Posts tagged ‘blog’
I’m Married!!!
To address any concern you may have had, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I got married (though I’m sure in the minds of some people, those events are equivalent)!!! At any rate, the ceremony was last Saturday, the only nice day in Maine since forever and we had a wonderful time. It was perfect and everything I dreamed it would be. A week later, my Man and I are getting settled into our apartment in the Berkshires and starting our life together. Finally.
I love my Man more than words can express. I’m so glad we’re finally married and together, instead of doing the silly long distance thing we maintained for 2 years. My Man has innumerable wonderful qualities, but one of the ones I’m most excited about is his willingness to let me be myself in the kitchen. He’ll eat pretty much anything (or at least try it) and though he still wants to eat meat on occasion, he’s totally cool with the healthy, flexitarian/vegetarian, homemade lifestyle I’m pursuing. Such a refreshing change from home, where “beans”, “vegetarian” and “different” are sometimes dirty words. And we’ve got a plethora of new pots, pans, dishes and cooking gadgets to encourage me in my culinary endeavors. It’s very exciting.
It’s also thrilling to be living in a place with several decent supermarkets in town. No more driving half an hour because our local store doesn’t have what I need! I’ve promised myself (and my Man) that I will shop more purposefully than my family does at home, which sometimes results in going to the supermarket several times a week. I made a list, planned a menu for the week and staked out deals in the supermarket fliers last night. We ventured out to the store this morning at which point I made a very sad discovery.
Food costs money.
Clearly this is not really news to the rest of the world, but now that I am living on a budget and seeking employment, we’re trying to limit the amount of money we spend on groceries every week. A sad reality for my cooking dreams, given that I used to not give a thought to spending $20 on the ingredients for one meal when I was living at home. At any rate, it adds to the challenge and I’m sure will work out once we get into a routine, have more staples in the cupboard, and I get a job.
Meanwhile, I’ve subscribed to the following blogs (because I obviously didn’t have enough others to read) with the hope that they’ll help me cook good food while saving money:
Thanks to another great blog, Cheap, Healthy, Good, for the links!
Excuses, Excuses
So, posting hasn’t been quite as frequent as I’d like it to be lately. Seems like I haven’t been able to make much free time since break from school in April.
Summer is fast approaching in mid-coast Maine. Around here, it seems like there are just 2 seasons: summer and winter. Winter was too long, too cold, and too boring, but things finally changing. Summer means the opening of all the seasonal businesses. This is good, because I’ve been waiting for farmer’s markets and fresh, local produce for months. Maybe next weekend I’ll have the chance to finally go check one out.
It also means that restaurants, including the drive in, the ice cream shops and the local hot dog stand, are open again. Some of these places don’t even have vegetarian offerings on their menus! It’s things like that which I forgot over the winter while I was making vegan soups. It was a lot easier to eat healthy food then, when delicious, greasy, meaty, fat-ridden food wasn’t easily available to me. As I get busier and spend more time out of the house with members of my family its easier for everyone involved to grab a quick hamburger instead of seeking out somewhere that serves healthy food just to make me happy. I’ve had some good grease in the past couple weeks. But I’m trying not to enjoy it too often and keep moderation (and flexitarianism) in mind.
Lunches got boring for a while, and this week I’m making vegetable sandwiches on whole wheat pita bread with hummus. They’re good, fresh, and easy to change a little from day to day. I do intend to get back into the kitchen soon and it looks like my schedule is going to allow me to.
I’ve almost finished reading Food Matters, and along with other sources, such as the excellent blog No Meat Athlete, have realized that the best (and often easiest) way to eat well is to eat natural food. I know this idea isn’t unique, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who didn’t realize it. Clearly, food that is closer to its original source, which hasn’t been altered and processed and treated, is better for us than the alternative. My current plan involves trying to eat whole wheat products, fresh fruit and vegetables, and packaged food with as few ingredients as possible (Michael Pollan recommends less than 5…at least that’s what I’ve heard, I still haven’t read In Defense of Food). Sometimes doing all this is still difficult, but its a lot easier than remembering all sorts of other rules. It’s nice to know it can be that simple, since I still feel like I just stumbled into this “eating healthy” thing with no idea what I’m doing. The Wall Street Journal just ran a piece about how “health food isn’t always healthy.” Check it out, it’s pretty interesting.
Stay tuned, I promise more, better posts in the future.
On Food, Fads, Teaching and Twitter
Food and Fads: When I started this blog, I just wanted to write and share with the world my thoughts on “stuff”. A week later I got the inspiration to write about food, it made sense: I was watching ridiculous amounts of Food Network television, beginning to cook for myself and was reading lots of inspiring food blogs. I like food.
It’s a bit surprising to find myself, three months later, a disciple of the current big “food fad.” (which is to say, “the thing everyone is talking about,” not “the thing that’s not going to last”) It’s really strange, because I usually work hard to buck trends. I still haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings movies or read the Twilight books primarily because everyone else has. I just like to be contrary. But it suddenly seems like I’m running into vegetarians all over the place and everyone is talking about flexitarianism and here I am, ranting and raving about not eating meat (though I still do) and cooking food with barley and beans and wondering how on earth that happened. It’s just so unlike me. I used to eat so much junk and now I’ve changed my habits dramatically. Its like I don’t recognize myself. Part of me wonders if one day soon I’ll wake up and go back to eating roast beef sandwiches and candy bars for lunch.
