Hunger in America 2010: A major hunger-relief charity delivers a troubling report

In its first comprehensive report since 2006, Feeding America shows how the economic downturn is increasing risk of hunger for a growing number of families and creating pressure on relief organizations.

The French have a saying: Jamais deux sans trois—never two (catastrophes) without three. There is certainly no shortage of catastrophes, disasters and ongoing problems in the world today. The latest to capture world attention is the devastation created by the earthquake in Haiti.

And just this month, Feeding America, the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity organization, issued Hunger in America 2010, “the largest study of domestic hunger,” according to their website. The report shows that hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States. Continue reading “Hunger in America 2010: A major hunger-relief charity delivers a troubling report” →

All quiet in the kitchen this week

I never called him Dad. I was already grown and living on my own when he and Mom married, not the first marriage for either of them. So Dad just didn’t sound right to me. Instead, I called him by his name, Jim.

Friends from the old neighborhood and the Fisher Body plant in St. Louis where he spent much of his working life called him Red. They did so even after his hair no longer matched his nickname. Red suited him. Like the color, he was big and bold and cheerful—and yes, sometimes a little loud.

Jim dreamed big. He always had projects, plans and ideas brewing, some of them a little goofy maybe, but some of them verging on visionary. And as he aged, they shifted from schemes to get rich quick to ways to save the planet, or at least a little corner of it. Continue reading “All quiet in the kitchen this week” →

TV Dinners: Serving up an eclectic sampling of 101 cooking videos

For people who can’t get enough of cooking—and that would include me—Guide to Culinary Schools has compiled a wonderfully eclectic mix of cooking videos.

The Internet is a wonderful place, chock full of cool stuff. On the other hand, it’s chock full of stuff. So much so that sometimes it’s hard to sift through everything to find what you’re looking for.

The website Guide to Culinary Schools has done some major sifting and come up with a wildly varied mix of 101 cooking videos. The videos range from classic Julia Child to current big names such as Mario Batali and Eric Ripert to goofy bits about baking cookies on your car’s dashboard. Continue reading “TV Dinners: Serving up an eclectic sampling of 101 cooking videos” →

Four ways to help the people of Haiti

The food blogging community has proven itself time and again to be generous, warm and caring, always ready to share. The people of Haiti are in desperate need of your generosity right now.

Living in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Haitians face daily struggles in the best of times. But the devastating earthquake has left many of them injured, homeless and without food or water. According to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, as much as a third of the nation’s population—about 3 million people—has been affected by the quake.

The best way to help is money. Donations in whatever amount you can give. Here are four organizations that will put your generosity to good use. Continue reading “Four ways to help the people of Haiti” →

Two new food blogs worth bookmarking

Two very different new food blogs have caught my eye recently, for very different reasons.

That’s not lettuce is written very much the way its creator Melissa Yen thinks about food: Constantly and from every angle. Our too infrequent conversations may occasionally veer away from food, but they always hurry back. Buying it, growing it, making it [at home or for paying customers], enjoying it [in restaurants or at the tables of friends and family]…

A former owner of the much missed Vella Cafe here in Chicago, Melissa’s first food job in a long line of them was in her aunt’s restaurant when she was eleven. She’s also been involved in the Logan Square Farmers Market. So when she says that thing that all food bloggers say, “I am someone who is absolutely passionate about food,” I think she has a little more history to back up those words than some of us do—certainly than I do. Continue reading “Two new food blogs worth bookmarking” →

Eat, drink and be healthy in 2010

A quick round-up of ideas for healthy eating and drinking, including fighting diabetes with small changes, more reasons to drink coffee, reasons to drink and not drink wine and an excuse for pregnant women to eat bacon.

‘Food Rules’ from someone who should know

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Michael Pollan

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Michael Pollan has written definitive tomes on food and health—the health of those who eat it, those who produce it and the planet we live on. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is the best known, weighing in at nearly 500 pages.

