardt in Speaking of Psychology, is focused on commercially produced foods. I kind of like the NOVA categorization schema, and this description:

“The term ultra-processing refers to the processing of industrial ingredients derived from foods, for example by extruding, moulding, re-shaping, hydrogenation, and hydrolysis. Ultra-processed foods generally also include additives such as preservatives, sweeteners, sensory enhancers, colourants, flavours, and processing aids, but little or no whole food. They may be fortified with micronutrients. The aim is to create durable, convenient and palatable ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat food products suitable to be consumed as snacks or to replace freshly-prepared food-based dishes and meals.”

Homemade white bread really isn’t this. In the NOVA schema, it would be 2:

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods
Processed culinary ingredients
Processed foods
Ultra processed food and drink products

If I chop up a bell pepper and some carrots and celery, those are minimally processed foods. If I squeeze a lemon over it for my dressing, still minimally processed food. If you ask google if olive oil is a minimally processed food, the resulting hits are deeply hilarious. But if you know what “processed culinary ingredients” means, and you know how EVOO is made, then you know EVOO for sure (and some other categories of olive oil) are absolutely 2: processed culinary ingredients. And YES, there are a bunch of people making their own olive oil at home, in an effort to back their way into category 1, or to at least convince themselves they have done so.

I mill my own wheat, and more recently, I’ve started bolting or sifting it as well. Bolted flour gets me more oven spring, and I put the bran plus that is sifted out into my sourdough crock and it becomes part of my english muffins. I know _damn well_ that grinding and sifting are processing. It’s annoying work. Annoying work that you look around for power tools to do for you is _definitely_ processing. And at the same time, this is all very much “processed culinary ingredients” type processing. What I’m a lot less clear on is the Cuisinart food processor I also use. I can make mayo in the blender, or with the immersion blender, or in the food processor — or I could get a bowl out and use a whisk and accomplish the same task and be a lot more tired afterwards. Mayo can absolutely fit into category 2. And also, the stuff you buy in a jar or squeeze plastic bottle (whether it is Kewpie or Hellman’s or whatever) can absolutely cross well over into 3 (but probably not 4).

If you eat peanuts out of a bag, that are roasted, that is probably still within category 1. But if you put them through some kind of a grinder, mill, food processor, blender, whatever, you’ve definitely moved into category 2. And you are still in category 2 if you did that all with a mortar and pestle. You’re just a lot more tired and will therefore make a lot less of it.

Dates: category 1. If I put them in the food processor with the nuts and egg and then bake little balls of the result, absolutely category 2.

One thing is super clear here: Category 1 ain’t cheap. It’s going to cost in money, in time, in ability to be there to tend the garden if you are growing it yourself. If I’m sitting around congratulating myself on sticking to category 1 and category 2 in the NOVA processing scheme, well, it’s a bad look and honestly it’s missing the point of the original scheme. The scheme was not there to be used to judge on an individual basis. It was an observation about our food system, and the negative impacts it was having on groups of people. Opting out of it with a bunch of machines at home is no solution.

I’ll probably be back. And I’m sure I’ll regret some of this.

I read a bunch more about NOVA, and things are not improving! I was wrong to think this thing would be better than that psychologist on Speaking of Psychology.

Here is someone using NOVA to extract some data from the Nurses Health study. They categorize Pie, Home-baked as a G1. !!!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8453454/

_Even if_ the 1970s era Pie, Home-baked in one of the 11 most populous states, probably a woman who also had a job as a nurse, was an apple pie, she surely used wheat flour in the crust, and some kind of fat and very likely sugar. Sugar is a G3. If that crust used Crisco, Crisco is _absolutely_ (in the 1970s formulation) a G4. If it was a cherry pie, the filling likely came out of a can and had just an amazing load of dyes and whatnot in it. But even if Pie, Home-baked is a G1, it is difficult to reconcile the pie as a G1 (because it was Home-baked) and Home-baked bread as a G4 (what the interviewee said). If nothing else, the system is difficult to apply consistently for study purposes, and as a guide to individual choices, guaranteed to devolve into a purity test.

Someone is trying to crowd-source Nova grouping here: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova (found via link on wikipedia entry for ultraprocessed foods). In this assignment, fats which are _named_ as examples of G3 and G4 in other schema are in G2, and _virgin olive oil_ is a in G3 with all the other vegetable oils. No distinction is made between types of olive oil (which the most fractionated is less processed than the least processed canola oil) and canola oil.

Nova grouping is opinion laundering.