Posts tagged ‘plant’
McDonald’s Imports One Third of Mexican Sesame Seeds
By Chad Upton | Editor
Sesame seeds come from sesame plants where the seeds grow in pods.
The seeds range in color from very dark to nearly white and are used in foods from Europe, Asia, The Middle East, North America, South America and virtually everywhere else. They are found in everything from sushi to breadsticks and soup to hamburger buns.
A tasty Middle Eastern dip known as Tahini, is made from ground sesame seeds and salt (and sometimes other spices too). Sesame seeds are also very popular in a variety of baked goods including breads, bagels and crackers. In Togo, a small country in West Africa, uses sesame seeds as a main ingredient in soup. They’re also used in Greek cakes.
Sesame seeds are popular because they add a subtle savory nut-like flavor. They taste good because they’re high in polyunsaturated fats (the “good” fat). It should be mentioned that heat from cooking or baking damages the polyunsaturated fats.
The largest producers are India and China, and one of the largest consumers is McDonald’s, which buys one third of the Mexican sesame seeds imported by the US annually.
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Sources: Wikipedia (Sesame, Polyunsaturated Fats), Purdue.edu
Photo: Oceandesetoiles (cc)
Watering Hard to Reach Plants
I did an interview with the BBC a few weeks ago and I was on the show with Caroline Bloor, head of consumer testing at Good Housekeeping. I shared a few secrets with the audience and she shared a few secrets too, including how to water hard to reach plants.
If you’ve got hanging plants or otherwise hard-to-reach botanicals, you’ve probably overshot the pot with the watering can.
Instead, trying putting ice cubes in the pot. They’ll melt slowly and water the plant. They’re much easier to water with and if you drop one, it’s much easier to clean up than its thawed relative.
Thanks for sharing this secret, Caroline.
Broken Secrets | By: Chad Upton
Photo: ell brown (cc)
The Massive Underground Vault Near the North Pole
By Chad Upton | Editor
Imagine your computer caught a really bad virus and you lost all of your files.
You lost all of the documents you’ve worked so hard on, all of the family photos you never printed and all the desktop icons you never clicked on. Hopefully, that never happens to you; if it does you’d probably be devastated, unless you have a thorough backup. Unfortunately, many people do not have a proper backup.
Now imagine our food crops or oxygen producing plants were being killed off by an aggressive virus that we couldn’t stop. If that happened, and it’s possible, how would we produce food to eat or air to breath?
Luckily, some smart people are keeping “backups” of as many plants as possible, so we can grow them again in the event of some man-made or natural disaster that wipes out existing crops and seeds.
These facilities are called seed banks. (more…)
Broken Secrets 