Photo: courtesy of Eating From the Ground Up

Eating From the Ground Up, umommy and It’s Not Easy Eating Green are just three of many blogs devoted to parenting through good food.

Some recipes might at first seem child-oriented — e.g., bean tostadas — but such dishes promise to be as delicious as they are accessible, as in shrimp gazpacho.

What’s more, these blogs often give advice sound enough for any home chef—parent or not. Take the post by Eating From the Ground Up on freezing corn. In addition to explaining/photographing the process and offering tips on what to do with the kernels later on, this author suggests turning the task into a shucking party! Fun for kids, fun for adults, and a practical purpose served.

Meanwhile, some of the more kid-challenging recipes such as white beans and sage and grilled polenta with mushrooms (the latter featuring a chilled glass of white wine) offer respite from the daily circus.

No matter if you’re looking for something to do with your little charges or looking to play around in the kitchen yourself, don’t let the ‘kid angle’ turn you away. There’s something for everyone!

Photo: Seelensturm/Flickr

LOCAL TREATS

A Shipment of Summertime
On Friday August 19th at 1pm, the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, which has been hugely influentual in the New York City food truck scene, will pay a visit to Adrian’s Restaraunt in Turo, MA for a one day Pop Up Ice Cream Shoppe event. MA residents are in for a real treat because Doug Quint, the truck’s creator, will be on hand with some of his most popular flavors. Don’t wait too long to get a cone of your own: the event ends when the ice cream runs out.

Beer Is Good, Better with BBQ
Maine Beer Company’s David Kleban is visiting the patio at Eastern Standard on Sunday, August 21st, 6pm, for an end-of-summer barbecue. Chef Jeremy Sewall (Collaborating Executive Chef, that is) is preparing a menu which features a whole roast pig with summery sides to go along. The $50 evening includes a family-style dinner and three beers. Call 617.523.9100 to make a reservation.

You Say Tomato…
A reminder! The 27th Annual Massachusetts Tomato contest is coming up on Monday, August 22nd, at City Hall Plaza in Boston. The event is organized by the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, New England Vegetable and Berry Growers Association and Mass Farmers’ Markets. Farmers from across the state compete in four categories: slicing, cherry, heirloom and heaviest. Come celebrate this quintessential summer vegetable.

Food Truck Fame
The folks from Roxy’s Grilled Cheese in Boston are taking their gooey sandwiches to the national stage. They’re competing in the The Great Food Truck Race on the Food Network with Tyler Florence, aiming to beat out seven other food trucks for national culinary glory. Tune in Sundays at 9pm to show your support for one of Boston’s best restaraunts on wheels. Continue reading →

Tender Pork Taco at Tico (Photo: Susanna Bolle)

It’s hard to believe, but when Chef Joshua Smith of Tico put together the first menu for the restaurant, he and owner Michael Schlow didn’t think tacos would have a place. Now tacos are the most requested dishes at this Latin American-influenced restaurant, located on Berkeley Street in Boston. Granted they are quite inventive, with ingredients like shimp, fried chicken, edamame and the like — Old El Paso, these aren’t.

But Smith’s favorite taco at Tico is among the more straightforward. It’s made with braised pork shoulder. “I’m from the south,” he says, “so I really love pork.” And there’s a smokey element to these tacos that recalls the joys of good southern barbecue, however obliquely.

He’s not alone in his affection for these tacos. Apparently, they provoke strong emotion. Recently, an old chef buddy of Smith’s was in town and asked Smith to make him some tacos. Naturally, Smith chose to make him the tender pork version. As Smith recalls, his friend took one bite, shook his head, looked him in the eyes and said simply: “I love you.” Continue reading →

Photo: courtesy of Healthy Food for Living

A couple of Fridays ago we posted a divine-looking recipe from Butrcreamblondi for a Peach Almond Crumble crowned with goat cheese ice cream and a cherry amaretto sauce. Summer love, we called it.

Today we’re featuring a similar, heavenly recipe for “Stone Fruit Almond Breakfast Crisp” from local blogger Lauren of Healthy Food for Living — in the event you’re tempted, like I am, to eat crisp or crumble at any time of day.

A healthy crisp for breakfast! That’s more summer love.

Photo: Vacacion/Flickr

It’s a common and commonly-accepted explanation: too many calories plus too little exercise is causing rampant obesity in America. But not all medical professionals agree. Is there more to this simple cause-and-effect equation?

Reporter Carey Goldberg of WBUR’s CommonHealth blog brought this very question to two leading experts here in Boston: Dr. Barbara Corkey, director of the Obesity Research Center at Boston Medical Centerr and Dr. Sarah Haigh Molina, director of the Boston University High Throughput Screening Core. Both feel that the additives in processed food might be playing a role.

Tune in to Radio Boston today at 3pm to hear the discussion around “What’s Making Us Fat? Researchers Put Food Additives on Suspect List.” If you don’t read ingredient labels as a rule, you just may start.

In Part Three of PRK’s ongoing Concord Food Tour series, I hinted at a stop at Verrill Farm.

Well, you’re gonna have to wait. Saving Verrill for the tour’s final installment, I will focus today instead on two smaller businesses in West Concord: Concord Teacakes and To Die For Dips.

