Better Late than Never, or How I Return to the Dormant Food Blog

I’m a month late and a dollar short, but it seems, somehow, important to note that I started this blog a full ten years ago. Yes, I haven’t posted here in more than three years, but, I have continued to write and occasionally post on my website, Healthier Kitchen, in the interim. 

It seems like a milestone and an opportunity for a little reflection. Having trained as a lawyer first, and having begun some food related work and training in the aughts, 2009 represents when I first saw myself as a someone working in food. Not quite professional at first, as I never monetized my blog, but when I look back at my posts, I have to give myself a little credit that I was very much ahead of the curve on the “healthier” trend and my posts about food policy still make sense today. 

Part of me feels frustrated that in ten years, I still haven’t found a way to properly make a living from my passion about healthier eating and food policy, but I continue to teach and write and advocate in as many ways as I can. I’m proud of the volunteer work that I do with Crossroads Community Food Networkand the Montgomery County Food Council, and feel that I’m helping my local community in some small way. I keep learning more about the food system, both on the local and national level, and I keep trying to stretch and acquire new skills outside my comfort zone.

Perhaps the dissatisfaction I feel is that I had high hopes of turning what I was doing into a permanent position with an organization working in this space. That has proven to be depressingly hard to do, whether because of a lack of an appropriate degree, my age, or just a general failure for my skill set to match up well with an existing organization. I keep trying though, and networking, and freelancing in the meantime.

The freelance life agrees with me on many levels: I like the flexibility in schedule, I like the variety of different tasks and issues I work on, and I enjoy having time to continue to experiment with my own recipe development. However, I miss working as part of a team, which is one of the best parts about volunteering with not-for-profits.  It keeps me working with others who are also passionate about helping others and improving our local food system. 

In the near future, I plan to write about a new book, Pressure Cooker, which has nothing to do with the Instant Pot and everything to do with how hard it is to make dinner every evening. I have a lot of thoughts, have engaged with one of the authors online, and hope to pull my ideas together soon.

If anyone is still reading this blog (truly, I have no idea if the email notices are still active at this point), please let me know what you’d like to hear, and what you think I could be writing about that would be helpful in feeding yourself and your loved ones. 

And, please weigh in on headnotes above recipes, communal cooking ideas, and if you think that the idea of people cooking at home is passed its expiration date. I look forward to continued conversations on all these issues.

In the meantime, if you're so inclined, head over to the Jewish Food Experience and you can see my most recent piece for them about a favorite family dish for Passover...and some feelings. 

Stepping Away

As any of you know who've actually read my blog from the beginning, I've sometimes been erratic in my posting schedule. I'd have a really inspired stretch where I had so much to share and then a fallow period in which I was either too busy to actually jot down what I was cooking or simply had nothing new to tell you.

That last part was always something I grappled with, as posting only when the spirit strikes doesn't make for much blog traction. I participated in a webinar last week, in which Molly Wizenberg of Orangette blog was one of the participants. She said something that resonated for me, which was that she doesn't blog often any more, but that when she does, she wants to really give her readers something, or it's not worth taking their time. I guess in my own small way, I've tried to do that too. There's so much out there, recipes, food photos, opinions, that if you bother to come here for a few minutes I want you to gain something, maybe a recipe that you can use at home, some food for thought about healthier eating, our food system or hunger, maybe some support.

In order to best do this in the near future, I'll mostly be on Instagram (see link at right) with some ideas, as well as on my Healthier Kitchen Facebook page (please like if you haven't already!), and my website: www.healthier.kitchen.  Things will be a bit abridged, but hopefully still helpful. This blog remains online right here, with its index to recipes at right, so please continue to make use of it! I might also post here now and then, to share a really wonderful recipe or something truly important in the food world. And, I'll still be available for private and group cooking classes and coaching.

But, as of now, I am officially a part-time "lead chef" in a wonderful little program called Young Chefs, which provides after school cooking classes in some middle schools in Montgomery County. Young Chefs works as a provider for Excel Beyond the Bell, a public private partnership which provides after hours meals and enriching courses for youth in schools that exceed a certain percentage of students receiving free and reduced rate meals, at no cost to families.

