Please Sign Jamie Oliver’s Petition

Cheers to Good Food

Thanksgiving kicks off tonight with the annual preparing of the Cranberry sage chutney. It is easy to make, absolutely delicious and stores well. Best of all it fills the house with a sumptuous holiday aroma.

Yesterday was my birthday and my wife and kids made me a carrot cake. It was the best cake I ever had — and I am not just saying that because my wife and girls made it either. They used Ellen Hauptman’s carrot cake recipe. If you like carrots and you like cake and you like cream cheese icing then by all means try this cake recipe.

End the tyranny — Believe!

There is a growing lobby of like-minded folk who are crying for change — these are people who want nothing less than to once again be able to simply Believe. As you may have guessed we are fed up. I can only imagine that after years of abuse you too are ready to stand up and fight for your rights to a quality cocktail. Yes the tide is turning as a gaggle of fervent grassroots activists (David King Lassman & myself) announce the dogma for a new century.

You see, in an effort to encourage some quality control in bars across the land, and in the hope that restauranteurs, landlords, publicans, ex-investment bankers turned part-owners of fancy bars — indeed any Tom, Dick or Hillary who has any interest in serving cocktails to the public – GreatGrub proposes the Dogma of the Cocktail. We demand that a set of standards is put in place against which all cocktail makers and shakers must abide. It’s not a complicated list. Nor is it complete. But in time, we hope to take it to the highest authorities in hope that it be ratified as an Imbibing Law and restores the cocktail to the heady days of its pomp.

I ask that you read about Spiritual Dogma and I urge you, for the sake of your drink (and mine), to add a suggestion of your own. At the very least, please show your support to this urgent political action by leaving a comment.

May the days of the mocktail be behind us… Long live the cocktail!

New rule: If you don’t have limes then for God’s sake don’t make a margarita!

I used to think that I did not like cocktails. Then I realized that I had never had a proper cocktail. Oh what a difference a measured pour makes.

Today is Mac & Cheese day! Yesterday at a museum my kids had some over priced junk from a box served by the cafeteria. It made us all long for a proper dish of mac and cheese. How parents ever came to believe that the stuff from the box it is healthy and wholesome is beyond me. Perhaps it is because they put “organic” on the box. My recipe may not be organic but it is a 100% homemade wholesome treat.

As food prices continue to increase and the US slips into a what is likely to be a deemed a recession, there are increasing reports of Food Banks feeling the pinch just at the point when the need for their services is growing.

Just today the Wall Street Journal reported that food banks are being forced to make up for government cutbacks at the very moment that people have less to give and more families in dire straights are turning up at their doors.

So why not take a minute from your dinner plans to help make sure that other families will have a meal as well. Follow the link for a Google directory of food banks by state. Even a little bit can go a long way to ensure that the family meal stay intact in good times as well as hard times.

I recently received this email from one of the Veggie Mamas of Nepal. They have been active contributors to the GreatGrub community and are clearly applying the same compassionate approach to the strife that is tearing apart their country as they do to the creation of their Mashpo Momo with Sauce

Dear Andrew,

Personally, we are a family that believes strongly in the power of prayers, non-violence and compassion. So we are not going out to the streets. As a Tibetan practicing the teachings of non-violence and compassion, I look through the eyes of a global citizen, and feel tremendous loss and pain that another group of people in the world who kept to the path of non-violence has been forced to resort to harming others. Please pray that the compassionate nature of Tibetans and the international community (including the Chinese in mainland China) will find some ways to stop this whole thing from escalating and resulting in “cultural genocide” - for the sake of the world and not only for Tibetans.

Read their story for more: Losing a bit of compassion

So get this — low calorie sweeteners may just make you fatter. This is the conclusion by Purdue University researchers Dr. Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson. It turns out that in experiments with rats, the rodents eating artificial sweeteners gained more weight than those eating sugar. The good doctors conjecture that the brain thinks sweetness is a sign of high calorie foods, and repeated use of artificial sweeteners causes the brain to become confused and it fails to stop the consumption of sweets at an appropriate point when they are eaten.

Granted this shouldn’t be a problem if you never eat the real thing. But lets be real — we wouldn’t be drinking the diet stuff if we didn’t a have issues with the real thing to begin with.

Don’t believe me. Then get the story right from the rats mouth and read the study just published in Behavioral Neuroscience. Just follow the link and scroll down to the article titled “A Role for Sweet Taste: Calorie Predictive Relations in Energy Regulation by Rats (PDF: 675KB), February 2008”

Or if you are too busy dumping your diet soda down the sink to read the full article, then take a look at this excellent summation by the economist magazine.

Me — I’m sticking to the recipes on GreatGrub. I don’t believe we have any that call for saccharine.

My 5-year-old daughter is home sick from school. My wife was headed out to the store to get a chicken for soup when my sick child came up with the following menu:

• mashed potatoes
• grilled steak “nice and juicy” (her words not mine)
• steamed broccoli
• mango sorbet

I’m impressed by her menu making skills. I am also curious as to which menu will prevail. I read somewhere that grilled steak cures the common cold — really I did.

Now if i could only find that “study’ from the American beef institute before my wife leaves for the market.

Happy new year to one and all!

This year I resolve to eat well and with my friends and family. Oh and I should probably drop a few and be nicer to strangers too.

Here’s to a healthy 2008.

As anyone who enjoys a quality cocktail can appreciate, finding a bartender that knows how to mix a proper drink is a rarity. Let’s face it, more often than not we end up mixing better drinks at home than the actor behind the bar who refuses to measure his sweet and sour mix. But I may have found the real deal managing the bar at comme Ca restaurant in Los Angeles.

Further investigation is necessary (and warranted) before I write proper a recommendation, but I was more than impressed when dinning at the restaurant with some friends for a holiday dinner (the food was pretty darn good too). If you are in the neighborhood stop in and give the Dealers Choice a try - apparently this is one dealer who knows his cards.

More soon but just in case you were in the neighborhood and looking for a quality cocktail, I thought I would shout out the good news.

comme Ca
8479 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90069