Cute Easter Sweets

Shrimp with Garlic Butter

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil
20 raw jumbo shrimp
sea salt and pepper
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
4 tbsp finely chopped fresh flatleaf parsley
juice of 1/2 lemon
5 tbsp dry white wine 2 tbsp butter, diced

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottom skillet, Add the shrimp, season to taste with sea salt and pepper, and cook over medium heat for 2 minutes. Turn the shrimp over, add the garlic and parsley, and cook for an additional 2-3 minutes, or until the shrimp have changed color.
2. Add the lemon juice and cook, stirring constantly, until it has almost evaporated.
3. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the shrimp to a serving dish and keep warm.
4. Pour the wine into the pan, bring to a boil, and cook until reduced by about half.
5. Whisk in the butter, a piece at a time until the sauce has thickened. Pour some of the sauce over the shrimp and set aside the rest for dipping. Serve at once with the extra sauce.

Makes 4 servings.

Source: Garlic

What’s for Lunch?

Hand-rolled Sushi (手巻きすし) Set Lunch at Tokyo Hilton Hotel in Japan

Make your own hand-rolled sushi with 16 kinds of sushi ingredients such as salmon, salmon, sea urchin and avocado.

You can roll the ingredients with nori or soybean sheets, two kinds of sushi rice and your choice of condiments.

The lunch also comes with assortment of seasonal appetizers, miso soup and seasonal dessert.

The price of the set lunch is 4,500 yen (plus tax) per person.

Large Food Delivery Company Piloting Ghost Kitchens

Jennifer Marston wrote . . . . . . . . .

A Bloomberg article from yesterday reported that Uber has a pilot program underway in Paris where it rents out commercial-grade kitchen space to restaurants selling food through the company’s Uber Eats app.

An anonymous source who spoke to Blooomberg said Uber has been leasing space in Paris on the down low since 2018 and stocking it with kitchen equipment. Uber then rents those spaces out to “restauranteurs planning eateries that cater exclusively to delivery customers.” According to the source, Uber has not publicly announced this pilot program.

Setting aside the potential conflict this could ignite with Uber co-founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick — who operates his own ghost kitchen concept in Los Angeles — a heavyweight company like Uber/Uber Eats getting involved in ghost kitchens could majorly impact the rest of the food delivery space.

As more software, apps, sales channels, and companies enter the restaurant food delivery space, fulfilling the influx of orders remains an operational headache for most restaurants. One food industry player, ClusterTruck CEO Chris Baggot, noted ealier this year, part of the problem is that restaurants treat delivery as an add-on business rather than the business. But delivery is projected to grow 12 percent per year for the next five years, and does create financial and operational issues for restaurants as they try and accommodate this growth. And lately, both established brands wanting to try new concepts and independent operators who lack the capital for a full-service restaurant are turning to ghost kitchens as a solution.

If Uber were to operate its own ghost kitchens on a widespread basis, it could save many a restaurant some of the hassles listed above. To be clear: we don’t yet know a whole lot about Uber’s kitchens in Paris right now, and the company isn’t publicly discussing the pilot program yet.

At the same time, it’s not hard to imagine a third-party delivery service taking over more of the operations up and down the operational stack. Uber suggested that much last year when it acquired Ando, David Chang’s delivery-only ghost kitchen restaurant. As Allan Weiner wrote at the time, the acquisition suggested food delivery companies like Uber Eats were on their way to becoming suppliers of “vertical consolidation.”

There’s another phrase for that: “walled garden.” It’s a controversial business concept, chiefly because of the amount of power it gives to the company, who controls the information or product available to a consumer (think Facebook Messenger not chatting with Apple Messages). Translated to the restaurant world, that would mean Uber controlling the choices that pop up when you search “Mexican Food” on their app, thereby limiting the restaurants you see to the ones who work directly with Uber.

But if we go by the Bloomberg article, Uber’s Paris kitchens are aimed at restaurant operators planning delivery-only concepts, which means those “restaurants” aren’t yet on the market. There’s no consumer choice to limit (which is the main objection to walled gardens), because these new restaurants wouldn’t be available without Uber.

For consumers, then, a vertically integrated Uber delivery stack could actually mean more choice, as they would get a chance to discover new restaurant choices they wouldn’t have otherwise had access to.

