Posts Tagged ‘food writing’
Buy a Copy of My New Book: The Culinary Cyclist
The idea for the book The Culinary Cyclist came about December of last year, so for the last six months I have had bikes and food on the brain. Well, I always have bikes and food on the brain, but this time as I wrote chapters about coffee, picnics and planning a dinner party, it was book related.
And now, after six months, the book is completely written, the illustrations are drawn (thanks to the lovely Johanna Kindvall) and now somehow in a miraculous showing of support, we managed to raise all of our printing funds on Kickstarter in the first 5 days. That’s a lot of love for food and bikes.
What that means is that the book will without a doubt be printed, and for only $12 you can get yourself a copy! So hop on over to Kickstarter and snag one.
A Cookbook Project in the Works
I never call myself a food blogger. No, really.
I have never felt that I can keep up with all of the prolific food writers and recipe developers out there. How some people manage to publish new complicated recipes ever single week is beyond me. It’s impressive, inspiring and quite honestly, a little scary. Plus we all know what taking too many photos of your food can do to you… But this year I’ve gotten a good taste of what it means to make food your profession.
Along with Johanna Kindvall, I am working on an illustrated cookbook, with stories and recipes inspired by our Swedish roots, to be published by Ten Speed Press in fall of 2014. The entire thing is certainly an ongoing process, from proposal to contract to the many moments of “I have how many recipes to finish this week??” but it’s entertaining to be working on a book project.
A Menu For When You’re Just Not Sure About Turkey
If there’s one thing I don’t like about Thanksgiving it’s the stress that goes into making the holiday “perfect.” Hint: it’s about being with friends and family, being grateful and in the process hopefully eating some delicious food. But too often we’re hung up on what has to be served.
Over on Foodie Underground, a story of why turkey will not be served in my family anytime soon inspired a full turkey-free Thanksgiving menu, complete with eight vegetarian, partly vegan, mostly gluten free recipes to get you from appetizer to dessert.
I could barely get past positioning the wings under the heavy carcass in the roasting rack. I am not a vegetarian, but I rarely prepare meat and quite frankly I was almost convinced that the thing was going to get pissed that I wasn’t treating it well, come back to life and start pecking at my face. Thanksgiving stress level successfully upped a notch.
Bringing Travel into the Kitchen
My latest over on Foodie Underground:
A freakish commitment to perfecting a recipe picked up while abroad might seem off, but don’t we all have food obsessions when we return from voyages? We come back from our travels, whether near or far with stories of “have you ever heard of [insert odd local dish here]?” and “they had the most amazing [insert normal dish] but with [insert oddball ingredient that is representative of the place traveled to here]. I wish we had that here!”
Ask someone which bus line they rode most often during a trip and you’ll get a blank stare, but ask about the best local meal and you’ll be sure to be listening to an animated story for a minimum of seventeen minutes. Food is often one of the biggest takeaways when we travel, be it just a half hour from home or on the other side of the world. That roadside diner with the house special sauce can be just as exotic as sambusas on a street corner in Kabul. Through food we experience a culture a people and a place. We are forced to stop and take things in, listen to our senses. It’s no surprise that the result is memorable.
Read the rest here.
Breaking Down Cultural Barriers with Food in Afghanistan
It should have come as no surprise that my favorite Dari word from nine intro language lessons would have been “lunch.”
The first step to traveling respectfully is to learn how to say “hello” “thank you” and “goodbye” in the local language. The second step is to learn a few things food related, because no matter where you are in the world, you are going to need to eat.
New Project: Foodie Underground
For those of you that have followed along, you know that for the last 2.5 years I have written a column called Foodie Underground. Over time it has morphed into a space where I try to make the idea of good food less elitist. That takes many forms, from interviews with people in the food movement to snarky exposes on sauteed kale.
Well today marks the launch of FoodieUnderground.com, an entire website devoted to the idea of “good food, from good places with good people.” Read the Foodie Underground Manifesto for an idea of where it’s headed.
Why Caring About Food Isn’t An Option, It’s a Responsibility
“Food is life.”
I have been known to say a similar thing, but when it came from the mouth of a Ugandan farmer, the words were more powerful than I could ever make them.
Sitting to the right of Constance Okollet on a panel titled Food Anthropology at SXSW Eco in Austin last week, I was humbled as she emphasized what food meant to her and her community. Okollet is peasant farmer from Osukuru subcounty, Tororo district in eastern Uganda, Africa and a mother of seven. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s the Chairperson of Osukuru United Women Network, working on agriculture health and the environment, and a founding member of Climate Wise Women, traveling the world advocating against climate change and its effects on the communities around her.
The Secret Diary of a Foodie, Part Three
While madly searching for food trucks, a good greens blog and love – we get another look into the secret life of a foodie. (Part 1 and 2 in case you missed them.)
Saturday September 1, 2012, 7:33 p.m.
Dear Diary,
This summer has been hectic! The Barista ended up being a total nightmare (you just can’t date people that bring PBR to dinner parties). Finished the coffee roasting class and then debated on building my own roasting machine in the backyard, but decided instead to focus my efforts on developing a new artisan salt business. Have been bottling up all kinds of infused salts, and everyone loves them so much, I figure I can totally sell them at farmers market. Or at least via my new salt blog. Who eats regular salt these days anyway? Boring.
For the Love of Cookbooks and Roots
When I was home earlier this summer, I asked my mother for a recipe. She pulled out her worn 3-ring binder. This binder is blue, has yellowed pages falling out of it and has sat in the same place on the bookshelf for as long as I can remember. In it are recipes scratched in her handwriting of her earlier years, additions by her sisters, and almost four decades’ worth of recipe inspiration ripped from magazines.
My natural instinct when I need a recipe is to go to that online thing that starts with G. For my mother, it’s to go to her recipe shelf. If it’s not in the blue book then there has to be a recipe that can be improvised on elsewhere among the culinary titles. In fact, it was only recently that she called to tell me that she was wondering about a specific recipe and went to her computer herself to search around the internet for it (normally she calls me and has me cull the pages and select a few links, her personal search engine so to say).
Dirtbag Gourmet: Cooking for Your Date in the Great Outdoors
It’s good when editors let you pitch the kind of articles that make you laugh. Which is why I am excited about my most recent post on the very respectable outdoor online magazine Adventure Journal, where I took a stab at the topic of food and love in the backcountry. It started as a conversation between friends on how to impress a date on a hike (“make your own trail mix!”) and resulted in this article:
If you can’t cook a decent meal in the backcountry, you’re destined for romantic failure. A way to anyone’s heart is often through his or her stomach, especially if you’re on the tail end of a grueling day outside. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Yeah, that will refuel the person you’re crushing on, but a homemade olive hummus wrap with sea salt? That might be the extra touch you need to turn adventure partner into your partner.
