Eating Between the Lines

I admit it, I have a sweet tooth. I resist the temptation everyday. So imagine my delight when Elisa Bosley, food editor of Delicious Living magazine assigned me a story to develop some healthy desserts. If ever I had an excuse to indulge this was it. I had visions of sugarplums dancing in my head (what are sugarplums?), then the other sweet shoe fell. The recipes had to use alternative sweeteners like stevia, sugar alcohols, rice bran syrup. I swept the sugarplums from my brain and sequestered myself in the kitchen for a week. I tested and retested dozens of recipes using dozens of sweeteners. It was a tough assignment (no really, it was), with a really high failure rate. My trash bin was filled with blobs of sunken cake batter, cookies hard as dog biscuits and custards that weeped more than I did at the Eat, Pray, Love movie last week. Now I understand why sugar is so popular. It not only tastes good, but it also gives recipes a strong scaffolding to hold up the fragile ingredients. My kitchen chemistry experiment unveiled five recipes that actually worked and will satisfy a sweet tooth but won’t spike your blood sugar. Sweet…yes? Link here to the five recipes. If you have your own sweet nothing recipes, I would love to post them on the site.

The egg recall expanded today to nearly a half billion eggs. In recent months 2,000 people have fallen ill from eating contaminated eggs and that number is expected to rise. Most of the contaminated eggs can be traced back to Wright County Eggs, and owner Jack DeCoster, a farm and a man with a history of legal problems related to hiring illegal immigrants, sexual harassment, health violations and animal cruelty.

I guarantee the egg recalls with continue. FDA laws changed in July, requiring egg producers to refrigerate eggs, test the egg barns and eggs more frequently and most importantly, report contamination which will lead to mandatory recalls when salmonella turns up in tests.

So what can you do to protect yourself? First, don’t remove your eggs from the carton and place them in those little plastic egg holder in the refrigerator. The number on the side of the carton are your only hope of tracing those eggs back to the farm. Packing dates are expressed in a Julien Calendar number, which assigns a number to the day of the year the eggs were packed. Also don’t wash eggs, they have a tasteless protective mineral oil coating. Refrigerate them right away, within two hours any bacteria in the egg will proliferate. Lastly, if you get sick, and you suspect it’s from egg, see a doctor so your illness gets reported to health authorities.
For more on egg safety, read Chapter 4, Hard Boiled Facts about Egg Safety, Eating Between the Lines.