Oh, that sounds absolutely marvelous. I love talking with older folks about food--I always learn something interesting.

Ruth--Real Food by Nina Planck compares the composition of various traditional cooking fats.

I’d add tallow (rendered beef fat) as well as lard to the list, plus duck fat and schmaltz (rendered chicken fat). These were the fats our great-grandmothers used and are local fats, as opposed to olive oil and coconut oil, which are shipped from afar.

Soup is one of the things I love about cooking during the cold months. It’s not only economical, but for me, a very lazy way to turn leftovers into dinner, fast. This week, I had leftover roast chicken, steamed rice, breakfast potatoes, steamed broccoli. I started stock with chicken carcass in the morning, then chicken & rice soup and cheddar-bacon chowder with broccoli for dinner that night (daughter doesn’t like potatoes, so see gets chicken & rice)...and lunches the next day and the next. Between the bit of chopping and heating, it took me maybe 30 minutes to make two soups? Oh, and because broccoli overcooks so easily, we just added it to our bowls and poured the hot soup on top.

This is totally making my mouth water! And I know you have a whole book on puff pastry, but I’m trying to avoid that (the pastry, that is) and think I will try this topped with thinly sliced potatoes, brushed with olive oil, instead.

I was there last night as well. The story of Kevin, boy who died from E coli tainted burger, really haunted me. His mom’s strength astounds me. I wish I could get my Green Revolution dad to go see the movie.

Since all-purpose flour is a combination of pastry flour and bread flour, you shouldn’t need all-purpose flour if you have the other two (or four, if you’re keeping whole and white versions). I use bread flour (white whole wheat or unbleached white) for yeasted baked goods and pastry flour for most everything else.

I recently bought a peppermill specifically for grinding small amounts of spices on the fly--I use if for grinding corianders, cloves. It’s easier and quieter than getting out the coffee grinder just to grind 1/2 tsp of spices.

I find ginger keeps in the fridge for a month or more. I store it in in paper bag in the crisper.

We just enjoyed our first taste of asparagus from our garden this year. Blanched and lighted salted...just amazing. Once we start harvesting 3-4 times a week, we eat the tips fresh and freeze the stalks for soups, quiche, and my favorite, twice-baked potatoes.

Mmmmm...radish and butter sandwiches. Can’t wait!

Such a lovely article, Harriet. My plan is to make lots of fried chicken this summer for taking on picnics...I’ll be pestering you for Hattie’s recipe.

Celtic sea salt, as well as other salts, like Real Salt, contain other minerals besides sodium. Since I want my food to be as nutrient-dense as possible, and still taste delicious, I use unrefined Celtic sea salt for most of my cooking and baking and a less expensive refined sea salt or kosher salt for brining, blanching, salting cooking water for pasta or potatoes, etc. Kosher is easier to pinch than the more finely ground sea salt, so I keep an open cellar of that by the stove for sprinkling. We only rarely have salt on the table, but if I think something needs a bit more salt, I put the cellar of kosher on the table.

@giovannaz Raw milk simply sours. It gets a kind of cheesy aroma and left long enough in the fridge, it begins to separate. I save whatever raw milk we don’t drink or use to make cheese and yogurt and have a few experiments going in my fridge. A quart I left for a few weeks separated completely--about 1/4 curd and the rest whey. During a cheese making class at my home, we tasted it, and agreed it tasted like blue cheese that needed some salt. Most of our soured raw milk goes into pancakes and other baked goods. It’s a perfect replacement for buttermilk in recipes.

Raw milk still has the good little beasties in it that naturally cause it to turn into cheese. Those probiotics keep the bad stuff at bay by turning lactose into lactic acid. That acidic environment is inhospitable to putrefying bacteria. Pasteurization destroys the good bacteria, giving the bad ‘uns the opportunity to proliferate and cause milk to turn.

As far as “a little homogenized,” I can’t say for sure, but I do think that the handling of milk causes some degree of homogenization. As Harriett mentioned, she just shakes up her raw milk once and it remains mixed--which demonstrates that it doesn’t take much to homogenized milk. When making cheese, I have noticed that vat pasteurized, but not intentionally homogenized, milk, has a much smaller curd than raw milk and I think that’s the result of “a little” homogenization that happens during processing.

He said something like, “We don’t talk...I mean, we don’t NOT talk.” Basically, he seem to be saying they don’t conspire (he was answering a question along those lines) and I imagine that as much as they have in common, that two such extremely busy people who live on opposite ends of the US don’t meet up often or pick up the phone for chit-chat.

I didn’t really learn anything new at Pollan’s or Bittman’s talks, except for the 2 pounds of animal products per day statistic. That is an astounding amount of cheese and eggs, along with meat.

This one’s tough! We are averaging about $530/month for groceries for our family of four. That’s with buying our meat farm-direct, in bulk (and limiting consumption to 5-8 pounds per week), buying most of our groceries in bulk (from Azure), and eating mostly organic, whole foods. I do a lot of food prep at home--bake bread/bagels, make yogurt, cream cheese, etc., which saves me 50% and more over buying from the store (and taste so much better). An interesting site with the USDA’s Cost of Food at Home.