avoiding food sold in plastic

I have a new challenge to the way we eat: avoiding food that comes in plastic. For example, I just bought the cottage cheese and sour cream for my Butternut squash pie--both full fat products that come in PLASTIC. I'm going to switch pie recipes. It's worth it to minimize my and my daughter's chances of breast cancer.

Potatoes fried in lard, the day after

Most people believe dietary fat translates to body fat. Well, after eating potatoes fried in lard to my heart's content, I stood on the scales the next day and had lost a pound.

Lard is a feminist food

Natural lard from a small, responsible farmer is a feminist food because it's heretical, challenges orthodoxy, and is FAT. Lard is a feminist food because our great great grandmothers of the U.S. Midwest cooked with it every day and many of them lived well into their 90s. Our grandmothers cooked with lard until the nutrition police, lobbied by agribusiness to promote vegetable oils, told them not to.

But the surprise is that Lard is actually good for you--its fat profile is similar to olive oil and it has some anti-microbial properties. It's better for frying than vegetable oils because it's more stable and has a high smoking point and it doesn't permeate foods as much as vegetable oils do.

Lard is very minimally processed, can be rendered at home, and can be produced and sold locally.

In addition, lard comes from pigs, who are smart and irreverent.

I fried potatoes in lard for dinner tonight. Yum. However, it took the oil forever to get hot enough. Should have started heating it sooner.

Oink Oink,
Holly

Barefoot Gardens Harvest

Tonight I harvested Kale, parsley, celery, carrots, purple, green beans, mesclun with arrugula and other greens, broccoli, okra, bell peppers, yellow squash, cilantro, a jalapeno, and onions. And 3 giant purple and gold zinnias.

stuffed tomatoes

Joel gave me some "stuffing tomatoes," so I processed some whole wheat bread with garlic, basil and Parmesan, stuffed the tomatoes, and baked for 30 min. YUM.

Butternut squash

Glad it's butternut squash season--I cut it up, sauteed it with leeks and a red bell pepper, some cumin, and chicken broth. Nice.

No more lettuce slime

There's a recent phenomenon in Macomb restaurants that would appear to be the kind of place one would go for a decent (if not exactly elegant) meal: lettuce slime. The "chefs" at both the Red Ox and Il Spazio have served me salads that have clumps of black slime in them. It's gotton so bad that before I get a salad at those places I have to request them to examine the lettuce piece by piece for slime before serving it to me. Actually, the safest bet is to order a romaine lettuce salad, since romaine doesn't turn into slime as quickly as the delicate mesclun greens that many restaurants, in an effort to appear more sophisticated, serve.

Why is lettuce slime now acceptable?