His latest book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, is a lot slimmer, a pocket-sized 112 pages. But in its own way, it’s just as full of useful information. In it, Pollan lays out 64 rules to help us eat smarter, eat healthier. In a piece he wrote for Huffington Post, he tells how the list came about and gives us a small taste of the list. Here are a couple of samples:

#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Pollan recently appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He entertainingly but forcefully makes the point that the way we eat is responsible Continue reading “Eat, drink and be healthy in 2010” →

Food blogging and simple gifts

Every year around this time, I like to share a little something about gifts. Last year, it was the humble gift of an orange that meant so much to my grandmother growing up on a farm in Illinois. Two years ago, it was the amazing gift of the poetry of e.e. cummings, first shared with me in grade school, a beautiful poem about a tiny Christmas tree. And the year before that, when Blue Kitchen was not quite two months old, it was about our non-traditional tradition of Christmas Eve dinner in Chinatown and a joke about gifts that transcended language barriers.

This year, I’ve been thinking about the gifts this blog has given me.

Gift one. I fell hard for publishing as a teenager. I got my first taste on my high school newspaper. Then I started an underground literary magazine with some friends, The Grub Street Journal. Continue reading “Food blogging and simple gifts” →

Ten random things you missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter

I‘ll admit it. I came to Twitter reluctantly, skeptically even. It can certainly feel a little navel-gazing narcissistic the way it’s sometimes practiced. “It’s only 9:30 in the morning and I’m already craving chocolate cake.” And the world needs to know this because?

But Twitter can also be a way to share ideas, links to stories and blog posts and even visuals. Like the amusing billboard above that I photographed and posted on Twitpic, Twitter’s visual sibling, along with the caption “I’m not a big fan of Miracle Whip, but I love their attitudinal advertising!”

Funny thing is, I’ve come to really enjoy Twitter and tweeting [a tweet is what you post on Twitter, and it can be no longer than 140 characters]. From finding articles about food, wine and health I think are worth sharing Continue reading “Ten random things you missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter” →

The face of hunger is changing—so is fighting it

As the effects of a sagging economy continue to spread, an ever-growing number of Americans face “food insecurity,” a newly coined euphemism for not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Hunger.

According to Daily Kos, the PSA above featuring President Obama is sadly already out of date. It says that one out of eight Americans is at risk of hunger. The number is now one out of six. According to a new report by Feeding America, more than 49 million of us are at risk for hunger.

A recent article in the New York Times delivers more sobering numbers. Food stamps, once scorned as a failed welfare scheme, now help feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. More than 36 million people “use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.” Continue reading “The face of hunger is changing—so is fighting it” →

If you can’t stand the heat, take care in the kitchen: 10 Thanksgiving fire safety tips

Cooking fires are twice as likely to happen on Thanksgiving as any other day of the year. Here are some tips to keep your kitchen safe—on Thanksgiving and every other day.

The people at Underwriters Laboratories have the coolest jobs. They get to break things, start fires and make things blow up, all in the name of safety.

Underwriters Laboratories is an independent product safety certification organization that has been testing products and writing standards for safety for more than a century. Each year, the Northbrook, Illinois-based UL evaluates more than 19,000 types of products, components, materials and systems. The UL Mark signifies that a product has undergone rigorous testing to assure that it meets UL’s standards for safety. You’ll find the UL Mark on some 72,000 manufacturers’ products in 98 countries.

Where you won’t find the UL Mark is on one single turkey fryer. Not one. All are deemed far too unsafe. Which leads me to safety tip number one:

1. Don’t deep fry your turkey. Seriously. The video above shows clearly all the ways this novel [read idiotically dangerous] approach to preparing your turkey can go wrong. And this is under laboratory conditions that don’t involve beer or wanting to hurry back to televised football.

But turkey fryers aren’t the only source of accidents. According to UL, “nearly 1,450 residential structure fires Continue reading “If you can’t stand the heat, take care in the kitchen: 10 Thanksgiving fire safety tips” →