Take Out In The Wilderness

 Everyone craves a good take out. Yet what happens when you're far away from any restaurant and delivery. You have a plane come in and deliver it. Delicious, albeit cold food of all sorts are delivered to remote villages. 

Regular contributor and Alaska journalist Victoria Peterson wrote about this , specifically in the Alaskan bush in yesterday;'s New York Times Food section. Many villages such as Fort Yukon, located  way in the upper northeast corner of the state are far from any fast food jiont. The villages have no pizzerias or Chinese restaurants. Families have to order through Door Dash to get any kind of"fun: food. Natalia Navarro had to wait until pilot Robert Golike deliver their order. He uses his Cessna to take food to them and other isolated families craving a taste of the city.,Ms Navarro's order consisted of steak tacos and churros from Pedro's Mexican grill in Anchorage and classics such as lo mein, beef broccoli and General Tso's chicken from Famous Wok, a Chinese food chain. Her family relished  every bite. The trip is to their house is a long one.It's a long air journey over the silty waters of Cook Inlet and over the craggy snow covered peaks of the Alaska range.and the many laked terrain In Nikolai where he would land.MS Navarro only orders twice a month because of the expense. 

The idea has caught on.Alaska Air Transit is one of the dozens of small regional airlines flying people and cargo to hundreds of remote communities across Alaska. There are Netflix DVDS along with the needed outdoor gear and groceries.Yet it's receiving something like pizza that's the most exciting.Most order from Pizza Hut whose food keep the best on the journey.For some families it was that along with CHinese that was only delivered. Now the spectrum has widened thanks to DoorDash. Families can get any kind of cuisine they're craving or want to try for the first time. To deal with the influx of orders coming to their office, Alaska Air Transit owner, Josie Owen has set up a giant tent in the parking lot where drivers can  label the order with the person's name and  village before leaving it before the staff. The need is growing. Twins Caiti and Shari O'Connor have started their own business , expediting orders during their school year in Anchorage. They pick up pets at the airport to take them to the vet,  along with storing vehicles. Their most lucrative order is food. They dropped off three hundred dollars of food from Panda Express  for an employee appreciation on St Paul Island.

Anyone anywhere nowadays can appreciate a pizza or lo mein. They can enjoy tacos or a good burger thanks to pilots who fly to where they are. it's a new form of food delivery but a much needed one.

Go Milk A Potato

 I'ts getting that dairy may be obsolete in another decade.Nut milks have taken over and now there's the chance that veggie based milks may also join their ranks. It seems that there will be little use or taste for cow's milk  which is good for the cows.

Regular contributor and food writer Victoria Peterson write about this new phenomena in the New York Times Wednesday's Food section. Plant  based milks are up in sales and usage, thanks to the pandemic.When dairy ran out , thanks to panic buying and supply chain problems many turned to the variety of plant milks and liked them according to Denise Purcell, the vice president of content and education for Specialty Foods. They then branch out into other plant milk based products like ice cream and yogurt. There's also a hot topic at the moment according to Professor David Julian McClements of University of Massachusetts. He has been a food scientist for more than thirty years and in the last five focused solely on plant based foods. His reasoning behind this is that they're one of the food industry's main trends right now. Consumers want them for sustainability, health and ethical reasons. Also the pandemic has forced people to cook at home and they're discovering  that cooking with plant based milks are better than cooking with dairy.

What are these alternative milks made from? Soy, which is one of the most popular, followed by almond, oats, cashews, macademia nuts.hemp seeds, sesame seeds and flax. Even peas can be used to make milk. Now potatoes are getting their due, thanks to a Swedish company Dugg that creates a creamy   milk from emulsified potatoes and rapeseed oil.It's becoming popular in London where many coffee shops have added it to their menus. Sarah Bentley who runs a plant based cooking school Made In Hackney was excited about this. She wants to try it in her recipes and also not rely on cow's milk so often. She and her students have tried to make potato milk on their own but did;'t come up with quite the right one. Dugg will help them create creamy sauces and desserts. Hopefully Dugg will come up with by products like whipped cream, yogurt and ice cream with a potato milk base. Plant based milks are nothing new. Surprisingly they have been around for thousands of years. There are caveats though to this. Almonds grow in water scarcity areas and require a lot of water to be trucked in. Coconuts involve deforestation, increased cultivation and the loss of biodiversity.

Soon potato milk will be joining the ranks of other non dairy milks. It will be just as healthy as the other milks. It will also be just as delicious as the others, a perfect sub in for cow's milk.