Curry Killz Cancer

Tumeric
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Studies are showing that chemicals in Turmeric can kill cancer cells. Turmeric also stains things yellow! But yeah for cancer kill agents! Might have to make some curry soon, just to be safe!

Curry spice 'kills cancer cells'

Getting the most from the goods...

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If you read something on the interwebz, it must be true right? Sure!

Here's an interesting, short article I saw online about bioavailability...getting the most nutrients out of your food. Your body only absorbs so much of the good stuff on its own. Sometimes with a little extra something something, you get more bang for your buck!!! For example, if you cook your tomatoes, the cooking process makes more lycopene available to your body, you do lose some vitamin C though. If you add black pepper, the chemicals there help more stuff make it into your system.

Some good tips. If nothing else, it's interesting...
Bioavailability: How to Get More Nutrients from Your Food

Oak Monsters and Fruit Bombs

Based on the recommendation of Greg & Selena, I picked up my own copy of Gary Vaynerchuk's 101 Wines Guaranteed to inspire, delight, and bring thunder to your world!

It's so much fun.

The introduction of the book is subtitled; "This is not a wine guide."

It looks like a wine guide. Wines are listed, ranked and described. Seems wine guide like to me.

This is where it's different. Gary wants this book to "help you to create your own story with wine." He continues, "I only wish for your discovery of wine to be as unique, exciting, fun and full of surprises as mine."

Unique?

Exciting?

Fun?

Full of surprises???

And the book certainly is! I'm really enjoying it. Of the 101 wines listed, so far I have read down to #64. I have 63 more to go.

I became hooked when I read about wine #94, a dessert wine from Italy.

"This is overlooked and so sensual, I need to get a little X-rated with my imagery. This wine makes you want to put on the Barry White and lap it off someone's belly. It's more like you and your teenage dream date are ending a summer night sharing an ice cream sundae at the Jersey shore. You are feeding eat other as it melts, and this sundae has not only peaches-and-cream ice cream, but bananas, warm caramel and butterscotch sauce. Your lips are all sticky with it, and the second you finish your last spoonful, you lean in and last your first kiss. It is that good, and that gorgeous and that memorable, and you need to find it."

I feel all tingly just reading that...and I haven't even tasted the wine!!!!

Pick up this book if you want to read about wine in a very enjoyable, excitable way. A way that will lead you to discover your own way to enjoy wine!

PS: I'm not going to tell you the name of the Barry White wine...pick up a copy of the book!

Secret Garden

WOOT! The Obamas are planting a garden at the White House!!! Well, they are, their staff and some local school kids, but yippee!!!!

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"...this commitment by Ms. Obama to local and freshly grown product is a progressive move forward that will raise the profile and awareness of local and sustainable food both at the White House and nationally to an unprecedented level."

--former White House executive chef Walter Scheib

Perhaps the Obamas read Michael Pollans' open letter to the future president back in October 2008. If you haven't read it, please do so. It's wonderful.



Read the full Washington Post article here:
Obamas to Plant Garden on White House Lawn



...and I planted my asparagus and some garlic this weekend...herbs will go out in a few weeks when the weather stops being so flighty.

I concur!

"Reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking
was like reading pornographic Bible verses."

--Julie Powell, author of Julie & Julia,
on which the new movie of the same name is based.

I've had the book on my shelf for a few years and decided now was as good a time as any to jump in. So far, so fun!

Get Your Drink On...and learn something in the process

Last night I finished Tom Standage's A History of the World in 6 Glasses. I recommend the book. It's very enjoyable and full of some great information and insights into human history and six of our favorites beverages.

Next week I'm discussing this with book club and will try to bring back some thoughts to share here.

Moo

I wanted to share an article from the Washington Post about a farmer in an area outside of Baltimore who is in the middle of legal battles to build a creamery on his property to process his certified organic milk in cheese, butter, etc. But due to zoning and other property issues is being sued by the neighborhood association.

I'm sad for the farmer. He's in a position to make his farm a success and provide an outlet for the sale of local, organic dairy products. But it sounds like he did put his property into an easement to protect it from any form of development, and got a good chunk of change to do so. On the other side of the story, I get the feeling some of the neighbors are being a bit snippy trying to protect the view. It's too bad. I think both sides could benefit from this creamery. The farmer could have a successful, independent farm (a rarity these days) and the neighbors could get locally grown, organic dairy products.