I volunteered with this program last winter and spring and am now stepping up to a new role. This summer, I've taken a good bit of youth development training in preparation, and have been gathering supplies, recipes, and ideas. I'd love to hear any of your ideas and recipes for 11 - 14 year olds!

The training was thought provoking, hearkening back to Ted and Maddy's wonderful Lowell School days, where child centered and empowerment were not just words but were mindfully woven into every aspect of the environment. I hope I can bring just a shade of that to my classes.

Dessert!

I know I'm not much for providing dessert recipes. I figure there are many sources for that. But lately, we've been experimenting with a few "healthier" ideas that I thought I'd share with you.

The first is from Elizabeth at Sienna Wellness and is an approximation of a crumble. Elizabeth calls it Raw Peach Blackberry Cobbler. It was perfect both for dessert and for breakfast the next morning with yogurt. To me, it approximates the feel of a cobbler without all the butter and sugar (just a little maple syrup sweetener). To you, it might be a bowl of fruit with a little topping, but either way, it works! Right now, when peaches are drippy fresh and exploding, this is amazing. In fall, I could see doing this with apples and cranberries or persimmons.

Yesterday, Maddy tried out the Sweet Potato Brownies from Deliciously Ella. These are also gluten free and vegan but, I have to admit, less appealing for me than for her. She loves chocolate and a healthier approximation of a brownie is more interesting to her. She, on the other hand, disdains potato chips, so, to each her own.

I found these good, but tasting more of date and sweet potato than brownie. I think I'd add in some dark chocolate chips so that there is more chocolate flavor. The texture is nice and gooey, fudgy, so that parts works really well.

photo: Madeleine Bazil

Sugar Redux

Last year, around the time the movie Fed Up was released, I wrote about sugar in our diets. After talking to someone yesterday, whom I haven't seen in many, many years and who had a heart attack not long ago, about diet and health, and sugar, I went back to those posts and reread them. They are still relevant so I thought it might be a good time to link back to them.

Just last week the Washington Post editorial board both applauded the FDA's recent outlawing of artificial trans fat, and suggested that a sugar tax could further help turn around the unhealthy eating habits of many Americans.

If you'd like to read my thoughts about sugar in our diets, click here and here.

Mussels for An Easy Summertime Dinner

There was a piece in yesterday’s New York Times Opinion section by Paul Greenberg who wrote American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood. In it, he suggests that eating eating farmed oysters and mussels is both good for us and the environment. According to Greenberg, mussels filter gallons of water which helps fish and because mussels are filled with Omega-3’s (like tuna and salmon), eating them helps us. 

But the main reasons to eat mussels are that they taste great, are relatively inexpensive as seafood goes, and couldn’t be easier to prepare. I had made some mussels the night before reading Greenberg’s piece just because the omnivorous portion of the family loves them and on a hot summer day, it’s a great meal that doesn’t heat up the kitchen and goes well with a summery glass of dry rose.  

This is barely even a recipe. I bought three pounds of mussels which could serve 4 as an entree with some side dishes with a little heft, or six as an appetizer, but which Paul and I polished off alone with just a little broccoli steamed alongside and a piece of really good bread.

I washed the mussels in a couple of changes of cool water and checked to see if any had wiry “beards” which needed to be pulled off. With farmed mussels, few have beards and even if you do find some, they are little. Fresh, live mussels should all close up in the cool water. Discard the ones that don't. This batch did give off some dirt and sand, so I rinsed them well. 

After that, the absolutely easiest method, is to saute a half an onion, or a large shallot, or even a few sliced spring onions (which is what I used this time) in a couple of teaspoons of olive oil in a pan or pot large enough to hold the mussels as well, over medium heat for a few minutes and then add a minced clove or two of garlic and about a pinch of salt and a quarter teaspoon hot pepper (I like Aleppo). After about another two minutes, raise the heat and add about 1 cup of white or rose wine and let it gently boil for a few minutes to burn off the alcohol. Add in the cleaned mussels, lower the heat back to medium, make sure the liquid is still bubbling a little, cover the pot and let the liquid steam the mussels for about 10 minutes. 

