Colorful Carrots
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
I bought these colorful carrots at the Farmers Market few weeks ago. I served them with cheese ravioli.
The second photo shows them cut up so you can see the color was different on the inside.
Archive for the ‘The Kitchen’ Category
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More Pickled Beets
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Beets On the Way to Being Pickled
These colorful beets from the Farmers Market were so pretty that I wanted to share them with you. This photo was taken just before stirring all of the ingredients. This will be my second batch of pickled beets. I am using the “Red Turnip Pickles” recipe from American Home Cooking. You can see it here: http://totallyrandomfiesta.blogspot.com/
Support Your Local and Regional Growers, Save Cash
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
So, Wednesday was market day.
And, by market I don’t mean a trip to the nearest strip-mall supermarket with cart corrals, though I shop at Giant and Safeway like everyone else. It was walk-to-market day. I work from home one day a week, and every other Wednesday I’m afforded the luxury of my own private branch office in Catonsville, MD. Not only to I get to save 20% on my commuting fuel consumption, I can walk or ride to somewhere interesting on our “main street” at lunch time.
Every Wednesday morning, from May to November, we have a local farmers’ market. It’s small, it’s in the community center parking lot, but it’s better than just about any grocery store’s produce department. All vendors must grow or produce for themselves all of the goods they sell. No “faux-farmers” offloading trucks of greenhouse tomatoes from produce distributors; these folks grow it, care for it, pick it, and truck it to your community. We use the farmers’ market a lot. When I’m home on Tuesdays instead of Wednesday, Theresa makes the trip to gather the goods.
Spices, the… umm… spice of life.
Friday, August 1st, 2008
One of the necessities of eating well is the need for appealing flavors. The American diet is heavily slanted toward basic ideas of what tastes good – sweet, salty, and fatty. Which is why a lot of people (myself included) half-jestingly consider bacon to be the Perfect Food – smoky, salty, fatty, with a bit of sweetness from the sugar in the cure.
However, what we crave is not necessarily nutritionally sound. We crave the salt, sugar, and fat because they are the basic nutritional needs that we require from food. We need salt to maintain heart rhythm, blood chemistry, and electrolyte balance. Sugar gives us instant energy for short-term demands. Fats are premium long-term energy storage – the densest calories we consume. We eat a lot of all of them. They taste good, and for very primal reasons. However, we overeat, especially fatty foods, because we need a certain sensory component to satisfy our appetite. If we take our satisfaction only from the basics, then we tend to require a larger amount of fats, salt and sugar to make us happy, because there are few other elements contributing to the gustatory experience.
Take the lowly potato. Pretty darned bland in and of itself, it’s got just a bit of starchy sweetness. Deep fry it, and sprinkle with salt, and it’s suddenly a tasty treat that’s loaded with sodium and fat – satisfying, but not healthy. Take that same potato, and cook it with other flavors – tomatoes, perhaps, and assertive seasonings – and it becomes a satisfying dish without destroying it nutritionally. As a culinary culture, we need to learn to substitute more intense flavors of spices for sugar, salt and fat’s lowest-common-denominator appeal.
