Monkey Monday: just a little news 28 November 2011 5:56 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cross-posting,economics,meta,monkeys,news,random , add a commentUrgh, readers. I have the post-holiday-weekend plague, in the form of a cold that makes me want to do nothing more strenuous than lie around feeling sorry for myself, with the only occasional exertion to pour myself the next cup of ginger ale (Schweppes, not even the good stuff) or tea. So today’s post is pretty random, an even more biased sample of the weekend’s food-related New York Times articles, and something I saw on Tumblr. Coming up later this week: Twitter Tuesday, a more complete turducken Wordless Wednesday if I can swing it, and then some well-earned rest. This NaBloPoMo thing has been quite the adventure! Anyway, on with the post: (more…)
The last epistle of NaBloPoMo 27 November 2011 10:19 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cross-posting,meta,writing , add a comment…is to the unread magazines currently cluttering my apartment. It’s very first-drafty, but hints at a project that may provide my motivation to keep blogging more regularly once this month of marathon is over. So that’s fun.
Thanksgiving Thank You Thursday 24 November 2011 10:21 am
Posted by Tracy in : cross-posting,meta,thank you Thursday,writing , add a commentAnd but so first and foremost, readers, thanks for checking out my blog this Thanksgiving. Extra bonus thanks to repeat visitors, and gold stars on those extra bonuses for thoughtful comments both on this blog’s pages and via email. I know it’s kinda corny, but I really am thankful for this blog, for many of the same reasons I am grateful for writing, as I posted over the weekend on Open Letters.
What else? Well, I am still grateful to Peter for showing me Written? Kitten! because it is simply fantastic and has made this second half of NaBloPoMo entirely more do-able and fun. Yay for kitty pictures! And yay (again) for writing! Going through my old Open Letters missives because of the “Writing” meta-post, i found a few other items I expressed gratitude for: friends old and new and not yet met, the Internet (in part for helping me keep in touch with said friends), the dream of a punk rock teahouse of my very own, pasta, green beans, soccer, compassion, flowers, rain (both for helping plants grow and for pausing now and then so it’s easier for me to get out and play—although this has not been the case in NYC for a few days; it’s been positively Oregonian!), my uterus, the absence of tobacco smoke, not having dog poop in my garden, even procrastination, stress, and mad cow disease (because I love me some black humor irony, yes I do).
I also love the more garden-variety humor of time spent with family and friends, which is the plan for today: by the time this post automagically appears online, I will be at my brother Piett’s place in Vermont, preparing or getting ready to prepare a feast of epic proportions. It’s not quite a cast of thousands, but it might feel that way depending on how creative Piett and Michelle are at rearranging their furniture…. It will be an adventure, pretty much no matter what. I am reminded of an African proverb I heard quoted at a Food Day event last month:
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.
Here’s wishing all of us luck on all our endurance events this Thanksgiving.
Love,
-Tracy
This post appeared on TracyFood briefly on Wednesday morning, thanks to my thumbs and the WordPress iPhone app, which I am still not very skilled at using. (My laptop was busy uploading turducken pics, you see, and I didn’t want to mess with its mojo…)
Thanksgiving starts off early this week… 20 November 2011 6:25 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cross-posting,meta,writing , add a comment…over at Open Letters, where I express a great deal of gratitude for writing. It might be the longest epistle I’ve ever posted there, and it is probably the most meta since my very first introductory letter-to-readers back when I started the project, holy cats, in 2005. It feels a little first-draft-y, to be honest, but I still think it’s a good start (especially considering how I had to rein myself in from embedding my whole letter to reading inside it). Anyway, here’s a link to the Writing letter again, just to improve the odds that someone clicking randomly on this page gets through to the right place.
Another Twitter Tuesday! 8 November 2011 11:24 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,diet stress is a health hazard,events,fangirl,fast food,food safety,food snobbery,health at every size,media,meta,news,Twitter Tuesday , add a commentHey, so like I confessed yesterday, I really didn’t know what to blog about today, only then suddenly, to my surprise and delight, the Twitters, which I kinda sorta really hadn’t been watching since last Tuesday, came through for me in a big way. Check these out! First and foremost, my former classmate Shanti with news that makes me want to make horrible puns about sticky messes:
Shanti Elise Prasad (@shantielise)
If you eat honey, this may blow your mind. Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey… foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-…
I’m having a little trouble wrapping my head around this story, personally, because as far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “honey” being argued about here is whether or not (for example) the sweet golden goo in the plastic bear has pollen in it. But the article’s scandal-monger-y lede:
More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.
really rubs me the wrong way. Because with the possible exception of some wild-caught fish, pretty much no animal product sold in U.S. grocery stores is exactly what the animals in question produce. It’s all processed one way or another. (more…)
