23 minute read
nibbles
Dim sum delight The joy of scratch-made dumplings at Boulder’s Formosa Bakery By JOHN LEHNDORFF
She had me at “dumplings.”
I had poked my head into Formosa Bakery, recently opened at 1305 Broadway on the Hill, to check out the pastries. What I discovered was a menu of dim sum treats wrapped in various kinds of dough made by Taiwan native Nancy Kao.
On a winter afternoon I tucked into a substantial steamed dumpling — sweet potato dough encasing chopped beef — in a rich miso gravy. I also pounced on steamed buns middled with barbecued pork.
On a return trip, I dipped shu mai — steamed dumplings — in soy chile sauce along with some perfect hot, crispy pork and chive potstickers. I have to get back to try the oyster omelet, the duck egg and red bean buns, and the thin Chinese scallion pancakes wrapped around barbecue pork “like a taco,” Nancy Kao says.
For 20 years she owned and cooked at Lee Yuan Chinese Restaurant in East Boulder until selling the business and retiring. “I stayed home for about two weeks, but it was a feeling I never had — I had nothing to do. So, I started to look around for a little place and found this shop,” Kao says.
She decided to focus on the street food items she had only served as specials and the dim sum goodies that were traditionally dished on weekends for dim sum brunch.
Kao makes everything from scratch, including all of the sauces, and won’t use the typical frozen dim sum items. She even plans on producing her own boba for drinks, wrinkling her nose at the packaged tapioca balls others employ.
After a few months Kao added a flip side to the menu featuring items her old customers at Lee Yuan were missing, including ChineseAmerican favorites plus specialties like sautéed green beans, sticky rice with chopped pork and daikon, and seriously good-for-you bone broth for her famous beef noodle soup, aromatic with garlic, ginger and spices.
The location comes with some challenges. She is virtually a one-woman kitchen with limited table service, and the parking nearby is almost always difficult. Chinese students are regular customers looking for a taste of home, but it remains undiscovered by most diners. Some folks suffering from an overabundance of caution have been avoiding eateries during the current health situation. I urge them to get their dumplings for takeout or delivery.
By the way, Formosa really is a bakery with Kao crafting muffins, egg custard tarts in sweet crusts, and sponge cakes in various flavors with whipped cream and fresh fruit toppings.
MARK YOUR CULINARY CALENDAR
With spring’s arrival, new dinners, classes and tastings are popping up across the region. Boulder private chef Valerio Castellano hosts a March 14 dinner with live music and four paired wines. Guests help with the cleanup at this private event in Lafayette. lvitaly.com … If you love maple syrup as much as I do, sign up for a brunch pop-up focused on maple syrups from Vermont and Washington at Coperta restaurant in Denver on March 21. copertadenver.com. … Also on March 21: Re-enactors will teach a fur trade-era cooking class featuring bannock, fry bread and pemmican cooked over an open fire at the Fort Vasquez Museum in Platteville. 970-785-2832
TASTE OF THE WEEK
For years, when people have asked me where they should go to sample some real Colorado Mexican fare, I’ve had one answer: Trek to the bright yellow El Taco de Mexico shack in Denver’s Santa Fe Arts District. The destination is known for authentic tacos filled with chopped, grilled meats on double corn tortillas with raw onion, cilantro, lime and chile de arbol tomatillo salsa. I always go for the ultimate, a chile relleno-stuffed burrito smothered with pork green chile, and sometimes a couple of eggs. It is quintessential comfort. Now, the James Beard Foundation is awarding El Taco de Mexico one of its 2020 America’s Classics Awards, honoring restaurants that are an integral part of the community and serve authentic fare. I’m worried people will go there expecting some fancy dining experience.
What you should know is that El Taco de Mexico is a slice of life worth appreciating in all its glory. The ambience at the limited number of seats available consists of watching a crew of these incredible, steely-eyed women whipping out food for people packed in like sardines. It’s a keeper. FORMOSA BAKERY (1305 Broadway on the Hill) has much to offer, from dim sum to beef noodle soup.
WORDS TO CHEW ON
“It’s OK to mispronounce things when you order at an ethnic restaurant. It’s OK to ask questions if you don’t know. You don’t have to be an expert in everything, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep learning.” — Soleil Ho
John Lehndorff hosts Radio Nibbles on KGNU (88.5 FM, kgnu.org).
