school lunches and gubmint cheeze

Posted on May 23, 2013 by foodmeonce

I don’t know about where you live, but in Pittsburgh (and Pennsylvania in general), the school districts and the local governments are completely separate animals. Which, when you think about it, sometimes makes sense, and sometimes doesn’t. Since I’ve been working in and around government for over a decade, this is second nature to me, but I recently had a convo with my friend Leah about local governments vs. school districts and realized that’s not always the case.

In that instance, we were debating the sway that the city’s next mayor could have over school lunches. Leah’s op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (scroll to the bottom, she’s there, I swear!) last week called for the new mayor to advocate for better school food in Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS). She’d initially called for the new mayor to change the school food system, until I reminded her that the city and the school district are two entirely different entities.

Thankfully, Tuesday’s mayoral primary makes it pretty darn clear that Bill Peduto will be the city’s next mayor (don’t get me started on the current one). Peduto’s been running for mayor since 2005, and has a huge, well-thought-out list of 100 different things he’ll work on once he’s mayor. Two of his points directly impact the schools/school lunch conversation: #36, Working Together to Improve Public Education, and #26, Get Fresh Pittsburgh: Providing Neighborhood Access to Fresh, Healthy Food. Peduto specifically advocates starting #26 in our schools.

While separate entities, the district needs to recognize the value in working with the city on improving the schools, both overall and with respect to the food in the schools.

Technically, the mayor has no sway. But he can certainly advocate for change because the district’s decisions impact the economic development opportunities for the city as a whole. Imagine if the city could tout truly healthy school lunches as part of a broader healthy child curriculum and an economic development opportunity. Wouldn’t that position Pittsburgh as a more well-rounded green, sustainable, healthy place to attract new investment and jobs? It seems that it would position the city to be even more attractive to workers with families. And don’t forget workforce training – it’s well-documented that the quality of food directly impacts the ability of children to learn. If we’re going to have a good future workforce, we need to raise them well. Crap food makes unhealthy kids.

So congratulations to Peduto – and help him make these two, and all 100 bullet points, happen for the city. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

do your kids cook?

Posted on March 22, 2013 by foodmeonce

It’s never occurred to me not to encourage my kids to help in the kitchen. It’s fun, we get to spend time together, they learn how to cook and what goes into our food, it’s a no brainer. Yes, sometimes they eat more raw cookie dough than I’d like, but that’s not the end of the world.

My most reliable helper. She also makes a mean PB&J.

Which is why I was so flummoxed recently when asked about what healthy foods elementary-age kids could manage on their own. Turns out the questioner is trying to help their favorite seven year old friend make smart choices when sent to the kitchen by a parent who has no interest in cooking. None. Like yogurt is a viable dinner. Every once in a while, I get a reminder that not everyone lives in my foodie bubble….

Here’s what we came up with so far (mostly on the fly). We would love suggestions from others whose kids have shown interest in kitchen independence!

I would think anything that doesn’t involve the stove or a sharp knife would be fine. So yes to cereal and breakfast bars (cereal as long as the milk is low enough in the fridge and not too heavy). A bowl of fresh fruit, bag of baby carrots with some hummus or other dip, chips and salsa, pretzels, string cheese, yogurt, that kind of thing. If there is access to a microwave and is comfortable with using it independently, microwave mac and cheese or lean cuisine-type prefab meals could work. Basic things on the stove could work in a year or so, maybe rice or noodles, spaghetti with a jar of sauce or some pre-chopped stir fried veggies with a simmer sauce and boneless chicken?

these are the people in my neighborhood

Posted on February 28, 2013 by foodmeonce

I bought my husband a book recently, and didn’t think much about it at the time. An old college friend of his had written it, and I was excited to support Matt’s endeavors and surprise my husband at the same time. And, of course, it didn’t hurt that the old friend is a chef, and the book he’d written was a cookbook (and a good-looking one at that). After Super Bowl Sunday (and making Matt’s great wings and blue cheese sauce), a thought clicked in my head.

Trying to get back to sourcing my food locally – away from processed food, away from GMOs and frankenfoods, closer to a more local system – automatically linked me in to a local foods community. Part of this has always been obvious to me, I know the ‘know your farmer!’ mantra well. But it didn’t really occur to me how plugged in we have become. Not only do we buy from farmers at local markets (both seasonal and year-round ones), we frequent locally-owned restaurants, we buy locally made bread, etc. etc. etc. Now we also plug into cookbooks and recipes written by people we know. So my kids think it’s normal to talk to the person who owns the restaurant, to get a hug from the coffee shop owner, to know the guy on the tv teaching the host how to cook, to have met the chickens who laid the eggs we’re eating. They’re learning to expect a certain standard of food, both in quality and preparation, at home and when we go out.

