I sometimes write poetry. No, it isn’t food-related, but have a poem anyway. Read more…

Categories: Uncategorized

Wow, it’s August already! I keep hoping to get back to blog-cooking, but at the end of the day, I’m just too tired. Read more…

Categories: Uncategorized

Good food starts with good seed. Obvious, isn’t it? Yet in America, at least, it can be difficult to find good seed, by which I mean non-hybridized and open-pollinated seed, preferably organic. You know, the only kind of seed that existed a century ago. The sort of seed that Monsanto wants to eliminate, if not make illegal. Where can you get such seed? Read more…

Categories: gardening, permaculture, rant
Tagged: gardening, permaculture, rant

As you may well imagine, I’ve eaten a few times since moving to Asheville. Here are my thoughts on three of the places I’ve eaten recently. Read more…

Categories: Uncategorized

Sometimes life goes more or less according to plan. Plans, however, often get tossed out the window. Read more…

Categories: rant
Tagged: rant

Hey, just want to let everyone know I’m still here. I just got a little tired of making bread almost every day and decided to take a short break.

Speaking of bread, has anyone started a sourdough mother? If there are any questions about that or anything else on my site, please ask.

Categories: Uncategorized

That lovely boule is a Pain de Provence. There are lots of recipes out there for making Pain de Provence, but I didn’t use any of them. Instead, I played around with the Baker’s Percentage of a standard lean dough. Read more…

Categories: baking, bread, technique
Tagged: baking, bread, technique

If there is one arcane art in baking, it’s understanding and using the Baker’s Percentage. Once you’ve grasped the fundamentals, the whole world of baking seems simpler. Read more…

Categories: baking, bread, mother recipe, technique
Tagged: baking, bread, mother recipe, technique

At its most fundamental level, bread is a magical mixture of flour, water, salt, and yeast. The one ingredient in that short list that causes fear is yeast. Read more…

Categories: baking, bread, technique
Tagged: baking, bread, technique

A Crude Awakening

It took me awhile, but I finally managed to watch this documentary and I must say I really shouldn’t have waited. Peak oil is an important topic, particularly because we are nearing if not already beyond Hibbert’s Peak, the point at which oil production begins to decline because there just isn’t enough.

Why should that matter to those of us who care about food? Well, in the United States, the average calorie of food takes ten calories of hydrocarbon energy to produce and ship. Think about that for a moment. Agriculture worldwide is largely dependent on fertilizers that are made from oil. To put it in really simple terms, everything you eat that isn’t organically or naturally grown is oil. And if you didn’t grow it yourself it took oil to get from farm to table.

The era of cheap oil is over. Watch this movie if you haven’t already. You need to know.

American Terroir

Here is an enchanting read for those of us who like to know foods. Rowan Jacobsen describes a day’s basic foods from maple syrup and coffee at breakfast to chocolate for dessert and introduces the growers, foragers, harvesters, and artisans who get it to market. There are interesting characters to meet, delightful places to visit, and a few interesting recipes, but the stars of the book are the foods.

Did you know that it takes forty to one hundred gallons of maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup? I didn’t. Nor could I even begin to imagine cutting twenty-eight cords of wood every year just to boil the sap. Yet there’s at least one man in Vermont who does it every year because he really enjoys making maple syrup.

Another thing I learned: “Shellfish farms can produce ten times as much protein per acre as cattle farms, with zero inputs of any kind. They are one of the greenest forms of food production on the planet.” Once again, I was ignorant. Now, however, I can freely indulge my love of shellfish with a clear conscience.

This is a celebration of what’s good rather then a condemnation of what’s bad about food in the Americas. And we can sure use some good news about food in this country, what with the idiots at the FDA poised to ban raw milk cheeses altogether while continuing to allow virtually unrestricted tobacco sales and the fools at the USDA deciding that it’s okay to allow unrestricted growing of GE Alfalfa because their masters at Monsanto say it’s okay.

Categories: book, rant
Tagged: book, rant