Strange Brew: Beyond the bottle
**Note: Before I even begin, I’m going to preface by owning up to how strongly I fought the urge to make a “malt-ernative” pun as a post title. It was hard. Really, really hard. But thankfully, nothing gelled and alas, I was able to resist.** I’m no Homer Simpson, by any stretch of the imagination, … Read more
Holidays: The Magnum Opus
Menu planning for the last of this years’ holiday revels, finally celebrating with my parents and sis on Saturday…snowstorm notwithstanding. They’re arriving in the early afternoon and leaving in the early evening, so a full-on dinner menu would’ve been too much, a bunch of snacks and hors d’oeuvres too little. Here’s what I think will … Read more
Weekend BBQ, Pok-Pok style
My latest culinary obsession has been Southeast Asian tastes: the freshness of mint, cilantro, basil and cucumbers meshed with puckery lime and pungent fish sauce. I never get tired of these flavors, from fresh summer rolls with crisp shrimp in delicate rice paper rolls to a cool and slurpy bowl of noodles with some Sriracha and crunchy peanuts. Yum.
The Clean Plate Club, and other valuable lessons of a kid in the kitchen
When was it decided that children will only voluntarily consume “meat” cut into dinosaur shapes or neon-pink yogurt in a tube? I’m concerned that focusing on so-called “kid-friendliness” enables future refusals to eat non-dinosaur-shaped foods and ultimately kicks off a lifetime of pickyness, or worse, a lack of an adventurous palate.
Experimenting with another winter farmshare
After plenty of research and about a week of deliberation, I decided today to sign up for the Winter/Spring farm share from Enterprise Farms. Running from December through March, the Enterprise share does things a little differently than you’d expect. In addition to providing local (and obviously seasonal, or stored) farm goods, they have also partnered with organic farmers within what they refer to as the “Atlantic Foodshed”.
Reading: The Cost of Wasted Food- A timely and thoughtful article
via food.theatlantic.com Stumbled upon this article in The Atlantic Monthly's online food channel *just after* composing my post about composting. Can you believe that typical Americans waste around $600 of food per year? That's crazy!
Why waste your waste?
via www.earthmachine.com While planning my move over to Somerville (yay!), I started nosing around the city website to learn about parking permits, trash pick-up and all that sort of new neighborhood stuff. In small print, at the bottom of a Department of Public Works Environmental Services PDF, I came across this gem: Somerville offers a … Read more
My 100 miles
I understand that eating locally is more fundamentally meant to turn away from supporting the creation of industrial monocultures, such as big corn and bigger soy, or to conscientiously object to abhorrent living and slaughter conditions on factory farms and ranches and to resist the strawberry in February with a carbon footprint that traces a path to New Zealand. I can get behind those principles pretty easily.But am I going to feel a twinge of guilt for every pinch of delicate fleur-de-sel from Brittany? I am not.
Thought for food: Ecologies of value
Heather Paxson is a student of how people infuse their lives with meaning, and the everyday ethical choices that come with that. She is a Radcliffe Fellow this year, writing a book on what she calls the “ecologies of value” in making American artisanal cheese. via news.harvard.edu I came across this interesting little article today … Read more
C’est moi qui l’ai fait: The hand-made’s tale
I’ve thought long and hard about it, and my theory around this behavior points to a deep craving for producing a tangible good, faites a main. At the end of a long week of conceptualizing, ideating and general arm-waving around various forms of digital ephemera, I long to face a mountain of apples that need peeling and coring, to push a hunk of lamb shoulder through a grinder and then form it into rounds, to have dough under my fingernails and flour in my hair. I long to MAKE.
