Category Archives: food

SNAX!

So, hailing from the land of Weight Watchers many moons ago, I am a big proponent of the office snack drawer. I’m a major snacker. When I’m bored, I snack. And I tend to also get legitimately hungry between meals. I’ve never been a big fan of vending machines (although, there are always times when a craving strikes…) and there isn’t on in this office anyway, but I have been known to bring nothing but high-carb, high-sugar, high-fat snacks to work.

No longer! At lunch today I hopped over to the Vitamin Cottage near my office –– a local health food store here in Colorado. I wandered the store for a good 45 minutes and came up with some good stuff.

First and foremost, Bare Fruit 100% Organic Bake-Dried Fuji Apple Chips are awesome! They are something between crunchy and chewy with awesome apple flavor and –– best of all! –– they have only 29 calories and NO FAT per serving! This is just what I need for the mid-afternoon slump boredom munchies. Guilt-free goodness.

I got some Soy Crisps in sea salt flavor. They’re… OK. They taste a lot like the Quaker rice snacks I used to nosh all the time on WW, but these have something of a strange aftertaste. HOWEVER! I got them to fulfil my chips-with-sandwich addiction, and I think they would probably be rockin’ with salsa (assuming they don’t disintegrate in the liquid…), which I intend to investigate ASAP.

I also got some Santa Cruz Apple Apricot Sauce for those times when I’m dying for something sweet come 3 o’clock. (It happens!) I haven’t tried these yet, but I like apple sauce; I like apricots. Where’s the bad? Also, these come in individual servings, so they’re easy to stash in the desk drawer.

Finally, I couldn’t resist the Good Health Natural Foods Peanut Butter Filled Pretzles. I am such a sucker for these, man. At least they come in a small bag and are all-natural. Hey, it could be worse! I could’ve picked up a bag of Have’a Chips! Mmm… Remind me of the shake shack in Laguna Beach, which, alas, is now a Ruby’s diner. 😦

OK! Back to work! Better break out those apple chips…

Burger King to Buy More Cage-Free Eggs and Pork

From Marketplace:

The burger chain says it will start buying 2% of its eggs and 10% of its pork from suppliers who don’t cage the animals. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a significant philosophical change — and BK says it’ll use more as supply becomes available.

Of course, that doesn’t mean their food will be any better for you, but at least it will be a little better for the world.

Green Thumb

What an amazing day yesterday! Have I mentioned how much I love Colorado? After rain all day Saturday, yesterday was bright and shiny and clean and deliciously warm.

The husband and I spent the whole morning poking around local nurseries. We have exciting plans for a container vegetable garden out on our patio. We were hoping to buy seedlings, but realized that it’s still pretty early for vegetables here; one lady told us that the last freeze isn’t predicted until Mother’s Day weekend. Yikes! But she did give us some good ideas for crops we could start now, like lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and kale.

We had to stop for lunch, having become overwhelmed with our options, and once we had some food in us, we decided on a plan of action. We purchased two beautiful wooden window box-style planters on sale, some lettuce seedlings, a raspberry bush, a bunch of seeds, and those cute little pop up soil thingies for starting seeds. Oh, and some soil.

Our plan is to start a bunch of seeds indoors and wait out the 4-8 weeks for them to mature and for the weather to warm up some more. By then, we should be able to transplant them outside easily, and we should also be enjoying our first lettuce crop!

I can’t even tell you how excited I am to try my hand at vegetable gardening, even if it is only in pots on our patio. The last time I grew vegetables, I was probably about eight years old, and my parents did most of the work! But I still remember the pleasure of eating fresh peas and carrots straight from our back yard.

There’s something so satisfying about growing things. Gardens have a lot to teach us, like patience and responsibility. Nothing happens on an artificial time table with a garden; things grow in their own way, in their own time, and they depend on you for food and water and care.

We plan to grow lettuce (as I mentioned), spinach, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, green onions, basil, oregano, thyme, cilantro, nasturtiums, zinnias, and sweet peas.

And then, today, You Grow Girl posted a review of seed-starting techniques! Must be that time of year.

This Milk, You Should Cry Over

I already mentioned the fact that Wal-Mart “organic” milk is getting a lot of suspicious looks from consumers, but The Good Human has articles that expand the issue to include all the other chain store brand milk that comes from Aurora dairy.

