TracyFood

Monkey Monday: Memorial Day Weekend edition 28 May 2007 9:42 pm

Posted by Tracy in : work, Morning Glory, seasonality, monkeys, America's Test Kitchen, garden, health, news, friends, restaurants, eating, soup, school, cooking , trackback

Quick summary: Peter helped me make some little changes to TracyFood’s look, I worked all weekend so if you had three days off I hope they were awesome and I will think of you when I sleep in for the next four days, I have many random thoughts to write about, I watched Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World TV show so you don’t have to, I just say no to bottled water and sodium benzoate, and I love my garden!

Hey look! I rearranged some stuff in the sidebar to the right and with Peter’s help it now also features teeny versions of the five most recent pictures I tagged “TracyFood” at Flickr!. I’m super-easily amused!

So I actually worked all three days of this so-called three day weekend, and today that involved a lot of answering the phone at Morning Glory and telling people that yes, in fact, we were open. Considering all the “closed Monday for Memorial Day” signs I saw on the ride to work, I thought it was actually a pretty mellow day, but then again, Beth came in to help on the line and Ben rocked out on dishes so we were never short-handed, which was awesome. I even had time to make soup, which I love (vegan creamy potato broccoli, because I feel like bragging it up and also to remind myself that I maybe have a similar Sundance recipe that needs the TracyFood treatment).

I have been thinking about the similarities and differences between restaurant food and home-cooked meals, but I am not yet sure what I want to write about that comparison. Also a few weeks ago Penny asked me about my favorite cookbooks and I am still thinking about that question and what makes a good cookbook and what I can learn from these thoughts to improve my own recipe-writing.

On Friday afternoon I watched the first episode of The Best Recipes in the World with Mark Bittman of the New York Times and How to Cook Everything and of course the shiny new cookbook that shares a name with the TV series that advertises it. It was a fun enough show, all about “Rice With Things” — paella, risotto, and other oddly non-Asian dishes, considering the central grain featured. Actually, a quick glance at the book/show website reveals that Bittman’s “world” is apparently the U.S. and Western Europe — oh well. His world is also very dudely, judging by “Rice With Things,” but in a teaser for future episodes they were quick to mention that they’d visited great chefs “and great-grandmothers” in their recipe quest, so I’m holding out hope for less macho and maybe an appearance or two by actual lady cooks, while I’m all dreamy. Also maybe other episodes will be less rushed — I got the feeling they would have loved a full hour instead of half an hour, but oh well. If anybody reading this has caught other episodes (Oregon is airing them a few weeks later than many East Coast stations, for instance), I’m curious as to whether it gets better, but I’m also fairly certain TBRITW won’t be replacing America’s Test Kitchen in my TV food show affections, oh no. (Note to self: really, remember to set the VCR on Saturdays.)

In freaky-fascinating food-related news, I really liked this New York Times Magazine feature about bottled water, beverage container deposits, and lots more. Made me happy to drink tap water from a handy-dandy refillable bottle, I tell you what. And then I read an article made me want to purge the pantry of all products containing sodium benzoate, a preservative commonly found in soft drinks and other products less healthy than tap water. Eek. A quick search of our kitchen turned up only a few items: Tapatio hot sauce, sweet & sour mix for whiskey sours and the like, maraschino cherries (it’d really be no surprise if these turned out to cause cancer) and sadly, IBC root beer, most recently used in triumphantly delicious root beer floats. Nothing I can’t live without, but eesh and ew, just to continue in the “exclamations starting with ‘e’” theme of this thought.

Finally, a happy thought after all the freaky-weird and freaky-scary news: I ate the first snow pea from my garden today! Yay! I saw many more that will be ready for harvest soon, which means time for stir-fried snow peas and tofu, and later stir-fried sugar snap peas, if I can wait that long. Yum!