Saturday, December 5, 2009

Soup Season!!!

Hey friends.
Its cold and grey in Michigan, but soups are warm and uplifting. I'm posting to direct you to two great website, with two great soups. I just made caulifower soup it was great! I cut the butter in half, and didn't use the half and half, because I thought it was excessive. But the soup still turned out delicous, and healthier!! Hope you all enjoy.

Hearty Potato:
http://pinchmysalt.com/2008/03/19/a-hearty-potato-leek-soup-recipe-for-the-last-days-of-winter/

Cauliflower:
http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/01/cauliflower-soup/

Saturday, November 28, 2009

When I say from scratch, I really mean it.

My family does NOT buy pie crusts (we're actually quite snobby about our pies), but I've always made pumpkin pie with canned pumpkin, and it always tastes great.

That's what some people call "making it from scratch"...I suppose "not from scratch" would be buying it at the store?


The great pumpkin pie experiment of 2009 took place at my brother and sister-in-law's house this week. Leah and I have both always thought it would be fun to attempt pumpkin pie making sans the Libby's can (read: actually from scratch...real scratch!), so we went for it on Wednesday before the family gathered for Thanksgiving on Thursday.

What transpired was both easier and better tasting than I expected. Literally, this is the best pumpkin pie I've ever had. The key is to food process the heck out of the ingredients (either pumpkin + egg for enough liquid or the whole recipe before pouring into the pie shell).

Here's the recipe (adapted from All Recipes, makes one pie)

  • 1 sugar pumpkin (we used organic pumpkins - they're small, but 1 does the trick!)
  • 1 pie crust (recipe below)
  • 2 eggs (we used 5 eggs for 2 recipes and it tasted great, but I assume 2/pie works also)
  • 1 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice + a whole lot more and extra cinnamon to taste
  • 1 (12 fluid ounce) can evaporated milk

This is what we did:

  1. Cut sugar (pie) pumpkin in half and remove seeds. Place cut side down on a cookie sheet lined with lightly oiled aluminum foil. Bake at 325 degrees F for ~45 minutes, or until the flesh is tender when poked with a fork. Cool until just warm. Scrape the pumpkin flesh from the peel. Puree in 2 batches in a food processor (you may need to put the eggs in so that there is enough liquid to process very smoothly - that's what I did) .
  2. In a large bowl, slightly beat eggs. Add brown sugar, flour, salt, 2 cups of the pumpkin puree, spices, and evaporated milk. Stir well after each addition. Whisk the ingredients until NO chunks are present (the flour clumped up for us, but a whisk did the trick).
  3. Pour mixture into the pre-baked (see recipe below) pastry shell. Place a strip of aluminum foil around the edge of the crust to prevent over browning (this is key).
  4. Bake 15 minutes at 450 degrees F, then reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees F. Bake an additional ~40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Remove the strip of foil about 20 minutes before the pie is done so that the edge of the crust will be a light golden brown (if needed - it may brown enough in the pre-bake of the crust). Cool pie, and refrigerate overnight for best flavor.
  5. Please use REAL whip cream (and add a little vanilla, if you like) to top with...it's so much better!

Pie crust recipe (my grandma's famous, makes two crusts):

2 cup flour
2/3 shortening (vegetable or butter flavor)
1/4 cup cold water
1 tsp salt

1. Cut the shortening, flour and salt together using a pastry blender until mixed.
2. Add the water in tablespoons while mixing (with your fingers or pastry blender) until moistened.
3. Ball the dough up firmly, then carefully roll out on a flat surface. Leah is great at this: she rolls once, then flips the dough, then back again, etc. so that it doesn't stick to the counter and gets enough flour on both sides.
4. Pick up the dough by loosely rolling it over your rolling pin and place in pie pan (glass pie pans are the best)
5. Gather up edges and make pretty (see picture).
6. Pre-bake pie shell in oven at 350 F for about 10 - 15 minutes. This will make sure your pie crust doesn't get soggy when pumpkin is added.



Wednesday, November 18, 2009

pumpkin season

hi all.

sorry for the absence on here. i haven't been doing much cooking (or eating) lately - i don't think i've been grocery shopping in almost a month. tonight, i swear!

