Cuisine: Casian Seafood, John’s Restaurant’s Figs with Mascarpone, and a Taste of Summer

by JOHN LEHNDORFF Casian Seafood

Many great tastes come to mind when we think of Asian cuisine, but sausage is seldom one of them. Over the years I’ve sampled some lap cheong, the thin Chinese preserved sausages, but almost all were packaged and imported from China. I raised my eyebrows when I read that Lafayette’s Casian Seafood restaurant had scratch-made artisan sausage on a unique menu featuring Hmong dishes from Laos, and Cajun favorites from Louisiana. One taste and I was wowed—these sausages are like an Asian fl avor fest captured inside a big grilled bratwurst. The kitchen grinds juicy pork belly with fresh ginger, lemongrass and zesty Thai chili peppers for a legit mouthwatering experience. It was served with a fi ery dipping sauce made with fi sh sauce, plus sides of sticky rice and house-made kimchi. We also sampled a bowl of true-to-its-form seafood and sausage jambalaya and a refreshing lettuce-wrapped fusion of shrimp ceviche and larb, the popular Southeast Asian salad. Owners Dau Xiong and Maria Nguyen also serve shrimp and seafood boils, fried oysters, Cajun fried rice, Cornish game hens, papaya salad with fried pork skin, banh mi and fried-fi sh po’boy sandwiches. The food has intrigued so many diners since the restaurant opened in Lafayette that it received a semi-fi nalist nomination for the 2022 James Beard Awards.

Boulder Recipe Flashback: John’s Restaurant

In the Glenn Miller Ballroom in CU’s UMC building, Boulder’s culinary community gathers annually for the Taste of the Nation, a walk-around restaurant sampling event that benefi ts local hunger relief organizations like Community

Food Share, and the national efforts of Share Our Strength. In 1995, a group of volunteers created the Taste of Boulder

Cookbook featuring recipes from favorite local restaurants. Chef John

Bizzarro of the much-loved John’s

Restaurant (now the site of River and Woods) contributed the following recipe.

John’s Figs with Mascarpone, Almonds and Port

About 16 large almonds (regular or Marcona) 8 fresh ripe fi gs (4 whole, 4 quartered) 8 ounces mascarpone cheese 6 teaspoons (approx.) powdered sugar 6 ounces port wine

Toast almonds in a skillet or oven. Score the four whole fi gs by cutting an “X” in the top, three quarters of the way down, and separate the sections so they look like fl ower petals. Stir powdered sugar and two ounces Port into mascarpone. Spoon mascarpone (in a dome shape) into four bowls. Place four almonds in the middle of each fl ower. Arrange fi g quarters around the edge. Spoon one ounce of Port over each dessert. Serves four.

Culinary Calendar: Taste of Summer

Dine out on April 28, 2022 for Dining Out For Life at participating restaurants that include Santo, Blackbelly, Avery Brewing and The Post—all of which will be donating 25% of the day’s sales to Project Angel Heart, an organization providing medically tailored meals to Coloradans living with life-threatening illness. diningoutforlife.com … The Denver Botanic Gardens has reopened its authentic Japanese Tea House for tea ceremony experiences on weekends from June to September. https://bit.ly/3iH3A0H … Plan ahead: Botanica — A Festival of Plants is June 18 and 19 at Lafayette’s Three Leaf Farm. botanicafestival.com … Slow Food’s summer food on the farm gathering with tours, burgers and a campfi re is June 25 at Longmont’s Community Table Farm. slowfoodboulder.org … Eagle Mushroom & Wild Food Festival, Aug. 5-7, with classes, forays and food. eaglemushroomfest.com

The alt-green pharmacy

In 2017, Medicaid paid $29.1 billion for prescription drugs—amounting to 5.1% of total Medicaid costs that year. And according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), prescription drugs are expected to see one of the largest growth rates in annual spending among any health care goods or services over the next decade. That’s an expensive burden for a federal program that uses taxpayer money. And while politicians in

Washington argue over healthcare spending policies and how to cut costs while still providing federal aid and services, new research published in Health Economics suggests there is at least one very accessible, very achievable way to bring those Medicaid prescription drug costs down. And (you guessed it) it has to do with cannabis legalization. Shyam Raman is a researcher and public health economist at Cornell University. He recently co-authored a paper with Ashley Bradford, who studies public policy at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, in which they examined how recreational cannabis laws (RCL) affected rates of prescription drug use among Medicaid enrollees.

The study was based on previous research conducted by Bradford that found states with medical cannabis laws (MCL) saw significant reductions in Medicaid prescription rates. Her 2018 study concluded that if every state adopted MCL, the programmatic savings would be between $1.4 and $1.7 billion annually. “So our prior going into this was that we would see similar reductions in states with [RCL].” Raman says of the study he and Bradford published this April, titled “Recreational cannabis legalizations associated with reduction in prescription drug utilization among Medicaid Enrollees.” For the study they looked at Medicaid State Drug Utilization Data (SDUD), examining 1,834 observations across all 50 U.S. states and D.C. from 2011 to 2019. They then compared the rates of prescription drug use in prohibition states to the 11 states that have legalized RCL: Alaska, Colorado, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington state and D.C. The results confi rmed their hypothesis, according to Raman. They found “signifi cant reductions in the volume of prescriptions within the drug classes that align with the medical indications for pain, depression, anxiety, sleep, psychosis and seizures,” the study says. RCL appeared to correlate with an 11% decrease in prescriptions for depression medications, a 12% reduction in anxiety medication prescriptions, 8% reduction in pain medication prescriptions, 10% reduction for seizure medication prescriptions, and 11% reduction in prescriptions for both psychosis and sleep medications. Raman and Bradford aren’t the only researchers to make observations like these. Another study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in 2021 looked at how state cannabis laws affected opioid prescriptions by orthopedic surgeons

in those states. That study found that states with legal States with legal weed see dramatic reductions in prescription drug medical cannabis saw a full 20% decrease in opioid prescribing. use, suggesting it’s a viable alternative to numerous medications A third study, published in the Journal of Health Ecoby Will Brendza nomics, analyzed a dataset of over 1.5 billion opioid prescriptions between 2011 and 2018. That paper concludes that recreational cannabis access laws were associated with an 11.2% reduction in those drug prescriptions, and medical cannabis was associated with a 4.2% reduction. “[These] results have important implications,” Raman and Bradford’s discussion section notes. “The reductions in drug utilization that we fi nd provide information about potential cost savings for state medicaid programs.” Raman suggests that recreational cannabis legalization could bring down Medicaid’s $29.1 billion prescription bill. That equates to less taxpayer money spent on opioids, antidepressants, epilepsy medications and other prescriptions, which could bring Medicare premiums down across the board. “Our results also indicate potential harm reduction [opportunities], as pharmaceutical drugs often come with dangerous side-effects or—as with opioids—potential for misuse,” the discussion section continues. That is particularly useful for a country that is still in the midst of an opioid crisis. Just in 2021 there were 100,306 overdose deaths in the U.S.—28.5% higher than in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recreational cannabis offers people a non-addictive natural alternative to those drugs. One that people are actively using despite the fact it isn’t covered by any health insurance plans, Raman points out. In the end, their results just raise a host of new questions necessitating more research, he says. Like quantitatively, how effective is cannabis as an alternative to these other meds? Why is it such a universal substitute across different classes of prescription drugs? And could cannabis help curb a national opioid crisis? For scientists like Raman and Bradford, those are all exciting new studies to pursue. But, they’re also studies that can’t be done until federal prohibition comes to an end. Until that happens, there’s really no way for researchers to get into the weeds of those deeper questions.