Bon, résultat du concours de pâtisserie, j'ai pas gagné. Les votes se sont éparpillés entre les macarons et le Nemesis.
:o Et c'est heureusement ma collègue et amie qui sait cuisiner pour de vrai qui a gagné avec son cheesecake aux cerises amaratti. Pour lequel j'ai voté sans hésitation, tant il était bon et tant le niveau des autres desserts volait bas. Les gâteaux digestes comme une brique, les pavés au chocolat Cadbury, les blocs de sucre décorés, ça devrait être interdit.
:sleeping:Au moins, j'ai pu essayer de nouveaux parfums de macaron, et chèvre-miel est un délice. Dommage pour choco-passion, le gout du fruit n'était pas assez présent, j'augmenterai les doses la prochaine fois.
Le mœlleux chocolat blanc était un régal même si pas très fin, par contre la recette de la couverture caramélisée est une arnaque. Je tenterai la chose à nouveau en suivant une vraie recette de caramel mou.
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Mon nouveau jouet... C'est la fusion homme-machine !
:wub:J'ai fait des bâtons de maréchal hier soir, mes 100 g de noisettes ont été réduits en fine poudre en 30 s, en pâte au bout d'une minute ! Mon céleri ? J'enfourne un quart épluché directement dans la goulotte extra-large et 3 secondes plus tard je peux le sortir pour manger avec ma vinaigrette moutardée. Mon gâteau au chocolat de la semaine dernière ? De superbes blancs en 6 minutes pendant que je m'occupais de faire fondre le chocolat. Mon fondant de patates douces ? 30 secondes et j'ai ma purée fine. Je suis aux anges !!!
Il me reste de nombreuses fonctions à essayer (le trancheur, la râpe à fromage/chocolat, la fonction blender, la fonction pétrissage) mais chaque chose en son temps. Je réalise à peine le dixième des possibilités offertes par cette machine, il va falloir étudier cela de près.
Si vous aviez des suggestions d'ailleurs, je suis preneur. Car autant, côté dessert, j'ai des idées à revendre, autant côté cuisine, je n'ai aucune espèce d'idée. Peut-être parce que je considère les légumes comme un simple exercice de coupe et que, ne mangeant presque pas de viande, les recettes de ce type ne m'intéressent pratiquement pas ?
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La vidéo... Elle est très intéressante à bien des points de vue (je me suis aussi tapé la séance de Q&R). J'avoue que les mauvais traitements infligés aux animaux dans l'industrie agro-alimentaire ne me surprennent guère, j'aurai envie de dire que je ne soupçonnais pas que cela était à ce point. Maintenant, à cause la proximité avec les mammifères, j'ai toujours eu du mal à manger de la viande en général. Ressentant moins d'empathie avec la gent ailée ou nageante, je n'ai par contre jamais eu de remords à avoir de la volaille ou du poisson dans mon assiette. Ahem.
:peur:C'est là où l'argumentaire de Gary me dérange parfois, le recours quasi-systématique à l'émotionnel. Des images insupportables, des histoires tire-larmes (j'ai EXACTEMENT la même chose pour la protection des ânes ramasseurs de déchet en Afrique, cf.
https://spana.org/kadi), le recours à l'enfance idéalisée/la période idyllique où l'on ne mangeait pas de viande et où nous étions les amis des animaux. J'ai des doutes sur la seconde partie de la proposition, et à titre personnel, je mangeais absolument de tout (y compris des choses qui me font frémir maintenant) quand j'étais bébé. Était-ce un goût acquis que j'aurai perdu en grandissant ? En tout cas, cela me fait m'interroger sur ses propos. Le point intéressant qu'il soulève est toutefois que la consommation de viande et autres produits animaux devrait être stoppée pour des raisons éthiques et pas simplement utilitaristes. Intéressant. Toutefois, le fait que l'industrie agro-alimentaire existe sert aussi à libérer du temps pour ne pas avoir à chasser, car aussi bête que cela paraisse, il me semble que la consommation de viande n'est pas une mode des trois derniers siècles.
Concernant le procès du lait ! Ah, j'en ai lu, des choses à ce sujet. Il parle des alternatives (lait de riz, de coco, de noisette, de soja, d'amande, etc.) mais elles n'ont pas exactement les mêmes valeurs nutritionnelles. Aussi, je vous offre l'un des articles les plus intéressants que j'ai lus à ce sujet, notamment concernant l'évolution génétique humaine (car oui, à l'origine, la consommation de lait est une aberration) :
The Most Spectacular Mutation in Recent Human History
How did milk help found Western civilization?
