Food

Tea cooler recipe, revised and improved

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Sunday, February 1st, 2009

The last experimental batch of tea cooler was heavy on the lemon and weak on the tea for Paul's taste, so I dropped the sugar to 1-1/2 cups, the lemon juice to 3/4 cup and increased the tea bags to six for the gallon. It was an improvement, but still a bit heavy on the lemon. That was still a little too lemony. We decided to drop the lemon to only 1/4 cup for the next batch, expecting it to be too weak, in which case, I could add lemon juice a tablespoon at a time until I hit the proportion of lemon Paul likes.

All about food

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Here's a website ( tastespotting.com ) that's all about food, beautiful, picture-perfect food, with links back to recipes on other food-related websites. Great for browsing if you have time to indulge the impulse to make everything you see. I'm obsessing over the green tea cookies and would be making them right now except I'm fresh out of matcha.

Local harvest

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Monday, January 26th, 2009
Here's a map listing of local farms and CSAs, from Local Harvest.

What's in season?

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Monday, January 26th, 2009
I like the concept of buying things in season and avoiding what's out of season, but until I came across the Eat the Seasons website, I found it difficult to put into practice. Eat the Seasons is updated weekly, and there are articles on most of the items listed for the current week. And it's not just about vegetables and fruits. The site also lists fish and seafood and meat, poultry and game.

Farm Fresh Express in Lansdowne

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Monday, January 26th, 2009

Farm Fresh Express in Lansdowne offers locally, organically, sustainably grown or raised food items. Customers order online on a weekly basis (the owners deliver) or visit the store Thursdays or Fridays 4:00 to 7:00 pm, or on Saturdays 8:30 am to 2:00 pm.

Tea cooler

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Saturday, January 24th, 2009

One of Paul's staples is Swiss Farm's tea cooler, and he's kept a gallon or two in the fridge for years. We haven't kept records, so don't know how much he actually consumes, but it's at least a gallon per week, and possibly two, especially in the summer. At $2.69 a gallon, tea cooler is hardly a luxury item, but there are some other concerns. First, allthough we try to reuse, we've found no way to reuse the 50 to 100 plastic jugs that we pick up along with the tea cooler each year, so they must be recycled. Second, the quality of the product is debatable.

Coffee, staple or luxury?

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

A friend wrote to me that her brother-in-law (Matt) in Ohio has started up his own coffee roasting company, and she asked if I would be interested in purchasing some. She included this note from Matt:

Dear Friends and Family,

Tips on stocking the pantry

By: 
Fran
Date: 
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Why clutter up the pantry with pale imitations of real foods that are easy to prepare, vastly superior in taste and quality, and often less expensive? Mark Bittman's article from The New York Times takes a decidely upscale approach

NY Times photo
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