If you want to get fancier you could add some celery in with the onion, or some diced tomatoes with the garlic. Herbs are always a great addition, and a few tablespoons of cream could go in once the alcohol in the wine has burned off. But these are just flourishes that while lovely, are not necessary if you want to keep things simple. 

I steamed some broccoli alongside, but you could easily throw it in the same pot with the mussels during the last five minutes or so of the cooking. Just keep the pieces of broccoli on the large size so they're easy to fish out when serving. 

Check inside the pot after about 10 minutes and make sure the shells have opened and that the mussels have plumped and solidified. At this point, if they have opened, toss the ones that stayed sealed tight. 

To serve, use a slotted spoon to place some of the mussels (and broccoli if you’ve cooked it all together) in individual bowls, then, when you can get at the broth and vegetables at the bottom, ladle some over each bowl. I reserved a little of the thinly sliced tops of the spring onion to toss on top before serving. Parsley would also work well here. 

Serve with great bread for dipping in the sauce. 

Late Spring

Summer paid us a brief visit, but now it's cool and wet again. I think my vegetable garden is doing better than my day lilies (see below!), but since it's been so rainy, I really haven't been out there to check on it much!

I've been trying out a few recipes from a cookbook Full of Flavor by Maria Elia who also wrote Smashing Plates. I found it in the sale area at my local independent bookstore and thought her approach was interesting. She gathers recipes around some of her favorite flavors (many of which also happen to be some of my favorites) and encourages the reader to improvise a little.

One of my goals in teaching cooking is to give others the confidence to know that they can deviate from the written recipe, so I thought I'd experiment with this book a little. The first recipe up was this one which, of course, I had to change around some and adapt to what I had on hand. I used spring onions instead of onion and added some diced up radishes and red cabbage to the mix to avoid some food waste. I used a mix of herbs as we are cilantro soap tasters around here and a very little goes a long way for us. In addition to a tiny sprig of cilantro, I used some lemon verbena, mint, and lemon balm. We topped the salad with Israeli feta and the almonds that Elia calls for. Quite good!

Yes, this deer is eating all the heads off of my day lilies

Musings on Cooking

A food friend posted this Adam Gopnick piece from the New Yorker a little while back on her Facebook. It's a few years old but still gets me thinking.

I love reading cookbooks even though I don't need more recipes. I get into how people combine ingredients and hope to see some different cooking methods.  Most of us who habitually read cookbooks, blogs, etc. are simply looking to see how other people have creatively done this. Or maybe, to learn about new ingredients. And sometimes, just to drool over food we will never create at home. The ideas do percolate even after perusing a coffee table, chef-y cookbook that is purely aspirational.

But cookbooks do give the illusion of perfection. If you follow these 8, 10, 4, 25  steps correctly, you will achieve the perfect dinner and all will be good in your life. Perfect doesn't exist so don't even go there. But start somewhere and make like Nike. Just do it. Just try something new and see what happens.

Once we're comfortable with basic cooking skills, we can create meals from whatever we have in the kitchen.  I'm not talking about a crazy tv show challenge where chefs must make a meal out of coffee beans, grape jelly and squid, but typical weeknight dinners. If your pantry and refrigerator contain the right ingredients, cooking gets easier.

I think most people need to feel like they can do this with muscle memory, that they won't ruin a bag full of groceries, that there's no time to experiment. But, as with any muscle, it gets stronger with practice, and the duration and intensity of the exercise should be increased in small increments. You wouldn't run a marathon without training for months. Likewise, make small forays into the kitchen if you're not already cooking everyday. Make a one pot meal first: a pasta dish, a chicken dish, a soup. Serve a simple salad on the side. I read once that when taking up jogging as exercise that you should increase your distance by only 1/4 mile per week. Per week!

Sweet Potato, Greens, and Bean Soup

We woke to a 64 degree house this morning, and though it felt great for sleeping last night, I had to do some cool acrobatic moves in order to bundle up without actually removing myself fully from the blankets. Just last week I worried that I was too late planting lettuce and chard as DC had a tease of the heavy air of August, which seemed poised to roll right over us for the duration. Today, with a high of 55 or so, it feels like a soup night again. Now I'm worried that I was premature planting my warm weather seedlings!