Anyhow, as Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and pumpkin is one of my favorite foods, I wanted to share my easy, low cal and delicious pumpkin recipes. I have big plans this year to make a pumpkin pie from an actual, honest to God pumpkin, so I'll definitely add that in when it happens (that fits in much better with the food ethic of this blog). Anyhow, for now:

Pumpkin Muffins

1 small can of pumpkin (or 1/2 one of those huge cans)
1 spice cake mix
1 cup applesauce
1 egg
spices to your liking (i add quite a bit of cloves and cinnamon)

Mix up, pour in muffins pans and bake at 350F for ~15 minutes, depending on how done you want them. So good and a definite crowd pleaser! I've seen dessert variations with cream cheese frosting - Oh LORD, those are amazing.

Pumpkin Mousse

SF (or not) Vanilla Pudding (prepared with milk)
1 container of Cool Whip
1 small can of pumpkin
spices (i use a lot of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg)

Fold ingredients together for a light, tasty fall treat. If you're not into Cool Whip (for good reason - who wants to eat plastic?) I bet you could try whipping up some legit whip cream instead, but it wouldn't keep (where the above recipe keeps for days).

Enjoy! Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, wherever you are in the world.
KK

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Cabbage, Koreans, and Kim = The Best

Cooking with Kim is the ultimate experience, and not just because it's an experience that could last days. My trip to Boston this summer was a week-long exercise in gluttony. Thankfully, most of Kim's concoctions are relatively healthy. Here is one dish, which I must admit I was originally skeptical of, and a couple of meals to incorporate it into.
Kim's "I Know You Think Cabbage Is Gross But I'm Here To Tell You It's Awesome" Cabbage Salad

1 small head or half medium head red cabbage

Juice of about 2 limes (can use rice vinegar as substitute or supplement)
Dash of soy sauce
About 1/2 spoonful salt
About 2 1/2 spoonfuls sugar
Sesame oil
Pepper to taste (white pepper if you have it)
Sesame seeds (optional)

Chop cabbage into thin strip type things, like you would for coleslaw. (But doesn't need to be shredded, unless you
want to). Place in mixing bowl. Juice limes into small bowl. Mix in soy sauce, salt, sugar, sesame oil, and white pepper. Mix until salt and sugar are dissolved. Pour over cabbage and toss.

I just made this salad to go with the garbanzo bean burgers I made.


The cabbage salad also goes really well with Bi Bim Naeng Myon, a spicy Korean noodle dish (thanks, Anna, for sharing this recipe with me!) Kim and I also fried up some tofu, wilted some kale
(done in a similar fashion as the cabbage salad), and pan "fried" some cauliflower (toss in olive oil, salt, and pepper and cook in frying pan) to go with the meal. Also, we only had udon noodles, so we used those instead of soba noodles.

Bi Bim Naeng Myon (serves 2)
http://www.koreankitchen.com/bibimnaengmyon.htm

1 package buckwheat (soba) noodles
1/4 cucumber, thin julienne
1 egg
2 hard boiled eggs
Anna also included sliced pear, which was amazing with the dish
Kim and I didn't have pear or eggs, so we did tofu, kale, and cabbage salad

In pot, hard boil the eggs. Cool, peel, and slice in half.
In large pot, boil water and add noodles. Cook according to package directions (though they're usually in Korean). Soba noodles cook really quickly and get super sticky, so make sure to have enough water. Dump in cold water. Rinse noodles several times. Drain.

Mix the sauce (recipe below). Place noodles on plate, add sauce, and top with cucumber, pear, egg, and whatever else you have. Meant to be eaten mixed together (pear + spicy noodle + cucumber + egg = heaven)

Yang nyum jang (sauce): 2 tbsp go choo jang (Korean chili paste)
2 tbsp sugar
2 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp minced garlic
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame seeds

Mix chili paste and sugar together until sugar dissolves. Add sesame oil, garlic, soy sauce, and sesame seeds. Add water, soy sauce, sesame oil to taste. I also sometimes like a little extra chili paste for heat.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Cook for Good

You may have already heard about this site, but a friend of mine just passed it along today and I had to share!

cookforgood.com is a site dedicated to saving time, money and the environment by, essentially, using the slow food movement. The thing I find really neat is that they started out trying to spend less than the North Carolina food stamp allowance, and not only have accomplished that (actually, they're way under), but they also have a "green" plan which incorporates more organic and local foods, and that plan falls under the NC allotment also. Pretty cool! Check it out, if nothing else, for the tasty veggie recipes.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Great Summer Fruit Pie!

