Everywhere you look there is a new horror about food consuming the mainstream media 24/7 showing up at a site like Grist, The Ethicurean or any of a thousand other excellent web sites that talk about food.My outrage for today is this article, Meat Wagon: Cow-feed misdeeds, in which Tom Philpott
explores the use of distillers grains, generated as waste when making
ethanol from corn, as livestock feed.
Apparently distillers grains
shares the bounty of problems it brings: it can increase the risk of e. coli 0157
(bad for us), cause sulfur toxicity (bad for the cows), and
dramatically increase levels of phosphorous in the ground and water
(bad for the environment). It's not a small problem either, the US
ethanol industry created 10 million tons of distillers grains last
year, with most (75-80%) being fed to cows. That number is expected to continue rising, especially since without selling the spent grain as feed, ethanol seems to be unprofitable. Even with all the subsidies.
Continue reading "The clueless feeding the blind" »
The Pavlova
is one of those bits of food magic that everyone should make once.
While it may look intimidating, at its heart it is as simple as
strawberry shortcake. You're not afraid to make strawberry shortcake,
are you? I didn't think so.
This combination of meringue,
whipped cream and fruit is a classic dessert Australia and New Zealand
where it was created as a tribute to the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova.
As a denizen of the northern hemisphere, I find the idea of serving it
for Christmas dinner, as they do down under, utterly delightful. Truth
be told, however, my locavore
aspect cringes at the thought. (I waited all the way until the 1st of
March and a business deductible excuse to buy some for far too much
money.)
Continue reading "mini-pavlovas recipe" »

May I just say, I love my new box of light! Following the Strobist's excellent instructions for photography on the cheap, in this case the DIY $10 Macro Photo Studio, I transformed a cardboard box into, if not a thing of beauty itself, a thing that will give that "thing of beauty" quality to other things.
When I
was a young'un, I moved
from "Baja Oregon" to a very small coastal town in southwest
Washington. A town where the locals joked, in some cases bragged, that,
upon arriving, you should turn back your clock 20 years - to the '50s.
I, being a child of the coolest artistic little beach towns in Baja
Oregon, thought this was mildly amusing...for about 15 minutes.
I arrived in late-spring and my first summer there was, to put it
mildly, not my best year. Two things saved me that wet, foggy summer.
The first was a job at the local pizzeria, where Gina, a wise-cracking
New Jersey girl — everyone swore we were sisters — taught me to toss
rounds of dough high in the air and, much harder, catch them again. She
also let me play with the brick oven. I loved Gina.
The second bit of salvation arrived one night when I met Becky and we
instantly became BFF, before there even were BFF. This bread, made in
loaves, was Becky's favorite. I baked some every week or so for years
and years. Then Becky and I lost touch. I also mostly stopped baking
this bread. Both sad things.
Continue reading "Caramelized onion and cheddar breadsticks recipe" »
Yesterday, while perusing the produce in a major grocery store chain in Western WA, I remembered we were about out of bananas. As I approached the almost empty display of bananas, I noticed an employee throwing hands of bananas into a trash box. Bananas that were fresher than the ones becoming banana bread fodder on my counter.
Each cluster of fruit hit the cardboard box with a muffled thump and I cringed in response. Thump, cringe. Thump, cringe. Thump, cringe.
Continue reading "vignette from a grocery store" »