Most restaurants can get at least one thing right - that signature dish, five dollar happy hour drinks, or even a special molten chocolate dessert. Unfortunately, not too many get it all right. I have found an exception straddling the border between midtown and Hells Kitchen (350 W. 50th Street) in New York City. Enter […]

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London Broil (part 1)
For once I was not the victim, I was just visiting. Following the Duck BBQ incident, I actually became quite proficient in the use of this weapon of mass destruction. One of my favorite dishes was London Broil. It is simplicity to make. You take a Fred Flintstone sized Top Sirloin steak […]

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Yum! Mushrooms. Who doesn’t like them (if cooked properly, even kids will eat them).
The problem? Well, the Epicurious blog has an article on the joys of mushroom picking.
It seems that a lot of yuppies in the Pacific Northwest have decided that the economic downswing is a good reason to take up this hobby.
Professional foragers […]

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Despite having a small apartment patio which limited my gardening area, I used to grow quite a few things that later wound up boiling, simmering and on occasion, burning, on the stove. These days I can’t do either, but I still review the books for my monthly column in the newspaper SENIOR NEWS. 
 
Thanks to […]

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Weight Gain, Obesity and Food Addiction

Unlike Global Warming there are very few experts that do not agree that obesity in the Western world has become a chronic problem. Authors Mannie Barling and Ashley F. Brooks tackle this question in their new book It’s Not Your Fault.
Over the years I have watched as people near and […]

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As a child growing up I frequently heard my parents and other ‘old’ people complain that food just did not taste the way it did in the old days. I thought these dinosaurs were out of their minds. Food is food, beef is beef, eggs are eggs, and yucky school lunch boiled cabbage was exactly […]

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This is a guest article by Mannie Barling and Ashley F. Brooks - Simon
The feeling of too much turkey and fixings is rumbling around your stomach. Your mind is struggling with the feeling of a hangover – a food hangover. The morning newspaper looks blurry. Your children’s mouths are moving out of sync with their […]

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This week my regular panel of the husband and wife writing and research team Mannie Barling and Ashley F. Brooks were joined by some very special guests, Dr. Daniel Dantini and his wife Chris Dantini of Sage Medical Labs.
Several times in the past few weeks the name Dr. Daniel Dantini had cropped up in […]

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This is a guest article by Mannie Barling and Ashley Brooks, it also forms a large cornerstone for tomorrows radio broadcast which will include Dr. Dan Dantini and his wife Chris Dantini of Sage Labs on the panel, you can use this link to listen live - Simon
We were recently asked by Simon Barrett to […]

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For several weeks I have been wanting to explore the strange and illusive world of the fine print put on canned and packaged foods. This week I was bound and determined that I was going to get to the bottom of it.
My panel of Mannie Barling and his wife Ashley Brooks were the ideal candidates […]

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A Change Of Lifestyle Diet Designed For Everyone
There are two things that I have enjoyed from my earliest childhood, books and food. Both offer sustenance to me, while my library may be obese, I am certainly far from it! I have been the same 148lbs for decades. I am lucky, about the only food I […]

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A small headline in the news: Guinea pig touted as solution to Congo food crisis.
…it’s not known how or when guinea pigs — native to South America — arrived in Congo, but CIAT (the Colombia-based agricultural research institute, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture) researchers discovered them last year being kept as “micro-livestock” in the […]

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Mundo Cafe and Restaurant is an exception. From the moment you arrive until the moment you simply force yourself to leave, everything just gets better and better. Seasoned restaurant goers will be pleasantly surprised by the fact that the inevitable letdown, which comes at some point during a night at far too many restaurants, simply never comes.

