Tag Archives: Hockey

Food safety defined -the how to avoid bears definition

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Stephen Colbert’s fear of bears – usually listed as the biggest threat to America in his Threat Down segment – has made it to the blogsphere.

I’ve made it a point to say in my talks lately, when I talk about food safety, I’m talking about food that doesn’t make people barf. Food safety means lots of things to lots of people, but I’m focused on the microbes that sicken up to 30 per cent of all citizens of all countries every year (that’s what the World Health Organization says).

“If you plan on venturing into the wilderness on a camping or hiking trip, you need to be prepared to deal with potentially dangerous wildlife. Bears in particular need to be respected and avoided. One of the easiest ways to avoid bears is to be careful with storing and preparing food.”

It’s not just Colbert. On a family trip when I was, oh, about 13-years-old, we spent a couple of nights in Banff, Alberta, and were visited by a bear that emptied the cooler.

"Be aware of the necessary food storage and cooking precautions while camping. Do everything you can to keep food odors away from your camp. Taking these precautions is the easiest way to prevent a bear encounter."

So respect the bears (especially in the video below, which involves Canadians, kids, hockey and bears).

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
ThreatDown – Bears
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

Ben Chapman profiled at NC State (this time with notes)

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Chapman got his obligatory profile as new faculty in one of the North Carolina State University publications this week; this is the bites/barfblog version.

When Ben Chapman arrived at N.C. State University in January as the new food safety specialist in the Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family and Consumer Sciences, he hit the ground running. …

Since arriving in North Carolina, Chapman has converted from a former Toronto Maple Leafs hockey fan to a Carolina Hurricanes fan.

Carolina has a good hockey team and tickets are easy to get. Toronto sucks and tickets are impossible to get. Carolina has also won the Stanley Cup once in the past 42 years. Toronto has not.

He says that he spends much of his free time discussing the virtues of hockey with his wife and son (that’s Jack, below, left, at a Hurricanes game in about 4 years)..

Those who can, do. Others teach. Others talk. Others bore their families.

A player himself since age 4, he has even started playing hockey here in North Carolina with a group in Wake Forest.

If he’s been playing since 4 he really should be better.

Chapman has focused on finding the best ways to communicate food safety risk to the people who need to know. He is interested in how social media like Facebook and rapid communication technologies like Twitter might improve public safety around the issue of food risk.

It also helps to stay current on all the social media for fantasy baseball/football/hockey/cycling tips.

Chapman had a sense that the bathroom posters proclaiming that “employees must wash hands before returning to work” might not produce the desired results.

It was probably the sense of smell, coming from his hands.

Chapman even spent a semester working as a dishwasher in a restaurant to get a better sense of what the work climate was like.

I didn’t pay him enough as a graduate student and he had to moonlight.

Chapman noted that during busy times, employees tended to forget safe food-handling practices. “When it’s busy in a food-service operation, it gets really crazy,” he said.

That’s when the Pink Floyd is cranked.

In his new position, Chapman continues his quest to find the best ways of reaching food-service workers and consumers.

Go to a restaurant? A supermarket? It’s not like searching for a Holy Grail.

“We have a responsibility to get that information out there,” Chapman said. “The kind of things we’re doing here would have been hard to do in Canada — moving food safety forward.”

That’s what she said.

One way that Chapman has been moving food safety forward is helping agents develop training programs on home food preservation. Once a hallmark of extension programming through tomato clubs for girls, canning and other home food preservation techniques had largely fallen out of favor with consumers in recent years.

Ben Chapman: Defender of the can.

Pic of mouse in doughnut shop allows Tim Horton’s to enter New York City – giv’r

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Tim Hortons, which the N.Y. Times described yesterday as “a Canadian purveyor of doughnuts and coffee that has won a wide following,” is making a sudden entry into New York City, primarily because of a picture of a mouse.

Between Friday night and dawn on Monday, the Riese Organization intends to convert 13 Dunkin’ Donuts stores into the city’s first Tim Hortons restaurants, including early-morning, high-traffic shops like the one in Pennsylvania Station and another next to the New York Stock Exchange. The switch may surprise regular customers of the shops, said Dennis Riese, chief executive of the Riese Organization.

