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Summit Up 5-6-11: Eating tahini in our pickelhaube

Summit Up
Special to the Daily/Jen MillerThe professor in action: Dan Taylor covers a wide array of material discussed in Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" Wednesday at the second in the series of book discussions and other events presented by the Summit Reads community project. Taylor even got a chance to show his former classics professor chops to scrawl on the board in Greek!
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Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column now celebrating Seis de Mayo, which marks the day in the Mayan calendar when this one dude did something or other way back when. The details are unimportant. What matters is the modern celebration, and in this case, in this country, the way to celebrate Seis de Mayo is to don a Pickelhaube, eat a bunch of pepperoni Hot Pockets whilst standing in a kiddie wading pool full of tahini sauce.

OK, it’s not quite as fun, festive or delightful as your typical Cinco de Mayo celebration, but you can’t expect every day of the month to be a nonstop cavalcade of joyous celebration, can you?

Plus, tahini’s pretty good on a falafel sandwich – so long as you don’t get any of the stuff that was squishing between your toes. As for the Hot Pockets, we suggest you forgo actually eating them and simply throw them at the cat.



And as for the Pickelhaube, you can see from the photo above that this is a type of helmet, worn, incidentally, by Russian and Prussian military dudes who obviously thought having a big, mean-ass-lookin’ spike up top was a good way to scare the pants off anyone who might oppose them.

Who are we to argue?



***

Speaking of food, we receive a recipe for an asparagus dish from the Colorado Department of Agriculture. As they should, the folks at Ag were pumping up the message about state-grown produce. And you should know that asparagus is a pretty healthful foodstuff, loaded with …

(sound of Googling)

… vitamin B6, calcium, magnesium and zinc, dietary fiber, protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol), vitamin K, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folate, iron, phosphorus, potassium, copper, manganese and selenium.

Wow! It’s like a wonder food! It says here asparagus is also kind to children, has been known to uproot itself to walk little old ladies across the street and that asparagus in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan in 2001 would’ve whacked Osama bin Laden if they’d only been able to get their stalks around the trigger of an M16.

So, you may justifiably be wondering, how can we Americans screw this up, nutritionally?

One word: Bacon! Yep, the recipe they sent along with this admonition to buy and eat asparagus is for “Warm Bacon Asparagus,” and basically you’re supposed to wrap all that yummy, nutritious asparagus in yummy but not-so-nutritious bacon, which …

(sound of Googling)

… in a single slice has 3 grams of fat and 188 mg of sodium.

But hey, if you don’t really like asparagus but love bacon, this could be one good way to eat your greens. Why not chase it all with some pepperoni while you’re at it?

***

Folks, it’s Friday. Do a little dance and get down tonight!

We out.


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