Seattle Local Food

For those of you who haven’t heard, the FDA has also shut down the business of long-time local raw milk cheese maker Sally Jackson (Seattle Times article here). It’s a shut-down with controversies about E. coli and cleanliness, but I’m going to put that particular discussion aside here, since the debate is already taking place [...]

Read Full Post »

A childhood friend, chef Peter Shelsky, tipped me off to a program on New York’s public radio station WNYC this morning, as thanks for tipping him off to my favorite restaurant in New York.  My favorite Egyptian chef, Ali El Sayed from said restaurant — the Kabab Cafe on Steinway Street in Astoria (Queens) — [...]

Read Full Post »

Since Hanukkah is early this year, latke season is coming up!  Here and here are some past posts on oils to use for frying.  I still haven’t tried the macadamia nut oil a few commenters suggested, but am interested in it. Here, however, are some latke-related mash-ups I put together in a bout of pre-Hanukkah [...]

Read Full Post »

A kugel, for those who don’t know, is a casserole with a self deprecating sense of humor. A Jewish traditional baked starchy pudding dish often made of noodles or potatoes, the name has roots in common with Yiddish words for “ball” and “bullet” possibly to signify the cannonball-like feeling it leaves in the stomach. There [...]

Read Full Post »

~ Check out this article in the New York Times! The Estrella Family Creamery situation is still gaining momentum. Thanks to everyone who has been part of spreading the word about this.

Read Full Post »

Hey everyone — For those of you following the Estrella Family Creamery situation, I’m adding my voice to the links over at Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s website today. She’s posted a few great resources for donating to the Estrella Case, the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, and a few other situations where small farms are in [...]

Read Full Post »

This one is for the paleo eaters, the cauliflower enthusiasts, or just anyone looking for a simple flavorful fall/winter dish that works for a variety of meals. This would be great for Thanksgiving. Cauliflower is a pretty classic grain-substitute for people who avoid grains for health reasons.  It’s bulky, low in carbohydrates, and a good [...]

Read Full Post »

There are foods you (probably) know to choose by smell.  A good cantaloupe, when perfectly ripe, releases a melony fragrance, especially from the navel where the stem used to connect.  Ripe strawberries call out, “You wrote me into your food budget this week, remember?  Really, you did!  You just spelled me e-g-g-s.”  And you’ve probably [...]

Read Full Post »

Okay, food confession time: I used to be a vegetarian.  A pretty bad vegetarian — what kind of nice, Jewish girl from New York could resist lox and whitefish on a visit? — but a vegetarian all the same. Today, we’re going to meet the food that undid my vegetarianism once and for all.  Readers, [...]

Read Full Post »

Kelli Estrella just posted a fascinating context/background article on the FDA’s use of L. mono to shut down raw milk dairies. It’s from the Farm To Consumer Legal Defense Fund. She posted this on the Estrella website. I’ll post updates if I hear them, but that’s a good place, obviously, to be checking too.

Read Full Post »

Just for fun, and on an entirely different note, I’ve been drawing biostatistics/health sciences/epidemiology humor sketches at 4 a.m. as a way to take a break from academic stress and deal with insomnia. I’m not saying I can draw, but here they are anyway. PERIODIC REGRESSION/COX’S PERIODIC REGRESSION ~ SELECTION BIAS / BAR PLOT / [...]

Read Full Post »

A few weeks ago, Sea Breeze Farm was selling merguez, a spicy North African lamb sausage, at the farmers market.  Their sausages usually contain pork fat or pork casings —  and I don’t eat pork — but this time, the merguez had no pork mixed in, and they had some for sale that was not [...]

Read Full Post »

The Cornucopia Institute has just released a 72-page report (pdf) detailing the ins and outs of organic eggs sold in the US. Specifically, the report gets into detail about discrepancies between what consumers may imagine about the egg-laying chickens and what is sometimes a very different reality. They go into detail about some of the [...]

Read Full Post »

Fans of the Estrella Family Creamery got a shock at the U-District farmers market this morning, but likely not as big a shock as the kids of this Montesano family got when the FDA showed up to shut the creamery down. The claim: Risk of exposure to Listeria.  However, Estrella’s current inspection records (available today at [...]

Read Full Post »

Have you made friends with celery root yet?  Also known as celeriac, this wrinkled bulb at the base of a celery plant  is a delicious, albeit charmingly funny-looking, friend to have in your kitchen during the colder months. I posted a recipe previously for celery root soup.  Today’s offering, a mashed celery root recipe, is [...]

Read Full Post »

I wrote a few weeks ago about dealing with my beloved grandmother’s decline in health as she faces pancreatic cancer.  I wrote that the desire to bring her food was inseparable from how I express love, and how she has expressed love for me. ~ Food and love has been on my mind a lot during [...]

Read Full Post »

I went to the annual Puget Sound Mycological Society Wild Mushroom Show today.  It’s still going on tomorrow and I highly recommend checking it out. I knew it would be interesting, but had no idea how impressively well-done it would be.  The main room is full of tables of beautifully laid out specimens organized by [...]

