OK Tire: A report from Chilliwack, BC

OK Tire in Chilliwack, BC

Image via Google Maps

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. A couple of days ago a “check engine” light appeared on the car dashboard. It was so sudden. It was a definite eeek! moment. 

Not fair! Was my first thought. But as we all know, that thought appears with regularity from the time we’re about four years of age. So true. As we go on with life it becomes part of it. Only when you’re grown up, you forget about the tantrums. It’s just all in your head.

Life just isn’t always fair. And it seems worst of all when you’re dealing with sudden automobile bad behavior, 

We are a single-car family. Our car, an aging but loyal Prius has served us well. This year, after 14 trouble-free Christmases, it made no bones about the fact that  its hybrid battery needed to be changed. That is a terrifying moment for most hybrid vehicle owners. Translate it as money, money, money. 

We took it into our local OK Tire shop, and dropped it off. Some excellent service hours later, it emerged with a new, hybrid battery. Everything was good. Even the car seemed to have a certain radiance about it. 

Until two days ago, when that horrible little gold engine symbol on the dash appeared. 

Well, it demanded a check, so we obediently took it straight to OK again. 

This time I had an appointment starting at 8.15 a.m., when the business opens. I got there early. After all, I’m a morning person.

OK Tire shop, Chilliwack, BC

Image via VickiW

 The set-up

Just before 8 a.m. the staff started arriving for the day. One of the first was their super-efficient front desk woman. She put out the OPEN sign. Seemed like there were many little details that she took care of, before settling into her place behind a computer at the front desk.

I watched the rest of the staff arrive. It was obvious that cars and big boys toys are their passion. Eight arrived, one by one, skilfully and without hesitation backing into space, or turning in confidently at the side of the operation. For the most part they seemed relatively young. It was interesting to see the variety in eight cars.

OK Tire shop, Chilliwack, BC

Image via VickiW

A lively bunch!

Those workers walked with a spring in their jean-clad steps. You could see they were looking forward to what could be a challenging day for them. Some of them carried take out coffee cups and something for lunch. They smiled at each other. They chatted.

As a customer, I found myself in a lovely little corner behind a private screen. There were comfy chairs, books, a TV and two coffee machines, with everything you might need for a special cup.

OK Tire shop, Chilliwack, BC

Image via VickiW

Loved the children's pictures, faithfully drawing the mechanics they had seen and obviously admired! 

OK Tire shop, Chilliwack, BC

Image via VickiW

The little, social centre encourages chit-chat between the customers. All too soon, Samantha, the front desk person poked her head around to give me the news that the Prius spark plugs needed replacing. Their expert scan was completed to their satisfaction. Those plugs were in bad shape! 

It’s a great thing to see a business that has focus on its work and workers. How the owners encourage a positive outlook each day. But this experience made me realize how important community and customers are in the whole scheme of things. 

I’d like to add to that crowded noticeboard. But there’s no room on it at present. We need another board to add our praises. Somehow cards are often more valuable than online reviews.

Thank you, OK TIRE!

Weeping Japanese Maple

Its beautiful, feathery leaves, are all falling now.

The maple should be pruned very lightly, just for shape, and definitely before the sap starts to run in spring.

Image via VickiW

Diet Drinks: Do they make you fat?

Image via DesignDrawArtes of Pixabay

I often shop at our lovely, local supermarket. While choosing some veggies and fruit, one of those forklifts they use for big crates of stuff appeared next to me. 

Then a gray-haired shopworker ( have you noticed, these places are employing many people now, who are past retirement age?) started offloading huge amounts, cases in fact of “diet” drinks. They made up a solid block of “special deal” offerings. 

Right away, customers came to put these caseloads of pop into their shopping baskets. Later, at the checkout, a woman in front of me had two cases. Her son, about 10, carried another. There were no fresh ingredients in their cart. Just boxes of packaged items. Snoopy of me, I know, but I’m constantly amazed at the stuff that people eat and drink.

