Slow food: the conversational, recreational artichoke for kids of all ages

Jul 11, 2009 by

  Stock artichoke

 

 My almost-19-year-old came home for a visit last weekend. Fresh out of high school and now on his own working a few hours from home, he had been away for three weeks.  My husband and I knew that we had competition for his time. So I did my best in my meal planning to conspire to keep him around as much as possible during his too-short stay.

First, I served food I knew he’d love all weekend. He’s mostly vegetarian, and I knew he’d eaten a lot of eggs since leaving home. So I…

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“Tuna on Tuna” or Fresh Tuna with Tuna-Pickle Sauce

Jul 10, 2009 by

Stock tuna I only recently really discovered fresh tuna. I might have eaten it a time or two before, but recently I found such a recipe and such tuna!  It’s one of the most delicious things I’ve made lately.

Quite a different animal from canned tuna, good fresh tuna is worth the expense once in awhile.

While our gourmet grocery store, Central Market, sells sushi- or sashimi-grade tuna for $16 a pound, it’s only $8.99 at HEB, the average-Joe grocery owned by the same company. So it seems like a bargain, though I think that’s still pretty steep. The four of us can put away $14 worth of fish with no leftovers. Yet, it’s a real steal…

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A Perfect Kid Meal: Snow Crab Legs & Raw Vegetables with Red Pepper Garlic Mayonnaise

Jul 9, 2009 by

  

I’m all about mayonnaise now.  I pretend that all mayonnaise, even the cheap store brand, is mayonnaise in its ideal form, like I once made from freshly laid raw eggs from our backyard, free-range, happy hens (who are no more), with a little lemon juice, Dijon mustard, good olive oil.  There’s nothing you can say against a little mayonnaise, at least in its ideal form. Good egg, good oil—it’s health food.

Stock veggies dip I made this mayonnaise-based dip the other day and served it with raw carrots, cucumbers, jicama (a crisp, fresh Mexican root vegetable), turnip and radishes, along with some ready-to-eat snow crab legs I found on sale for $5 a pound. I had never served crab legs…

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Which nuts are the best?

Jul 4, 2009 by

Stock nuts

It’s as easy to eat well and feed your children well as it is to eat poorly. Well, OK, not really, but sometimes, in some ways. OK, mostly it’s not exactly easier, but occasionally just having a little accurate information is all it takes to make a better choice over a worse choice.  I’m all for building in as many ways as possible to do this thing better without increasing my effort.  I figure the more good choices I can make, the less my bad ones will matter.

A reader asked me some time back which nuts were the best to feed children.  I really had no clue and hadn’t thought about the question.

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Following the Caveman Part II: The Verdict on Fish

Jul 3, 2009 by

Stock salmon

Only a little damned if you do, much more damned if you don’t

Before I knew better, I idealistically thought fish farms would probably use their ability to control the raising environment to create a cleaner, healthier home for our finned friends than the polluted oceans offer them.

I now scoff at my innocence. I look with cynicism at the cheerful stickers on fish labels at the store that declare "farm raised" as if it were a badge of honor. I now know that farmed fish are probably about as ready–and as better off–as whitetail deer would be to give up their liberty and sometimes scarce foraging in exchange for regular meals in a pen.

Eating fish and seafood is as much a minefield, and for many of the same reasons, as…

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