September 2011
4 posts
The Cost of Junk Food →
That’s the topic of this thoughtful piece by Mark Bittman, but the point isn’t just the familiar fact of the hidden high (and highly subsidized) costs of processed food in America. Bittman reflects more generally on how regular ingredients can be bought cheaply and prepared easily to make healthy delicious meals at home (which, coincidentally, is this blog’s wheelbox). His...
Bike Share NYC!
This is not exactly food-related, but today the NYC announced that Alta Bike Share won the contract for the NYC Bike Share. For anyone not in NYC (or just not following this story), the City put out a call for bids last fall, and since then there has been much speculation about what a share for a city as large as New York will look like. Now we have it:
Within the service area, which will...
August 2011
6 posts
Hurricane Preparations
Step 1: Make a Peach Pie
Thanks, Angie, for sending me your friend Tom’ mom’s crust recipe!
Pie Crust
1 3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 cup (half a stick) butter or margarine
1 egg
1/2 tbsp vinegar
3 tbsp. water
Combine flour and salt in a large bowl. Cut in the shortening and margarine by hand (with a pastry blender or using a fork and knife)...
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Food For Thought: If there are only two paragraphs... →
food-forthought:
Make it these:
When you consider the Twinkie as a product — which it truly is, in every sense of the term — it’s not that hard to fathom its link to the world economy. Twinkies’ ingredients are the products of a rural-industrial complex, made from a web of chemicals and raw materials produced by…
“We were and remain right to uphold nature, wildlife and the rural landscape as...”
– Seeing cities as the environmental solution, not the problem, from the National Resources Defense Council Staff Blog.
American environmentalists from Thoreau and John Muir onward have held country living as more desireable and superior to life in morally bankrupt towns and cities. The NRDC argues...
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July 2011
3 posts
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“A country that can engineer the seemingly unattainable economics of a $5...”
– David Sirota in Why Americans can’t afford to eat healthy, arguing that the US must shift its agricultural subsidies from supporting the large-scale production of corn (used to make high fructose corn syrup) or soy (used to make low-cost vegetable oil) to other fruits and vegetables.
In...
CSA recipe #6: grilled peaches →
We used our CSA peaches to make this at Anthony’s sister’s bbq over the weekend, minus the blue cheese the recipe calls for. Highly recommended. It turned out something like this (not my actual photo):
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CSA recipe #5: beet and bean veggie burgers
This week was the first week our CSA brought us beets. Now, at the risk of sounding like a bad vegetarian semi-hippie locavore, I must confess that I don’t really like beets. I’ve never enjoyed eating them alone or on salads, and figured that I would leave this week’s beet eating to Anthony, who likes eating beets almost as much as he hates wasting food (a lot).
At least, this...
June 2011
8 posts
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CSA recipe #4: strawberry balsamic vinegrette
While we’re on the subject of neat things to do with strawberries:
I didn’t use any measurements. I just made to taste with the following ingredients:
one part balsamic vinegar
two parts olive oil
strawberries, destemmed
salt and pepper
To make, blend the above using some kind of blender or a food processor.
We poured this over a salad of CSA-supplied lettuce and radishes, and...
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CSA recipe #3: skillet-baked eggs and spinach
We’ve just completed week two of our summer CSA.
Because Anthony’s the Prospect Park CSA treasurer, we get a full share of veggies every week for free, in addition to the fruit and egg shares we purchased. Most couples we know who participate just get a half share, as the CSA veggie output is quite high. Nonetheless, it’s a fun challenge to try and do interesting things with the...
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CSA recipe #2: spicy kale chips
Two weeks into our CSA and we are inundated with greens. Which is great, because it forces us to eat them. It also forces us to find things to do with them!
When our first week’s kale started to get a little yellow, I needed to find a way to cook it all quickly. Hence, my first foray into kale chip making. I used this recipe, with a couple of alterations.
Ingredients:
kale, washed,...
“Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy...”
– Interesting analysis, but they’ve set up a false dichotomy here: why does it have to be one or other? Less meat + eating local ftw.
Local Food or Less Meat? Data Tells The Real Story (Harvard Business Review)
(via Local Me (via adriennes)
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CSA recipe #1: fresh greens salad with scape pesto...
I was a bit taken aback by how much food we got our first week of the CSA. Assessing our bounty, I decided to start by making a salad that would feature the two garlic scapes included with our share as the base for the salad dressing.
A garlic scape is the delicious early-season offshoot of a garlic plant. The scapes form curly, green tendrils that shoot out from the ground and must be plucked...
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April 2011
3 posts
Prospect Park CSA: Sign-Ups are Open! →
So, the new Prospect Park CSA we blogged about? Shares are now open to the public and will go quickly, so sign up soon!
prospectparkcsa:
Our sign-ups are now open! Please look over the details below, then head to our sign-up site (the link is at the bottom of this post).
2011 Prospect Park CSA Share Details
Vegetables
When you purchase a full vegetable share, you receive a substantial...
