My name is Rick Bradley and here I intend to share some of the recipes that have worked for me, resources I've found, sites that have inspired or interested me, and other food related 'stuff' as I come across it.

A brief resume can be found here.

The more I play with my food the more curious I have become about it. Not only how to prepare it to best advantage but how it is grown, how it came to be what it is today, what happens twixt field an fork, and perhaps most important, what impact will it have on me? Some of this search is a direct result of the realization that we'd been feeding our cats cereal with a side of toast when they desperately needed a mouse (but that's another soapbox).
Shortly thereafter I came across the Paleo diet/lifestyle and was curious enough about it to try living without grains for a trial period. Six weeks later my doctor declared that I was not only not diabetic but was slightly below the normal range. My diabetic notation was replaced by 'gluten tolerance issues'
This pursuit is different than the majority of the content of the site so I'm putting it into its own folder, Healthy food - Healthy people. Take care if you follow the link or you may end up as confused as I am.

Approximately $47 billion worth of food available for sale at grocery stores and other retail outlets in the US in 2008 did not make it into consumers’ shopping carts.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), launched the U.S. Food Waste Challenge, inviting producer groups, processors, manufacturers, retailers, communities, and other government agencies to join in their efforts to:

• Reduce food loss and waste
• Recover wholesome food for human consumption
• Recycle discards to other uses including animal feed, composting, and energy generation

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program helps consumers and businesses make choices for healthy oceans. Their recommendations indicate which seafood items are "Best Choices," "Good Alternatives," and which ones you should "Avoid.". Get their pocket guide here.

A survey by the Consumer Federation of America shows 90 percent of Americans are in favor of requiring companies to list the origin of the fresh meat they sell on the label. It seems that the current administration (not the idiots in Congress or Senate) is either willing to listen to the general public or (more likely) has an adgenda which happens to coincide with popular opinion.
Here in Canada the government doesn't give a rat's ass what we think (they've never asked) so instead of giving us some decent COOL regulations they've devoted all of their efforts (and a boatload of our tax dollars) to whining about the American regulations
I'll drive across town to Sobey's because they advertize (some of) their meat to be Canadian and my regular store (RCSS) tells me source of the meat on the counter is a crapshoot. Thanks Galen but no thanks

Local Claims the CFIA is abandoning it's definition of local (within 50km or in the local government unit) "with input from consumers, industry and other stakeholders"

The CFIA is adopting an interim policy which recognizes "local" as:

• food produced in the province or territory in which it is sold, or
• food sold across provincial borders within 50 km of the originating province or territory

Burgers are everywhere, expanding from fast-food outlets and quick-serve casual restaurants to high-end temples of gastronomy and everything in between. And of course, recipes flood the Internet. No need to go on a burger hunt, though, because Epicurious has the ultimate guide to hamburger heaven

Roundup, Roundup everywhere. Most homeowners use it without a second thought. Many schools even use it, blithely spraying around planting beds and sidewalks where children walk and play, tracking its residues into classrooms, cars, homes and little bodies. article with florid prose and the report as published in Entropy Volume 15, Issue 4 longer, really technical, same bottom line. The stuff's going to kill us.

Buycott is a tool that lets you organize your consumer spending to help causes that you care for, and to oppose those that you don't. Scan a barcode with the Buycott app and it will try to determine what the product is and who owns it. Buycott will then trace the product's ownership back to its top parent company and cross-check this company against the campaigns that you've joined before telling you whether it found a conflict. web site

So you got the memo that soy is very bad for the hormonal system. But did you know that back in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers studying damage to the pancreas caused by protease inhibitors noted that pancreatic cancer had then moved up to fifth place, and suggested a soybean-protease inhibitor connection. Since then pancreatic cancer promoted itself to the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths of men and women in the United States, and is predicted to move into second place by 2020. full story

High-protein, low-carb dieters take note: The billions of cicadas emerging from the ground this month are a healthy alternative to that bacon double-cheeseburger without the bun. Magicicada Brood II will emerge along the US Eastern Seaboard. This map shows the area of expected emergence.
More info on the insect.
National Geograpic article on the 2007 emergence.