Thoughts?



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Email

I received a glorious email this morning from The Kara. Emails/Comments like this make me very happy. Read on...

Good Morning, My Friend,

I cooked - yes it's true - yesterday!

Inspired by ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE I have been trying very hard to keep it local (at least East Coast within a distance I would drive from my house). To that end, I am SUPER excited about asparagus which is just about everywhere now. I went to Whole Foods yesterday and cannot believe how much money I spent on just 2 bags of groceries - oy! The cost of food is no joke and the cost of good food is hilarious.

Anyway, they had a recipe at the Whole Foods Market that looked pretty easy with lovely seasonal asparagus and I tried it and even fed it to my friends who concurred it was delish! It's in the same vein as the 'pudding' or whatever that Barbara Kingsolver has in her book with asparagus and morels, but thought I'd send it to you b/c the recipe is lovely AND seasonal :)

Asparagus and Brioche Strata - serves 6-8

1/2 loaf brioche (about 8 slices) or other soft bakery bread sliced
7 large eggs
1 1/2 cups ricotta cheese
2 1/2 cups milk (I actually used a little bit less)
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
3/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 bunch (about 1 lb.) thin asparagus, tips and tender stems cut into 2- inch pieces I was having dinner with vegetarians so I did not add the 1 cup (about 1/3lb). diced deli ham which is optional.

Halve the bread slices on the diagnol and lay them across the bottom of a 9 x 13-inch baking dish or 2.5 quart casserole dish, overlapping the pieces slightly.
In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, ricotta, milk, salt, pepper, and
1/4 cup of Parmesan. Pour mixture over bread and press the bread down into the liquid. Cover with plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour and up to 1 day.

Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Sprinkle top of casserole with asparagus
(and ham if you did it) and press some pieces down into the bread.
Sprinkle the top with the remaining 1/2 cup Parm and bake until browned and the center is almost completely set, about 1 hour. Serve warm or room temperature.

Sending my lovees,
Kara

Thank you Kara. This recipe sounds great and I love that ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE has influenced you and you're trying to make it a part of your life! Bravo.


For those of you who haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. Truly an influential book, well thought out, well written and for me, life changing! I really understand Kara's comment about the price of food, especially local food right now. Even if you can eat locally, just one meal a week, you can make a difference. Find a local farmers market and pick up some ingredients on a Saturday and make them for dinner that night. Take baby steps. Eggs are a big thing right now. If you can find a local supplier, you're have fresher eggs and you can get them more affordably. The eggs I buy at the store are $3.25 a dozen. The eggs I can get from a local farmer are $3. That's a quarter savings in my pocketbook. That's $3 back into my local economy, $3 directly to a local farmer, no middle man!! That's less fuel transporting the eggs from the farm to my door.

Think Globally, Act Locally!

IN or OUT?

In an effort to have at least one post this week, please read today's post over at The Amateur Gourmet. Our host at T.A.G., Adam, discusses eating "IN" versus "OUT." I feel he raises valid points and I support his message.

Eating out is fun and social and all that good stuff (and can be expensive!)...but I often don't feel completely satisfied; stuffed, bloated and completely full perhaps. Eating in, cooking a meal at home, for my friends, is the most rewarding experience for me. Especially when something has turned out so very well.

Just One Meal

Took me awhile, but I finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I tried to finish it the last few nights, but I start reading and would fall asleep--not a sign of the quality of the book, just how tired I've been.

For now, I'm going to leave this reading assignment at this; it has been a long time since a book has warmed my heart, educated my soul and left me feeling like I, myself, can actually do something, anything, even just one thing, to change the world and our environment in which we find ourselves today.

It starts at home
In the kitchen
With just one meal...
Organic
Local
Sustainable
Fair Trade...