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So, we’ve been trying to join a neighborhood CSA ever since moving in together; we didn’t succeed until now because we never managed to get off the waiting list to buy a share. Brooklyn takes its community-supported agriculture seriously, and shares get snapped up almost immediately.
The solution presented itself when Anthony joined up with some other people in the neighborhood to...
February 2011
1 post
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January 2011
3 posts
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Things fermenting in our apartment right now
1. The beer we brewed at the last Brooklyn Mini-Skillshare at LaunchPad. It should actually be done by now but we miscalculated by leaving it in our basement storage room for 2 weeks over Christmas. I guess the temperature got lower than we thought it would down there, slowing down the fermentation process. Anyways, now that it’s under our kitchen table it seems to be coming along...
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Adventures in bagel-making
After a few days at home over the holidays I started to go into bagel withdrawal. At this point, I’ve lived in New York long enough that midwestern supermarket bagels just don’t cut it. Also, there is very little to do at my parents’ Appalachian Ohio farmstead in the winter: the cold temperatures keep me indoors while there’s no tv or cell service and only the crappiest...
December 2010
3 posts
WatchIgnore the fact that I’m really nervous and only know a fraction of what my co-teacher does, and I’d say this came out pretty well.
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November 2010
6 posts
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Two years later
Two Novembers ago, I was working as an Elections Legal Observer for the Obama campaign at a crowded megachurch gym in a particularly rural, definitely red part of Ohio. My mom joined me for the day but, as a nonvoter (either a non-citizen or a convicted felon, take your pick), was confined to staying outside the polling place and watching the line.
The other legal observers, who came from...
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October 2010
8 posts
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Biking Altruism
Caroline shared a charming bike story about our neighborhood last month, which prompted me to tell one of my own from a couple of weeks ago. Having biked in New York since I moved here three years ago and crossed the Manhattan bridge more times than I care to count, I’ve become a reasonably strong rider. To the point where I pass something like 9 out of 10 riders I encounter on my commute...
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After the hatchets, come the scalpels
Since complaining about the meat industry is becoming a common theme of my posts, I would be remiss if I didn’t share an op-ed from the Guardian where George Monbiot comes out in favor of sustainable meat eating, after having argued that veganism is the only just option. Consider:
Feeding meat and bone meal to cows was insane. Feeding it to pigs, whose natural diet incorporates a fair bit of...
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Brooklyn Skillshare 2010
Last year, our inaugural Brooklyn Skillshare drew some 450+ people out to the Gowanus Studio Space for a day of five blocks of three classes each, ranging from Make Your Own Butter to Balloon Animals. The day was awesome but also insane, as we dealt with larger-than-expected crowds who swarmed the classes, making it difficult to everyone to see and hear. The crowd also overwhelmed what we had...
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Recipe: Spicy Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese...
Because it’s autumn, and also because there were a number of special events this week at work (two birthdays, someone coming back from maternity leave, someone else leaving), I decided it was time to break out the pumpkin cupcakes.
The recipe comes from a scanned page of my mother’s cookbook, in which she had a pasted a number of recipes cut out from the newspaper. Though...
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October basil
As garden season nears an end in Brooklyn, Anthony and I are left with the decidedly pleasant task of disposing with our basil.
Our basil did spectacularly well this year. We started them from seeds in May, and in June they looked like this:
Today, each one of those stalks has turned into a bush like this:
Magic, right?
Therefore, it’s pesto time. (You may or may not want to...
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“Given the high costs of waste disposal in New York, it’s senseless that we cart...”
– A certain hottie (who also writes half of this blog), in Time Out New York today in an article about our worm composting class at the Brooklyn Skillshare!
If you’re in the New York area, you really should check out the Skillshare on Saturday. In addition to our worm composting class, there...
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Yo la Tengo Late Summer Blog Challenge farewell
As I’ve mentioned before, one of our motivations for finally starting this blog (after talking about doing it for months), was to join Adrianne’s Yo la Tengo Late Summer Blog Challenge. The challenge is quite simple: you blog every day for the month of September. You get one mulligan for your first missed post, and if you miss another one after that, you are listed as...
September 2010
30 posts
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Craft Beer Week 2010
One of my favorite things since moving to the city has been NYC Craft Beer Week, which I’ve enjoyed since it kicked off in 2008. Some background for the uninitiated: The first year was a little rocky, with neighborhood bar crawls that you could buy a passport to which would be valid for one night. My sister, her boyfriend, and I did the one in downtown Brooklyn - which actually included bars...
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Ethics and Carnivores
A propos of yesterday’s unhinged screed about meat-eating, today via Practical Ethics I see Jeff McMahan has a piece at The Stone about the ethics of carnivores - only McMahan isn’t just talking about humans. In his imaginative piece, he explores the idea that the suffering caused by one animal preying on another isn’t something that we have reason to prevent, if we can do so...
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