Suzan Colon's Blog, page 7

Happy Meatless Monday!

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I've been mentioning Meatless Monday a lot lately, and I'm happy to announce that this little blog of mine will soon be joining the roster of fine blogs that support the MM movement!

Why go meatless on Mondays? Lots of great reasons, starting with you: reducing consumption of meat on just one day of the week can reduce your risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity (the latter two are, unforch, all the rage these days, even for children). And then there's our beautiful country: meat production is a huge cause of environmental pollution, and it increases our dependence on fossil fuel. Even the biggest burger fan wouldn't be down with that.

The Meatless Monday movement goes back as far as World War I, when Americans did their part to conserve food by not eating beef, pork, or chicken on Mondays. Well, we're in several wars now–not just the ones going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, but here at home, to save money during this ongoing recession, to improve our health and the health of our families (which also saves money on doctor bills and prescription drugs), and to preserve our natural resources. Meatless Monday is a pretty good deal all around, yes? (Yes!) So, starting today, this blog will be featuring a meatless recipe each Monday to support this delicious and patriotic movement.

Going meatless–especially for just one day a week–is super-easy, and you don't need to buy special cookbooks, ingredients, or tools. I used one of my favorite cookbooks, Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (apropos, no?) and swapped out real meat for Gimme Lean in Ground Beef style. Gimme Lean is a burger and sausage substitute that's available in supermarkets, usually the refrigerated organic section. Here's a link to their store locator. It tastes great in chili, spaghetti faux-lognese, and the recipe below. This rated a "!" from The Hubbins–a great return on a small investment, as this dish cost less than 10 bucks to make and would feed four regular-appetite people or two hungry folks for two nights.

"Beef" and Vegetable Pot Pie

(Inspired by Jamie Oliver's Ground Beef Wellington)

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Woah! Did I do that? (Behold the impressive power of frozen puff pastry.)

What you'll need:

1 package Gimme Lean (ground beef style)

1 carrot, chopped

1 onion, diced

1 potato, cut into small cubes

3 cloves garlic, minced

handful of mushrooms, sliced

1 cup frozen peas

1 sheet frozen puff pastry (go ahead, be a cheater–it saves time. I used Pepperidge Farms)

olive oil

rosemary

oregano

Jane's Crazy Salt (or regular salt n' pepper)

About 20 minutes prep time and 60 minutes baking time

What to do:

1. Set aside one sheet of puff pastry to defrost. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Sauté garlic and onions in olive oil (about 2T) for about five minutes. Add vegetables and season with 1t rosemary and a few shakes of Crazy Salt. Continue sauteing for about 10 minutes.

3. Add frozen peas to the mix for one minute, then move all veggies to a casserole dish.

4. Get out your mock meat. Pull it apart with your fingers to form small pieces and saute in veggie pan. Add a drizzle or two of olive oil if necessary. Season with just a dash of Crazy Salt and a hint of oregano. When faux burger is browned, add to veggie mixture in casserole dish and mix everything together.

5. Unfurl your frozen puff pastry, being thankful that you didn't try to make it yourself because that's just exhausting. Lay it artfully over the top of your veggie mixture; there will be overlap, so just fold corners to make triangular sides. Using the tines of a fork, crimp the sides of the dough to the edge of your casserole dish. Prick the top of the dough to let steam escape.

6. Into the oven she goes, for about an hour. Enjoy a simple salad of greens and tomatoes with olive oil and lemon juice in the meantime. When top of dough is golden and delightful, move to table. Ooh and ahh before serving.

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The Proverbial Lemonade Stand: Mortgage Apple Cakes

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This cake could save someone's home.

You know the old saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"? Sometimes that's easier said than put into practice, because you really need to have wits, smarts, and a heap of moxie to make that adage work. To that list, my Nana would have added fear. Yep, good old bone-chilling fear was, in her opinion, one of the great motivators of life.

Take the fear of, say, losing your home–something that too many Americans can identify with. Angela Logan, a 55-year-old former actress, was one of them. A renovation loan came due on her Teaneck, New Jersey house, and suddenly, Angela was facing foreclosure.

Desperate to save her home, Angela had a brainstorm: Bake 110 of her luscious apple cakes and sell them to raise the money she needed. The catch? She had ten days to get the payment to the bank.

