Posts Tagged ‘healthful eating’
What’s Cooking: Food News Round-Up
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Monday, May 2nd, 2011
The best ways to cook asparagus, protesting beer barons, canning D.C. Brau, and how your self-cleaning oven is destroying the planet in today’s news round-up.
- Over at the Times, Mark Bittman shares his favorite ways to prepare asparagus, which is enjoying the height of its season right now. He lists 12 ways to prepare the veg, including steamed with brown butter, roasted with blue cheese and breadcrumbs and stir fried with scallops and black beans—all pretty delicious and easy. No doubt it’s a response to our own awesome write up on asparagus from last week, but we’re not bitter. No need to give credit, Mark. You know the truth.
- American Craft Beer week is coming up in a couple of weeks, and to mark the occasion, over 50 craft brewery owners will be marching on Washington. Why the march? To get their taxes lowered, why else do business owners march on Washington? The Post has the full story, but essentially the brewmeisters are hoping to get the bookend bills H.R.1236 and S. 534 through Congress, which would effectively halve the industry’s tax burden and save them something in the neighborhood of $56 million, and maybe lower the cost of beer by a couple of pennies for us. Because if there’s one thing we all need, it’s more pennies lying around the house.
- Also in the Post, D.C.’s newest star-child brewer D.C. Brau started canning up about 200 cases of their American pale ale, The Public Pale, last week. Stock is reportedly moving off shelves quickly, but there are several places to pick up this new brew in both the District and Northern Virgina, a full list is on the D.C. Brau website.
- Depressing news time: USA Today has a stat-heavy article highlighting how our farming habits are basically destroying the planet. The article casts stones at wasteful transportation methods that siphon diesel fuel, a lack of concern for the degradation of domestic water and soil quality, and wasteful personal habits like using a food processor instead of chopping vegetables with a knife, you lazy bum. So, buy local right? Well, not according to a study from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. The study suggests that a regional agricultural system, not local, offers the greatest energy efficiency, citing that a regional system is “8 to 17 times more fuel efficient than the national system, but also 4 times more efficient than the local system.” Also, stop eating so much red meat, eat seasonal vegetables and, for goodness’ sake, clean your own oven.
- CNN highlights a new study that shows that having at least three family meals a week can make children healthier. A study from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, shows that having meals with your kids causes a “12% reduction in the odds for being overweight, a 20% drop in the odds of eating unhealthy foods regularly and a 35% reduction in disordered eating.”
- Kris King
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Thursday, February 19th, 2009
By Warren Rojas
Given our geographical predisposition for immediate gratification (omnipresent WiFi, Olympic-pace text messaging) and comfort (drive-through everything, from coffee shops to upholstery cleaning), it is no wonder some NoVA residents have lost sight of what’s really important: great food.
Slow Food DC co-leaders Alexandra Greeley and Kati Gimes want to help everyone find their way.
The dynamic dining duo have been championing sustainable living and sensible eating for going on a decade in this area, fostering a cadre of a band of perhaps 30 like-minded omnivores that have blossomed into force of approximately 800 floating members (those with email accounts, anyway) and close to 400 active participants. That makes the D.C. chapter, according to Greeley, the fifth-largest convivium in the U.S.
Greeley suggests that members tend to be “middle-class, well-educated people who care about what they are eating.” She says she knows of at least one Great Falls couple that has remained active since the beginning, and notes that a subset of about 20 chapter members regularly get together for private slow food dinner parties.
But Greeley is hoping the current wave of interest in green living and locally sourced cuisine will help them recruit the next generation of Slow Food members. To that end, Greeley is kicking around plans to set up a schoolyard garden at an area school to help teach students about sustainable agriculture and healthful eating.
Meanwhile, the group is lining up a variety of activities for 2009, including: a cook-off between the chef at the Latvian embassy (a chapter member) and Clyde’s Penn Quarter staff, an open-air dinner a la last summer’s Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco and their annual farm dinner (to be hosted again this year at Clyde’s Willow Creek Farm in Ashburn). Local farm tours and charity events are also in the works.
New members must pay a $60 annual fee to join, plus the cost of individual events (which Greeley said are usually capped at around $50).
For the global perspective on slow food, visit: www.slowfood.com
To join the D.C.-Metro chapter, visit: www.slowfooddc.org
(February 2009)