Dining and Opining

Now, for something a little lighter, check out these food-inspired valentine cards : Find, and send, the whole spread here . Which are your favorite? UPDATED: Even more foodie valentines here, at the Kitchn!

In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer offers this thought: "If this entire book could be decanted into a single question—not something easy, loaded, or asked in bad faith, but a question that fully captured the problem of eating and not eating animals—it might be this: Should we serve turkey at Thanksgiving?" Should we serve turkey at Thanksgiving? This is his whole book in a sentence. The chapter goes on to explore the dark side of turkey production in the U.S.  (Read short versions of similar stories here , here , or here ). But in classic Foer fashion, he leads up to this "single question" with a personal take on the meaning of Thanksgiving and of storytelling. The way he recounts his own Thanksgiving memories, and their embeddedness in some bigger ideas about a good meal, is beautiful:  . . . Two dozen or so mismatched chairs circumscribed four tables of slightly different heights and widths, pushed together and covered in matching cloths...

I'm not yet quite sure what will be on my Thanksgiving table, but here are some ideas and recipes that really get me going, all with links to their sources, where you can find the full recipe: Appetizers Spicy Sweet Potato Wedges (Smitten Kitchen)  Brie with Cranberry Chutney (Betty Crocker) Winter Squash and Sage Blini (NYT) Sundried Tomato Stuffed Mushrooms (Smitten Kitchen) Creamed Mushrooms on Chive Butter Toast (Smitten Kitchen) Red Bean and Walnut Spread ( NYT) Breads Gluten-Free Sweet Potato and Rosemary Biscuits (Gabby's Gluten-Free) Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese Cornbread (Smitten Kitchen) Thanksgiving Challah (The Jew and the Carrot) Sides Golden-Crusted Brussels Sprouts (101 Cookbooks)  Cranberry Sauce in Apple Cider (Real Simple) Coconut Butternut Squash Soup (NYT) Updated Green Bean Casserole (Martha Stewart) And, grudgingly, for JH, the classic version (Campbell's Kitchen) Cauliflower with Almonds, Raisins, Ca...

Another string of holiday food posts this week, because I just can't seem to shake them... December 24 brought a big pot of pureed carrot soup (with onion relish, from Deborah Madison's  Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone ): Fresh-baked challah (not as beautiful as my mom's, but it'll do), and a table full of treats! Small golden-brown challah rolls, two kinds of pickled red onions, a vegetarian meatloaf , a slightly-healthier version of green bean casserole (which I'll blog about soon), and a colorful relish tray:    Relishes of red cabbage sauerkraut (made by a former student of mine), some of our own home-canned pickles, and the most delicious tomato butter (made by some of our friends, and which we've been saving for WAY too long for just the right special occasion): We even got to use the rolls, green bean casserole, and veggie loaf to make little sandwiches, in honor of J's brother, who always does this with his Thanksgiving and Chri...

For the first time, we'll be in Madison on Christmas, and Justin will not be celebrating with his family in their traditional ways. And so, we're thinking about starting a new tradition of doing some volunteering on the holiday.  Many community centers and churches put on free community events, and offering a hot meal to someone in need sure seemed like a good way to spend this winter day. I did a quick search and found a few key volunteer opportunities in the Madison area, which I thought I'd share, in case others are looking for similar lists. Please add others, if you know of any! Saturday, December 24, 2011 Where: Wil-Mar Center , 953 Jenifer St. When: 11:15 AM What: Free community meal for Chrismas Eve, prepared by volunteers. How: Call 608-257-4576 for more info. Sunday, December 25, 2011 Where: Wisconsin Capitol cafeteria. Lutheran Campus Center , 5 N. Mills St. When: 11 AM What: Savory Sunday , with volunteers needed to prepare and serve a...

Happy First Day of Chanukah to all! This year, our holiday meals will likely feature some Autumn Latkes, from the Veganomicon . (image from vegancrunk.blogspot.com) Maybe with some home-canned applesauce ? And perhaps loaves of challah , inspired by Mama's always-awesome baking: And what will be on your holiday tables?

