Add these droolworthy cast iron cookware pieces to your kitchen.

Once regulated to campfire cooking or something passed down to you from your great-grandmother, it seems like cast iron cookware is once again gaining in popularity. From cooking shows and online how-to videos to cooking magazine, cast iron is everywhere.

Why Cast Iron Cookware?

Whether cooking your morning eggs to roasting a chicken in the evening, cast iron cookware is the workhorse of the kitchen. There are a variety of benefits of cooking with cast iron cookware making it a no-brainer. Cast iron cookware is healthier for you and the environment. There are a variety of chemicals utilized in the manufacture of those ubiquitous nonstick coatings found on many types of cookware. These chemicals raise concerns about exposure (both for the people making the pans in the factory and when they are used in cooking). That’s also not to mention the durability of cast iron cookware. It is cookware that will last you (and your children) a lifetime making it a more sustainable choice. But most importantly to those who take their cooking seriously is cooking with cast iron produces amazing results!

Beyond the basics of a cast iron skillet and a cast iron enamel dutch oven, what are some unique cast iron cookware pieces to add to your kitchen?

Cast Iron Cookware Must Haves

1. Le Creuset Cast Iron Heart Cocotte

This sweet, heart-shaped casserole dish is the perfect vessel to make a special dinner or dessert in. It’s also perfect to show off the next time you are invited to a covered dish supper.

2. Lodge Panini Press

Pair the Lodge Square Grill Pan and this Panini Press to make the most awesome grilled sandwiches ever. Both are available in red or blue enameled cast iron.

3. Cast Iron Tortilla Press

If you have never made homemade tortillas, you are missing out. While a tortilla press isn’t required, it sure does make the job a whole lot easier. Of course, if you plan on buying a tortilla press, you do want it to be made from durable cast iron.

4. Staub Cast Iron Covered Fish Pan

Never wrap another piece of fish in aluminum foil again with this cast iron pan. Not only does it brown fish perfectly, but it will also help to keep your delicious fish from drying out.

5. Utopia Kitchen Cast Iron Wok

Believe it or not, but one does not make the best stir-fry with a nonstick wok. For a tasty treat, cook your next stir-fry in a cast iron wok and discover a trick that serious chefs have known for years. Plus, a cast iron wok can even be used on grills or campfires.

*Disclaimer: Help support EcoSalon! Our site is dedicated to helping people live a conscious lifestyle. We’ve provided some affiliate links above in case you wish to purchase any of these products.

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Get dinner on the table quickly without a lot of fuss and muss by using a

If you aren’t already part of the initiated who use a pressure cooker, you probably think pressure cookers are unsafe and are only for the pros.

Am I right? I thought so.

That’s because that’s what I thought before I decided to take up the challenge to use a pressure cooker as part of my regular cooking routine. I got acquainted with the idea of pressure cooking after reading a few specialty recipe books for various anti-inflammatory diets (that’s a subject for another post). I started following some Facebook groups devoted to pressure cooking and even downloaded a couple of cookbooks exclusively filled with pressure cooker recipes before jumping in.

A point of clarification about pressure cooking is needed. Mainly, the pressure cookers of today are nothing like the ones your grandmother used and about which she filled you full of horror stories about the red sauce on the ceiling. Today’s cookers are third-generation cookers and include enhanced safety and programmable features that make them not only super easy to use but completely safe when used in coordination with the directions. Third-generation cookers are electric plug-in devices that look very similar to a crockpot–but instead of taking all day to cook a meal, can cook one in as little as ten minutes!

These cookers are fitted with a microprocessor to control for accurate pressure and temperature readings from pressure and temperature sensors are just about magical, as far as I am concerned.

The beauty of pressure cooking is that it’s possible to make a wholesome meal in the evenings without spending three hours in the kitchen. For example, if you wanted to make a whole chicken, instead of the normal rule of thirty minutes per pound, it would be possible to cook by pressure cooking in 15-25 minutes depending on the size. Cook soaked black beans in ten minutes flat. Make lentil soup in 15 minutes and rice in only four (FOUR!) minutes. If you can use a microwave, then you can use a third-generation pressure cooker.

Here are a few pressure cooker recipes to get you started.

Pressure Cooker Recipes for Beginners

1. Fall Off the Bone Whole Chicken

2. Black Bean Soup

3. Chicken Noodle Soup

4. Colombian Vegetable Soup

5. Indian Butter Chicken

6. Thai Red Curry

7. Pork Carnitas

8. 10 Minute Lentil Soup

9. Chili Mac

I do highly recommend the 7-in-1 InstantPot, which is not only a pressure cooker but also functions as a slow cooker and can be used to saute foods before slow or pressure cooking. It can also be used as a rice cooker and to make homemade yogurt and more. If you are going to add another appliance to your kitchen, this is the one to add.

