Okay, a few weeks ago I linked to an EcoSalon article about the “proven” link between corn syrup and obesity…

Umm…it looks like someone published a bogus article with bogus research, and it looks like maybe it wasn’t exactly accurate.

So here’s a link to the retracted versions on Grist, and on EcoSalon.

I still don’t drink the stuff.

The other night, in honor of my finally getting to watch Julie and Julia, I made Coq au Vin for dinner–which is fancy-French for “Chicken in wine sauce.”  It was so remarkably easy that I’m going to record the recipe here; at least I’ll be able to find it in the future, and maybe someone else will desire to give it a try.

This, by the way, is ridiculously far from the Julia Child version, which involves browning baby onions and sauteeing mushrooms separately and using lots of butter and a dutch oven and several hours.  But it’s very tasty, and took maybe 35 minutes start to finish, which is for me a “special occasion” meal.

I also suspect that a vegperson could honestly simply omit the chicken and have a really lovely shrooms-and-onions-in-wine-gravy-over-rice-or-noodles kind of thing.

So here’s what I did:

Busy Mom’s Coq au Vin

• (Put on your noodle or rice water…by the time that’s done, so will dinner be)
• heat a few tbs. olive oil (or butter, if you’re Julia) in a skillet. (Cast iron is awesome for this!) (If you use non-stick pans things won’t brown as well, and you need to not heat the pan by itself without oil or stuff in it or it can give off toxic fumes.)
• Dredge two chicken breasts in flour; brown in the hot oil for a few minutes on each side. (The pan should be pretty hot before you put them in; let them cook unmoved on each side till they begin to brown; keeps the juices in.) (Mine were organic and free range, and I swear they taste ten times better than the other kind. So worth the extra cost, safety and humane-treatment-ness aside.) If you’re in a big hurry, cut the chicken into bite-size pieces before browning.
• When chicken is browned, remove to a plate.
• Cut up one onion into half-rings or quarters whatever shape/size you prefer; saute in the oil
• Throw in a few cloves of mashed or minced garlic (in my case, from a jar, because I’m lazy) and saute with onion
• Before the garlic and onions burn, which they tend to do for me, toss in half a pound or so small button mushrooms or larger ones cut in half; I used cremini, which has a richer flavor.  (Increase shrooms if you’re skipping the meat.)
• Splash in a little wine and scrape up any stuck chicken or onion or flour bits off the pan; this intensifies flavor and makes the pan much easier to clean.  Stir in a tablespoon or so of tomato paste (optional, or you could probably do a little pasta sauce or whatever tomato-based thing you have kicking around.  I like the tomato paste in a tube; it keeps forever and you don’t have to use it all at once like with a can.  Plus it tastes better.).
• When shrooms are basically cooked, put chicken back into the pan, if using.  Add about half a cup of wine, a cup of broth (chicken broth if you’re using chicken; veggie or mushroom broth if you’re skipping the meat).  Add 1/2-1 tsp thyme, half a bay leaf, a little salt and pepper.
• Cover and simmer on low heat till chicken is just cooked through (maybe another ten minutes, fifteen if your pieces are thick); then take cover off, raise heat a little, and let the liquid cook down.
• Serve over rice or noodles, or potatoes I guess would be nice too.

This was a lovely Friday night dinner, one which merited opening a bottle of better than adequate red wine.

Bon Appetit!

Look what I bought!

Secondhand on ebay for cheap; this spring and summer I won’t have to do two pints at a time while being amazingly careful of my non-stick-coated soup pan…I can do quarts now.  Seven of them. At once.

It’s got a little chip, and a little water staining on the wire rack.  So it’s not perfect.  But it’s perfectly good.  And it’s mine.   This summer it’ll be red sauce…and in the fall, enough applesauce to get us through the winter…

I’m happy.

For the past couple of months I have been a regular poster–once every 2 weeks and then a “Superhero Secrets” posting once a month–over at The Green Phone Booth, which is awesome and fun…Today I have a post up there where I lay out what my favorite go-to cookbooks are (many are vegetarian or mostly so, which is a really good way to learn to cook even if one has meat every so often–they have been a huge education in the concept that “no meat does not equal boring.”)