Using her media savvy, Angela called local news stations with her story to get the word out and increase sales, and she was featured on Fox, CNN, and NBC's Today Show. And here's the happy ending: Angela made her cake deadline and the money she needed and saved her home. Yes!! (Can't you see the movie? I totally can…)

Even after her payments were made, Angela kept right on baking–this time, to help others who are in danger of losing their homes. She started Mortgage Apple Cakes (http://maccakes.com/), which donates 5 percent of all profits to help people in mortgage crisis. Love her motto: "Fighting foreclosure one cake at a time."

And here's the second best part: the cakes. I met Angela at her MAC stand in our local farmer's market this past Saturday. I'll admit the first thing I was drawn to were her delicious-looking apple cupcakes, but then I noticed the name of Angela's business. Wanna-be baker that I am, I've never been so happy to hand over $5 for a box of cupcakes. I knew that part of my money would help someone keep their home, and also I had the BEST cupcakes ever! The apple cake is moist and full of apple-spicy flavor, and they're topped with cream cheese icing–only one of the best inventions in the cake world. (Yes, I know I've been trying to be vegan this month, but an exception needed to be made.)

I love Angela's story of dealing with her bad situation with a combination of guts, resourcefulness, a crazy idea and the willingness to make it not so crazy by doing it, and I love that she's helping others who were in her situation. And I really love her cakes.

If you know of another story like this, please share it here!

xx,

S (wiping cream cheese frosting off face)

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Angela Logan baking her home-saving apple cakes. A local hotel offered their large-scale kitchen so she could meet her goal of 100 cakes in 10 days. Faith in humanity: restored!

Oh yeah it's a Happy Monday!

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Three reasons for me to be cheerful on a Monday morning, even one where I'm tired because Tootsie was howling for half the night:

* Cherries in Winter is on Dr. Oz's website today! Yes, THE Dr. Oz, America's favorite doctor, Oprah's #1 MD, and a man I've personally interviewed and can say, in all honesty, is a nice guy. Here's the link to Susan Wagner's lovely blog.

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* It's Meatless Monday! Well, every day has been meatless in our house lately; I'm still sticking to my promise to celebrate National Vegetarian Awareness month. (And note to NAVS: I'm still very confused as to why we're celebrating vegetarianism in October and not turkey-filled November or even lamb-crazy April. Just sayin'…) Why go meatless on Mondays? There are all sorts of horrifying/thrilling statistics about how much energy we can save, how many greenhouse gases are lowered, and how much healthier we'd all be simply by cutting out meat for one day a week. One day, people. Not much to ask, is it? Last week, noted nutritionist Gary Null proclaimed that eating less meat could save 45,000 lives per year. Well hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart attack (and cancer, and stroke)! Meatless Mondays is now going global, so for those thrilling facts and some great recipe ideas, check out MM's website here.

* The website has been revamped! Special thanks to Amanda of als3designs, my bestie of (gasp) 30 years now (lordy we're old) and one of the most creative people I know. In addition to being a crack web designer, Amanda also designs gorgeous jewelry and bakes beautiful cakes. And her paintings… Oy, I could go on for days about this woman's talent. But since you don't have that kind of time, I'll just say please tour around my beautifully revamped website and check out Amanda's designs on her site and on Etsy.

If things keep going this well, Monday may soon be my favorite day of the week…

xx!

S

Bloggers love "Cherries"!

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Yeah, it rated a FIVE!

And I love bloggers. Especially Kelly at 1776 Books, who gave Cherries a rating of 5 out of 5. (The rating means: "Excellent. I would read it again in a heartbeat.") Kelly, you rate a 10 in my book!

You should check out Kelly's blog for other good book recommendations, too. And I'm not just saying that because she gave Cherries a 5. She's a voracious reader who gives good reading tips in her brief but rich reviews of books by Sophie Kinsella, Jodi Picoult, Dan Brown, Allison Winn Scotch, Food Network star Ellie Krieger, and many others.

Many thanks to Kelly and all the bloggers who support us trying-to-be-humble, review-hungry authors!

xx,

S

The Babble-ing Continues!

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Lemon meringue YUM. (See, when you know the secret ingredient, you can get peaks like that.)

Babble.com was fab enough to feature an excerpt from Cherries in Winter to help celebrate the book's release in paperback (wooo-HOOO!). As if that weren't enough, they ran Nana's recipe for lemon meringue pie! Check out that link, and the luscious pie porn they ran with it…

As any of you who read the book already may remember, this was the most difficult recipe for me to replicate. Why? There was a missing ingredient that was kinda crucial to the making of a lemon meringue pie, as opposed to a lemon tart (which was what I ended up with). Holy Martha Stewart, Batman. If you haven't read the chapter yet, I hope you have a good laugh at my expense (no, really). And don't worry; the missing mystery ingredient is in both the book and on the Babble.com recipe page, so you won't end up with egg whites on your face like I did.

