Books

Sampling Veganism: 2 Cookbooks for the Curious Omnivore

Let’s just get one thing straight, I’m probably never going to turn the corner to veganism. I just love goat cheese way too much. I’m not much of a vegetarian either, nor do I proclaim to be. But having gone through vegan-like cleanses a few times, I also know the incredible benefit that this kind of diet brings to my body. So this Christmas, as I was getting ready to embark on my January detox, one of my dear friends gave me a beautiful vegan cookbook.

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Eating Lassie? Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" Gives Us Lots to Digest

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" is one of my favorite food books ever. I don't agree with everything it says, but the book is so incredibly compelling, the arguments so well reasoned, and the descriptions so very vivid, that I recommend it to anyone who is thinking seriously about our food and where it comes from.

Early in the book, Safran Foer takes great pains to describe why we should be eating dogs. He even goes so far as to provide a "classic Filipino" recipe. Here's a small excerpt:

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Simple, Good, and Tasty Launches Book Club with Mississippi Market Co-op

We're excited to announce the launch of a brand new club in town - ours! Simple, Good, and Tasty - in partnership with the good folks at Mississippi Market Co-op in St. Paul, MN - is launching a book club focused on local, organic, sustainable, fair trade, healthy food books (we can think of about a thousand to start). We think a book club and discussion is a fantastic way to engage the community and get people talking about food in our families, our culture, our homes, and our markets.

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Michael Pollan Teaches Jon Stewart Some Food Rules

Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, is a breeze to read. The author himself says it will take you about an hour to, ahem, digest his 64 practical, even folksy rules – gleaned from doctors, scientists, chefs and readers – to eat better. Here are a few samples:

#11 – Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

#19 – If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.

#36 – Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.

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Does Local Food "Enhance Community Cohesion?" Food Writer and Devil's Advocate James McWilliams Says No

James McWilliams: Food writer, fellow, professor, blogger, and locagrarian contrarianJames McWilliams:
Food writer, fellow, professor, blogger, and locagrarian contrarian
Community. It’s a name for the place where we live, but also for the social connections that we live among. In yesterday's post, it was a word used by two people on two occasions to describe the benefits of opening a new food co-op in the Orono/Long Lake area, and a new farmers market in Edina.

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Got a Craving for Raw Milk? Blame it on Nina Planck

Every Tuesday morning, the supplier, under cover of pre-dawn darkness, packs up his truck in rural Minnesota to make his weekly delivery. His drop-off site is a nondescript, middle-class home in a Minneapolis suburb, where his regular customers begin to converge around 8:00 a.m. They drive up, park, pick up their orders, leave cash, then return to their everyday lives.

What they’re doing is illegal, but the contraband isn’t cocaine, krugerrands or even Cuban cigars.

It’s milk. Straight from the cow. Whole, non-pasteurized, non-homogenized, non-industrialized, raw milk.

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Have a Toast and Taste at the Arboretum

toastandtaste[UPDATE: I just got a note with a few more details from Judy Hohmann, Manager, Marketing & Public Relations for the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum:

"New this year are ‘green’ prize drawings including two sets of touring bicycles, cooking classes at the Arboretum, signed cookbooks, basket of natural soaps and balms made in Waconia by SunLeaf Naturals, etc.

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Awesome Onion Planting Day at Riverbend Farm!

gregandmary2Organic certification is a substitute for knowing who's growing your food and how they're growing it.

- Greg Reynolds, May 24, 2009

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This Week's Farmshare Bounty

csa33A quick look at what's coming in my CSA box this week, along with ideas from Harmony Valley Farm on what to do with it all. This content comes directly from the Harmony Valley newsletter:

  • Asparagus - Make a quick and delicious cream of asparagus soup by boiling asparagus until bright green and tender, pureeing in a blender along with its cooking water, and stirring in shredded Swiss cheese, cooked bacon crumbles, salt and pepper. Cook just until heated through and serve immediately.
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Birchwood Dinner as Good as it Sounds

birchwood dinnerThank you so much to those who came to last night's Simple, Good, and Tasty dinner at Minneapolis' Birchwood Cafe. For the second month in a row, more than 30 friends and foodies filled one of the Twin Cities finest local, sustainable, organic restaurants. The Birchwood was beautifully decked out, the food was terrific, the beer and wine pairings were exceptional, and the sense of community in the room was palpable.

