Three Things Learned Over Two Cups of Coffee: Part 7

Introducing Mango Sriracha Hummus, What the Fo’c’sle? And Gila Lizard Love

Three Things Learned Over Two Cups of Coffee is a silly but surreptitiously semi-educational series that I rely on to share quirky things that don’t really logically fit anywhere else. It’s my Substack version of a curio cabinet shelf display that may or may not include an exoskeleton of a cicada, a plastic top hat from a bottle of gin, an elk head candle snuffer, a small red triceratops on a skateboard and a round sushi magnet. They all fit in my mind and mango, sriracha and chickpeas are the edible equivalent of a cicada shell, dinky dinosaur and gin hat grouping. Let’s break it down.

Year of the Hybrid Hummus

Remember when only hippies and lesbians and lesbian hippies ate hummus? Kim and I have quickly made our way through Summer Fresh’s line-up of guinea pig combos: avocado, jalapeno edamame, spicy, pine nut, Kalamata olive, beet, carrot, caramelized onion and the very best of the lot: spicy dill pickle hummus. Summer Fresh’s latest limited batch includes a “dessert hummus” offering (chocolate brownie) and mango sriracha hummus. This one is the hummus trophy winner with just enough heat to simulate a small bonfire starting in your mouth. The mango tastes like the Caribbean and not like furniture polish or air freshener as so many citrus fruits can.

What the fo’c’sle?

I’m more than halfway through Linda Greenlaw’s The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain’s Journey. Reading about swordfish fishing in Newfoundland’s moody Grand Banks in the stale heat of July (on solid ground) is cheating, really.

At the helm of my grandfather’s boat (well, my mom is—I’m grasping my brown bag lunch though I was an early fan of fried smelts nipped from Lake Erie’s belly.

I’m naturally drawn to deep sea reads like The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter and Swell: A Sailing Surface’s Adventure of Awakening by Captain Liz Clark. An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude by Ann Vanderhoof is the only cookbook/sailing memoir combo I know of and appropriately, the 42-foot sailboat she lived on was named Receta (Spanish for “recipe”). *There appears to be an undercurrent theme of mango in this post but it’s purely coincidental.

I still have three of Vanderhoof’s recipes neatly copied out (One-pot Coconut Brownies, Spicy Island Gingerbread and Caribbean Polenta) and saved for posterity in my very ambitious sleeve of Fantasy Recipes That I Will One Day Attempt (or farm out to my mother for fruition). Until then, I’ll stick with my skill set and add mango to anything and everything, especially pizza.

Our early mango pizza inspiration was found in Bali. If we are in a mango-growing country Kim and I usually insist on it as an addition if it’s absent from a menu. Most recently, in Hanoi and Manila, it was like asking for diced flip flops. “Really? On pizza? You are sure?”

I’ve chronically pushed mango-fied pizza and oceanic memoirs by Colin and Julie Angus for the instant danger and disaster one-two punch they deliver. Rowed Trip: Scotland to Syria by Oar (Colin and Julie’s joint ambitious paddle), Rowboat in a Hurricane (Julie’s 145 day, 10,000 km journey across the Atlantic), Beyond the Horizon (Colin’s human-powered circumnavigation of the world including a grueling row from Portugal to Costa Rica), Lost in Mongolia (chronicling Colin’s journey down 5,500 kilometres of one of the world’s most dangerous man-eating rivers) and Amazon Extreme (a tell-all from Colin as a member of the first team to raft the entire length of the Amazon). Richard Bangs recent memoir, The Art of Living Dangerously: True Stories from a Life on the Edge is full of electric catfish (who knew such a species existed) and equally charged stories from over 80 of the darkest, snakiest rivers that he’s navigated by raft (and capsized on).

“Alex, I’ll take Books About Boats for 10,000.”

Clearly, I’m drawn to boaty books, regardless of the vessel (swordfish boat, yacht, rowboat, raft). However, in Linda Greenlaw’s The Hungry Ocean, it’s the first time I’ve heard of a fo'c'sle. Did the publisher goof on the typeset? Greenlaw referred to the fo’c’sle three times and I felt like I was part of a patchy Zoom call or on the receiving end of our dodgy home cell reception.

Apparently, fo’c’sle is a widely acceptable and shortened version of "forecastle," and is used in reference to the forward part of a ship's upper deck. Typically, this is where the crew's living quarters are located. Well, what the fo’c’sle is going on? And if you want to know anything about slammers, D crimps, spin-ups or banana and pig taboos on ships, I’m your call-a-friend in the fo’c’sle. My dad loves a good short form, acronym (both of his own design and not often widely accepted) and nickname, so he will be all in on this one. But not the mango sriracha hummus.

Gila Lizard Love

This is the closest thing I have to a Gila monster in my archives. Back in the day I drew lizards almost exclusively. This was a page from a calendar I created as part of a fundraiser to send myself to Costa Rica back in 1994.

In a recent issue of Toronto Life, Daniel Drucker, the researcher who co-discovered the hormone that made Ozempic more popular than a fo’c’sle and mango sriracha hummus, shared his genesis story. There are no Ozempic jokes queued up here—I was more interested in how a venomous desert-loving lizard (*not dessert) became involved in diabetes research.

The dumbed down version is this: glucagon counteracts insulin by raising blood sugar levels. For those diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, there is insufficient insulin production or improperly working insulin issues which results in elevated blood sugar levels.

Image credit of first drawing of Gila lizard by Baird, S.F. (1857): MonsterDoc - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Lean in close here and pay attention. So, a “newer” identified hormone, glucagon-like peptide-1 (or GLP-1), when paired with islet cells, produces more insulin when incubated together. BUT, GLP-1 quickly deteriorates in humans which makes consistent drug levels difficult to maintain. The solution? An unsuspecting Gila monster.

Gila lizards have extremely slow metabolism and survive on just three to four meals a year. They secrete a compound (exendin-4) in their venom that is identical to GLP-1 and it’s longer lasting. I was happier to read that a synthetic version of this compound has been created so the Gila lizard can continue living its best (but threatened) life.

It’s not the first (or last time) venom has had a non-deadly purpose. A protein in Australia’s funnel-web spiders (Hi1A) has the ability to protect the human brain from the damage inflicted by strokes.

Puku Puku lattes at the Lima airport at a very jarring 5 a.m.

Thanks for joining me for a virtual cup(s) of coffee and this installment of 100% caffeinated curriculum. Did you miss Part 6? You can learn about when camels were used in the U.S. Postal Service, bison embryo popsicles and Things Made in Norway (like the band A-ha!). Norway is more than rats, Northern Lights and break-the-bank ship expeditions! Here’s the ever- juicy Part 6 edition.

Have you tried mango sriracha hummus yet? Mango pizza? Have you dropped anchor in a hammock and been consumed by a good at-sea book lately? I’m listening!