Blogs : CHOW Pick
CHOW Pick Our favorite products, gadgets, restaurants, bars, wine, beer, and food websites and blogs.
Freedom Is Just Another Word for Control
Recently I decided to give up drinking alcohol and excessive amounts of vending machine coffee for two weeks, so I could actually sleep through the night and not feel like a bloated zombie all the time. I picked up a new book, Freedom in Your Relationship with Food: An Everyday Guide by Myra Lewin. The author is a yoga teacher and Ayurvedic consultant in Hawaii, and she writes about how to break old patterns of emotional overeating of unhealthy foods, and establish conscious control over what you put in your body. I learned some great tips I’ve been putting to use:
• Don’t eat more than you can hold in your two hands at any one time.
• Wait at least two hours in between snacks or meals before eating again, to give your last round of food a chance to digest.
•Breathe, chew your food well, don’t eat too fast. Slow down.
• Don’t eat when you’re angry or upset, even if it means missing a meal.
In the back of the book are some great healthy recipes, some of which are Indian-inspired. One, Roots and Greens, is exactly what I always want to eat: Indian spices, kale, a little ghee, and shredded carrots and beets. I wish Lewin would do an entire cookbook!
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Tagged with: pick, food and cooking, freedom in your relationship with food, myra lewin, health, eating patterns
The Little House Cookbook
If you’re not hungry when you start reading one of the Little House books, you soon will be. Author Laura Ingalls Wilder loved to eat, and when she turns her attention to the table, she describes her family’s simple pioneer fare so evocatively that it’s a surprise each page isn’t dotted with drool. Butter is churned, meat is smoked, maple sap is boiled into syrup—it’s not that you’d want to rustle up a farmhouse breakfast yourself (it starts with chopping wood!), but you wish you could taste just one bite.
And thanks to The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories, you can. Author Barbara Walker started trying to work out some of Wilder’s recipes when she began reading the Little House series to her own children. First she tried making pancake men, then sourdough starter, then drying blackberries, by which time the whole family was obsessed. Several years and many tinkering sessions later, The Little House Cookbook was born.
Studded with text and images from the stories and historical background on pioneer food, The Little House Cookbook does readers a service by adapting Wilder’s cooking methods to modern times. You use a jar to make butter instead of a wooden churn; bread rises in a turned-off oven rather than on top of a wood cookstove. Methods are simple and straightforward, and many recipes are so easy to make that even a small child can help out in the kitchen. I can’t think of a better way to encourage kid-on-book love than to make the molasses-on-snow candy described in Little House in the Big Woods.
The Little House Cookbook, $9.99
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Ceramic Greek Coffee Cup
Back before there was a Starbucks on every corner, practically every diner in Manhattan served coffee in small blue-and-white paper cups decorated with the legend “We Are Happy to Serve You.” (Really? Somebody should tell the guy behind the cash register that.) Now that everyone buys gigantor $7 cups of caramel crappucino with sissy jackets and sippy cup lids, the little cups aren’t quite so ubiquitous. Except at my house, where I drink my drip coffee from the Ceramic Greek Coffee Cup, a fancy breakable version of the classic.
The Ceramic Greek Coffee Cup is pleasantly heavy in the hand and sized just right if you want a cup of coffee, that is, an 8-ounce serving with maybe a little bit of cream. No room for steamed milk or caramel syrup, sorry. If you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, why’dja ask for coffee?
Ceramic Greek Coffee Cup, $12.
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How to Craft with Peeps Candies
I love Peeps, so naturally I loved the idea behind the book Peeps: Recipes and Crafts to Make with Your Favorite Marshmallow Treat. It has 24 easy-looking projects, from place-card holders to wedding-cake toppers. Apparently there is also a Peeps CD with 14 tunes on it if you are looking for something to listen to while you’re crafting with candy. And if your project goes awry, you can always microwave it. (For the more ambitious Peeps crafters, there’s also the Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest.)
Peeps: Recipes and Crafts to Make with Your Favorite Marshmallow Treat, $12.95
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Surprisingly Sweet Lemons
While filling up on my requisite Asian pear supply last weekend at the farmers’ market I noticed a pile of round, squat citrus fruit that looked like mandarin oranges in lemons’ clothing. “Sweet lemon,” said the vendor, noticing my inquisitive stare. “Meyer lemon?” I asked, not sure I understood him correctly, “No, sweet lemon,” he replied. He sliced a thin wedge and handed it to me. I don’t know if it’s a hybrid or what, but it was floral and juicy like freshly squeezed lemonade—sweet, with a sassy wink of acidity.
Chowhounds have called the fruit insipid and flavorless, but I disagree. I was so enthusiastic about my find that I immediately bought way more than my husband and I could possibly eat in a week. The fruit has the firm, tightly packed texture of a lemon, making it ideal for eating out of hand, but it would also work in any application where sweet citrus is called for: tossed in a salad, squeezed into cocktails, or cooked down with some rhubarb and spooned over ice cream.
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Tagged with: pick, food and cooking, lemon, citrus, sweet lemon, sweetlemon
Your New Kitchen Tool Has a Motherboard
The maker of the new Touch Book, a miniature netbook-style laptop, says it boasts many attractive features: affordable price, very portable dimensions, excellent battery life, and “always on” instant start-up. So far, impressively techie. But why are we talking about it here?
Well, this little laptop has a secret: You can detach the keyboard to create an even smaller, screen-only tablet PC that is controlled via touchscreen technology. Better still, the designers have made the display half of the device magnetic, which means that you can stick it to the fridge while you’re using it. So now you’ll be able to browse CHOW for recipes and ideas in the kitchen without losing valuable counter space or risk spilling stuff on your computer.
Touch Book, $299 (screen only) or $399 with keyboard, available for preorder now and due to start shipping in May or June
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Tagged with: pick, touch book, laptop, recipes, tool, netbook, magnetic, kitchen tool, computer