By Benjamin Phelan|Posted Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012, at 8:20 AM
To repurpose a handy metaphor, let's call two of the first Homo sapiens Adam and Eve. By the time they welcomed their firstborn, that rascal Cain, into the world, 2 million centuries of evolution had established how his infancy would play out. For the first few years of his life, he would take his nourishment from Eve's breast. Once he reached about 4 or 5 years old, his body would begin to slow its production of lactase, the enzyme that allows mammals to digest the lactose in milk. Thereafter, nursing or drinking another animal's milk would have given the little hell-raiser stomach cramps and potentially life-threatening diarrhea; in the absence of lactase, lactose simply rots in the guts. With Cain weaned, Abel could claim more of his mother's attention and all of her milk. This kept a lid on sibling rivalry—though it didn't quell the animus between these particular sibs—while allowing women to bear more young. The pattern was the same for all mammals: At the end of infancy, we became lactose-intolerant for life.
Two hundred thousand years later, around 10,000 B.C., this began to change. A genetic mutation appeared, somewhere near modern-day Turkey, that jammed the lactase-production gene permanently in the “on” position. The original mutant was probably a male who passed the gene on to his children. People carrying the mutation could drink milk their entire lives. Genomic analyses have shown that within a few thousand years, at a rate that evolutionary biologists had thought impossibly rapid, this mutation spread throughout Eurasia, to Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, India and all points in between, stopping only at the Himalayas. Independently, other mutations for lactose tolerance arose in Africa and the Middle East, though not in the Americas, Australia, or the Far East.
In an evolutionary eye-blink, 80 percent of Europeans became milk-drinkers; in some populations, the proportion is close to 100 percent. (Though globally, lactose intolerance is the norm; around two-thirds of humans cannot drink milk in adulthood.) The speed of this transformation is one of the weirder mysteries in the story of human evolution, more so because it's not clear why anybody needed the mutation to begin with. Through their cleverness, our lactose-intolerant forebears had already found a way to consume dairy without getting sick, irrespective of genetics.
Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, points out that in modern-day Turkey, where the mutation seems to have arisen, the warm climate causes fresh milk to rapidly change its composition. “If you milk a cow in the morning,” he says, “by lunchtime it's yogurt.”
Yogurt has plenty of benefits to confer, among them large testicles, swagger, and glossy fur—at least if you're a mouse—but most salient to our ancestors was that the fermentation process that transforms milk into yogurt consumes lactose, which is a sugar. This is why many lactose-intolerant people can eat yogurt without difficulty. As milk ascends what Thomas calls the “fermentation ladder,” which begins with yogurt and culminates with virtually lactose-free hard cheeses, ever more lactose is fermented out. “If you're at a party and someone says, 'Oh, I can't eat that—I'm lactose intolerant,' ” he says, “you can tell them to shut up and eat the Parmigiano.”
Analysis of potsherds from Eurasia and parts of Africa have shown that humans were fermenting the lactose out of dairy for thousands of years before lactose tolerance was widespread. Here is the heart of the mystery: If we could consume dairy by simply letting it sit around for a few hours or days, it doesn't appear to make much sense for evolution to have propagated the lactose-tolerance mutation at all, much less as vigorously as it did. Culture had already found a way around our biology. Various ideas are being kicked around to explain why natural selection promoted milk-drinking, but evolutionary biologists are still puzzled.
“I've probably worked more on the evolution of lactose tolerance than anyone in the world,” says Thomas. “I can give you a bunch of informed and sensible suggestions about why it's such an advantage, but we just don't know. It's a ridiculously high selection differential, just insane, for the last several thousand years.”
A “high selection differential” is something of a Darwinian euphemism. It means that those who couldn't drink milk were apt to die before they could reproduce. At best they were having fewer, sicklier children. That kind of life-or-death selection differential seems necessary to explain the speed with which the mutation swept across Eurasia and spread even faster in Africa. The unfit must have been taking their lactose-intolerant genomes to the grave.
Milk, by itself, somehow saved lives. This is odd, because milk is just food, just one source of nutrients and calories among many others. It's not medicine. But there was a time in human history when our diet and environment conspired to create conditions that mimicked those of a disease epidemic. Milk, in such circumstances, may well have performed the function of a life-saving drug.
