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HEY HEY HEY! First things first….get over to Missy’s blog and vote for your favorite salsa recipe in her contest!! I’m #8, in case you have trouble choosing a winner from all the yummy choices! 🙂

One more fair this morning and with a lucky traffic day, I was home around 3:30!! I am EXCITED!  I love being on the road and travelling to new places, but I get so homesick…I wish I could take Matt and Santana along with me whenever I travel! That would be the best!

Green Foodie Arguments

Here is a link to an interesting post that is probably of interest to some of the other foodie bloggers out there.  Anyone into the organic, slow food movement should be familiar with Alice Waters and her restaurant in Berkeley, CA, Chez Panisse. When the roommate and I went to California on a grad school visit/research trip the summer before our senior year, and we made it a point to have lunch at Chez Panisse (dinner was WAY out of our price range). Super delicious and fun to be eating at Alice Waters’ place.  I met her and listened to her speak at The Bale Boone Symposium put on by The Gaines Center at the University of Kentucky in 2005 (I think?).  It was really amazing and wonderful for me at a time when I was still sort of defining who I was as a cook. 

The Jezebel post by Sadie, points to a recent backlash against Waters and her push for organics.  One of the most vociferous, unsurprisingly, is Anthony Bourdain (who I have a bit of a crush on, fyi).  Sadie quotes Bourdain:

Alice Waters annoys the living s%#* out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits.

First of all, he loves to talk about the Khmer Rouge…I have zero statistics or citations to back this up, but I have heard that name come out of his mouth so many times that when I read about Khmer Rouge (even unrelated to Bourdain at all), I hear it in his voice and I picture him ranting. This kind of random association is wonderful…maybe I should choose something to be obscurely connected to.  Whenever you think of Mussolini, you will think of me! Maybe not…

Second, I love Alice Waters, but I have no problem with Bourdain’s ranting…he often goes off on a lot of topics that I don’t agree with, but that is basically his job.  He’s a complainer and a grumper and I think this is why I love him oh so much.  He openly hates on cultures, women, men, children, other chefs, things I would normally be very against  ranting about…but from him, it’s pretty enjoyable.  So I am not bothered by him particularly saying this.  And I don’t think his overall culinary stance eschews the organic, local side of things.  In the essay “The Evildoers,” Bourdain says that you should “try to eat food that comes from somewhere, from somebody,” and I think this applies not only to his signature “Chef’s Tour” mantra of eating the cultural food of wherever you are, but also to the roots of where you get your food…if your veggies, your meat, your dairy comes from somewhere, someone in particular, you are more likely to connect to it and more likely to appreciate and understand its importance.

About the post itself, I have to agree with Sadie…Waters can handle the criticism as someone behind the Green movement and any kind of revolutionary progress needs to be questioned and pulled in different directions as it develops.  Yes, we’re in an economic crisis and a lot of people are having trouble affording the bare basics for their families.  Yes, the cost of organics is often high and going fully green is not necessarily feasible for every family out there.  But I know an increasing amount of people who are not typical of the “elitist” perception that has been tied to organics, especially as I’ve discovered more and more food bloggers who are in super green mode in so many ways.  And I think if more and more people fit local, sustainable, green, organic ways into their lives on a daily basis, at a level that fits their lifestyle and economic means, then it pushes for more and more change towards the positive. 

While the individual families have to make these changes on the small scale, on the larger, more vocal scale, revolutionaries like Waters and critics like Bourdain are necessary to keep pushing ideas forward and honing and refining the ideas that have made it to the mainstream mindset. 

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Ok, that was more rambling than I predicted, but I thought some of the bloggers out there would find this discussion interesting! What are your thoughts on Alice Waters? Anthony Bourdain? Feel free to despise either one, despite my love of them! 🙂

Contest news:

Don’t forget to enter Dori’s Doormat Giveaway, and she has a second one this week for an Always Infinity Gift Pack!

Missy is also having a giveaway for the Always gift bag!

Jackson’s World is not only featuring an adorable pup, but is also having a Spring has Sprung Giveaway! Bring on the spring!

Lucky Taste Buds has a Big S Farms Salsa giveaway! Yum yum yum for Salsa!

Celebration and a New Meal!

