Project Omniherbivore: February 2007 Archives

First in what I hope will be an occasional series. Following the suggestion of this well-circulated and thought-provoking article to "try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet... biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields," I'm making it a deliberate project to try every nonpoisonous species of plant I can find that I haven't eaten before (at least those offered for sale as food; I'm not going the "Wildman" Steve Brill route just yet. Maybe later).

Experiment #1, found at Limbo yesterday: purple carrots. (Are they actually a different species?) I'd been told they were crisper and sweeter than orange carrots; crisper, yes, but when I tried a couple raw, they actually seemed slightly bitterer, and I was slightly disappointed that the purple color was only on their skins; on the inside, they were orange. So I cut up a few and threw them in with some leeks I was braising for dinner, along with a couple of orange carrots; cooked, their texture and flavor were all but identical.

Deerhoof at the Crystal Ballroom last night: excellent, and adjusting well to their trio lineup. (A couple of links that have been hanging around for a while: here's a nine-song live-stuff-and-covers collection--as one long MP3, but the track listing is here, and includes covers of the Beatles, My Bloody Valentine, Canned Heat and Herman's Hermits--and here's "+81" from the new album, which neatly encapsulates what they're like for people who haven't heard them before.) But one moment I really enjoyed was actually before they went on: their intro music was Niney's awesome "Blood and Fire," which I don't think I'd encountered at club-speaker volume before--hearing Jamaican music from that era at suitably high volumes always makes me imagine what the "sound system" scene would really have been like.