Daniel's Horse Burger

Last week I was at a restaurant and I ordered a "Horse Burger." As I ate my wonderful Horse Burger not only did I wonder how my delicious horse escaped the glue factory, but how horses came to America. I went home and decided to do research on the history of horses, and how they came to America.

I found out that when the Spanish traveled to America they brought horses along with them. This exchange was known as the Columbian Exchange. The Columbian Exchange caused the trade of many products.

After eating my horse burger I felt very sick. This worried me because I feared that I may have contracted one of the many diseases that were spread in the Columbian exchange from eating my tasty horse burger. I feared that I could have a disease such as small pox, or measles. And now as I lay here on my death bed, I wonder when it will be that I will become part of the earth that horses run on, unless the horses are all in a glue factory, cause horses can't run if they're  in a glue factory.

 

 

 

Yummy Yellow Curry Ashlyn Macie

Ashlyn Macie

Mr. Benschine

Ap World History

13 December 2013

 

Yellow Curry

 

A long time ago, there was a little boy named Abhijat Yuvraj. He always wanted to be just like his father when he got older. Abhijat's father was a businessperson; he would go into the big city every weekend to sell the crops grown on their farm. His father was a very well known man in town and was favored by the gods according to the townsmen. Abhijat wandered to himself, "Why not start now?" Abhijat went to his back yard to pick a crop that would be easiest for him to start with. First he went over to the potatoes, which he remembered his dad telling him he got them from the Philippines, thought they would be too heavy to carry around, but they were very tasty. Then he thought that maybe red peppers would be exciting, his dad told him they came from the Americas. However, they might be a little too spicy for customers wanting to buys a lot of them. Then, maybe he thought, something more simple from his hometown India would be much more convenient. He decided to start with cinnamon, onion, cumin spice, and turmeric because these ingredients were very primitive.  His father let him come to the market one day and set up a little shop. Abhijat's little business turned into a worldwide exchange from the old world into the new world. That is how the yellow curry was able to get in front of me today.

 

 - Ashlyn Macie

            Here I was popping tags, and bottles in the Big Apple. I have been to some of the best Italian restaurants, but this one, Ai Fiori, the food here takes me back to Trentino-Alto Adige. The spaghetti blue crab with lemon, bottarga, and chilies are enticing to my taste buds, which leads me to this. As I was eating my meal, I began to wonder where chilies are from. I mean these chilies are crispy, juicy, and tastes like no other thing I can think of.  Crispy and juicy does not sound like something of the French and Italian culture, both being of the Old World, so what about chilies?

            I did some research on chilies when I arrived back home, and this is what I found. Chilies are a spice which gained universal significance as one of the few spices to travel from the New to Old World. Chilies are the fruit of the Capsicum genus of flowering plants, and range from sweet bell peppers, which have no heat, to the Naga chili, which are currently the world's hottest pepper. Chilies come from the Americas, where they have been refined and were probably a vital part of the Mesoamerican diet. For example, the great amount of Vitamin C in red peppers increases the uptake of non-red blood cell iron in diets that has little to no meat.

            Christopher Columbus encountered chilies on his first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492, but he did not bring any chilies back on the voyage. Columbus wrote of a pepper that Natives called Ají, which was better in taste and nature than ordinary peppers. It was the Portuguese in 1498, who took the chili pepper, most particularly the piri-piri chili, to Portugal and Cape Verde Islands. As Portugal sought to exploit their foothold in the Americas, they brought chilies to West Africa and African slaves to Brazil. Between 1498 and 1549, chilies had spread east, over the Silk Route and through Portuguese conquests in India, Spice Islands, China and Japan so by 1549 chilies were known as far as Japan.

            Back to me sitting at home, I found this information quite interesting and decided to make spaghetti blue crab for dinner tomorrow. Below is the recipe I used.