Pressure cookers are great for both meat-eaters and vegetarians alike. The one downside  is that it is yet another appliance cluttering up the kitchen and they are somewhat pricey–most are on the other side of $100. In my experience, though, it’s money well spent. Look at it this way, if you can cook dinner in 15 minutes there is no excuse for ordering take-out!

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The post Pressure Cooker Cooking is About to Change Your Life appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column What if the solution to our health and environmental problems was a matter of just making more delicious food?

“Why eat one donut when I can eat all six in the package?”

I was having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about the standard American mindset to food with a couple of friends, who both happen to love donuts.

Instead of savoring one quality donut, many opt for the cheap, $2.99 box of six industrial donuts. Because six is always better than one, right? And so we stuff ourselves, because in reality, those donuts are disgusting, and after we eat one, we’ve failed to be satiated, so we eat another, and another, in the hopes that just another bite will leave us feeling the way we want to feel.

You can replace donuts with essentially any food product, and the result is the same: in the Standard American Diet quality and taste are our last qualifiers for what food we buy and eat.

This is problematic, an approach to food that’s not only harmful for us as humans, but our environment as well.

There is a growing group of researchers now starting to make a link between taste and overeating, the idea that the more delicious food that we eat, the less likely we are to overindulge. For example, in 2009, researchers in the Netherlands studied participant’s cravings after eating certain foods, in this case, a portion of cottage cheese and a portion of chocolate mousse. Cravings were significantly less after eating the chocolate mousse than the cottage cheese, leading to the conclusion that people were less likely to overeat if they ate foods that they liked, as opposed to more boring, neutral foods.

It has also been shown that the more we eat of a food, the less we like it. That is to say, if you eat one piece of chocolate cake, you’ll be thrilled. You’ll go back for another one. But with the second piece you will be less satisfied than with the first, and so on and so on.

I don’t mean “delicious food” in the sense of just baked goods. I mean “delicious” in all forms of food. The carrots that you pull from the ground, rinse off, bite into and are so surprised by the crunchy sweetness. The loaf of bread, pulled freshly from the oven, and made with a natural starter. The roasted butternut squash that almost tastes like eating a dessert. The lentil soup on a cold winter day that has been simmering on your stove. Food that blows you away because of its simplicity. Food that is delicious because all of the ingredients that went into it were natural, and good to begin with; no need for additives and preservatives. Food that is real food.

If we focused on quality, rather than quantity, there’s a chance that not only would the food on our plate taste better, but we’d be healthier too. The same goes for the environment.

This is well-discussed in famed-chef Dan Barber’s book “The Third Plate” (if you haven’t read this yet, hop to). As a chef, when focused on good quality produce, he begins to connect the dots between tasty fruits and vegetables and how they were grown. “When we taste something truly delicious, something that is persistent, it is most likely originated from well-mineralized, biologically rich soils,” writes Barber. He continues a few pages later, writing, “chemical farming – and bad organic farming – actually kills soil by starving its complex and riotous community of anything good to eat.”

In other words, our entire system of agribusiness has always operated to reduce costs and increase output, yet it has all come at a serious costs to our health and the environment. Taste has never been a part of the equation in this system – or it’s only part of the equation when food companies, working with base ingredients that have no taste to begin with, have to add a variety of fats, sugars, and salts to get any taste into their product, leaving us with grocery shelves worth of unhealthy food (and even then, I am sure no one is going to argue that it’s “delicious food”). It’s because taste isn’t part of the equation from the ground up that this system has depleted the earth, while keeping our waistlines growing.

As Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, a company that grows and mills organic heirloom grains, is quoted in Barber’s book, “food and cuisine have to be an important part of our culture, and not just something that fuels the culture in one way. Food as fuel is a dangerous concept. That’s where we are right now – food as fuel. It’s why nothing tastes good, and why our farming systems are collapsing.”

Taste equals diversity, and when we focus on diversity (which means first and foremost, focusing on the soil), instead of one where only a few crops reign, we are better for it, both for our own health and for that of the environment. So think of food not just as fuel, but as the chance to indulge in something amazing. When you cook with good ingredients, or buy foods made from good ingredients, ingredients that are produced with respect for the environment, you need less of them to be happy with your meal. And isn’t it nice that focusing on something like taste can have such positive ramifications?

