“It’s meat-free Monday all around the world!”
– Paul McCartney
Paul and his daughters, Stella and Mary, have started an environmental campaign to encourage people to eat less meat with the aim to cut down on carbon emissions. You can read more about it on their website, Meat Free Monday, and you can also become a fan on Facebook.
It’s enough to make Paul sing. (I think I want that couch.)
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“American are the most open-minded eaters in the world, constantly looking for new flavors and experiences. The way we eat has changed constantly throughout history, but now, as we welcome a new generation of cooks, we are thinking about food in a particularly interesting way.”
– Ruth Reichl, “Gourmet Today“
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“During the many years that I have taught cooking, I have noticed that of my students, all are enthusiastic, many are quite sophisticated, but more than a few regard cooking as a quirky process that’s hard to grasp. Unnerved, they fail to notice that indeed there are unpredictable things about food, most of the time cooking is guided by common sense and even logic.”
– Deborah Madison, “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone“
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Assault on junk foods
The Obama administration is leading a charge this week with soon-to-be introduced legislation that will ban candy and sugary substances from many schools. The aim is to reduce obesity levels among children.
On Tuesday, Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign to promote more exercise and healthier eating for kids. Parents can download age-appropriate recipes on Letsmove.gov and find resources for developing more healthy lifestyles for their families.
Teens, of course, are rebelling. People make people fat, not vending machines, they claim. Continue Reading »
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“Cooking creates a sense of well-being for yourself and the people you love and brings beauty and meaning to everyday life. And all it requires is common sense – the common sense to eat seasonally, to know where your food comes from, to support and buy from local farmers and producers who are good stewards of our natural resources….”
– Alice Waters, “In the Green Kitchen“
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Reviewed by: Leigh Montgomery
“Of all of this year’s Christmas gifts – this is one that has been getting a lot of use in recent days. Boston star chef and restauranteur Barbara Lynch deserves all accolades, for her divergent styles that all have a kind of primacy. She’s also very pragmatic. While locals know you cannot go wrong with any of her establishments, I’ve also found that the case with this cookbook, which focuses on Northern Italian – with French influence. With clear instructions and multiple suggestions for hard-to-find items, it is a book for cooks of all levels – for very basic weeknight fare to ambitious menus for the more technically adept (pain au poulet – a chicken wrapped in bread dough, for example). Plain, explanatory language is used, and you’ll find yourself making things you might never have occurred to. Which brings me to mention that being an Italian cookbook, there are more gnocchi variations in this book than anywhere – because, Lynch maintains, it is so good, yet so easy, you don’t need a machine, and you can freeze it. Of course. What’s been the most impressive is finding yourself attaining restaurant quality at home – even me.”
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“There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion. Special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored.”
– Michael Pollan, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”
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It’s Superbowl Sunday and I’m tasked with bringing the brownies to the party. Usually I rip the top off a cardboard box and mix the contents for a chocolate win. But this year I made a little extra effort.
Fair Trade Brownies
For Christmas gifts I gave fair trade chocolate from Taza Chocolate, and having a few bars left I thought I’d try their brownie recipe. Taza is a small company just over in Somerville, Mass. I toured their factory before the holidays with my friend Jessica. It was no Willy Wonka experience. It was crowded and the highlight was watching an old Italian-made cacao bean grinder painted fire engine red do its work.
But what makes fair trade special is all the stuff you can’t see. Taza’s beans are grown in the Dominican Republic by local growers organized into cooperatives. The business is financially and environmentally stable and community-oriented. Basically, no mean people or practices are involved. It’s stone-ground chocolate that has a heart. Continue Reading »
Posted in Baked goods, Dessert | 6 Comments »
In order to reach the highest heights of creativity, cooking should really be seen as if it were a kind of a travel adventure. Sometimes traveling requires careful planning and the consulting of travel books with big glossy photos and maps to entice you out of the comfort of your routine. And other times you just follow your whim and intuition and push off, hoping for the best.
I did this kind of travel recently when I decided with hardly any premeditation to go to Panama for a week in December with a friend. Now that I’m back and faced with winter’s quiet days I find myself remarking out loud from time to time, “Well, at least I pushed off for Panama. That was fun.”
My friend Rebecca heard me saying this the other day. Without missing a beat she said, “It was more like you jumped into a cannon and blasted off!”
Yes. It’s really true.
So anyway, sometimes cooking means poring over cookbooks, carefully planning a menu, budget shopping, and inviting a few select friends to come enjoy a meal.
Rebecca’s no-recipe chili
Or you can do what Rebecca did the other night when she rang. “Come over right now! I’m making chili!” Soon there were three of us around the table as we waited for the pot to simmer. “I didn’t follow a recipe,” Rebecca said as she stirred and banged the ladle against the side of the pot. It was delicious. Continue Reading »
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At the center of my Boston neighborhood sits the Loring-Greenough House, a historic mansion. It was the home of a wealthy British naval officer Commodore Joshua Loring. Loring, a Loyalist, followed his good intuitions and abandoned the property in 1777 right before the Revolutionary War broke out. The house was confiscated by colonial forces, served as headquarters for Gen. Nathaniel Greene, and eventually as a hospital for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It is local legend that George Washington paid the hospital a visit.
That’s a lot of history for a place that I consider one of my bus stops. Despite how badly things turned out for the British in my neighborhood, I have the courage to admit that when it comes to scones, I am a bit of a Loyalist. America may be about bigger, faster, better, but this unfortunately has resulted in scones that are much, much too large and heavy – colonial one might say.
Proper English Scones
When researching a recipe for this essay I wrote about superior English scones for the Monitor I called my good friend Glenda who has years of professional baking experience in England. She told me the secret is in using self-rising flour and working very quickly and lightly so that the dough doesn’t get too dense.
She was right. I swear my tea kettle whistled a Tory tune when the scones came out of the oven in my Boston kitchen. Continue Reading »
Posted in Baked goods | 18 Comments »
Kitchen Report 