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| Photo Courtesy: thisweekfordinner.com, 2010. |
The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman: Everyone who knows me knows that I am a serious Mark Bittman recipe groupie. My wonderful little brother happened to (unknowingly of my Bittman obsession) buy me his How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian a few Christmases ago and with that there was no turning back. In those cookbooks, Bittman has the most wonderful basic (and complex variations) on anything you could possibly want to cook and his newest cookbook doesn't disappoint. With a new ethical philosophy on eating responsibly - for the planet, society and our own bodies - that is of course in Bittman-esque simplicity incredibly straightforward, i.e. eat less meat and more legumes, replace refined carbohydrates with whole grains and alternative sugars, and don't eat anything you can't pronounce (basically make your own foods).
Tim and I have gravitated towards eating less meat (flexitarians) for quite sometime now, but this book has made me feel a whole lot less guilty about it -- by explaining the fallacy of the meat = protein equation, once and for all and by explaining how much energy is spent in meat production - it's an incredibly unethical disgusting amount. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good steak every now and then, and thanks to my awesome hunting-gathering/friends-with-organic-farmers parents, much of the meat we do eat is wild or organic. But we are now trying to only eat meat once or twice a week and even then we use it as more of a garnish than the main menu item. A nice side effect has been the reduction of our food bill, as well as getting to try out all kinds of cool new foods - like millet and farro ---- can you say delicious risotto!
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| Jane Jacobs, 1961. This edition 1972. Cover photograph by Max Yavno. |
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs: I know, I know, Jane Jacobs seems to be a total trend right now but I have become increasingly attracted to the planning side of heritage and I couldn't not read Jane Jacobs obviously, and it just so happens that I love this book.
It's actually kind of amazing that Jacobs was writing at the time about things that may seem counterintuitive to what most people think about big cities but make so much sense when you think about them even just a little bit. Like that sidewalks are where social interaction happens, and contrary to the idea that they are dangerous places in the inner city, they are often the safest place to be - especially when they are overlooked by the traditional mix of commercial and residential. Just think about it - if you've more people who think of an area as their own community - they know what are normal events for their sidewalks and what aren't. They will police it without even thinking about it.
Essentially Jacobs makes the case that complex community systems in the inner city really work (i.e. mixed use neighbourhoods) and that the whole of modern planning methods denied this and by separating residential from commercial from industrial you are essentially destroying human ecosystems. I like to think of Jacobs as having a holistic approach to planning - if you have a little bit of everything you are going to win everytime - especially if you ask the people who actually live in those communities which little bits they appreciate and want in their own communities. But this is the huge caveat, you have to ask the people who live in an area what makes their community their own - it might be the local coffee shop but that doesn't mean you should plan on having one in every community. What works in one place won't necessarily work somewhere else.
P.S. Here's a really cool interview from the CBC archives with Jane Jacobs.
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| Photo Courtesy: http://www.cocoandvanilla.com, 2010. |
You're gonna be like "What?!" when I mention this next thing but believe me they are delicious and good for you and gluten-free. Right now I am loving Black Bean Brownies. I know it sounds weird and awful but in actuality these are incredibly good, dense, moist, chocolate goodies. Not only do they use legumes in place of flour (increasing your protein potential and making them very filling) they use agave nectar in place of sugar (decreasing your use of refined carbs). I can eat a couple of these itsy bitsy 1 inch brownies for dessert and be totally satiated.
I've also found a recipe I haven't had a chance to try yet that replaces the butter with banana - making these low fat and vegan. Cha-ching.
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| Photo Courtesy: © 1999 Dietmar Regensburger/Innsruck |
This awesome 5 part Ideas from the CBC on Rene Girard. I had to read some of his literature on the Scapegoat when I was in Theology which I thought was fascinating at the time but then promptly forgot about after the class. But then what do you know, I'm on my way home a few weeks ago and catch the tail end of Ideas (which is generally awesome but which I rarely ever catch) and I hear them talking with Girard about victimization in the modern society. I didn't even realize it was Rene Girard they were talking with but it piqued my interest thoroughly enough for me to seek the archive out on-line and listen to the whole thing during the course of one afternoon.
Girard is a French academic that has created this all-encompassing system which doesn't fall under any one academic discipline but is an anthropological, philosophical approach to humanity that draws upon ancient literature (the greeks), the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, to form an understanding of the violence inherent in mimetic desire (the competitive desires of individuals towards the same goals). The interview with him goes over his whole body of work and is a really great listen if you've got 5 hours of free time (it sounds like a lot but you could just replace 1 hour a day of television with a mini-lecture).
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| Photo Courtesy: Irene O'Toole, http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/JOVMNAcCgKe8zBXVZqLuig |
And now my last favourite thing of the moment....vegetable peelings. Yep, you heard right and you may believe that this is somewhat of an anti-climatic ending to this post. With all of the vegetables we've been eating, there seemed to be a lot of waste - and even thought we are lucky enough to live in a place which has green waste pick up - I was still feeling bad about the amount of waste.
So I've started to keep a couple of freezer bags in the freezer that I fill up with all of my vegetable peelings (from pretty much everything except for the really watery things like tomatoes and cucumbers and don't put the papery skins of onions in - it'll make your stock bitter). After a couple of weeks or sometimes even just one week, I'll boil all of those vegetable peelings and make my own vegetable stock or chicken stock if we've had one recently (after picking the bones I put the carcass in the freezer to save for stock too). I reserve this activity for the weekend, when electricity is cheaper and I have the time to let it simmer on the stove for most of the day. I usually boil up a couple of batches of grains and beans on the weekend as well (in keeping with Food Matters- see above) so that they are easy to toss together during the week - so I'm in and out of the kitchen anyways.
There is still the same amount of waste but at least I'm getting the full nutritive and economic value out of everything and I'm buying way less bouillon cubes and making way more soup. Frugality is the bomb.
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