Posts from — September 2012
Salad Bars + School Cafeterias =
Healthy Fruits and Vegetables for our Kids!
If you live in Arizona, Southern California, Las Vegas, or Hawaii: Take the day off from cooking this Sunday, September 9th. Instead of slaving over a hot stove, head on over to your local Whole Foods Market to support “Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools.”
For every pound purchased at its salad and hot food bars, Whole Foods Market will donate $1 towards getting salad bars into our local schools!
Supporting salad bars in schools is a sure-fire way to help combat childhood obesity. Giving kids healthy food to eat is a critical part of slowing the obesity epidemic, and it’s something First Lady Michelle Obama has made a cornerstone of her Let’s Move initiative. Whole Foods Whole Kids Foundation supports the First Lady with their Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools website.
September 7, 2012 1 Comment
lemon cucumbers = B&B Pickles
I had these five lemon cucumbers (there on the lower left) from my CSA haul last week and I couldn’t decide what to do with them. Dave doesn’t like cucumbers and five was too many for me to eat over a short length of time. He does love pickles though, so I turned them into bread & butter pickles and then proceeded to give three of the five jars away.
I am by no means an expert on canning, so once I came up with the recipe, I needed to do a Google search to find out just how long to process them. In doing so, I found THIS wonderful blog from a woman in Wisconsin who lives on a 10-acre farm and grows her own cucumbers – that she pickles. Her post on making pickles is fantastic, so if you have questions about the process or want super detailed instructions, be sure to check it out.
When I think of bread & butter pickles, I picture the crinkle-cut slices like those in the jar above. Hey, I have a crinkle cutter, so I dug it out and began using it on the cucumbers. It wasn’t quite sharp enough (it’s old and dull!) so I ended up cutting about half of the slices with the crinkle cutter and the other half with a chef’s knife.
September 6, 2012 6 Comments
a hint of Asia
As summer drags on and I long to make soups, stews, and roasts. To heat the oven and roast vegetables instead of stand in the sweltering heat and grill them. Summer means burgers and we’re actually tiring of those too … so I decided to put a twist on the traditional summer burger and throw in some Asian influence. It was the perfect change!
September 5, 2012 1 Comment
…a bushel and a peck
“A Bushel and a Peck” is a song written in 1950 for the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. It was later made popular by Doris Day, The Andrew Sisters, and Perry Como, to name a few. It was most recently included in the soundtrack of the movie, Julie & Julia. If you’re not familiar with the tune, check it out HERE. Just don’t blame me if you aren’t able to get the snappy melody out of your head.
What is a bushel and how much is a peck? Both are very old English units of measuring volume. A bushel is a British imperial capacity measure for liquid or dry and is 2152.42 cubic inches. If that makes no sense to you, join the club. A bushel of potatoes would weigh 60 pounds, a bushel of oats comes in at 32 pounds, and barley weighs 48 pounds.
A peck is 1/4 of a bushel. In a dry measure, it is 8 quarts. So when Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, exactly how many peppers did Peter Piper pick? It would depend on the type of pepper, so the answer would be somewhere between 10 to 14 pounds.
Green beans, banana peppers, corn, watermelon, lemon cucumbers, Anaheim peppers, tomatoes, bell peppers, and potatoes from Crooked Sky Farms
When I picked up my CSA weekly allotment from Crooked Sky Farms this past Thursday, there looked to be about a peck of peppers. Now generally when I get this many peppers, I just fire up the grill and roast them off, but my freezer is already full of roasted peppers from the summer’s bounty. Upon further examination, there turned out to be a mixed 3 1/2 pounds of bell, Anaheim, and banana peppers. Not exactly a peck, but still a bunch! And here is what I decided to do with them.
September 4, 2012 2 Comments
Happy Labor Day
Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a Labor Day picnic?
Photo credits: Country Living 1958 Nash Rambler Tailgate Picnic, Mason Jar Salad Picnic, The Full Spread
If only it wasn’t 105 degrees today in the Arizona desert, that is exactly what I would be doing… picnicking in the great outdoors, or at least in my backyard. But since this is my reality, maybe a picnic indoors would fill the void left by the heat. I wonder when we get to do this again? Maybe I should refresh my understanding of the USA federal holidays with this list of federal holidays in 2020 so I can plan another beautiful picnic soon.
When it cools down in late October and we get our fall temperatures …
This is exactly what I dream of doing! How relaxing, romantic, and delicious does that look?!? The images come from one of my favorite bloggers, the talented, Heather Bullard, who also happens to have a real job as Contributing Editor at Country Living Magazine and is Editor-In-Chief for Souvenir Lifestyle Magazine. These specific photos come from the summer issue of Souvenir, which I subscribe to online. That way I can look at Heather’s gorgeous images over and over again without searching through my mile-high pile of magazines.
September 3, 2012 3 Comments
