How to make your soup wonderful: Wild food soup stock

...n Outdoor Skills, and I like to go there to check out a section called the Food Lab, where they talk about food products they’re experimenting with, and give how-to’s. A few months ago Erik brought home a beautiful bouquet of nettles. I decided to try one of the Food Lab projects that intrigued me — Wild Food Soup Stock Preserved with Salt. This is no more than a bunch of finely chopped vegetables, herbs and greens (wild or not) mixed with plenty...

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Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not too Much

...ain’t pretty. It has made our trips to the supermarket, to supplement the food we grow at home, a series of moral dilemmas. Where did this food come from? How was it grown or raised? What are these mysterious ingredients? Our book contains practical how-to advice for ways to deal with these supermarket conundrums by learning to grow your own food. Journalist Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma, recently wrote an editorial, “Why Bothe...

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What’s Your Personal Food Policy?

...nksgiving holiday would be an appropriate moment to define my own personal food policy. But as I started to write down my personal food policy I discovered so many contradictions and exceptions that I just stopped. My own personal food policy, when considered honestly, was almost as tangled as the USDA’s. Yes, sometimes we manage to grow all of our greens, but other times bugs/bad soil/forgetfulness in the garden sends us on a trip to our local di...

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Notes on Mark Bittman’s “Behind the Scenes of What We Eat”

...eal food Encourage small family farms De-subsidize companies that make non-foods (junk food) But as we’re always saying around here, real change starts at home. In your daily choices. Our actions drive policy at the higher levels. So what can we do? A lot of it I’m sure you, dear readers, are already doing– just like us. You’re trying to support local farmers. You’re cooking from scratch and eating whole foods. You’re trying to source ethically ra...

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What Will Be the New Kale?

Our 2011 crop of spigarello. Since 2011, we’ve been saying that Spigarello is the new kale. Thanks to a tip from the folks at Winnetka Farms, we may need to wait for BroccoLeaf™ to have its fifteen minutes of fame as the new kale. The Salinas, California based Foxy Organic is, quite sensibly, marketing broccoli leaves. Broccoli leaves are indeed edible and tasty. Foxy has the recursive media to prove it, a Facebook photo of someone Instagramming...

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