I'm a salty recipe developer, food photographer, and educator here to vent about the current trends in the digital food landscape. Send me your questions about food blogging, food journalism, and even just questions about recipes.
Enjoy some hot and spicy takes - with some salty and bitter notes, and sometimes even sweet because we are all about flavour balance here. For more life help style cooking advice check out @failure-to-omlet
Currently accepting asks about:
Burning questions about the digital food industry (why the fuck do food bloggers do x?! Why doesn't my food look like the picture? What food trend is so over done this month?)
How to cook
Transcribing recipes from annoying videos (with all the important information they didn't include) - send me the tumblr post link
Please help out a disabled freelancer: ko-fi link being edited
Patreon/newsletter coming eventually. All art on this blog is my own unless otherwise attributed.
There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?
I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!
A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.
Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...
I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.
The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come
DO I HAVE A SERIES FOR YOU. University of California Press has a gift for you and it is a 80+ book series on food studies. There are even some that are open access (legally free), but the rest are in libraries.
I also highly recommend Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. It’s about the impact refrigeration has had/is having on food preservation and culture, globally. It was one of my favorite books of this last year.
the diet industry is so unbelievably fucked and it’s in your fucking walls. “keeps you full longer so you don’t get hungry an hour after lunch when you’re trying to do something” is a neutral statement of benefit but no we have to treat pistachios like crucial medicine in the war against basic bodily functions.
eating disorder recovery is just getting angry over and over again because food is treated like some horrible necessary evil instead of one of the great joys of life. eat some nuts because they taste good and you are a living thing that thrives on pleasure and calories. you need both.
I need to get some sleep but in case you need to hear it: you deserve to eat. your appetite is not the enemy. if you can, treat yourself to a filling meal of foods you love today. throw pistachio shells at people. be free.
Ah, the fun fact that I surprise people with regularly. The reason cake batter/cookie dough isn't safe to eat is not just the eggs. It's the fucking flour. Uncooked grains like flour are not safe. That's the problem here. Most people hear all about the egg piece (at least in the USA and Canada) when they are young to the point of panic, but no one ever learns about flour and other grains.
Toast the flour in the oven first and you're fine if you want to make edible cookie dough. Which unfortunately isn't going to work for cake mix because of the sugars and powdered milk.
Also serious side-eye for the way that headline makes it sound like they're creating some toxic chemistry experiment. It's just a basic food safety issue.
When you've been recipe testing and photographing all day and the prospect of even one extra dish to clean is yoo much so you eat dinner out of the pan.
When you've been recipe testing and photographing all day and the prospect of even one extra dish to clean is yoo much so you eat dinner out of the pan.
This buttery, chamomile tea-scented loaf is a sweet pop symphony, the Abba of cakes. A pot of flowery, just-brewed chamomile isn’t required for drinking with slices of this tender loaf but is strongly recommended. In life and in food, you always need balance: A sip or two of the grassy, herbal tea between bites of this cake counters the sweetness, as do freeze-dried strawberries, which lend tartness and a naturally pink hue to the lemony glaze. This everyday loaf will keep on the counter for 3 to 4 days; be sure the cut side is always well wrapped.
Ingredients
Yield: One 9-inch loaf
½ cup/115 grams unsalted butter
2 tablespoons/6 grams chamomile tea (from 4 to 6 tea bags), crushed fine if coarse
1 cup/240 milliliters whole milk
Nonstick cooking spray
1 cup/200 grams granulated sugar
½ teaspoon coarse kosher salt
2 large eggs
1 large lemon
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1½ cups/192 grams all-purpose flour
1 cup/124 grams confectioners’ sugar
½ cup/8 grams freeze-dried strawberries
Preparation
Step 1
In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon chamomile to a large mixing bowl. Pour the hot melted butter over the chamomile and stir. Set aside to steep and cool completely, about 1 hour.
Step 2
Use the same saucepan (without washing it out) to bring the milk to a simmer over medium-high heat, keeping watch so it doesn’t boil over. Remove from the heat, and stir the remaining 1 tablespoon chamomile into the hot milk. Set aside to steep and cool completely, about 1 hour.
