Monkey Monday: making excuses edition 22 September 2008 11:51 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery, monkeys, school, books , add a commentToday’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
The symposium featured:
- Joan Reardon, Fisher’s biographer several times over, who spoke about the particular difficulties in writing about someone whose work was “unremittingly autobiographical,”
- Judith Jones, one of Fisher’s editors and author of the autobiography The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, which I had to return to the Eugene Public Library unfinished before we moved,
- Amanda Hesser, author of The Cook and the Gardener and Cooking for Mr. Latte, the latter of which was recommended to me literally just last night,
- and Kennedy Friede Golden, M. F. K. Fisher’s youngest daughter.
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?
Monkey Monday: food irradiation, breakfast cereal, and more! 8 September 2008 1:46 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery, breakfast, food safety, good news, New York, random, monkeys, politics, Marion Nestle, books, school, news, milk, restaurants , add a commentUm, not necessarily in that order. Breakfast first, right? Right. Here goes. I had cereal for breakfast for the first time in a very long time today. Not oatmeal (it’s still way too hot for that), Tracy granola with yogurt, like I love, but something more in the muesli genre (hand-me-down free food from my parents) with milk. Turns out this was a bad idea, one which reminded me why I quit eating cold breakfast cereal. I’m just not a big fan of milk, unless it’s transformed in combination with something delicious, like tea or ice cream ingredients. (I’ll make an exception in the case of hot and fresh chocolatey baked goods, and tomato soup. For some reason I really love the contrast between a glass of cold milk and the savory acidity of hot tomato soup. But I digress.) If grains are going to be soggy, I want them warm, and soaked in delicious stir-fry sauce or something — old milk doesn’t count. So I was still hungry after forcing myself to finish the sad little bowl of milk-soaked oats and whatever. All told, cold breakfast cereal is still not my favorite: anything besides granola leaves much to be desired.
In other news of the disappointing, today the Ethicurean reminded me that the FDA now allows irradiation of spinach and lettuce. (more…)
Happy birthday to me! 28 August 2008 11:18 am
Posted by Tracy in : good news, health, books, eating , 4 commentsHere’s some good news from the browser tabs I should’ve closed a week ago: for the past more than a month, the New York Times health blog, Well, has been reporting about researchers finally publishing some common sense about diets, weight, and health. I hope you all have read about this already, but it’s important enough (and makes me happy enough) that it seems well worth repeating. So here, some birthday gifts of good news: (more…)
Fun facts! 6 August 2008 3:33 pm
Posted by Tracy in : not even vegetarian, work, Morning Glory, news, books , 2 commentsI started writing these on Friday, for extra bonus alliteration points, when I discovered that our toaster oven does not work unless it is plugged in (I know, I know, dur-hurrrrr, but in these exciting times I’m not exactly the swiftest). Then I got distracted (no big surprise). Whatever. The toaster oven was unplugged because Peter installed shiny new GFCI outlets in the kitchen, thus satisfying (more…)
I’m having some kind of food geek peak experience right now… 25 June 2008 8:57 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery, monkeys, books, cooking , add a comment…if you’d like to share it with me, go check out Time magazine’s writeup of Harold “On Food and Cooking” McGee in their special 2008 Time 100 “most influential people” issue. Here it is, in all its glory, by no less a food geek than Mr. Alton Brown himself. I cannot make this stuff up, nor would I want to. (I got the good news from Michael Ruhlman’s blog, this post here.) Instead, I will just do a happy little monkey-geek dance. Next up I will do a happy hungry monkey dance for whatever it is Peter’s making in the kitchen, because my tummy is rumbly and it smells like awesome. Here’s hoping you read this post in circumstances at least as happy as the ones in which it was written. Cheers!