The U.S. has one of the safest food supplies in the world. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. In fact, shoppers here are just as likely as shoppers anywhere in the world to succumb to the growing problem of food fraud, cases of unscrupulous food producers adding cheaper ingredients to a product, for instance, cheaper oils rather than olive oil, but advertising it as the real thing. "Food fraud attempts to cheat the market by selling a substandard product and trying to get away with it," says Markus Lipp, senior director of food standards at U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP), which recently launched an online database of independently documented food fraud instances. full story

It’s hard to find fault with the latest field trials by Washington State University showing that organically grown strawberries are more nutritious than their chemically grown counterparts. The study also shows that the soil in which the organic strawberries were grown is healthier. article

A group has examined whether diet, assessed in midlife, using dietary patterns and adherence to the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), is associated with aging phenotypes, identified after a mean 16-year follow-up. press release
It's curious that they are re-examining data from the British Whitehall II cohort study which focused on the social determinants of health, specifically the cardiorespiratory disease prevalence and mortality rates among British civil servants. Sadly the (AHEI) which they tout as our path to salvation looks little different than all of the other food guidelines which certainly have led us down a path.

California just officially declared the canned food chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, what it is: toxic. The state announced its has included BPA on its Prop. 65 list, a collection of compounds that by state law must be labeled due to their known carcinogenic and/or reproductive damage properties. Rodale article
Unfortunately the replacement may be as bad or even worse (but who knows because of course it hasn't been tested before use either). Rodale article

Schmaltz has been on my round toit list for an indecently long time. Last week the supply of chicken fat left over from making cat food started to overflow it's allocated spot in the freezer so I went looking for instructions and found this delightful dissertation by Tori Avey, the Shiksa in the Kitchen and another at Sadie Salome on this quintessentially Jewish ingredient. The schmaltz adds a new flavour to fried potatoes but, while I'm glad to have it in the pantry, I doubt that it's going to get called out as often as the bacon fat.
The gribenes on the other hand should be classed as an addictive substance. I may have to find some Jewish acquaintances and offer to make schmaltz for them just so I'll have an excuse to make gribenes.

Sugar-sweetened sodas, sports drinks and fruit drinks may be associated with about 180,000 deaths around the world each year, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2013 Scientific Sessions. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130319202144.htm

Konstantin Monastyrsky, author of Fiber Menace offers a candid perspective on dieting.
Can you lose weight by dieting? Of course you can. Will it be effortles, miraculous, instantaneous, or rapid? Not in this lifetime.
The Real Reason Diets Fail and What You Can Do About It
How Long Will it Take to Lose the Weight?

Data from: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). National Center for Health Statistics, Division of National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. Prevalence of Overweight, Obesity, and Extreme Obesity Among Adults: United States, Trends 1976–1980 Through 2007–2008.
There is hope however faint.
In December 2005 Dr. Annika Dahlqvist was reported by two dieticians in Sweden. They wrote to the National Swedish Board of Health and Welfare complaining of her 'divergent dietary advice' (High Fat Low Carb). That agency examined the issue and publicly declared on January 16, 2008 that a low-carb diet is

in accordance with science and well-tried experience for reducing obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

It's not quite that bad. The apple is the most contaminated fruit you can buy but the Environmental Working Group still admonishes us to eat our fruits and vegetables while pointing out the items for which we might want to pay the premium for organic:

The health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure.

The Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce™ will help you determine which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticide residues and are the most important to buy organic. You can lower your pesticide intake substantially by avoiding the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated produce.

At 10 AM on Wednesday, November 21, 2012 The Highland Companies withdrew their application for environmental assessment of the proposed “Mega-Quarry” they hoped to dig out of the prime farmland in Melanchton Township, near Creemore, Ontario. Among the reasons the company gave was that “the application does not have sufficient support from the community and government to justify proceeding with the approval process.” A brief history of the grass-roots movement that opposed the quarry, got the Ontario government to make the unprecedented move of requiring a quarry to go through a public environmental assessment, and then demonstrated how profoundly the people of the province did not want it, has been written by activist Jason Van Bruggen in The National Post, click here to read it.
It will be interesting to know what will become of that land holding as I doubt that a bunch of speculators want to start farming.