There are no written records from the period when humans invented agriculture, but if there were, they would tell a tale of woe. Agriculture, in Jared Diamond's phrase, was the “worst mistake in human history.” The previous system of nourishment—hunting and gathering—had all but guaranteed a healthy diet, as it was defined by variety. But it made us a rootless species of nomads. Agriculture offered stability. It also transformed nature into a machine for cranking out human beings, though there was a cost. Once humans began to rely on the few crops that we knew how to grow reliably, our collective health collapsed. The remains of the first Neolithic farmers show clear signs of dramatic tooth decay, anemia, and low bone-density. Average height dropped by about 5 inches, while infant mortality rose. Diseases of deficiency like scurvy, rickets, beriberi, and pellagra were serious problems that would have been totally perplexing. We are still reeling from the change: Heart disease, diabetes, alcoholism, celiac disease, and perhaps even acne are direct results of the switch to agriculture.
Meanwhile, agriculture's alter ego, civilization, was forcing people for the first time to live in cities, which were perfect environments for the rapid spread of infectious disease. No one living through these tribulations would have had any idea that things had ever been, or could be, different. Pestilence was the water we swam in for millennia.
It was in these horrendous conditions that the lactose tolerance mutation took hold. Reconstructed migration patterns make it clear that the wave of lactose tolerance that washed over Eurasia was carried by later generations of farmers who were healthier than their milk-abstaining neighbors. Everywhere that agriculture and civilization went, lactose tolerance came along. Agriculture-plus-dairying became the backbone of Western civilization.
But it's hard to know with any kind of certainty why milk was so beneficial. It may have been the case that milk provided nutrients that weren't present in the first wave of domesticated crops. An early, probably incorrect, hypothesis sought to link lactose tolerance to vitamin D and calcium deficiencies. The lactose-intolerant MIT geneticist Pardis Sabeti believes that milk boosted women's fat stores and thus their fertility, contributing directly to Darwinian fitness, though she and others allow that milk's highest value to subsisting Homo sapiens may have been that it provided fresh drinking water: A stream or pond might look clean yet harbor dangerous pathogens, while the milk coming out of a healthy-looking goat is likely to be healthy, too.
Each of these hypotheses makes rough-and-ready sense, but not even their creators find them totally convincing. “The drinking-water argument works in Africa, but not so much in Europe,” says Thomas. He favors the idea that milk supplemented food supplies. “If your crops failed and you couldn't drink milk, you were dead,” he says. “But none of the explanations that are out there are sufficient.”
The plot is still fuzzy, but we know a few things: The rise of civilization coincided with a strange twist in our evolutionary history. We became, in the coinage of one paleoanthropologist, “mampires” who feed on the fluids of other animals. Western civilization, which is twinned with agriculture, seems to have required milk to begin functioning. No one can say why. We know much less than we think about why we eat what we do. The puzzle is not merely academic. If we knew more, we might learn something about why our relationship to food can be so strange.
For the time being, the mythical version of the story isn't so bad. In the Garden, Adam and Eve were gatherers, collecting fruits as they fell from the tree. Cain the farmer and Abel the pastoralist represented two paths into the future: agriculture and civilization versus animal husbandry and nomadism. Cain offered God his cultivated fruits and vegetables, Abel an animal sacrifice that Flavius Josephus tells us was milk. Agriculture, in its earliest form, brought disease, deformation, and death, so God rejected it for the milk from Abel's flocks. Cain grew enraged and, being your prototypically amoral city-dweller, did his brother in. God cursed Cain with exile, commanding him to wander the earth like the pastoralist brother he'd killed. Cain and agriculture ultimately won the day—humans settled into cities sustained by farms—but only by becoming a little like Abel. And civilization moved forward.
Autre chose qui me dérange, le recours à plus d'agriculture autour du soja, par exemple. Certes, libérer des terres pour ne plus avoir à nourrir des bestiaux, c'est bien dans l'absolu, mais... Il y a quelque chose qui me dérange, des trucs qui commencent par Mon et finissent par Santo, ou des acronymes comme OGM...
Aussi, que faire des animaux de boucherie ? On les relâche dans la nature ou on s'offre une dernière orgie carnivore ?
Bref, c'était vraiment intéressant mais je ne suis loin d'être convaincu que l'homme soit strictement végétalien. Je crains de continuer à consommer des œufs et du lait (ne serait-ce qu'en pâtisserie !) et un peu de viande, aussi. Mais en faisant attention à ce que je consomme (lecture des étiquettes) et en continuant à me documenter sur le sujet. Mon comportement est terriblement égoïste de ce que je continue à sacrifier des animaux pour mon alimentation, mais du moins M. Yourofsky m'aura donné envie de goûter les spécialités qu'il défend (certaines choses ont l'air savoureuses !). Et qu'il soit content, mon fondant de patates douces est une recette végétalienne (lait de noisette, je n'ai pas trouvé de lait de riz).
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