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Winter squash, courtesy Flickr user randomduck

There are hundreds of ways to eat winter squash, but these are five of my favorites. Tell me yours…

1) Baked maple squash. This is best with smaller varieties like acorn or delicata. Cut in half, scoop out the seeds and pulp from both halves, and place cut-side up in a baking dish with just enough water to cover the bottom. Mist with olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt. Drizzle a tablespoon of maple syrup in the middle of each half, and bake for an hour at 400 degrees. Simply Recipes shows you how good it will look.

2) Curried coconut squash soup. The hardest part of this endeavor is simply cutting a sizable squash in half (we used a 3 pound Blue Hubbard) without breaking your best kitchen knife. (Try chiseling, rather than sawing, to crack the rind.)  Prepare and bake as above, minus the maple, for about 1 1/2 hours or until very tender. While the squash cools down enough to handle, sautee some diced scallions and/or onions with a few pats of butter in the bottom of a large stockpot for 5 minutes. Add 1/2 cup of dry white wine, 2 tablespoons fresh grated ginger and 1 tablespoon curry powder (or garam masala, chili paste, whatever you like), and cook until wine is nearly evaporated. Use a metal spoon to scoop out the flesh of the squash into the pot, along with 4 cups of water, 1 cup of coconut milk, and a sprig of fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dried). Simmer for 15 minutes, then puree with a hand blender until smooth. Add more water or coconut milk to adjust texture; sprinkle in some salt and play around with other spices until it tastes perfect! There’s a more precise recipe on Food52.

3) Squashed squash. You can substitute squash for potatoes in a mashed potato recipe, or combine the two vegetables, as in this Bon Appetit recipe. For a sweet version, follow the baked maple squash recipe and simply scoop it out of its shell at the end. Smooth out the lumps using an electric mixer, hand blender, or even just a fork. Eating Well has a recipe for Mashed Maple Squash.

4) Squash risotto. I love this Moosewood Cookbook recipe, which mixes kale and chunks of winter squash into a basic white-wine risotto. It’s easier than I expected—although you do have to be vigilant about stirring!—and it’s a very healthy dish, yet the creamy arborio rice makes it taste decadent.

5) Stuffed squash. I like chopped apples and cinnamon-spiced couscous inside baked squash, and this inventive recipe for “quinoa stuffed sweet dumpling squash” looks so good that I’m already counting it among my favorites. (Carnivores might prefer Alton Brown’s stuffed squash with pork and rice or Rachael Ray’s stuffed acorn squash with beef and couscous.)

I depend on coffee for my morning caffeine, but I prefer the more delicate flavor of tea when I need an afternoon warmer or a mild pick-me-up. The various international rituals and accoutrements of tea I’ve encountered in my travels are also part of its appeal for me: I loved how, in Turkey, every social or business transaction began with some steaming çai served in a graceful little glasses on a silver tray, and that I never entered a home in Ireland or Great Britain where a kettle wasn’t immediately put on to boil for some milky tea.

A silver Italian teapot, circa 1840. Photograph courtesy of Fowler Museum, UCLA

So, during a recent visit to my hometown Los Angeles, I was interested to catch an exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum called “Steeped in History: The Art of Tea“. Aside from seeing some beautiful artifacts, including teapots, tea caddies and Japanese netsuke, I absorbed enough historical tidbits to ace a tea category if I ever make it onto Jeopardy.

For starters, I learned that steeping didn’t become the preferred method of preparing tea until the Ming Dynasty in China, which began in the 14th century. The ancient Chinese compressed tea into cakes, then shaved off portions to boil in water. By the 10th century, during the Song Dynasty, powdered tea, which was whipped with hot water using a bamboo whisk, became popular.

According to Chinese legend, an emperor named Shen Nong discovered tea nearly 5,000 years ago, when the wind blew some leaves into his kettle of boiling water.

During the Ming era, Xü Cishu wrote a tea manual called Chashu, which listed appropriate times to drink tea. These included “When bored with poetry,” “After tipsy guests have left,” “When skies are overcast,” and “In perfect weather.” In other words, anytime.