Update: I've since learned that those Boston bankers may have a little dirt under their fingernails. Since beginning this little escapade they've become one of the largest potato producers in Ontario. Do you suppose they'll discover that there's money to be made in organic??

Researchers from the Universities if Caen and Verona have published a study about "Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize" which is apparently the first long term study yet undertaken (previous studies were limited to 90 days).

The health effects of a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize (from 11% in the diet), cultivated with or without Roundup, and Roundup alone (from 0.1 ppb in water), were studied 2 years in rats. In females, all treated groups died 2–3 times more than controls, and more rapidly. This difference was visible in 3 male groups fed GMOs. All results were hormone and sex dependent, and the pathological profiles were comparable.

The original publication and a number of dissenting opinions can be found at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637 After cursory inspection of the dissenting views it seems to me that the only item not in dispute is the fact that this is the first long term test. I suppose it's just naive of me to wonder why a product that's been in the works since the early 1970's has never before been tested to this extent. If drug companies were held to the same strict standards as the chemical behemoths then all we'd ask is that the pills fit in the bottle.

Crops which are currently Roundup Ready® include corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, sugarbeets, and alfalfa
Monsanto is rumoured to be hiring more lawyers and PR hacks.

Talk about a photographic treasure trove! Over 600 signed prints by legendary American photographer Ansel Adams have been discovered in a box at the University of California's Berkeley campus.

In October of 2009, Andrew Wilder was struck by a simple idea: What would happen if I went for an entire month without eating any processed foods?

Unprocessed food is any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with whole-food ingredients.

So he tried it, along with a few good friends: A month of no processed foods.
It was revelatory.
In 2010, he decided to try it again, in a bigger way. He issued the challenge again and 415 people took the pledge.
Last year, over 3,000 people took the pledge.
And this year he's back again. When it wrapped 6,133 people had joined in.

If you've got lots of eggs to separate this might prove worthwhile. Unless you speak Chinese you might as well turn down the volume.

One of my indulgences is watching the mentioned show on the travel channel whenever I see that it's on or remember to record it Chef Zimmern will eat nearly anything, anything that is that his hosts in whatever country he's visiting are dishing up. He recently had a show focused on children and what they were eating around the world. He then brought back some of the examples to the International School of Minnesota for the children there to sample. They tucked into fried crickets (and devoured every last one), head cheese, trotters, chicken feet, and tongue prepared in blood. I suspect that they were more adventurous than their parents would have been.
One short segment from Argentina was enlightening. He introduced several children to peanut butter. While they all tried it the girls agreed that it was 'gross' while the boys seemed to think that anything brown and squishy had some redeeming value even if it wasn't taste.

Karen Robinet of CTW fame has produced a valuable resource for the community. Bookmark http://made-in-chatham-kent.ca and contact Karen if you are "creating/growing something here in Chatham-Kent"

Imagine, milk with terroir. Two local dairy farms are about to revolutionize the way we think about that most basic of foods. Make history this summer. Walk into a food market in Creemore and pick up some fresh Jersey milk in a glass bottle from Miller's Dairy. Then drive past John and Marie Miller's farm on County Road 9 so you can say, "That's where my milk came from".
We can all be jealous now of the lucky folks near Kingston and up Collingwood way who have, or soon will, access to farm fresh milk (still not raw but that's another battle). The story here in the Food In The Hills magazine or the farm websites at http://www.sheldoncreekdairy.ca/ http://www.millersdairy.com/ http://www.limestonecreamery.ca/

Sustain Ontario is compiling lists of organizations, networks and resources related to healthy food and sustainable agriculture.http://sustainontario.com/
June’s here and with it the opening of seasonal farmers markets everywhere! Finally, you can taste the spring weather and earth in the fresh produce delivered direct to your local neighbourhood. Farmers markets are one good food idea that keeps on growing. These four videos show how farmers markets are making a difference in communities across Ontario (but lamentably NOT in Chatham-Kent). http://sustainontario.com/category/growing-good-food-ideas/ggfi-videos

I just discovered on the Nebraska Pork Producers Association website that the US Department of Agriculture has finally decided that pigs should be pink, at least on the inside. In May of 2011 they finally announced that it was safe to cook pork to 145°F much to the delight of pork producers and consumers. Now whether or not that's medium-rare is another discussion but at least it's not dried out. Here unfortunately the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is still (as of 2012/1/16) holding out for 160°F. Of course they think that beef at 145°F is medium rare so. . .