Hey hey hey! Look up! A Bacon-Wrapped Life is now located at it’s very own domain name baconwrappedlife.com!!! EXCITEMENT! Also exciting, Dori’s Shiny Blog is now located at dorishinyblog.com, check it out and keep your eyes peeled for some fun on her end to celebrate the change!!

I’ve been absent from the blog for a few days because we were switching servers, updating names, and just generally being busy with chores, errands and some nice weather  But I have a yummy new recipe to show for the missing weekend!

This is a conglomeration of this cooking light recipe and a pumpkin ravioli recipe I tried about 4 years ago and turned into an AMAZING pumpkin lasagna recipe that I’ll probably share at some point. 

Spicy Sweet Butternut Squash Ravioli with Prosciutto and Parmesan 

I roasted the heck out of a butternut squash at 400 degrees for about an hour or so, then scooped it out of the peel (after it cooled) and mashed it.  In a pan with a bit of olive oil, I sautéed 4oz diced prosciutto until it was a little crispy on the edges.  Half of the meat went into the squash along with breadcrumbs, 1 egg, salt, and parmesan cheese.  

 

I bought a package of wonton wrappers, and these made the ravioli! I filled a wonton wrapper with about 1Tb of the squash mixture, wet the edges with water, topped with another wrapper and sealed all around, making sure to get out all of the air bubbles.  I used a biscuit cutter to cut into rounds and set them aside on a parchment-lined tray. 

I made 20 ravioli like this and still hade some wrappers and squash mixture left, but knew we wouldn’t eat them, so I just stuck with the 20 (good thing, because I was stuffed by the end of the meal!).  Brought a big, wide pan full of water to a simmer and cooked about half of the ravioli at a time, for about 5 minutes with each batch.  I pulled them out with a slotted spoon and let them wait on the parchment-lined baking sheet while I cooked the second batch. 

As the second batch of ravioli cooked, I heated the remaining prosciutto and olive oil back up and added a little over a tablespoon of brown sugar, a few chopped sage leaves, a pat of butter and a dash of cayenne pepper for a little kick.

After this got all melty, I sort of just wanted to eat it with a spoon!

I melted this over medium-low heat and then tossed it with the ravioli and served, topped with a little more fresh sage and some parmesan!  Pretty easy (a little time-consuming because you have to fill the ravioli) and SUPER delicious!  You could also buy ravioli and just make this prosciutto brown sugar sauce to coat them, and it would be really really easy. 

We served it with a bagged Pacific salad with a bunch of different greens, soy nuts, carrots and a poppy seed dressing.  Plus we added a bunch of diced tomatoes from our CSA!  It was a nice accompaniment to the ravioli, which had a wonderful balance of the nutty squash, sweet brown sugar, salty prosciutto & parmesan, and a tiny bit of spice from the cayenne!

Creamy Asparagus Soup and Roasted Veggies – A healthy dinner, topped with bacon and followed with a sugar rush for dessert!

Last week we had HUGE asparagus stalks in our CSA box.  I have never seen asparagus quite so massive.  With the chilly weather and a lack of creativity, I stole this recipe from Maeve for Asparagus soup and switched it up a bit to make a pretty quick weeknight dinner that lasted through two rounds of leftovers.  We had soup again on Sunday with our potato cakes leftover from the Passover/Easter dinner, and AGAIN on Monday with some egg salad sandwiches.  Yum!! It’s finally gone now, but it was definitely worth the minor effort I put into it 🙂

Maeve is amazing and made an asparagus based stock for her soup….I used veggie broth from a box. It was the middle of the week. Just deal with it :)  I also had a different set of vegetables on hand, and didn’t feel like going to the store, so the variety in the soup got switched up a bit as well.  This is where the stalks of our Red Swiss Chard (previously noted in the side-dish yuckiness from this past weekend) came into play.  I also bacon-ed  it up a bit because we had some bacon in the fridge that needed to be used up quickly.  This made the original dish AMAZING, but we had it without bacon both times we had leftovers and it was still mucho delicious.

