rx prednisone buy prednisone effect of 20 mg prednisone every other day on bone density prednisone 25 mg cheap prednisone prednisone canada purchase prednisone is 20 mg prednisone every third day a high dose price of prednisone prednisone overnight prednisone tab 20 mg mail order prednisone cheap meds prednisone prednisone 10 mg dose pack directions how to buy prednisone mexico prednisone sale prednisone 10 mg weight gain do people get high off prednisone 20mg order prednisone online what is prednisone 20 mg used for pictures of veternary prednisone 5 mg no prescription prednisone where can i buy prednisone prednisone no prescription amoxicillin prednisone no prescription

I just found Howdini.com and I am absolutely addicted.  Lots of great food tips from how to make garlic paste to baking a fire engine cake. Howdini also has lots of non-food tips as well, such as how to deal with a crier at the office and ways to spice up you love life.

I am definitely trying this tip on how to make your own pie crust. He makes it look SO easy.  I’m not so fancy as to have marble counter tops, but I am willing to bet that if I throw my pizza stone or even a cookie sheet into the freezer beforehand, that would work just as well.

How to make a pie crust

Ms Piggy and the Owners (photo credit: the.piggery)

Those are some of the names of the sows that will be chopped up and delivered to homes in the NYC area this year. The Piggery is offering the first meat-only CSA in the Big Apple, and it is sure to get bacon lovers all hot and bothered.  Here’s the deal:

At the Piggery, animals are raised among the squeaking and squealing until they weigh about 250 pounds. Then they’re shipped to a USDA-certified slaughterhouse. The meat is returned to the farm, where Sanford and Marshall butcher, cure, cook and package it for customers in Ithaca and New York City.

Their top menu items include thick pork chops, bacon, creamy patés, sausages, salami, pulled pork and chorizo.

Customers can choose between a “whole hog” order which will cost $1200 per season, a half-hog at $600, and a quarterhog at presumably $300, although the website does not explicitly state its price.  A customer that goes half-hog can expect to get at least the following through the 24 week season:

I personally am dying to know what a Boston Butt is.

Now a key trait of CSAs is that the food is supposed to be local.  The Trumansburg-NYC trip is a stretch, clocking in at over 3 hours.  However, its a lot closer than the factory -farm meat that travels to the east coast via I-80 from the western skies. So for CSA lovers, it definitely is a judgement call.  And for the health conscious there is the matter of whether one should incorporate so much bacon fat into a diet.

The Naked Chef makes his debut at TED Talk. Now I love TED Talk, and I love Jamie Oliver, but I have to admit that Mr. Oliver comes off as a little strident, and just skims by shrill.  However, the chart in the beginning is one to know by heart, and some outtakes from his new show teaching folks how to eat are rather poignant.  Check it out:

Ads that make you go hmmmm

Tom Philpott gives an inside look at what makes the American food system a massive contributor to global warming and pollution.  And no, its not due to cow farts.

I still remember a few years back when there was a huge piece on heirloom garlic in California, where upscale grocers were stocking a dozen different varieties of garlic with “chocolate undertones” and “whiffs of rose”.

Well the mad scientists on the farms have a new designer product - chicken.  I’m all for naturally grown, well fed and well cared for chickens, even though I personally do not indulge in the bird these days.  But isn’t chicken supposed to taste like, well, chicken?

We can breathe safely now.

Yes, they’re coming, and life as we know it will never be the same.  Imagine all the innocent organic veggie sandwiches with avocado and roasted red peppers and NO ALFALFA.  The horrors.

As mentioned earlier, GM corn has now taken over 90% of the market - more than Internet Explorer’s market dominance in its heyday.  And its impossible to stop - GM corn seed can be carried by the wind to land and cross pollinate with organic - no corn is safe in America.

And now it is the poor alfaalfa sprouts’ turn. Harmless, unoffensive, never hurt anyone.  And about to be extinctified. But it’s not just veggie sandwiches that will suffer - organic alfalfa is a major feed source for organic cows.  So goodbye organic alfalfa could mean goodbye (or really, really, REALLY expensive) organic meat and dairy.

The USDA is accepting comments on its impending decision for the next two weeks.  The folks behind the fabulous documentary FRESH has a petition you can sign in solidarity with the Alfalfa.

