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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The Mediterranean Diet offers a healthy, tasty, aromatic array of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, wild greens, fish, olive oil, and red wine while sharply reducing intake of milk products, meat, processed foods, sweets, and caffeine. The MD helps prevent cardiovascular disorders, reduce the incidence of cancer and diabetes, and–it appears–curb neurodegenerative processes.
It is strange, […]

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As a long time reviewer of just about anything and everything, I can honestly say that not all of my reviews are positive. In fact sometimes an author or movie maker, or eatery will irk me so much that I feel obliged to give them a public flogging. Generally speaking, said miscreants hide in a […]

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Ruby Tuesday’s, despite the ever changing menu, and the attempt to be more grown-up and sophisticated still manages to cater to children. While it can be a bit annoying to find a new menu on each visit, it is a pleasure to know that both my children, ages 5 and 13, will enjoy their meal, […]

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Chuck E. Cheese’s is a favorite for most children, but for parents it can often be a nightmare, and most certainly the last place they wish to go. It is overly crowded, full of wild children running around, and just complete and utter chaos. It is truly a madhouse full of children. Regardless of these […]

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It’s not quite as high in kid’s list of veggies most hated: brussel sprouts or eggplant probably rate higher; and Papa Bush openly said he hated to eat it, but nevertheless, eating vegetables such as Broccoli are probably the natural way to stay healthy.
Broccoli, Cabbage, Cauliflower, and soy beans have been found to have a […]

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When menopause hits you will no longer joke about how Krispy Kreme doughnuts go straight to your hips. That’s because they won’t. You’ll be storing fat like a man. Your body will have lost the estrogen supply it needs to direct fat to your hips and buttocks, and will instead store it in your midsection. […]

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We just delivered more rice from the “second harvest” to the rice mill for storage and milling later. We don’t worry about a shortage of rice: We grown our own, a gormet organically grown rice for the upscale Manila market.
But not everyone is so lucky.
Here in the Philippines there is a rice shortage.
It came on […]

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Since May 2007, Absolut Vodka has been running an ongoing ad campaign created by TBWA/Chiat/Day/New York, “In an Absolut World,” described by The New York Times as:
[A] fanciful, even surreal, place where common sense prevails and just deserts are always on the menu.
On Planet Absolut, for instance, men can get pregnant, the Curse of the […]

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The Lammas are the UK’s first eco community to have been granted permission to construct a mini village. The nine families involved recently received approval to build straw bale and mud houses on a plot of 76 acres in the middle of nowhere Wales.
The name of the Welsh village where the new community is going […]

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This is a specialist but none the less fascinating account of a relatively unconsidered aspect of Old West lore in one of it’s livelier towns; that is, what was for dinner? And breakfast, lunch and for snacks in between as well. After all, it couldn’t all have been gunfights, gambling and mining, twenty-four hours a […]

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This is a great book for the epi-curious romantic, but also stands on its own as an inspiration for the more experienced. The humor, full-meal suggestions, and anecdotes make this much more than a simple collection of recipes; and it’s further enriched with a guide to wine selection, a guide on setting the table, unit conversions, and a glossary of terms. And while the book is very oriented towards “the traditionally inexperienced man cooking for his woman”, it’s innocent enough that I think it lends itself to any wooing situation.

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You’re a sophisticated vegetarian, maybe even a vegan, and suddenly you are confronted by an earthquake (or hurricane, or tsunami) and you are on your own and have to survive.
Would you eat meat?
This is a discussion that is going around the internet. Some of those commenting on BoingBoing seem to scoff, and one comment is […]

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Opening with an extensive breakdown of needed utensils, pantry staples, simple cooking methods, and plans for shopping, the first 60 pages of Ed Dugan’s new cookbook serve as a cooking guide for inexperienced chefs that want a simple step-by-step manual on how to get started in the kitchen. Reducing relatively complex subjects and phrases to easy-to-understand […]

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Maybe it’s only being nostalgic, but it certainly seems as though the entire genre of children’s movies has gone downhill as of late.  At best, you will find one or two movies a year that are specifically made for children that actually stand out as being noteworthy.  The time has passed when the classic Disney […]

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On a whim, my wife and I decided to try out Bookers. I had eaten there a couple of times before, but always at lunchtime. I had always found the food quite good and the service excellent. Bookers after dark is not such a fun place to get to, it lives in one of the […]

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