For vegetable fans and foes alike, there was a fun column in Tuesday’s New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope, the health reporter who ends up on the most-emailed list so often it makes me jealous, even though I don’t write for the New York Times.
In the column, Parker-Pope looked at which cooking methods cause vegetables to retain the most nutrients. First of all, she noted, “raw and plain vegetables are not always best.” This is unlikely to be news to Serious Eaters. Personally, I can’t resist crunching a few bites of raw carrot every time I’m using one to cook with, but I would not want to be sentenced to eating raw broccoli.
As the Cooking With Kids guy, my favorite part of the article was this:
Studies at Ohio State measured blood levels of subjects who ate servings of salsa and salads. When the salsa or salad was served with fat-rich avocados or full-fat salad dressing, the diners absorbed as much as 4 times more lycopene, 7 times more lutein and 18 times the beta-carotene than those who had their vegetables plain or with low-fat dressing.
Yesterday, Renzata posted this Talk topic, "WTF is on my swiss chard?" with the above accompanying images. "No freakin' clue," was my first answer. Luckily, Serious Eats readers were more helpful and pointed out they were beetle eggs. Or UFOs.
At Highgrove shop, the prince is sticking to the formula that has served him so well; on offer will be everything from seasonal vegetables freshly pulled out of the ground from the prince's nearby estate—no extra charge for the royal mud still clinging to them—to apple juice from Camilla's orchards in Wiltshire.
There will be jams, jellies, honeys, chutneys, and mustards, as well as handmade biscuits and chocolates. But the coachloads of visitors, tourists and shoppers that will beat a path to his store should not come expecting a bargain.
To be fair, it's the spendy souvenirs at the shop that the Guardian knocks; the produce, it says, is reasonable.
PingMag rounds up popular characters on Japanese produce packages. Squash, mushrooms, cabbage, eggplant, oranges, and more are all graced by aww-inducing cartoon likenesses of themselves, sometimes clothed, sometimes sporting stylish hairdos, and mostly smiling.
Bittman is, of course, known for his Minimalist column in the New York Times dining section, for his popular How to Cook Everything series of cookbooks, and for his cooking show on PBS—all of which stress an informal style of cooking, as befits the Minimalist title.
This book, obviously, puts Bittman's spin on vegetarian cooking. The first recipe we'll be highlighting from it will be along shortly, but, as always, let's take care of business.
We've got five (5) of these to give away this week. Simply tell us in the comments: What's your favorite vegetarian recipe?
Their books, which teach parents to disguise veggies in brownies, mac and cheese, and pudding, are wrong on so many levels, Mimi Sheraton writes. "First, children get the wrong message that sweets and starches are good for them." Second is "the invisibility of vegetables in their own recognizable forms. As a result, children are not afforded the opportunity to get used to the idea of trying and learning about them. Nor will they consider them necessary for good health."
Posted by Adam Kuban, September 24, 2007 at 1:30 PM
This week's Cook the Book feature highlights How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons. With the disconnect between consumer and producer that's developed in recent years, Parsons says that basic skills shoppers once had—knowing what's in season when and how to choose the best fruit or vegetable on offer—have atrophied. His book, with its detailed rundown on everything from apples to winter squash, will make you a produce-aisle expert in no time.
As with all weekly Cook the Book features, we've got a number of copies to give away. Ten (10) winners will be chosen at random from among the commenters below. All you have to do is answer the following:
What's your favorite fruit or vegetable for 1.) cooking and 2.) eating raw?
Knee high by the Fourth of July, they say. But how does the rest of that cornmnemonic go? Is there more? I don't know. All I need to know is that corn, sweet corn, is in season and on my mind, so this photo caught my eye in the Serious Eats photo pool. It was taken by the Homesick Texan, who provides the recipe on her site.
The next time you find yourself face to face with an ugly potato or malformed pepper, don't cast its ugliness aside—it can't help being a mutato. German artist Uli Westphal'sMutato Project highlights the world of "nonstandard fruits, roots, and vegetables" found at supermarkets and farmers' markets in Berlin. Some look like the product of Mother Nature after she's had one too many, while others look like symmetrical works of modern art. Check out the Mutato gallery and judge for yourself. [via swissmiss]
One of the many things I like about Taming the Flame is that Elizabeth Karmel provides us with lots of easy-to-prepare grilled vegetable dishes. Here's her ingenious take on Fire-Roasted Succotash. Karmel says, "If you are phobic about lima beans, substitute edamame (fresh soybeans) for a new-age succotash."
Violent Veg is a series of dioramas featuring anthropomorphic produce in silly, strange, mostly pun-enhanced situations. These aren't just carrots with drawn-on faces—special lighting, settings, and props are used to bring life to this odd and elaborate world of wide-eyed fruits and vegetables. I think I'll be dead before carrots evolve into hoodlums with biceps; for now these creatures only exist on t-shirts, keychains, and other merchandise. [via chocolatesuze]
Who needs guitars, keyboards or drums when you can use carrot recorders, celeriac bongos and leek violins? The 11 members of The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra create music from vegetables—sometimes modified, sometimes not—influenced by electronic sounds in contemporary electronic music. It's serious music that sounds better than anything I could play on a real instrument; take a listen or watch this video of their pre-concert preparations and performance:
I like to roast asparagus in a 450-degree oven for ten minutes, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkled with kosher salt. I then take the asparagus out of the oven and top it with flash-fried capers. I think I first found this recipe in one of Rozanne Gold's 1-2-3 Cookbooks. But now, I've found a recipe online.
Steven Reinberg of the Washington Post reports that two new studies in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine say Americans are eating far less fruits and vegetables than they should. According to a John Hopkins study, 62 percent of participants didn't eat any fruit daily. 25 percent didn't eat any vegetables, and "only 11 percent of U.S. adults meet the guidelines for both fruits and vegetables." Perhaps more troubling, a second study from Queens College compared intakes of vegetables, potassium and calcium from 1971 to 1974 and 1999 to 2002, and found that the diets of blacks has not improved compared to those of whites, numbers "not explained by race differentials in income and education." As one of the researchers said, a serious public health concern because "a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is associated with a lower risk of obesity and certain chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers."
"Welcome to the World's First Great Big Vegetable Challenge! Take one seven year old boy named Freddie and his mother as they face the challenge of turning him from a Vegetable-Phobic into a boy who will eat and even enjoy some of life's leafier pleasures. Join us as we work through the A to Z of vegetables!"
Fred's mom posts photos and the recipes they've tried (some suggested by readers) and Fred himself rates dishes—recently he's given potage crecy a nine and courgette quesadillas a full ten, so he can't really be that much of a vegetable hater, he certainly seems to like them more than I do! The GBVC is first and foremost a fantastic idea but it's also a very charming read, and I look forward to eating vegetables vicariously through their continuing adventures.
For vegetable fans and foes alike, there was a fun column in Tuesday’s New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope, the health reporter who ends up on the most-emailed list so often it makes me jealous, even though I don’t write for the New York Times.
This week's installment of Cook the Book features Mark Bittman's 
. (We figured you could use a counterpoint to 
Their books, which teach parents to disguise veggies in brownies, mac and cheese, and pudding, are wrong on so many levels, 
One of the many things I like about Taming the Flame is that Elizabeth Karmel provides us with lots of easy-to-prepare grilled vegetable dishes. Here's her ingenious take on Fire-Roasted Succotash. Karmel says, "If you are phobic about lima beans, substitute edamame (fresh soybeans) for a new-age succotash."
