For those of you who have traveled overseas, either to Europe or Asia, you will most likely be familiar with the tremendous street food component of those countries' culinary landscapes. There are travel guides, websites, and entire cookbooks dedicated to street cuisine. People actually travel to Southeast Asia solely to enjoy "hawker"-stall food.

The Hong Kong street food image comes from a gallery on about.com.

For instance, if you watched Anthony Bordain's older tv series, "Cook's Tour", just count how many sit-down restaurants he actually patronized when he visited Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, and Brazil. He and his cameras spent more time meandering the labyrinth of food stalls in open marketplaces than anywhere else. In Vietnam, he even visited an entirely water-born community where hawkers had taken to boats to sell their wares.

Now, with Ontario being a multi-cultural province in an arguably multi-cultural country, do you ever wonder why we don't find a vast array of "hawker" cuisines being sold on the streets? The answer has to do with a provincial law that abjectly states that hot dogs and sausages are the only food that can legally be sold from a street cart.

This has so infuriated a chef named Guy Rubino, that he set out to feed an Asian-favorite street food to provincial politicians and their staff at Toronto's city Hall. According to an article from cbc.ca, Chef Rubino, who happens to be the co-owner and executive chef of the restaurant Rain, served up frog-leg porridge in Nathan Philips Square to highlight how diverse street food in the city and province could be.

The image of frog-leg porridge comes from the talking+photos blog.

Phonetically, frog-leg porridge is "thim kai chok" in Cantonese. Chef Rubino discovered the dish on a trip to Singapore, a country that accordingly impressed him with its tasty street food. Largely considered a delicacy in Asia, the dish consists of a bowl of seasoned white rice porridge, called "congee", various aromatics, and, or course, frogs' legs. Accounts say it tastes like chicken.

The taste test at city hall was a co-ordinated effort by both Chef Rubino and Toronto's Board of Health to demonstrate that street food can provide nutritious alternatives to the hot dog. The board's chair, John Filion, has asked Queen's park to change its rules regarding street food.

More of the Toronto's top chefs will be pressing the issue during lunchtime on July 13, 2007. They are arranging a street food fair at city hall. I guess I will have to schedule a visit to Ontario's provincial capital.

According to the associated press and nwsource.com, archaeologists in western Japan excavated remains of a melon that was carbon-dated to be approximately 2 100 years old. What makes the find even more significant is the fact that the melon still had flesh on the rind. As such, it is the older than the remains found in China that date back to the 4th century AD.

The fresh melon image comes from plantsciences.ucdavis.edu. The moldy melon image come from scienceclarified.com.

A theory has emerged regarding the reason why the melon was so well preserved. It holds that because the melon remains were vacuum-packed in a wet layer below the ground, microorganisms that might otherwise have broken down the melon were held at bay.

And here I have trouble keeping melon in the fridge for a week. Talk about sealing in the freshness.

According to an article from goodanimalnews.com, a biotechnology firm, called ViaLantia, has found several extra-ordinary cows in New Zealand that are genetically pre-disposed to producing skim milk. Scientists there plan to use this information to breed commercial herds of skim milk producing cows. The same researchers are also planning to breed commercial herds that produce milk that can be made into spreadable butter even when chilled.

The picture of the cow comes from desktopexchange.com. The picture of the milk droplet comes from agromilk.hu.

Skim milk is produced by a process called "skimming" which effectively removes butterfat (cream). Depending on what country you live in, skim milk is milk that contains either very little butterfat or almost no butterfat at all. According to wikipedia.net, in the UK, skim milk contains 0.1% butterfat. In Canada, very low fat milk contains less than 0.5% butterfat. Skim milk contains nearly no butterfat. In the US, skim milk has been renamed fat-free milk.

Leave it to humankind to actually encourage the development of herds of cows that produce milk that is nutritionally poor for calves. Ordinarily, natural selection would weed out this trait. Along the same lines, other UK scientists are discussing breeding cows that produce full fat milk that contains no saturated fats. This would address the waste issue when it comes to producing skim milk. Producers need to dispose of the unwanted fat.

Since brown cows, singing or otherwise, don't yet produce it, I'm waiting for someone to bio-engineer cows that produce chocolate milk :P

Wiki-how.com just posted an entry on how to make Open Cola. The entry includes various tips, tricks, and warnings for those adventurous enough to make your own soft drinks at home. For those of you, like me, who heard of open source cola and filed it on the "to Google" list, allow me to give you some background.

OpenCola is a brand of cola, like Pepsi or Coke. However, unlike Pepsi or Coke, the instructions for making it and its ingredient list are far from secret. They are freely available under a GNU General Public License. As such, anybody can make the drink, make modifications, and improve the formula, so long as they respect the license.

According Wikipedia, OpenCola was originally intended as a promotional tool to explain and demonstrate the benefits of open source software. However, the drink would later take on a life of its own when the Toronto-based OpenCola company actually sold 150,000 cans. The OpenCola company was founded by now famous Grad Conn, Cory Doctorow and John Henson.

Considering the less than convenient ingredients, it will be a while before I'm restless enough to attempt this recipe. Also, if Coke or Pepsi's recipe resemble this ingredient list, one has to wonder how healthy cola really is. Cheers?

Source: Yahoo News
Title: "Buy your milk in the dark for flavour"
Picture: Wonderful picture of a lion and a jaguar cub.
Caption: "Reuters Photo: A two-month-old lion dozes on the back of a jaguar cub of the same age..."
Correlation: As a rule, I don't pick on Yahoo News because it behaves more like a news organization than Google News. However, the pairing of picture to article is so ludicrous that I had to point it out. What makes this worse is that the article is extremely useful. If you purchase your milk in translucent containers, either buy homo milk or reach for the ones at the back of the dairy case where fluorescent lights don't shine. Apparently, fluorescent light oxidizes the milk, causing an "off flavour." Ironically, the fat in homo milk blocks the damaging wavelengths of light.