Dining and Opining

Sometimes we like to go all out. To feast like kings and queens. In the past, this impulse, when paired with the desire to see our friends TY and SK, has culminated in a Sichuan Feast and a Mexican Fiesta . This time around, a Mediterranean-inspired spread, with nods to Turkish and Lebanese cuisine. I've linked to some of the recipes or sources below, but let me know if you want more information about any of these dishes--they all turned out wonderfully! (1) A spread of marinated goodness: artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, home-canned dilly beans with garlic cloves, and home-pickled beauty heart radishes; and (2) Hummus , Vegan Muhammara (an amazing walnut-roasted red pepper spread), and Baba Ganoush , with whole wheat pita: Turkish Red Lentil Soup (super simple, and really hearty) and Turkish-Style Braised Green Beans (made with green beans I'd frozen from the market last summer): Spinach and Black Eyed Peas with [lots of extra] Caram...

I've got a guest post up over at A Liberated Life : Food: Health, Community and Memory! Please check it out, and let me know what you think!' --- A sneak peek: How might crafting stories help us to live in a more environmentally sound way? What's the connection between individual food memories and a larger politically-engaged food movement? These are the questions I've been pondering as I set out on the adventure of teaching an undergraduate seminar called “Eating and Memory.” My students all live in the University of Wisconsin's GreenHouse, an environmental living community in one of the campus dorms. These students are vibrant, passionate, and really bright. So I figured if anyone were able to help me answer these questions, it would be these folks. On its surface, a class about food memories doesn't immediately seem to fit into a environmental curriculum. It's less tangibly connected to sustainability than, say, a class on wind turbine design or...

The 2012 Global Meal season at the UW GreenHouse started out in style, with an Arctic Feast! Our close friends Andrew and Ariana curated a feast of "caribou" stew (actually made with venison because of caribou sourcing issues) and white fish with cranberries: Macaroni salad, Caesar salad, and fresh dinner rolls: And an English trifle(ish) dessert! And what made the Ariana and Andrew qualified to present this feast with the eager students was the two years they spent living in Inuvik , in the Northwest Territories of Canada, on the very northern-most tip of North America, just 50 miles south of the Arctic Sea. With a backdrop of evocative photos, the As wove beautiful and intricate tales of their time in Inuvik, sharing with the students stories of how the community finds food (hunting, trapping, gathering, growing, sharing, buying), of their travels to the north, of the ethnic makeup of their town, of their night sleeping in a hand-made snow cave in dangero...

Ok. After celebrating Dining and Opining's One-Year Anniversary and then taking a few days off to regroup, I had high hopes for my return to this blogging space. I hoped to come up with some clear, clever structure that would allow me to post less frequently, but more thoughtfully and usefully. One day on "dining" (with photos/recaps of actual food/cooking experiences) and one day "opining" (with more discursive essays on food culture, politics, or history)? Or one recipe and one article analysis a week? Or maybe some riff off those photo-a-day projects, where I tried to post one photo each day that chronicled my experience with food during that day, along with some creative nonfiction that put the photo in context? Or a focus on food memoir, to go along with the course I'm teaching this semester, where I shared stories from my food-filled past? All these ideas whirling around, but as is often the case with good ideas--they all started raising my expectat...

Lurpak - Lightest from Blink on Vimeo . Beautiful! (even if in a weird butter-product ad)