The European horse meat scandal drove this home to me – especially since so many responses to it have been ‘what’s the big deal?’ Either people are so used to not knowing what’s in their food, not used to reading labels, or not caring what they ingest, that they don’t seem to think it’s a problem that what is labeled at beef may not actually be beef. Even if you don’t care about whether or not you eat horse meat (in many places it’s culturally acceptable to do so), why don’t you care when you’re being lied to? Doesn’t it bother you that the companies that feed you are banking on your apathy for their profits?

Have you considered where all your food comes from? Not just the local farmers, but the boxes of mac and cheese on your shelf, the flash frozen reconstituted whatever it is on your plate from the chain restaurant you took your family to tonight? We’re far from perfect with our food management, but good food is a priority of ours. I don’t miss the crap, and I cherish the real connections we’ve made. The wings aren’t bad, either.

confessions of a crappy lunch packer

Posted on January 18, 2013 by foodmeonce

Eating my homemade street food lunch out on the street. Just because I can.

Yes, you read that correctly. I have a blog where I wax poetic about food and policy and growing edible things in my yard, and I can’t pack a decent lunch to save my life. My kids get pretty much the same lunch every day. I am amazed they haven’t mutinied against the ubiquitous PB&J monster. And I have the same problem with my own lunches – I have largely given up on packing lunches on office days because I just can’t get excited about nuking what’s in my fridge in the break room. Not when biryani is right down the street.

While I have friends who do bento boxes for their kids every day, I am intimidated by the entire process. It doesn’t occur to me to craft the sandwich into a monkey, or the cheese into a fish. It runs up against my mother telling me in my head not to play with my food.

I’ve started to consider this seemingly mundane topic more seriously, as my son is more interested in packing his own lunch, and I recognize that we need to expand our horizons a bit. Surprisingly, following 100 Days of Real Food has not intimidated me, it’s made me think ‘hey, I could do that!’ a few times. I haven’t yet done “that,” but the gears are at least turning.

So some Cornish pasties (thanks, Jamie Oliver’s Great Britain and Santa Claus) made an appearance in my son’s lunch last week (his idea, my brain is still mush on this topic). It may have been the only time he willingly ingested zucchini, but I’m going with it. Wish us luck!

slowing down for the holidays

Posted on December 23, 2012 by foodmeonce

How is it already December 23rd? Halloween was late this year (thanks to Superstorm Sandy rescheduling), Thanksgiving was early, I blinked, and now it’s Christmas.

You mean you don’t celebrate Christmas with the Muppets? Perhaps you should.

Thankfully, we recognized that a calmer holiday season was in order (as opposed to our usual crazy hosting of hordes of people with groaning tables of food). While we missed the cacophony at Thanksgiving, keeping it simple this year actually gave me time to wrap presents days ahead of time and make something more than just chocolate chip cookies for Santa as the kids are going to bed on Christmas Eve. I broke out the cookie cutters from my own childhood, and let the kids lead on baking. Tomorrow, we decorate, and Kermit will likely lose all his facial features under mounds of powdered sugar icing. But I’m ok with that. At the end of the day, the kids are happier with ‘candy sandwiches’ anyway, and I’ve actually been able to enjoy their company without running down the mental list of things I still need to do. Sometimes you just need to take the holiday season slowly.

Good things can happen when the kids are in charge of dessert.

Here’s to important connections – family, friends, the neighborhood coffee shop, bakery, cheesemonger, or just the neighbor who smiles while walking by – all the little things that add up to a life well lived. Happy Holidays to you, and thanks for helping me feel connected to what truly matters.

getting back in the groove

Posted on December 8, 2012 by foodmeonce

making lemonade out of lemons – Julia Child style.

Slowly…. slowly. Since life is getting in the way (darn public school germs, and broken freezer with 100+ lbs of meat inside, among other things), and I reached that point in the year that I started to resent my tomato plants, I took a little brain break. But today it’s fifty degrees outside, so I am going to plant my garlic and pull out my bean teepee and rake my leaves, dammit. Hold me accountable, please… just after I finish my breakfast.

—

One of the perks of all the summer travel I did was that I hung out in Huntington WV for a couple of days… and of course, I wrote about it.