Personally, I think it’s a serious breach of trust when manufacturers do this to their consumers.  While they are, perhaps, following the letter of the law when it comes to standards for organic products, there is a bigger, more important, and unfortunately unwritten set of standards that people who believe in organics want, and it’s disappointing to realize that while we thought organics were going mainstream –– we were right.  In the worst way possible.

Two steps forward, as they say…

Eat (Local) Food

100-Mile Diet

The 100-Mile Diet is simple. It’s a living experiment in local eating that will reconnect you with your food, your local farmers, the seasons, and the landscape you live in.

After all the great talk yesterday about the benefits of local versus just organic, I thought today would be a good time to post some of the resources I’ve been collecting on eating locally.

Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon decided to try an experiment: they would eat nothing that was not grown within a 100 mile radius of their home in Vancouver. For a whole year.

From those humble beginnings, a grass roots movement has sprung. The creators have written a book and started a very cool website that looks to have lots of nice features once completed including a section on local resources.

While a strict 100 mile diet might not be for everyone (Do they grow sugar cane in your neck of the woods? Coffee? Chocolate?), the idea is sound, and the 100 Mile Diet website lists 13 reasons to eat locally––my favorite being, “A friend of ours has a theory that a night spent making jam–or in his case, perogies–with friends will always be better a time than the latest Hollywood blockbuster. We’re convinced.” (And the one about food and sex.)

Slow Food

Complimentary in nature, the Slow Food movement has been around for years, espousing simply good, clean, fair food. The movement has chapters all over the world linked through their extensive website. I found out that Slow Food Boulder holds events, hosts a foodie book club, and provides a list of local vendors who support the Slow Food agenda.

Other Resources

If you have local food resources I haven’t mentioned, I’d love to hear about them!

New Foods!

Went to Trader Joe’s over the weekend while we were in Santa Fe.  Oh Joe.  You know I pine for you!  When are you coming to Colorado????

Mostly picked up old favorites from TJ’s (like those dreamy boxed soups, tuna curries, cat cookies and dark chocolate raisins…), BUT!  Got some new stuff last week at Wild Oats!

  • halloumi––a goat and sheep milk cheese from Cyprus.  We made a recipe from the Nigella Bites cookbook that called for this cheese and it is delicious!  Like a firmer and slightly saltier mozzarella.
  • Spectrum Vegan Caesar and Golden Balsamic Vinaigrette Omega 3 salad dressings––boy, that’s a mouthful!  A couple of years ago, the Husband and I tried a diet––I want to say it was through the Discovery Channel Store, but now I can’t remember––that wanted us to add flax seed oil to everything. It got old real fast.  Unfortunately, that’s what these dressings remind me of.  While they don’t taste bad in their own right, they do taste distinctly of flax seed oil, which is added to the dressings to increase their Omega 3 content.  We bought them because they were BOGO at Wild Oats last week, but I’m not so sure they were a good deal if they end up sitting in our fridge, uneaten.  😦
  • Wild Oats carrot cake––it was my birthday on Monday, and the Husband brought home an adorable 6 inch (I’m guessing) carrot cake with FAB cream cheese frosting from Wild Oats.  YUM.

Faux Foods

This a great article about processed food from one of my new favorite websites/magazines, eatingwell.com:

“People are so used to foods lasting forever,” says Slavin. “I think from a consumer standpoint, for people to say, ‘Well, I don’t want processed foods,’ they’re going to have to learn how to cook, be willing to shop regularly, learn how to store foods. It’s going to be this huge paradigm shift before we can get away from the processing that everybody is used to. As long as convenience is such a leading force in people’s lives, processed foods have to be there. People expect it, they want it. Are they willing to put more time and more money into less-processed foods? It’s a big decision.”

“Local Is the New Organic”

Wow, I’m gone for a few days and the world of organics explodes into controversy over this Time Magazine article about the benefits of local versus organic foods:

Nearly a quarter of American shoppers now buy organic products once a week, up from 17% in 2000. But for food purists, “local” is the new “organic,” the new ideal that promises healthier bodies and a healthier planet.

Read the article? Have an opinion? Which is better, the organic apple trucked in from across the country, or the conventional apple grown in your own state?