Our Food Choices

The principal goal here is to write about the foods we eat and the foods we think about. We want to share our curiosity about the many real foods available to us by exploring their nutritional values, their histories, the farming practices that produce them and the best local sources for obtaining them. We have our biases and you’ll read plenty of them here. Don’t worry, you’ll know them when you see them – no tricks. We hope the information and photographs you find here will inspire you to step away from your computer and head into your kitchen or out into your garden to experience your food world your way.

We’re on the slow food bandwagon and it’s driven by a number of ambitions that speak to our desire to consume responsibly, nourish ourselves healthfully and to do so cost effectively. The changes we’ve made manifest in a number of changes in sensibility including our growing commitment to eating locally grown, sustainably harvested organic produce; a desire to avoid whenever possible industrial processed foods; a yearning to re-discover our ancestral food wisdom; and a need to reduce the cost of preparing and consuming our meals.

We cook at home and most of the food we eat is prepared at home from basic staples we’ve learned to store in our one-ass kitchen. Breakfasts are served at the family dining table before work, lunches are packed and carted into the office and dinner is prepared in the kitchen from the foods in our pantry and served, like breakfast, at the table. This isn’t a wishful description of an aspirational lifestyle. This is our daily reality. Our coworkers and friends admire the effort, though we suspect that many view the commitment with some cynicism. We take the commitment seriously enough to bake bread in our un-airconditioned apartment kitchen on the warmest day of the year and to eat ice cold gazpacho on a chilly foggy “summer” afternoon.

We’ve come to understand that our meals aren’t hard to plan for or prepare once the basics are in place. All a home cook needs is the right storage strategy, a commitment to keeping a list of things you use regularly and will need when you go to the market, some well rehearsed go-to recipes, a couple of accessible reference cookbooks, and the sense to realize that cooking a great meal at home doesn’t require an act of divine providence or an epiphany or enlightenment. Of course, if you lack the most basic skills of the kitchen – how to read a recipe, how to use a knife, how to boil water – you’re going to need to bone up on a few things to get started. But most of us have access to books and cooking shows, as well as the internet, and as such will never lack for inspiration.

So, dig in. We welcome your comments and hope to “see” you here often.