The temperatures are dropping here in mid-Michigan. And, that means it’s time to break out the hot chocolate! And, what goes perfectly with hot chocolate? Marshmallows!

A few years ago, I decided to take my hot chocolate to the next level. I started making my own marshmallows! They taste so much better than your typical store-bought variety. Plus  homemade marshmallows can be customized - you can make lots of different shapes, colors and flavors like vanilla, mint, chocolate, raspberry… and the list goes on.

People always ask me how to make marshmallows. It’s simple! First you need sugar, sugar and then more sugar! If you can boil water, you can make marshmallows!

Here’s my recipe and instructions:

2 1/2 T Unflavored Gelatin

1 C cold water

1 1/2 C Sugar

1 C Light Corn Syrup

1/4 t salt

2 T Vanilla Extract

Confectioners Sugar for dusting (also known as powdered sugar)

Whisk gelatin and 1/2 C water. Let stand 30 minutes.

In a saucepan mix sugar, corn syrup, salt and 1/2 C of water. Stir over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Heat the sugar mixture to 244 degrees on high. Take off the heat immediately.

Pour the sugar mixture into a mixing bowl. Using a mixer, beat the gelatin into the sugar mixture. Gradually increase the mixer speed until the sugar mixture is thick and tripled in volume - about 15 minutes (this is where one of those fancy KitchenAid stand mixers comes in handy). The sugar mixture should now be white and fluffy! Add the vanilla (or other flavoring).

Dust 8″ x 12″ glass baking pan with confectioners sugar. Pour mixture into pan. Dust the top with confectioners sugar. Let stand overnight uncovered.

*Cut with a dry, hot knife and dust with more sugar.

Note: I use a clean pair of kitchen shears instead of a knife. And I roll/toss the marshmallows in confectioners sugar to coat the sides so they are not sticky.

I also learned this summer that you have to be really fast if you roast homemade marshmallows. We lost a few to the fire. Seems as though they cook up faster and fall of the stick quickly. We learned the hard way. Tragic!

Get artistic - You can use cookie cutters to cut out fun shapes or use some food coloring to tint the marshmallows! Coat them in chocolate for chocolate covered marshmallows or drizzle them with chocolate

Marshmallows make a great gift too! I’ll be making some around the holidays as gifts. Package them up with some gourmet hot chocolate and a cute mug and share the sweet, sugary love!

Some how my spam filter didn’t catch this.

So much of the urban farmer movement has to do with the reallocation of resources for more effective means.  Now before you get your panties in a bunch, no, there ain’t no communism lurking here.  What we’re talking about is efficiency so don’t you worry your little shriveled free market heart now.  There’s tons of resources going unused, and the brilliance is in the connecting of these resources to skilled laborers to take advantage of them, or consumers who want them.

And so I bring you: Ample Harvest.

Have an over-abundance of tomatoes from those energizer bunnies of the garden?  Just can’t come up with another squash dish.  Ample Harvest helps you find a food pantry near you to dump your excess produce.  Healthy whole foods for the hungry and no more rotting vegetables in your pantry.  Win-win.

The kids these days are betting it all on the farm.  I personally don’t know if I should be flabbergasted that a 26 yr old was making $110,000 a year, or impressed that she gave it all up for $7/hr pulling weeds and harvesting crops.

Stanley, 26, who’s working in a camisole tank top, lives in an uninsulated barn on the farm and spends more than 50 hours a week weeding, mulching, harvesting and selling at farmers markets.

Just a year ago, she was making $110,000 a year at Cisco Systems in Herndon, often telecommuting from the two-bedroom condo she owns in Georgetown. Now, she makes $7 an hour. She and Jabbar, along with Jabbar’s fiance, Steve Hirschhorn, work for Chip and Susan Planck on Wheatland Vegetable Farms in Loudoun County.

The monetary sacrifice is commendable, but one has to wonder how sustainable it is.  $7/hr is not a living wage, and until that problem is solved, farming will continue to be the toil of the poor and the food obsessed elites.

But can you swaddle it?

This almost as disturbing as the fetus shaped cookie cutter I saw for sale at the Crafty Bastards Festival the other week.

I got nothing.

Go check out all the art at The SOP.

Out of the bin of extraordinairly bad ideas, Redwood gives us our first ever $15 veggie burger. First off, veggie burgers are almost universally bad no matter how pricy they are.  Think about it - this is a food born with a split personality.  Is it supposed to be a burger?  A patty of veggies?  What is it supposed to taste like?  Is it supposed to taste like anything at all?

Secondly, if you are going to go ahead and make a $15 veggie burger, it should really taste a whole lot better than this:

The veg burger at Redwood combines white beans and wild mushrooms into a mammoth patty that apparently wants to compete, in terms of sheer volume and prestige, with the 8- to 10-ounce gourmet steakhouse burgers out there.  To its credit, the burger tastes light on traditional binders like breadcrumbs and rice. But it has other problems, like a mushiness that I can only compare to oatmeal, even when the patty is topped with house-made pickles and tomatoes.

Sorry Redwood, you’re just giving veggie burgers a bad name.  Now Spike on the other hand, he’s got it going on.  Panko encrusted, deep fried veggie burger?  Hell yes, thank you, please.

It’s like eating Quaker Oats between two brioche buns. The flavor isn’t much better.