…and in case you didn’t want to read it on the Food Revolution website, you can see it here too.

And if you haven’t seen what I wrote about the Month Without Monsanto challenge in October, take a peek. While I’m disappointed that Prop 37 didn’t pass in California, it came darn close, and awareness about GMOs has increased a lot as a result (check out the Cheerios Facebook protest, for example). It’s heartening to see more people start to question the corporate food model and want to know what’s really in their food. Makes me think that I’m not just shaking my fist at the sky for no reason.

getting ahead of myself

Posted on November 10, 2012 by foodmeonce

I’m trying valiantly to get back in the game. My garden is overgrown, the weeds are laughing at me, and I *gasp* finally broke down and hired someone to help me in my yard. Yes, my mother, frugal German/Scot that she was, is rolling over in her grave. Sorry, mom, but if I wanted to walk through my yard without tripping on ivy vines or dog presents, it had to be done.

Amazingly, I was getting tomatoes until about a week ago. My lemongrass is still alive outside, and hopefully will transition well to being an inside plant this winter. We just found some carrots and onions hiding in a raised bed. The cucumbers and green beans produced for ages, I’ve got kale and mesclun and lettuce in my backyard, and cilantro (that I successfully killed in the spring) is happy as a clam growing direct from seed in the fall. Who knew?

Today’s surprise finds.

So, not as much a bust as I thought this year was, especially when I was ridiculously overachieving in the spring. I’m kinda scared to update my garden math totals, because I know I probably didn’t break even. Not because my garden wasn’t capable of producing, but because I was traveling five out of eight weeks in July and August, which just happens to be prime produce season in these here parts.

Plus, this gardening stuff is hard work. Americans who are so far removed from their food sources have conveniently forgotten how labor-intensive food production is – and how artificially low-priced food is. Don’t believe me? In 2004, Oxfam America wrote a report on farm workers in Florida and North Carolina, where in order to make $50 a day, workers have to pick TWO TONS of tomatoes. That’s $6.25 and 250 lbs an hour. Could you do that? Things have improved a little since then, but not much. Just so you can get cheap tomatoes at the grocery store.

But I digress. As a busy working mom, the garden sat on the back burner for a while this summer. I’m planning on learning from my successes and failures, plotting out new strategies for the spring, and scaling back the volume of stuff I grow. Maybe….

this summer’s urban ethnic food tour

Posted on September 22, 2012 by foodmeonce

or, how to stuff your face with different food every day while in a different city.

This summer’s work trips – usually very manageable, evenly spaced, and reasonable for my family to deal with – took on a whole new level of crazy. Thankfully, in addition to some nowheresville towns, I was able to spend a whole week in Washington DC with the family unit tagging along. And, oh, there was that vacation to Toronto last month. Needless to say, spending two weeks in two large – and diverse – cities means awesome ethnic food options. By the end of our vacation we had our kids eating doner and shawarma like old pros.

Sadly, I didn’t hit as many food trucks as I would have liked, but I think that would have taken more planning than my full-to-the-brim head was able to manage. Besides, both cities are currently having debates around food trucks (much like the one happening here in Pittsburgh) and modernizing outdated municipal restrictions on mobile vending, so they were not as prolific as I expected in cities of their respective sizes. No worries – there’s always next time, and in the meantime, there’s plenty of other food options to go around.

Why ethnic? (Why not?) Granted, not every place was an ‘ethnic’ restaurant, but most places we visited were. 1) more likely to be locally owned (do chain restaurants really need your business? not as much as locally owned businesses do). 2) more likely to be healthy. 3) more likely to be delicious – when was the last time you were blown away by chain food? Yeah, didn’t think so. 4) more likely to have something on the menu we’ve never heard of or had before – always a plus. And the list goes on.

So here’s our lineup, in varying degrees of picture quality (we upgraded our cell phones between DC and Toronto). Not a poor choice amongst the group.

Washington DC:

Lalibela Ethiopian

Teak Thai (sorry, no pictures, I was kid-wrangling)

Thai Tanic (didn’t go there, but had to grab a picture of the sign)

Roti (technically a chain, but damn. So good anyway)

Orange & Black burgers

Lebanese food in Alexandria

Park Bruges – yes, I know, it’s in Pittsburgh, but we ate there the weekend we left for Toronto, and I was on vacation in my mind already. Close enough.

Toronto:

Sukho Thai – best spring rolls I’ve ever had. So good we had it twice. Spring rolls for breakfast = awesome.

