It's Friday afternoon. It's August. I, for one, would rather be at home doing something interesting with the quart of blueberries that have been patiently waiting on the bottom shelf of my fridge for the last week than sitting behind my computer. However, someone must hold down the internet, and so I carry on, doing a little work for my real job and searching the internet for tasty bits to keep you Slashfood readers salivating.
Of the many things I love about the city in which I grew up, one is that fact that people are permitted to keep chickens in their backyards inside the city. Tour de Coups is an annual neighborhood tour of the coops in which those chickens live. How I wish I could have gone!
My cousins Dan and Sabrina are just weeks away from the arrival of baby #2 and the whole family is waiting excitedly. This week, both The Kitchn and The Wednesday Chef have asked for tips on good foods to take to new moms. I'm bookmarking both posts for near future inspiration.
Loobylu tells the story of her mother's chocolate cake and how she never seemed to be able to make it correctly. A baking session with her mom revealed that her mom had given her a recipe that wasn't quite right. Cake sabotage!
A clever tip from Not Martha about how to preserve your beer bottle cap when opening, thus enabling you to put it back on the bottle and save the balance of your beer for another time.
College cafeterias go trayless to save on food waste, a nation of undergrads wonders how they'll carry five plastic cups of juice now.
I am a big fan of sausage, especially the kind you buy in bulk (as opposed to the stuff that comes in casing). I use it as the protein/flavor base for egg scrambles, pasta sauces and stews. However, despite my love for ground, highly seasoned meats, I've never actually tried to make it on my own (I like to leave tasks like that to the professionals).
On Monday, Culinateposted a piece by Matthew Amster-Burton that's got me thinking that maybe I should change my ways and start experimenting with homemade sausage. I like the idea of avoiding all the perservatives that you find in commercial sausages and Matthew makes it sound so darn easy. He says you don't need many tools (I would have to buy the meat grinding attachment for my KitchenAid mixer) and that there are recipes to turn to until you feel confident enough to create your own flavor blends.
I think I might need a bit more encouragement before I become a home sausage maker. Is this something that others of you have done? Any tips or tricks?
A salmagundi is either an English dish that consists of chopped egg, ground meat, anchovies, onions and assorted spices or, more generally, a miscellaneous collection. So today, I bring you a salmagundi of links for the Slashfood Ate. These are links I've collected all week long, tasty bits that I've been holding on while I looked for a way to write about them.
PAgent twittered this link over to me yesterday and it has gone straight to the top of my 'must make' list. Because how can you live until you've tasted coffee jell cubes?
Over the years, I've actively tried to expand the number of grains I eat regularly. I grew up eating quite a lot of brown rice, and my mom frequently added barley to soups and stews, but beyond that, I was fairly clueless. I acquired a copy of The New Laurel's Kitchen not long after I moved to Philadelphia and it became my go-to resource for learning about new grains. It opened my eyes to quinoa (not exactly a grain, but it acts like one), millet (both as a cooked and raw grain) and kasha (buckwhat groats) and I continue to explore.
If you're also trying to incorporate more whole grains into your diet these days (after all, it is the new food trend) then I have a helpful resource for you. Last week, Carrie Floyd put together a whole grain glossary on Culinate and it has become my new favorite repository of grain information (Laurel's Kitchen is still wonderful, but since I often plan meals while sitting at work, I can't really carry it around with me all the time).
Check it out and let yourself be inspired to check out some new grains. It's a little more challenging that buying the box of Cheerios that now has more whole grains, but it's a whole lot more interesting and tasty.
Until last year, I had never heard of green garlic. I was certainly familiar with regular old garlic, it was ever-present in my childhood kitchen, but I generally didn't give much thought to the younger, spring version of that familiar, stinky bulb until it started appearing all over the media. It (along with ramps) was the springtime darling. I actually missed out on it last year because the large Headhouse Square Farmers' Market didn't open until the beginning of July and the smaller markets I frequent didn't carry it, but I was intrigued by it.
