TracyFood

Foto Friday: recipe revisionism EXPOSED! 11 November 2011 2:52 pm

Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,baking,consumerism,cookies,diet stress is a health hazard,food snobbery,geekery,photos,pictures,random,recipes,seasonality , add a comment

Just one picture today, readers, but it is a doozy! Check this out:

Oatmeal cookie recipe revisionism — EXPOSED!

Do you know what this means, readers? DO YOU? (more…)

Thank you Thursday: Lentil salad with feta. 20 May 2010 9:21 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cheese,consumerism,food snobbery,photos,pictures,seasonality,summer,sundance,thank you Thursday,vegetarian , add a comment

Let me show you a little composition I like to call: “Lentil Salad, F*** Yeah!”

That’s my favorite lentil salad, on a bed of green leaf lettuce and topped with feta cheese. Not just any feta, though, but the nigh-legendary Bulgarian feta. Let me explain. (more…)

Up past my bedtime again, yep. 25 December 2009 3:38 am

Posted by Tracy in : baking,dessert,family,fun,seasonality , 1 comment so far

So about two and a half hours ago I pulled a pretty rad-looking mincemeat pie out of the oven here at Peter’s parents’ place upstate, and now I’m waiting on Super-Secret XMas Baking Project 2009 (pie turned out to be a fantastic excuse/cover story/source of plausible deniability/diversionary tactic, oh yes). It’s a very good thing I had a nap this afternoon.

But dude! I made a pretty good-looking pie! The crust might be a little crumbly instead of flaky, but y’know what? I’ll take it. Rolling out dough between sheets of wax paper totally worked wonders and I am feeling a bit ninja-like for that bit of trickery, but mostly I am sleepy. Bake faster, mystery treats!

While I’m waiting, I think I’ll make this a Tracyfood Xmas tradition:

Here’s to peace, joy, and figgy puddings for everyone.
-Tracy

Belated Monkey Monday: winter solstice 2009 edition. 22 December 2009 1:48 am

Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,monkeys,politics,random,school,seasonality,sustainability,whoops,writing , 2 comments

So I know tonight is officially the longest of the year, but I’m also subjectively sure that my longest night of 2009 was last Thursday, when I finally came up with a way to organize my sociology paper into a more-or-less coherent whole. That was at 11 PM, and of course it took a few more hours for the writing to really start to gel. Whee. I ran into a spot of technical difficulties at 2:40 PM the next day, when I had settled on a conclusion and all that was left was cleaning up, cutting the big block quotations down to size, and so on… Google Docs sent me the error message that it couldn’t save my changes, and I noticed it hadn’t been able to do so since 2:15 PM. Eeks. I’m still not sure what caused the choke-up, but I managed to work around it by opening the most recently saved version of the paper in a different web browser, and rescuing the last few paragraphs into it by cut and paste, but the confusion did cost me a bunch of editing. So the final mess ended up way longer than intended, and I may yet revise it to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive superpower, but not today. Today is for the policy portfolio, which I had hoped to have turned in by now, but self-imposed deadlines be danged, sleep is more important.

Here’s my one-page summary of the issue, the stakeholders, and my strategy about what I think should be done about it. Can you dig it? (more…)

Monkey Monday: winter squash goodness and more. 2 November 2009 9:47 am

Posted by Tracy in : books,cooking,eating,fangirl,Harold McGee,health at every size,kitchen mishaps,monkeys,nyc,reading,seasonality,winter squash , 2 comments

Fun fact! In some dialects of English (but not mine), the word “pumpkin” is used to refer to all winter squash, not just the orange hard-skinned kinds used to make pies and jack-o-lanterns (and other tasty things, some of which I will be describing later in this post). In my experience, this is mostly a Southern Hemisphere/British usage, but I welcome a more substantial analysis than my touchy-feely “I think this is how it works.” Meanwhile, in this Northern Hemisphere, between Halloween and the end of Daylight Savings Time it’s officially winter in my brain, and for the past week or so I have been marking the changing season by eating lots of winter squash, including pumpkin. Yum.

For starters, (more…)