Image via CorrieMiracle of Pixabay

Statistics

According to 2019 stats, Mexico, with an average of 634 per person, per year is a world leader in consumption of carbonated soft drinks. USA follows closely with 618. India, with a very high population, ranks last with 18.

So this week we’re having a conversation about what is known in the food labs’ as Non-Nutritive Sweeteners. (NNSs). You find lots of these artificial chemicals in your drinks and your food. They are sugar substitutes.

All NNSs are developed in laboratories. They are hundreds or even thousands of times sweeter than sugar, so only tiny amounts have to be used for any given purpose. They serve the main goal of food manufacturers and retailers; profitability.

When you read your labels and see modified starch as an ingredient on your sugar-free drink, translate that to mean fillers of maltodextrin and dextrin. These lab-created substances contain about ¼ of sugar calories. So they might be sugar-free, but they are not calorie-free.

The fizzy drink manufacturers love the word “natural” on their labels. It makes everyone feel better about things. “Natural flavours” sounds healthy enough, even though it is usually last on the label list. 

For instance, stevia, the incredibly sweet plant, is used often, but not as a plant. The sweet substance is lab-extracted. The leaves are steeped in acids and solvent first, to achieve the chemical glycosides extraction. This happens in labs of course. 

Then those active compounds are further refined, purified and concentrated to the point that there are only minute amounts of the original stevia plant left. But that’s enough for the label. There are other chemical compounds too, that are not labeled, because their addition is deemed to be not necessary on the label.

Most of the time natural flavours conjure up a healthy image in your mind. But there’s little difference between the lab procedures to extract from plants, and artificial flavours derived from the thousands of available chemicals. It’s all in the wording.

Image via VickiW

Why would you pay four, good Canadian dollars for this? We have water. We can grow stevia in a pot if you don’t have a garden. We can mash up the leaves and put them in the water. But it might be way too sweet! Add some fruit for flavouring. Just one leaf can be all you need in your tea. I plan to grow another plant in a pot next year.

Decisions, decisions...

You’re between a rock and a hard place with this dietary “problem.” Go for a can of sugar-sweetened soda, and in the one above you’ll be consuming more than 9 teaspoons of sugar, to counteract the 12% bergamot, a type of bitter orange.

The plastic bottles and cans that contain soft drinks cause huge pollution in most countries and oceans.  Soft drinks are very popular everywhere! I don’t know how many countries are even able to deal with the enormous discard/littering problem.

Let’s be honest. Soft drinks, meaning non-alcoholic, usually carbonated (fizzy) drinks, have no nutritional value at all. In fact, some studies show that rather than helping your thirst they can even cause it to become greater.

There’s a lot of controversy about this. 

Image via VickiW

Microbiomes

Years ago, (2015) I read that there were real concerns about aspartame (ASP) being used in soft drinks. Then Pepsi announced they were discontinuing it in their Diet Pepsi. (Their sales were down.).Instead of it they would use a mix of sucralose and acesulfame potassium ( ACE-K) in their USA manufacturing.

Big mistake. Pepsi market shares nosedived. They brought back the original Pepsi diet cola in 2017, after numerous complaints about the new improved taste. The bottom line always rules.

Most folks decide to drink diet sodas because of their determination to lose weight. After many studies though, it seems there is a definite correlation between diet sodas, sports drinks and obesity. 

In a previous post, I discussed the existence and function of your microbiome, a major collection of microbes in our bodily systems. 

When you subject your microbiome to a constant supply of sweeteners in your diet your digestive microbes ultimately get interested enough to try using them, even though there is absolutely no nutritive value in them. 

The microbes have a collective goal. Use what is fed to them as real food. If they can’t, because of different chemicals, the glycogen usually stored as glucose in the liver will instead be released straight into the bloodstream.

It takes some while, but in some individuals, after constant exposure to NNSs, there is a build-up of glucose in the blood. Next stage is glucose intolerance, then full-blown type 2 diabetes. 