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Sustainable Birchwood Dinner Tonight

birchwood_logo_withtagIf you were one of the first 36 people to sign up for the local, sustainable meal in Minneapolis, I'm very excited to see you tonight at 7:00 at the Birchwood Cafe. If you weren't, hope to see you at next month's event! I did finally get a copy of the menu, which looks fantastic. I'm not going to spill the beans, but I will give you one word: nettles. See you later.

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Just BARE Chicken, Part 3: The Wrap-up

justbarechickenThis is my third post about Gold'n Plump's Just BARE Chicken, and boy am I hungry! Just in time to try some, I might add.

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In a Bad Economy, People Eat Less Crappy Food

[caption id="attachment_1212" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Doesn't this soup look tasty?"]Doesn't this soup look tasty?[/caption] With the help of Zachary Cohen's Farm to Table blog, I recently found an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about how big food companies are going after the current sales slump.

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Local and Organic Beer: the Time Has Come

crudor2Local beer is easy to find these days, especially if you have a tendency to drink microbrews, as I do, and live in a decent sized city (like Minneapolis or St. Paul, as the case may be).

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Awesome Local Dinner at the Craftsman

Craftsman Chef Mike Phillips"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." -Unknown, possibly Frank Zappa or Elvis Costello

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Whole Foods Up Close: Breaking Into the Chain (Part 3 of 3)

whole-foods-3 My recent tour of Whole Foods has got me thinking about how true the company has stayed to its core values despite its size. Sure, there are problems.

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Michael Pollan's "Farmer in Chief" is Well Worth Revisiting

pollan5On my friend and neighbor Kathy's advice, I just re-read Michael Pollan's outstanding letter to our nation's "Farmer in Chief," first published in the NY Times on the eve of Barack Obama's

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In Defense of Food, Part 2

pollan-21I just love Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto- I return to it constantly. There are so many great ideas here, so much that inspires and aggravates me. Chapter One, From Foods to Nutrients, is an example of the latter.

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Organic, Fair Trade Peace Coffee

peacePeace Coffee is a terrific Minneapolis company committed to organic, fair trade beans. Here's what it says on their site:

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Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I'm still near the start of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, and really liking it. It's my first Kingsolver book, so I king-folksdon't have strong feelings about the author either way (most people I know who've read her books do), but I'm really enjoying the way she describes her family moving east to become closer to the land and, more specifically, to the food they eat.

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Photos from the Birchwood Cafe

birchwood-watermark1The Birchwood Cafe, located at 3311 East 25th Street in Minneapolis (612.722.4474), serves terrific food that is local, sustainable, organic, and fair-trade. It's got a terrific neighborhood feel, a solid wine list, an amazing breakfast, and the best vegetarian Juicy Lucy well, ever. The many people who sing the Birchwood's praises include an amazing number of regulars, including my friend, Photographer Chris Bohnhoff.

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Michael Pollan at TED (2007)

"Lawns as totalitarian landscapes"? This is a 17-minute presentation that Michael Pollan gave in 2007 entitled "The Omnivore's Next Dilemma." The video is available here (courtesy of YouTube.com), and also on the TED.com site, which has all sorts of terrific presentations from brilliant people.

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In Defense of Food, Part 1

michael-pollan1 Mention Michael Pollan in a crowded room (or in an elevator, at the dinner table, at work, etc) and you get one of two reactions: Reaction One: the person rolls their eyes, remembering Pollan as some sort of a "Food Nazi" from a TV interview he gave over the past year, probably one where he said you should only eat things your Great-Grandma would recognize. Or maybe one where he discussed "edible foodlike substances," which are, according to Michael, often disguised as real food. Reaction Two: An "oh my God"-like gasp, followed by vigorous head-nodding, a sense of brother- (or sister-) hood, and an in-depth discussion of how they selected their CSA, the size of their garden, and what's growing there this year.

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In Defense of Food, Part 1

michael-pollan1 Mention Michael Pollan in a crowded room (or in an elevator, at the dinner table, at work, etc) and you get one of two reactions: Reaction One: the person rolls their eyes, remembering Pollan as some sort of a "Food Nazi" from a TV interview he gave over the past year, probably one where he said you should only eat things your Great-Grandma would recognize. Or maybe one where he discussed "edible foodlike substances," which are, according to Michael, often disguised as real food. Reaction Two: An "oh my God"-like gasp, followed by vigorous head-nodding, a sense of brother- (or sister-) hood, and an in-depth discussion of how they selected their CSA, the size of their garden, and what's growing there this year.

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