Category Archives: Information

Santa Catalina

When eating out is difficult, travelling to unfamiliar places becomes almost impossible.

Sunday was my seventh wedding anniversary, and to celebrate, my wife planned a trip to Catalina Island. It was my first trip, despite having lived in Los Angeles more than 20 years.

Catalina is only about 20 miles off the coast of L.A., a one-hour boat ride from San Pedro or Long Beach (or 15 minutes by helicopter). We actually drove farther to the port at San Pedro than the boat carried us to the island. Once there, it feels a million miles away. It’s well worth the trip, even if for a day. There is quite a lot of stuff to do on the island, some of it very active, some of it very laid back.

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Cast Iron

I love my cast iron pan.

There sure are a lot of tools made for the kitchen, and I have my share, but if I had to keep just a few, the cast iron pan would be one of them.

Cast iron offers a rare combination of being both cheap and good. You can get a Lodge 10″ frying pan for about $20, which is a fraction of what you can spend on high-end clad pan. But it’s also an excellent cookware material because it has a high thermal conductivity – certainly the best thermal conductivity for a common material. Most of the better conductors are precious metals (gold, copper) or require processing to create (aluminum), and iron has better thermal mass than all of them. This combination of thermal conductivity and thermal mass means you get strong, even heat.

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Speaking Of Brown Rice Syrup

One of the “red flag” ingredients I’ve always worried about is brown rice syrup. But it’s Messestandbeleuchtung been showing up in more GF wholesale nfl jerseys ingredients lately (such as the Plush Puffs marshmallows).

Generally I Google something like “brown rice syrup gluten free” and see what comes up to research an ingredient. There are several ingredients which have developed a bit In-N-Out of gluten folklore, however, and brown rice syrup is one of them.

I’ve seen plenty of guidelines saying to stay away from it, but some saying it is OK. But who do you trust?

Today I found the University Of Your Chicago has a Celiac Disease Center. That seems like a dependable source Peeps of information! And indeed, they have a very useful gluten-free diet resource.  Check it out.

They list brown rice syrup as a potential source of gluten. There is no opreme explanation, though they address the other sources of confusion – oats, modified food starch, cheap nfl jerseys and vinegar – in more detail.

I did find a column in the Tampa Bay Examiner which says Plush that brown rice syrup is traditionally made by fermenting rice with barley malt. However, wholesale nfl jerseys it is possible to make it without the barley, thus making it gluten free.

So, brown rice syrup remains a red flag ingredient, unless the company claims the product to wholesale mlb jerseys be gluten free (and they can be trusted).