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.

OK, now I feel doubly lied to.  Not only did the Food Network insinuate that the First Lady would play a key role in their White House Iron Chef, but now it turns out that the produce used in the cooking segment was not the same produce picked in the White House garden by the famous chefs.

At the beginning of the two-hour special, the chefs were shown picking sweet potatoes, broccoli, fennel and tomatillos from the White House garden. Then the chefs were seen walking into Kitchen Stadium, produce in hand. One problem: The show is filmed in New York City.

“Due to the production delay between the shoot at the White House and the shoot at Food Network, the produce used in Kitchen Stadium during the ‘Super Chef Battle’ was not actually from the White House garden,” said Food Network spokeswoman Lisa Krueger in a statement to The Talk.

Instead, the chefs used replacement produce, though only the same types of fruits and vegetables picked from the White House garden.

Replacement produce!  You can’t replace the Secret Ingredient on Iron Chef.  When you specifically name the ingredient to be produce from the White House garden, you can’t substitute fare from your local Whole Foods.  It’s like replacing Beluga with your local sushi takeout roe.  They may both be fish eggs, but no one is going to spend $5K for a kilo of sushi roe. Now I just want to slap Jane Seymour for each time remarked on how unbelievably “fresh” the produce tasted.

Additionally, this was just dumb.  It’s a 3 hour trip from DC to NYC, there is no reason why they couldn’t use the same produce if it was planned properly.  Or they could have filmed in DC.  Either way, this was a pointless lie, and an obnoxious one at that. The Food Network may have been served extra helpings of viewers for its White House special, but how many viewers are now left with a sour taste in their mouth?

Fathers, best be locking your daughters up, lest they end up dating a fast food mascot:

Fast Food Rage

RAD OMEN - “Rad Anthem” from Nicholaus Goossen on Vimeo.

Haven’t decided if the mountains of coke or the stripper wearing a chicken mask giving a lap dance to Colonel Sanders was more disturbing.

H/T SoGoodBlog

image courtesy of flickr user immolation scene

Sadly, my local Farmers’ Market over in Mount Pleasant shut down for the season about a month and a half ago.  Only 4 blocks away, it was incredibly convenient way to find fresh and often organic fresh fruits and vegetables.  Since then, I have attempting to scour my local grocery (Giant) for my local and organic fare.

I hasn’t been easy.  Over the past year, all sorts of organic produce has been appearing on the shelves, mostly under the brand “Nature’s Promise”.  Better than conventional, and of course more expensive, it’s still industrial farmed organic, so I have trust issues with it.  Plus, there’s still plenty of items Giant doesn’t carry organic - sweet potatoes, pears, green beans. Very frustrating.

So this weekend I have resolved to brave the cold and head over to one of the take-no-prisoners-open-all-year Farmers’ Markets and find out what the true believers are selling.  My suspicion is that there will be lots of root vegetables and baked goods.  The former is better than buying at Giant, the latter ridiculously over priced.  Will let you know what I harvest.

Rocco debuted his must try foods of 2010 on Rachel Ray, and the one that caught my eye was the Shiritaki Noodle:

These noodles have NO CARBS and NO CALORIES. They’re made of plant fibers, so they’re healthy and make you feel full. The best part? They’re already cooked! Just rinse and eat.

And yes, they are sold over the interwebs. However, no one really addresses how they taste…

Yep, they found fecal matter in soda machines.  According to Virginia food scientists, 48% of the liquids they tested were positive for Coliform bacteria, which is an indicator of feces. Drink up!

I, like many foodies across the nation, was super pumped for the special White House Iron Chef that was broadcast this past Sunday night.  Sadly, I left the table wanting something more.  For anyone that has been following the exploits of the Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden, there wasn’t much new information.  Yes, Bobby Flay informed us that sweet potatoes are Mrs. Obama’s faves, but how many times are they going to gush about the pounds and pounds of produce the garden has dished up?  How many times are we going to get the same tour of the White House acreage?  Foodie bloggers across the country have already beaten this story to death.

No, I tuned in, because I was curious to see FLOTUS at the tasting table, rubbing shoulders with the other judges, smacking her lips at the amazing creations, and dashing the hopes of world famous chefs when she dismisses a dish as being under seasoned.  At least that’s what I thought we were getting with the advertising “…and a special guest of national importance…”.

No such luck.  Instead we got Nigella Lawson, Jane Seymour, and Natalie Coughlin. Really?  They couldn’t even get Bo Obama to lick some crumbs up off the floor?  Insanely dull and disappointing considering all that hype.

The show did pull in some mega numbers, the show’s biggest in its 8 seasons, but how many patrons left with a bad taste in their mouth?

While most of the barely year old administration has been mired in a morass of inertia, there has been a few bright points of, egads, CHANGE. And I’m happy to report its the good sort of change.  While Hilda Solis has been hard at work trying to keep employers from killing their employees and screwing them over in their paychecks, the FDA has been ginning up the oversight machine as well.

Working with the DOJ, the FDA has asked for a permanent injunction against the Quesos Mi Pueblito manufacturer, because along with a bunch of mexican cheese-esque products, they have also been manufacturing Listeria.

