Family & Home

Spring has sprung, which means it's time for eggs. Colored eggs are used to celebrate spring in general, as well as the Christian observance of Easter or the Persian new year, Nowruz. And a hard-boiled egg is one of the items on a seder plate at Passover dinner.

In pursuit of the perfect spring egg, I tested several different methods for hard cooking -- not hard boiling -- eggs, all of which had fans swearing up and down that theirs was the best and most foolproof method for easy-to-peel shells and yellow yolks. Common to all was that eggs should not be boiled; overlong heating produces an unpleasant gray line around the yoke and a strong smell. Instead, eggs should be put in a pan, covered with one inch of cold water, brought just to a boil over high heat, then removed from heat and covered. How long they remain covered, and what happens next, differ widely among methods, though.

To say that Susan Dietrich’s handmade Prairiepeeps are akin to the mass-produced flocks of Peeps found in stores before Easter is like comparing a beautifully roasted, free-range bird to a Chicken McNugget. These are birds of an entirely different feather.

These locally made marshmallow chicks hatched from their creator’s serendipitous craving for s’mores. Dietrich, a chef and co-founder of the Minneapolis artisanal food company Very Prairie, had successfully adapted her grandmother’s oatcake recipe to make graham crackers, which led to thoughts of that classic campfire combination. “It had been years since I had a s’more and I tried them again,” she said. “But once you stand there as a chef with a trained palate, and you taste something that doesn’t live up to it to your memory of it, it’s disappointing.”

School lunches have come under some serious scrutiny as of late, and, it seems, not a moment too soon. As Americans try to find explanations for our growing obesity epidemic, the food available to children during the school day is being fingered as one of myriad culprits. I was horrified to read about the low cost, low quality, highly processed junk consistently fed to American children, day in and day out, under the National School Lunch Program. I was fired up and inspired after watching Jamie Oliver’s impassioned TED prize acceptance speech and call to arms to try to recapture our lost food culture by teaching children about cooking and eating good, fresh food.

Last Sunday evening I watched the sneak preview of the Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. Oliver is a world-renowned chef from Essex, England, who was one of the first celebrity chefs of The Food Network. He's known for his emphasis on fresh, local foods and a casual, no-fear approach to cooking.

Thanks to a big national push and the large group of moms in Colorado who told us that running a school lunch contest during their kids' spring break was unkind, we are officially extending the deadline for school lunch contest entries until Friday, April 9, 2010. We will be posting our top entries and gathering votes during the week of April 12, and announcing the winner on April 19.

Click here to read details about our school lunch challenge, including rules and prizes (like lunchboxes and free organic milk from Organic Valley for a year). 

Last week, while going through a box of old things my father saved before he died, my younger brother found this old school lunch menu. It's from Valley Stream Union Free District Thirteen in NY (my family spent several years at Howell Road Elementary School in that district), and it's dated 1976. My dad was a pretty sentimental guy, so I'm not terribly surprised that he saved a menu from when we were kids.

I find the menu fascinating, and not just because there are still union free school districts in this country. I've been thinking a lot about what was on the menu back in 1976 in the context of the some of the comments you've posted related to our article "An Open Letter to Our Children: We're Sorry About School Lunch." For example, Ginger wrote:

SGT is currently holding a school lunch challenge. Enter and you can win big prizes like lunchboxes and free organic milk for a year. Get the details here.

Please read the article that started it all, "An Open Letter to Our Children: We're Sorry About School Lunch" (and a host of interesting comments) too.

For an Argentine and self-professed meat lover, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to actually figure out how to eat and feed my family less meat. It's not easy, because to me, comfort food is a good steak. The first thing my mom cooked for me after I had my first baby was a big salad and steak. I'm an animal-protein girl, and nothing gives me the Popeye arms like a succulent piece of meat. But even though there are cultural and maybe even physiological reasons for me to love meat as much as I do, I know that it is better for my health, my wallet, and the environment to try to eat less of it.

Last week's school lunch post, our "Open Letter to Our Children," was a direct response to the sixth graders at Minneapolis' Sanford Middle School who I'd met with the month before. Their question was simple and heartbreaking: if our communities love us, why do they knowingly feed us this junk?

The response to this post was fantastic. Many of you provided explanations, made suggestions, and shared your own views, and we at SGT were reminded once again of how much we love this community. For example, Laura wrote:

photo credit: Zazzle.com"May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far.”

Leave it to an Irish blessing to anticipate overindulgence! Though my Morgan roots came originally from Scotland, my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother – O’Keefe and Brennan respectively – handed down some definite ideas about how an Irish lass such as myself might honor St. Patrick.