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Dear Dan: Married 40-year-old gay guy here. I hate beards — the look, the feel, the smell — and I miss the good old days when the only beards gay dudes had were metaphorical. When I got back from a long business trip, my hot, sexy, previously smooth husband of many years was sporting a beard. Unsurprisingly, I hate it and find it to be a complete turnoff. However, he says this is controlling behavior on my part, it’s his body and his choice, and he’s hurt that I’m rejecting him. He also says I’ll get used to it and he doesn’t plan to keep it forever. I agree that it’s his body and his choice, but I think he should still take me into consideration, and that it’s actually him who’s rejecting me, by choosing the beard over me. What’s your take? —Spouse’s Hairiness Averts Virile Erection
Dear SHAVE: I’m with you, SHAVE, but I’m also with him. It is his body, and growing a beard is something he can choose to do with the face section of his body. But that my body/my choice stuff cuts both ways: Your body is yours, and what you do with your body is your choice. And you can choose not to press your body against his — or press your face against his — while he’s got a beard. If long business trips are a regular part of your life, maybe he could grow his beard out in your absence and shave when you get home. (Full disclosure: I have a pronounced anti-beard bias, which means I’m not exactly impartial.) Dear Dan: I’m a 32-year-old woman married to a 45-year-old man. We’ve been together for 10 years. At the beginning of our relationship, I told him smoking was a deal breaker for me because he was a former smoker. Well, the asshole started smoking again this year. I’m pissed about this, and it has affected my desire for him. This is complicated further by the fact that for most of our relationship, we’ve had very mismatched libidos, with mine being much higher. He has always said that I could get my needs met elsewhere, as sex just wasn’t that important to him. Well, last year I started exploring extramarital relationships, and now I have a boyfriend that I’m eager to fuck. Can you guess who is now interested in fucking me? My husband, Mr. Sex Isn’t Important. Turns out, he’s very into fucking me after I’ve fucked another dude. But I only want so much sex, and I don’t want to fuck a smoker. I feel obligated to have sex with my husband, though. My question is, am I? He didn’t feel obligated to have sex with me more than once a month for nine years, which made me feel shitty and undesirable. (Also, we have kids. Hence the marriage and why I’m not going to leave.)
—Seriously Hate Ash Mouth
Dear SHAM: You aren’t obligated to have sex with your husband — you aren’t obligated to have sex with anyone, ever. But I assume you don’t want to be left any more than you want to leave, SHAM. And if you refuse to fuck your husband because he broke the deal you made a decade ago — and because you’re pissed about nine years of sexual neglect (legit grounds) — he might decide to leave you. So while you don’t have to fuck this ash-hole, you might want to fuck this ash-hole. But until he quits smoking, you could reasonably refuse to kiss him or sleep in the same room with him. (Smokers don’t realize how bad it smells — how bad they smell — and just how thoroughly they can stink up a room, even one they never light up in.)
One follow-up question: Did your husband always know this about himself — did he know he was turned on by the thought of you being with other dudes — or did he realize it only after you started fucking this other dude? If he knew it all along, and his encouragement to get your “needs met elsewhere” was a dishonest and manipulative attempt to force his kink on you, SHAM, you have even more right to be pissed. But if he realized this turned him on only after you started fucking other dudes — if he was as sur prised by how you getting a boyfriend uncorked his libido as you were both surprised and annoyed by it — you might want to forgive him.
On the Lovecast, let’s think about same-sex animal behavior: savagelovecast.com.
Send emails to mail@savagelove. net, follow Dan on Twitter @ FakeDanSavage and visit ITMFA.org. BY DAN SAVAGE
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A dank new super-bug killer... maybe by Will Brendza
Scientists don’t discover new naturally occurring antibiotic molecules very often — and the last place anyone probably would have guessed to look for the next big one was in cannabis plants. However, at Eric Brown’s “Drugs and Bugs Lab” at McMaster University in Canada, the last place most people look is the first one they try to explore. Brown, a biochemistry and biomedical sciences professor, prides himself and his lab on their out-of-the-box solutions to pharmaceutical problems.
“My research group is really focused on taking new, unconventional approaches to problems,” he says. They like to get a little crazy with their science. “And cannabis seemed just crazy enough.”
They began their experiment with a simple enough hypothesis: that cannabis plants don’t produce cannabinoids for human ingestion; that is, cannabinoids have to serve a greater natural purpose, likely to protect the plant. From what? That was what the scientists wanted to find out.
So, they investigated 18 different commercially available cannabinoids and started testing them against a common and notoriously challenging-to-combat superbug known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
“This bug kind of does everything from causing boils to causing devastating blood and respiratory infections,” Brown says. “It’s kind of a famous drugresistant, stubborn, scary bug for any infectious disease clinician.”
While many of the cannabinoids exhibited some level of antibiotic activity against MRSA, when the scientists tested cannabigerol (CBG) specifically, they were really impressed by the results. It was surprisingly effective against MRSA.
So, they decided to take the study of this so-far unresearched cannabinoid a few steps further:
Reproducing the CBG molecule in concentrate form in quantity and started testing it more rigorously against different infections.
Brown’s lab determined that CBG works as effectively against MRSA as the most potent antibiotic currently available to fight that infection: Vancomycin. Unlike Vancomycin, though, CBG works against MRSA by disturbing the organism’s cell membranes. That presents a slight issue of toxicity to humans, since it might affect our cell membranes as well. And Brown is up-front that they did notice some toxicity to human red-zones.
But, he adds, Vancomycin also exhibited this property, and its developers were able to circumvent that issue with relative ease. “Certainly, we wouldn’t be pursuing this if that wasn’t possible.”
On top of having an effect against MRSA, they found CBG was also effective at both preventing “biofilms” and eliminating existing ones. Brown explains that biofilms are collective “communities” of different micro-organisms (including bacteria, fungi and proteins) that adhere to surfaces, like contact lenses, catheters, dental equipment and surgical body-part replacement pieces.