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

3 cloves garlic, peeled, smashed and minced

1 28-ounce can peeled tomatoes

2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley

1/2 teaspoon red-pepper flakes

4 large blue crabs

Kosher salt

1 pound dry spaghetti

½ cup fresh basil leaves

Freshly ground black pepper to taste.

1. Heat the oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. When it begins to shimmer, add garlic and cook for 1 minute or until it is fragrant. Add the tomatoes, crushing them by hand as you do so, as well as the parsley and red-pepper flakes. Stir and allow to come to a simmer.

2. Turn the heat up to high and add the crabs. When the sauce starts to boil, lower the heat to a gentle simmer and cook for 30 minutes or so. Remove the crabs to a serving bowl and cover to keep warm.

3. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until it is firm — Drain.

4. Place the pasta in a large serving bowl or platter and drizzle with olive oil. Pour the crab sauce over the pasta, scatter the basil leaves over the top and season aggressively with black pepper. Serve with crabs on the side and lots of bread. Serves 4

-Dionna Green

 

Authentic Tandoori Chicken

                                I had the best experience of my life on my last night trip to India which was by the way really short since I had to go to school today. I was so hungry by the time that I had to eat a chicken that I found on my way. It was cooked into the mouth watering Tandoori chicken. It consists of salt, onion, lemon, garam masala, cilantro, plain yogurt, clove garlic, cayenne pepper and ginger root. However, I had to wait 1 hour until it was done cooked which was not good at all. But the waiting was worth it because the dish tasted amazing.

                                During the wait, I thought about the Columbian Exchange Food Extra Credit we did in class. I realized that many of the ingredients used in this dish have traveled between the Americas and to Europe. The chicken is from the Old to New World. Onions, salt and lemon are from old to new. Pepper was from new to old. Lemons' origin was said to be from Asia and it was distributed by the Arabs in the Mediterranean region. The origin of onions is from Central Asia and chicken is from Southeast Asia. Thanks to ships, any kind of food can be eaten anywhere!

               

Tandoori chicken

 

-Hima Velaga

Selena's picture

Caribbean Jerk perk chicken (Selena)

I had the best time of my life. A week ago, I took my private broom and flew to the Caribbean islands, and boy oh boy it was a rush. By the time I got there I was so hungry, I could eat a cow. Luckily, I saw a restaurant just on the broader of an airport. I flew over to them asked to talk to talk to the owner. I asked him what was their special and they Caribbean jerk perk chicken. It consisted of :

 1 red onion chopped

o   4 green onion tops, chopped

o   Salt and pepper

o   4 teaspoon ground ginger and nutmeg

o   I roasting chicken, cut in half

o   ½ cup lime juice

o   Scotch bonnet peppers

It was so hot and the chicken was a jerk. My mouth was on fire.  Apparently the chicken, onion, and lemon hitched a ride from the Old world to the New World and they were exhausted. Also, the salt hitched a ride to, so the jerk perk was too sweet.

All About Pumpkin Pie (Gillian)

I went to a restaurant right before Thanksgiving that was serving the best pumpkin pie I had ever tasted! If you were to ask for my opinion, I'd say to go just for the sake of the dessert. The rest of the food they offered was alright, but the pumpkin pie really made the experience worthwhile. It had supposedly been made from scratch from a secret recipe passed down in the family business, although the basic recipe is simple; pumpkin puree, egg yolks, sugar, cinnamon, spices, and so on.

 

It's always important to know where a food originated from though, right? Pumpkins had been exchanged from the New World to the Old World. Sugar, also commonly used in pumpkin pie, had been exchanged from the Old World to the New World. It explains why pumpkin pie has become an essential dish for Thanksgiving; most dishes used for Thanksgiving dinner use foods that had come from the New World to the Old World!

 

In addition, they also served turkey (which had also come from the New World to the Old World). It wasn't that bad, but it was a little bit dry.

