Good Food is Everybody's Business
All about living a healthy life, having safe and nutritious food, growing and making good food.
I’m living on a budget… I just don’t have one. Somehow, it works. I guess I would say that the trick to living on a budget is not allowing yourself to get obsessed with the idea of something. There’s no guarantee that you’ll find said something on a discount rack or sale section. If you can’t be flexible, you’ll end up paying full price. Bargain Bin Rhubarb
But if you peruse the sales regularly, you’re bound to find something that you want or need.
The Chaya plant offers extraordinary attributes as a food crop: potential year-round yields; highly nutritious; tasty; productive; minimal pest or disease susceptibility; tolerant of diverse growing conditions; easily propagated; perennial; handsome foliage; fragrant flowers that attract butterflies, moths and bees; useful forage for domestic animals. On the minus side… it is freeze-tender; its leaves should be cooked rather than ingested raw; it has but few cultivars, and their relative merit and behavior are practically undocumented. Overall, more people should know about, and grow, Chaya — hence this article.
I’ve been way into baking bread lately. Once a week on my day off, it goes something like this: wake up, throw a loaf of bread together, and let it rise while I shower and get ready for the day. Deflate the dough for a second rise and have a fresh loaf by the afternoon. We go through about a loaf a week, and I’ve been conducting careful weekly experiments in the hopes of perfecting the recipe for a whole wheat bread.
It’s the middle of March and time to get your seeds in – and for those of us lucky enough to live in milder climates, time to get those cool season plant starts! Buying starts and seeds from local growers and at local sales ensures that you get plants that are climate-appropriate. Get planting!
Looking back, this last month has been a little roller-coaster ride. Ian and I have taken on a number of new challenges, some individual and some joint. I took on a new job while he took on more practice hours in preparation for his recital. I launched a new website and we started saving our food scraps for compost. As I mentally ticked off the events of the last few weeks, it was clear that we weren’t wasting time. In between each hiccup we celebrated little successes, and even our low points left us with lessons learned.
Meat and poultry that is conventionally produced to reach the market quickly and in large quantities comes to us at a cheap cost, but it’s a high price to pay for the environment and our health (not to mention animal cruelty issues). Fortunately, there are steps you can take to make it easier; not only for the earth, but for our wallets, our conscience, and our bodies.
A growing trend among restaurants, food producers and butchers has some consumers scratching their heads and wondering “what’s in the beef?” It’s not what you’d expect to be on the menu, but chances are you have eaten meat that’s been bonded together with a product called “meat glue.” Or even more descriptive: “blood glue.”
What’s with eggs these days? It’s déjà vu, all over again! This time we’re talking hard-boiled, not “shell eggs.” Summer of 2010 saw the recall …