Thanks again, Babble!

xx,

S

[Image of yummy pie courtesy of Babble.com]

"Cherries" on Babble.com!

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Nana was warned by doctors not to get pregnant due to heart issues. But her main heart issue was the desire for a baby, so she risked it. Et voila: her daughter Carolyn, aka my mom-to-be. Here they are on a picnic in the Bronx.

We interrupt this series of road trip food reports to let you know that Cherries in Winter has been excerpted on Babble.com! Babble is a very cool parenting site, and I'm honored that they liked Cherries enough to include it in their section about the difficulties of infertility.

Yeah, that'll give you a hint about which chapter was chosen for an excerpt. As many of you know, The Hubbins and I did not end up replicating ourselves in smaller (hopefully smarter) form. I joke, but I have to because it was a painful journey. There's a large emotional reckoning to being the last of your family line, trying to continue it, and coming to the realization that it's not going to happen. For both of us, the family tree stops with our shared branch.

That was the part where we had to practice acceptance, as well as gratitude. After all, we were just happy to have found each other. As Bette Davis's character says in Now Voyager, "Don't let's ask for the moon; we have the stars."

I wrote about my baby issues in Cherries because I knew other women were probably going through the same weeping and hand-wringing that I went through. I hoped the chapter "When In Doubt, Bake" might be of some help. Fertility issues are a hundred kinds of painful, but there's some relief in commiseration.

I'm hoping that Babble.com visitors, whether they have children or not, will like the excerpt. If you're one of them, let me know what you think.

xx,

S

Pismo Beach: Buggin'!

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Hot Lix of Pismo Beach, a sweet shoppe that features scorpion lollipops. Oh, at last. I was just really craving one of those the other day, y'know?

The Hubbins, David Keeps (host of Ovation TV's fab travel show The Scenic Route), and I continued to eat–er, drive our way up the Pacific Coast Highway. So, we went from LA's Indian-Mexican mash-up to Pismo Beach, a salt-water taffy seaside town. The local specialty? Clam chowder in a bread bowl, fish n' chips, more clam chowder, and clam chowder (in a bread bowl).

Did I mention a few blogs ago that I'm celebrating National Vegetarian Awareness Month by trying to be both vegetarian and aware? Yes, I've had two run-ins with fish since the start of the month. It's really hard to turn down fresh fluke caught by our buddy Cap'n Gene. I mean, he does it the way Grandpa used to, where it's just him, a line, some bait, and presto–fish. Turning down a gift of fresh fish is like telling your bestie her new pixie cut isn't flattering: Too late. So I said yes to the fish.

That was then. Here, in Pismo Beach–which has some of the most mind-blowingly gorgeous coastline ever–we went to Splash Cafe, which has been serving creamy clam chowder in bread bowls for over 18 years. David and The Hubbins got the chowder. Me? Veggie burger. Thank you, Splash, for offering a wanna-be aware veggie a meatless, clamless option. And it was delish! As was the chowder. I could tell because the men went silent as they chowed on their chowder. The only sounds were the schmeckin' of lips and the occasional "Mmmmm!"

After that, we headed to Hot Lix, one of Pismo Beach's sweet shoppes, for dessert. They had the requisite wall o' saltwater taffy, but when David asked what the house specialty was, the counter gals said, "Our lollipops." And what flavors of house-made lollies do they have?

Scorpion. And Worm. YEAH. Bugs–INSECTS, people–encased in candy. On a STICK.

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Holy $#!+, people: That is a scorpion lollipop.

Can anyone tell me why this would be an even remotely good thing? I mean, forget that I'm doing this whole aware vegetarian thing–bugs? In sugar? And the larva-lollies weren't the only creepy-crawly candies they had. There were also chocolate-covered ants and salted crickets. Yum?

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Okay, like, bad enough that they're putting ants in candy, but then they're trying to show us that the ants are okay with it. They're on board! See? They posed for an American Gothic-style caricature! (And what does that have to do with candy?)