There is still ongoing research into this. Scientists are beginning to think that the brain reacts to the stimulus of artificial sweetness by skewing your need for food. To the brain sweetness equals energy. The NNSs overstimulate you to think you need more food than you actually do.

Obesity is a worldwide scourge now. The chemical extracts and other chemicals are difficult to avoid, not only in sodas, but just in almost every commercially produced foods. That means you don’t only ingest from one source. It may be several each day. 

Still want a fizzy drink? Save the money you’d spend on buying them for a time, and you’d be able to buy a machine that would fizz your plain old water! Add a slice of lemon, or other favourite fruit. Want it sweeter? Grow a pot of stevia, and throw in a couple of leaves.

Or…just learn to love water without the fizz!

Purple Mountain Majesty

Not quite in the boundaries this week, but those mountains are still to be seen from the balcony. 

If you look carefully, you’ll see a little snow on the top of the peaks!

Image via VickiW

Sugar: Is it truly, scary stuff?

 

Image via Pasja1000 of Pixabay

Tragedy? Indeed!

The workers at Canada’s massive Rogers sugar factory workers are on strike. Thank goodness though everyone managed to get through Hallowe’en, and children could get their bags of sweet goodies safely home. 

But now there’s a sugar shortage starting. Over the years I’ve cut down on sugar in our house. A five-lb bag will last us a year. But I still love creamy cakes. Love the way you have to smash through a solid sheet of sugar on the top of crème brûlée for dessert. So sugar in the pantry doesn’t count!

We often don’t know how much sugar we consume. This stat from the American Heart Association is quite interesting.

“American adults consume an average of 17 teaspoons of added sugar every day, more than 2-3 times the recommended amount for men and women respectively. 

“This adds up to around 60 pounds of added sugar consumed annually. That’s like six 10lb bowling balls”. Sounds extreme, doesn’t it?

Has sugar changed?

I ask this simply because growing up in Zululand, South Africa, I recall eating a lot of sugar. It was just what you did. 

Meals were never complete until you had the dessert after your lunch or dinner. It gave the parents ammunition to exhort children to eat their vegetables and main meal ingredients, otherwise “no dessert!”

In our large family hunger before a meal would drive you to get a slice of bread, open a can of sweetened condensed milk, and spread a couple of liberal spoonfuls on it. I know now that amount would have been about 60 mls. The sugar content then would have been about 6 teaspoons of sugar per snack slice. Yikes!

We used to frequently make fudge. It was of course almost pure sugar, mixed with cocoa, and a bit of water, brought to “soft ball” stage over heat, then spread out on a pan to cut into sugary squares. Yum!

Now, with a microwave, you can make lovely, perfect fudge in just a few minutes. You need the can of sweetened condensed milk of course, and some chocolate chips. Add pure vanilla, just to feel virtuous. Microwave 1 minute, then let it all melt together. When that’s happened, spread it quickly into a 9x9” pan. Restrain yourself, wait until it has cooled, then cut it into squares.

So, going back to those early days…what happened, health-wise? Nothing, short and sweet. We all grew up slim and healthy. So did everyone else I knew. But this was in the days before development of many food chemicals that are now interspersed with the sugar, in food as well as candies.

Obesity was such a rarity that I only knew one fellow student with it. My parents spoke to us about it, explained she had a medical condition, and told us very firmly never to mention it to her, and to be very kind.

These days, I see so many folks obsessed with different diets. Obesity is a huge concern in developed countries. Sugar is blamed for so much of the ills of society. But is it the main culprit?

I’ve never really been able to square away those early sugar habits and complete lack of obesity with what I know to be true at this much later time, the 21st century.

Life has sped up since I became an adult. It’s hard to get a break from the relentless speed of it. But strangely, in between gym sessions, or lounging in a recliner, depending on your choice, people seem to feel virtuous when they manage to shy away from sugar. It has become a “guilty pleasure.”