1 cup plain yogurt or sour cream
2/3 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tbs flour
1 tbs lemon juice or 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
(combine and mix)

2 1/2 cup (fruit/berries)
(mix in)

Pie Crust:
1 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup salad oil
5 tsp cold water
(add mix into pie crust)

Bake in preheated 400 for 25 minutes* or 55 minutes total

* optional topping (I've made it without this and still like it)
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
2 tbs butter
(take pie out of oven after 25 minutes and sprinkle topping on)


recipe from Simply in Season pg. 158

Saturday, June 27, 2009

A Perfect Saturday Afternoon

While some call it alcoholism, I call it a damn good time. 

I raise my glass to the Saturday afternoon (ok, post  11 am) Margarita. Need I say more?

1 part Tequila
1 part Triple Sec
1 part lime juice (freshly squeezed please)
Spoonful of simple syrup

Mix and sip.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Dirty Dozen

A friend from South Africa recently visited me in Seattle, and I spent a lovely week showing her around a bunch of amazing places in and outside of the city. It was great. We went to Pike Place Market one day, and I was surprised that, on a Wednesday afternoon, it was so busy. Food galore. Which got me thinking:

How can I afford to buy local/organic?

I know I'm not poor by any stretch of the imagination, but as a kid raised by bargain-hunter parents (who still won't buy berries in season or meat unless it's "on sale"), 6.99/lb for cherries makes me cringe. Or, then there was the really cute produce guy who offerred me a slice of the most amazing white nectarine I've ever tasted, but I was astonished to see that it would probably cost me ~$2 for one piece of fruit! Blasphemy!

This made me recall an article I read a while ago about the most essential food to buy organic if budget/availability does not allow a fully organic diet. There are a million of these lists, but check out this one from The Daily Green called the Dirty Dozen. In the article, there is also a link to a list of "safe" foods that we don't have to worry about buying organic. Essentially, these categories make sense (thicker, less permeable skin = less serious pesticide build-up threat), but I remember being especially interested in buying strawberries and carrots organically when I first read this.

Anyhow, take a look. I totally have a final I'm supposed to be writing and grading I should be doing, but this is way more fun. I'm hoping to try some actual recipes sometime soon which I will post, pending success!

Peace to you all,
Katie (K)

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to...

I'm sitting here, surfing the web, enjoying my break, and noshing on the most delicious strawberries.

It amazes me how red and sweet real strawberries can be. So, I felt it imperative to remind everyone that it is strawberry season.
Don't miss out!! I encourage you to head to your local farmers market, which should be packed with delectable strawberries (until late morning when they have surely sold out) and pick some up.

Once you've had berries from the FM, you'll wonder what those red seeded things they sell at the grocery store are, because they certainly can't be strawberries. You, after all, have had strawberries. And they're not white in the middle.


*And, in case you couldn't place the title, the next line is "strawberry fields" from Strawberry Fields Forever by the Beatles (my favorite).

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Sriracha: Reason #421 Why Asians are the Best

I haven't cooked a proper meal for weeks. Life, visitors, travels have all come between me and my food. But because I can't stop thinking about good food (and because I don't want this blog to die at post 2), here is a little piece of awesome.

Sriracha, the little hot sauce of cycle 23's kitchen that made everything taste better, made it in the New York Times. (Do you think that makes us more hip because, you know, we knew about before it was popular? We're so ahead of the curve.)

From the New York Times:

May 20, 2009

A Chili Sauce to Crow About

ROSEMEAD, Calif.

AFTER-HOURS calls to Huy Fong Foods, here in the suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, are intercepted by an answering machine. One recent day, 14 messages were blinking when Donna Lam, the operations manager, hit “play.”

A woman told of smearing Huy Fong’s flagship product, Tuong Ot Sriracha (Sriracha Chili Sauce), on multigrain snack chips. A man proclaimed the purée of fresh red jalapeños, garlic powder, sugar, salt and vinegar to be “the bomb,” and thanked Ms. Lam’s employers for “much joy and pleasure.”

