Archive for July, 2008

In theory, a perfectly balanced meal includes some protein, but not too much; a vegetable or two; some fruit and a carbohydrate. Such a meal also should balance tastes — savory, a little sour or bitter maybe, perhaps some sweet and salt — and textures, from chewy to succulent to crisp. Let’s go a step further and propose that this meal also can conveniently be eaten while playing cards.

Read the complete article at Kitchen Window.

Technorati: Food | recipe | kevin d weeks | Kitchen Window | sandwiches

Too often, in my view, tabouleh is a bulgur wheat salad with some vegetables and this is wrong. It is a tomato, cucumber, and herb salad with some bulgur wheat.

You can find the recipe at Cooking for Two.

Technorati: Food | photo | kevin d weeks | seriously good | tabouleh

In a blog entry one of my favorite writers and the author of The Elements of Cooking, Michael Ruhlman, raised the issue of favorite kitchen gadgets. It’s a great question, particularly for those of us in love with gadgets.

Ruhlman writes, “I’m not the first to suggest that a tool that has only a single use is just as useful in the garbage as it is in your drawer. A mango slicer, please. An egg separater — Jesus, an egg separator! We are born with the perfect egg separators, right at the end of our arms! Why would anyone be moved to invent one?” And he’s mostly right, Alton Brown has been lecturing for years on avoiding specialty tools, what he calls, “single-use gadgets.”

Read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | gadgets

Among my many jobs, one is as a food columnist for a social networking site named Gather.com where I publish article/recipes under the title “Paisano” focused on what I call “peasant” food. Essentially it’s about family cooking from around the world. One column may cover pot roast and the next fondue which has a gourmet tinge in this country but in its original incarnation as bread dipped in melted cheese, fondue was what Swiss cowherds ate.

You can read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | cooking

Chillin’ Out

I grew up on a farm named Direenfinhilid, a Gaelic word roughly meaning “pretty little oak grove.” And in fact, the house my parents built was surrounded by oaks ranging from 50 to 150 years old. Behind the house was a field belonging to someone else that hadn’t been maintained, as a result it had become a solid acre of wild blackberry bushes — blackberries that ripened mid-summer.

Every year my father would organize three or four berry-picking expeditions, out-fitting us with empty paint cans to collect the berries in. Each expedition would last until we were sated on berries and stained blue, our hands and arms were covered with scratches (despite long pants and long-sleeved shirts), and our complaints about the heat finally exceeded Dad’s desire for more berries. Then we’d make our way back to the house where we’d sort the berries from the twigs and leaves that also ended up in the buckets.

Back in those halcyon days ice cream was easy for adults to make when they had kids to do the cranking.

Dad or Mom would make a blackberry cobbler that night and they’d freeze the rest of the berries. Often the end of the berry season would coincide with the first of the peach season and we’d have a blackberry/peach cobbler — a pairing made in heaven. But one thing I don’t recall eating as a child is blackberry ice cream.
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I came home from the farmers’ market last Tuesday with a couple of pounds of tomatoes. To some folks, that makes me a brave or foolish man.

So far more than 1,000 people have officially been sickened by the latest salmonella outbreak. But, health care professionals say that in such estimates, for every reported case of sickness, more than 30 go unreported. This means something close to 40,000 people have been sickened to some degree.

You can read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | food health | food safety