• 1 Box Vegetable Stock
• 2 Tb Olive Oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 Bunch asparagus, tops reserved (we also had some leftover stalks frozen from our yummy asparagus side dish that we served with pan fried scallops a while ago)
• 2 small potatoes, diced
• 2 cloves crush garlic
• Stalks from 1 bunch of red swiss chard, chopped small
• Salt & Pepper
• 1/4 cup milk
• Bacon!

Heat olive oil in large stockpot. Sauté middle portions of asparagus stalks, chopped onion, potatoes, and garlic until a little brown. Add stock to cover and simmer until the veggies are nice and soft.  Puree (I used our wonderful stick blender!). Turn it on low heat and add  Simmer for 20 minutes covered until vegetables can be mashed with the back of a spoon. Puree soup until smooth. Return to a very low heat and add milk, asparagus tops, and chopped chard stalks.  Cook on low until the veggies are cooked through (the chard will take a little longer than the asparagus, so you may want to add the asparagus a few minutes after the chard).   While this was happening, we had chopped the bacon and then cooked slowly over medium-low heat to render out as much fat as possible, then cranked the heat to get it nice and crispy.   This went on top of the soup! Yum!

We also roasted some potatoes, red peppers, onions and garlic coated in olive oil to serve alongside.  When we were cleaning up after dinner, we threw the handful of leftover roasted veggies into the soup and it became a creamy asparagus vegetable soup for the rest of its yummy career. 

Thanks for the inspiration Maeve!!

Matt made dessert! We had a package of strawberries from our CSA and he grabbed some angel food cake and whipped cream at the store.  This was a complete sugar overload and so huge I couldn’t finish, but a satisfyingly sweet to end the evening.

Matzah Brie, Passover/Easter dinner, and Dying Eggs!

Happy Passover/Easter/Earth Day/Any other reason to celebrate! Yay!

My big editing job is D-O-N-E DONE! HOORAY! I have a couple tiny things to finish up with it, but the deadline was Sunday night, and I felt like I was back in grad school working on that all weekend.  But now it’s finished and I feel GREAT! Tonight has been ridiculously relaxing after a hectic day at work, and I had no idea how restful it would be to come home and not have editing work to do!  I spent the night making egg salad for dinner, finishing up my nut butter cups for the blogger bake sale high bidder and doing other little chores, but to not have the huge editing project hanging over my head was amazing!

I have a few things I want to post, since I’ve been a bit behind in updating and keeping on top of some of the fun recipes we’ve been trying.  But to celebrate the holiday weekend, you get our Passover/Easter weekend food! 

I splurged and bought lamb from Whole Foods for our Saturday night dinner because Matt and I are huge lamb fans and we don’t usually spend extra money on meat for cooking at home (I dream of a day when I can buy half a cow from a farmer and have a huge freezer to store it all away). 

We had also gotten a bunch of Red Swiss Chard in our CSA box last week and have been trying to think of ways to use it.  I’m usually wary of greens…I have never been a big fan of collard greens or other dark greens when they’re just sautéed or served on their own as a side dish.  But, some things I read online about it made me think maybe I wanted to revisit greens. 

Earlier in the week, we had used the stems from the chard in a soup (recipe to come!), so we washed and chopped the leaves, which are absolutely gorgeous.  I love the bright vibrant colors that you can find in fruits and vegetables. 

I decided to jump right into the experiment and just sauté the chopped chard with some olive oil and garlic…..I was skeptical the whole time.

For the lamb, we trimmed off some fat, crushed a couple pieces of matzah, mixed it with some parsley, and coated the lamb.

We pan fried this for a couple minutes on each side and then threw it in a 400 degree oven until it reached 145 degrees internally (medium rare-ish).  After we pulled it out, we covered it and let it rest while I finished up the greens and our other side dish. 

We served the meat with the sautéed chard and some mashed potatoes (made with some seasoned chicken broth, salt, pepper, and parsley…no dairy!).  The leftover potatoes were made into potato cakes the next night to go with the leftover soup from the earlier meal mentioned above! Leftovers all around!!