I must admit I find the practice of trick-or-treat quite deplorable. Yes, it’s fun for everyone to dress up, but really, should you send your children to beg for copious amounts of candies to put in huge bags? What does it mean? The sad thing is, this year folks had to decide between their need for groceries and buying candies at exorbitant prices to please their kids.

It might have been easier on the wallet to make some treats, but the sad truth is that is no longer acceptable. Anything homemade will be weeded out and discarded by caring parents who know that dangerous things can be included in homemade “treats”.

Inside those beautifully wrapped, delicious and harmless-looking Mars bars you have other interesting ingredients though.

Ingredients: Sugars (sugar, corn syrup, lactose, malted barley extract), Milk ingredients, Modified palm oil, Cocoa butter, Cocoa mass, Cocoa powder, Salt, Soy lecithin, Dried egg white, Artificial flavour. Please refer to the product label for the most accurate nutrition, ingredient, and allergen information.

Let’s look at Twix

Ingredients: Milk Chocolate (Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Chocolate, Skim Milk, Lactose, Milkfat, Soy Lecithin, Pgpr, Artificial Flavors), Enriched Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Sugar, Palm Oil, Corn Syrup, Skim Milk, Dextrose, Less Than 2% - Salt, Cocoa Powder, …

So some of this stuff I'm willing to bet you’ve not heard of, and most definitely don’t have in your home kitchen. Pgpr isn’t a word, for starters.

Unfortunately, for the following information, it’s hard to translate this science -speak into language that most folks can understand.

PGPR is a mixture of esterified products manufactured by the esterification of polyglycerol with condensed castor oil fatty acids. The brief 3-step manufacturing processes is as follows:

1. Polyglycerol preparation: Glycerol is heated to above 200 ℃ in the presence of an alkali catalyst to produce polyglycerol. 

2. Condensation of the castor oil fatty acids: Castor oil fatty acids (synthesized by hydrolyzing castor oil in water) are heated to above 200 ℃ to create interesterified ricinoleic fatty acid chains of varying lengths. 

3. Esterification: Then polyglycerol mixed with interesterified ricinoleic fatty acids to produce PGPR with different chain lengths. (1)

Voila! There you have your unpronounceable polyglycerol polyricinoleate.

Sugar is indeed the first prime ingredient in these candies, and of course that’s a whole lot in those bags of candies. 

Palm oil farming is causing rapid deforestation of the tropical forests of Brazil, and other tropical areas. This destroys animal habitats, in addition to wreaking incredible damage to life on our planet and climate change.

There is a really good discussion of this here: What is Palm Oil? Facts About the Palm Oil Industry

Image via VickiW

So, there’s a lot going on in those bags of candies! My parents used an opportunity to help us become aware of a problem. They trusted us to use it wisely and kindly to help someone.

Can you teach a child to recognize some words on a label when they shop with you? Sugar is one. Palm oil might be a good choice for discussion of their future. Just hope they don’t ask you about any of the mysterious other ingredients in the lists above!

Children love discussion with parents and grandparents, or any adult prepared to give back-and-forth friendly talk with them. It lasts so much longer than chatting on social media.

Time passes quickly. Always seize the opportunities to talk with children. They are your future.

Regarding sugar: my parents taught “moderation in all things”. 

A special week!

I love to walk down the little creek. Imagine my delighted surprise to see that salmon are returning to spawn. What an interesting amazing show from Mother Nature. 

Then, amid the splashing of tails on the gravel rock bed, there are amazing reflections and colours in the water, away from the fish.

Image via VickiW

Thanks for your visit and hope you'll be back soon!

VickiW

Beef & Barley Soup: Some thoughts...

 

Image via IndigoBunting of Pixabay

Chilly weather perfection...

Dearly Beloved has been looking forward to some hearty beef barley soup. Trouble is, I couldn’t find the barley, and the beef is now incredibly expensive. I wondered if there is such a thing in a can. There is. Of course I read the labels! I’ve even provided a couple of the ingredient lists for you to read.

