FoodNerd!

One of my foodwhore pals is going to be housesitting in Melbourne (Croydon, to be specific) for a month sometime soon, and she’s on the lookout for congenial types who might A) point her in the direction of delicious things and/or B) join her for a meal or grocery shopping junket. She’ll find things on her own but it is more fun to have random hookups occasionally with friends of friends (or friends of random internet food-obsessives who read my blog).

I have not had a comment on the blog for ages so I wonder if maybe it’s broken? If so, email me at foodnerd -at- paisleysky -dot- net.

I love the internets. Thanks to my pal M for the link!

http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com

I have a new food-crush on Nigel Slater. I’d read a couple columns of his in Gourmet. I read his book Toast, which I very much enjoyed and recommend. But then I stumbled onto his web-column in the Guardian’s website, and I am smitten. I love his casual but unmistakably British tone, in which he can be offhand about leftovers, be elegantly particular about a technique, and talk about farting all in the same sentence.
But more than anything I love the recipes. They’re clearly the result of a fellow foodnerd who reads a lot of cookbooks and spends a lot of time just making shit up in his kitchen, and they are so very English somehow. How is it that no one in the States, myself included, has ever thought to put a goat-cheese mixed with pickles and pickle juice from the jar into a beet soup? (Maybe they have, but I’ve not found them yet.) There’s always a bit of marmalade or a bit of curry involved, in places I might not think to put them. Every single thing I’ve read on his column sounds absolutely gorgeous to eat. And it’s become a must-read site for me, at least of late… swoon.

A coworker forwarded this today, about how world consumption overshoots natural resource regeneration capacity each year: World Overshoot Day
It more or less boils down to the idea that since 1986, we’ve gone further and further into natural resource debt each year. Which i suppose explains why it feels like the world has been going steadily down the tubes without letup for my entire adult life. I do not like it, no sir, I do not like it at all.

my friend told me about this crazy new thing where you can have dinner on a platform suspended from a giant crane.
file under: Things I Would HATE
(i mean really. 4 point restraints during dinner? smog? and what if you have to take a whiz?)

So it figures that I stumble on an interesting locally-written blog by reading about it in a Chicago-based magazine that FoodNerd gets delivered to the house. One of the more recent issues of Time Out Chicago makes mention of a blog on U.S. Food Policy (aptly named, U.S. Food Policy) written by a Tufts University professor.

FoodNerd is concerned that reading it is just going to make her depressed about how bad the policy in the U. S. currently is, but it seems like there’s also a lot of good stuff in the form of local info, resources, and news of good things that can be done and/or are being done.

Hopefully there’s enough balance so she won’t be upset that I posted it. I’ve found it a good read so far, but I’ve haven’t had the chance to dig through the archive yet and I’ve got to get back to work.