Foto Friday: Linguine Alfredo recipe, for Piett. 15 January 2010 11:08 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cheese,convenience,cooking,eating,eugene,family,Holland,hot mess,Netherlands,pasta,photos,pictures,random,recipes,restaurants,vegetarian,work , add a commentSo I’m back from Holland and recovering from the trip, but still pretty freaking tired and nowhere near done uploading and organizing all the pictures I took. Today’s photo post was going to be all about flying fancy-style, but like I said, I haven’t quite got those pictures processed. Instead, I’m going to blog my dinner, which happens to relate back to my trip in more than just the “so tired, can’t get stuff organized” way. You see, on Tuesday night my brother Piett and I made a huge pasta dinner for my parents, my Oma, my aunt Ingrid, uncle Dako, their daughters Stéphanie and Claudia, and Stéphanie’s boyfriend Raymond (to be perfectly fair, Claud made her own food but I was still happy to have something that almost everyone could agree to eat). We cooked 1 1/2 kilos of spaghetti and three different sauces for people to mix and match to their own tastes: tomato-meat, tomato-vegetable sauce, and creamy pesto. Piett was an awesome sous-chef, and somewhere in the chatting over cooking we got to the topic of Alfredo sauce. My basic point was that it’s super-easy, and Piett said he’d like me to show him how to make it some time. While this post is not the video podcast recipe he suggested, it’s a step in that direction.
Linguine Alfredo: it’s what was for my dinner tonight.
Monkey Monday: coming up for air edition 14 December 2009 8:08 am
Posted by Tracy in : events,fangirl,geekery,health at every size,Marion Nestle,news,nyc,politics,school,sustainability,video,work,writing , 3 commentsHey, so it’s finals week from now until my last paper is due on the 23rd (which is an awful deadline and I sincerely hope to be done before then) and in the meantime I’ve been a big slacker which is why I haven’t posted and blah blah blah excuses excuses. Last week was ten thousand kinds of awesome, though.
On Monday morning, I went to an awesome event at The New School, celebrating the NYC FRESH initiative, which had not yet officially passed City Council, although it did on Wednesday. FRESH is Food Retail Expansion to Support Health, and it’s a mix of zoning and tax incentives for full-service grocery stores in certain underserved neighborhoods (Northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens). Not only must the stores devote a certain amount of square footage to fresh produce and other whole foods, they are required to accept EBT and WIC (which is really only common sense if they’re actually going to serve the lower-income communities that food retailers often avoid) and publically, transparently commit to good labor practices, so that people who work at those stores can afford to shop there. So awesome. And (more…)
Thank you Thursday: geeking out on government data 19 November 2009 2:13 pm
Posted by Tracy in : diet stress is a health hazard,fun,geekery,health,health at every size,media,meta,random,reading,silly,work,writing , add a commentSo today I ran across a survey on the CDC website while I was doing some research for my food policy final project (on how maybe health at every size is a better goal than weight loss, or obesity prevention, weight control, “healthy eating” or any other euphemism for making ourselves miserable about being irresponsible, fat, unhealthy failures at life, despite the fact that life, y’know, is not always easy, and there’s plenty of reasons we might be unwell besides the stuff we can try to control if we have the means, which not everybody does). I had a surprising amount of fun with that survey, and I copied some of the questions and my answers to prove it (there were questions about whether I might blog about what I was finding on the websites, and then I knew for sure I would have to go all meta). But before I get to that, today’s Thank You:
Dear CDC and USDA Economic Research Service and other awesome organizations doing public policy research and putting it online where I can geek out over it,
Thank you. Keep up the good work, and please give me a job someday.
Love,
-Tracy
And now, on to the survey silliness. (more…)
Monkey Monday: knee-jerk reaction edition. 1 June 2009 10:58 am
Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,convenience,cooking,friends,monkeys,people,politics,random,restaurants,work , 3 commentsHey! Is anybody reading this planning to go to the Vegan Brunch book party at MooShoes tonight? I’m going to try to make it, but I’m going to have to get Isa’s autograph on Vegan With a Vengeance since my super-lucky copy of Vegan Brunch is still on its way over here (do tell me all about it, Megan!) Okay, now on with the rant.
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Disclaimer: Only the last paragraph of this rant (the update) was written after I’d actually read the blog post in question, but I stand by everything that leapt partly-formed from my brain as soon as I saw this headline and summary:
American Dining’s Service Deficit
from The Atlantic Food Channel by Nina and Tim Zagat
About 70 percent of complaints recorded by the Zagat Survey are about service; far more than food. How to fix our service problem.
PAY THEM! I shouted at my computer screen, startling the cat who was climbing around on my desk in a futile effort to get my attention. (more…)
Food writing snarktacular! (For Christine) 30 October 2008 8:18 am
Posted by Tracy in : eugene,food safety,food snobbery,friends,oregon,school,work , 3 commentsI sent this article to my Sugar Momma and her favorite Englishman in Davis, and she said nice things about it, like “Can I forward it to my family?” Flattery rules, and so I am posting this to show off (and so Christine has the option of sending a link instead of all my text).
Possible titles for this piece, depending on who I’m selling it to (in which case there’d be appropriate tweaks, blah blah), include: “Ex-Sundance Employee Tells All!” and “Confessions of a Cheesemonger.” (more…)