Sometimes it’s tough to make sense of these ingredients, never found in a home kitchen, created by food scientists in their well-stocked labs. 

So this week we’re finding out if the veggies in my home fridge can be as tasty as their commercial competition, and how much effort I need to produce my version of Bob’s longed-for soup.

Convenience version: Mitchell’s beef-barley soup

Ingredients: Beans (navy, adzuki, mung), Barley, Soup base (salt, corn syrup solids, dextrose, wheat flour, sugar, canola oil, corn starch, onion powder, beef extract, guar gum, spices, herbs, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, natural flavours, turmeric, caramel), Red lentils, Dried vegetables (carrot, potato, onion, green pepper, red pepper, leek), Onion, Garlic, Herbs, Spices (mustard).

May Contain: Tree nuts, Peanuts, Soy, Eggs, Milk, Sesame, Oats, Sulphites.

Couple of interesting chemicals here. Always read the labels.

By the way…where’s the beef?

Progresso Beef-Barley Soup

Ingredients: Water, Beef Broth, Cooked Diced Seasoned Beef and Modified Food starch Product (beef, beef broth, hydrolyzed soy protein, modified food starch, salt, sodium phosphate, natural flavor, maltodextrin), Carrots, Barley, Tomatoes, Tomato Paste, Celery. Contains less than 1% of: Dried Peas, Modified Food Starch, Corn Protein (hydrolyzed), Sugar, Salt, Soybean Oil, Yeast Extract, Natural Flavor, Caramel Color, Potato Starch, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Spice, Maltodextrin, Beef Fat, Beef Extract, Calcium Chloride, Citric Acid.

Questions?

What is beef extract? 

It’s extracted by the test tube folks from porcine pancreas, bovine heart. Very tasty.

Hydrolysis means scientifically breaking the substance down into tiny pieces with water. No, You can’t do this in your kitchen. 

How much salt should you have in a day?
Less than 800 mg.

Canned soup is a processed food that owes part of its extra long shelf life to lots of added sodium. One cup of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup packs an amazing 960 milligrams. As with other prepared foods, try to find low-sodium options. When you make your own soup it has only the amount of saltiness that you choose to put in the broth.

My Beef Barley Soup

These are the fridge clearing ingredients today! You want to use whatever veggies you have in your fridge. This was my collection.

Image via VickiW

To the vegetables I added some prepared garlic, some barley,
and the remains of a bottle of strained tomatoes. You can feel okay about using some ready prepped ingredients. Just read the labels

The beef was an unusual bargain, so that was appreciated. It was ready cut, and four packs at $5 each. Bought two chicken and two beef. One teaspoon coarse salt, and a liberal amount of fresh ground pepper.

Image via VickiW

I used my trusty pressure cooker for this soup. Took me 10 minutes to prep everything, ready for the pot.

Final step–I added the barley on top, then mixed the whole thing up. Added the water mixed with the broth cube, about five cups. Sneakily added a big dash of Worcester sauce for its wonderful umami flavour.

You can use an ordinary pot, or a slow cooker, or like I did, use my beloved pressure cooker.

This was the moment of truth, and delicious aroma, not to mention taste!

You can always adjust the soup with more water if it is too thick, and add salt and other flavourings from your pantry.

Image via VickiW

But, this isn’t the end of the story. 

Those fridge leftovers have given us 8 good meals. Bob enjoyed a second-to-last cheese scone with our dinner tonight, zapped for 20 seconds in the microwave.  One left for tomorrow. This is really fast food.

These containers are frozen for the future.

Image via VickiW

Talk about convenient food. Reheating is easier and faster than bought soup. And we don’t need any chemical processes to give us flavour. 

A view from the balcony...

Image via VickiW

Just a peaceful duck couple today. There are many of them in the little creek just a stone’s throw from the balcony. 

The trees are losing their autumn coloured leaves. All too soon they will be bare again.