All winter, I kept finding sweet potatoes in soup recipes. Joe Yonan of the Washington Post had a sweet potato broth based soup with collards and black eyed peas. And then there was the streamlined sweet potato and kale soup in the Arcadia Mobile Market Seasonal Cookbook, written by JuJu Harris of the Arcadia Mobile Market, a service run by the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture in Alexandria. 

I had planned to make a hybrid of these soups for a class I was to teach in March, that ended up snowed out. I had some ingredients around that I didn't want to waste, and things went in a little bit different direction, but, inspired by the above recipes, I ended up with hearty vegetable soup for a snowy day.

This soup is perfect for this time of year as well. Go ahead and substitute any other bean you like for black eyed peas, or other greens for collards. Use turnips instead of rutabaga, or throw in a parsnip or two with the carrots. If you're OK with salt, and the soup seems bland when you taste it, throw in a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Add more hot pepper if that's your thing. Play with this and use whatever you have hanging around the vegetable bin.


Easy Sweet Potato, Greens, and Bean Soup

(inspired by Joe Yonan and JuJu Harris)

makes a big potful

1 small bunch collard greens rinsed and dried
1 onion, peeled
2 stalks celery, washed and ends slightly trimmed off
2 carrots, washed and ends slightly trimmed off
1 Tablespoon olive oil, more if pan looks dry
Sprinkle Aleppo or Maras pepper (or 1/4 teaspoon cayenne)
1 rutabaga, washed and peeled
2 small sweet potatoes, washed and peeled
1 Tablespoon tomato paste
4 cups broth or stock (I use vegetable to keep the soup vegetarian, but can be chicken or beef)
4 cups water
1 can black eyed peas, drained and rinsed in a colander
1 cup small pasta shape - shells or ditalini work well
salt and pepper

Cut out the thick center rib of the collard greens. Put the leafy areas to the side and dice up the ribs. Then cut the leaves into ribbons or thin strips. Reserve those separately from the diced up ribs.

Put a large soup pot over medium heat on your stove. Dice the onion, celery and carrot. Add a little olive oil to your pot and then the onion, celery, and carrot and the reserved diced collard ribs. Sprinkle on a little salt and pepper and the Aleppo or hot pepper. Mix from time to time and cook until the onion begins to turn translucent, about 8 or 10 minutes.

Dice the rutabaga and sweet potato as the other vegetables saute. Add them to the pot, give it a good stir, and let that cook for another five minutes or so.

Add in the tomato paste and another pinch of salt and grind of pepper. Let that cook while mixing for 2 or 3 minutes.

Add in the water and broth or stock, the ribboned collard leaves, another pinch of salt and grind of pepper, and bring to a boil.

Once the soup boils, lower heat to medium low and let it simmer (still bubbling, just not too hard) for about 10 minutes.

Throw in the beans and the pasta and cook for another ten minutes.

Test a piece of the pasta to see if it's done. You want it al dente -- just a little bite to it, not crunchy and not mushy. Check for salt and pepper.

Serve topped with a little grated parmesan cheese if you like.

Flawed Thinking in "The Joy of Cooking?" Study

While I was traveling a couple of weeks ago, this study, called The Joy of Cooking?, came out and caused a little stir in the home cooking world. In it, three sociologists argue that encouraging home cooking should not be a part of fixing our food system.

As you know, I am all about home cooking, so this got my attention.  I've read the study and many responses to it now, and I am not persuaded at all. While they raise some legitimate concerns about poverty, none of their arguments change my feeling that more home cooking is a worthwhile goal.  

My main problem with the study is the straw man they set up. They argue that people are frustrated by feeling the need to cook some "ideal foodie" three hour extravaganza and give examples of families attempting that.  They suggest that because Michael Pollan can seem a little elitist, that all proponents of home cooking (and presumably this would include Michelle Obama's Let's Move which has identified home cooking as a piece of the fix, and ME!) are pushing "ideal" as the standard.

