TracyFood

Another belated Foto Friday: adventures in Upper Class dining 15 February 2010 1:53 pm

Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,eating,food as spectator sport,food snobbery,not even vegetarian,photos,pictures,salad,silly,travel,vegetarian,weird , View Comments

All right, party people, I’m pretty sure this is the last post in my series on traveling super-fancy Virgin Atlantic Upper Class style. The first was during the trip out to my Opa’s funeral early last month, then a few weeks later I showed off my flying fancy schwag (and the Virgin Clubhouse at Heathrow, OMG, and ~~yesterday~~ Friday I posted a bit about the actual in-flight experience. But I have, in a sense, saved the best for last, which is to say today I’ll be writing about what I ate on said ridiculously luxurious flight.

Perusng the menu.

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Recipe: Russian Dressing 29 September 2009 10:51 am

Posted by Tracy in : books,cooking,recipes,salad,seasonality , View Comments

It’s fall, gentle readers. I am reluctant to admit it after such a weird summer, much of it cold and wet. But the sun barely shone into my food sociology class at 5 PM yesterday, and not just because it was overcast. The days are now shorter than the nights in this hemisphere, and that’s that. Still, I’ve been craving salad, perhaps because I haven’t eaten it much the past season what with the weird weather and salad-meister Peter being across the country. So last week I made this dressing, since although salad is one of my summer foods I wanted something a little richer and autumnal than my standard vinaigrette. I worked from a recipe in my beloved Moosewood New Classics, kinda like Tracy Granola is based on New Classics, only perhaps even more so — for both recipes, I open the cookbook to the original recipe’s page, then change almost every ingredient’s measurement to my personal tastes. All of which is to say, please, tweak my version to your heart’s content. For more food for thought about how cookbooks are written and how that may not have much relation to how they’re used, check out Rachel Laudan’s recent-ish post about Julia Child, Elizabeth David, and other visions of French food. I liked it very much. And now, on with the recipe. (more…)

Foto Friday: Oma’s 80th birthday 24 July 2009 8:33 am

Posted by Tracy in : Holland,Netherlands,cooking,eating,events,family,pictures,potatoes,salad,travel , View Comments

According to my mother, the original plan for Oma’s 80th birthday was to keep things simple. Sure, we rescheduled a bit, since December 29 is a terrible time for family gatherings for reasons at least equal in number to the strong personalities involved in such a gathering, and June decreased the likelihood of lousy Dutch winter weather cramming us all indoors together. The date decided, Mom proposed a family meal at a nice restaurant, only then… well, neither she nor my aunt Ingrid are willing to take or give any blame about this development, but next thing anybody knew, a small family get-together had turned into Oma inviting everyone she knows and loves for drinks and munchies in Ingrid’s back yard. What can I say? My Oma loves being in the middle of a crowd, especially a crowd of family and friends, and celebrating someone turning an age with a zero in it kind of means doing whatever they want. (Have I mentioned that I turn 30 in August? But that I don’t know what I want?) Oma wanted a party, and a party she got. (more…)

Recipe: a spinach salad for Sarah. 19 September 2008 11:31 am

Posted by Tracy in : eugene,events,friends,recipes,restaurants,salad,vegan,vegetarian , View Comments

Another month, another round of No Croutons Required. I haven’t played along since mushroom miso soup, in April, but this time, the challenge from Holler at Tinned Tomatoes was: use fruit in a soup or salad, and it was the excuse I needed to finally get around to writing this recipe up for Sarah, like I promised to do back in May. Yes, I’m a giant slacker.

Speaking of slackery, it’s not laziness that makes me a raw salad minimalist. Instead, it’s because I like to taste food as a recipe comes together, and if I’m not cooking salad ingredients, they usually don’t go through enough of a transformation to keep me interested if I’ve already eaten a bit of everything involved. Peter doesn’t have this problem, and he likes salad much more than I do, so he makes a lot of the salads we eat. But when I’m in charge of salad, I try to keep it simple, lest lunch or dinner fall victim to my sampling habits and short attention span. An added side effect of this approach is that minimalist salads are somehow much fancier than mixed greens with the works.

To get back to the theme of this month’s event, there’s a formula for a green salad so fancy it hardly even needs a vinaigrette: (more…)

Monkey Monday: happy salad season! 30 June 2008 1:03 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,eating,news,nutrition,salad,seasonality , View Comments

So a New York Times health blog headline caught my eye this morning: The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating, and when I clicked through, the images at the top of the post made me laugh. Why? Well, they had pictures of beets and cabbage, and this is what I had for dinner on Saturday night: