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Monkey Monday: so much mystery meat! 29 September 2008 8:48 am

Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, advice, consumerism, food safety, food snobbery, health, ingredients, meat, monkeys, mystery meat, news, politics , Comments

Seriously, kids, was it International “Make Tracy Happy to Avoid Mystery Meat” Week and nobody told me? I just kept finding more and more news stories and blog posts to that effect. Also, on a metaphorical level, the TracyFood comment spam just kept pouring in — I broke 16,000 17,000 deleted comments over the weekend (number edited on Sunday morning after I started the post on Friday night). Woo? But seriously, all the scary meat news you can read:

22 September: Sucks to be a factory-farmed pig.

Last Monday, U.S. Food Policy alerted me to a news report about pig abuse at factory farms. The official Associated Press news piece is here, along with a video which I cannot bring myself to watch. You can click through to the full piece without being forced to watch the video, but (more…)

Recipe: Party Hummus 23 September 2008 11:13 pm

Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen, advice, cooking, events, recipes, school, vegan, vegetarian , Comments

There was a fantastic recipe titled “Best Hummus” in the May-June 2008 issue of Cook’s Illustrated, and I’ve been using it as a guide to improvise delicious chickpea-based dips for parties this summer, with great success. I had sort of been brushing aside the resultant compliments until I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the hummus offered at a few NYU orientation events (sorry, NYU catering!) Turns out I’d forgotten how mediocre hummus can be. On top of that, I realized that I could submit my post about hummus to the third round of My Legume Love Affair, a blog event created by Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook and hosted this month by Lucy at Nourish Me. I mean, really, it’s about darn time I jumped on that particular bandwagon of beany goodness. But back to hummus. The following hints should help prevent disappointment in homemade concoctions.

First, everybody’s taste in hummus is slightly different, but when in doubt, I vote for a texture with more light fluffiness and less pastiness, and this recipe achieves that goal. If you’d rather have something suitable for home decorating projects (caulk, spackle, you get the idea), by all means leave out some oil and water. That said, it is possible to omit ingredients and still get delicious results. Just before our going-away party in Eugene, I discovered that our tahini had grown mold, and threw it out. The hummus turned out fine anyway; I used a little extra olive oil to make sure it got a nice creamy consistency even without the sesame goodness. At our housewarming party here at the Moon Monkey Bar, Grille, and Cocktail Lounge, I forgot the lemon juice and substituted a few extra cloves of garlic for pungenty goodness. If you do this variation, I highly recommend finishing the hummus the same day it’s made, because the raw garlic will get stronger with time and try to destroy you, even if you aren’t a vampire.

And now, on with the recipe. (more…)

Monkey Monday: making excuses edition 22 September 2008 11:51 pm

Posted by Tracy in : books, geekery, monkeys, school , Comments

Today’s TracyFood is brought to you late by my shiny new MacBook and iPod Touch. Holy monkey gods, new toys are time-consuming and addictive. It was all I could do to tear myself away from the new laptop and take the Touch downtown to the “M. F. K. Fisher: Poet of the Appetites” symposium at The New School. You can watch it here, if you’re interested. It was pretty great, and free for all students, not just The New School’s! Yay!

Now, of course, I have to spend lots more quality time with The Art of Eating, in particular the essay “The Anatomy of a Recipe.” Oh darn, reading ahead!

The symposium featured:

Next month (October 16, to be exact) the New School is having a forum about Edible Manhattan, a new magazine about the food culture of the island (as distinct from Brooklyn, which has had its own Edible publication for awhile now). It’s free to students, too, and I can’t go because it’s at the same time as my food writing class, ironically enough. Maybe we can have a field trip?


Recipe: a spinach salad for Sarah. 19 September 2008 11:31 am

Posted by Tracy in : eugene, events, friends, recipes, restaurants, salad, vegan, vegetarian , Comments

Another month, another round of No Croutons Required. I haven’t played along since mushroom miso soup, in April, but this time, the challenge from Holler at Tinned Tomatoes was: use fruit in a soup or salad, and it was the excuse I needed to finally get around to writing this recipe up for Sarah, like I promised to do back in May. Yes, I’m a giant slacker.

Speaking of slackery, it’s not laziness that makes me a raw salad minimalist. Instead, it’s because I like to taste food as a recipe comes together, and if I’m not cooking salad ingredients, they usually don’t go through enough of a transformation to keep me interested if I’ve already eaten a bit of everything involved. Peter doesn’t have this problem, and he likes salad much more than I do, so he makes a lot of the salads we eat. But when I’m in charge of salad, I try to keep it simple, lest lunch or dinner fall victim to my sampling habits and short attention span. An added side effect of this approach is that minimalist salads are somehow much fancier than mixed greens with the works.

To get back to the theme of this month’s event, there’s a formula for a green salad so fancy it hardly even needs a vinaigrette: (more…)

Wednesday “whoops” redux 17 September 2008 11:55 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Warren Belasco, events, fangirl, geekery, random, school, silly, whoops , Comments

So regular readers of this blog will know that I have been sooooooo excited about school for awhile now, like at least since getting in. My eagerness was such that I programmed my class schedule into Google Calendar when I first registered in May. Only it turns out the gods of the Internet adjusted for time zones when we moved…. which is why, at 7:35 tonight, when I started recognizing some other food studies first-years in a flood of people emerging from the direction of the classroom where I thought I should be going, I finally figured out that my class was at 4:55. Gah! (I didn’t figure out about the time change earlier because I had to rearrange the rest of my schedule on short notice, but I made those changes after leaving the Pacific time zone.)

The good news (and the reason I don’t want do-overs for the whole friggin’ day) is that I did something fun and geeky before going down to NYU campus to eat dinner (mmm, pizza) and finish my class reading (urgh, academic sociology). (more…)