Dork Chow

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Continuing from my previous post about microformats, I went googling to see what I could find.  Lo and behold, there is a hRecipe plugin for WordPress (in case you hadn’t guessed, this blog sits on the WordPress platform.)  As you may know installing plugins in WordPress is ridiculously easy, and there is nothing to configure with hRecipe.  After activating the plugin, I was at first not even sure it had done anything at all.  But then I spotted it:  a little star icon in the blog post editor (circled in red).

This is what you see when you click the star:  a popup window with tabs where you can enter various aspects of your recipe.

What does this do for you?  A couple of things:  You don’t have to learn the hRecipe markup labels because it just does them (well at least some of them)  for you.   You can attach your own styles to the various classes if you want, and have a consistent look for your recipes.  (You could have always done that, but if you follow standard conventions, your work will be more portable.)  Software that is able to find and read hRecipe pages will be able to “read” and export your recipe.  Meanwhile, it just looks like an ordinary recipe.  All the special markup is invisible to people;   however, search engines will be able to find your recipe more the way you want it found.  And if you want your recipe shared, it makes it easier for that to happen.

hRecipe is relatively new.  There is only one application that supports it as I write.  A handful of forward looking recipe sites have marked up their recipes in hRecipe.  I don’t expect it to take off virally, as most of visitors this blog post have probably left by now, or if you  did get this far,  you’re saying, “huh?” because you skimmed it too fast.

What I’m saying is:  if you install the plugin and start using it, don’t expect to see huge jump in your Google analytics right away.  But microformats including hRecipe are catching on, albeit slowly, and the people who wrap their content in microformat   will be  well positioned when the Google crawlers evolve to be fully aware of them.  And anyway,  it’s a nice way to organize your content if you have a recipe blog.

My next post will be a recipe in hRecipe.  It won’t hurt, I promise!

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Chinese Omelette

Quick, simple, and delicious! You can make substitutions to suit …

See Chinese Omelette on Key Ingredient.

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A nice change from your Denver or Mexican omelettes. I nicked this out of a local free Australian food rag. A pinch of red cabbage I happened to have adds color.

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Sweet Potacos

I slightly modified this recipe from my friend marisuewrites at …

See Sweet Potacos on Key Ingredient.

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Serving suggestion: I served it with guac, nopales, lime, cilantro and salad.

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Zuppa di Fagioli

Another Tuscan traditional recipe that doesn't have refined white …

See Zuppa di Fagioli on Key Ingredient.

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A splash of cooking sherry adds just the right sweetness to this delicious, creamy and robust soup. I starch mine up with whole grain barley (a substitute for the traditional Roman farro, which is hard to find these days). A little Parmesan cheese is a great topping for non vegans, and I also fried up some Italian sausage as a toss-in for those in my family who think they must have meat.

We have elected a president in 2008, I hope, who actually cares and responds to real people (unlike the current $%#$@#$#!!)  Let’s urge him to plant a national victory garden on the whitehouse lawn.  He might just do it!!

This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.

The Garden of Eatin’: A Short History of America’s Garden from roger doiron on Vimeo.

All the dorky sustainable and healthy recipes we’ve published on this blog from the get-go plus a few bonus ones we never got around to blogging are now coagulated into a handy dandy PDF and you can get it FREE for a limited time.    (See, now if you were a subscriber you would have been notified.)  After 31 Dec, we will, like every patriotic American, shed this seasonal goodwill  and recall that we also have to eat. And so we did. If you want the cookbook now you will have to blog a recipe on the blog. This doesn’t mean comment or email me a recipe for me to blog. This means you become an author on the blog, read the about page and blog your recipe according to our protocols. There is a glut of recipes. Blogging is a lot about presentation.

The food dork wants to wish everyone a healthy, happy and prosperous 2009!

[WP-CUMULUS]
This is a bit of geekery that should really be featured on my Hot Dorkage Geek blog Ironically it doesn’t work over there. Both blogs run out of the same install of WordPress. Even more ironically, on Hot Dorkage it works in preview mode but as soon as you publish the post it tells you you don’t have the right version of Flash. Well then gee how did it just work in PREVIEW MODE 3 seconds ago? It’s a beautiful blue cloud that exactly matches my theme. And this is a lovely green food cloud that doesn’t really match my theme here. Because I hope to change it soon.

A friend of mine, for whatever reason, is having a vegan Thanksgiving. She told me that traditionally, a longstanding girlhood friend of hers has celebrated Thanksgiving with her and her family, but when the friend heard it was going to be vegan, she decided to do something else. It wasn’t one of those “oh do you think maybe she’s mad at me?” sort of deals. This friend told her straight up, “OK if you are doing vegan you can count me out.”

