Saturday, October 8, 2011

Sadly Skipped September

Who knows what we were thinking when we assigned September - the first full month of school and seriously cold weather - to be raw food month. You just don't want frozen raw cheesecake or a salad when it's forty degrees outside and you've had to go through the entire day at school without warm food. (Actually I take that back - frozen raw cheesecake is just too good to not want.) And you also don't have time to make raw stuff when you don't get home until 6:45 every night starving and still with a ton of homework. That's just the way of things....

So, unfortunately - tragically - we've had to skip September as a raw food month. We still made a lot of really good food - Radical Raspberry made dinner almost every night for a very grateful Magnificent Mango, both of whom did a very good job at packing healthy lunches for themselves everyday. And we finally have the best-est ever apples from Peifer (an orchard on the edge of Yellow Springs)! Other things we ate: a good number of creative and soothing soups, most of which used the many green tomatoes from our garden, beans (of course), rice pasta and homemade pesto with garden basil (Raspberry picked a whole basket of it to save it from the frost), and some really pretty striped squash. Mango also made some (vegan) chocolate chip cookies for play rehearsal (since it was the director's birthday) with less sugar and replacing half of the butter with banana; those were a big hit.

In short, we're always on a family food adventure, even if we don't follow the schedule. But October is Indian Food Month, which sounds much more appealing in this cold weather than raw food! So let's spice it up!

Notes:
Despite the fact that Stunning Sauerkraut posted his blog post significantly late, no punishments were administered due to the fact that Mango was being lenient since it was the first month (a word which she wrote on the kitchen calendar board because she kept wanting to tell him she was being lenient when she reminded him to write it, but couldn't remember the word); and also because Mango sort of neglected to actually write a punishment for late blog posts.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Package foods go away

Packaged Foods Go Away

Nuts have shells. Corn has husks. Grapes have skins (and so do we humans). Oh, potatoes have skins that we peel. Watermelons have rinds …which we compost, throw away, grind up in the garbage disposer or pickle and eat. Milk, in its natural form does not have a package, so we package it in order to reap its benefits. Honey comes in a comb or a hive or a cute plastic honey bear. Hershey Bars, which are representaive of a food group called chocolate come in aluminum and colorized pigmented, chemically treated paper wrappings. Um! Now, we’re getting somewhere . Can we eat, pickle, compost, burn what Hershey Bars are wrapped in? How about pickled Hershey Bar wrapper paper? What about potato chips, Oreos, Moosetracks ice-cream, natural frozen orange juice from 3,000 miles away, Nutri-bars, protein powder and McDonald’s wrappings and packages and holders? We throw them away. Where is “away”?

by Saul