Soft-serve gets a makeover at upscale ice cream joints. Think spiced cantaloupe topping, balsalmic cherries, a "creamsicle" of white nectarine granita and jasmine tea soft-serve.

The Slow Food movement plans a Labor Day Slow Food Nation festival, to be the "Woodstock" of food festivals. Hope they bring more porta-potties than the original.

The Rutgers Tomato Project brings back the Jersey tomato.

The Minimalist does a no-bake summer cheesecake with blueberries.

Some New Yorkers are apparently unable or unwilling to leave their own neighborhoods for dinner.

Wasabi fudge, lavender caramels, blue cheese truffles.

Whether I can afford to bid or not, it's always fun to check out the items available at auctions. The Slow Food USA auction is particularly fun because it is almost all foodie items!

Slow Food has a long list of items to bid on. I want them all! I am now dreaming of making my own pizzas in the wood fired oven. I'm also imagining myself eating everything from the basket of apples to baked goods with pure vanilla. Don't even get me started with all the culinary tours and vacations.

Be sure to check out the complete list of auction items before the auction closes on June 26. For more information on Slow Food USA, visit their website.

What item would you (or did you) bid on?

Waters' cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, is a fantastic introduction to the slow food movement.

The movement was founded in the late 1980s by a group of people who wanted to bring back local food traditions that had taken a backseat to technology as our lifestyles picked up speed and changed course. Slow Food International, the non-profit, member-supported group that popularized the idea, does not pretend to have discovered a revolutionary idea. Instead, it reiterates principles that people in places like Italy and France have lived by for thousands of years: celebrating biodiversity in our food supply, utilizing local ingredients and taking the time to enjoy and appreciate our food and where it comes from.

But back to the cookbook. Waters' recipes echo the food she serves at her own restaurant, Che Panisse - she pays close attention to details, and the dishes are full-bodied and well-rounded. The book features a much-needed "techniques" section, and accompanying each recipe is a nice description of the dish, and several variations on ingredients and preparation. Even if you're not yet a slow food convert, recipes Waters' Spicy Cauliflower Soup and Chocolate Crackle Cookies will win you over.

I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book extolling the virtues of eating locally (and the horrors of eating veggies trucked in from California, Chile, and other places far afield). Beyond simply pushing organic food or a vegetarian lifestyle, Kingsolver suggests that eating foods grown locally, in season, by farmers using sustainable practices can, basically, save the world -- not to mention, be delicious. I've swallowed her pitch hook, line, and heirloom potato, and have begun deeply rethinking our family's grocery lists. Starting this process in the dead of winter is a challenge, and "the sustainable food project" is my way of sharing the struggle with you.

The sandwich, a staple of my family's diet, is a particularly interesting problem. Were I to open a pictorial culinary dictionary under "S," I'd imagine a photo of bread, meat, tomato, lettuce, mayo. But fresh red tomatoes and leafy green lettuce are anything but in season in Oregon, where I live -- and the vast majority of the U.S. and Europe for the next several months. Because it's easy to find a sustainably-farmed source, we've been eating lots of beef, ham, and crusty local bread, but what else?

I've been able to find lots of delicious, flavorful options utilizing local, organic produce.

A couple of Friday nights, I took a break from school work in order to make a big pot of beef stew. I needed to retreat to some deeply comforting food and in cold weather there's nothing like beef stew (at least in my mind) to warm you up. It had been awhile since I had made it and but it's one of those recipes that always comes back to me when I have the ingredients spread out in front of me.

You can adjust this recipe to your tastes. I used about a cup of red wine to deglaze the pan when the veggies have picked up all the caramelized brown bits that come from browning the meat, but if you can use a little water instead. I always use parsnips in mine, but if you find them objectionable, feel free to leave them out. Instructions on how to make my version of beef stew are after the jump.

I don't eat as healthy as I should (the entire bag of Dove milk chocolate I ate last night is proof of that), but I'm always looking at ways to make my diet a lot better.

Cooking Light has picked five healthy food trends that you might want to follow. I've heard of most of them, though Flexitarianism is a new term to me, even though I would say many American's follow this without even know it. It's when a person eats a diet that's mostly grains, vegetables, and fruit, with a little meat, fish, poultry, and dairy mixed in too. Functional Foods are foods that are enriched with more nutrients, such as orange juice with calcium. We know what Organic Food, Locally Grown Foods, and Vegetarianism represent, but are you familiar with Slow Food? I first heard this term a few years ago (and there have been books written about it and it's a growing movement). It's choosing locally grown food, cooking it in traditional ways and then eating it with family, something that a lot of families don't do nowadays. Whenever I hear the term I think "food that's not cooked in a microwave," though I doubt that's the real definition.

• Summer is salad time, including salads with green beans.
• When you order fish in a restaurant, does it come with bones or without?
• An interview with Darra Goldstein, author of Baking Boot Camp: Five Days of Basic Training at the Culinary Institute of America.
• What's the best cottage cheese you can buy at the supermarket?
• You've heard of the Slow Food trend? How about the Slow Sip?
• This week's recipes: Eggplant Gazpacho, Chicken Salad, Poor Man's Caviar, Ham and Cheddar Scones, Pecan Butter Ball Cookies, Angel Food Summer Pudding, and Lemonade.