Step 3
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with the nonstick cooking spray and line with parchment paper so the long sides of the pan have a couple of inches of overhang to make lifting the finished cake out easier.
Step 4
Add the sugar and salt to the bowl with the butter, and whisk until smooth and thick, about 1 minute. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, vigorously whisking to combine after each addition. Zest the lemon into the bowl; add the baking powder and vanilla, and whisk until incorporated. Add the flour and stream in the milk mixture while whisking continuously until no streaks of flour remain.
Step 5
Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake until a skewer or cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean (a few crumbs are OK, but you should see no wet batter), 40 to 45 minutes. Cool in the pan on a rack for 30 minutes.
Step 6
While the cake cools, make the icing: Into a medium bowl, squeeze 2 tablespoons juice from the zested lemon, then add the confectioners’ sugar. Place the dehydrated strawberries in a fine-mesh sieve set over the bowl and, using your fingers, crush the brittle berries and press the red-pink powder through the sieve and into the sugar. (The more you do this, the redder your icing will be.) Whisk until smooth.
Step 7
If needed, run a knife along the edges of the cake to release it from the pan. Holding the 2 sides of overhanging parchment, lift the cake out and place it on a plate, cake stand or cutting board. Discard the parchment. Pour the icing over the cake, using a spoon to push the icing to the edges of the cake to encourage the icing to drip down the sides dramatically. Cool the cake completely and let the icing set.
Reminder - in the US, you can't copyright recipes. (This is why online recipes tend to have stories wrapped around them - you /can/ copyright the story. But the recipe directions are exempt from copyright.
Slight correction from someone who writes recipes for a living. This is a complicated issue but the nuance is you can't copyright a list of ingredients. The recipe instructions can be copyright.
Do you have any healthy snack suggestions for someone who isn't a huge fan of nuts and dried fruit?
FIRST: A 'Snack' is just a small portion of food. It is a signifier of quantity. 'Snack' does not exclude any type or form of food - it just means a lil' bit of food.
SECOND: "Healthy" is entirely relative to every individual.
'Healthy' is just 'Supportive of a complete nutritional profile, taking into account a person's existing diet, dietary needs, and habits of energy expenditure'
For example:
A small, greasy hamburger is an EXCELLENT snack for a highschool athlete who needs to consume an large amount of calories every day to maintain their body. It has lots of fat and protein for muscle recovery and long-term energy, carbs for immediate energy, and some lettuce/tomato/onion for some extra fiber/vitamins/minerals.
On the flip side, if someone already eats a fair amount of of meat and carbs already but has a lower-energy lifestyle, a healthy snack for them might entail leafy greens, beans/legumes and vegetables, because they need more fiber and nutrients in their diet that plants have in abundance.
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If you are allergic to or hate eating something, then it's not healthy to force yourself to eat it anyway. Find a different food, or a different way to prepare it that doesn't cause physical or psychological distress!
Don't like peanuts, but peanut butter is good? Eat peanut butter instead! Hate the texture of whole tomatoes, but tomato sauce is good? Eat tomato sauce instead!
Don't be afraid to finely mince or blend your ingredients into a sauce or smoothie if you feel you need or want to eat something for the nutrients but hate chewing it.
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I'm a big fan of probiotic stuff in general, like fermented foods (kimchi, pickles, sauerkraut, miso, mustard and yogurts), since a strong bacterial colony in the gut has a positive impact on wellbeing for most folks. More importantly, I love the taste.
Buuuuuuuut~ some people are extra sensitive to compounds that are concentrated in fermented foods. Those people should not eat a lot of fermented foods. It's not healthy for them.
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If you're munching snacks out of boredom when you're not actually hungry, something low-fat but satisfyingly crunchy usually does the trick for me. Something I can keep devouring for the sensory delight, gives some good nutrients, and won't make me feel overly full afterward.