If you saw yesterday's GreenHouse Thanksgiving photos , and are hungry for more, today I'll give you all the tools to recreate some of those dishes themselves. Of course, I assume you don't need to make 25 servings of each, so I'll pare down the ingredient amounts, but if you do want the full 25 servings versions, just let me know! As with any good menu, this one began with some imagination, lots of internet and cookbook research, and a trip to the farmer's market (in my case, the first indoor winter farmer's market of the season!). Many of the ingredients were from our Dane County Farmer's Market: the sweet potatoes, potatoes, apples, salad greens, cranberries , wheat bread for stuffing, eggs, and carrots. The onions and garlic were from the local farm of the GreenHouse Program Coordinator.  And the rest of the ingredients all came from the Willy St. Co-op . Pretty cool. The full menu: *** GreenHouse Thanksgiving 2011 Sweet Potato Biscuits...

In addition to the delicious Thanksgiving feast I had on the day itself , I got to share a Thanksgiving-style meal with the students at the GreenHouse during the week before the holiday. About eight student chefs joined me--some with lots of cooking experience, some who were just starting out--and we managed to cook a meal for 25 people, with 7 different dishes, in just 3 hours. It was kind of a heroic feat, if I do say so myself. I'll be back tomorrow to share the recipes from the night, but because there were so many beautiful photos, I thought I'd dedicated one post to the images themselves. All of the photos below, except for the fourth and seventh are by Kat Cameron . So here we go: The prep. Making vegetarian gravy, apple pies and vegetarian stuffing: Justin convinced me we had to have green bean casserole, so, for him: Starting to come together! Vegetarian stuffing, green bean casserole prep, gravy, green salad: Mashed potatoes and white beans wi...

Wanna know what my Thanksgiving looked like? It looked like a full plate of delicious food, with brussels sprouts and pretzel rolls and simple stuffing and chunky applesauce, all for me: and like four of my favorite people in the world: But also like the joy of shared food, brought potluck style by different family members, who all took me in and made me feel at home: and like adorable nephews and cousins who run around with joy and share secrets and use their outside voices, but can never actually look at the camera at the same time: And what did your Thanksgiving look like?

http://www.chow.com/blog-media /2011/11/FlowChart.jpg

from digitalgallery.nypl.org My pal AC recently called me his "vegetarian Turkey Day coach"--and I was so happy about this label, that I figured I'd share some of my coaching with you. You see, AC had heard some of the awful things about the way that modern day grocery store turkeys are produced, and he wasn't so happy about the fact that baby turkeys have their upper beaks snipped off, or that in the fourth week turkey chicks are packed into a room with 24-hour-a-day bright light, which disrupts their natural sleep cycles, so that they can be kept awake and force-fed all day long. He wasn't  thrilled about the fact that conventional turkeys are pumped full of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick from the over-crowded conditions, or that they have been bred to have so much white breast meat that they can't stand on their own, and can't reproduce without artificial insemination. (Read more in this recent article: The Truth About Turkey ). B...

UPDATE 10/18/12: Visit my new blog post for more details on how to make a Sriracha costume, and for a downloadable black-and-white image of the Sriracha label.  --- Happy Halloween! Our Halloween weekend has been filled with all kinds of adventures, some of which you'll hear more about later this week, but to celebrate the day itself, I wanted to share the costumes we came up with: Sriracha and Chili Garlic Sauce! These two are the workhorses of our condiment shelf, bringing heat and bright pepper flavor to pretty much everything we eat around here. Sriracha has gotten a lot of love around the web ( nytimes.com , oatmeal.com ) in the last few years, but we've been loving it for a long time now, at least since college when our old buddy RC introduced Justin to the wonders of the green-capped sauce (8 years?). So, what better tribute to that long-lasting love than a Halloween costume? I got the idea from some browsing over at Pinterest , and then scoured the web ...

Ever since I attended a presentation last year about the sustainable and ethical Kallari chocolate , I've been trying to think even more about my chocolate consumption (although I've certainly eaten my [un]fair share of Hershey's and Mars and all the rest, simply because it's so omnipresent).  photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/sykosam/432097056/sizes/m/in/photostream/ But this Halloween season has brought a wave of articles about chocolate candy that make clear just how detrimental our annual tradition of burying kids in candy can be, not only for these kids' dental and bodily health, but for the health of kids who are making this chocolate, whether in cacao plantations or factories. Here are just a few of those articles that are worth checking out: Child Slaves Made Your Halloween Candy. Stop Buying It , from Good Halloween candy is a human rights nightmare , from Grist Hershey Exchange Student Warnings Were Ignored , from the New York Times t...