Archive for January, 2011

Monthly Archive

Fri 21 Jan 2011 1:11 am

Pull Up A Chair



lebkuchen

If you have some reading time, here are a couple places I’ve been lately:

I was honored that the James Beard Foundation asked me to write about a recipe of my choice from Beard’s American Cookery. That’s how the photo above came about. If you don’t want to guess what I picked from the 896-page new edition, you can read about it and get the recipe here.

I’ve been a fan of the gorgeous Edible Seattle magazine since its first issue. It has a goal I can appreciate — to “make farmers and fishers as famous as rock stars” —  and it includes some of the best food writers around. I’m so pleased to have a story in the latest edition, writing about Skagit River Ranch’s quest for “heart-healthy ham” (thanks, editor supreme Jill Lightner, for that catchy phrase).

Canlis is turning 60, and celebrated by… oh, by a super-hot treasure hunt using new media, and a super-philanthropic party. I joined the Canlis family for lunch — not at the restaurant, they make a point of meeting weekly outside the workplace — for an article in the December Seattle Magazine.

I knew I was a longtime fan of Cakespy, but it wasn’t until I wrote this profile for The Seattle Times that I realized I’ve devoured Jessie’s sweet, madcap words and artwork almost since the start. (Her latest? Watch your favorite bookstore for “the best thing to happen to butter and sugar since flour“.)

If you’ve ever thought of farming as a romantic career, read “The Dirty Life” by Kristin Kimball. I reviewed it here for The Christian Science Monitor. And, speaking of farming books, I said for the record that you’ll feel pretty prescient about picking up Kurt Timmermeister’s “Growing A Farmer” when it starts showing up on the “best books of 2011” lists. I talked with Timmermeister here for the Monitor.

I write a monthly food-news column for Seattle’s Child magazine, and wrote there about the secret ingredient for perfect pie. I also talked with Laurie David about “The Family Dinner”.

You can often find me over at Al Dente, where I interviewed chocolate queen Alice Medrich, couldn’t stop cooking from Melissa Clark’s new cookbook, weighed in on the best baby present (John Howie’s chili, in case you’re wondering about the food connection), wondered if you would buy your nephews an Easy-Bake Oven, and felt compelled to reprint this recipe for bacon-sriracha cornbread.

Thanks for following along! If you miss the more back-and-forth conversations of my PI days (as I still do), I also spend way too much time on Twitter. I hope you’ll join me there.

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Wed 19 Jan 2011 3:04 pm

Are Muir Glen Tomatoes BPA-Free?



I was plenty interested in seeing what Jason Stratton of Spinasse was doing with organic tomatoes at this event last night. But the first question I hear when I say “Muir Glen” these days, I told the organizers, is when their tomato cans will be free of BPA.

The company announced last year that it would have BPA-free cans with “the next harvest,” delighting customers who are tearing out their hair trying to find ways to avoid the endocrine disrupter, but leaving them without a firm date.

Good news: “It’s already happened,” said Julie Johnson, an internal marketing communications consultant for General Mills, which owns Muir Glen. The harvest in question was the fall one, the tomatoes have already been packaged in BPA-free, non-epoxy-lined cans, and “they are literally hitting the stores now”. When the shipments are complete the company will announce the news from the rooftops. So for now, the Muir Glen tomatoes you find at the market might be BPA-free. Wait for the announcement and it’ll be a sure thing (or, at least, as sure as you can be these days). Eden Foods, an early adopter of BPA-free packaging for its beans,  has noted that their alternative cans cost them 14 percent more to produce. I didn’t ask Johnson about production costs, but she did say that Muir Glen did not raise retail prices when they made the switch.

One interesting note: Eden Foods now packages tomatoes in glass jars, citing the difficulty of finding BPA-free linings for such high-acid canned foods. I’ll update when I know more about what Muir Glen is using.

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