November 2012

Coloring Our Plates: What the Color of Your Food Can Tell You About Nutrition

I’m a sucker for color, I admit it. I’m sure anyone who knows me or even sees me on a regular basis could attest to that statement based solely on the clothes I usually wear. One might even guess that my love of color is simply inherent, given the color of my hair (a rather unusual and interesting shade of orange-red). I have also been known to make a big deal about the colors of the autumn leaves or the shades of pink and orange in the sky at sunset, and I’m that person who is always talking about the colors in someone’s flannel, or the stripes on someone else’s socks.

 

Read more »

Raising Chickens: A Respectful Butchering

Our butchering date had been weighing on me for weeks. I was counting the days, looking forward to the end of hauling 5- and 7-gallon water jugs morning and night from our yard hydrant to the chicken yard and of wrestling 50-lb. bags of broiler feed every few days. But I was also dreading the slaughter – the toll I would be exacting on sixty living creatures. This was not the sort of burden I ever considered before our first harvest of meat chickens in July of 2011.

Read more »

Co-op on a Budget: The Wedge Co-op vs. Cub Foods

The Wedge Co-op

This is the second post in our Co-op on a Budget series, which explores the different ways that we can shop co-op effectively and affordably. Also check out the first post, on shopping bulk.

 

About three years ago our young family went through a financial crunch, which I’m sure most Americans shared. My employer was on a two-year wage freeze and hiring-freeze. Rumors of layoffs were the smaller waves of a larger fear that the company might fail altogether. As a relatively new employee, I was confident that layoffs would affect my position. My wife, pregnant with our second child, had recently quit her job to stay home with our 3-year-old daughter and the expected baby, so my income was solely driving our household, and, to be honest, we were scared shitless.

Read more »

Report from Slow Food's Terra Madre Conference

When I told my friends and family that I had been chosen as a delegate for Terra Madre, the International Slow Food Conference in Turin, Italy many of them replied by asking, “What is Slow Food?”


Read more »

Wellness: Staying Healthy in the Holiday Hustle

This post is part of an ongoing series on Wellness, which looks at the importance of health and healing in living a Simple, Good, and Tasty lifestyle. Also check out the previous Wellness posts on massage as preventative care and the controversies around calcium.

 

Read more »

L.C. Finns Local Extracts: Spice Up Your Holiday Baking!

L.C. Finns flavor extracts

The idea for L.C. Finns extracts happened, as many great ideas do, over beer. Chad Gillard and a foodie friend, Lee Zwiefelhofer, were talking about what food-related items they wished were available. Both are dads of small kids, and Chad was looking to start making an item that wouldn't require such intense weekend hours as he was used to at Mill City Farmers market, where he sold his popular Danish apple dumplings, Aunt Else's Aebleskiver. Chad and Lee came up with an idea for locally made flavor extracts made from top-quality ingredients.

Read more »

Hunting for Dinner: Mom Bags Her First Deer (and Juniper Roasted Venison with Whiskey Cream Sauce)

This is the fourth post in a series about hunting for food -- truly meeting your meat. Also check out the earlier posts from the series, An Unsuccessful Pheasant Hunt, Duck Hunting, and Squirrel Hunting with Mom

Read more »

Great Grains: How to Have a Whole Grain Thanksgiving

Whole Grain Stuffed Acorn Squash

This is the seventh post in the series Great Grains, highlighting unusual whole grains and easy ways to incorporate them into your diet. Check out recent posts on teff, barley, and rye.

Read more »

The Latin Tongue: Aurelia's

This is the latest post in our Latin Tongue series, which explores Latin eateries in the Twin Cities area. Check out the first article for the ground rules and a running list of restaurants we've covered.

 

Read more »

Kitchen Adventures: A Passage to Indian Food, Or An Indian-ventory of Spices

Selection of Indian Spices

I have loved Indian food ever since I was a kid, when, as a picky eater on a family vacation to England, I subsisted almost entirely on a diet of CTM – chicken tikka masala, the national dish of post-colonial Britain. This Anglo-Indian hybrid of grilled marinated chicken in a spiced tomato cream sauce is hardly authentic Indian food – you won’t find it in most self-respecting Indian cookbooks, and in fact today I live up the street from any Indian restaurant that goes by the defiantly anti-tikka (and painfully awkward) name of “No Tomatoes!” But for me, CTM was a gateway drug that led me down the delicious and aromatic path to kormas, dosas, puris, saags, biryanis, and heck, even the odd kofteh.

 

Read more »