Roasted Beet Salad with Caraway Seeds, Cloves, and Horseradish

A colleague of mine brought a whole basket full of delicious, fresh beets to work last week and I helped myself to several large ones. I thought a while about how to creatively cook them, and settled on this German-style salad.

First I pierced the beets with a fork and wrapped them individually in aluminum foil. After roasting them for an hour and a half or so (beets vary in size so you just have to roast until they're tender), I peeled and sliced them.

Then, I dressed them in a vinaigrette I made that contained cider vinegar (1/4 cup), ground cloves (1/4 tsp.), caraway seeds (2 tsp.), prepared horseradish (2 tsp.), salt and pepper, and just a touch of sugar (1 tsp.) and oil (2 tbsp.).

The resulting salad was a complex mixture of sweet, spicy, and earthy flavors.

The Best Grapes in the World

These are Okanagan Coronation grapes...I discovered them today. They're the most wonderful grapes I've ever had. Their skin! The most regal shade of frosted indigo. Their flavor! A burst of tart, grapey sweetness. Their flesh! Firm and with no distracting seeds. These come from the Okanagan Valley in BC, and I'm not sure they're available outside of Canada, but if you see, them, get them, I can't believe how perfect they are.

Edmonton Eskimos Game

Last weekend we went to an Edmonton Eskimos game with our friends Jason and Laura. I am not a particular fan of football, but it was fun. The Eskimos lost :(

Gwyneth Paltrow's Roast Chicken

I'll admit it--I love Gwyneth Paltrow. I know I'm in the minority--most people find her annoying and haughty, but I think she's beautiful, interesting, well-spoken, poised, and wonderful. I can't help it.

She has a blog called GOOP and even though a lot of people call it POOP, I love her blog too. She discusses fashion, traveling, cooking, shopping, and I guess whatever else suits her fancy. A few weeks ago she posted a video of herself cooking what she called a "quick, homemade dinner," roast chicken, fingerling potatoes, and a salad.

I watched the video and wanted to try her recipe for roast chicken--she takes the back and thigh bones out and steams/roasts the chicken in the oven with aluminum foil covering the chicken for the first half of the cooking time. Immediately, it seemed, everyone on the internet did a collective eye roll, taking issue with the fact that she called roast chicken "fast food."

Well, I tried the recipe, and I know I'm a bit biased, but it was truly a good and quick way of making a whole chicken. Taking the back and thigh bones out of the chicken was a little work, but it cuts the cooking time in half. Plus, by the third time I made the chicken I had mastered it enough to be able to do it while talking with my mom on the phone, which I think shows it can't be that difficult. After you de-bone the chicken and spice it up with some lemon and herbs (I also used some red pepper flakes), you put it in a hot oven with aluminum foil over top for 20 minutes. The liquid from the lemon, I imagine, steams the chicken, cooking it quickly. Then you remove the aluminum foil for the remaining 20 minutes and let the skin crisp up and the chicken finish cooking.

I've made the chicken three times now, and each time I've been impressed with the quickness, ease, and deliciousness of the chicken. It's awesome to be able to eat a scrumptious whole roasted chicken after only 40 minutes of cooking time. To the critics that scoff at her saying it's her version of fast food, scoff away, but I think she demonstrated an economical, healthy, quick, and easy way to feed one's family.

Here's a link to her video and recipe: http://goop.com/newsletter/44/en/

The High Cost of Cheap Food

Browsing for some magazines to read by the pool a few weeks ago, the cover of Time magazine caught my eye: a picture of a packaged pound of ground beef and the words

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

This issue has been interesting and important to me for a while--ever since I took a class in university about environmental justice--and it was nice to see it getting attention on the cover of Time.

Read the article (click on the title above)!

I think the article does a good job of clearly explaining the problem: food producers, wanting to produce cheap food that appeals to consumers, have created a food production system that exploits the environment, and ultimately we who live in it. Unfortunately, the article doesn't offer very many helpful solutions...

According to the author, the solution to the problem is an individual commitment to buying organic food: "Whether that happens will ultimately come down to all of us, since we have the chance to choose better food three times a day (or more often, if we're particularly hungry)."

The notion that we all have the choice to eat less meat and purchase organic ingredients is problematic: a large percentage of us don't have the choice to purchase organic meat and produce for twice the price. Even further, for the percentage of us who could make that financial commitment, organic, locally-grown food isn't exactly readily available, especially in grocery stores in inner-city, low-income areas (where it can sometimes be difficult to find whole grain bread or low-fat coffee creamer, as I know from personal experience). The article brings up both these obstacles to making good personal eating choices, but doesn't really explain how they can be remedied.

According to me, America's corporate food producers can't be trusted to and individuals shouldn't have to shoulder the responsibility for promoting and supporting a healthy, sustainable way of producing food: that's what regulations and the government are for. If the problem is as far-reaching and as devastating as the article says, which I believe it is, it's disheartening that the American government hasn't done more to protect our environment and people.