In less than a week, Nathan and I are off on vacation. We’re spending half the time camping at the beautiful Mount Rainier National Park, and since we’re flying, we’re traveling light and buying virtually all our food when we get there. We’re planning menus and making a shopping list now, so we don’t forget [...]
This post from Herbivoraceous, praising the food cart scene in Portland and Seattle, makes me incredibly jealous. We here in DC have nothing like what he describes: where Portland’s food carts are apparently ubiquitous, creative, delicious, and vegetarian-friendly, DC’s are mostly… just not there. I know that the District used to have incredibly tight regulations [...]
Today, I went to the DC Green Festival. It’s a big, expo-style event with exhibitors, food, workshops, and super-star speakers. Think of it as a who’s who of green businesses and green thought leaders. It’s organized by Green America and Equal Exchange, two amazing non-profits in the green space. It’s a great event, with a [...]
I promised in my last post, about homemade tomato sauce, that I’d soon write about the gnocchi I made to go with the sauce. I’m overdue in sharing. The truth is, I started making the gnocchi with the thought of writing about how easy it was, how it seems so intimidating but really it’s a [...]
The more cookbooks and food blogs I read, the more I find a widespread derision for canned beans. Canned beans, the discussion goes, are so far inferior to freshly-cooked dried beans that no self-respecting foodie would ever use them. I’m perplexed by the apparent strength of feeling many cooks have for the subject. Sure, dried [...]
I remember when my mom used to make popsicles when I was a kid. She had a set of plastic molds, and for at least a few years there were always popsicles in the freezer for summer snacks, and they were so good. We used all kinds of juices, and they were the perfect way [...]
I don’t cook a lot of chili, perhaps because I associate it with meat. But when my coworker invited me to her Chili Bowl party yesterday, I couldn’t resist. I was starting at a disadvantage – when you think of chili, the first words that come to mind are probably “meaty” and “spicy”. Mine could [...]
Last winter I was on a serious local foods kick, because I was doing a lot of reading, and the result was that I bought and ate fewer vegetables, because so little is local around here in the winter. This winter, I gave myself permission to buy whatever out-of-season vegetables I wanted, especially if they [...]
Start with corn, grown on a big farm in Iowa. Pick it, ship it off to a factory. Grind it up, separate it, mix it up with enzymes and catalysts and all sorts of complex chemical processes; out comes high-fructose corn syrup and a number of other products, like stabilizers and preservatives and the like. [...]
Apparently you can now get pre-packaged, refrigerated breakfast cereal, complete with milk. I have to ask: why? Is even just-add-water packaged/flavored oatmeal too hard? For about 50 cents you can combine your own cereal, milk, and sweetener in a bowl and microwave it for a couple minutes, getting something that’s probably healthier and definitely made [...]