Part 6 :Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

The wonderful author Barbara Kingsolver takes pride in cooking all her own food. She even makes her own spaghetti. But here is something I bet you have never considered making at home: cheese. Yep, that's right cheese. Well according to Kingsolver it only takes thirty minutes to make some super yummy mozzarella cheese. And here's the big shocker you really don't need that much stuff to make cheese. All you need is milk, citric acid, and liquid rennet.
Here's a link to website where you can buy culture (bacteria) for cheese making. Here's a link to a one of Kingsolver's recipes for cheese making.
Do you know what else is super interesting? There is a reason why some people are lactose intolerant and a reason why some people are not. Well according to Kingsolver, being lactose tolerant is actually a genetic mutation that became adaptive for the people that first started to domestic animals that produce dairy products. Normally, after people reach their fourth year of life they should not be able to drink milk. However, people who are blessed enough to have the gene SNP C/T13910 can slurp that milk away until their eighty and still not experience any problems. The people who tend to be the most lactose inclined are northern Europeans (86 % frequency among that population) and people of African heritage (50 % frequency among that population). The people who tend to be the lactose genetic losers are Asian (10 % frequency among the population) and Mexicans (25 % frequency among the population).

  += yummy cookies?
Now let's move on to something even more surprising. Apparently you can make chocolate chip cookies with zucchini in them. That is one way of force feeding children vegetables that I have NEVER heard of. But apparently, in the Kingsolver household this happens - without Kingsolver's youngest daughter's awareness. I have the link to the recipe right here. To be quite honest, I kind of really want to try it. Maybe we could bring it in to class and see how many people would notice? I wonder if anyone would because Kingsolver's daughter has yet to notice that her cookies are vegetable flavored.
http://www.epicurean.com/articles/zucchini.html
http://vintagerosestudio.blogspot.com/2009/07/woolworths-cookies-aka-urban-legend.html
- Quinn Rhodes