But this year, there was an abundance of green garlic, in all of its purple, white and green glory. The first weekend of the market I picked a bunch up (even though I didn't really know what to do with it) and brought it home. That week I chopped up several of the bulbs and their leggy greens and sauteed them with onions and sausage for a quick pasta topper. I've used it in place of regular garlic in lots of things and have also tossed thin slices with some early tomatoes, salt and olive oil for a tasty salad (eat it with toasted pain au levain). I'm enchanted by the idea of making pesto with them like Sarah Gilbert has done.
I grew up with a Salton, five-cup yogurt maker. As far back as I can remember, it was always tucked into the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. However, it never got much use during my childhood, as it was more of a relic from my mom's earlier, pre-children, hippie days than an active appliance. When I was 9 or 10 years old, at a moment when we were in need of drinking glasses, she cannibalized the yogurt maker, and pressed the milk glass cups into service around the dinner table. We continued to use them that way for years (I think that my mom even picked up a second yogurt maker at a thrift store at one point, just for the glasses).
Three or four years ago, I happened across a similar yogurt maker at a thrift store. I bought it, despite the fact that I had no active interest in making my own yogurt and my kitchen was already woefully overstocked. I tucked it up on top of my kitchen cabinets and didn't touch it again until last week.
Over at Culinate, Catherine Bennett Dunster wrote an interesting article/explanation about probiotics -- live microorganisms found in foods which may have health benefits. Dunster writes that probiotics have been reported to improve intestinal health, boost immune systems and reduce lactose intolerance, but adds that there is currently minimal strong scientific evidence to support these claims.
As an immune-suppressed, lactose-intolerant person with an auto-immune intestinal disease, I've tried my fair share of probiotics. Though I used to take a powdered, lemonade-flavored probiotic, VSL3, which I dissolved in water, I've switched to just trying to eat probiotic-friendly foods. My experiences are pretty much in line with Dunster's report, in that I don't notice a big difference in how I feel based on how much of these foods I consume (my doctors warned of this). Mostly, I just eat them because they taste good and I figure they can't hurt.
My favorite probiotic-containing food is Kashi Vive, a cereal for digestive health that I eat -- again -- because it tastes delicious. I have to be careful not to consume too much, though, because it's also high in fiber (which isn't great for my intestines). Many yogurts are also well-known for containing them, and some companies have even launched lines of yogurts aimed at promoting digestive health (though there has been backlash). Check out a longer list of brand-name foods containing probiotics here at The Nibble, and definitely let us know if you've had success with any of them!
For some reason, I have coffee on the brain today and so decided to search for coffee pictures in the Slashfood pool. I found lots of fantastic pictures of cakes and pastries infused with coffee flavors, but this image by Sarah Gilbert, an occasional Slashfood contributor, captured my attention most of all.
Sarah has been writing for Culinate recently, expressing her passion for food and the experiences she has as she tries to feed herself and her family a more sustainable and local diet. Her most recent piece is about her process making sourdough starter from scratch. If you haven't been following her writing over there, you should definitely check it out, as her enthusiasm for food, eating and cooking is contagious and inspiring.
When I was a kid, I wasn't a picky eater, but I was difficult when it came to school lunches. I hated buying lunch at school, but I wasn't a big fan of sandwiches, mostly because of the squish factor. I also got tired of things easily, which made it hard for my mom to keep track of acceptable lunch bag contents. I really liked taking yogurt and granola to school, but I got teased mercilessly for having food that seemed too healthy (you must remember that we're talking about the late eighties here, when eating locally and organically was not the norm).
Cookbook author Keri Fisher currently has a post up over at Culinate that addresses the question of the lunch box. She talks of her own struggles making lunches for the kids in her household and offers a few of her suggestions for successful and kid-approved meals. I particularly like her Frog in a Bog Muffins, as they are essentially a healthy version of a corn dog. And who doesn't like corn dogs?
