After a series of difficult and stressful posts, I thought I’d take it easier and write about something fun, something yummy. My new fatty friend is the coconut.
Several of my Objectivist friends have gotten interested in lower-carb diets, as indicated by Diana Hsieh’s blog. Lower-carb means higher-fat. It was Diana who recommended coconut fat to me, I think, which I’ve started using for general cooking (often instead of butter or olive oil). In fact, I just made up a batch of chocolate sauce, consisting of chocolate powder, water, and a glob of coconut fat. I ate some for dessert with whipped cream over a sliced banana. Ridiculously good.
I’ve been enjoying Spectrum brand, which costs me seven or eight dollars at Whole Foods for a fourteen ounce jar. The entire jar contains nearly 400 grams of fat, mostly saturated. I see Amazon carries it for six bucks.
However, I now have a new source as well. Free the Animal has an easy recipe for chicken mole, which I tried substituting chocolate powder for the bar. Pretty good. It calls for a can of coconut milk.
The cheapest source of coconut milk I’ve found is Thai Kitchen brand, which Target sells for $1.44 for a fourteen ounce can. A whole can contains around 70 grams of fat, so it takes 5.6 as many cans to equal the fat content of a jar of Spectrum. I noticed that, with the milk, the fat separates from the juice at lower room temperatures, so it would be easy to pour off the juice for some other purpose and use the fat in cooking.
The “big three” fatty fruits are the olive, avocado, and coconut, and I’m a big fan of each of them (though I don’t eat many avocados because they’re fairly expensive).
Incidentally, my wife and I have been watching a fair amount of Hulu lately — including, most recently, Legend of the Seeker — and one of the Hulu ads is from “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.” The ad mocks the “Buttertons,” family that foolishly eats real butter instead of soybean and canola (rape seed) fat, including hydrogenated fat. Thus, even though the company claims its products contain “0g trans fat,” this claim is a product of rounding down, as trans fat means hydrogenated fat, and hydrogenated fat is clearly listed in the ingredients, as I verified a few days ago at the grocery store.
So we’re supposed to believe that vegetable fat — including hydrogenated vegetable fat — is healthier than the saturated fat in butter and fruits such as coconut.
I can’t believe it’s not bulls***.