What is up with that? First of all, I was always taught that it is rude to ask anyone who is offering to feed you what’s on the menu. It is even ruder to announce, “Oh brussell sprouts? No thanks I’ll go to McDonald’s.” If you have a food allergy or a religious practice that limits your dietary choices, it is OK to inform your host, as in, “I have gluten intolerance so I am unable to eat bread or pasta or any product containing wheat.” On the host side, I was always taught that if you are having someone for the first time, it is considered gracious to ask them if they have any dietary restrictions, and accommodate those. If your host knows about your restrictions and still serve you a meal consisting entirely of food that you will not be able to eat, that is rudeness on their part. Food comes in an amazing variety. Surely any host trying to create a balanced and satisfying dinner for guests will offer a number of choices of dish. People can then help themselves to the dishes that they both like and are able to eat. If there’s any uncertainty about what something is, the host might say something like, “those are bacon bits for the salad for those who want them,” to alert their Islamic guest not to eat it.

I’m forever astounded at the number of people who get hot under the collar and feel it’s perfectly OK to rant if asked to forgo meat for just ONE MEAL! If I were to spout off when invited to a hot dog barbecue about how toxic hot dogs are and how much I hate them and how terrible it is to eat them, I would be considered rude. So what do I do? If I like the people, I accept the invitation, and I just eat the potato salad and skip the hot dogs and don’t say anything.

Come on people! It’s not like vegans or vegetarians eat boiled lumps of charcoal or slimy seaweed or dogs. And there is no medical condition I’ve ever heard of that requires a person to eat exclusively large slabs of a dead animal three times a day. Most vegetarian/vegan fare prepared in USA would be familiar to the average USA citizen: grains and potatoes, beans and nuts, mushrooms, salads, vegetables that you’ve seen before, fruits, and a dizzying array of delicious desserts. Any vegetarian worth their salt knows how to use high protein ingredients such as tofu or seitan. Seitan in particular can pass for meat if that’s what the cook is trying to do. There are some vegetarian meals where you wouldn’t even realize they were vegetarian unless someone told you. And heavens to Betsy there might be some unfamiliar food, combination, or method of preparation, and what is more, you might actually LIKE it! And if you really HAVE to have meat, pack a turkey sandwich in a cooler in your car, make a pretext of going out to get something, and slip out and nosh on it.

Having a meal with others is about spending time together and sharing. It’s not really about the food.

Even if none of this Chinese candy contains any melamine, it is still poor nutrition.
Is poison only something that will make you sick within 24 hours, or could sugar and transfats in high doses also be declared toxic because of all the diseases they contribute to over time. Halloween is national sugarbuzz day, I know, and I don’t want to be a big Scrooge about it. But please folks, be vigilant, and buy local, or at least domestic, whenever you can. We have the FDA in the USA, such as it is. Many other countries don’t have such an agency, or if they do it is in the pocket of some industrialist and is corrupt as all get out.

Aging is such a bitch. You hear terms like “healthy aging” but what it boils down to is at about 30 you start to decline, bit by bit, at first so slowly you don’t even notice, but gaining speed as you go. Muscle is lost, Bone becomes brittle, perceptual acuity is lost, speed, strength, coordination all decline. Digestion, elimination, and thinking slow down. And that’s “healthy aging.” Then if you get some disease on top of being old, you can have other problems as well, for example, not tolerating foods that you used to pig out on. At some point you can’t really be trusted to take care of yourself. That’s where my parents are right now. Neither can walk without a walker. Simple things such as putting on a belt or shaving baffle them or seem hopelessly difficult. Dad can no longer write his own name. I am charged with taking care of them for a period of time. I wrote a very personal account of what a day taking care of them is like. Read it to commiserate if you’ve ever been involved with care and feeding of helpless elderly. Read it if you haven’t, because some day, chances are you will.  Just read it to educate yourself. You’d be amazed what a hurdle a crack in the sidewalk is for an elderly person.

This blog post goes into more detail about their food–basically rather bland and boring. Mom, always the one with the adventurous palate, has had to curtail her list of approved foods, due to gastric reflux, partial regurgitation, and compression of the gut brought about by multiple osteoporotic compression fractures of the vertebrae. Many things disagree with her or cause unpleasant after effects. Dad just sort of always preferred boring foods to begin with, even though he can pretty much eat whatever he wants. Luckily, thanks to 20th century dentistry, they both have enough teeth left to eat corn-on-the-cob.

When you are young, you can basically eat crap for several years on end and your youth will protect you. When you are older, your food affects you directly and immediately. You need to eat small quantities of healthy food, and you need to do it frequently. Mom has been experimenting with ayurvedic food combining. She believes that waiting 90 minutes between consuming yogurt and pears has decreased the amount of regurgitating. Now she won’t eat her totally healthy hemp bread moistened with smart balance at the same sitting as her split pea soup, and she also needs to wait another 90 minutes before eating the apples. She has certainly turned from a 3-meal a day die-hard into a grazer.

What have we got here?  Well,  we try to take advantage of abundant local Kansas produce, so it’s a summery menu:

• tuna salad
• bitter greens (for me)
• melon
• boiled egg for Mom
• potato soup with cilantro
• corn on the cob
• cucumbers
• romaine salad with tomato and avocado
• stewed prunes for Dad for the obvious reason

Nothing exotic, or gourmet, but I do what I can to make it look appealing.   Presentation is a great part of the enjoyment of food. It is especially important for the elderly. Thanks to Mom and Dad’s diet of simple, mostly fresh food, they are “healthy” modulo all their issues relating to aging.  As if they could ever even get close to anything this good in a “place.”