This is not only ridiculous, but really wrongheaded, perpetuating the myth that unless we create a dinner party worthy masterpiece we’re not really cooking, that unless we have the time to achieve this "foodie ideal" (and they use the words "foodie" and  "ideal" repeatedly) that we might as well throw in the dishtowel. "Ideal"is dangerous thinking and should not be a standard in the food world any more than it should be in the body image arena.  As Megan McArdle says in her response to the study, "don't make the perfect the enemy of the adequate." 

Using reasonable shortcuts and some packaged items that are thoughtfully chosen we can make home cooking possible for many of us, even on those busy weekdays. We need to approach cooking from a place without guilt or judgment.  We are all doing the best we can with what we have - time, money, space, interest - and should feel good about whatever steps we can take to make our food just a little bit healthier.  This is not an all or nothing venture. 

The home cooking movement is just one strand of many needed to repair our food system and turn back the obesity epidemic and its resulting health ramifications. The authors describe some families living in severe poverty and their particular challenges to home cooking. There is no dispute that there is much work to be done to help such families with food access and poverty relief in general, as well as continued and increased access to healthier foods and teaching about them in schools. But, as government and community groups attempt to assuage these problems (and we should all be activists fighting for changes that help all families eat more healthfully) we should not discount the value of home cooking in the mix, when it is at all possible. 

Baby steps are still steps in the right direction. 

Granola for Breakfast

One of my favorite breakfasts is a bowl of plain yogurt with a small drizzle of honey, topped with fresh berries and a little granola.

I particularly love this in summer when I don't have the same physical need of the warmth of a hot bowl of oatmeal that I do on a winter morning, and when I can enjoy the sweet local blueberries.  I will be sad when blueberry season ends. My local farm stands include farms from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania so I've been able to stretch my blueberry season by moving north as the summer progresses.

One of my best finds this year has been Icelandic yogurt which my daughter introduced me to.  I think it might be even thicker and richer than the Greek yogurt I love, and is also nonfat.  It's full of protein and tastes just a little less tangy than Greek. As I discovered in my sugar experiment a while back, nonfat yogurt is one of the few food items where the stated serving size is actually larger than what I'd eyeball for myself!

Granola can be full of fat and calories, so I both make my own and use only about a 1/4 cup serving. I like the crunch and the nuts with only a little sweetness.  Sometimes I sprinkle on a little bit of hemp hearts as well. I base my recipe off of one from a Brooklyn shop that has made the rounds and has even been adapted by Melissa Clark of the New York Times.  I've adapted it slightly differently, reducing the sugar and adding some spices like Clark does, but changing out the nuts a little. Feel free to experiment with reducing the sugar even further. One friend reported that she eliminated the sugar but added a couple of tablespoons of molasses to good effect. 

healthier.kitchen

I'm really excited to tell you about my new venture!  After years of playing with this idea, I've finally taken steps toward making it happen.  I'm now officially offering my services as a "cooking coach," meaning I can come to your home and help you with whatever kitchen and cooking issues you'd like to resolve to make it easier and more pleasant for you to cook at home more.

I see this as a logical offshoot of what I've done in my own home and what I've tried to do here.  If you've been reading this blog, then you know that I try to make healthy and delicious, seasonal foods that satisfy all kinds of eaters.  I use whole, natural foods as much as possible and stay away from too many packaged items, while still trying to maintain ease and simplicity. Taste and fulfillment are paramount to me and I love to experiment with spices and international flavors as well as play around with much loved comfort foods to try to lighten them up. I'm not playing with molecular gastronomy here - I'll leave that to the restaurant chefs - but I'm hoping to make it easier to cook real food at home.

I've got an official website now, at www.healthier.kitchen.  It's a new [dot]kitchen domain name which is kind of cool and different, so don't be confused by the unusual ending. I had lots of help from my great kids with design and photos so please head over and take a look! And if you like what you see, please pass it on to anyone you think might be interested in this type of service. I can help busy parents with recipes, skills and organization for time saving, healthy meals, I can help if you've recently received a medical diagnosis that requires an eating change, or just requires that you eat out less and cook at home more (though I am not holding myself out as a medical professional or dietician, there is much that I can help you adjust in your own home), and I can help if you just want to expand your weekly repertoire, learn some new techniques and lighten up your family recipes. I can do everything from a complete kitchen and pantry evaluation and overhaul to cooking skills lessons to recipe development.

