Egg Quesadilla with Strawberry-Chipotle Sauce and Kale Salad

Egg QuesadillaWe know you’ve all been waiting for our solution to last week’s three ingredient challenge. Here’s how we combined strawberries, garlic scapes and Russian kale into a tasty dinner for two. The sweet-spiciness of the sauce makes a great complement to the eggs, and the citrus dressing on the salad keeps the flavors bright.

In addition to the three central ingredients, you’ll need to pull together these items: eggs, cheddar cheese, flour tortillas, scallions, canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, dried barley, limes, salt, black pepper, chili powder, and cumin. Continue reading

Dead Man Gnawing: The Provenance of Our Big Gulp (1676 – 2012)

Among my different jobs is one that takes me to public middle schools to teach creative and academic writing.  In those classrooms, I have discovered that the craptastic school lunches I sometimes ate while that age are nothing compared to the contemporary dining habits of the Bronx’s eleven-to-thirteen set.  Oversized plastic cups of sugared coffee slushy and a few Dunkin donuts, as well as the bags of Skittles or Doritos that were less of a surprise, are routine.  Of course, I had a class at one of those schools whose lunch period began at 9:10, just after first period.  It’s safe to say that our kids are both getting and seeking a raw deal.

And that takes us to Michael Bloomberg, who in spite of getting the law changed so he could have a third term, seems likely to go down in history mostly for banning smoking in bars, making us a more bike-friendly city (!), and trying to outlaw oversized soda containers in certain types of business.

Well, it's not Joe Camel...

I presume the soda ban is national news; I can’t imagine the Glen Becks of the country passing up such an opportunity.  And so I’ve scrounged up a few key pieces of soft drink history: Continue reading

Lunch at the End of the Line: Bonnaroo Edition

Andrew at Solar CafeThere is a lot of good food at the annual Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee. Much of it, along with dozens of good bands giving it their all, can be found in the central area of the festival, but for a perennial favorite of my brother-in-law Andrew (of Andrew Leahey and the Homestead), we were going to have to venture out into the great beyond. We were headed to the end of the line, and we were on the hunt for a mean tofu scramble.

A little background here: because both Andrew and my husband write about the festival for various publications, I have become an exceedingly spoiled Bonnaroo-goer over the past few years. They had once again managed to land us in “guest” camping, which boasted benefits like free showers and actual trees to shade our tents from the broiling Tennessee heat. (“Oh, no! This weekend, we’re like the one percent!” Andrew said, with a tiny bit of genuine class guilt.) But to get a taste of a particular dish that Andrew and his wife, Emily, had come to crave in Bonnaroos past, we needed to wander into the melee of the general camping area, where the great ninety-nine percent were partying in every conceivable fashion.

It is almost impossible to describe the verve, conviviality and downright filthiness of general camping. “I bet the best food is somewhere out here,” Andrew proclaimed with authority. Continue reading

Concrete Jungle: Pencil Pod Yellow Wax Beans, Manhattan Bridge, NYC

These are the source seeds. They are tenacious as hell. Props to Botanical Interests.

The Seed Saver Exchange, an organization that does just what the name states and with the authority deserving of proper noun status, has 4,000 types of bean in its collection.  Among these is the Pencil Pod Yellow Wax heirloom variety.  Pencil Pods are bush beans, meaning they don’t need the high vertical supports string beans and other pole beans do.  They were developed around 1900, soon after folks started trying to breed the pesky “string” fiber out of beans (Check out Monday’s post) and are best raw or lightly steamed.  They also have little black seeds nestled in golden flesh, giving the bean a cool bumblebee color scheme or—if you happen to be appreciate your Christian Hair Metal—making it a fine tribute to Stryper. Continue reading

Road Harvests and Vulpine Unmentionables

foxNot long after I was writing on this blog about cavemen and stalking the wild tortilla chip, I had the chance to sit in on a primitive skills class. Since many people are gradually coming around to the idea that it might not be such a bad idea to have the knowledge to grow one’s own food, why not go one step further and learn how to really cook from scratch?

My teacher in this pursuit was Patrick, a representative of the Sequatchie Valley Institute. Patrick had long hair that looked not terribly unlike the brush he was using as kindling, and he wore a tank top that said “Extinction is Forever” tucked into a sort of hippie version of a fanny pack. His eyes were round with an earnest sweetness. Patrick was a believer.

Before we got around to the whole fire-starting thing, Patrick explained to us the fundamentals of “road harvesting.” All sorts of useful things, he assured us, could be found dead by the side of the highway. Continue reading