Valentine's Day is a little more than a week away and so it is time to start celebrating all things chocolate. Our friends over at Culinate are hosting a contest in which they'll be sending both a reader (and their guest) and a food blogger (as well as their guest) to Copia Center'sDeath by Chocolate Festival in Napa Valley. Entering is easy, just head over to the Culinate contest page, sign up and choose your favorite food blogger. You enter yourself when you vote and put your preferred blogger one step closer to winning as well.
I am something of a Smitten Kitchen groupie. I love Deb's recipes, her photography and the amount of personality that comes through in her writing. This is why I was particularly tickled to discover that earlier this week Culinate published a collection of tips from her about entertaining (especially helpful for the rapidly approaching holidays).
The most helpful piece of advice for me is number 8, which recommends that you pick a quitting time in order to give yourself time to pull yourself together and enjoy your friends and family when they arrive. I always seem to be sweaty and hassled when guests arrive at my house, not exactly an attitude to make people feel welcome. Check out the article on Culinate for the rest of Deb's helpful tips!
I love This American Life. I love every trendy, emotionally orchestrated, hipster-ish moment of it. I try to catch it on Sunday mornings at 12 noon (that's when it plays on WHYY in Philly) but often times, I'm not at home when it's on the air. This last Sunday, I happened to be driving around with the radio on to catch the beginning of Jonathan Gold's story about how for six months he kept a live chicken on the top of his fridge, feeding it several cans of corn niblets every day. Sadly, I didn't get a chance to finish listening, because I had to get out of the car and buy ingredients for fruitcake.
However, thanks to Kim's post on Culinate today, I'm now aware that the entire episode this weekend was all about food, poultry specifically (so appropriate for Thanksgiving). Lucky for me, I subscribe to the show's podcast, so that episode will appear on my iPod sometime in the next few days and I'll be able to listen to it in all of it's wacky, foodie glory. However, even if you don't subscribe, you can check out the show online. It might even be airing again in the next day or two in your listening area. It's worth listening to just to hear Jonathan Gold say "niblets" over and over again. There is something inexplicably entertaining in that one word.
This is the time of year when life can start to feel overwhelming and cooking becomes more of a burden than a joy. Thankfully there is lots of good food writing out there that can help you recenter yourself and find the peace and satisfaction available in cooking, eating and living.
Earlier in the week, Culinate posted an essay by Charlotte Freeman entitled The Walking Cure. It is about a time when Freeman was struggling with an inexplicable illness that made her run fevers and feel exhausted. A practitioner of Chinese medicine recommended outdoor physical exercise and so she started taking long, very slow walks in the woods on the Utah/Wyoming border.
The essay contains a sense of quiet, almost as if you have stepped into the woods with Freeman and you are able, for a moment, to feel the dampness of the trees and hear the twigs snapping as you step. It also makes you (well, as least if you are me) want to leap up, grab a book about mushrooms and head to the woods in order to find your own.
There are few things in life that I love more than a personal essay that creates a sense of companionship between the writer and the reader. An essay that shines light on perfect details and invites you into a space that feels intimate, revealing and fascinating. And if it also bears relationship to food/cooking/eating, I become nearly inarticulate with bliss.
I stumbled across such an essay on Culinate that hits everyone of these notes and left me wanting more. It is an excerpt from the recently released anthology Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant called Table for One and was written by Erin Ergenbright. It reads quickly and leaves behind a feeling of quiet appreciation for food and the time it takes to eat it. Definitely worth the few minutes it takes to read it through.
I grew up with a Salton, five-cup yogurt maker. As far back as I can remember, it was always tucked into the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. However, it never got much use during my childhood, as it was more of a relic from my mom's earlier, pre-children, hippie days than an active appliance. When I was 9 or 10 years old, at a moment when we were in need of drinking glasses, she cannibalized the yogurt maker, and pressed the milk glass cups into service around the dinner table. We continued to use them that way for years (I think that my mom even picked up a second yogurt maker at a thrift store at one point, just for the glasses). 
10 More Dirty Restaurant Tricks
5 Things You Didn't Know About Turducken
10 Catchiest Food Jingles We Love to Hate