I'm a Slow Food kinda guy and I abhor fast food. I'm not talking about food that you can cook up fast at home like a quick stir fry, but that slop masquerading as burgers and tacos that the mega-chains foster off as food. Just thinking about it has me up in arms and ready to charge to the attack. No, give me a nice slice of baked ham from a hand cured and aged hog that met his maker kindly and I'm happy and peaceful.

This week in Italy is the Salone del Gusto, the "Exhibition of Taste" put on by Slow Food, the organization formed 20 years ago to counter the fast food culture. The main theme for the tenth anniversary of this festival is peace. Food for peace, what a concept. One of the events will be Israeli and Palestinian chefs coming together to cook a meal using the best of their cooking traditions. The Chefs for Peace Association has organized this in the hope of creating a dialogue on common ground to focus on working together to prevent the agricultural and food based destruction of war. Let's hope it works because while I may get all riled up about food, it also tends to calm me down as well. Hopefully the same is true worldwide. After reading about the tasting areas at the festival I wish I could take the time to head to do my share for world peace and gustatory exploration.

Here's a cookbook that is for those who enjoy a book with a good read as well as one with recipes. The Pleasures of Slow Food is about the movement for appreciating every aspect of how food is made and where it comes from, rather than just concentrating on getting food from your plate and into your stomach as quickly as possible. For those who really follow the slow food movement, it is a philosophy and a way of life, but for the rest of us, it is something to be appreciated for its food, if not always followed to the letter.

This cookbook will tell you a lot about the ideas behind slow food, pairing them with about 60 recipes from chefs around the country and the world that use those same ideas; the chefs are some of the big names that support "slow food". You'll hear a lot about local ingredients and traditional - meaning slow, steady and perhaps even a bit old fashioned - cooking methods throughout the text and, while the book can be inspiring, since slow food often focus so heavily on local foods, you find yourself reading the book for fun/education and heading to your local farmer's market to pick up whatever is in season rather than trying to recreate all of the recipes in here.

I guess I had better get started if this stew is going to be cooked by the time my guests arrive! (It has just gone 6 in the evening). 

As per normal - where there is inevitably some disaster or other - I can't locate the original recipe I was going to use. I have a chorizo, tins of chopped tomato, onion, garlic, smoked paprika powder, stewing steak, potatoes... but forgot to buy a pepper (bell pepper) or a bottle of red plonk to go in with the beef stock. Did get some parsley for the garnish though! Hopeless really, at shopping... even with a list.

The other day I popped into Panzers Deli near Lords Cricket Ground in London (I was there for a New Zealand Wine Tasting, not the cricket) and spotted uncooked chorizo (this is unusual as I have only seen the pre-cooked version in the UK) although it doesn't look that different from the ready-to-eat. No idea how long it takes to cook but it is going in the pot with softened onions,some garlic and the paprika, all after the steak has been browned. Then the wet stuff.

Today's slashfood mini theme is slow cooking with three hours the minimum. So I will let this lot simmer gently for a couple of hours before adding the potatoes which should give plenty of time for the wine to breathe - a gutsy red from La Mancha - one item I didn't forget to buy!

[Photo Andrew Barrow]

"I want a crock pot!" says the woman who's checking me out at the thrift store, eagerly. Later, I'm shopping for a slow cooking recipe book and am surprised to see five shelves in Powell's Books for Cooks devoted to the subject. "Do you have a slow cooker?" asks the clerk after I make my selection. I tell her I've just purchased one. "I need one, too!"

Today, it seems, everyone's into slow cooking. I head to my favorite gourmet market and there, next to the fabulously shiny stainless steel cookware and in front of the organic local produce is a sexy All-Clad slow cooker. I try to find a price tag, and when I can't, figure it's a sign from the heavens: stick with your thrift store purchase, sweetie. I have to go to the supermarket for a few things, and there's an end-of-aisle display of much lower-priced slow cookers.

When we set out to do a theme day around slow cooking, few of us even could define it. Now, we're all hooked, as Crock Pots bubble in our kitchens and beans bake for hours and hours at 300 degrees. For the record: slow cooking is any method of cookery that combines low heat and long periods of time, usually without requiring much attention. Often, slow-cooked meals are begun a day or two before they're meant to be eaten.

Why is slow cooking so popular, now, a good thirty-five years since it became vogue with the introduction of the Crock Pot? It's because it brings back the soul to cooking.

I thought I could do better than the Hillbilly Housewife, whose weekly menu of weiner stirfry and tuna-and-peas-over-rice didn't appeal much to my sense of budgetary gourmet. I'm not the only one, evidently. The good people at the Better Times Almanac have created what they call the "Slow Food for Poor People Challenge."

Taking the "Food Stamp Challenge," they ate on a food stamp budget for a week (about $61 for two people) and tried to make their example an even better one by employing "(1) frugal supermarket shopping, (2) preparing meals from basic ingredients, (3) buying local foods, (4) gardening, (5) food storage, and (6) home preservation of food."

Menus like "Buffalo meatloaf, oven fries, corn on the cob, green beans," biscuits and gravy, buffalo pot roast and a breakfast of "2 scrambled eggs, 1/3 lb sausage, hash brown, potatoes, rolls, apple cobbler" are a little more my speed. The drawback is that their menu is a bit repetitive (and, being from Oklahoma, relies heavily on buffalo meat). But you can hardly argue with a $60 weekly menu that employs organic eggs from free-ranging hens and meats from local cooperatives. It's a nice attempt and only fuels my desire to come up with more and better cheap-but-gourmet meals.

[photo Sarah Gilbert]