Sadly, its not food pills you pop in the microwave and out comes a Thanksgiving feast.  Luckily, it doesn’t require GMOs.  All that’s required is some coding and a well populated database:

“Food miles, food safety, animal well-being and exceptional quality are important issues that guide my purchasing practices,” said Joe McGarry, an executive chef with Bon Appetit Management Company. “FoodHub allows me to use these factors to sort through the database and find the best suppliers.”

Sophisticated search capabilities allow buyers, both large and small, to instantly discover ready suppliers with a few clicks of their computer keyboard. Conversely, sellers can use FoodHub search features to identify new buyer leads and build targeted customer databases. All registered users can complete an online profile that includes a detailed description of their operation and preferred methods for doing business. FoodHub supports both direct market relationships and leverages existing distribution channels to encourage growth in regional food sales.

Meet FoodHub.  Membership for buyers is a cheap $100 a year.  Another reason why Portland is probably the most kick ass American city.

Biologists decided it was high time to test out those new fangled GM corn varieties that Monsanto has been pumping out and now account for more than 90% of corn grown in the US.  Sure, there has been industry tests, but the more analytically minded among us have a hard time swallowing results that were bought and paid for.

The initial findings are not promising:

We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. NK 603 has been modified to be tolerant to the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation. MON 810 and MON 863 are engineered to synthesize two different Bt toxins used as insecticides. Approximately 60 different biochemical parameters were classified per organ and measured in serum and urine after 5 and 14 weeks of feeding. GM maize-fed rats were compared first to their respective isogenic or parental non-GM equivalent control groups. This was followed by comparison to six reference groups, which had consumed various other non-GM maize varieties. We applied nonparametric methods, including multiple pairwise comparisons with a

False Discovery Rate approach. Principal Component Analysis allowed the investigation of scattering of different factors (sex, weeks of feeding, diet, dose and group). Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.

Yeah I had a hard time wrapping my head around the jargon also.  The short of it is, GMO corn poisons the liver and kidneys.

This is scary, scary stuff.  Corn syrup is pretty much in everything we eat.  Westerners have massively high intake of corn, and in the US, the vast majority of that corn is GMO. Ten years down the road, will we be seeing liver and kidney failure of epic proportions?

I’ve encountered this before, but its really quite amazing how irrational people can be about farming and livestock:

That won’t fly with folks like D.C. resident Greg Stewart, who’s resisting the aspiring chicken farmers. “Their neighbors have no desire for any type of country or rural feel to where they live,” said Stewart, a 44-year-old real estate agent.

That is a pretty broad stroke of the pen to decree “Their neighbors have no desire for any type of country or rural feel”, but I can’t say its the first time I’ve heard someone object on those grounds.  Apparently there are many who stereotype farms and rural living as poor and unsanitary and backwards.  In particular, I hear this from older folks who they or their family escaped poverty by moving off the farms and into the city a half century ago.  Times have changed, but people are always slower.

Just so we’re clear the zoning law provides for control over sanitary concerns and noise complaints. No roosters and no noxious smells allowed.

Even if you can afford the seeds, the inputs.  Even if drought and bugs don’t wipe out your crop.  Even if you can harvest a bumper crop, it don’t mean squat unless you can deliver it to market.

With two employed parents the norm in most American families, the majority of school age children are eating more and more meals at school.  At a point in their lives where they are developing habits that will last a life time, these kids seem to be learning all the wrong lessons.

Even when school districts try to move away from “airline” food of unidentifiable saran wrapped servings, they still have trouble offering up what most of us would consider edible:

She opened the door to the walk-in freezer and grabbed several 5-pound bags of something called “beef crumbles,” then pulled a 10-pound box of curly egg noddles and two 6-pound cans of tomato sauce off a shelf in dry storage. The pre-cooked “beef crumbles” would be heated in a steamer; the egg noodles as well. Then Whittington would slather the beef with the canned tomato sauce, spice it up with a little garlic powder, and finally stir in the noodles and some pre-shredded cheese.

Voila: “Baked ziti!” Whittington declared.

This is just one observation of Ed Bruske, who spent a week with his daughter’s lunch ladies in a Washington, DC elementary school. Turns out its fairly hard to create a healthy well balanced meal when school lunchrooms are supplied with steamers instead of stove tops, and the cooks are incentivized to produce the fastest, cheapest meals possible.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  It may have taken 5 years to figure out, but Revolution Foods, based in Berekley, CA seem to have a winning solution:

So Revolution Foods adopted higher standards than the government requires for school meal programs. The meals are prepared fresh daily and feature foods free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors and sweeteners. Every lunch includes fresh fruit and vegetables.

