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I just finished reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It was a good, quick read. One of the quotes I liked from the book is found in the “Eat Food: Food Defined” section.

When you eat from the farmers’ market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious. Eating in season also tends to diversify your diet - because you can’t buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes twelve months of the year, you’ll find yourself experimenting with other foods when they come into the market. The CSA box does an even better job of forcing you out of your dietary rut because you’ll find things in your weekly allotment that you would never buy on your own. Whether it’s a rutabaga or an unfamiliar winter squash, the CSA box’s contents invariably send you to your cookbooks to figure out what in the world to do with them. Cooking is one of the most important health consequences of buying food from local farmers; for one thing, when you cook at home you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated diglycerides or high-fructose corn syrup.

We are almost at our 1 year anniversary of joining our CSA and it has made a a huge difference in how we eat and how we approach food in the grocery store. I actually look at produce based on what is in season and where it is grown now instead of buying on impulse based on what I feel like eating. A few weeks ago, we received pea shoots in our box. I had no idea what to do with them. I looked online and found a really easy recipe and now I look each week with anticipation in my box to see if more pea shoots are included. Tasty!

I saw a video on the New York Times today that was really incredible. If you have time, check out An Angel in Queens. It is about a man who decided to start feeding day laborers from the back of his pick up. His inspiration? He was once an immigrant who landed in New York with nothing as well. He starts cooking in the morning around 5am, goes to his regular job as a bus driver, comes back to finish up the meals, and heads out for distribution at 9:30 every night. And he hasn’t missed a night in 3 years.

I found this wonderful new site tonight called Clean Scores. You can type in any cafe, restaurant, coffee place, etc. and find out their health inspection record history. This is brilliant. For an anti-germ person like me, I crossed my fingers and put in my favorite bites in SF and found out that the lowest score for my favorite places is a 90 for my favorite Indian buffet - so, it’s not as bad as it could be. The website is currently only for SF places of business, but it says that it is “coming soon to all metropolitan areas”. Stay tuned. And…get online before you make reservations.

I was looking for a recipe for a family celebration and this is what I found in the pages of Cooking Light. The recipe appealed to me as it is very low maintence when you are planning a dinner for approximately 20 people. You can just stick the sweet potatoes in the oven and forget about them while you get the other menu items coordinated. Then, when the sweet potatoes are almost done, you can quickly throw together the ingredients for the sauce (or if you are very organized, you could even make it in advance and just heat up before serving). The complete recipe is below:

• 6 medium sweet potatoes (about 3 pounds)
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 1/3 cup finely chopped onion
• 1 tablespoon grated peeled fresh ginger
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper
• 3/4 cup water
• 3/4 cup tomato sauce
• 1/4 cup peanut butter
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Pierce potatoes with a fork, and bake at 375 for one hour or until tender.
3. Heat oil in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add onion, ginger, and garlic, cook 3 minutes. Add cumin, coriander, and pepper; cook 1 minute. Add 3/4 cup water and next 4 ingredients (through salt), stirring until smooth. Bring to a simmer. Cook 2 minutes or until thick.
4. Split potatoes lengthwise. Spoon about 1/4 cup sauce into each potato. Top each serving with 1 teaspoon cilantro.

I just ran out of cumin, so I made this recipe without it and it still tasted great. I did add extra red pepper, but maybe if I had the cumin in the recipe, I would not have needed to add it. Also, I omitted the sugar since my peanut butter had more than enough sugar already in it. Maybe if you were using the all-natural peanut butter from Trader Joe’s you would need a little extra sweetening. This was just my test run, so I will use all these new tips when I make the recipe next weekend. Enjoy.

The organic trend in America is growing stronger. This became vastly apparent to many consumers when Wal-Mart announced that it would see more organic products on its shelves due to growing demand. The press release sparked a debate to define the term “organic” and the sustainable food movement in general.

As a vegetarian, I look for ripe, tasty fruits and vegetables. However, I did not put much thought into where my fruits and vegetables came from or how they were grown until I met my husband. His family is very educated about organic produce and have been teaching me about the benefits of purchasing organic food that has been grown in a sustainable environment.

Recently, we went to a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in Mendocino called The Ravens. I was so inspired by my entree that I purchased their cookbook. Chapter 8 of the cookbook begins with a vegetable stock recipe. It reads:

We begin this section with our vegetable stock, which is used as a base in many of the following soups. Be sure to use organic ingredients; any of the vegetables can hold traces of pesticides and herbicides, especially carrots and celery.

Yikes! That is a scary thought. Here you are in the kitchen with an array of succulent vegetables, making soup, completely ignorant to the fact that you are adding pesticides and herbicides as additional ingredients.

Since I recently found out that Pepsi and Coke products in India contained too many pesticides, I have been wondering how many other products I consume that contain harmful silent, deadly ingredients.

Of course, buying all organic ingredients also comes with a price, so I was wondering which items give you more bang for the buck, so to speak, when it comes to buying organic. I read in my current issue of Cooking Light, that there is a pesticides report card online at FoodNews.org (they have since taken down the web page, so it is a good thing that I saved the lists last week!). See below.

These lists are a good thing to keep in mind when you are choosing items in the produce section. I also was wondering if washing fruits and vegetables made a difference in the organic produce debate. FoodNews anticipated my question. According to FoodNews:

What about washing?

Washing will not change the rank of the fruits and vegetables in the Guide. That’s because nearly all of the data used to create these lists comes from the USDA Pesticide Data Program (PDP) where the foods are washed and prepared for normal consumption prior to testing for pesticides (apples are washed and cored, bananas are peeled, etc.).

While washing fresh produce may help reduce pesticide residues, it clearly does not eliminate them. Nonetheless, produce should be washed before it is eaten because washing does reduce levels of some pesticides. However, other pesticides are taken up internally into the plant, are in the fruit, and cannot be washed off. Others are formulated to bind to the surface of the crop and do not easily wash off. Peeling reduces exposures, but valuable nutrients often go down the drain with the peel.

Hmmmm….food for thought. We will see how successful I will be at buying more organic fruit and vegetables and how that ultimately affects the bottom line. So far, so good. Today I went to Trader Joes and was looking for sweet potatoes. They did not have organic sweet potatoes, so I compromised and purchased organic yams instead. It will take a little ingenuity, but I think this will work.