Candidates running unflattering photos of their competition in negative ads is nothing new in electoral politics.  Heck, even a certain cable network has been found to take certain liberties with the photoshop. However, campaigning hit a new low this season when Jon Corzine put up an ad disparaging Chris Christie for his exceptional girth.  The “throwing his weight around” ad has kicked up quite a bit of dust and poses an interesting question.  How fat is too fat to get elected?

While we now have a president who is splashed across countless magazine covers, including one where he appears shirtless, the public at large is getting larger and larger.  Yet there is increasing expectations on our elected officials to not just have pleasing policy positions, but to be easy on the eyes as well.

In a country where over 64% of the population is either over weight of obese, one would think we would see the opposite trend - a public that votes for heftier and heftier candidates that look just like them.  Instead we see the rise of the politicians that look more and more like Hollywood.  While New Jerseyans are slim by today’s standards, clocking in with a 22% obesity rate while states like Mississippi sport an eye popping 32%, that still means that one in five of the state’s citizens are tipping the scale. Yet Corzine is doubling down on his calculation that voters will pull the lever for the fittest candidate.  Even while editorial pages are calling for an apology,  the governor broke out the jogging shorts to run a 5K through the streets of Newark with Mayor Cory Booker.

While unseemly, the ad has been effective, and the fat label is sticking:

But, it appears the message might be working, for now. A new poll from Monmouth University revealed that when voters were asked to say the first thing that came to mind about Christie,“fat” was one of the most frequent responses.  A political analyst told the Times that the ad seems to try to link Christie’s weight with his political ability — subliminally telling voters that he lacks self control.

One would think that overtly mocking one fifth of the state’s population would have consequences, and many political watchers predicted a backlash.  Yet, in the past few weeks, Corzine has been making a comeback in the polls, gaining 5 points.  Perhaps the lessoned to be learned is that voters don’t so much choose a candidate that is most like themselves, but rather most like who they want to be.

We have an embarassment of holiday riches this week. Just three days after National Coming Out Day, today we are blessed with World Food Day. Nom nom nom.

More seriously, the point of World Food Day is to bring attention to food insecurity around the world. Learn more about world hunger at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

As the dairy world is crashing and burning, its kinda nice to read a happy cheery story about how one dairy is making things work for them and their (somewhat) urban area. They’re expanding, while others are selling off their herds:

One of the family’s biggest decisions in recent history was to install a double-12 milking parlor, known to dairymen as a DeLaval Champion VLP parlor. The family started milking from the unit in April and is in the process of completing an office setup, which includes office space, a meeting and break room for employees, and a place to shower and clean up.

Not only are they expanding, they are also cultivating respectful relationships with the locals:

“We’re in a highly developed area as far as urban pressure,” he said. “Half the ground we farm is in Jackson Township (pop. 38,000). We have fantastic neighbors and we try to be good neighbors.”

Still, there are some things that have to be done, and spreading manure is one of those. But the family tries to avoid spreading during the winter, when it would fail to penetrate the ground, and also makes a second use of some of its resources, including water that is recycled during the milking process.

Not only do these fantastic farmers really care about their neighbors, but they also get how regulation can help, rather than hurt farmers:

Burkett, who is a state trustee with the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, said farmers are calling for more regulation, because they want to assure consumers that farmers are doing a good job.

“And that is happening, but we want to make sure that when it’s not happening, that there’s a method that it’s dealt with,” Burkett said. “Animals deserve fair treatment and one bad act reflects poorly on whole industry.”

Is there anything bacon can’t do?  For step-by-step instructions, check out This is Freaking Ridiculous.

A new report out from Harvard this week claims to have highly accurate numbers on obesity and diabetes in the country, and things do no t look good for our southern friends.

Colorado, Minnesota, Montana and Vermont have low rates, with Vermont the lowest at 6.1 percent for people 30 to 59 and 19.9 percent for people over 60. Southeastern states have the highest rates, and Mississippi, where 11.4 percent of people 30 to 59 and 27.7 percent of those over 60 are diabetic, has the highest of all.

Perhaps most shocking is the clear differential between men and women.  While men tend to have higher levels of alcoholism and therefore are more suseptible to diabetes, I had expected that women would roughly the same level of diabetes due to how difficult it is to shed excess pregnancy weight.

More men than women have diabetes in every state, and the gap is sometimes large. In Minnesota, for example, almost 12 percent of men have the disease, but only 8 percent of women. The variation among races is also stark. Nationally, about 18 percent of blacks and 16 percent of Hispanics have diabetes, compared with 11 percent of whites.

photo courtesy of flickr user lorri37

Did you know that a banana peel can remove warts?  And splinters?  And also shine shooes.  Nope, me neither.  Turns out that there are many uses for banana peels. They are the swiss army knife of the produce aisle.

Never mind that some guy at Pepsi thought that a great way to promote their energy drink Amp was to create a pick up line iPhone app. Never mind that this guy probably had a boss that approved the bratz-esque female caricature. And never mind that there was probably a whole slew of people over at Pepsi who thought that the “brag list” feature, where users can tally how many times they score, was a swell idea.

Thanks for keeping it classy Pepsi.

The Center or Science in the Public Interest put out a list this week of the Top 10 riskiest foods based on the number of outbreaks and the number of people who got sick. And those lucky duckies are:

This halloween brings us pumpkin, ghost, and cat peeps.

Let the peep halloween dioramas begin!!