The lamb was a little less done than we had planned, but amazing anyway.  Lamb is one of the few meats I can eat when it is this pink.  YUM.  The potatoes were super flavorful and went really well with the meat.  Matt liked the chard and cleaned his plate, but I couldn’t do it…the flavor wasn’t there for me, but I think it really comes down to the texture and temperature of greens cooked like this.  They’re too slimy and soft for me, plus they never seem to be hot…the chard was the last thing to come off the stove for this meal, and yet when I sat down to eat it was already cold…cold and slimy? Not my thing.  But the rest of dinner was so good! And look how pretty it is!

Sunday morning we made one of Matt’s favorites…matzah brie!! (Pronounced “BRY” not “BREE”…there is no yummy gooey cheese involved in this dish, sad to say).  It’s basically french toast made with matzah.  We added lots of cinnamon and dipped it in syrup! Mmmm! We also tried to be somewhat healthy and share an orange, but the orange we had was flavorless and just tasted like slightly orange-flavored water.  Blech.

 

In the afternoon, I took another quick break from editing to teach Matt some fun things about Easter (I had no time to make Easter baskets for us this year 🙁 booo.)  Matt is horribly disgusted by the smell of vinegar, so we used lemon juice instead…vinegar would have made brighter colors, but no one was gagging at least! The green, blue, yellow, and orange were decently bright, but the pink was super disappointing! I was looking forward to some bright bright pink eggs! The swirly green one is my favorite! 🙂

I look like a monster attacking the camera with my huge hands in this picture, but I had to post it because you can see Santana popping her head up in the background! She wanted to help SO badly!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter and Passover!  More recipes and yumminess to come soon!

Bar Review 4/5 and a bonus!

Today’s Bar: Bumble Bar Organic Energy in Cherry Chocolate

Package Goodies: Gluten Free & Vegan. There is also a random picture of a pretty cute little kid’s head floating on the back of the package and it says “Abby Adores Em!” and “Abby les adore!” for those French speakers out there. “BumbleBar is a delicious blend of organic, simple, whole foods. Made only from certified organic, gluten free, dairy free, ethically sourced ingredients, BumbleBars are the purest form of energy!” Pretty neat! Ingredient List: Organic agave syrup, Organic sesame seeds, Organic cherries, Organic non-dairy chocolate, Organic flax, Organic almonds, Organic coconut, Organic cocoa powder, Organic cherry flavor, Organic chocolate extract, Sea Salt, Tocopherol. Our bookstore only had regular chocolate and cherry chocolate flavors, but looking at the website, they have a ton of different choices! The Verdict: Wow! This is like the healthy kid’s no bake cookie. This is not a cookie bar or anything like that…it’s basically the seeds, nuts and fruits that are listed in the ingredients, smooshed together with some dark chocolate and rolled flat. I loved it! At first, it was a bit strange, since it was pretty different from the bars I’ve had the rest of this week so far. But after I tried a little more, I was completely hooked. Each bite tastes a little different because you’re getting a different bite of fruits and seeds and things. Some bites are sweeter, while others have a sour punch from dried cherries. Some are more chocolatey than others. Overall, it has a very clean chocolate taste, with nice pops of the different things that make up the bar. I would totally recommend this to people who love chocolate, seeds/nuts, OR chewy things! I want to try more flavors now for sure! I hope I can find these at Whole Foods where they have more of a selection!

Bonus Review!

Today with my lunch, I was feeling the need for juice over my regular water. I went for something new: Bossa Nova Superfruit Açai Juice! They had a few different flavors to choose from, and I went with Raspberry. Bottle Claims: “highest antioxidant fruit”, “Rethink Juice! Choose superfruits. Meaningful nutrition. Vital performance. Reject empty calories. No apple, grape, pear or cane juice fillers.” “Not all fruits are created equal. Superfruit: Açai (ah-sci-ee). Taste: Lush, tropical dark berry with a blueberry note. Superpower: Highest antioxidant fruit. Benefit: Reduces free radicals linked to premature aging, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and certain cancers; anti-inflammatory benefits; supports recovery after exercise. Profile: About 60% more antioxidants than pomegranates with about 40% less sugar; sustainable harvesting helps preserve rainforest ecosystems.” “Naturally Occuring Nutrients: Antoyanins (powerful antioxidants), Vitamin A, Magnesium” What a mouthful! For a tiny bottle, this was PACKED with random claims and exclamation points! Ingredient List: Wild-harvested Açai Juice, Organic Agave Nectar, Raspberry Juice (from concentrate), Natural Flavors* Nice and short…sort of. See below for some interesting ideas about “Natural Flavors.” The Verdict: Yum! This was a very powerful juice. Lots of flavor, so it’s a good thing it came in a little bottle, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have finished it. It went really nicely with my lunch (leftover Italian wedding casserole) and was a great sweet break from my many cups of water throughout the day. I may try some of the other flavors, but these little guys cost around $3! Definitely a special occasion…free water from the office is my drink of choice on a daily basis!

