Foto Friday: back to Nepal 12 September 2008 8:43 am
Posted by Tracy in : tea, potatoes, eggs, nepal, travel, people, pictures, breakfast, restaurants , add a commentI know, you thought I’d forgotten all about the Nepal picture project, and to be honest, for a while there, I thought I’d forgotten all about it, too. But New York’s American Museum of Natural History is food for Tracy nostalgia, and last week Peter and I had a visit from an out-of-town friend who provided me with all the excuse I needed to revisit the dinosaurs of my childhood. Hot diggety have those ever been updated! (Bear with me; I’ll bring this ramble back around to Nepal soon.) Not so very updated but still impressive were all the dioramas, which, as Abi (the aforementioned out-of-town friend) pointed out, are sort of a dying art form but which look very different once you think about all the work someone has to do to create and maintain them. I’d never thought about it that way before, but it made me consider those darkened halls of stuffed and mounted animals in a whole new (if dim) light. The displays of world peoples, however, were still just weird — even weirder now that I’ve seen more of the parts of the world that they purport to represent.
Which brings me to the Hall of Asian Peoples, where I could not find a single reference to Nepal. Lots about India, China, and even Tibet, to the point where I wondered when the displays had been created, and whether Nepal was on some kind of anthropological blacklist then. Next time I go back I’ll try to take notes on the exhibits and try to figure out where they fit on the Tibet vs. China timeline as I know it — they certainly seemed to represent a culture which I’ve learned think of as extremely endangered and better preserved on the Nepali side of the Himalayas. But I digress. The whole “no Nepal in the Hall of Asian Peoples” phenomenon was so weird that it made me want to get back to my long-neglected picture-posting project. So here I go. (more…)
Ask TracyFood: about my granola 9 September 2008 10:10 am
Posted by Tracy in : Morning Glory, breakfast, ingredients, baking, advice, restaurants, health, cooking , add a commentSo a few weeks ago, I got an email:
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Hi, Tracy.
I heard that Padnah’s Pit BBQ is now serving Tracy’s Granola.
First, is this your granola?
If so, is it gluten free? (i.e. no wheat products, rye or barley … and are the oats from a dedicated, wheat-free source, such as Bob’s Red Mill?)
Many of us are gluten intolerant or have full-blown Celiac disease, and most granola uses oats that share process facilities with wheat flour manufacturing, so every grain of oats has a small amount of flour on it, making it dangerous.
If you’re the one making this granola people are raving about and you have not been processing it with gluten free ingredients, your market would increase HUGELY if you began doing so and labeled the packaging with “GLUTEN FREE”.
I appreciate your time and hope to hear from you …. I miss granola!
Sincerely,
Carolyn
Portland, OR
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Here’s what I wrote back: (more…)
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…)
Phew! 2 July 2008 6:21 am
Posted by Tracy in : pictures, breakfast, work, Morning Glory, restaurants, news, cooking , 3 commentsOn my way out the door to an opening shift, I realized again that yesterday was a doozy (doozie? no, that’s definitely not spelled right). I got to Morning Glory a little late, so I didn’t really get any of my prep chores started before opening time, and at 7:30 (yes, AM) the phone rang, and I was within arm’s reach:
“Are you guys open yet?”
— “We’re open 7:30 to 3:30 every day.”
“So can I order some food to go?”
Okay, I thought, so that’s how it’s going to be. (more…)
Foto Friday: excuses, excuses, and another specials menu. 13 June 2008 11:25 pm
Posted by Tracy in : breakfast, garden, pictures, family, food safety, not even vegetarian, eggs, seasonality, work, eating, restaurants, meta, eugene, Morning Glory, news, cooking , add a commentHey everybody! I’m not dead in a ditch! Here’s some quick hints about what I’ve been up to instead of posting here:
In next week’s posts, I’ll actually write captions for all those and (more…)