Read Full Post »

Mark Bittman’s blog recently caught my eye with a piece about how school lunches in the United States are worse than in many countries, including a number far poorer than we are.  In Brazil, he points out, 30% of food for school lunches has to be bought from local farmers.  Here, we get excited when [...]

Read Full Post »

October has started.  It’s the season of red-leafed huckleberry bushes, golden larches [blatant excuse to stick in a hiking picture], rain, wild mushrooms and… cod liver oil. In honor of October, I’m reworking a post I wrote a few years ago at my old site, on cod liver oil and vitamin D. Once again, the [...]

Read Full Post »

Even in the summer, I like to eat hearty stews, ragoûts, casseroles, and generally filling dishes of meats and vegetables cooked together.  But fall and winter invite these dishes onto our plates, into our freezers, into our bellies. Now that grad school has started back up and I’m spending more of my time doing things [...]

Read Full Post »

Every year around September, Billy of Billy’s Gardens, who sells at most of our local farmers markets, offers a deal on #2 tomatoes in bulk: a 20-pound box for $25.  I generally get a box to help feed my tomato addiction through the winter.  Other vendors also offer discounts on tomatoes if you buy in [...]

Read Full Post »

Just read an article at Grist about grocery chains (Safeway, Albertson’s) in the Pacific Northwest setting up fake farmers markets full of their own (non-local) produce.  That’s pretty creepy. Some supermarkets, like the Grocery Outlet on Union and MLK, do host farmers markets in their parking lots, on the theory that it brings them customers, [...]

Read Full Post »

Events from City Fruit (forwarded via CAGJ).  Want to know what to do with green tomatoes?  That one caught my eye.  If I don’t make the class, I’m going to be working on some of my own recipes, thanks to Seattle’s charming lack of proper-length summer this year.. ~~~~ What to Do with Green Tomatoes? [...]

Read Full Post »

We’ve covered a few different ways to preserve or cook salmon, like making gravlax and broiling fresh salmon. I finally got to experiment with another salmon treatment I’d been wanting to try: Ceviche. Ceviche is a Central and South American dish, a way to cure raw fish using lime juice, a bit of salt, and [...]

Read Full Post »

Salmon: Does food get much better?  Salmon is fatty, full of vitamins and omega-3s, flavorful. It’s local and traditional in the Northwest. It’s fast and easy to cook. And yet there are so many ways salmon can go wrong. There’s farmed salmon, whose failings have been detailed plenty of other places. There’s old salmon, tragically [...]

Read Full Post »

I live with people who like to cook, which is a happy thing. Today, my roommate Adina, stuck at home with a busted knee, was inspired to turn some local ground cherries and tomatoes into salsa, also using up some cilantro from our CSA box and limes a friend had leftover from a party. I [...]

Read Full Post »

I grew up in New York.  My soul food is: bagels with scallion cream cheese, whitefish, and nova salmon.  Pastrami on rye with mustard.  Deli-style tuna salad, nearly puréed.  Half sour pickles.  Heavily-seeded rye bread. Most of this, I can’t get on a daily basis.  For starters, there is no decent whitefish in Seattle.  I’m [...]

Read Full Post »

Okay, I’ve been storing up so many events and resources to post about, I’d better get them all down in a post.  I’m sure I’m missing a few I meant to include, so I’ll post again if and when I find them. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Eat Local Now! collaborative is putting on the annual Eat Local [...]

Read Full Post »

Updated to add: Thanks to Laura for the screen shot! So, I had no idea that Google ads appear at the bottom of my blog.  I’m fairly new to WordPress, and I use Adblock on my web browsers.  I guess it’s how WordPress makes money. Reader Laura cracked up when she got to the end [...]

Read Full Post »

Sometimes, I’d rather not be right. Years ago, I wrote a blog entry about how manipulatively renaming detrimental ingredients can trick consumers into eating things they don’t want.  I was thinking about the term “organic evaporated cane juice” and how it’s simply a way to encourage people to eat sugar who might otherwise hesitate. I [...]

Read Full Post »

They’re back, and they want my tomatoes. I don’t give my tomatoes up easily, so these fruit flies have crossed a line.  Time for another fruit fly trap. Many fruit-loving households have considered what to do with fruit flies.  A former roommate and I joked about packaging them up for a friend of hers running [...]

Read Full Post »

I’ve written before about eggs: ~ Why eggs are good for you, ~ How to pick out eggs, ~ Why eggs contain the important vitamin K2 MK-4 when they’re from chickens raised on pasture, and ~ How small-farm eggs are more nutritious overall. So, you know there are lots of reasons to eat eggs, other than that [...]

Read Full Post »

When I wrote about cauliflower crust pizza, reader Sarah tipped me off on the Seattle Local Food Facebook page to another idea: zucchini crust. Apparently it’s a trick she learned from her grandmother. Grandmother-approved and grain-free? I had to check it out.  If it was as delicious as it sounded, it could be the ultimate [...]

Read Full Post »

Rosh Hashanah and the holidays that follow mark the season of sweet foods. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and try to avoid sugar, but there is, as they say, a time and place for everything.  This is the season for my grandmother’s plum cake. The first rule of this plum cake: Use [...]

