Flavor-Tripping with Miracle Berries

There was an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago about this amazing little berry that numbs your sour and bitter taste buds for up to 2 hours. The idea of eating something that could completely change the flavor of everything else that follows has stuck with me ever since I read about it.

Miracle fruit, miracle berry, magic fruit are some of the names that this little berry goes by (apparently the name ‘miracle’ berry comes from the glycoprotein that can be extracted from it called miraculin) and it has become the inspiration for Mr. Aliquo’s “flavor tripping parties” in New York where guests can go and experiment with this fruit. This is how it goes; you pop a berry, chew for 30 seconds to a minute and swallow. Miraculin binds to the tongue altering your taste buds so that a lemon tastes sweet, Tabasco sauce tastes like donut glaze, and lemon sorbet dropped into some Guinness tastes like a chocolate milkshake. HOW COOL IS THAT!

Now, there is probably a reason why things tastes sour and/or acidic – it’s probably not a good idea to make a habit of chugging vinegar; I’m sure it would wreak havoc on your stomach. That said, it would be great to be able to experience an ‘alternate universe’ where goat cheese tastes like cheesecake and bananas taste like… well, bananas. Yet most of us may never have the chance to because this berry is so hard to find.

Thanks to the NY Times article, a couple of places in New York City have already been added to Cook’s Compass as locations to find Miracle Berries and I’m sure there are many people out there who would be interested in finding them in their area. If you know where to find some, let everyone know at www.cookscompass.com. We’d all be grateful.

Reducing Our Carbon Food-Print

Andrew wrote an entry a few months ago about the distances produce may travel before arriving on our plates for consumption. I was just reading an article about reducing our carbon footprints and the picture that was painted for me just blew me away – so I thought I’d share…

In the article, Maribeth Crandell describes the trip that the beans for your coffee may have taken. She says:

Say you have a cup of coffee in front of you right now. Where did that coffee come from? Did you grow the beans yourself? Not likely. Let’s trace it backward from the grocery store shelf to the truck that brought it from, say, a field in Colombia. (Coffee is the second largest legal export commodity after oil. The United States drinks about one fifth of the world’s coffee.) After these beans are crushed and dried, they’re transported by freighter using Venezuelan oil to New Orleans, where the beans are roasted using natural gas from Texas. Then they’re taken to Seattle in an 18-wheeler which gets six miles per gallon of diesel at $4.50/gallon. A smaller truck takes the beans to the grocery store where you bought them.

(To read the whole article here is the link: http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/opinion/19030804.html)

Now, the reason this had such a strong impact on me was because of the amount of fuel needed for the transport of these coffee beans. With the global fuel crisis that we are currently in, it seems like a good idea to reduce how much fuel we consume, directly, and in this case, indirectly (not to mention the effects we would have on lowering fuel emissions.) It’s amazing to think about the power each of us has.

Anyway, getting to my point, if we buy our produce from local farmers, we can go a long way towards limiting how much we depend on ‘well-traveled’ goods. Obviously, we can’t get our coffee from local growers (if you can, you have to let me know about that), but there is such great produce being grown close by. Granted, sometimes people simply don’t know when or where these farmer’s markets (or any other sellers of locally grown produce) are. We hope that people will share their insights on Cook’s Compass and use some of the power they have to literally make huge changes for our planet.

A few recent developments

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, apologies for the intermittent nature of these posts! We’ve been working on a lot of cool new features, and generally getting the word out about Cooks Compass. Farmers markets are starting up and we are working on the best ways to include them in our search results.

Buying from farmers markets not only gets you the absolute freshest produce possible, but also supports local farms, and typically uses significantly less energy than buying from the grocery store.

Free listings for food store owners

One of our main goals at Cooks Compass is to bring the owners of good and interesting food stores and local markets together with our users — potential customers! So we’ve created the store owner section – it’s free to use for anyone who would like to promote their food store (pleass – only food stores for now!). If you own a food store, and would like to create a free web page that you can edit, please visit our free publicity for food stores section and create an account. We are a rapidly growing new site that has a feature that NOBODY else on the web offers — the ability to list the types of ingredients you sell and even the individual ingredients! We’ve developed some tools to make this task as easy as ever.

Some people have asked why we are doing this, and that it seems too good to be true – so there must be a catch. Well, there is no catch – it’s totally 100% free, but we both benefit from the listing. You (the store owner) tell us about your store. As more store owners use our site to describe their store, the more people who are looking for good stores come through. And that is how you help us grow as a site, and we help you grow your business.

So get started with your free online listing today!

Growing the blogroll, and blog partnerships

We’ve begun to grow the blogroll, and contact blogs who might be interested in partnering with us. There are a ton of great food-blogs out there, and we are looking for those that share our passion for interesting and exotic ingredients and/or exploring the local markets. We hope to offer bloggers and small recipe sites interactive tools that allow users to access the Cook’s Compass store finder functionality – so people can find and buy the ingredients for those great recipes we keep finding online. We also welcome comments and suggestions from bloggers (and non-bloggers too!) about how to make Cook’s Compass easier to use.

If you want to contact us directly, use the comments page here. If you have a food blog or recipe site, and are interested in partnering with us, we’d love to hear from you!

Store owners section

At long last, we’ve  unveiled the store owner’s section. Now people can sign up and use our free tools to promote their store. We hope this will be a win-win scenario for all involved, store owners will be able to inform our users about what they do, and our users will have more to look at on Cooks Compass. Of course, like all our services, this is free for store owners.

If you own or manage a store and would like to sign up for a free listing on Cooks Compass, Click here  to list your store.

We’d love to hear from you about this new feature, so send us any questions or comments after you’ve signed up!