Your Fort Collins Kitchen Store
The Cupboard will be hosting Stacey Krastins on Saturday, November 19 from 1-4 p.m. She’ll be serving samples from the cookbook and will be available to chat and sign copies of her book. So we hope to see you at the store on Saturday!
In a previous post I talked about ‘The Stocked Kitchen’ and its authors, Sarah Kallio and [Read more...]
Welcome back to the blog. Summer is now officially moving back to the southern hemisphere. The Cook’s travels have come to a temporary end, but what great travels they have been. The Cook’s never ending search for the best foods of the world has substantiated the Cook’s belief that the best foods come from products which are grown local to the region.
Case in recent point, while the Cook was traveling in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, the Cook found wild blackberries growing everywhere. After picking and consuming many kilograms of these huge blackberries, it became evident that these fresh berries tasted nothing like the varieties available in the supermarkets. They were soft, sweet, aromatic, and extremely flavourful. The same can be said of the local salmon. Wild salmon fresh off of the boats, is a whole taste experience different than the store bought steaks and fillets. It is amazing what an extra day or two of processing and shipping does to food tastes and textures.
Bottom line: eat in season, eat fresh, eat local, and eat sustainable.
The Cook was introduced to a coffee that is grown in Laos (Southeast Asia) and is marketed in the local Fort Collins, Colorado, USA area by The Coffee Registry. Laos has been a region embroiled in war for decades. The majority of the population lives in poverty. Bolaven Farms formed a cooperative that helped local residents become farmers; an undertaking aimed at providing jobs, not aid. The resulting coffee beans are organic and akin to many of the Sumatran and Indonesian beans, produce a coffee that has lower acidity, is very distinctive in flavor, fruity, yet full-bodied. This has become the Cook’s favored coffee. Not only is the coffee great, but by supporting this project, the consumers provide jobs to these people; provide them with a sense of worth and dignity. We all want that do we not? (thecoffeeregistry.com)
A new coffee…my oh my, the Cook never imagined that there would be a deviation from the Italian coffee roots, but never say never. Open the palate to all possibilities!
The Cook has been asked this question numerous times: “How do I become artistic and inventive in the kitchen?. This is a great question, as we all become patterned or habitual in the ways and menus that we cook. Some people are gifted with creative spirits and some are not. The Cook was not one of those gifted with creativity even though the Cook comes from a family of very talented artists and performers. The Cook had to learn and practice.
The Cook’s answer is two-fold. Most importantly: learn the basics of cooking with all of the products that you and your family enjoy eating. It may be a bit boring but hang with it. Learn what foods and spices work together. A great book to use for a reference is: Culinary Artistry by Dornenburg and Page, published by Wiley&Sons. Develop a “taste palette” and experiment with your newly acquired basic skills. Once you are comfortable with your favorite menus and no longer need the recipe cards, practice with increasing the artistic look or presentation. Keep it simple! Look at the pictures in the food magazines and try to duplicate them. This will lead to your own ideas. If you are a creative person, then have a go. Who was it that said: “we don’t make mistakes, we just have happy accidents”? (Bob Ross-artist)
Open the palate to all possibilities! Once you have a good working knowledge of the basics, you can now experiment with foods not so familiar to you. When you have a success, add that to your basic menu set and try with another food product. Do not be timid. Experiment by tweeking seasonings and garnishes or cooking methods to your basics. Practice makes perfect!
Well – the Cook is out of space so thanks for re-joining the Cook. Next time we’ll get into a few things that the Cook learned. See you then.
The Cupboard Cook
The Cupboard Cook asked me to chat about some new cookbooks covering International cuisine. International cooking is hot these days, with cooking shows, cookbooks, and culinary magazines devoted to the subject, and with the recent phenomenon of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Asian, Italian, French, and even Indian [Read more...]
With the 41st anniversary of Earth Day approaching on April 22nd, it is time to revisit the seminal ‘Diet for a Small Planet.’ Written by Frances Moore Lappe, the book began as a one-page handout and eventually, after detailed research into how we grow our food and why we eat what we eat, was published in book form in 1971, eventually selling 3 million copies. In the process Lappe helped spur a movement that is still going strong today, and in the last ten years, has hit the mainstream.
‘Diet for a Small Planet’ grew out of the author’s realization of and subsequent outrage that almost half the world’s grain supply is fed to livestock while millions starve. Lappe realized that world hunger is a human creation, and that the poor distribution of food to those who need it was creating, in her words, a ‘scarcity of democracy.’ In ‘Diet for a Small Planet,’ she sought to help bring about change by not only bringing these global food problems to light but also how we as individuals could make decisions on what we eat to change our health and help the planet, specifically by eating lower on the food chain.
‘Diet for a Small Planet’ inspired a generation of authors, cooks, and environmentalists to help change the way we think–about how we grow food, about what we eat, and how we treat our planet. A host of related books have since been written, including ‘Hope’s Edge-The Next Diet for a Small Planet,’ co-written by Lappe and daughter Anna, published in 2002, Michael Pollan’s ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ and Mark Bittman’s ‘Food Matters.’ With the global population this year expected to reach 7 billion, there is no better time for change.
Author Mark Bittman experienced a revelatory moment that changed his life.
Bittman, a New York Times columnist and author of several bestselling cookbooks including “How to Cook Everything” and “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian,” read a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) called “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” This report, on the connection between the livestock industry and global warming, included a statistic that stopped the author in his tracks: the report stated that about 70% of all the land on earth is devoted to livestock production and generates 18% of annual greenhouse gas emissions, almost 1/5 of all greenhouse gasses produced (the Worldwatch Institute estimates that livestock and other by-products may account for as much as 50% of greenhouse emissions). This news came at a pivotal time in Bittman’s life: he had high blood sugar levels, was overweight and had sleep apnea. His doctor strongly encouraged him to change his diet.
Bittman linked all these issues together–his own health problems, Americans’ eating habits, the health of the planet–and came up with a personal action plan to eat more whole grains, fruits and vegetables and legumes, and less meat products. The result of this shift to a more plant-base cuisine was the 2009 bestseller, “Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating.”
The next logical step was to create a cookbook with practical applications for Bittman’s new plan of conscious eating. “The Food Matters Cookbook” is a collection of 500 recipes of mostly plant-based or whole grain foods that are easy to make and approchable for most anyone who cooks. The book is broken into three parts: Eating like Food Matters (the Food Matters philosophy defined in depth), Cooking like Food Matters (myth-debunking, ingredients, technique, using the cookbook), and the recipes. One key ingredient of Bittman’s Food Matters philosophy is simplicity: as he states in the book, you can skip all the pertinent info in the beginning and jump right into the recipes and start cooking. And, according to Bittman, you’ll find it’s not hard to re-prioritize your diet and eating habits from meat-centered to plant-centered. And you can save money in the process.
With “The Food Matters Cookbook”, Bittman is leading the way for an ever-growing movement in America away from bad eating choices and environmentally destructive food production practices toward a more environmentally conscious and healthy way of eating. And it’s about time.