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Those Medieval painters were a bit less puritanical than we moderns: A common motif in paintings was the Madonna Les Latte: the Virgin Mother breastfeeding the baby Jesus.
Back in those days, if a woman didn’t breast feed her baby, it died. Yes, upper class women often would find a “wet nurse” to provide nutrition,  and […]

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A study among Chinese factory workers shows exposure to high doses of Bisphenol A at their jobs resulted in an increase of erectile dysfuntion.
Compared to the other workers, men with high BPA exposure were about four times as likely to report trouble achieving erections, about seven times as likely to say they had difficulty ejaculating, […]

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Now we really can play with our food while taking the phrase, “vegging out,” to a whole new meaning.
The “Play with Your Produce Personality Quiz” from Produce for Kids.org aims to teach children (and the rest of us) to value and include fresh fruits and vegetables as part of our daily diet.
Minus the tedious lectures, […]

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Vancouver: I stopped by the Farmers Market on the lawn of Pacific Central Station, a magnet for people making an effort to follow the Hundred Mile Diet. I bought an organic Macintosh apple to snack on as I walked home.  It was $1.09, an expensive apple it seemed to me.  I bit into it, expecting […]

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The father of the “green revolution”, Norman Borlaug, has died.
Some of use are old enough to remember when famines in Asia were common, and when the “Population bomb” types were predicting mass starvation of millions of poor people.
The famines didn’t happen, because Borlaug, and other agricultural scientists, developed high yield wheat and grains, along with […]

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If you are tired of saving recipes off of boxes, this book is for you. It features 500 recipes from over fifty brands in a hardback spiraled book format. These recipes are ones consumers requested the most from companies.
 
The thirteen chapters cover every meal time, snack time and desert. Each contributed recipe is just […]

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Like most children, I hated Brussel sprouts, which were soggy, bitter and terrible tasting. Indeed, they come in first in a UK poll on the most hated vegetable.
But they are a source of Vitamin C, and in places like Great Britain they are part of the traditional Christmas dinner.
But now, to the horror of sprout […]

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At over 700 pages, this recently released paperback cookbook from Reader’s Digest boasts at containing over 300 recipes blending home style cooking and ethnic cuisine. Most are listed as easy to make and all are supposed to be made within thirty minutes. Fresh ingredients, not canned or frozen, is paramount here in most recipes with […]

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With recipes by Adam Ried, this colorful book is organized by four sections labeled for each season of the year. The forty-four soup and a few stew recipes are organized that way to take advantage of what should be in stock and of the highest quality at that time.  After an intro that pushes using […]

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Growing your own vegetables and fruits has come back into favor in the last year thanks to the bad economy. Instead of focusing primarily on beauty in the landscape a lot of folks went in a new direction and began planting with the idea of growing food.  As the author notes in the introduction, one […]

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Jonni McCoy has got a handle on all things frugal. I just thought I knew all the tricks, growing up in a very frugal home with a very frugal Mom. Jonni has taught an old dog lots of new tricks.
Even though the title says Moms, everyone should have this book and should study it because […]

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Sharon talks about how wonderful it is for her to be going home even if she will be staying in the guestroom. She tells Jack she appreciates him not pushing her into anything. Then she asks just how long Billy and Chloe are going to be staying there. Jack tells her if their being there […]

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In what can only be viewed as shocking to the gastronomes of France, gutter mouthed celebrity English chef Gordon Ramsay has scored two coveted Michelin stars for his first restaurant in France. This is the first time that an Anglophile has made it to this lofty position in this fiercely nationalistic Francophone country.
Congrats to Gordon […]

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The advent of cable TV created a fertile environment for specialty channels, and one of the favorite subjects is food. We all love to eat, so what is not better than being treated to gourmet delights in our living room. Thirty years ago the term Celebrity Chef was a rarefied and lofty position, in fact […]

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Okay, folks. You want to be “green” and go without your refrigerator, that huge thing in the corner of your kitchen that eats electricity.
As I pointed out in my previous post, the folks in the NYTimes article who claimed they were doing that were really faking it by using freezers in the basement or ice […]

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I will plead guilty of having about more cookbooks than any normal person needs; cookbooks for French food, for Cajun, for Italian food, and practically every cookbook ever generated by Sunset Magazine, and about fifteen shelves of others, to which Susie Fishbein’s “Kosher By Design Lightens Up” is cheerfully added. It goes onto the shelf […]

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Written from the perspective of a cook living in the Mississippi Delta, this book aims to depict tasty meals and a laid back lifestyle. Texas born and raised in the big city, I envy such a lifestyle even with knowing that it isn’t always what it is purported to be. Pictures never capture the oppressive […]

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