oyster happy hour

for those of you in dc, let me recommend oyster happy hour at sea catch. dollar oysters, half-price glasses of wine under $9 and a view of the canal. ahhh…

(vegan? no problem! oysters are apparently allowed.)

vending machine meals

in case you’re ever stuck at work and starving… the washington post’s food critic, tom sietsema, reviews a few vending machine dinners.

too stupid to cook?

here is an excerpt from a post that i thought hit the nail on it’s little head. in fact, i think this lays out – better than i have been able to – the reason why i write this blog:

i don’t want you to think that cooking is rocket science. you are not too stupid to cook.

carol was behind me all the way and said, “no, you’re right. the book is good. americans are being taught we’re too stupid to cook and it’s simply not true.”

that one sentence crystallized the issue for me, turned my frustration from a wall into a lens. americans are being taught that we’re too stupid to cook. that cooking is so hard we need to let other people do it for us. the messages are everywhere. boxed cake mix. why is it there? because a real cake is too hard! you can’t bake a cake! takes too long, you can’t do it, you’re gonna fail!

look at all those rotisserie chickens stacked in the warming bin at the grocery store. why? because roasting a chicken is too hard, takes forever. an hour. i don’t have an hour to watch a chicken cook!

companies that make microwaveable dinners have spent countless r&d dollars to transform dishes that used to take 7 minutes in the microwave into ones that take 3 minutes. “hey, marge, that’s four minutes of extra teevee we can watch!”

in practically every single cookbook produced today, the message is, buy this book because we show you easy things to make fast. only takes a second. whether it’s rachael’s 30-minute meals or the quick-and-easy columns in the food magazines. that’s all we hear. real cooking is hard and difficult so here are the nifty shortcuts and tips to make all that hard stuff quickly and easily.

favorite food blogs

somebody gave me a blog award this morning, and the rule is that now i have to pass it along. so, here are a few of my favorites:

big girls small kitchen: a guide to quarter-life cooking

tart reform (she’s a law student and she bakes. GET IT?!)

the cooking of joy – we were cooking all the same things for awhile there…

macheesmo: learning to be confident in the kitchen (his no-knead bread recipe rocks my world)

and of course, tastespotting: a community driven visual potluck. my only beef with them is they hate everything i submit!

what food blogs do you read regularly?

designer doughnuts

forget about cupcakes, forget about whoppie pies. according to the la times, designer doughnuts are the newest, hottest, tastiest thing.

credit: la times

wine drinking tips

wine-drinking tips from the washington post’s food critic, tom sietsema.

food labeling information

i had always known that food labeling is deceptive, so this post from macheesmo didn’t come as too much of a shock.

it’s pretty disgusting, though, and makes me want to run off to the country and grow all my own food.

gifts for cooks!

check out this great list of 21 stocking stuffers for cooks over at macheesmo.

i’m lucky enough to have many of these already, but i gotta say, a silpat would change my life and save a lot of trees because of how much parchment paper i use instead…! * hint hint *

depression link to processed food

“eating a diet high in processed food increases the risk of depression, research suggests.”

read more…

halloween goodies

i didn’t make or cook anything halloween-y this year (other than eat almost an entire bag of candy corn…), but if you need some tips, head over to macheesmo for candy corn cosmos, bloody worms of doom and mozzarella eyeballs.

boo!