So, Pismo: Gorgeous beach, apparently awesome chowder, and bugged-out sweets. Have fun!

xx,

S

LA, Tandoori Burritos, & Me

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Masala sauce. Fries. A marriage made in heaven (and Los Angeles).

Sounds like a setup for a road movie: one photographer (The Hubbins), one TV show host (David Keeps of the Ovation station's travel TV show, The Scenic Route and one of my Best Friends Ever), and one food-obsessed author (moi) going from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway. Sweet!

We started out in Los Angeles, where David lives when he's not traveling around for the show, and when we told him we needed food real bad (but not real bad food), he knew just where to take us: Cowboys and Turbans, home of Indian-Mexican fusion.

I swear, LA is the home of fusion cuisine, otherwise known as confusion. There's not only Indian-Mexican but Jewish-Scottish, also known as Kosher in a Kilt. We weren't up for that, but the Indian-Mexican thing sounded right on target.

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Naan pizza. Say it with me now: Naaaaaaaan piiiiiiiiiizzaaaaaahhhh.

And OOOOOOOOHHHHHH, was it good. Masala fries, a saag paneer pizza made on naan, and tandoori burritos… We're talking monster good. Can you ask for more? Sure: It's cheap. (But not so cheap that you're like, "Uh…".) Another bonus: Lots o' vegetarian and vegan options. Alicia Silverstone would feel right at home here, as do I–yep, I'm still celebrating National Vegetarian Awareness Month. Okay, not perfectly–I had two run-ins with fish. But I've been really, really good so far, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals is keeping me faaaaaaar, far away from chicken, pig, and cow parts. It's almost keeping me away from food entirely, but what a great read; his writing is beautiful even when he's describing some of the ugliest behavior known to man. Salute, sir.

Anyway, if you're in the Silverlake Area of Los Angeles, I implore you to head to Cowboys and Turbans to try their fab fusion. Fainting from the goodness, I tell you.

More road food to come. Until then, this insomniac is about to fall across a hotel mattress.

xx,

S

My Egg Blog on The HuffPo!

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My grandpa on the farm in Saratoga Springs, New York. He would've gotten a five-egg rating from the Cornucopia Institute.

Hey everyone,

Countdown to Cherries in Winter in paperback in bookstores: only 11 days!

Until then, I'm helping to spread the word about The Cornucopia Institute's report on organic eggs. Not only did I blog about it here, but the Huffington Post was kind enough to pick up the blog too! Click on the link here so you can see all the helpful links sent by the cool people who commented.

If you have similar links, post a comment and share the blog with your friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter!

xx,

S

Organic Egg on Our Faces?

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Taking a break from my relentless, shameful promotion that Cherries in Winter is out in paperback on October 19 (oops) to post a link to the Cornucopia Institute's rating of organic eggs.

As I've been ultra-dismayed to learn recently, the word "organic" does not mean that the chickens who lay these eggs were put out on a nice, green, natural pasture with plenty of room to flap their flightless little wings, eat stuff they should be eating, and then go back to comfy nests to lay a gorgeous future scrambler. No, "organic" just means they eat organic corn. And "cage-free" just means they aren't in cages; it doesn't mean they aren't packed by the thousands in filthy, cramped, airless sheds. And "access to the outdoors" means there might be a tiny door leading to a concrete patio, should any chicken be strong or brave enough to get outside.

Quel nightmare, peeps. And here I thought I was doing good by spending a little extra money to get organic, cage-free eggs. I might as well have been saving money on the dollar-a-dozen kind for all the good I'm doing. And ultimately, those dollar-a-dozen eggs come with a hefty price tag: Remember how half a billion of those had to be "recalled" (read: destroyed) due to a salmonella outbreak? Yeppers, that's just what I want for breakfast–scrambled salmonella.

Thanks to The Cornucopia Institute, which advocates on behalf of small family farms that produce real food humanely, the joke is no longer on me. (I want some points for not going for the obvious "the yolk is no longer on me" pun.)

I know not everyone can afford to buy organic food. Me, I cut back on other things (so long, cable) so I can put healthier food on our table. I can't always deal with $5 strawberries, so I go without. But when it comes to eggs, I do spend more, and I want to know that I'm not just buying a variation on factory-farmed eggs. I want to support farmers who take care of their animals and crops the way my grandfather did–naturally and humanely.

I've really enjoyed taking this break from pushing my book (did I mention it's out on October 19 in paperback?), and I hope you have, too.

xx,

S

[Image courtesy of The Cornucopia Institute.]