Read Full Post »

It’s been a rough week.  Sometime in the last few months, my grandmother was diagnosed with early-stage pancreatic cancer.  About a week ago, she wanted to give up.  She wasn’t eating enough or drinking enough.  She didn’t want the (mild but still unpleasant) chemo treatments anymore.  She didn’t want anything, or to see anyone.  She [...]

Read Full Post »

(I’ve had some requests to revisit and repost this recipe from my old site [archive].  Here it is!) A former roommate had a tradition of hosting pizza parties, at which she’d provide dough and friends would bring toppings.  I wanted to participate, but don’t eat gluten and try to limit my grain intake a bit. [...]

Read Full Post »

I’ve published a recipe for madeleines before, another gluten-free one using honey, almond meal and lavender.  They were tasty, low-grain, low-sugar, and full of delicious lavender from Sequim. But the holy grail madeleine I was after kept evading me: the hazelnut madeleine. I buy hazelnut meal from Holmquist Hazelnuts (U-district farmers market or Pike Place), [...]

Read Full Post »

Western Washington residents know we’ve had some early-fall cold and wet weather this past week.  But in honor of the changing skies — today and tomorrow should be warm and sunny — I’m giving you an insistently summer salad.  It’s all stuff that should be at the peak of ripeness at the markets right now. [...]

Read Full Post »

I wrote a few posts ago about some arguments for local eating, including the abundance of varieties we just don’t get from industrial-level agriculture. Plant diversity means increased chances climate tolerance and disease resistance, (sometimes) extra nutrition, and lots of delicious things to taste. But I forgot to say one thing about those abundant varieties, [...]

Read Full Post »

Seattle Local Food has been nominated Best Food Blog at the King 5 Best of Western Washington contest! First, thank you to whoever nominated the site.  I really appreciate it.  If you’d like to vote for us, go ahead!  You can vote using this button: (Second, as a fan of lolcat nerdiness, I always think [...]

Read Full Post »

I first learned to make this dish from an ex-boyfriend, who learned it from his grandmother in Provence. But since then, I’ve cooked it for several friends from Sephardic Jewish backgrounds.  ”Oh, nice fasolia!” they said.  It turns out that fasolia, or fasoulia (or I’m sure countless other spellings/pronunciations) is a traditional Sephardic dish as [...]

Read Full Post »

A New York Times article disparaging local eating generated a fair amount of buzz when it was published last week, mostly writing it off.  I’m not surprised, since it contains a number of flaws in logic. I encountered the article when an acquaintance rather triumphantly brought it to a local-foods themed Shabbat dinner potluck.  No [...]

Read Full Post »

There are some recipes that should remain unaltered. These are generally the recipes that are a combination of  memory-entwined, delicious, and very simple, so that a single change would transform the nature of the dish significantly. This view is a departure from what I wrote in my last post, about finding the freedom to experiment [...]

Read Full Post »

My love for Thai food stems mostly from a college semester I spent living in Chiang Mai, a small, beautiful city in the north of Thailand with spectacular food. It took a while for me to love the food rather than just like it.  Tiny, incredibly hot chilis looked deceptively like mild string beans as [...]

Read Full Post »

Thanks to the Seattle City Council, it’s now legal to have up to eight chickens in Seattle!  No roosters, which is probably a good compromise, considering their tendency to be rather vocal. The new bill, described here, also expands urban farming to be allowed in all zones, with some limits in industrial areas, and makes [...]

Read Full Post »

I’ve always been fond of Thai basil chicken.  The mixture of ground chicken, garlic, fish sauce, basil, chilis, vegetables and lime is outstanding. I’ve also always adored tod mun, little fried cakes (usually fish) served with dipping sauce in Thai restaurants. And finally, I’m developing a bit of a thing for breakfast sausage patties, but I don’t [...]

Read Full Post »

I’m generally a fan of lightly cooked vegetables instead of soft ones, particularly in spring, but there are exceptions.  This dish is one of those exceptions.  The flavors meld together beautifully, especially as they absorb butter and cream. The most common gratin is a potato one: layers of potatoes absorbing cream and onion and flavor, [...]

Read Full Post »

So, I’m slowly coming up for air after a month of travel and finishing up my MFA.  I have a few things left to do this week, and then the MFA is complete and I can focus on the MPH for the next year.  And, of course, get back to blogging! Today I displayed a [...]

Read Full Post »

Hey everyone – I’ve been finishing my fiction thesis so I apologize for the delay in blog posts.  Interesting stuff coming up, including from some great conversations I had and things I learned at the Nutrition & Metabolism Society’s recent conference.  But for the next week or two at least, my thesis has first dibs [...]

Read Full Post »

Ground lamb continues to be one of my favorite ingredients.  It’s fatty, versatile, delicious, available from local farms, and a compliment to great spices or a comforting flavor on its own. These breakfast patties are full of Persian-influenced flavors: cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, saffron, and parsley.  They’re great with yogurt or fresh sheep-milk cheese, with [...]

Read Full Post »