TracyFood

Monkey Monday: thoughts on a theme, and more. 30 March 2009 8:55 am

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,geekery,Harold McGee,monkeys,pasta,pictures,random , add a comment

First things first: last week, I made Harold McGee’s One-Pan Pasta With Garlic and Oil, and it worked:

Readers, I put raw noodles into cold water — and way less water than the recipe/back of the box standard — and they came out. Yes, the texture was a little different than the pasta I’m used to, but boy monkeys is this trick going to save us a lot of white gas on future camping trips! Coming up later this week: more pictures and comments on the experiment.

Along those same lines, I continue to enjoy Rachel Laudan‘s blogging on fuel, water, and pasta, which led to a great post on fire, water, and salt.

Speaking of cooking fuel and efficient resource usage, this coming Wednesday, April 1, is the deadline for voting on the Financial Times / Forum for the Future Climate Change Challenge and I for one think the Kyoto Box solar stove is a super-cool idea, not just because of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions but also because of all the potential energy saved — human energy and time spent collecting firewood, that is. So go read about cool inventions, and vote for your favorite, even if it isn’t the shiny, shiny stove.

Also on my mind this week: (more…)

Another belated Monkey Monday. 2 March 2009 1:43 pm

Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,cooking,geekery,Harold McGee,news,pasta,pictures,random,school , add a comment

Lateness and weird timing have sort of been a theme for me lately, dangit. Later this week I will post about the 24-hour food record I did for my nutrition class, and the weird timing issues around that assignment (Superbowl Sunday was seriously the closest I could get to a “normal” day to record). Last week’s timing was such that I was too busy having a sinus infection to do my supermarket participant observation until darn near the very last minute on Thursday — but as always, food stores are completely fascinating to me and the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle is no exception. Check out this awesome shelf tag:

Yes, that’s right. Sea salt and vinegar Kettle Chips fit in a special diet! Celebrate your choices! (more…)

I’m having some kind of food geek peak experience right now… 25 June 2008 8:57 pm

Posted by Tracy in : books,cooking,fangirl,geekery,Harold McGee,monkeys , 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!

Confessions of a food geek: Olive oil obsession and more. 6 June 2007 10:46 pm

Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,cheese,cooking,eating,fangirl,food snobbery,geekery,Harold McGee,identity,news,salad,taste test , 3 comments

So in case it wasn’t obvious from, oh, this entire blogsite, I’m a bit of a food geek. My kitchen scale is the coolest new toy maybe since Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, I think Cook’s Illustrated is by far the best food magazine in the entire universe not just because it has no ads but even more so because their recipes read like lab reports (here’s what we wanted, here’s what went wrong, here’s what we learned and how we eventually fixed the problem), and until recently I was pretty sure that nothing could beat the culinary nerdiness of Cook’s TV show, America’s Test Kitchen. However, until just a few hours ago I had never seen a single episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown. Wow. (more…)