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Toxins in Bottled Water
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Water is necessary for life, so it's a wonder that it's treated with such disregard. What flows from the...
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Easy garden fresh tabouleh recipe
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Tabbouleh is a Lebanese dish, considered by many as the "national salad". Its main ingredients are bulgur, finely chopped parsley, mint, tomato, scallion (spring onion), and other herbs with lemon juice and various seasonings, generally including black pepper and sometimes cinnamon and allspice. In Syria and in Lebanon, where the dish originated, it is often eaten by scooping it up in Romaine lettuce leaves. In the Middle East, it is truly a salad with the green ingredients dominating. The dish's global popularity has led to new interpretations and regional modifications such as the use of couscous (which originates from Northern Africa) in place of bulgur.
Ingredients
2 bunches of fresh parsley (1 1/2 cup chopped, with stems discarded)
2 tablespoons of fresh mint, chopped
I small onion, finely chopped
6 medium tomatoes, finely diced
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 cup bulgur
juice of three lemons
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Procedure:
Rinse bulgur in water and add to a large mixing bowl. Combine all chopped ingredients, salt, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, and stir. Cover with a clean dish towel and let sit for 1-2 hours or until bulghur is tender.
Photo credit: Ulterior Epicure
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Vegetables That Cut to the Quick
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By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, August 23, 2007 in The Washington Post
As a gardening cook, I always say that flavor is everything, but my evil twin, the lazy cook, knows otherwise. Sometimes I just want vegetables that are easy to slice.
Cooking is all about cutting things up, and a cylindrical variety that yields uniform slices -- quick to do, tidy on the plate -- is what I reach for on a busy day. I'll choose a long, slender beet such as Forono over a round one. I'll grab tapered radishes such as red-and-white D'Avignon, or a daikon, to slice for salad. I might even forgo my favorite Brandywine tomato (delicious but a bit lumpy) in favor of a paste type that makes quick, round disks. I'll skip the flying-saucer-shaped pattypan squash and reach for zucchini. Chop, chop. Pattypans, like round tomatoes, are great for stuffing. But stuff anything on a day when there's 10 for lunch? Not a chance.
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Two ways of looking at chicken parmesan
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When most of us think of chicken parmesan, we picture something similar to the photo above. It's a simple and delicious dish: breaded chicken breasts, pasta, red sauce, with a sprinkling of zesty parmesan cheese.
But, as the bright young minds at Middlebury College in Vermont have recently learned, it's not as simple as most people think. Below is a screen capture of a Google Earth map that some students and faculty put together to show the complex route that chicken parmesan's ingredients take to go from farmers' fields to Middlebury students' forks. It should be noted that Middlebury is considered a leader in its efforts to move towards local sourcing for its cafeterias.
The point of the exercise (and - we'd say - the local foods movement in general) is not to say "no" to all foods that have traveled, but to become more aware of where our food comes from, who produced it, how it was produced, and the good local alternatives that exist. The more attention we give to these local options, the more of them there will be.
To learn more about Middlebury's food mapping work, please see: http://geography.middlebury.edu/applications/Food_Mapping/
Chicken parmesan photo credit: My Amii
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