Overseas Chinese Web Guide

Tag: super size me

  • Cuisinart ICE-20 Ice Cream Maker

    Last month, Newsweek ran a piece on Six of the Most Fattening Ice Cream Flavors. Having used the Cuisinart ICE-20 for two weeks now, I don’t think the extra ingredients used to flavor the ice cream matter as much as the basic ingredients in the ice cream itself. Out of the box, the Cuisinart ice cream maker comes with a basic instruction book and a few recipes. I’ve tried the vanilla ice cream, lime sherbet, orange sherbet and pineapple sherbet recipes. I’ve also improvised and made banana frozen yogurt.

    In general, the texture of the desserts is a bit better when freshly made. After I freeze it, the desserts get a bit too hard. Also, I’ve been substituting half and half as well as non-fat milk in place of the heavy cream and whole milk combination. So, my desserts end up not as creamy as the store bought favorites. I think I will have to test a batch one of these days with just non-fat milk and no cream to see how bad (or good) non-fat ice cream really tastes. I haven’t tried any of the premium ice cream recipes that require numerous eggs and egg yolks. A little too frightening.

    Two issues. The booklet says to place the freezer bowl in the freezer for 6 hours to 22 hours. For my first batch, I was a bit too eager and shaded towards the 6 hour mark. Even though the bowl was completely frozen when I started, it defrosted much too fast and I ended with a cold, creamy soup. After that, I left the bowl in the freezer for 24 hours each time and haven’t had a repeat of that initial experience since. Also, I find that the recipes generally produce more liquids than can fit into the bowl. So, I’ve been scaling down to about 2 cups of liquids and that has worked out much better. Of course, if you’ve seen Super Size Me and heard the commentary about the health problems experienced by the founders of Baskin-Robbins and Ben and Jerry’s, you might avoid ice cream altogether (or not).

  • 30 Days of So-Called Sustainability

    In Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock taped his experience of eating 3 meals per day at McDonald’s for one month. 30 Days is a spin-off television show of that concept. Morgan hosts the show, but finds one or two guests to follow through on the 30 day immersion experience. In Off the Grid, Morgan sends two people to live at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage for 30 days.

    From the Chinese-American perspective, I found this show to be fascinating. In China, you have several hundred million people seeking to live on the grid and join the 21st century. However, our modern lifestyle is resource intensive. Where will we find the energy, water and food for all these people? In America, you have a small band of people seeking the opposite route. While these people may have renounced consumerism, their lifestyle depends entirely on consumerism albeit by their neighbors. Recycling or reusing doesn’t exist unless you have a neighbor throwing away perfectly reusable goods. Biodiesel doesn’t exist unless you have restaurants and fast food chains producing vast amounts of grease. Basically, if everyone tried to live like the people from the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, their lifestyle would collapse because their would be no restaurants producing grease, no companies selling solar panels, and no consumers abandoning usable goods in dumpsters. So, while they do use less energy and water than most of us, I don’t think their lifestyle is sustainable.