Book quotes

I wanted to share some excepts of Barbara Kingsolver's newest book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Here you go:

Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards? How did Europeans, ancestral cultures to most of us, whos average crowded country would fit inside one of our national parks, somehow hoard the market share of Beautiful? They'll run overa McDonald's with a bulldozer because it threatens the way of life of their fine cheeses. They have international trade hissy fits when we try to slip modified genes into their bread. They get their favorite ham from Parma, Italy, along with a farvorite cheese, knowing these foods are linked in an ancient connection the farmers have crafted between the milk and the hogs. Oh. We were thinking Parmesan meant, not "coming from Parma," but "coming from a green shaker can." Did they kick us out for bad taste?
Chapter 1, page 4

***

Scott's Note: Interspersed in the chapters are small articles written by Barbara's husband Steve, as well as short essays, menus and recipes by their daughter, Camille. Here is an article by Steve:

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big differences. Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast.
Chapter 1, page 5
Steven L. Hopp

***

Scott's Note: There was a point when I got the giggles early on. Somethign along the lines of explaining where certain foods come from. And though it might be funny to think some folks don't know that a potato comes from underground, Barbara makes a great point:

We can't know what we haven't been taught.
Chapter 1, page 12

***

Scott's Note: One point I guess I never realized was how much of the U.S. foodstuffs come from just a few varieties of corn, soybean and wheat. I'm certainly hopeful that the scientests are regularly watching to make sure this doesn't happy, this is a scary thought:

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for athe majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote histoy and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal & vegetable) eat by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who've ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.
Chapter 3, Page 34

***

Scott's Note: In the first article that Steve gives us in the book, we're presented with the grim fact that a great deal of the natural resources (i.e. OIL) used by the U.S. are used for food production, Barbara gives a strong visual here:

Transporting a single calorie of perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about 87 calories worth of fuel. That's as efficient as driving from Philadelphia to Annapolis, and back, in order to walk three miles on a treadmill in a Maryland gym.
Chapter 4, page 68

***

Scott's Note: I'm sure that Barbara didn't set out to write the book to change everyone and their habits. But more than likely set out to get people to at least think about how small changes and a little work can have a positive outcome on a community. A slogan comes to mind: "Think Globally, Act Locally." In an argument about buying locally, some folks may say that the money then doesn't go to developing nations to help them, in fact the farmers/workers in developing nations receive so very little money to begin with. Their time/energy would be better served, working the land and farming for their own communities, instead of farming and sending the produce thousands of miles away.

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and a winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.
Chapter 4, page 69

***

I might be back with more tidbits and sound bites as I keep reading!

I've been reading

I've been a lazy blogger lately. I've been busy. And when I'm not really busy, I'm working my way through a wonderful b-day present from the Duchess of Narberth (Hey!).

I'm only about 4 chapters into Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, but I am certainly in bliss. The nutshell: Barbara and family move onto their farm and live of the land and eat locally for one year. Interspersed through this memoir are foodie factoids, antitodal stories and recipes. I love it.

I love it because this is where I came from. Soon after I turned 10, my mom packed me up and we joined her soon to be fiance, soon to be husband and we moved out of the city and into the deep Wisconsin wilderness where we "lived off the land."

As a ten year old city boy, this had a lot of appeal. Small mountains (hills really), creeks and streams, woods...I could explore for days. But the appeal soon wore off. We moved 12/31/8x (I don't remember the year.) It was fridged cold. I'm not talking 40s, 30s, 20s...I'm talking -20s, -30s...suck! There was no electric heat in the house we moved to. And since no one was living there...no wood for the wood stove. FREEZING COLD! Shortly after we got in, we started getting firewood and had a warm house. We had a great wood burning stove in the kitchen, which provide a lot of the heat for the house. And soon, my mom discovered how to cook with the wood stove.

Then we started gardening when the spring came. Rocks, rocks and more rocks...When I see TV shows or movies of frontiersmen/women tilling the land...I am with my brothers and sisters...that's some hard work.

As the spring sun warmed the soil, the plants started to sprout. This was exciting! We grew green beans in the city schools...but then they died. Again, the excitment soon faded as the spring sun turned to the summer heat that sweltered and wilted even the toughest plants. And the weeds...so many weeds. I wanted to play in the creeks and streams, not the dry earth.

After nearly 6 years, and lots of back issues of Mother Earth News, we figured out what to do and how to do it. What started as a barely turned field of rocks and some soil turned into 7+ individual gardens of the freshest produce, herbs and flowers. We canned, dehydrated, perserved, froze and devoured the fruits of our labors.