“You take down one sign and put up another. The biggest challenge will be to get New Yorkers to know what Tim Hortons is.”

Tim Hortons Inc. is a Canadian fast food restaurant known for its coffee and doughnuts, founded in 1964 in Hamilton, Ontario by Canadian hockey player Tim Horton. In 1967 Horton partnered with investor Ron Joyce, who quickly took over operations and expanded the chain into a multi-million dollar franchise. There are almost 3,000 Tim Hortons in Canada, and another 5-0 in the U.S. The chain accounted for 22.6 per cent of all fast food industry revenues in Canada in 2005. Canada has more per-capita ratio of doughnut shops than any other country.

Tim Horton was a bruising defenceman who won 4 Stanley Cups with the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1960s. Born in 1930 in Cochrance, Ontario, Horton spent his formative years playing in mining communities surrounding Sudbury, Ontario. He got noticed by the Leafs organization and moved to Toronto when he was 17-years-old. He died in a car accident in 1974 after a 24-year National hockey League career.

Horton had a reputation for enveloping players who were fighting him in a crushing bear hug. Boston Bruins winger Derek Sanderson once bit Horton during a fight; years later, Horton’s widow, Lori, still wondered why. "Well," Sanderson replied, "I felt one rib go, and I felt another rib go, so I just had—to, well, get out of there!”

The Times reports that the arrival of Tim Hortons to N.Y. City comes after a decade of contention between Riese and Dunkin’ Donuts that peaked after The New York Post published a photo of a mouse munching on a doughnut in a shop operated by Riese on 46th Street at Fifth Avenue. The chain sued Riese, and the sides eventually agreed that the relationship would end this week in what Dunkin’ Donuts called a “disenfranchisement.”

In Canada, owning a Tim Hortons is like owning a license to print money.
 

BBQ safely with Douglas Powell

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Look, I’m goofy. Probably the Brantford, Ontario, water, cause hometown pal Wayne Gretzky sure looked goofy on The Young and the Restless in 1981.

I don’t want to be on video. But if that’s what it takes to get the message out about how to safely grill burgers this holiday weekend, then why not.

As I wrote the N.Y. Times today in response to their July 1, 2009 piece, The Perfect Burger and All Its Parts, Chef Seamus Mullen’s recommendation to use any thin piece of metal into the side of a burger, and “if it’s barely warm to the lips, it’s rare. If it’s like bath water, it’s medium rare” only demonstrates the divide between food safety and food pornography.

The only thin piece of metal that should be stuck into the side of a hamburger is a tip-sensitive digital thermometer.

Color is a lousy indicator of burger safety, as is the taste of metal sticks. Rather than putting E. coli O157:H7 on precious testing lips – stick a thermometer in.

Final hockey game – Friday, 7 p.m., our place

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Fortunately, Dale’s in Germany so I don’t have to listen to how awesome Pittsburgh is and how he’s followed them since he was a kid.

Me, I was crushed when Pittsburgh beat out Carolina in 4 straight games in the semis.

But I’ve gotten over it to host game 7 of the National Hockey League finals Friday night. Seriously, in Manhattan, KS, and with Dale in Germany, Amy and I are  hockey central.

And Amy once again wants Detroit to win. Zetterberg is her hero.

Game starts at 7, we got the big screen, the HDTV, the food, the beer, and the hockey know-how – watch me explain again to Bob what offside is – and where would you rather be?

You’re all invited. Even you public health students I talked with this morning. I’ll show you how to properly cook a decent hamburger using a digital, tip-sensitive thermometer. Let’s see if you really read barfblog.com.


 

Forget beer – Pittsburgh wins 4-2

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When I think Detroit and Pittsburgh, I don’t think professional hockey or beer, I think Austrian Mozart Chocolate Cream Gold liquor that my mother brought us, on berries (a mixture of fresh and thawed).

After those pizzas, why not cap off an exhausting evening of child rearing and hockey watching and food porn with a delightful mix of berries and booze – and bed.

Pittsburgh wins, 4-2.


 

Thin-crust pizza, Pens and Wings – end of second

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That first pizza was so delightful and light, I made another during the second period, modifying cooking times and adding a few asparagus spears.