I have been watching Murray Carter's videos on YouTube and other sites for quite some time and I finally splurged (at $25 I suppose it's not much of a splurge) and ordered his new instruction video Blade Sharpening Fundamentals. He makes a compelling argument for eschewing other sharpening "systems" because they exclusively address the primary cutting angle of the blade and lock you into the "right" angle while ignoring the fact that the secondary angle will have to be adjusted to keep the blade cutting properly.
He makes no promises of instant success but if one were to follow his careful instructions then I expect that proficiency would soon follow. I've retrieved a test knife from the garden shed, a blade of unknown provenance which may once have belonged to my grandfather. I expect to start on it soon and will provide progress reports here.

I have written about Murray Carter before in my compilation of knife care resources. This man has doubtless forgotten more about knives than most of us will ever know and now he has written a compilation of Free Knife Care and Maintenance Tips which he is providing for absolutely no charge! These tips include:

• Seven-Step Sharpening Procedure
• Three-Finger Sharpness Test
• How to Sharpen Anywhere, With Anything

And more... so go and sign up now. http://www.cartercutlery.com/free-knife-care-and-maintenance-tips
Check out Murray playing with paper airplanes.

Alfred P. Knopf has invited a cross section of people to participate in a celebration of Julia Child, to mark what would have been her 100th birthday. The select few (many?) are all publishing online and will be trying out a new JC recipe each week till the happy day in August. I mention it here because a few days after the selected people get the recipe it will be shared on the JC100 page on facebook http://www.facebook.com/JuliaChild?ref=ts so that we mere mortals may also join in the celebration (and perhaps be tempted to purchase a cookbook?).

Government cutting 100 food-safety inspectors The witless wonders at the helm in Ottawa seem determined to gut what few protections consumers have. This story is old news (a month old anyway) but put into perspective by these two postings on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency site. Food Safety Investigation - E. coli in certain ground beef products and List of Affected Products for Certain Ground Beef Products Produced at Establishments 761 and 530
Might just be time to dig out that old meat grinder and find a local farmer with a cow except of course the idiots in Toronto are trying to put a stop to that too.

The Organization for an International Geographical Indications Network - oriGIn - is a not-for-profit NGO based in Geneva. Established in 2003 in response to the increasing phenomenon of Geographical Indications (GIs) abuse, oriGIn represents today some 350 associations of producers from some 40 countries (including Canada’s own Conseil des appellations réservées et des termes valorisants).

This was last year's story and to no one's surprise it's still happening. Basically a large American producer takes slaughterhouse scraps and "liquefies the trimmings and uses a spinning centrifuge to separate the sinews and fats from the meat, leaving a mash that has been described as 'pink slime,' which is then frozen into small squares and sold as a low-cost additive to hamburger". But when it was tested "the tests came back showing that the slime was rampant with harmful bacteria" so they treated it with ammonia! Yummy!
But it gets worse. Seems the ammonia made it taste funny (ya think??) so they started using weaker solutions which don't kill all of the nasties. Then the USDA allows them to call the ammonia a "processing ingredient" and exempted the slime from normal testing. TLC story or Google 'pink slime in meat' for 7 million other stories.
This just in - and I wish it were hard to believe
March 19, 2012 USDA Gives Schools the Option to Buy Beef Without "Pink Slime" only after 7 million pounds of the crap has already been purchased for school lunches this year alone. story
Now I'm sure that you'll all be pleased to know that MacDonalds is no longer using 'pink slime' as of February 2012 but the kicker is that they quit using it because they couldn't get enough to feed the whole world. Don't you just love corporate ethics? ABC story
These fillers are banned in the civilized world but just be careful the next time you pick up a package of ground beef. The CFIA is none too fussy about what it lets in the door and it seems that our supermarkets don't much care either.