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Susy Morris

The post If We Ate More Delicious Food, Would Everyone Be Healthier? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column If we want to talk about more cooking at home, we also have to talk about sexism.

I have always been an advocate of cooking. If there is one thing you can do to better your diet and better your food choices, I really do believe it’s opting to make your own food at home.

There’s a current trend in food media that echoes this sentiment: Michael Pollan’s most recent book “Cooked”, food television shows devoted to quick and easy food preparation, and every single blog devoted to making your own yogurt/butter/kombucha/almond butter/kale infused anything.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the entire population is making a mad dash for the kitchen. All this talk of going back to the kitchen can be a big pressure on working families. As a friend of mine, a mother of two, put it recently, “I do my best but never feel good enough.” And this is coming from a woman who knows how to cook, is devoted to shopping locally whenever possible and whose favorite cookbook is from the 1970s and all about putting more sustainable meals on the table. But the pressure is there, because the reality is that cooking and making our own food takes time.

But why is it that women feel this pressure more than men? Why is it that most food media is devoted to headlines like “10 Easy Meals For the Busy Mom” or, even worse, “Easy Outfits to Transition from the Kitchen to Hostess”. No really, I have read several of those.

The answer is that the world of food is dealing with some serious issues of sexism.

In the food world, chefs gain celebrity status, and those chefs tend to be male. Take a look at any chef roundup recently and take note of how many women are mentioned. But if men reign in the flashy world of food, women reign in everything else. We are after all the ones usually putting food on the table at home. We are the ones that make sure that our families eat three times a day, every day of the week. When you cook in this way, you don’t have time to make it artistry.

Recently, I came across an image of the cover of “Quick Dinners for Women in a Hurry,” a book published in 1942. Ah, the 1940s and 1950s, when advertising was overtly sexist and the only role for a woman was in the kitchen. Yet in our modern, presumedly more progressive era, have we really moved so far away from this? Sure, such a title would never fly with today’s cookbook publishing houses, but the reality is that it’s still mostly women that are bearing the brunt of putting food on the table everyday. And they get zero credit for it.

A New York Times article, titled “When Their Workday Ends, More Fathers Are Heading Into the Kitchen,” took a look at exactly this question. As the New York Times reported, “Michael M. Rooke-Ley, a retired law professor in Eugene, Ore., echoed those concerns, noting that “a 1950s ethic still prevails” at times, even when both parents work. ‘In these outposts of gender-based tradition,’ Mr. Rooke-Ley said, ‘Dad needs to get off the couch!'”

While the number of men in household kitchens is up – 29 percent of men spent time in the kitchen in 1965, in 2008 it was 42 percent – women still devote double the amount of time to food and drink preparation than their male counterparts.

I am not saying men don’t cook. I am in a 50/50 relationship when it comes to making food with my partner; and he’s not just putting frozen pizza in the oven. But there’s no denying that this issue of sexism is deeply seated. On some level, we still have the image of a woman in an apron and the man with a martini.

Let me put it another way: if it’s still revolutionary enough for men to be cooking, so much so that it necessitates a New York Times article, you can be sure that the problem hasn’t gone away. There’s plenty of sexism in kitchens, and in the world of food in general.

If we are going to talk about getting more people back in the kitchen, the conversation needs to be inclusive. It shouldn’t be just women feeling this pressure to buy better products and cook more meals at home. Both genders need to be empowered to take part in the everyday, boring cooking. Not just the sexier, dinner party throwing, look-at-the-12-course-meal-I-made-for-Saturday night type of cooking.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post The Sexism of Food and Our Kitchens: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnMaybe this year should be devoted to kicking our food porn addiction.

I spent my vacation reading. Reading books. You know, those things that have a bunch of words printed on paper and don’t have a touch screen? Yes, those things.

I was deep into “A Fork in the Road”, a lovely collection of food/travel essays, when it occurred to me: good food writing doesn’t have to be accompanied by food photography – or dare I say it – doesn’t even need to be.

These stories were beautiful, and I was inspired to get cooking (and eating) immediately, and yet, there was no food photo in sight. It was refreshing.

Here’s the dilemma we’re currently find ourselves in:

We spend much of our time during the day online. During that time we often come across a recipe or two. How do we determine whether or not it’s good? If there’s a salivating photo to accompany it. Smoothie in a Mason jar? Definitely making that. Simply worded, text-only explanation for how to make your own fermented sauerkraut? Pass. Bare hands holding a warming bowl of soup? Don’t even get me started (and if you want a real snarky take on said subject, read this).

