TracyFood

Monkey Monday: odds and ends edition. 10 December 2007 2:41 pm

Posted by Tracy in : breakfast,friends,monkeys,news,pictures,restaurants,travel , trackback

So I seem to recall that back in the day, the original purpose of Monkey Monday was to give myself an excuse to post random short things like fun links and little stories that don’t quite add up to full-size entries all by themselves. Today I’m getting back to exactly those basics, only with a few pictures thrown into the mix, because that’s how I roll. Short summary: weird food label revelations, snarky commentary on recentish food-related New York Times articles, tales from my weekend road trip to Olympia, and more!

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Weird food label revelations

Check out the nutrition information on this package of ground cumin I picked up at my friendly local Asian market on Thursday:

Look at all that calcium and magnesium! Okay, it’s nothing compared to leafy greens or multivitamins, but still. For some reason, I think of spices as having no nutritional value, perhaps because I’m sick of all the nutrition news stories of the form “X might cure cancer/help the body resist cholesterol/give you the ability to fly!” So it was funny to find a counterexample on my own kitchen table.

Snarky Food Geek reads New York Times! Breakfast at Eleven!

Speaking of nutrition news of the obvious, here’s a little month-old news item that made me snark, “On the one hand, no shit, Sherlock. On the other hand, maybe it’ll take a Ph.D. epidemiologist to get the gorramn message across, and if it does finally sink in that food is better than vitamin pills, well hey howdy go team.” Of course whole foods are awesomer than their component parts! Coming up next: might bread be more delicious than flour, water, salt, and yeast? Only science can tell! Sigh.

In more recent news, last week the New York Times Dining section asked, Is the Entree Heading for Extinction? As someone who frequently cooks dinner from the “Side Dishes” sections of the Moosewood cookbooks, I can only hope the answer is “yes.” Which reminds me of another fun New York Times blog post I spotted today: Oversized Portions? Blame the Chef. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the solution to all these problems, and it is small plates menus, served family-style. It’s also perfect for our twenty-first century short attention spans. Bring it on!

Finally, yesterday the Times asked, If It’s Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener? and answered: well, not if you’re driving for all your errands and eat so wastefully that you end up throwing a lot of food out. Also, maybe try cutting back on the meat or at least switching to grass-fed (in which case if you can afford not to cut back on the meat maybe you should’ve switched a long time ago for the deliciousness alone, eh?) Sigh, but at the same time I’m always glad to see local food backlash stories, because it means the idea of at least thinking where your food is from geographically has really caught on some.

And now for something completely different.

I got a phone call from my brother more than a week ago. “How much liquid can you consume?” he asked. “A gallon? Just half a gallon?” Uh-oh, I thought, those are scary questions coming from a guy who works in a liquor store. Turns out he was offering to hook me up with a lot of delicious maple syrup, courtesy of his girlfriend’s dad, who makes the stuff in Vermont. Sweet! Literally! After a quick consultation with Peter, I’ve concluded that we’re going to try to take the physical challenge of polishing off one gallon of maple syrup in a year. I predict lots of breakfast for dinner, as well as many batches of Tracy granola, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that.

I went to Olympia for the weekend!

Speaking of delicious breakfasts, yesterday I made a delicious brunch to celebrate spending the weekend in Olympia with my friend Marcy: French toast using pumpkin bread from her community-supported bakery (like a CSA, but members get delicious baked goods — very exciting!) I think Marcy got a picture of the deliciousness, but for now you’re going to have to believe me when I say it looked almost as good as it tasted.

Other fun food adventures in Olympia included: a Secret Café on Friday night, whereat (yes, I know that’s not a word) we ate tasty vegan food while being serenaded by a mandolin player, all for the cause of helping some hippies raise money to bring a friend back from the East Coast. On Saturday there was hippie pizza and then pie, and on Sunday after brunch and Duck the Malls craft fair, I really enjoyed the vegan recipe offerings at the Olympia Zine Library:

Awww, so adorably punk rock!

In conclusion…

Phew! Turns out there’s no shortage of random little things to write about, but now I should really get back to working on my grad school applications. Still, yay for TracyFood being a wonderful distraction!