Pizza (with millet !?!)

We make a lot of pizza - without the slightest amount of guilt.  Well okay, every once in a while we order pizza and I do perhaps have a little guilt about that.  But most of time it's homemade pizza.  Interesting vegetables, less cheese, and homemade crust with whole grains.  I actually feel good about the amount of pizza we eat! 

Fiddlehead fern pizza with feta bombs

You can ferment that!

Fermenting your own foods to make sauerkraut, pickles, yogurt, or kimchi probably sounds kind of crazy. The type of thing that only a person living in the middle of nowhere or someone who is unemployed would even consider attempting.  I can assure you that nothing is easier.  It will take you less time to make a jar of your own pickles then it would to select a jar from the wall 'o pickles probably available at your supermarket.

From left to right:  Red cabbage sauerkraut, bok choy kimchi, sauerkraut with jalapeno, sauerkraut.

Embrace Summer with Pasta Salads

I have been craving pasta salad for the last couple of weeks.  A summery, crisp, and bright pasta salad of some kind. At the same time I read an NPR blog post that basically read my mine (http://www.npr.org/2013/06/26/195311156/helping-pasta-salad-dress-for-success).

Think differently about your pasta salad - ditch your jar of mayonnaise and think of it as a salad or a complete meal (whole grains [e.g,, pasta], vegetables, protein [e.g. nuts, beans, tofu, shrimp], and fat [e.g., olive oil]) not just a starchy/fatty side dish.  Look around you at all of the fresh summer tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, chards, asparagus, and leafy greens for inspiration.

Flip Your Food

Pancakes.  Burgers. Eggs Over Easy. Pineapple Upside Down Cake. No wait, sorry, that isn’t what I meant by “flipping”. If you aren’t mad at me now, I’ll continue. When you plan any meal, start with thinking first about what good and nutritious thing you can include. I think we’ve all been trained to think (or shamed into thinking) about what we should eliminate or minimize in our meals. Thinking things like if I make a pizza I should really cut down on the cheese or if I make a traditional egg breakfast I should cut down or cut out the butter and bacon. This type of thinking is exhausting and I think it sort of sets us up for failure. If you are always eliminating, you can never win, there will always be something else that you can think to minimize or eliminate.


Stir-fry - Peas, two kinds of peppers, red onion, green onion, garlic, ginger, and tofu.

So instead, try this. Focus your energy and thoughts on adding good things to your meals.

Holiday Food Traditions

There is no other time of the year where our cultural traditions are more entwined with food.  You just say the word “holidays” and you’ll get strong responses from people, a far off glance and twinkle in their eye thinking of cookies and egg nog, a groan and a belt loosening from last night’s Christmas party, or mouthwatering and talk of roasts, stuffing or pumpkin pie.

Christmas Cookies (from Wikipedia)

The holiday season is the one season where we all still hold strong to our food traditions, the baked goods your grandmother prepared, the eggnog and tree decorating tradition in your family, or hosting of a great feast (or series of feasts!) throughout the season.  I can bet that right now you are all thinking of homemade cookies and not frozen, boxed or canned dinners. It seems that this is the one season that our busy schedules, love of fast and easy food, and lack of cooking desire or skill just can’t penetrate.  In this holiday season, cooking, baking and eating survive as a celebration and as a gesture of love and friendship.  I bet that at the very least, most of you will break out an apron and make cookies this month.

Trimming Food Waste

I read this amazing book, American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom, last year.  The book is well-researched and completely easy to read.  It looks at our entire food system - from farms and production, to packaging and shipping, grocery stores, restaurants, and your kitchen - and points highlights inefficiencies and waste in the system.  It’s astounding.  Nearly half of all the food produced in the United States is thrown away.  Half!  And think about when the waste occurs at the end of this system, for example, after the food has been grown, picked, packaged, shipped, stored, purchased, prepared and served in a restaurant or your home.  If you don’t end up eating it then, the amount of materials (fertilizers, boxes, packaging) and energy (transport, cooking, refrigeration) that are literally just being thrown away is mind-boggling.

Step 1: Find your kitchen.

Cooking has really changed in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents.  It used to be something that wasn't really thought about very much. Our grandparents mostly just prepared something for dinner that was based on what they had eaten as children, usually culturally influenced "standard" dishes.  Since the 1960s, what it meant to cook has changed dramatically.  At times it had been such a chore and women felt that they had to bear the responsibility of all of the shopping and cooking.  This burden, in a time when woman were also working, led to the idea that the quicker and the easier the meal the better.  

The dawn of the prepared foods.

Come on in and have a seat!

My name is Julie and I invite you into my kitchen (and a corner of my life)  because food is really important to me.  Growing, buying, preparing and eating of food is fundamentally gratifying to me.  It is intrinsically linked to our cultural identity and life itself. And for some reason we seem to have become distanced from all of it.

I hope that others can discover (or rediscover) the pure pleasure and satisfaction that home cooked food can bring.