For the near future, I plan to continue the blog right here and migrate some posts that are also relevant to the cooking coach side of things over to the website.  This site will continue to have new recipes and links as well as food politics.

See you in the healthier.kitchen!!

To Be Organic or Not To Be Organic...

The Washington Post recently reported on Consumer Reports' Food Safety and Sustainability Center consideration of whether organic foods are worth the extra money.

For fruits and vegetables, they concluded that the priority to use organic is "high" to avoid pesticide residue.  They labeled beef and dairy "medium to high" priority for nutritional benefits (limited antibiotic use, more heart healthy Omega-3 fatty acids especially with grass fed animals).  They also labeled poultry "medium to high" priority to avoid the antibiotics in regular chickens as well because organic chickens can not be fed what is called "poultry litter" which is a mix of chicken droppings, spilled feed and feathers.

Food for thought.

Irish Soda Bread

Maybe it was Maddy talking about making Irish scones with some friends who'd all spent some time in Dublin or maybe it was the bottle of farm fresh buttermilk that called out to me from the refrigerator shelf at the market or maybe it was the bag of locally ground wheat flour I recently purchased. I don't know.  But Irish soda bread has been on my mind for days, and today was finally the day.  Not too hot out, stuck in the house while the tree service chips the fallen limbs from my lovely maple, half gone now.

This is a pretty straightforward recipe adapted from Merrill Stubbs at food52. I've written about her recipe before, and linked to it directly, but over the last couple of years, I've made more changes so I thought I'd write about it again and add in my changes.

Eating Well

Over the years, I've come up with some "healthier" truths that I use for my own eating and for cooking for my family and that inform my recipes here on the blog. As is obvious on the "pages" here, I'm not into extremes or completely omitting entire food groups, but I try to cover many bases of health while maintaining flavor and enjoyment. I favor a mixed/balanced approach, loosely based on the NIH created DASH diet and a love of Mediterranean cooking of all sorts, along with a little portion control and some exercise.

Many have provided rules for healthier eating that I like and adopt:

Of course, Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Marion Nestle (Nutritionist and Professor at NYU): "My guess: If you balance food intake with physical activity and are not overeating, the specific proportion of fat, carbohydrate, and protein won’t matter nearly as much."

and

"While the arguments about fat v. sugar go on and on:  Eat your veggies, vary the foods you eat, don’t gorge, and enjoy what you eat."

David Katz (Yale University Prevention Research Center): "A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominately plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention."

Now, Eating Well magazine has just come out with a list of 10 ways to cook healthier.  I'm linking it here, but please be warned that although I like the magazine itself, its online presence is quite annoyingly littered with pop ups and ads and forces you to see their list in slide show format rather than as one article, which I can not stand and seems to be the norm for these magazine lists.

But this list is pretty similar to what I've been saying here for years, though other than in my "Why I'm Here" piece, haven't set out so concretely and perhaps should have.  So here, with my usual caveat that I am not a doctor or nutritionist and don't even play one on tv, is my list of top things to do for eating healthier:

Thanks, food52!

Nothing like a James Ransom photo to make your food look amazing!

Just saw yesterday that food52 selected one of my recipes, for a Community Pick, the best part of which is that the recipe now sports a fabulous photo taken by Ransom - much better than anything I could hope to take. Very excited and thrilled for the nod!

It's still a little early for local corn in most places, but keep this group of Community Picks in your pocket for when it starts making its appearance.  My recipe is right up top, Sauteed Corn, Green Onions and Shitake Mushrooms. If you click either on the name of the recipe or the picture, you can click right through to the recipe on food52. Or, you can go directly to the recipe from here.

And while you're there, check out the other great corn recipes, including the two that are finalists this week!

Memorial Day Weekend Cooking Ideas

I guess it's pretty lazy and cheesy to repost my Memorial Day Weekend roundup from 2011, but really, all the recipes I wanted to put in this are already there!

So accept my apologies for the quick and easy approach and check out some ideas here.