 

 

THE FREINKINSHINE BURGER (Andreas)

Last Saturday I experienced the most horrifying, gruesome hamburger I have ever seen, THE FREINKINSHINE. This burger was jam packed with the most wicked habaneros grown on this universe. In fact, they were grown on the mysterious dwarf planet called Benschized. Not only were there extremely spicy peppers, but this so called "sandwich" included a weird variation of cow meat called frenschit, to top it off it was marinated in bensauce, THE URINE IN THE COW!!! At the restaurant, my cook, familiarly named Beddie Frenschine, said "I'll see you on the other side", who knows why. Just looking at the thing made my bowels move. After I took the first bite, I went unconscious, and then I woke up on my toilet with the face of the fry cook tattooed on my stomach.

You are probably wondering the origins of these ingredients used in the burger, like the weird cow meat and ridiculously spicy pepper. Well, luckily I know exactly where these are from, I don't know why, but the fry cook knew all this history stuff about the origin of the ingredients and how they were incorporated in the Columbian exchange. He told me that at first, these items were not found in the same place, the Columbian exchange moved them to different places. Well the cows originated in the "Old World", which is generally the region of Afro-Eurasia, and the peppers, though not found on this planet at first, were found in the "New World". The "New World" consists of the Americas, or as the current inhabitants of it refer to it as 'Murica. During the Columbian Exchange, these items were moved from place to place and are now found all around the earth.

The Mystery of The Pineapple-Sophie Fineberg

Hello world, this is Sophie, food critic extraordinaire. This weekend I was sitting at the dinner table when all of a sudden my mother placed a large cake in front of me. This is a reoccurring event in my house since my mother loves to bake. Usually she makes regular looking cakes but this cake had yellow circle on the top. I was confused about what these yellow circles were so I asked her. She told me the cake was made with pineapple. I was confused and a tad disgusted at the fact that there was fruit in the cake, especially pineapple because I am not a fan. I mean who would make a cake and then put fruit on it?  Even though I am a food critic I have never come in contact with a cake like this one. But I trusted my mother's taste and tried a piece. It was not as bad as I thought. I still wanted to know who thought of this idea and I knew my mother would have absolutely no idea so I turned to the only place I knew I would get the answer, The Internet.

I went online to search where this interesting delicacy came from and the first page that came up was about the Columbian Exchange. I had to click on the page because the thought of a pineapple cake originating from the Columbian exchange seemed a bit farfetched. It turns out that the website was not talking about the cake; it was talking about the pineapples. Since I had started reading the website I decided to finish it. It turns out that pineapples originated in the New World, specifically Southern Brazil and Paraguay, and travels all the way to the old world. This interregional trading system was called the Columbian Exchange and it occurred when the Europeans decided to send people over to the Americas.  Columbus decided to name it this because of its pine cone shape. As soon as this oddly shaped fruit reached the Old world it became popular and everyone wanted a taste.

A traumatic experiance--Danielle Dinberg

 

Danielle here, reporting to you on what may have been the most traumatic experience of my life. The other day, I was kindly invited to indulge in a delicious meal cooked by none other than Mr. Benschine. Knowing full well about his love for food, I accepted the invitation with the hopes of being treated to a feast. As the first course came out, I saw a beautiful salad with iceberg lettuce, finely chopped carrots, cucumber, and a light vinaigrette dressing. But after taking a bite, I tasted a familiar and horrifying taste… BANANAS.  I quickly pushed the first course aside, hoping the rest of the meal would be better. However, to my horror, the feast soon progressed into my biggest nightmare. As the main course arrived, I was disgusted to taste a steak cooked to perfection… except for the sickening sliced yellow fruit that adorned it. Let me tell you, by this point of the meal, I was in tears. But not wanting to offend Mr. Benschine and sacrifice my hard earned grades, I decided to keep it together. All I could do was pray that dessert could save the meal (and my sanity), but I wasn't so lucky. As a finale to my already terrible experience, for dessert, I was served a whopping banana split complete with chocolate syrup. It was too much for me to handle, not even my grades were worth this experience!