Then I ask others to post their favorite go-to cookbooks in the comments–so come on over, check it out, and if you have any other cookbooks you love, leave a message at the beep!

Huge thanks to Green Bean for this: the Lazy Manifesto: Do Less; Then Do Even Less.

I am a firm believer in the virtues of laziness.  Not the “sloth” kind of laziness that doesn’t care if it does anything of any worth at all, but the laziness that weighs the value of what effort we put into the something and decides if, realistically, it’s worth said effort.

As I’ve often said, efficiency is nothing more than the marriage of perfectionism and laziness.  A deep desire to combine best possible result with least effort expended to acquire it.

I tend to take a similar approach to my green efforts–I’d like to be as green as possible, but to be honest, I’m loath to work too hard at it.  And I refuse to yield to the siren call of Mommymartyrdom, you know, that impulse many of us have to Sacrifice All For The Good Of Others, because That’s What Good Mommies Do?  Hate that.

I’m a firm believer that life should be fun, enjoyable–not because I’m selfish and immature and refuse to grow up and face the music, but because I have a deep conviction that when we’re living our lives well and in the direction we’re sort of Meant to, we will naturally find joy.  The idea that we don’t have to Do More, in fact that we do need to Do Less, in order to find our lives filling up with more and more of the life-giving stuff and sweeping away the energy-suckage stuff, is one that makes really good sense to me.

So I’m going to take a nap.

Funny this should come up a few days after my friend on The Green Phone Booth got a thorough dressing down from some particularly “compassionate” vegans about her decision to not be a complete vegetarian any longer…

Okay, so Saturday my husband goes to the allergist.  He’s been having some sort of odd rashes and stuff, and lots of snuffliness in his nose, and started wondering if he might have any food allergies (he’s already allergic to practically everything else).

This is the husband who, if you recall, would love to be a carnivore but not enough to actually cook on a regular basis, so I’ve managed to get us to a point where meat is a comparatively infrequent dinner guest–maybe once or twice a week.   He’s resigned to When Jenn Cooks, Probably No Meat. To do so I’ve relied heavily on grains and legumes and stuff, since he also doesn’t much like cheese.

So he brings home the list, and what’s he allergic to?

Beans. Peanuts. Almonds and most other tree nuts. Soy. Rye. I think that’s about it.  He’s supposed to stay off of them all for 2 months, to see if it changes the way he feels at all.

I’m in a slight panic…on the one hand, it sort of feels like we’ve been handed this “get out of veggieguilt free” card, because without beans or nuts where the heck is he supposed to get his protein? We can only eat so many eggs, and he doesn’t like cheese. Except on pizza. On the other hand, I don’t think I WANT a get out of veggieguilt free card, because veggieguilt is only the smaller part of my leanings in that direction–meatscariness is the other, since it’s increasingly difficult to get non-scary meat these days.

I can still eat beans.  My kids don’t love meat so much anyway, though they eat a little of it sometimes.   But this puts a new spin on the family dinner.

Anyone got any great recipes to share? Non-legume-non-cheese-non-nut-high-protein-vegetarian dishes? Or is this Real Man going to have to learn to eat quiche?

This could be a challenge.

Okay, so the mission continues…for the past week and a half I’ve managed breakfast every day.  Most days it’s been oatmeal in various permutations, which I like but which is getting a little old no matter how much variety I attempt to introduce.  Once it was a piece of whole grain zucchini bread, good but too much sugar and not enough stick-to-the-guts-ness so I was hungry an hour later, and once (sigh) it was an egg-and-cheese wrap from Dunkin Donuts (Give me a break, it was a Sunday when I had to play the 7:30 service, and I’m so not a morning person…the one day every 3 weeks or so when this happens I do allow myself the drive-through. ), but every other day it’s been oatmeal.  The box emptied yesterday morning.

So yesterday I’m shopping for more, and I ran across the whole Bob’s Red Mill section of the cereal stuffs.   My immediate attention had been caught by the “on sale” sign for the multigrain hot cereal, a pound for $1.99.  Right next to it was a pound of Bob’s “Muesli” for $3.69. They looked fairly similar, except that the muesli had some fruit and nuts and seeds and stuff in it too.