Amy said the asparagus tasted “green” and not in a good way.

The crust was much better but still need to adjust the cooking times. Sorenne is almost 6-months-old and is interested in everything we eat. We have introduced several solids – orange wedges, sweet potato, banana, peas – but a bit early for pizza, homemade or not (below, left).

Amy says Detroit goalie Chris Osgood really needs to control his rebounds. Doug says he needs to position better, and maybe have some defensive help. Amy says, Osgood sucks — and she’s a Detroit fan.

Pittsburgh up 4-2 after two periods.

Thin-crust pizza, Pens and Wings

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During our recent sojourn to Phoenix, Amy and me ate most of our dinners in the room because baby Sorenne would be tired and it was just easier.

There was a so-called authentic Italian pizza place just down the road so we tried it out – awesome.

I’ve been making pizza crust for a long time using a blend of semolina, white and whole-wheat flours, along with garlic and fresh rosemary in the crust. Tasty, but never quite great.

This Italian place had crust so thin and delicate, topped with mixed greens and prosciutto, I tried to modify my own attempts.

I also figured I better pre-bake the crust a bit before the toppings – in this case tomato sauce, red peppers, mushrooms and artichoke hearts (below, left).

It’ll take some more practice, but the result (above, right) was fairly delicious.

Pittsburgh and Detroit tied 1-1 at the end of the first period.
 

Hockey hat trick hats are often discarded for sanitary reasons

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After three games of the Stanley Cup finals with Detroit leading Pittsburgh 2-1, and some of the best hockey in years, I finally have a reason to blog about it.

Puck Daddy asked today, What happens to hats thrown for hat tricks?

It all comes down to sanitation.

In hockey, when a player scores three goals in a game, it’s called a hat trick, and after the third goal, the ice is often littered with hats from fans.

One of hockey’s greatest traditions, the tossing of hats on the ice when a player scores thrice evolved from local businessmen handing out fedoras to players about 90 years ago. During the 1970s, fans built on that tradition by tossing hats on the ice, and the NHL eventually amended its rule book to say that "articles thrown onto the ice following a special occasion (i.e. hat trick) will not result in a bench minor penalty being assessed" to the home team for delay of the game.

So where do all of these hat-trick hats eventually end up?

1. The Players Keep the Hats.

2. The Garbage: Remember what mom used to say about wearing other kids’ hats back in elementary school? Turns out that health concerns about the indiscriminate origin of the hats is a consideration.

Mike Sundheim, media relations for the Carolina Hurricanes, said that a portion of the hats that are in decent shape are given to the players, but that "the majority of the older, well-worn ones pretty much have to go in the trash because of health concerns."

That was echoed by VP of communications Tom McMillan of the Pittsburgh Penguins, although he said a student once did a project with the Penguins in which he took hats thrown on the ice, had them "cleaned and medically approved" and then donated them to charity.
 

Hockey and triathalons – don’t swim in the Oklahoma River

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I miss hockey. The closest ice is two hours away. I used to play 4-5 times a week, coached a whole bunch of girls teams, and now I’m in Kansas, watching TV, and I’m fat.

Maybe my friend Steve will guilt me into getting back into shape. But Steve doesn’t have a six-month-old, and Ben does, and he understands the laziness.

Amy spent 6 years doing her PhD at the University of Michigan so figures she’s a Detroit Red Wings fan. Last year, she watched more of the Detroit- Pittsburgh final than I did while we were in Quebec. Detroit just eliminated Chicago in overtime, and I’m still crushed that Carolina lost in 4 games.

If I’m going to work on fitness, it won’t be the triathalon.

More than 100 athletes who swam in the Oklahoma River during a triathlon earlier this month have returned health questionnaires from state officials investigating an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness among participants in the event.

Laurence Burnsed of the Oklahoma Health Department says several athletes who were sickened have also provided stool samples to aid the investigation.

The Boathouse International Triathlon, including a 1.5 kilometer swim in the downtown river, was held May 16-17. The cause of the illness remains under investigation.

BTW, those old farts in the pic, upper right, haven’t won the faculty tournament since I left in 2005.