When introduced into the body, these infections can be particularly tricky to fight, Brown says. CBG,
however, demonstrated a therapeutic window for fighting the infections that those biofilms cause. “CBG proved to be marvelous at tackling pathogenic bacteria,” Brown says. “The findings suggest real therapeutic potential for cannabinoids as antibiotics.”
All of that is great news. Between the booming human population of planet Earth, our everevolving bacteria assailants and society’s overuse of antibiotics, the threat of a serious pandemic outbreak is constantly on the rise (and, with coronavirus, is not really just a threat anymore.)
That’s why Brown’s research will undoubtedly motivate even more research. The slow cultural (and even slower legal) acceptance of cannabis, has meant that legitimate science around this substance has been effectively stunted for generations. Now, though, that’s starting to change, and in a place like Canada, where recreational cannabis has been legalized at a national level, scientists and interested parties now have the legal leeway to start exploring the medicinal potential of cannabis and its cannabinoids.
Brown isn’t naïve about the implications of this discovery, though. He understands that it’s going to be a long time before cannabis-based antibiotics hit the shelves of pharmacies all over the nation.
“It’s a really long road to develop a drug,” Brown says. “We’re in the process right now of doing a systematic modification of CBG, to see if we can come up with a better version of CBG, a kind of functionally different structure.”
Essentially, they’re using the framework of the natural CBG molecule and rebuilding it to exhibit the highest antibacterial potential while minimizing human toxicity. And that won’t be fast or even necessarily easy — but it is still very exciting.
“Nothing’s simple in science or discovery,” Brown says. “But we’re also pretty jazzed about this.”
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Trump’s drug budget: More of the same by Paul Danish
The Trump administration’s drug budget is out — $35.7 billion worth of trying the same stuff over and over again and expecting different results. According to the Drug War Chronicle website, $17.1 billion goes to “domestic law enforcement, interdiction and international drug control efforts,” aka the failed war on drugs. But, hey, it’s politically easier to send good money after bad than to admit the magnitude of the failure.
Some $18.6 billion is directed toward prevention and treatment, which sort of works sometimes and sometimes doesn’t. Still, it’s money better spent than what’s spent on the enforcement side. “The FY 2021 budget request sends a strong message that, although we’ve seen signs of real progress, the Trump administration will not let up in our efforts to save American lives,” Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) director Jim Carroll said in a statement accompanying the budget release. “Whether it is going after drug traffickers, getting people struggling with addiction the help they need, or stopping drug misuse before it starts, this budget request ensures our partners will have the resources needed to create safer and healthier communities across the nation.” Ho. Freaking. Hum. While most of the treatment and prevention request is directed toward treatment, $2.135 billion is intended
for prevention. Drug War Chronicle points out that while we tend to think of “prevention” in terms of education, the administration includes coercive and punitive “drug-free workplace programs” and “drug testing in various setting, including athletic activities, schools and the workplace.”
The budget moves a lot of money around among various drug war agencies. For instance, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, aka, the office of the “Drug Czar” in the White House, would have its budget cut from $261 million to $4.3 million. Trump has been trying to get rid of the office since he assumed the presidency, but Congress has always blocked him.
Other expenditures under the budget include:
• $9.95 billion for domestic law enforcement, including $3.4 billion for incarcerating federal drug war prisoners
• $3.4 billion for the Department of Homeland Security’s customs and border protection efforts.
• A $154 million reduction in the Pentagon’s international drug enforcement spending from $354 million to $200 million
• A 15% increase in the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement to $441 million
• A 31% increase in the Justice Department’s overseas spending to $499.7 million, most of it for the
DEA’s international activities
The budget shows the war on drugs has turned into a sprawling bureaucratic parasite that has embedded itself throughout the federal government like a tape worm. There are probably members of Congress who think it is actually working, but there are probably more who know it isn’t and don’t have the stomach or even the interest to root it out.
• • • • According to Kyle Jaeger at Marijuana Moment, Joe Biden mistakenly said he would “legalize” marijuana and then corrected himself — twice in the last few weeks.
Biden told KMOV-TV in St. Louis that “There is evidence that we have to do some more study on impact on mental acuity... I would legalize — I would decriminalize and I would provide for the ability of researchers to get in and make sure we got it right this time.”
Last month he made a similar slip of the tongue in an exchange with Don Murphy of the Marijuana Policy Project before the New Hampshire primary. He said that “it is at the point where [pot] has to be basically legalized” but then went on to insist that further research be done before he would commit to actually pursuing legalization.
Biden and Michael Bloomberg were the only two Democratic presidential candidates who were opposed to the legalization of marijuana.
Biden has had other problems with the marijuana issue. For years he claimed he opposed legalizing marijuana because it was a gateway drug to hard drug use. But after he got scorched for that position during the Democratic debates, he abruptly reversed himself and insisted pot isn’t a gateway drug.
The technical term for this sort of thing is speaking out of both sides of your mouth, but a more likely explanation is that Biden has trouble remembering his previous statements about a particular issue, so he makes up new ones as needed.
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