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Monkey Monday: New kitchen toy edition! 5 June 2007 12:27 am

Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, Morning Glory, books, cooking, garden, kitchen gear, monkeys, school , trackback

Short version: This post is late! I got myself a kitchen scale! I read a fun gardening book called You Grow Girl! I had a super-fun weekend! Tufts sent me a bunch of information about the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy!

This post is late!

But Peter and I had a delicious dinner of last Friday’s leftover falafel batter, updated with parsley and egg, which did indeed help everything stick together quite nicely. Big love to Allison for that trick, oh yes. And I made pita bread again! This time I wasn’t quite so successful at getting them to rise and puff up into pockets, in part because it was cooler so everything rose more slowly, and also I think maybe I put too much flour in the dough. But that’s okay, even un-pocketed pita will be delicious with Curried Red Lentil Dip, oh yes. And baking gave me a chance to use my new toy:

Kitchen Scale!

So not long ago, the InterWeb reminded me that I really need a kitchen scale, just because I’m that kind of obsessive-compulsive food geek. So today I got one! The Escali Primo, to be exact, because it came in orange and also because while the Tabla was very shiny, for an extra $10 it wasn’t actually a lot smaller, and the interface sort of sucked, and it had the only very arguably useful feature of giving liquid measurements. Um, color me skeptical. (Apparently, orange is the color of skepticism.) Really, the important features of this scale are:

It can handle weights up to 5 kilograms/11 pounds, which should be big enough even for dealing with Sundance recipes that make 50+ pounds of food, because I will certainly be scaling those down to less completely insane amounts (um, pun not intended, really). I got the scale (which might be getting a name if I keep talking about it so much) at Hartwick’s, which is also where I got my chef’s knife (I like Hartwick’s even though they’re a little big and corporate-looking; I could probably get stuff for cheaper at a real restaurant supply store, but the closest one would not be much fun to reach on my bike). My friendly local hippie home and garden store had just this one digital scale, albeit only in black, white, and metallic, as well as several cheaper spring types, so I was very glad I made the extra stop and saw more options, including all the colors.)

Anyway! From now on all my recipes will include weights as well as volumes whenever I remember to use my awesome new toy. Also I will do my best to use metric units, because they’re geekier. Yay geeking out! (Coming soon: updated TracyGranola recipe with weights and maybe prices, because I’ve always been curious how much it costs per pound compared to store-bought granola.)

Mini book review: You Grow Girl by Gayla Trail

So some time last week I discovered YouGrowGirl.com, because apparently I have been hiding under a rock for the past seven years. Actually, to be fair, although YGG has been around since 2000, I really only started having a use for a fun and funky DIY-gardening-on-the-cheap website in 2004 or so, and hey, better late than never. Then I found out that the lady behind YouGrowGirl has a book out, and I asked my friendly local public library about it, and sure enough, they had a copy for me to enjoy, and enjoy it I have! Gayla Trail’s writing is frank and funny and her book seriously made me think twice about my knee-jerk aversion to potted plants, because hey, our back deck is plenty sunny enough for a container garden… hmmm. The crafty Ms. Trail has written about gardening for Bust and ReadyMade magazines, so fans of those publications, take note! And everybody else interested in low-stress gardening books, you take note, too!

My Awesome Weekend

Speaking of gardening and awesome, this weekend featured both! I traded my Saturday shift at Morning Glory so I could spend the day at the Urban Farm and the Saturday Market, both of which were super-fun and no doubt contributed to the sunburn that sent me to bed very early that night. (It really wasn’t a very bad sunburn, just enough to make me feel all flushed and sleepy.) Then on Sunday I saved the day at work via a complicated scheduling maneuver that made it possible for me to close for Jen, who really needed to go home. Also I talked to Ben about volunteering at Skinner City Farm because I am really going to miss the big group garden experience when this term of Urban Farm ends (sniffle!) I hope to tour there (SCF) on Wednesday afternoon, and put in a few hours a week whenever I can this summer. Yay community gardens!

Mail!

There was a big envelope waiting for me in the mailbox when I got home after work and my scale-acquiring adventures. The envelope was full of information about the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, including their programs in Agriculture, Food and Environment, Nutrition Communication, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Food Policy and Applied Nutrition. Most of these programs include the option of combining a masters (or drive-by-masters on the way to a Ph.D.) with an M.P.H. — say, for instance, a masters of public health nutrition, the field my hero, Marion Nestle, recommends to food geeks interested in learning about nutrition and health in a more big-picture way than, say, dietetics. How intriguing…. now I really want a similar pile of literature from the NYU food studies program, oh yes. But first, bed.

Comments»

1. Penny - 24 June 2007 5:20 pm

I’m just commenting to plug Tufts, not because I know anything about the program but because I would be extremely happy if you moved to the Boston area. I would dance and bake cupcakes. It’s a fact!