Ask TracyFood: questions from my mom! 7 October 2008 8:01 pm
Posted by Tracy in : New York, advice, consumerism, kitchen gear, random, vocabulary , 1 comment so farToday’s Ask TracyFood comes from none other than my mom, who has sent me a number of questions and recommendations by email and paper mail in the past week. Hi Mom! You have questions; I’m online at the NYU library with answers. First up:
What does the phrase ” Sweat the onions” mean in a recipe?
Monkey Monday turns into a belated Paul Newman appreciation. 6 October 2008 9:15 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery, monkeys, news, vegetarian , 1 comment so farHey, so I’m not dead in a ditch, but I don’t have access to an unsecured wireless network at home anymore. Instead I can only get online at school, and wouldn’t you know, I have a tendency to do homework there. But! In my various and sundry online readings (some homework-related, others not), I found out that October 1 is World Vegetarian Day, which kicks off World Vegetarian Month. So all the news about scary mystery meat was a perfect lead-in to that. Then right after I finished my post, Umbra had some more advice about eating less meat over at Grist. Sweet!
In other news, (more…)
Monkey Monday: so much mystery meat! 29 September 2008 8:48 am
Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, advice, consumerism, food safety, food snobbery, health, ingredients, meat, monkeys, mystery meat, news, politics , 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…)
Recipe: Party Hummus 23 September 2008 11:13 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen, advice, cooking, events, recipes, school, vegan, vegetarian , 2 commentsThere was a fantastic recipe titled “Best Hummus” in the May-June 2008 issue of Cook’s Illustrated, and I’ve been using it as a guide to improvise delicious chickpea-based dips for parties this summer, with great success. I had sort of been brushing aside the resultant compliments until I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the hummus offered at a few NYU orientation events (sorry, NYU catering!) Turns out I’d forgotten how mediocre hummus can be. On top of that, I realized that I could submit my post about hummus to the third round of My Legume Love Affair, a blog event created by Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook and hosted this month by Lucy at Nourish Me. I mean, really, it’s about darn time I jumped on that particular bandwagon of beany goodness. But back to hummus. The following hints should help prevent disappointment in homemade concoctions.
First, everybody’s taste in hummus is slightly different, but when in doubt, I vote for a texture with more light fluffiness and less pastiness, and this recipe achieves that goal. If you’d rather have something suitable for home decorating projects (caulk, spackle, you get the idea), by all means leave out some oil and water. That said, it is possible to omit ingredients and still get delicious results. Just before our going-away party in Eugene, I discovered that our tahini had grown mold, and threw it out. The hummus turned out fine anyway; I used a little extra olive oil to make sure it got a nice creamy consistency even without the sesame goodness. At our housewarming party here at the Moon Monkey Bar, Grille, and Cocktail Lounge, I forgot the lemon juice and substituted a few extra cloves of garlic for pungenty goodness. If you do this variation, I highly recommend finishing the hummus the same day it’s made, because the raw garlic will get stronger with time and try to destroy you, even if you aren’t a vampire.
And now, on with the recipe. (more…)
Monkey Monday: making excuses edition 22 September 2008 11:51 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books, geekery, monkeys, school , add a commentToday’s TracyFood is brought to you late by my shiny new MacBook and iPod Touch. Holy monkey gods, new toys are time-consuming and addictive. It was all I could do to tear myself away from the new laptop and take the Touch downtown to the “M. F. K. Fisher: Poet of the Appetites” symposium at The New School. You can watch it here, if you’re interested. It was pretty great, and free for all students, not just The New School’s! Yay!
Now, of course, I have to spend lots more quality time with The Art of Eating
The symposium featured:
- Joan Reardon, Fisher’s biographer several times over, who spoke about the particular difficulties in writing about someone whose work was “unremittingly autobiographical,”
- Judith Jones, one of Fisher’s editors and author of the autobiography The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, which I had to return to the Eugene Public Library unfinished before we moved,
- Amanda Hesser, author of The Cook and the Gardener and Cooking for Mr. Latte, the latter of which was recommended to me literally just last night,
- and Kennedy Friede Golden, M. F. K. Fisher’s youngest daughter.
Next month (October 16, to be exact) the New School is having a forum about Edible Manhattan, a new magazine about the food culture of the island (as distinct from Brooklyn, which has had its own Edible publication for awhile now). It’s free to students, too, and I can’t go because it’s at the same time as my food writing class, ironically enough. Maybe we can have a field trip?