Have a great weekend and take a moment out of the festivities to remember our fallen.

Healthier Veg

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has released its annual list of vegetables and fruits with the most and least pesticide residue. The list is based on pesticide residue testing data from the USDA and FDA. These federal agencies produce the data, but don't collate it for the consumer, so the EWG provides this service for us.

Organic produce can be expensive, so it's helpful to know which items are more likely to have high levels of pesticides.  That way, we can pick and choose which ones, if any, we prefer to buy organic.  In many cases, produce sold at farm stands, grown on small farms, is grown using organic principles and little or no pesticides even if not certified as organic.  It's worth asking.

As in the past, strawberries and apples are at the top of the list of high pesticide residue. If concerned about pesticides in your food, simply buy organic for those items, even if you don't buy everything organic. The EWG refers to the top 12 items as "the dirty dozen" and recommends purchasing those organic if possible.  For the last few years, they've also added two more items to watch out for: leafy greens such as kale and collards and hot peppers. While these don't meet their usual criteria for the dirty dozen, they do show pesticides that are highly toxic to humans.  They recommend that if you eat a lot of these items, to purchase organic.

Check Your Sugar

Here's a brief update to my last blog entry, Sugar, Sugar, now that I've seen the movie Fed Up! and had a chance to process some of my thoughts.

This movie is an important public service because all of us need the smack in the head about sugar. Even those of us, like me, who are hyper conscious of what we're  eating, can learn from this movie. I appreciated the very simplified (almost dumbed down) scientific explanation of our bodies on sugar.  It made the reason to limit sugar much more clear.  The stories of the morbidly obese teens and families featured are compelling and heartbreaking, bringing me to tears more than once. I'm glad Paul saw it with me and I will take both my grown kids to see it when they're in town.

The experts interviewed are highly respected doctors, nutritionists, scientists and journalists. They are people who have been fighting this fight for many years. People like Margo Wootan of Center for Science in the Public Interest, Dr. David Kessler, a former head of the FDA who wrote The End of Overeating, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, the list goes on.

Sugar, Sugar

Trust in a sales relationship is a funny thing. I remember feeling somewhat unsettled when Paul and I bought our first piece of real estate, back in the day before buyer's brokers. Although I knew in my head and had been told many times, that both realtors worked for the seller, it was really hard to comprehend that even the broker we'd hired to show us potential homes still owed her duty to the sellers she might never have met. If there was some horrible flaw in a property that she wasn't legally bound to tell us, she was not going to tell us. If a particular property was out of our budget, she was not going to dissuade us.  And though we had a pretty nice relationship with that first broker, and she brought us a lovely Portmeiron bowl as a closing gift, I had felt a certain tension throughout the process.  She didn't behave like the stereotypical used car salesman. She was pleasant in a motherly sort of way. So though trained as a lawyer and a skeptic by nature, I still found myself pulled in and had to remind myself to be wary.

Chinese Food at Home

I realize these green bits look a lot like avocado slices in the photo, but they are cucumber!  This is Kylie Kwong's Chicken with Cashews, a recipe that I have loved for years and forgot about until the other night. I've been trying lately, to be extra conscious of not wasting food.  This sometimes requires a last minute change of plans in order to avoid throwing out an about to go off cucumber or some rapidly desiccating scallions.  

I had thawed a small package of boneless, skinless chicken thighs with thoughts of crispy chicken dancing in my head and then the weather suddenly got unseasonably warm that day (and for only that day!) and I found said vegetables in need of saving.  

The Washington Post featured this recipe when Kwong's cookbook, Simple Chinese Cooking, came out in 2007. It's a great book, filled with recipes that, once you have a few basic staples of Asian cooking, are quite accessible. This one, in particular, is on the lighter side and tastes like you've ordered it in from the best new Chinese restaurant in town.  It is up there with monkeymom's Ma Po Tofu on food52! And, as the book title asserts, it is pretty simple. Have everything cut up and ready in advance for this one.  

I like to serve this with a little brown rice and another vegetable.  Steamed or roasted asparagus, broccoli or baby bok choi are all great.  With a vegetable side, this should serve well more than the 4 it recommends.