The other side of that coin is that it could “uberize” the restaurant industry. It might make financial sense for an independent restaurant to team with Uber and in the process save on costs, but doing so triggers the question of how much control Uber would then get over the restaurant brand. Would the Uber logo have to appear on all promotional materials? On packaging? Would Uber demand a say in the menu? Would it be the one to decide when to pull the plug if business wasn’t up to snuff?

We can’t get the exact the answers based on one lone article. But there’s no denying the presence of third-party delivery services with ghost kitchens. Both DoorDash and Postmates have dabbled in renting out kitchen space to restaurants. Grubhub invested $1 million in 2018 in Green Summit Group, one of the old guard of ghost kitchens. And Deliveroo operates not just its own kitchens in Europe but also a food hall.

If Uber’s really serious about this walled-garden approach to delivery, we can expect to see the other major players trying out their own vertically integrated restaurants, starting with the ghost kitchen.

Source: The Spoon

High Testosterone Levels Are Bad News for the Heart

Dennis Thompson wrote . . . . . . . . .

High testosterone levels can drastically increase a man’s risk of heart failure and stroke-causing blood clots, a new study reports.

Men with a genetic predisposition to high testosterone levels have a nearly eightfold increased risk of heart failure and twice the risk of thromboembolism (blood clots that can block veins or arteries leading to the brain or lungs), researchers found.

Although the study focuses on men with naturally high testosterone, it has implications for aging men who are taking testosterone supplements to boost their energy levels and improve their sex drive, experts said.

Testosterone sales increased 12-fold globally between 2000 and 2011, particularly in the United States, the researchers said in background notes.

“This study serves as a big, red stop sign, a warning that higher circulating levels of testosterone can lead to an increase in cardiovascular events, which are all associated with an increased risk of death,” said Dr. Guy Mintz. He is director of cardiovascular health and lipidology at Northwell Health’s Sandra Atlas Bass Heart Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y.

For the study, an international research team, led by C. Mary Schooling from the School of Public Health and Health Policy at City University of New York, analyzed genetic variants that predict testosterone levels, and then assessed whether those variants appeared to influence a person’s risk of blood clots, heart failure or heart attack.

The researchers found the testosterone genes by using data from 3,225 men, aged 50 to 75, who were participating in a worldwide prostate cancer prevention trial. The investigators checked the men’s levels of testosterone, and then looked to see if those with the highest levels had any shared genetic variants.

Next, the researchers compared these genes against medical data on more than 392,000 British men and women, to see if people carrying these genetic variations had an increased risk of blood clots, heart failure or heart attacks.

One testosterone-boosting gene in particular, the JMJD1C gene, was found to double the risk of dangerous blood clots in men and increase their risk of heart failure by 7.8 times.

A follow-up validation study involving nearly 172,000 people found that the same gene increased the risk of heart attack by 37 percent.

These findings jibe with those of previous studies regarding the heart health effects of testosterone, said Dr. Richard Becker, director of the University of Cincinnati’s Heart, Lung and Vascular Institute.

“One could conclude that the findings — although it’s not proof of cause and effect — certainly are consistent with some of the concerns that have been raised,” Becker said.

Men carrying this particular genetic mutation should be mindful of their heart health, he added.

“You would address all known and modifiable risk factors first, and you would probably do that as aggressively as you could,” Becker said. These men should exercise regularly, eat right, avoid smoking and watch their weight, blood pressure and blood sugar, he advised.

Further study is needed to determine if naturally high testosterone levels are a heart risk factor that should be directly treated, Becker added.

Beyond that, the study would indicate that older men should think twice before indulging in testosterone-replacement therapy, the experts noted.

Becker said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now requires testosterone product labels to warn of a possible increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

Testosterone is believed to contribute to hardening of the arteries, Becker added, and people taking large doses are more likely to form blood clots.

Mintz pointed out that “medical testosterone-replacement therapy has decreased over the last few years, but still remains at a significant level. These prescription requests are due to social pressures and a lack of education in this area.”

Aging men concerned about their potency often are influenced by TV and radio ads to buy over-the-counter testosterone supplements, Mintz said.

“Testosterone-replacement treatment is not sexy, but really dangerous if given to patients without a true medical indication and a known proven benefit,” Mintz concluded.

The new study was published online in the BMJ.

Source: HealthDay

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Is testosterone therapy safe? Take a breath before you take the plunge . . . . .

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