Monkey Monday: so much mystery meat! 29 September 2008 8:48 am
Posted by Tracy in : food safety, consumerism, food snobbery, ingredients, mystery meat, meat, monkeys, news, health, advice, politics, Marion Nestle , add a commentSeriously, 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…)
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:
* * * * *
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
* * * * *
Here’s what I wrote back: (more…)
Monkey Monday: weekend roundup. 3 March 2008 7:14 pm
Posted by Tracy in : pictures, food snobbery, ingredients, Morning Glory, vegan, restaurants, eating, books, cooking , 2 commentsWritten all weekend, finally posted Wednesday, backdated to Monday for extra confusion! Very quick summary: You (and everyone you know) need(s) a copy of Vegan With a Vengeance, and I have pictures to prove it. TastingMenu had an excellent post about tip-sharing. It’s Jen’s last week at Morning Glory, and she rose above and beyond the occasion with an amazing specials menu. Later this week: yay for my garden! (more…)
Winter Squash 103: toasting the seeds. 28 February 2008 12:22 pm
Posted by Tracy in : pictures, ingredients, winter squash, seasonality, vegan, eating, vegetarian, cooking , add a commentFebruary is never my favorite time of year, but it’s especially rough in Oregon, where most of the winter looks like the very worst kind of February weather to me — not super-cold, just grey and dark and rainy. There’s usually a nice week in the middle of the month, when the sun comes out and I get my hopes up that winter is over and I can go back to playing in my garden. That week is almost invariably followed by at least a month of meteorological misery (sometimes it even snows on my poor little sproutlings). Not so this year. It’s been a remarkably sunny February, and I’m a little suspicious, like Oregon is trying to lure me into a false sense of security so it can destroy me with hail. I’ve been trying to resist overconfidence, but March is almost here…
All of which is to say that if I want to write about winter squash, I had better hurry up and do it while there’s still a hint of the appropriate season. So. (more…)
Winter Squash 102: enough prepping, let’s roast (and eat)! 8 February 2008 6:31 pm
Posted by Tracy in : advice, ingredients, winter squash, vegan, soup, eating, vegetarian, cooking , 6 commentsIn Winter Squash 101, I described the process of cutting a winter squash into bite-size pieces suitable for a recipe like Gladys’s Rice and Bean Stew, and even illustrated the process with pictures of my wrangling an acorn squash for similar purposes. But that’s not all you can do with winter squash, oh no, and many of the alternatives are even more fun and easy. Take roasting, for example. (more…)