My husband really likes muesli.  I have tended to shy away from it simply because it seems to cost so much more than ordinary grain cereal, and isn’t THAT much better, at least to me.  But I bought this stuff because, you know, breakfast mission and research and stuff.  (The blog becomes a rationalization for so many things…:-)

Had some this morning.  Rarity of rarities, I found it too sweet–I soaked it overnight in milk like the package suggested (1 part cereal to 2 parts milk), and I think the dates (dates are almost pure sugar, you know) just gave up too much and the milk was crazy sweet. Soaking it for less time, or making it hot, might help this.

(Did you know that in ancient world in the Middle East dates were the primary source of all sugars–still might be, actually–and that in the Bible when it talks about a land flowing with “milk and honey” the honey it’s referring to is probably date syrup?)

On the other hand, making my own might help more.  Because essentially, as far as I can see, “muesli” is German for “granola you didn’t bother to bake.” This was a major light bulb moment for me.  Because baking granola, as yummy as it is, introduces a lot of oil into the mixture and also is just an extra step and more work.  So I’m going to start making my own muesli, to see if it’s another way I can fit a healthy whole grain breakfast into my life without being more stressed or losing any sleep. (My mission parameters are fairly clearly stated, and the speedy-quick is a big one.) Putting cereal and juice/milk/whatever into a bowl in the fridge before bed and just pulling it out to eat the next day sounds like an incredibly easy thing to do, so let’s see how that goes. (And I guess I can always heat it up if I want a hot breakfast.)

So I looked up a few sites with muesli recipes (here and here , for example, but there are lots more)…and this is what it boils down to

Infinitely Varied And Substitutionny Cold Muesli Recipe

• whole grain, 1/4 to 1/2 cup per serving. This can be rolled oats, wheat, rye barley, or one of the “multigrain hot cereal” mixes that are easy to find and cost about the same as old fashioned rolled oats. (Stay away from steel cut oats for this; they are a different story, delicious but require a time commitment to actually cook!) Some recipe sites suggested using pre-made corn flakes, wheat flakes, whatever…but that sounds like cheating to me.
• dried fruit/raw nuts, almost any kind you like.  Anywhere from half as much fruit-and-nut as grains on up to equal parts of each, but remember that the fruits and nuts will up the calorie content significantly and too much might, er, mitigate some of the Advantageous Digestive Benefits Of Eating Nice Whole Grain Breakfasts. (You know what I’m sayin’–too much fruit will take it one way, too many nuts the other.) They also cost more.  But the bottom line is, don’t bother dirtying a measuring cup for this–just toss a little in till it looks right.
• liquid: fruit juice, yogurt, or milk.  Twice as much liquid as solids, basically.  If you used a total of about 1/2 cup grains, use a cup of liquid.  This is where the real variety might begin–I even found one recipe calling for dried cranberries and almonds as the fruits-and-nuts, with cranberry juice as the liquid.  It was sort of funny looking, bright bright red, but it might taste really nice.
• If desired, fresh fruit (a banana, a chopped apple, fresh or frozen berried) could be tossed in too.  As much as you want, I guess–who needs recipes?

Mix together in a bowl before bed; chill in the fridge overnight.  Pull it out in the morning and chow down.  Quick, easy, yummy. Leaves plenty of time to make coffee and children’s lunches.

I think you can use this identical recipe and toss it into the microwave for 3 minutes, and you have hot cereal…

My friends tell me I must be the only woman in the greater Chicago area, or possibly the Western world, who has just about zero interest in shoe shopping.

It may partially be because I have really big feet, and the makers of shoes seem to have done extensive market testing which proves that a) women with big feet, who also tend to be tall (because of the whole, you know, proportionality thing), must want 4 inch heels all the time to make them even taller and b) women with big feet must have this deep desire for really ugly shoes.  Seriously.  Go look in a shoe store at the bigger sizes–they are almost always just ridiculously ugly.  So having no desire to be 6′2″ with ugly shoes, shoe shopping for me has devolved to something below bra shopping and only a shade better than trying to buy a swimsuit.