Tea was introduced to Japan during the early Heian period (794–1185) by monks who returned after studying Zen Buddhism in China. The traditional Japanese tea ceremony was formalized in the 1500s, and was believed to offer a path to enlightenment through everyday gestures performed “in mindful awareness of the present moment.” At first performed solely by men, the role eventually became associated with women.

An alternative, less formal ceremony called Senchado emerged later. It was based on the wu wei principle of “yielding to the stream of life rather than working against it.”

Europeans didn’t start drinking tea until the 17th century. It caught on first with the Dutch, who were the only traders allowed to enter Japan after it enacted a closed-door policy in 1639, and even they were only allowed as far as an island in Nagasaki harbor.

No place today is more associated with tea drinking than the United Kingdom, and the exhibition devotes some space to both English tea culture and to the political ramifications of the kingdom’s former imperial practices in India, where most of its tea was grown, and in the American colonies—where, of course, tea-related taxes and restrictions eventually helped spark a revolution.

Steeped in Tradition: The Art of Tea continues at the Fowler through November 29.

Vegemite on toast, courtesy Flickr user StephenMitchell

The Australian snack spread Vegemite, a yeasty brown goop, is one of those taste sensations—like cilantro—that inspires either fierce loyalty or disgust.

I know it has a lot of nutritional value, but personally, I can’t think of anything less appetizing than “a food paste made from yeast extract.” (Well, maybe aspic; I’m with Colin Flynn there.)

So I was bemused to read recent news articles about the “storm of complaints” that erupted from the Australian public when Vegemite’s maker, Kraft Foods Australia, announced plans to make a new “cheesy” version of this odd food product. It wasn’t necessarily the new product itself that bothered people (although my first reaction was amazement: There IS something less appetizing than yeast paste! Yeast paste mixed with cream cheese!), it was the new product’s name: Kraft proposed naming it iSnack 2.0. (Wow, something even less appetizing: Yeast paste mixed with cream cheese and named after an inedible electronic device!)

After polling some 30,000 consumers, Kraft has since settled on a new name: Vegemite Cheesybite, which beat out Smooth, Snackmate, Vegemate, Vegemild and Creamymate. (The company apparently did not consider a few of the more creative names suggested by some online commenters: “Veg-I-Mite-Not,” anyone? How about “Vegemort, the snack which cannot be named?”)

“We have been overwhelmed by the response from the public; it clearly demonstrated your passion for this brand,” Kraft writes on the Vegemite web site. (It almost sounds like they were surprised to realize people liked it, too!)

I know, I know…I really should try the stuff before I knock it. But there’s a very similar product called Marmite in England, where I studied abroad in college, and if it didn’t have a label I would have sworn it was some sort of industrial glue or solvent.

Have you tried Vegemite (or Marmite)? Did you like it?

Oh, and just for fun:

Splash of milk, courtesy of Flickr user Tamabako the Jaguar

I’ve never been a milk drinker. From the very moment I had any control over my diet, I stopped drinking it, unless a hearty squeeze of Hershey’s syrup was involved. Now, I use it merely for the occasional bowl of cereal.

When I decided to forego milk as a child, good old cow’s milk was really the only option. But that was then, and this is now. Consumers have more choices than ever about which type of milk to drink. The list now includes cow, goat, soy, almond, rice, hemp and even camel.

I have tried soy milk, but so far, that’s my only foray into the non-bovine milk world. Each alternative has pros and cons. My younger brother single-handedly drinks one gallon of 2% cow’s milk a week. He’s 20; he can handle all the calories (1,920) and fat (72 grams) included with that. I had a roommate who swore by soy milk until her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She had heard that the high levels of estrogen in soy can increase the risk of breast cancer. Recent studies, however, suggest that soy can actually prevent breast cancer.)

The LA Times recently investigated the different choices of milk out there. The story included a nifty graphic to help you compare the milk choices side by side. I’m especially intrigued by the concept of almond and hemp milks.