Carrots, bell peppers, mung bean sprouts, apples, pears, jicama, radish, pretzels, sweet onions, green papaya, broccoli, popcorn, cucumber, water chestnut, seaweed crisps, coconut chips, any of those fermented foods I mentioned... hell, coleslaw is mostly cabbage with oil and vinegar - plow through that and have a great time!
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If you want a snack because you're hungry, but you just want to tide yourself over until the next meal, eat something that is high in fat and fiber. Fat & Fiber makes you feel full.
Cheese, Yogurt, Butter. Olive oil. Guacamole. Tinned fish. Cream. Fry up an egg. Olives, Hard-boiled eggs - These are all relatively high in fat.
Beans, Legumes, Oats, Leafy Greens, and most Berries are pretty high in fiber, and can pair up with any of the fatty things.
Hell, a slice of cheese pizza is also fine! Buttered toast is fine! A small portion of roast beef from last night's dinner!
Eat a little bit, wait 20 minutes, and see if you're still hungry after that. A normal stomach takes 20-30 minutes to register feeling satiated. (Some people's stomachs don't really feel the difference of hunger vs satiation. Those people need to be more mindful of the quantities of food they eat - both eating too much, AND eating too little!)
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If you want a snack because salty snacks in particular sound fucking amazing, but other fatty and high-protein foods sound kinda gross, Try chugging a glass of water.
If water doesn't resolve the feeling after giving it a few minutes, try something with salt.
Dehydration and not having enough salt in your body both cause salt cravings. Acute thirst is often mistaken as hunger.
Honestly, you can have a handful of chips. Eating a whole family-sized bag of potato chips in one sitting is probably too much salt & fat for most people, but eating a handful here and there is fine. It's just as morally neutral as eating a carrot.
Eat some rice with soy sauce. Eat some pickled okra, or pickled onions. Eat some miso soup. Drink some soup broth. Have some salt-cured meats.
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So: A Healthy Snack!
Ask yourself: Am I hungry, bored, or thirsty?
Ask yourself: What have I been eating lately, and what has my diet lacked, or had in excess? (Fats, Protein, Carbohydrates, Vitamins/Minerals, Water, Salt)
Ask yourself: Am I trying to provide my body with a complete nutritional profile, including fats and carbs - or am I focusing on an imagined 'purity' of food and assigning moral value to eating what diet culture calls healthy so I can be 'good.' (Aka: Do you think instances of eating candy or fatty food is 'being bad'? Stop that.)
Ask yourself: Am I able to rely on my body's signals for hunger and thirst, or do I need to manually track this?
Sometimes a snack is a small portion of leftovers from yesterday.
Sometimes a snack is carefully sliced, cooked, and arranged on a cute plate.
Sometimes a snack is gnawing through half a head of cabbage doused in vinegar.
Sometimes a snack is a handful of shredded cheese eaten from your own palm so you become both the gentle horse and the stablehand feeding it, and that's all okay
Doing some recipe development and would love to get thoughts.
What jam/preserve do you use when something is PB&J?*
Strawberry
Grape
Blueberry
Raspberry
Apricot
Marmalade
Voting ended onOct 10, 2024
*Can be for PB&J sandwiches, but also for recipes that are PB&J inspired.
Honey is not included because that is a different thing. If your go to is honey, I'm right there with you, but pick what you think it would mostly be when you hear "peanut butter and jelly".
You should be starting a recipe book. I don't give a shit if you're only 20-years-old. The modern web is rotting away bit by bit before our very eyes. You have no idea when that indie mom blog is going down or when Pinterest will remove that recipe. Copy it down in a notebook, physically or digitally. Save it somewhere only you can remove it. Trust me, looking for a recipe only to find out it's been wiped off the internet is so fucking sad. I've learned my lesson one too many times.
Reblogging this now as a reminder to myself that I have Thoughts on this and should do a writeup on it for my @adulting-help sideblog.
For context: I'm a former pastry chef and currently the main meal planner in my household. I'm also working on digitizing my notes from pastry school and all my home recipes, which may all get compiled into a POD notebook.
I just have to get out the door for a hair appointment and am on mobile, or I'd just do the writing of the thoughts now.