In addition to a common location, these businesses were started by women brave enough–and savvy enough–to quit successful day jobs in order to pursue something they enjoyed more.

Judy Fersch of Concord Teacakes and Margaret Hammill of To Die For Dips are inspirations. Both women have grown their businesses considerably; both employ loyal workers (men and women); and, both have dedicated customer bases. Who doesn’t want to come back a second time for butter cookies and flavorful dips?

7.) Concord Teacakes, 59 Commonwealth Ave., West Concord

Left to right: bakers and decorators Danielle Silva, Maria Silva, and Michael Anderson of Concord Teacakes

West Concord truly supports their small businesses. So when Judy Fersch quit her job at the district court in the mid 1980s, she was in a prime location to start a bakery. “It was at the time Mrs. Fields was thriving,” Judy said, “and many women were turning to baking as a career.” Judy whipped up different teacakces and brought them down to the local library for tastings. Encouraged by her community’s response, she opened shop on Commonwealth Ave., West Concord’s main street, in 1984. Continue reading →

Photo: totalAldo/Flickr

I’ve never been good at responding to tragedy. When it happens to me, I ignore the rumbling in my stomach – who can eat when the world is falling down around you? But when bad things happen to others, people whom I deeply love, my first instinct is to feed – even if they don’t want food, even if taking care of themselves feels irrelevant to them. I cook because I want to fill up the hole in their hearts with something warm and homemade and loving.

But there’s also something more innate at work – productivity in the face of complete helplessness. “We like lists because we don’t want to die,” Umberto Eco said, and lists of ingredients are no different. Cooking is a kind of order in a world that’s unfair and disordered – you put batter in the oven and you get a cake.

As I said, I’ve never been good at responding to tragedy. But there are lots of people out there who share my instinct at what to do next. After Jennifer Perillo – of the well-known food blog In Jennie’s Kitchen – posted that her husband had died of a serious heart attack, she encouraged her readers to cook. She published a recipe for one of her husband’s favorites: creamy peanut butter pie. And all around the food blogosphere, people baked a pie for Mikey.

I hope that in the wake of his death, these pies bring comfort. I hope they bring people together in love. I hope we all take the time to appreciate those people who really matter because, as Jennifer put it so eloquently, “today is the only guarantee we can count on.”

I’ll bake a pie, but I know there’s a hole in the world, and nothing can fill it. Rest in peace, Mikey.

Photo: Girl Interrupted Eating/Flickr

Like many people, most of my cooking takes place before dinner, in the span of an hour or so. And almost all of the food that I make is consumed immediately after. Cooking, for me, has never been about the long term.

But cooking solely on impulse, on the desire to make food for tonight alone, limits my ambition. I’ve always bought ketchup and mustard from the store, never seen the point of homemade yogurt, and had no desire whatsoever to brew my own beer. I’ve read enough food websites to know that there are large and passionate groups of people who freeze pounds of pesto, make 10 jars of jam in one day, hoard food for winter like they’re hibernating squirrels – but I’ve never made the effort.

Why? I suppose because I’ve never been convinced that the upfront costs (weird, hard-to-find ingredients! pounds of fresh berries, or mustard seeds, or vinegar!) and the usually lengthy time required were worth it. Often, these projects create food that, ultimately, only serves as an accessory to a meal. How fast is that mustard going to go bad? How many hot dogs do I have to eat to use up that single jar of relish?

So maybe I wasn’t the intended audience for Karen Solomon’s new cookbook, Can It, Bottle It, Smoke It and Other Kitchen Projects. Still, I enjoyed it. A sequel to Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It – her previous guide to kitchen crafts – it’s a very fun and even funny book, designed to avoid provoking intimidation.

On that ground, it fails somewhat – the time required for these recipes is often measured in days, not hours, even if most of that time is inactive. And you may occasionally be left scrambling for ingredients like brewer’s malt and candied fennel seeds. Still, the recipes aren’t really hard, and the final product usually is quite special. Continue reading →

Photo Courtesy of MA Food Trader

Food Swapping has arrived in Boston, in case you haven’t heard.

If you have, perhaps you read the Boston Globe’s report on the swaps happening around the city, or visited one of the small markets at the Somerville Trading Post and the Boston Food Swap where bartering actually takes place.

Or, maybe you’ve spent time on the MA Food Trader website, an online food swapping website for the greater Boston area that’s been called something of a “Craigslist for food.” The movement is new to the city, in any event; the MA Food Trader site was launched just last month and the Boston Food Swap began only this summer.

PRK was curious to learn more about this rising trend, so we spoke to Jake Benner, co-founder of the MA Food Trader website, and Lyn Huckabee, who organizes the Boston Food Swap. They gave us the low-down about the trading they have been seeing online and in the market, and the trend. Continue reading →

Lee Reich first attended the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) summer conference in 1978. Having received his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin and in the midst of two Masters degrees — the first in Soil Science, the second in Horticulture — Lee found many attendees at NOFA who shared his passion for the natural world.

This weekend, Lee returns to NOFA’s 37th summer conference (August 12-14th in Amherst, MA) to deliver back-to-back workshops, the first of which is on the subject of his doctoral dissertation — blueberries–and the second of which is titled Useful & Special Fun Pruning Techniques.

Special fun pruning techniques?? Continue reading →