I absolutely can’t stand getting involved in games of “greener-than-thou” (for one thing, I’d almost always lose, though that’s not the reason)–but there’s something about getting my first pair of sustainable shoes, secondhand on ebay, that enables a small amount of smugness.

(Would have been even more sustainable if they hadn’t had to ship, I guess.  I’ll work on that.)

That is a photo of my new-to-me Eco-Sneaks, made by SimpleShoes.  They are made out of cotton, hemp, and recycled inner tubes and car tires.  And they are cute.  And comfy.  Love them. (Others should be warned that these are not your faboo-super-foot-support kinds of gym shoes; no arch support to speak of, although the insoles are nicely cushioned–these are several steps up from the cheesy white lace-ups we used to get at Kmart when we still shopped there.  But I have flat feet, so the lack of arch support doesn’t bother me. One could probably find a supportive insole if one wanted…) And now I know that the Eco-Sneaks sizing system works for my feet, which is even more important–I got these shoes for what I’d probably pay in shipping if I bought a new pair and then had to return them because they didn’t fit. And now I know if I do choose to invest in a new pair of SimpleShoes that at least they’ll fit when they arrive. (They do have sales sometimes…)

I won’t get to wear these much till spring, unfortunately.   But I have a feeling once everything thaws out and all, I’ll practically live in these things.  They’re cute enough that I can wear them to work with skirts, and comfy enough that I can go for walks in them.

Love. These. Shoes.

Last week was rough.  There were several deaths and illnesses in our circles of friends and colleagues, and a lot of anxiety and sadness and worry all around.  And I had to professionally sort of hold it together through everything, which was a challenge…

So I indulged in a lot of creative Baking Therapy.  I don’t know why this works for me, but whenever I need to get grounded and find my emotional balance and self-identity again, baking is one of the best things for me. Which is weird, because normally I’m not a baker–I love to cook, but baking is something I don’t immediately gravitate to…just for therapy, I guess.

I still had some little half-cups of frozen pumpkin puree in the freezer (when I baked my pumpkin in the fall and pureed the flesh, I put half-cup portions into a muffin tin and froze it.  Then I could pop the little pumpkin bits out and have pre-measured puree.  Next year I need to do a lot more of it!), so I went looking for the perfect pumpkin snack cake recipe.  This one (again, heavily tweaked by moi) seemed to fit the bill:

Pumpkin Gingerbread:

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup powdered milk (could omit and use 3 cups sugar, but it’s too sweet for me that way!)
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup applesauce (could omit the oil and just do a whole cup of applesauce, but I went crazy this time, I guess:-)
• 4 eggs
• 2/3 cup orange juice
• 1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree (or two cups)
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Mix sugar, powdered milk, oil if using, and applesauce until smooth.  Beat in eggs.  Add orange juice and pumpkin, mix well till very smooth.

Combine and mix all dry ingredients well; gently fold into wet ingredients and mix just till blended.

Pour into 2 loaf pans or 1 bundt pan; bake at 325 for about an hour or until top springs back when touched and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

******

This was a seriously good cake–it was flavorful but not too sweet, moist, and just all-around delicious.  A big-time keeper.

I also made another round of my zucchini bread, which the kids love, and of course another big batch of my artisan bread dough. (We’re having pizza tonight.)

A few days ago I posted a link to the Monumentally Stupidly Ridiculous article in The Atlantic detailing why school gardens will mean the end of society as we know it.  I ranted a little bit, too.

Fortunately, other bloggers with clearer heads posted their own rebuttals:

Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore details how many other “subjects” children touch on while gardening. (This is my favorite.)

Tom Philpott over at Grist also takes a good look at school gardens and tries to offer a balanced and rant-free critique of the original article.

And Kurt Michael Frieze, also of Grist, offers a critique that is far more pointed, also worth a read.

Then there’s the one you’ll find here, which has links to a bunch of others…

I still can’t believe The Atlantic published anything this ridiculous.