WalletPop has all the delightful details:

In the complaint, provided to WalletPop, inspectors found a pit in the cheese production room with sewer gases leaking from it, thermometers that register the wrong temperatures — causing cheese to be “refrigerated” at up to 55 degrees, the use of rusty equipment and an infestation of cockroaches and other insects. Tests also found Listeria in several parts of the facility.

The FDA said the company reported addressing many of the issues in the fall, but retests over several months continued to find contamination at the plant. On other occasions, responding to state officials, the plant was closed for cleaning and repairs only to be cited again for more violations.

Requests to close down facilities are uncommon.

Compare this response to the horrendous peanut butter contamination a year and a half ago that killed 8 people.  Yep, change is good.  People not dying is even better.

So I had to assume at some point I’d hit a recipe I wasn’t totally in love with. But it’s not them, it’s me, I’m fairly sure.

I decided to attempt the carrot bread for a few reasons. We were on white bread overload after 3 loaves of master white. We were working through a healthier rye, but I wanted a bread that my daughter would eat, and I wanted something healthy and with veggies in it. There really weren’t as many good options in the Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day book as I was hoping. But I figured I would try the carrot bread out and see how it worked.

I still had a loaf of rye dough in my bucket, so I cloaked and laid out that loaf, did a partial bake and put it in the freezer for a rainy day. Minnesota is in the middle of a brutal cold snap, so we had been defrosting our stand up freezer for a few days, and now there is much more room in it (for those of you wondering how I keep a major sized tub of dough in the tiny fridge, the answer is that I don’t — I just leave it in the basement where it’s only 40 degrees).

I cleaned out the tub and made a half batch of the carrot bread recipe. The dough felt completely wrong - more like batter than actual dough, so I kept adding extra whole wheat flour to the dough. It never seemed very doughy, but at least it was a little more firm and less soupy. I let it rise for 4 hours and stuck it in the basement.

The next day, I had a risen, but still ridiculously porous dough. I sprinkled my flour and tried to cloak (cloaking is the process of putting your dough in a ball, then pulling the top of the ball over and under the dough while rotating it, basically gathering the dough underneath it while creating a smooth outside surface), but it just kept breaking apart in, well, ooze. I did manager to form it into an oval, somewhat, and wrestle it into a loaf pan, where it maybe did a little rise. There was also a bit of rise in the oven, but really not that much.

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?

The bread, rather than being a “bread” bread, was thick and dense and reminded me more of a zucchini or some other batter bread. And it was REALLY dense. That was a heavy bread.

The flavor? It was good to the first taste. I don’t know why I was thinking that carrot bread would be some sort of savory bread (I have eaten carrot cake after all, and I was aware that I was adding some brown sugar and dried fruit). I would love to eventually find a savory carrot bread, down the road. So, for a sweet bread, not bad. There was a little bit of a gritty, almost bitter aftertaste that I realized later was the wheat germ, especially since I used that in the cloaking. And I didn’t do the egg wash or sugar sprinkle, since I thought there was already enough sugar in it, and I was trying to feed it to my toddler, so maybe that would have helped.

And did I mention it was really dense?

As for the toddler — she thought it was fantastic. So she just ate her carrots. Not that veggies were a big deal last night anyway, since she demolished her spinach. But I still like to feel like I mix up the ways she gets her vegetable occasionally.

So, success? Yeah, I think so. It was what it was. It just wasn’t necessarily what I wanted.

Next bread? I’m thinking a whole wheat rosemary baguette. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Speaking of retrospectives, here a great, albeit quick and dirty, recap of food stories from the past decade.

The big one they missed? The massive food price shocks that rocked the third world.

Since Top 10 lists are so last week, fine journalists from across the country have moved on to trends and predictions of the new year.  And there is no more important question to be answered than, what will we be wearing in 2010?  I don’t know Fido, but I’m sure that the fashion pages of the LA Times can set us straight.

From the prognostications of Booth Moore, we now know the following is coming:

• Tacky and cheap is all the rage via Forever 21
• For a new duds, try a trip down the rabbit hole literary-wise
• Gisele, and more surprisingly, Ronaldo are this year’s icons
• Home Shopping Networks (can’t tell if the author was cracked out or just paid off by QVC when declaring this a trend)
• Brand America, which can be defined as “a classic-looking trucker’s jacket with the front panels cut out so that it resembled a bondage harness”
• New Bridge - high end labels like Posen offering somewhat-affordable lines.  They must have finally noticed this recession thingee

No, I did not actually create the perfect rye, like I had hoped. But I’m much, much closer.

I tried the Deli Rye from the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day book. I made a bigger loaf — about half of the dough in the bucket.

It cloaked into a beautiful oval, which rose wonderfully in the stove. The crust was crispy and rustic, the crumb perfectly spongy. The key really was the carraway seed, I’ve realized now. It is definitely necessary in order to have the true rye flavor I was looking for.

The only thing lacking is maybe a little more heft to the loaf. I feel like it may need more rye flour in proportion to the white flour used, or maybe I need to swap out some of the white flour for wheat instead. The crumb was just slightly too white bread for the flavor I was hoping to obtain.

So, not the perfect rye, no. But by far the best rye loaf I have ever baked.