According to the article, almond milk has no cholesterol, saturated fats or lactose. It has less calories and total fat than health food favorite soy milk. But, it has significantly less protein than cow, goat and soy milk: a mere 1 gram compared to 7-8.7 grams. The calcium in almond milk depends on the brand. Some provide 20% of your daily value (10% less than cow, goat and soy), but others provide no calcium at all. Looks like the benefit of almond milk is the lack of fat and cholesterol:

“With almond milk, it’s more about what you don’t get” than what you do, says Sam Cunningham, an independent food scientist and consultant specializing in nuts, who helped develop almond milk for Sacramento-based Blue Diamond Growers as an employee of the almond processor in the 1990s.

Hemp milk contains just as many calories as soy milk but has 50 percent more fat. Don’t toss it aside yet, though. The fats in hemp milk are mostly omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids, which promote nervous system function and healthy skin and hair. And, because most hemp milks are fortified, they can provide more calcium than traditional cow’s milk.

I don’t think I’ll become a milk drinker, even almond or hemp, but I might pick up some almond milk at the store, just to try it out.

– Written by Smithsonian intern Abby Callard

As I wrote last week, food safety is a hot topic right now, and it just keeps getting hotter. Although there’s a growing “locavore” movement in parts of the United States, it’s still far from mainstream, and imports constitute a growing portion of the national food supply (80 percent of seafood, 60 percent of fresh fruits and vegetables, and 15 percent overall).

On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report about what it calls “gaps in enforcement and collaboration” in the current system for ensuring the safety of imported food. You can read the entire 78-page document online, or just a summary.

That same day, I attended a “global food safety policy forum” at the Senate, convened by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Waters Corporation. Lisa Shames, director of the GAO’s food safety division, was among the speakers, and she discussed the highlights of the report.

I learned that three separate agencies are involved in the food import inspections system, which might be part of the problem in itself. Get ready for the acronyms: There’s the Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of Homeland Security.

The CBP’s role seems the most clear-cut: It’s their computer system that importers use to report incoming shipments to all the agencies involved. But that’s not as simple as it sounds. As Shames noted, the CBP’s computer system isn’t set up to share information about when a shipment actually arrives. In other words, the FDA might plan to inspect a boatload of Asian seafood from a certain importer, but by the time it finds out that the boat has physically arrived in port, that seafood may already have cleared a CBP inspection (which has more to do with documentation than food safety) and be on its way to your plate. Not reassuring, is it?

This lack of information sharing is one of the problems highlighted in the GAO report. Another problem is also technological: The same importer might have dozens of different identification numbers within the CBP’s computer system, making it nearly impossible to notice when they have a pattern of violations.

Also, the FDA’s rules for importers lack teeth. The GAO report includes this unsettling tidbit:

“Equally problematic is FDA’s lack of authority to assess civil penalties to deter importers from bringing violative goods into the country….liquidated damages that importers incur are often so small that they, in effect, encourage future illegal distribution of imported shipments.”

And finally, there’s the reality that it’s not possible—in terms of financial and human resources—for the FDA and FSIS to inspect all, or even most, of the imported food we eat. The FDA’s role includes inspecting overseas food production facilities to make sure they’re in keeping with U.S. food safety standards, but it inspected only 153 of  a total 189,000 foreign facilities last year. The GAO report estimates that if the FDA were to inspect each of these facilities just once in a year, it would cost nearly $3.2 billion—the agency’s entire budget.

Things may improve if the various agencies can start coordinating and sharing their resources better, both in terms of imports and domestic food inspection, but I can see why some people are calling for a single food safety agency to be established.

One of those single-agency advocates, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the House Appropriations Agriculture-FDA Subcommittee, was among the forum’s speakers. She discussed legislative efforts to raise standards for food imports, especially Chinese poultry, and said evaluating other countries’ food safety systems should be a precursor, not an afterthought, to establishing trade with them.

“We flirt with disaster when we remain lax,” she said, and “we cannot allow trade issues to trump public well-being.”