Carson Downing. Food Styling: Kelsey Moylan
21.07.2023 - 22:37 / awaytogarden.com
SARA KATE GILLINGHAM-RYAN’S “Good Food to Share,” invites us into a place where lucky guests get to start meals with finger food like green beans in garlickly toasted-almond and parsley pesto, broccoli spears roasted in olive oil and red pepper flakes, maple-glazed sweet potato wedges, or the most heavenly looking deviled eggs. It’s also a place where the host gets to have a good time. I’d be happy at such a party—and plan to cook from The Kitchn [dot] com founder’s latest cookbook even when I’m a party of one. Want to win a copy and feast along on Sara Kate’s beautiful, seasonal food that matches any occasion?Sometimes entertaining–or even cooking a family meal–stresses the “ta-da” over the togetherness at the expense of the cook’s mental health. Sara Kate, whom I have never seen without her brilliant smile on full display, says that’s just not the point.
“When I first started to work on this book, knowing it was in the entertaining category, I thought long and hard about what entertaining meant,” Sara Kate wrote recently on her blog. “In my mind, entertaining as a word applied to my work is a bit of a silly notion; because this thing we do with food feels so much more deep than other forms of entertainment in our culture. The act of cooking is really about feeding the bellies and souls of the people we love, and I take it very seriously.”
“Good Food to Share: Recipes for Entertaining With Family and Friends” will nourish on every level through all the courses from drinks to dessert (even salad dressings!). And not one photo or recipe made me feel pressured (just hungry).
With a bounty of herbs and green beans at the moment, I selected two twists on pestos that sounded timely to showcase below. I can’t wait for fall
Carson Downing. Food Styling: Kelsey Moylan
Not so long ago my Hostas were in fine flowering fettle. Now as Autumn approaches the slugs and snails are making a meal of the soft juicy leaves that are starting to give up the ghost.
I recently had a call from a South Carolina resident who lost power for more than 24 hours and wanted to know whether the foods in her freezer would be safe to eat. This is a very common problem in South Carolina winters and could easily affect you in the coming months.
Yes, you read that right – snowman hands. When I started teaching food safety practices to children I wondered how to teach them about proper hand washing. We all know how important it is to thoroughly wash our hands before preparing food, after touching raw meat and poultry or any other potentially contaminated surface. We can easily explain to children (and adults!) that singing happy birthday twice, while scrubbing hands, equals the prescribed 10 to 15 seconds that we should do while washing. However, how do you explain how much soap to use to create a good lather?? The answer: snowman hands! Use enough soap that your hands look like a snowman’s hands after rubbing them together! I have found great success with this tip while teaching children (and now my own children) to wash their hands properly. And guess what – it takes a good 10 to 15 seconds of scrubbing soapy hands together to create those snowman hands! Bonus to the singing of happy birthday while washing hands! So next time you are washing your hands, use enough soap to create snowman hands. This will help prevent the spread of food-borne illness (and those nasty cold and flu bugs too!).
Food waste and how to reduce it is a big topic with big implications. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that food waste each year totals 133 billion pounds which includes 31 percent food loss at the retail and consumer levels. Food is lost at all stages of the supply chain and for a variety of reasons that might include produce that is discarded because of flaws in appearance or restaurants serving large portions that may not be finished.
Food Insecurity and Food Deserts are terms used in the news to describe society’s status with food.
Not going out for sit down dinners just yet? Did the pandemic increase your food delivery orders? Do you think about your food being safe during delivery? Has your twenty-piece entrée arrived with five pieces missing? Ordering food to be delivered right to your door is still a higher practice compared to two years ago.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 600 million people, or 1 out of every 10 people on the planet, contract a foodborne disease each year.
The phrase “you are what you eat” has been around for as long as we can remember. Whether we stand by the statement or not, many of us use food to express our identity. In every culture, food is an essential component. Meals are a way to gather people and establish a connection– we all have memories with our food. In the piece Food: Identity of Culture and Religion, Vatika Sabal writes,
I have said before that I know what birds like, and have created a slideshow of the variousCornus, or dogwood, species that I grow–all of them good wildlife plants. But since the berries produced by Cornus alba and Cornus sericea, both twig dogwoods, really don’t catch my eye, I was interested to see that gray catbirds and tufted titmice, in particular, are positively wild about the unassuming white fruit.I grow a few varieties of Cornus alba andC. sericea, including the variegated-leaf, gold-twig ‘Silver and Gold,’ the gold-leaf, red-twig sericea called ‘Sunshine’ (above, in fruit; Cornus
Just jump in (down below in the comments) and tell me a tip, trick or insight you have to share about saving some kind of food for later use (or simply say hello; I’ll count your entry anyhow). Here’s mine:I’m using Mason or Ball jars for freezing this year, gradually phasing out most of my plastic food-storage containers. That’s a frozen test jar up top of my first 2010-vintage tomato sauce (popped out of the freezer for a moment for its portrait).Why this change?I keep reading more all the time about food and their reactions to contact with various plastics. Apparently “p