Stout Irish Pub – amazing poutine

Shawarma near the CN Tower

Gourmet Burger Company – I’m still chuckling at Yuengling beer being exotic, but the burgers and poutine were very good.

Daniel et Daniel – a dangerous place to stay a block away from

Doner on our way out of town

St Lawrence Market – fish and chips for lunch and tenderloin from Witteveen for dinner

Places we wanted to try, but didn’t make it to:

Market 707 – maybe not adventurous enough to try the camel burgers, but you never know

Porchetta & CO

Gourmet Gringos

my new favorite.

Posted on September 3, 2012 by foodmeonce

I have a new favorite farmer’s market. Sorry, East Liberty Citiparks Market, there’s someone else. Don’t worry – I’ll be back to visit you regularly, since this new relationship is long distance. Besides, you took the day off for the holiday anyway.

(Since I didn’t want to show you a picture of an empty parking lot, here’s a picture of my favorite farm stand from last year at the East Liberty market, Who Cooks for You Farm. Great presentation, friendly farmers, organic produce!)

Back to my new love, The Wild Ramp in Huntington, WV. Trust me, I was as surprised as you are. A coworker mentioned it before I left for a week of work in West Virginia, and I wanted to check it out. You never know about such places – could be great, could be so-so. In this case, The Wild Ramp is fantastic.

They’re located in a restored train depot, tucked away beneath a visitor’s information center, side by side with other locally owned shops. What makes them different from what we think of as a ‘regular’ farmer’s market is that it caters to the consumer *and* the farmer. It’s a non-profit, keeps regular business hours (several days a week) catering to the lunch hour and after-work crowd, and sells local produce year-round from producers within a 250-mile foodshed (focusing mainly on a 150 mile radius). They take a modest cut of the sold goods to support the store, and give back to the farmers by organizing periodic community volunteer days on farms. It helps get product to market in a new way, gives smaller producers the ability to sell without having to commit the time and resources to a traditional market stand, and supports the surrounding businesses by raising foot traffic. According to the local visitor’s bureau, the bakery (which makes a mean pain au chocolat) in the same complex saw its foot traffic double once the Wild Ramp opened.

Since I didn’t have a place to store perishables in my hotel room, I just grabbed some corn chips from Athens, Ohio and sassafras jelly from a nearby town in West Virginia. My brief foray into the store made me wish it was closer. In an area with rich rural history and commitment to local foods, the Wild Ramp is a new way to support your farmers. And if you work in downtown Huntington or live nearby, it’s dead easy. And that, my friends, is pretty awesome.

(Thanks to Leah at Brazen Kitchen for being the impetus for this post!)

the secret to getting your kids to eat what you make…

Posted on August 28, 2012 by foodmeonce

Have them help you.

I forget this lesson often, usually when little people are whining and tired and ‘I really wanna watch tv’ and I’m tired too and dinner needs to be made quickly and and and….

Well, I need to get out of that habit. I haven’t made toddler sushi with my nine year old in ages (or with my four year old at all, I don’t think). This past weekend, before I left for a week-long work trip, I made spending time with my clingy daughter a priority, to hopefully make those ‘please don’t go, Mommy!’ pleas not hurt quite as bad. And because we needed to use up the two pecks of peaches I bought mid-week with a neighbor, peach pie was on the menu. Yum.

This time of year, fresh local peaches are ripe, delicious – and easy to slice with a table knife. Perfect for a helpful little person not particularly good at watching her fingers when slicing peaches:

Color-coordinated bathing suit optional, but recommended.

Measuring and dumping is also easy for kids (we even successfully grated fresh nutmeg while not grating any fingers), with different colors of stuff going into the mix to jazz things up. Giving input to the pattern on the top of the pie – a wobbly star, this time – also added to the fun.

Here’s the end result of our peach weekend: pie, peach bourbon jam, and peach halves canned with local honey syrup.

This process of encouraging help might have worked a little too well. After eating almost all the jam that didn’t fit in a jar…

…she still had enough room to put away two pieces of pie. Great! She’ll eat what she helps to make! I have succeeded as a parent (especially one who doesn’t mind if her kids eat pie for breakfast since I know there’s a ton of fruit and not much sugar)! I left for my work trip secure in the knowledge that this life lesson was a good one.

And then I offered a slice of pie to a friend, who contacted my husband to sort out the pie delivery details on facebook:

Lesson learned: next time, make two pies.

Food Me Once

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