The breakfasts and lunches contain no high-fructose corn syrup or trans fats, the milk is hormone-free and the meats are from cattle that have not been given antibiotics or hormones. Whenever possible, the food is organic and uses locally grown ingredients. Nothing is fried.

Both programs are paid for through the federal child nutrition program, so it’s not that the Californians are out spending their DC counterparts. Rather, it is a more fully evolved program that grew out of an atmosphere where parents, teachers, and students were educated on what healthy meals really look like.  And we’ve got a long way to go before that happens in DC.

Acknowledging that I am not a master chef (yet!), I rarely stray from a recipe, knowing that my untrained deviances will lead to probable disaster.  However, I was inspired by a bread pudding a friend made for Christmas, and decided to try and turn it around into a suitable New Years Day brunch item.

The original bread pudding recipe is fantastic because 1) it is incredibly hard, pretty much impossible, to screw up, 2) it is very light and with a hint of sweetness - an excellent base for experimentation.  Trust me on the hard to screw up part.  I scorched half a loaf of bread, tooled around with the cooking time, then drowned the poor thing in a pond of butter, and was still able to resuscitate it. The very simple recipe can be found on the BBC website, and yielded the following:

It’s super simple:

Ingredients

3 free-range eggs
3 tbsp caster sugar
2 cups milk and cream mixed together, half and half
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 loaf white bread, croissants, brioche or panettone
50g/20z butter
large handful raisins, soaked in a liqueur of your choice (or Marsala is good)
double cream or custard, to serve

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
2. Mix the eggs, sugar, milk and vanilla extract together in a large bowl.
3. Slice the bread of your choice, toast and butter it and arrange in overlapping slices in the bottom of an ovenproof dish, leaving some edges sticking out at the top so that they crisp up. Scatter the soaked raisins over the top and then pour in the egg mixture.
4. Bake for 30 minutes in the preheated oven and serve warm with cream or custard.

I added way too much butter that wasn’t cooking off, so I had to take it out of the oven, pour out the extra butter, and toss it back it.  I also found that it needed at least an extra 10 minutes more to cook than what the recipe called for. I skipped over the raisins and cream, opting to go with the simple brilliance of the pudding itself.

After the improbable success of my first try with the recipe, I was riding fairly high on my horse, and knew I couldn’t wait to get back in the saddle.  Having a pot luck brunch to attend, the wheels of the cooking brain started churning.  What if I made bread pudding a brunch item?

So here was my thinking: remove most of the sugar, and all of the vanilla, and essentially you have an omelet and toast baked together.  And there’s lots of things that go well in an omelet.  I settled on onions, peppers, spinach, cheddar, and rosemary. However, I am positive that anything that works in an omelet will work here.

The key is to saute the extra items first, especially if you are using meat, as the bread pudding cooks at a fairly low temperature.  So I softened up the onions and peppers for a few minutes in a skillet, added the spinach for the last minute just to wilt it.  I wisked up the egg mixture sans vanilla with 1 tablespoon of sugar instead of three. In the pan, I did a layer of bread, a layer of veggies and cheese, another layer of bread, then the egg mixture over the top. And then into the oven it went!

I cannot describe in words how yummy this is.  So yummy I shocked myself.  If you took french toast and an omelet and baked them together, you might get something halfway as tasty as this. Sweet, savory, filling, and delish-a-rama.

There is new hope that the FDA is finally ready to get serious about BPA.

The agency said Friday that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and would join other federal health agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.

BPA is a chemical that is technically not in food, instead it can be found in hard plastic bottles (look for recycling number 7) and the lining of aluminum cans. However, the chemical doesn’t always stay there, and has been found to leach into the food it holds, often at toxic levels.

The first major concern was the high levels of BPA found in baby bottles and sippy cups.  While manufacturers have been moving to remove BPA from those items, people are starting to ask about BPA affects on the rest of us.

Naglene and Camelbak have stopped using BPA in their products, however if you have an older item, you may want to look into an upgrade. Sadly, most canned goods manufacturers have resisted a BPA-free diet. Requiring product labeling, coupled with a good education program, amy be an easier and almost effective strategy than attempting an outright ban.

A: If they are sold under the label “Parkers”, Listeria!

Yummm, recall fun. Good luck with that one Big Food.