                Hoping to minimize the damage and please Mr. Benschine, I decided to analyze where each ingredient came from.  Starting with the salad, carrots, cucumbers and lettuce originated in the Old World and were both brought to the New World. In the main course, steak, coming from cows, originated in the Old World before cows were brought to the Americas. As for the banana split dessert, 'ice cream' would have come from the Old World, because milk comes from cows! The chocolate syrup however, would have started in the New World, because a main ingredient, Cacao, was an item exported to the Old World.

Let me tell you, I DO NOT ever, recommend eating a meal cooked by Mr. Benschine.

--Danielle Dinberg

Michael Swayne

Michael Swayne

Gladys Knights Chicken and Waffles

There are so many different and delicious restaurants in the Atlanta Metro area but one of my all-time favorites is Gladys Knights Chicken and Waffles. My family and I tend to go there a whole lot, probably 3 times a month at the least. We have been there so many times; I have the full menu memorized. I always tend to order the midnight train with a side of macaroni and cheese. The mac and cheese is so good it's like my favorite food. As I was in the process of eating my meal, I began to think about what I have learned earlier that day in my AP World History class. We learned about "The Columbian change".  The Columbian Exchange was a widespread exchange of food, as well as many other things, between the America and Afro-Eurasia .Therefore as a food critic, I began to wonder where mac and cheese originated from.

After doing some research I discovered that macaroni and cheese was a part of the Columbian exchange. I learned that the macaroni came from the old world, Europe, to the new world, America. This is because Grains was one of the things that were transferred from the old world to the new world along with other things such as Livestock, Many fruits, and onions. Because cows produce milk, cheese was also one of the things that were introduced to the new world by the old world.

This particular visit to my favorite restaurant ended up being more fun and interesting because I actually learned something and my parents actually believed me when I say I pay attention in class.

Ratatouille food blog

Ratatouille; Not just a Movie

The other night I was sitting in my living room after a long day of school, flipping channels, and being a genuinely bored teenager. While flipping channels I stumbled upon the Disney movie Ratatouille, an adorable animation about a rat who cooks french food. Then it dawned on me, most people who watch the movie Ratatouille don't even know that it is a dish. I flipped out my smartphone and looked up "Ratatouille." Of course the first thing that pops up is a animated film, I scroll down and then I see the recipe for a delicious vegetable stew originating in Provence, Ratatouille. I found the solution to my boredom, I looked up the recipe and my mom and I began to cook up a storm

I was very interested in all the simplicity of the dish. The dish itself is very old, tracing back to 14th century. The main ingredients are zucchini, olive oil, tomatoes, and yellow squash. Since the dish does originate in the 14th century it makes me wonder how these ingredients play a role in the Columbian exchange.When I researched the ingredients I found that both olive oil and eggplant comes from the Old world to the New world. Tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini were traded from New world to the Old world. All these delicious aspects combine to form an historic delicacy.

Once my dish was complete I had a beautiful masterpiece. The colors were so exuberant and the smell was unbelievable. For some protein, I added a piece of Cod on top, a fish that came from the Old world to the New world as well. It was certainly a Bon Appetite!

I(Talia)n Experience

  After studying for three hours for the AP World History final I decided to feed myself. Hungry for some spaghetti Bolognese I drove myself to the Italian restaurant called Carbonara Trattoria. The smell of basil, garlic, and onions filled the atmosphere as soon as you walked through the door. As I sat down to read the menu my eyes immediately went to their delicious bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Reading the ingredients, to see if it was kosher, I started to notice that this meal was full of ingredients from the Columbian Exchange, which I had been studying about earlier. The meal contained oil, tomatoes, onions, beef, sugar, parsley, salt, pepper, and spaghetti all ingredients that were traded between the Americas and Afro Eurasia during the Columbian Exchange. Spaghetti Bolognese is a meal I recommended to anyone that wants a delightful meal filled with a variety of ingredients from the New to Old and Old to New Worlds.  

