Why a food blog entry on a children’s movie? I just read this article on Slate and thought readers might be interested. It’s subtitled “This Robot Hates Fat People: What Wall-E gets wrong about obesity and the environment.“
I’d be curious what other people think–but be sure to give the research a good look before you draw any final conclusions.
Sarah and I always have coffee in the morning, but the weather right now is not very amenable to warm beverages. We’ve been drinking iced mochas every morning these days, and I can’t seem to make enough. The recipes below are easily doubled or halved.
Iced Mocha
3 1/2 cups fresh brewed strong coffee, preferably medium-dark roast1/4 cup cocoa powder1/3 cup sugarpinch salt1/2 cup half and half1/4 t. vanilla (optional)
Combine half of the coffee along with cocoa, sugar and salt in a small saucepan. Heat and boil for 30 seconds, whisking constantly. Remove from heat and add to remainaining coffee along with half and half. Cool (in an ice bath if desired) and add optional vanilla.
Chill and serve over ice. Shake well before serving.
Makes one quart.
Iced Chocolate
Subsitute water for the coffee, increase cocoa to 1/3 cup, and decrease sugar to 1/4 cup.
Neither of these are nearly as sweet or rich as what … continue reading
I recently made two yummy fruit confections from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop. The black raspberry sherbet (using fruit from the North Union Farmers Market) had a wonderfully intense flavor–you wouldn’t even know there was milk in it. And the strawberry sorbet had a very fresh flavor and an especially good mouthfeel. The strawberry sorbet recipe can be found here, and the raspberry sherbet recipe is here.… continue reading
I took a class at the Loretta Paganini School of Cooking last week with award-winning chef Peter Reinhart. The focus was whole grain breads. Most people, as Reinhart pointed out, know very well that whole grains are good for them, but they’ve also discovered that they often taste bitter and not nearly as good as, say, a fresh baked Italian bread. To quote page one of his newest book, we will only eat whole grain breads “if they taste very, very good.” The class delivered on this promise.
Reinhart’s emphasis is on pulling out the flavor hidden in whole grains, which includes converting some of the starches to sugars. Reinhart’s technique is to make two pre-doughs and combine them after a day or so of flavor development. He called this “the epoxy method,” because, like epoxy glue, two substances that are relatively inert on their own combine to make something much more … continue reading
