I brought sour cream, onions, crackers, and potato, but forgot the bucket. Nobody here is game to lend me one. Strange.
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Just FYI, Iâm sure you know this but you can often get pieces of raw sugar cane at African/Carribbean/some Asian stores. Might be a good teaching aid as well.
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There are a few stores around here that have itâthe Asian grocery seems to have the freshest.
Each week weâve tried to bring in a cooked/finished example that contains the raw ingredient or process weâre discussing. Some weâve had fried sweet potatoes and potato soup for âPotato/South Americaâ week, a few different kinds of kimchee for âfermentation weekâ (which the Surströmming will supplement), pemmican for Native American food, and a few kinds of coffee for âCoffee Week.â Topics left for the semester include: spices (Indian food), chocolate (trying to recreate Mayan/Aztec recipes for that one), spam, ârituals/feasting/fastingâ (not sure about the food for that one yet), and rice. The idea has been to use the foods as a launching point for discussing how those particular items or practices have impacted history and culture. Generally we have a local âexpertâ come in to discuss how the food example is important to them, culturally. So for fermentation/kimchee we had someone from the local Korean-American association who makes kimchee come in to talk about it.
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This is an amazing course! As a somewhat food historian (well, someone who looks at medieval food from an archaeological and literary history perspective, but who moves in âproperâ food history circles from time to time) I have a lot of thoughts on this, especially on spice and, weirdly, spam.
So much cultural history to talk about, even just from my limited European perspective!
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I love eating dried tomatoes like chips, with basil pesto as the dip. Sooooo yummy.
What kind of dehydrator is that?
Also, @anon33932455 , I so want to take your class. It sounds fascinating.
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Spam is going to be a really fun one, because itâs still so commonly-eaten in the Pacific Islands. It was a staple there during WW2, so weâre thinking of doing Spam Musubi and discussing food logistics during WW2, as well as class conceptions of âlow classâ food. My fatherâs family ate it during the war, because it was cheap and available, and as soon as the war was over, they stopped because they had pretensions.
For spice we chose to do Indian food because we have a big local population, so itâs relevant. And a local restaurant agreed to bring in some breakfast-type dishes. Weâll discuss trade routes, spice islands, etc etc.
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Yeah, there is so much there one can use as jumping off points for different aspects of different food systems, of society and of history.
Iâve never had spam, nor corned beef I think. Should really try some Pacific Islander recipes one of these days.
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Maybe get the students to agree to fast from the time the class would start on the day before until the class itself, and then if thereâs any way to do some of the cooking during the class so they can experience what itâs like to be very hungry and smelling the food but knowing that they âcanâtâ eat it until a predesignated time.
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I briefly beat the egg whites before folding in. And added a 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda too.
The pumpkin purée seems so heavy.
Thank you for asking. I should have shared better.
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This had occurred to me. But a decent percentage of our campus student population is food-insecure, so I want to be careful with how I approached that.
The âfastingâ section was going to focus on some really interesting research into anorexia mirabilis, which was a phenomenon among Medieval Catholic nuns who fasted as part of their religious rituals, but also seem to have developed what we would call an eating disorder (good book on this: Holy Anorexia). That could springboard us into a discussion of modern eating disorders and maybe touch on something relevant to someone in there, make them feel less bad about that if theyâre going through it, and more likely to see themselves as a normal person living in a historical context and maybe be willing to reach out.
Dunno, though. We havenât sorted that lesson out yet.
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Your sharing is great! Itâs just in my nature to always wonder about things that might be related to other things, thatâs all 
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Yeah Iâm just eating these hot off the dehydrator.
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Combining thoughts hereâ
In the recipe for chewy Pumpkin Cheesecake Cookies that Mindy linked to above, they have you dry out the pumpkin puree first by pressing it with paper towels:
STEP TWO: Then dry your pumpkin to get rid of excess moisture. This may seem weird but it is the only way these cookies will bake properly and not turn out cakey! Spread your pumpkin on a plate and place paper towels over the top. Lightly press to absorb the liquid. Repeat the step at least four more times until hardly any liquid transfers to the paper towel. (It needs to reduce down to just under Œ cup from œ cup). Then set aside.
I donât buy paper towels very often, and that seems like using a lot of paper towels to me. I had been thinking of putting it in the microwave oven on low, because when you microwave food the inside of the microwave gets covered in steam from moisture coming out of the food, right? But you wouldnât necessarily want to cook the pumpkin at that point. So now I wonder: could the dehydrator be used to reduce the moisture in the pumpkin puree for the cookie recipe? (Not that I have a dehydrator. Just curious!)
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You could also put the purée in cheesecloth and either hang it over the sink overnight or put the bundle in a colander and weight it down for an hour.
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Brilliant! I like that!
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Considering the history of sugar, there were far far worse teaching aids which could have been employed
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If you have a dehydrator, absolutely. I would just roll it out with towels to squeeze out the moisture, then lay it in a sheet in a dehydrator for a couple hours to make pumpkin leather
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That Lentil salad I made last Sunday made a huge batch that we werenât getting through, so today I put some in the blender, added some flour and bread crumbs, and made into croquettes. Came out good!
Seen here with a home made Remoulade that really brought them home:
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