Flavors 518

Recently, I stumbled onto the White House Food Blog . It is really interesting because it includes a lot of information about recent discussions about school lunches. Also, apparently steak is big in the Obama white house . I also stumbled on the online portion of an exhibit at the National Archives about Uncle Sam's influence on the diets of the American people . I love all the historical photos. Also, cool images like this one: They also have a tumblr about the exhibit . It is all very interesting. All I know is that pizza is my favorite vegetable. Although, my second favorite is french fries.

So I have mentioned that I am dogsitting in a house that has a kitchen that is equipped for cooking with mixes and not from scratch. The dogs' owners come home from Florida tomorrow, so I decided to make myself one of these mixes to test out how they are (and because I feel celebratory because it is almost time for me to go home). It is usually my feeling that mixes are more expensive than cooking from scratch, and also may have other unwanted ingredients included like preservatives. It is also usually my feeling that all a mix really does is give you the dry ingredients already mixed together (which takes about two minutes to stir together yourself). I guess it also saves you having to look up a recipe. I always doubted if they tasted very good. Well, here I am to tell you that actually the Duncan Hines Devil's Food cake mix is not bad. It is just about as good as a homemade cake as bread made from a bread machine mix is as good as bread made from scratch. You get a lot of ...

One good thing about living in Albany is the proximity to so many other great places to visit like NYC, the Berkshires, Cooperstown, Montreal, and Boston. About a year and a half ago some of my Study Abroad companions and I reunited for a weekend filled with cultural activities. I brought British themed snacks. We had a Mad Men inspired fashion show. We visited the Boston Public Library and a great vintage travel poster show. We went to a great Italian restaurant in the North End. And we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Café . Unfortunately, it looks like the café is closed right at this moment for renovations, but when we were there it was open. I love that museum. It is so eclectic, so intimate, so personal. It is not formal or stuffy. Also there is the mystery of the stolen paintings , that I (as a person who works in museums) find completely fascinating. I find the subject so fascinating that I read books meant for teenagers about the su...

When I was a kid I felt overwhelmed by Thanksgiving. It just always seemed like so much food that we'd end up feeling sick at the end of it. When I was in college and learning about people starving all over the world, a holiday just devoted to eating seemed a bit like flaunting our wealth in the faces of the less fortunate of the world. Like many things in life, sometimes it takes being able to do something out of free will instead of obligation for you to appreciate it. I did enjoy the green bean casserole:  (A Midwestern classic: can of green beans, can of cream of mushroom soup mixed together , french fried onions on top, put in the oven for a while.) This blog shows someone attempting the kind of holiday meal I remember as a kid here and here . This post has some great retro Thanksgiving photos (like the one I featured above).  In the past few years I've had different ideas about how to approach it. Our first Thanksgiving we did actually make an enormous am...

A long time ago I read about Julia Childs's kitchen organization ideas . She kept everything out in the open and quickly accessible.  I love this philosophy, and since I read about I have thought that having tools at the ready is just as important as having things already chopped up before one starts cooking. It is all part of the mise en place . I have followed this model in a few different ways. Utensils at the ready in canisters: Glasses on racks: Hooks for aprons and pot holders: And that leaves us with my project for today. One of my friends once said to me when we first got engaged not to put things on our wedding registry we didn't have space to store. Well, we have already received more gifts than we really have space to store. And sure there are some great options for dining room/kitchen storage (that cost a fortune) , and maybe one day we may even be able to afford one of these beautiful storage solutions. But in the meantime, I got a cheap bookshelf from Stap...