Another caller, hampered by a slight slur, botched the pronunciation of the product name before asking whether discount pricing might be available. Finally, he blurted, “I love rooster sauce!” (A strutting rooster, gleaming white against a backdrop of the bright red sauce, dominates Huy Fong’s trademark green-capped clear plastic squeeze bottles.)

“I guess it goes with alcohol,” deadpanned Ms. Lam, who, like David Tran, the 64-year-old founder of Huy Fong and creator of its sauce, is both proud of the product’s popularity and flummoxed by fans’ devotion.

The lure of Asian authenticity is part of the appeal. Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples.

It’s become a sleeve trick for chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

At the restaurant Perry St., in New York City, Mr. Vongerichten’s rice-cracker-crusted tuna with citrus sauce has always relied on the sweet, garlicky heat of sriracha. More recently, he has honed additional uses. “The other night, I used some of the green-cap stuff with asparagus,” Mr. Vongerichten said. “It’s well balanced, perfect in a hollandaise.”

In Houston, at the restaurant Reef, Bryan Caswell, a veteran of Mr. Vongerichten’s kitchens, stirs sriracha into the egg wash he uses to batter fried foods, from crab cakes to oysters to onion rings. “It’s not heavily fermented, it’s not acidic,” said Mr. Caswell, who has won a devoted following for the sriracha rémoulade he often serves with such fried dishes. “It burns your body, not your tongue.”

Sriracha has proved relevant beyond the epicurean realm. Wal-Mart sells the stuff. So do mom-and-pop stores, from Bristol, Tenn., to Bisbee, Ariz.

Sriracha is a key ingredient in street food: The two Kogi trucks that travel the streets of Los Angeles, vending kimchi-garnished tacos to the young, hip and hungry, provide customers with just one condiment, Huy Fong sriracha.

Recently, Huy Fong’s sriracha found its place in the suburbs. Applebee’s has begun serving fried shrimp with a mix of mayonnaise and Huy Fong sriracha. They followed P. F. Chang’s, another national chain, which began using it in 2000, and now features battered and fried green beans with a sriracha-spiked dipping sauce, as well as a refined riff on what both Applebee’s and P. F. Chang’s call dynamite shrimp.

For Mr. Tran, of Chinese heritage but born in Vietnam, neither sriracha-spiked hollandaise nor sriracha-topped tacos with kimchi translate easily.

“I made this sauce for the Asian community,” Mr. Tran said one recent afternoon, seated at headquarters, near a rooster-shaped crystal sculpture.

“I knew, after the Vietnamese resettled here, that they would want their hot sauce for their pho,” a beef broth and noodle soup that is a de facto national dish of Vietnam. “But I wanted something that I could sell to more than just the Vietnamese,” he continued.

“After I came to America, after I came to Los Angeles, I remember seeing Heinz 57 ketchup and thinking: ‘The 1984 Olympics are coming. How about I come up with a Tran 84, something I can sell to everyone?’ ”

What Mr. Tran developed in Los Angeles in the early 1980s was his own take on a traditional Asian chili sauce. In Sriracha, a town in Chonburi Province, Thailand, where homemade chili pastes are favored, natives do not recognize Mr. Tran’s purée as their own.

Multicultural appeal was engineered into the product: the ingredient list on the back of the bottle is written in Vietnamese, Chinese, English, French and Spanish. And serving suggestions include pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers and, for French speakers, pâtés.

“I know it’s not a Thai sriracha,” Mr. Tran said. “It’s my sriracha.”

Like many immigrants of his generation, David Tran’s journey from Vietnam to America was epic. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Tran’s travel, and the travel of his family members, was fueled by chili sauces.

From 1975 onward, Mr. Tran made sauces from peppers grown by his older brother on a farm just beyond Long Binh, a village north of what was then Saigon. The most popular was an oil-based sauce, perfumed by galangal, a pungent relative of ginger. (Mr. Tran intended it as a dip for beef plucked from bowls of pho, it was more popular as a sauce for roasted dog.)

