Tag: vegetarian

Finding Comfort in the Culinary

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enchilada plate

Cheese Enchiladas with Spanish Rice

“When disaster struck, it didn’t surprise me that the people of New Orleans yearned more than ever for that taste of home…”

––Amy Cyrex Sins

After the floods caused by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanian Amy Cyrex Sins was left with a deep sense of loss from both her destroyed home and, more poignantly, her devastated recipe collection. In her essay, “Doberge Cake after Katrina,” Sins longingly reminisces about such family classics as cheesy “Birthday Chicken” and, of course, “light, fluffy, and moist” Doberge Cake (45). Sins goes into detail about the specific foods and memories of her hometown, but she is ultimately writing about the same hunger we all feel when we are away from home and can’t find comfort on our foreign plates. Continue reading →

“Eat Food”: Sweet Tomato Soup with “Real” Ingredients

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Sweet tomato soup served with grilled cheese

Sweet tomato soup served with grilled cheese

“There are in fact hundreds of foodish products in the supermarket that your ancestors simply wouldn’t recognize as food…”

­­––Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, whom most of us know from his best-selling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a simple suggestion for his readers: “Eat food.” Not processed, chemically-altered food, he explains, but the kind of food that our ancestors could identify, that comes from a plant or an animal. In his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, he questions how we define food. Should we assign that label to anything we eat, or should we apply the term more frugally, to that which nourishes and enriches our bodies? Continue reading →