* A note about natural flavors: I haven’t done a tone of research, so don’t use me as some expert witness to this, but in one of my grad classes a couple years ago, we read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. Really really interesting. He has a lot to say about flavors (natural and artificial), and the way that flavors are manufactured in giant factories. Schlosser does a pretty decent job of citing the claims that he makes, so while I’m not going to throw him out there as an irrefutable scientific resource, his concerns in this area are ones that I tend to have as well. Here’s a brief excerpt (which I snatched from a random website in order to avoid having to type it all)…there is a lot more interesting stuff in the book. I’d definitely recommend it.

The Food and Drug Administration does not require companies to disclose the ingredients of their color or flavor additives so long as all the chemicals in them are considered by the agency to be GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”). This enables companies to maintain the secrecy of their formulas. It also hides the fact that flavor compounds often contain more ingredients than the foods to which they give taste. The phrase “artificial strawberry flavor” gives little hint of the chemical wizardry and manufacturing skill that can make a highly processed food taste like strawberries.

A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

Although flavors usually arise from a mixture of many different volatile chemicals, often a single compound supplies the dominant aroma. Smelled alone, that chemical provides an unmistakable sense of the food. Ethyl-2-methyl butyrate, for example, smells just like an apple. Many of today’s highly processed foods offer a blank palette: whatever chemicals are added to them will give them specific tastes. Adding methyl-2-pyridyl ketone makes something taste like popcorn. Adding ethyl-3-hydroxy butanoate makes it taste like marshmallow. The possibilities are now almost limitless. Without affecting appearance or nutritional value, processed foods could be made with aroma chemicals such as hexanal (the smell of freshly cut grass) or 3-methyl butanoic acid (the smell of body odor).

The 1960s were the heyday of artificial flavors in the United States. The synthetic versions of flavor compounds were not subtle, but they did not have to be, given the nature of most processed food. For the past twenty years food processors have tried hard to use only “natural flavors” in their products. According to the FDA, these must be derived entirely from natural sources — from herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables, beef, chicken, yeast, bark, roots, and so forth. Consumers prefer to see natural flavors on a label, out of a belief that they are more healthful. Distinctions between artificial and natural flavors can be arbitrary and somewhat absurd, based more on how the flavor has been made than on what it actually contains.

“A natural flavor,” says Terry Acree, a professor of food science at Cornell University, “is a flavor that’s been derived with an out-of-date technology.” Natural flavours and artificial flavors sometimes contain exactly the same chemicals, produced through different methods. Amyl acetate, for example, provides the dominant note of banana flavor. When it is distilled from bananas with a solvent, amyl acetate is a natural flavor. When it is produced by mixing vinegar with amyl alcohol and adding sulfuric acid as a catalyst, amyl acetate is an artificial flavor. Either way it smells and tastes the same. “Natural flavor” is now listed among the ingredients of everything from Health Valley Blueberry Granola Bars to Taco Bell Hot Taco Sauce.

A natural flavor is not necessarily more healthful or purer than an artificial one. When almond flavor — benzaldehyde — is derived from natural sources, such as peach and apricot pits, it contains traces of hydrogen cyanide, a deadly poison. Benzaldehyde derived by mixing oil of clove and amyl acetate does not contain any cyanide. Nevertheless, it is legally considered an artificial flavor and sells at a much lower price. Natural and artificial flavors are now manufactured at the same chemical plants, places that few people would associate with Mother Nature.

Iiiinteresting, no? I am definitely not one to condone anything for being not completely healthy, but I like bits of info like this that make me think about food labels and ingredient lists differently. Makes me feel like I am not so swayed by all of the marketing gimmicks that are out there.