| 1. |
In a Lebanese kitchen garden
|
|
|
We're delighted to feature a video this month entitled "Cooking With Love: Alice’s Kitchen" produced by the good folks at "Cooking Up a Story". It features Linda Dalal Sawaya who talks about how her love of gardening, cooking, and her own Lebanese heritage got passed down over the generations from mother to daughter. Linda shares a biteful of this oral history in this short video and a heaping portion in a book she wrote called "Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Recipes".
Related recipes:
Summer Squash Stuffed with Rice
My Father’s Tomato Salad
Easy Garden Fresh Tabouleh
Lebanese Okra and Tomato Stew
|
| 2. |
Garlic's Unexpected Gems
|
|
|
By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, September 6, 2007 in The Washington Post
Some of the best garden discoveries are made by accident. Last fall a friend gave my husband and me some family heirloom garlic. Against the standard advice, he hadn't removed the flower stems, known as scapes, when they appeared, and when he harvested he pulled up the whole plants -- bulbs, stems and flower heads. Inside the flower heads were tiny bulbils (above-ground bulbs) the size of rice grains. We broke apart the regular garlic bulbs at the base of the plants and poked the individual cloves into the ground the way you normally would plant fall garlic. On a whim, we also planted those tiny bulbils, one by one, just to see what would happen.
What we expected to find, come spring, was green garlic, a tasty scallion-like treat you get by planting any small garlic cloves you think aren't big enough to make full-sized heads. But the green shoots the bulbils sent up were so spindly they weren't worth eating, so we let them grow through the summer.
|
| 3. |
Water: Tap is the new Bottled
|
|
|
Just as in the world of high fashion, trends come and go in the world of food and drink. It was once seen as the height of food fashion to buy "designer water". It was what the rich and famous did and, therefore the logic goes, what the rest of us should aspire to do. Now, however, tap water is enjoying a renaissance in popularity.
Some of the most chic restaurants in the US - such as Chez Panisse in the Bay Area and Del Posto in New York - now serve only their own filtered still and sparkling tap water. This gushing new popularity comes amidst admissions on the part of many bottled water makers like Pepsi (maker of Aquafina) that their waters do not originate from some pristine mountain spring, but from a public tap as well. Below you'll find The New York Times' take on the issue which, to us, reads like a drink of cool water on a hot, summer day. Tap water, that is.
|
| 4. |
Eat-out Nation
|
|
|
Each year, the US Department of Agriculture compiles and publishes data about America's food habits and purchases. 2005 represented a turning point in the way Americans eat: for the first time since statistics were kept in this area (i.e. 1953), we ate more foods prepared outside our homes than ones we cooked ourselves at home. While the US has been famously dubbed "Fast Food Nation", it seems like "Eat-Out Nation" might be a more accurate term.
For those interested in seeing the raw data, you can find it here
|
| 5. |
Kitchen Garden Day Celebrations
|
|
|
For those of you new to Kitchen Gardeners International, we organize a global garden party on the fourth Sunday of August each year which we aptly named Kitchen Garden Day. The day started as a tongue-in-cheek challenge to the snackfood makers of the world who have claimed the entire month of February as "Snackfood Month". Our logic was that if the fluorescent orange cheese-puff makers of the world could have an entire month to celebrate their vision of good eating, home gardeners and cooks deserved at least a day. The video above was some local press coverage we had in Maine.
What started in one backyard in Maine is slowly, but surely spreading to others and a few frontyards too! Kitchen Garden Day this year (August 26th) will be recognized in different places and in different ways: a street parties, picnics , potlucks, gardening workshops, and locally-sourced dinners cooked by area chefs.
Why not join the fun and organize a gathering of your own with friends and good food? But, please, no artificially-flavored bacon snacks or foods containing "blue #40". Those are for another day month.
|
|
Everyday Menus: No Cook Recipes
Comment This Article
Refer it to Friend