-Talia Kowalsky

 

Eitan Be Trashin Dat Chocolate

Today I went to The Dollar Tree and was served a box of very bad chocolate. While eating this chocolate, I cried because of how bad it tasted. I am pretty sure there was actually a little bit of mold on it. I looked down at the package/wrapper and it said that the ingredients were milk, cacao and sugar. From my previous knowledge (because I'm a genius), I knew that the cacao came from the New World. Chocolate is produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree which was cultivated in Mexico, Central America and Northern South America. Sugar came from the Old World to the New World. It originated from Africa but was then brought over to the Caribbean and cultivated there. Cattle originated in the Old World and were brought over to the New World during the Columbian Exchange because there were no large animals in the New World besides buffalo. Milk comes from cow.

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What Does the Lily Say? Tea is for Terrific!

Tea: the most heavenly concoction on the planet. Tea is made from a celestial blend various herbs, leaves, and plants, to make the most incredible hot beverage known to man. As I drank my cup of tea, I noticed several ingredients: vanilla, citrus, lemon in particular, and black tea. I then thought of the vast and extensive history of tea: ancient Chinese emperors were the first to drink tea thousands of years ago for its medicinal qualities.

I then began to ponder, when did tea first reach North America all the way from Asia? As I began to research, I discovered that these several tea components, black tea and citrus, were exchanged between the Old World and the New World. Vanilla, on the other hand, was exchanged from the New World to the Old World. The New world consisted of North and South America, while the Old world consisted of Asia, Europe, and Africa. This diffusion of ingredients made it possible for North American tea fanatics like myself to engage in the glorious experience of drinking tea. History is certainly my "cup of tea"!

Eitan Be Trashin Dat Chocolate

Today I went to The Dollar Tree and was served a box of very bad chocolate. While eating this chocolate, I cried because of how bad it tasted. I am pretty sure there was actually a little bit of mold on it. I looked down at the package/wrapper and it said that the ingredients were milk, cacao and sugar. From my previous knowledge (because I'm a genius), I knew that the cacao came from the New World. Chocolate is produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree which was cultivated in Mexico, Central America and Northern South America. Sugar came from the Old World to the New World. It originated from Africa but was then brought over to the Caribbean and cultivated there. Cattle originated in the Old World and were brought over to the New World during the Columbian Exchange because there were no large animals in the New World besides buffalo. Milk comes from cow.

A Day in the Life (and food) of Maddie

My favorite restaurant, hands down, is Marlow's Tavern, which is convienient considering that it is a five minute drive from my house. I am not one who likes change very much, so it makes sense that every time that I go out to eat there I always order the same thing: a plain, juicy grilled chicken sandwich on a wheat bun that absorbs the tangy taste with frech, crispy, thin-cut french fries. I know what you might be thinking-- Really Maddie? Such a plain meal? Just chicken, bread, and fries? Way to be healthy. What can I say? I just am not into fancy foods.

Anyways, on my most recent trip to Marlow's, I could not get a lesson that I learned in AP World History out of my head. I kept thinking about the Columbian Exchange, and how my food is probably more well traveled than I am. My chicken traveled to my plate all the way from the Old World! I would love to go to the Old World and experience life there, so needless to say I am a little jealous of my chicken. The bun (wheat of course, gotta be a little healthy) also traveled from the Old World! I am sure that the chicken and wheat were a package deal though, because they taste so incredibly good together. During the Columbian Exchange, potatoes traveled from the New World to the Old World, so I hope that I have seen more of the world that my greasy little guilty pleasures. I am sure that my french fries did not travel to the Old World and back to the New World to end up here, so it makes me feel a little better.

All of that thinking made me hungry, so I decided to stop thinking and devour my comfort food instead.