On Alice Waters and School Lunches
When I began this blog, part of the intent was to learn more about food and the current issues surrounding it and develop my own opinions and use those opinions to influence my cooking and lifestyle. All that said, Relishments has largely degraded into a demonstration of how many ways there are to use oil, garlic, herbs and canned tomatoes to make lunch (which I did once again today, though I’ll spare you a post). It’s becoming apparent to me that I really need to look into this issue and develop a stance, both as someone who loves food, and as a teacher.
On February 19, Alice Waters and Katrina Heron published an op-ed piece in the NY Times called No Lunch Left Behind. They make a lot of good points, but as a high school educator, I don’t think their plan is going to have all the “magical” consequences they’re hoping for. I do agree that “without healthy food (and cooks and kitchens to prepare it), increased financing [of the current school lunch program] will only create a larger junk-food distribution system,” but I’m unsure if there’s enough locally grown, untreated, unfertilized, fresh foods to supply every child in America with the perfect lunch every day, as Waters and Heron envision.
The column also argues that healthy meals could be created for $5, but that does not include the “one-time investment in real kitchens”, providing students with the education they recommend or new training for cooking staff. I suspect a tab of far more than $27 billion dollars would result, especially in the first few years. I’m also not sure that the long term benefits and savings would be as far-reaching as Waters and Heron hope (though I’d love if they were right). I think school lunch programs can only do so much. The real issue is frequently at home; even if children are educated about good eating habits and given good food at lunch (which may or may not actually taste good), I believe that youth are more influenced by what they see and experience at home than at school; yes, “…parents should be able to rely on the government to contribute to their children’s physical well-being”, but the keyword is contribute.
Finally, I love Ezra Klein’s commentary on The Internet Food Association: “There are things we should do because they should be done. We’re the richest nation in the world. We can do better than feeding our children inventively presented corn syrup fresh from the microwave.” As much as I can be suspicious of Waters and Heron’s proposal, I’m sure that there are improvements that can and should be made to the school lunch program. Changing school lunches is not going to revolutionize American health, as the column seems to envision, but there’s no reason why America shouldn’t make changes where we’re able.
See also:
Mouthing Off, from Food and Wine
Alice Waters Proposes New School Lunch Program, from Serious Eats
Anthony Bourdain on Alice Waters, from The Food Section
Alice Waters’s Open Letter to the Obamas, from Gourmet
Lunchtime Revelation
Some days I feel better about my eating and cooking (and this blog) than others. I’ve made some good meals over the past month with no real failures. I’m much more comfortable in the kitchen and plan to continue improving my skills.
At the same time, I’m still torn about the purpose and function of this blog. My most popular posts are ones discussing television shows, which puts me in an awkward place. Do I just post about television, and “give an over generalized recount of events on a given television show,” as one commenter phrased it? It’s clear from my stat reports that is what gets my visitor count up. Only one of my top 8 viewed posts isn’t connected to a show. So, should I spend more time in the kitchen, creating and sharing the results, even though no one’s going to read it? What’s the point of keeping a blog if no one’s going to read it? It’s a difficult situation.
All that said, I’m obviously running out of steam in the kitchen. This morning there was nothing of interest to bring for lunch, so I grabbed a frozen burrito on my way out the door. Sitting down to lunch in the teacher’s room, another teacher commented, “Do you actually like those, or was there just nothing else in your house?” And it made me think–I mean, they’re certainly edible but they’re definitely not good for you and obviously not vegetarian. I can eat better than this and I should be eating better than this. It isn’t that hard to make something decent to bring to school; I just have to be intentional about it.
I’ll be stopping at the supermarket on the way home to remedy this travesty. No more frozen burritos.
The cool thing to do?
The longer I work on this blog (a whole two weeks now, but it seems like longer), the more I realize how un-unique it is. The “FoodBlogger on FaceBook” group on Facebook has 703 members. 703 other people who are probably a lot like me doing the same thing I am. Furthermore, a lot of food blogs are more creative than mine, such as Obama Foodorama, which is “A Daily Diary of The Obama Foodscape, One Byte At A Time”. Where do people come up with this stuff?
In a way, that’s frustrating because it means that I’ll probably just remain in internet anonymity writing a blog that only my sister and my Man read. But I’ll still be improving my writing (I hope) and compiling all my thoughts on food and food television and the like, which I think has some intrinsic value. And I like teaching too much to really consider blogging as more than a hobby, even if it is the only thing I think and talk about in my spare time.
On the other hand, joining the world of food bloggers has opened my eyes in some ways. It’s amazing what you see when you’re looking for it. It seems like everyone’s talking about food and a lot of it is really interesting. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t use Google Reader to subscribe to another food blog (check out the blog roll to the right) and its exciting to be part of that conversation. Even people who don’t typically talk about food are talking about it. Case in point, Tim Buckley of the excellent Ctrl-Alt-Del webcomic reviewing Personal Cooking Trainer for the Nintendo DS and mental_floss’ post this morning about The History of “American Cheese,” from Colonial Cheddar to Kraft Singles.
At the very least, I’m loving blogging and I hope you’re loving reading. Thanks!
relishments HAS MOVED! 