As I have gotten more and more into cooking over the past several years, gaining wisdom, I look back to what I experienced as a kid with a much greater appreciation and a certain amount of longing. I wouldn't mind going back to a time when the only thing we picked up at the grocery store was milk (and some junk food, I was a kid after all!), knowing that everything else was coming from our gardens and the animals we raised, hunted or fished.

Barbara Kingsolver's book is allowing me to relive parts of my youth, long forgotten and generally unappreciated, with much vigor and vast amounts of jealousy. Pick up the book when you have a chance and enjoy a families experience to get back to the roots of food production and consumption.

(When I get a minute, I have some passages of the book that I have underlined/highlighted that I want to share. Stay tuned.)

The Good Book

About two weeks ago, I finished reading this:

I loved it! LOVED IT! Very inspiring and sweet and lovely. I highly recommend it. As the book is really about Julia's formative foodie years in France and the result of that, her book MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING....I had to buy it!

This arrived today:

It's beautiful! An absolute classic, even in it's appearance! Can't wait to try something from it. I was giggling earlier, the first recipe I flipped to was Duck! I've never cooked duck, but have always wanted to. This might be a sign....OH MY...that is a total lie....I cooked a full duck once for Thanksgiving....it wasn't good, that's why I say I've not done duck...but maybe now.

My Life in France

Since Saturday, I have been the proud owner of MY LIFE IN FRANCE by Julia Child with Alex Prud'Homme. Since Saturday I've been wanting to post about the book, but thought I should wait until I've finished reading it.

I COULDN'T WAIT!

I am not even 100 pages into the book and I am in love, inspired, happy, joyful, enlightened, envious; I wish I could go one...but I'm not that great with adjectives.

Written by Julia and her...grand-nephew, Alex, the book focuses on Julia and her husband Paul's time in Paris, shortly after getting married and while Paul was stationed in France with the U.S. State Department. Of course, we know the story of Julia learning to cook at L' Cordon Bleu, eventually pairing with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck to write MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, then moving back to the U.S. and creating her show, THE FRENCH CHEF on PBS, bringing gourmet food to the U.S....the rest is history. But this provides the details in a way you can't even begin to appreciate with my novice narrative, so I'm not really going to try.

So far in the book, we've experienced Julia's First French Dinner, fresh off the boat from the U.S. and before they even make it to Paris. I swear I could taste it all, savoring every bite, and I've never had Sole Meuniere! Subsequently we taste more meals Julia and Paul have, and we go through her early cooking classes, trips to the country-side and the true love that Paul and Julia had for one another....and the cooking experiments at home.

Just last night I patted my book as I was preparing to head to bed to read, "We're moving to Paris for a few years so that I can immerse myself in the art of French cooking and live like this." There might have been a grunt or nod, but nothing I can call a verbal contract. I've never been to Paris and although I've often wanted to go, it has never been on the top of my list of destinations. It has certainly moved up there with this book.

I've always had one memory of Julia, standing tall, proud and goofy, before a copper bowl of egg whites with a large wisk in her hand, pronounced to the camera in her marbled voice that she was going to whip the eggs to a soft peak and like a snapped rubber band, her upper body contorted and she whipped those whites into a frothy pillow in a flash! That image will always be with me.

Julia lost Paul in 1994, I think, and the world lost Julia in 2004. Alex Prud'Homme had been interviewing Julia and collecting data and photos*, creating outlines and such to help her with the book focusing on these years in France. When she died, Alex continued the book with Julia as the main author. Just in the past month, MY LIFE IN FRANCE was published and released to the masses. My understanding is that it's already on the best sellers lists! I am having a hard time not reading it at my desk. I have a few days off next week before I start my new job and I do plan on finishing the book then.

**Photos...these are not of Julia's cooking, at least not yet, they are photos, mostly taken by Paul and they are amazing. They are not on plates the middle of the book, they are tucked right into the narrative and really capture and portray Paris and France and Julia. There have been more than a few I thought would be lovely matted and framed...would I want to tear the pages out of the book to do this....? We'll have to see.

And if you haven't heard, the American History Museum is closing their doors after Labor Day for two years of renovations. As of now, you can head over and take a look at Julia's Kitchen. It's pretty damn cool!!!

All this said, I'd recommend you pick this book up for a read. I had it on my wishlist and planned to get it, but then I started reading review after review praising it and being a sucker, I picked it up and couldn't be happier.