Though he never devised a formal name for his products, Mr. Tran decorated each cap with a rooster, his astrological sign. Production was family focused. Mr. Tran ground the peppers. His father-in-law washed the sauce containers, reusing Gerber baby food jars obtained from American servicemen. His brother-in-law filled the jars with sauce. Itinerant jobbers bought the sauces from Mr. Tran, and sold them to shops and other informal restaurants.

By 1979, many of the Tran family’s friends were leaving Vietnam. “I had enough money saved to buy our way out,” he said.

To limit potential losses, Mr. Tran split the family into four groups: One group went to Indonesia, another to Hong Kong. A third went to Malaysia, and a fourth to the Philippines.

David Tran traveled on a freighter, the Huy Fong. Everyone ended up in United Nations refugee camps, before the family finally began to regroup.

“I was in Boston,” Mr. Tran recalled. “My brother-in-law was in Los Angeles. When we talked on the phone, I asked him, ‘Do they have red peppers in Los Angeles?’ He said yes. And we left.”

“I landed the first week of January in 1980,” he added. “By February, I was making sauce.”

Mr. Tran did not anticipate the popularity of his take on sriracha. He believed the sauce to be good. He took pride in the augers and other apparatuses he designed for the plant. He liked to tell people that all he did was grind peppers, add garlic and bottle it.

He figured that immigrants of Vietnamese ancestry would stock his sriracha at pho shops. He hoped that the occasional American consumer might squirt it on hot dogs and hamburgers.

He could never have expected what he found, one recent afternoon, as he trolled the Internet in search of what fans of his sauce have wrought.

Mr. Tran scanned pictures of 20-something women in homemade Halloween costumes designed to resemble the Huy Fong bottle. He navigated to one of two sriracha Facebook pages, the larger of which has more than 120,000 fans.

He retrieved a favorite picture, of Travis Mason, a 36-year-old coffee salesman from Portland, Ore., who commissioned a tattoo of the Huy Fong logo on his left calf. “I’m always interested in what they do,” Mr. Tran said, his voice filled with genuine wonderment.

Over the last decade, a number of imitators have entered the sriracha category. A recent visit to grocery stores in the San Gabriel Valley, near the Huy Fong headquarters, yielded Cock brand sriracha from Thailand, Shark brand from China, Phoenix brand from Vietnam and Unicorn brand, also from Vietnam.

Each brand included its namesake animal at the center of the bottle. Some copied Huy Fong’s signature script. Others employed similar green caps.

The competition has proved no great hindrance to Huy Fong sales. In 1996, the company expanded, adding processing and storage capacity to meet demand. More than 10 million bottles of sriracha now roll off the Rosemead line each year. With the purchase of a nearby warehouse, the company has begun storing its peppers where Wham-O once manufactured those icons of pop culture, Frisbees and Hula-Hoops.

Demand has continued to build. Fleming’s steakhouses now glaze their lobster en fuego entrees with a mix of sriracha and soy sauce. Roly Poly, another national chain, has begun spiking its cashew chicken wraps with squirts of Huy Fong sriracha.

At Good Stuff Eatery, a burger restaurant in Washington, the owner, Evangelos Mendelsohn, uses a condiment blend of mayonnaise, Huy Fong sriracha and condensed milk.

The Tran family has taken it all in stride. “We’re happy to see these chefs use our sriracha,” said Huy Fong’s president, William Tran, the 33-year-old son of its founder. “But we still sell 80 percent of our product to Asian companies, for distribution through Asian channels. That’s the market we know. That’s the market we want to serve.”

Sunday, May 24, 2009

I'm obsessed with Heidi Swanson

Hi all! Props to KVL for such a great idea! I've heard such great things about all of you and hope to meet you someday.

That said, since I don't know what everyone's "food angle" is (that is, veggie or not, local, chain or dumpster, etc), I'll tell you where I am right now in that arena. After contemplating health and environmental impact of meat and highly processed foods for about two years (I should admit, as a chemist, I should research more than I already have, but you know how it goes; though, one thing that really impacted me in an article I read a year ago is that it takes 4.8 lbs of grain and 2,500-6,000 lbs of water to produce 1 lb of beef) and then visiting Ms VanLoo in DC a couple months ago, I decided to take "the plunge" and try to swear off land animals, with the exception of the healthily, ethically, fairly (and local if possible) produced. I've been doing well so far(I love eggs, beans, soy, cheese and nuts, so it wasn't too much of a change), and recently bought Heidi Swanson's (of 101cookbooks.com) veggie, natural cookbook entitled "Super Natural Cooking," which I love and wish I had time to try all of the recipes.

