Cooking with Pooh
Last night while Doug was cooking dinner and we were feeding Sorenne some rice cereal and squash, I noticed we still had a tube of Pillsbury Cookie Dough in the refrigerator leftover from last week’s cookie experiment. We decided to make some cookies and free up more space in the fridge.
Doug reminded me, as I got ready for the extremely complicated process of slicing the dough to put on a cookie sheet, that I needed to treat the product as though it were contaminated. I said, “But this isn’t the recalled dough.” To which Doug responded, “Just because it wasn’t recalled doesn’t mean that it isn’t contaminated.” True that. So we were careful not to cross-contaminate. We put the tube on a cutting board. I used a pair of scissors to open it up and immediately put them in the dishwasher. I sliced up the dough, put it on the cookie sheet, washed my hands thoroughly, and Doug took care of the actual baking.
The cookies were not nearly as delicious as the ones Katie and I used to make during her 5 month stay in Manhattan, and I’m sure they contained some dairy, but we ate all of the cookies anyway.
This week Tom sent us a book advertisement from Amazon.com, “Cooking with Pooh: Yummy Yummy Cookie Cutter Treats.” If you’re potentially cooking with poo, be careful not to cross-contaminate and do not eat uncooked dough.
Contaminated food for resale found during Michigan traffic stop
Driving the long stretches of big sky country in Kansas, the mind can wander. I wonder what’s in that rental truck up there, the one I may pass in the next hour. Maybe it's a load of fresh produce in a truck that was moving chickens the week before; maybe it's a widely popular Canadian band tyring to break into the U.S. where they are unknown; maybe it's a crystal meth lab.
The Grand Rapid Press reports that during a routine traffic stop at the eastbound Int. 96 weigh station near Ionia this week, motor carrier officers discovered a large quantity of perishable food being transported in a nonrefrigerated rental truck.
Inspectors discovered a case of Biofeel, a yogurt drink included in a nationwide import alert on dairy products originating from Asia because of the melamine contamination of baby food and milk products in some Asian countries.
Inspectors seized and destroyed more than 2,000 pounds of food products, including tofu, dairy, meat, seafood and noodles. They also seized 200 pounds of beef that had not passed USDA inspection.
And since that video of the Canadian band I like is no longer available on youtube, here's a different version, circa 1999.
Keep poop out of ice -- wash your damn hands
Julie Barratt, director of the CIEH in Wales, said, “The results of the survey give us cause for concern. Although realistically there is little likelihood of food poisoning from the levels of bacteria that were found, the presence of fecal bacteria shows that the people handing the ice have very poor standards of personal hygiene. While the ice may pose little risk the same may not be true for other foodstuffs that they may also handle. Food business operators and food handlers need to recognise that ice is a food product and treat it in the same way as all other foods prepared for sale to the public.”
The Chartered Institute for Environment Health in Wales has put together these tips for when asking for ice in a drink:
• if the ice is in a bucket on the bar where anyone can lean over it or cough or sneeze on it, don’t have it;
• if the bar tender takes the ice out of the bucket with their hands, don’t have it;
• if the bar tender pushes a glass down into the ice and their hands come into contact with it, don’t have it;
• if the scoop or tongs for handling the ice are not stored properly, don’t have the ice – you wouldn’t chose to have meat cut with a dirty knife;
• if you can see the ice machine, and it looks grubby, don’t have the ice that comes from it; and,
• if the ice bucket looks dirty, don’t have the ice that comes out of it.