The winter Insider's Report had the usual parade of boxed and packaged goodies to tempt the time deprived shopper over the holiday season. Tucked away on the second last page was the gem that made perusing the flyer worth the effort. BACON MARMALADE.
I'd heard about the product from Skillet Street Food in Seattle and tried a recipe by Not Quite Nigella which was good but just needed a little something extra so I was quite pleased to see that the President had taken up the gauntlet.
I found the jar last week, resplendent in its black label, trumpeting 'MADE WITH BALSAMIC VINEGAR OF MODENA' over a montage of foodstuffs. I hurried home with my treasure, abandoned the box of groceries at the door, and rushed into the kitchen to find a roll or a cracker.
I spread a generous dollop on a bit of bread and prepared to savour the treat.
I was flabbergasted. All I could taste was ORANGE!!! It wasn't bacon marmalade. It was orange marmalade with a bit of bacon, damn little at that as it's seventh on the ingredient list.
It boggles the mind how the President can give us such fine products as Memories of Lyons (unfortunately discontinued AGAIN) and 4 Peppercorn Steak Spice then turn around and try to palm this off as Bacon Marmalade. Shabby!

Second Opinion:
It seems that my disappointment in this product may not be as common as I would have expected. I shared the product with the participants in this weeks 'What's for Dinner' and several of them found it to be satisfactory (though I did not see anyone accept the proffered bottle).

Update:
I made a batch of jam this week and am quite pleased with the result. It has a distinct taste of onion as the caramelised onions provide most of the sweetness. The recipe is posted here.

The typical fast-food burger is made with slaughterhouse trimmings, fatty cuts of beef typically reserved for pet food and cooking oil. What's more, these burgers contain pieces of hundreds, potentially even thousands, of different cows. This creates an environment where bacteria thrive, so to clean the meat, the USDA allows a company called Beef Products to pipe the raw beef through pipes and expose it to ammonia gas. Never mind that ammonia is a poison or that evidence suggests the process may not be fully effective. The USDA deems it safe enough, and it allows the meat to be sold without any indication that it received the gas treatment.
From Men's Health - 20 Scariest Food Facts

Cilantro is the darling of the SouthWestern set, integral to SouthEast Asian, Mexican, Portuguese and many other cuisines and the bane of our existence to an astounding number of people (estimates range from 12% to 47%, neither of which I'd believe) including the renowned Julia Child. Put in the very simplest of terms, the inclusion of cilantro ruins any dish!
The problem it seems lies in the nose. Those of us who dislike (or hate) the Fetid Barb of Green have certain receptors enabled or overactive while others are disabled or at least of diminished capacity. The culprits in this little drama are unsaturated aldehydes which are present in cilantro and are also byproducts of soap making (see NYTimes article). It seems that those of us who dislike the weed smell these aldehydes to the exclusion of the other smells which lovers of the herb find so attractive. Of course there is a substantial middle ground of those who can tolerate it in small amounts or in certain dishes.
Bottom line? You won't find cilantro in many recipes here.

A veritable powerhouse of nutritional goodness, the sweet potato is only distantly related to the potato. And don't call it a yam — it’s not even the same species! The sweet potato is a flowering perennial vine in the same family as morning glories, with delicious, starchy, tuberous roots. Read the whole article at Eating Well

The never ending battle to eat better and safer is being actively thwarted by some manufacturers. When you're reading the next label you come across remember that Aspartame is now called AminoSweet and High Fructose Corn Syrup is now called Corn Sugar.

Growing vegetables shouldn't seem exotic. It's straightforward stuff.
As a horticulturist and life-long gardener, Steve Biggs shares practical experience about simple ways to garden. And as a writer and journalist, he gives frank opinions about what you need...and what you don't. You'll find advice served up with a simple, no-nonsense approach.
http://www.the-locavores-garden.com/index.html

Knives are one of, if not the most important tool in the chef's kit. A sharp knife is a thing of beauty while a dull one is a threat to all who use it. I've looked at some of the many resources online and assembled some of the ones that make the most sense to me and put them here

<soapbox>Our governments really need to get their shit together if we hope to be able to continue to feed ourselves.
Between the feds letting in tons of American meat without so much as a quick peek to see if it's rotten and the province trying to drive local producers out of business report we'll be lucky to be able to find a local tomato much less afford one.</soapbox>