As far as the rest of the "food ethic" goes, I live in the suburbs pretty far out of Seattle, so buying local is a bit of a chore, but there's no time like the present to start! I'm obsessed with blueberries, so I'm hoping to start picking within the next month. Yay! I mainly do my shopping at TJ's, and try to buy a decent amount of organic as I can while still keeping the bill economical. I've done some looking into which foods are "essential" to buy organic (strawberries and carrots being two keys), because I realize it's not always possible to buy everything organic. Maybe I'll post those findings later.

Anyhow, let me start off with a recipe from that new cookbook of mine: Garbanzo Burgers! I tried it a couple weeks ago, and while I opted for making larger patties (I think it made 6) and doing things a little differently based on what ingredients I had/didn't have, I highly recommend this! The leftovers freeze very well, so that' s a bonus. I ate them as a patty with some salsa, romaine, peppers and pickles and was a very happy camper! (Notes: I used canned beans, and omitted the sprouts (they had already gone bad, blast!) and the lemon zest, and they were still great - because I made the patties bigger, they had to cook a lot longer, but just used your best judgement.)

Ultimate Veggie Burger Recipe (101cookbooks.com)

2 1/2 cups sprouted garbanzo beans (chickpeas) OR canned garbanzos,
drained and rinsed
4 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt
1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1 onion, chopped
Grated zest of one large lemon
1 cup micro sprouts, chopped (try brocolli, onion, or alfalfa sprouts -
optional)
1 cup toasted (whole-grain) bread crumbs
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil (or clarified butter)

If you are using sprouted garbanzos, steam them until just tender, about 10 minutes. Most of you will be using canned beans, so jump right in and combine the garbanzos, eggs, and salt in a food processor. Puree until the mixture is the consistency of a very thick, slightly chunky hummus. Pour into a mixing bowl and stir in the cilantro, onion, zest, and sprouts. Add the breadcrumbs, stir, and let sit for a couple of minutes so the crumbs can absorb some of the moisture. At this point, you should have a moist mixture that you can easily form into twelve 1 1/2-inch-thick patties. I err on the moist side here, because it makes for a nicely textured burger. You can always add more bread crumbs a bit at a time to firm up the dough if need be. Conversely, a bit of water or more egg can be used to moisten the batter. Heat the oil in a heavy skillet over medium low, add 4 patties, cover, and cook for 7 to 10 minutes, until the bottoms begin to brown. Turn up the heat if there is no browning after 10 minutes. Flip the patties and cook the second side for 7 minutes, or until golden. Remove from the skillet and cool on a wire rack while you cook the remaining patties. Carefully cut each patty in half, insert your favorite fillings, and enjoy immediately. Makes 12 mini burgers.


Friday, May 22, 2009

HOW TO POST

holy crap! food!

i've invited all of you to contribute to this blog because it seems you all love cooking and eating good food and are committed to doing it in an ethical, community-building way. as the "about this" states, i thought up this blog as a place to share recipes (old favorites and new must trys). but because i hate limitations, feel free to post articles, info, etc. related to THE MISSION (we don't really have a mission).

when you post, please create labels (same as tags in other blogging formats) so that people can better search for recipes and such. ideas for good labels: main ingredients, type of cuisine, saying it's a recipe, and...i'm not actually very good at labeling, so...that's all i've got.

for those of you new to blogging, some instructions on posting:
1. once you sign into blogger (must have a gmail account i think), you'll see your dashboard that lists the blogs you are a part of. click on the "eat this" blog.
2. click on the "posting" tab. click on "create" sub tab (should automatically come up).
3. make sure you're in the compose window (unless you're an html guru) and start blogging!
4. make sure to enter your labels.
5. click publish post.

rss feed: so there's this thing called an rss feed. i don't know what it is. but i do know that when i click on the feed button i can put it in my google reader or igoogle or whatever so that new posts show up there. you should do have it do that for you. or else you'll totally miss out. (colin, oh internet one, help?)