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Category: Food
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The Dose Makes the Poison
I recently stumbled across this quote by Paracelsus (ok, I knew it before, but not who originated it), and it fits well with the topics I frequent here on the blog. Food, cooking, chemistry, wild edibles – and their flip side, wild poisons. Snakes, spiders, centipedes… and sometimes wasps. Toxicology has been a long-time interest…
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Russian Cupcakes
Ok, they aren’t really Russian. They are triple chocolate, with buttercream frosting. The Russian part comes in how they are decorated… The latest cake decorating rage is these single-tip flowers. I was curious, so I used some of my art money (I only buy art supplies when I sell art, so it’s a self-supporting hobby)…
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Peep Roast
Over the weekend we hosted a campout at our house – four little boys running around, tents in the yard, and a campfire (safely confined to the metal fire bowl on the patio). I’d promised my girls we could roast peeps, which they wanted to do mostly for the amusement factor of watching them burn.…
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The Great Cookie Caper
Today is my First Reader’s birthday. We have no gift-exchange traditions, we are as likely to give one another spontaneous gifts as we are to wait for some arbitrarily special day. So for his birthday I had planned to do our usual of making a special meal for him (tonight will be steak and veg…
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Food Anthropology: From the Beginning
I’ve been toying with this article for a while, and decided the only way to do it justice was to write a series of articles, rather than trying to cram it all into one place. It started, as so many of my ideas do, in a conversation between the First Reader and I. We were…
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Persistent Food Myths
We live in a time when the concept of famine is distant. It happens to someone else, far away, and we collect pennies at school to help the poor starving children we can’t quite identify with. I am an American, and my culture is one of plenty. The cornucopia of what is available to me…
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Cheesecake Brioche
The other day the First Reader was looking at something in the bakery section at the grocery. He does this often, and it’s a toss-up whether we buy it, or I say ‘I can make that for you?’ depending on the schedule. So the Brioche/Danish thing he was looking at stayed on the shelf, and…
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Guilt is not the Special Sauce
I was standing in the kitchen processing meat in bulk, and mulling over shopping, the budget, and how we eat. I find something very satisfying in preparing food for my family, whether it is butchering down a big cut of cheap meat into meal-sized portions, which saves us on the food bill, or making a…
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Splendid Spices
I had a moment of anxiety recently, when I discovered that my husband’s favorite flavor of cake was getting hard to find in cake mixes. Carrot cake doesn’t equal spice cake, although we do like it, and Butter Pecan isn’t right, either, although it’s good too. Spice cake on Amazon was nearly six dollars a…
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Can I buy a Vowel?
We were looking for a recipe the other day. I had a chunk of pork loin in the fridge, we’d just had pork chops… so the First Reader popped it into google. I was lying on the bed and reading over his shoulder, sort of. He started cruising websites for recipes, until he found one…
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Tradition is Hard
Last night, I finished the work in progress. Tanager’s Fledglings is a bouncing baby manuscript weighing in at 101589 words, the biggest rough draft I have ever completed. It took two years, from the nucleus that was a short story about a boy, a dog, and a spaceship, for this book to develop. Life was…
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Fear of Food
I’m not talking about a fear of eating – that’s a whole ‘nother box of worms I’m not opening today. No, I’m talking about a fear of food. Or rather, trying new foods. Last night at dinner I served a seasoned rice I’d made up – and deliberately under-spiced because I knew the kids would…