This food porn disease is infectious, and it follows us from the computer screen and into the bookstore. Book covered in food porn? Get it! Book that has – god forbid – mostly words? Forget it.

And then what happens? We don’t cook. We spend so much of our time looking at food blogs, buying yet another cookbook that we’re sure is going to change our lives and watching other people cook food on TV that we forget what all this stuff was supposed to inspire us to do: actually make food. And you know what the funny thing is? When you’re making dinner, you’re probably not going to style it, throw on a sprig of rosemary, and carefully sprinkle some bread crumbs on the side of your plate to make it look rustic before sitting down to eat. Nope, you’re just going to cook and consume. Because when the camera isn’t there, that is what we all do.

I love food porn as much as the next person, but there’s a point where you hit the overdose level and you need a detox. My frequent frustration with food media is this: we let the photos do the talking instead of the story of the food itself. The photos are great, and the food is mediocre.

You know why people aren’t cooking? Because they’re intimidated.

“Oh shit, my vegan chocolate mousse didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to.”

Was it delicious? Yes. Did you forget to put it in a quaint glass jar and tie a strand of twine around it? Well of course that is where you failed.

We need more focus on food and less on photos. Photography is a wonderful and beautiful thing, and when done well, amplifies a story. “The Way We Cook: Portraits of Home Cooks Around the World” is a photography book that comes to mind which does exactly that. And there are plenty of very talented food photographers out there who I respect and admire. But the photos shouldn’t be a crutch to distract us from the matter at hand: cooking and eating, and cooking and eating well.

So you know what this year is going to be about? Telling stories about food and telling them well. Inspiring people to cook more and think about what they’re eating. Addressing all the problems in the food world that really need fixing (and a food problem is not defined as something that ends up on Pinterest Fail).

Get off the computer, read a good food essay and be inspired to make something new. And please refrain from taking a photo of it. But write a paragraph, or an essay and share it with someone.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post Less Food Porn, More Food, Please: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnA lot of things we call food waste are delicious, versatile ingredients waiting to be discovered.

We all know about whole animal cooking – the charcuterie movement to prove that offal isn’t awful. Yes, pun intended.

But what about whole vegetable cooking?

I made pesto with carrot tops recently, and while it was very tasty, I think I was exponentially more excited about how I made it than how it tasted (it was delicious). Here was a part of a vegetable that I normally discard as food waste, now at home in a new recipe! The cooking world immediately became my proverbial oyster.

The inspiration to turn food waste into pesto came from the new cookbook, Root to Stalk Cooking by Tara Duggan. No really, aren’t you excited knowing that you can finally do something with chard stalks? And come on, any person that has the genius to soak apple peel in bourbon deserves an award. Thank you Tara.

Beyond the joy of not overloading your tiny urban compost system – there’s eco-issue at play when we think about making use of the whole vegetable: food waste.

Forty percent of all food in the US goes uneaten, resulting in a whopping $165 billion in food waste each year.  The average American throws out 20 pounds of food per person every month. In 2011, 36 million tons of food waste ended up in landfills; the single largest component of US municipal sold waste. That’s bad on a variety of levels, from environmental (contributor to climate change) to social (while we’re busy wasting food, many people are starving).

Not everyone can, or if they can, is, composting, which is why programs like Hello Compost in New York are commendable, as well as city-wide initiatives that encourage people to put their food scraps to better use. But another part of the solution is being smarter about how we use our food, which is where whole vegetable cooking comes in.

Granted, pickling your kale stalks (haven’t tried it yet, but yes, it can be done) isn’t the end-all solution for our food waste problems. There are a whole lot of things that need to change, from inefficiencies in the food delivery system to a better understanding of food expiration dates. But every step in the right direction is still a step, and maximizing what we get from our vegetables is all part of it. To be able to waste food is, ultimately, a luxury that many others can’t afford.

With that in mind, shouldn’t we challenge ourselves to make better use of the ingredients that we have at home? Cooking is fun, and using a “throw away” ingredient in a delicious way can give a bit of an adrenaline kick. So be bold, be creative, and never throw a carrot top away again.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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The post Cooking with Food Waste: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnBored with your cookbooks? Here’s what you really want to read but were afraid to admit.

Tired of the same old titles popping up at the bookstore? Here are the cookbooks you really wish you could track down.

1. How to Infuse Everything With Kale and Other Leafy Greens
2. The 100 Dishes That Will Most Likely Lead to a Third Date and then a Wedding
3. How to Pretend You Eat Well When You’re in a Room of Really Wholesome People
4. Fancy Sounding Dishes for Lazy Cooks: How to Impress Even When You Don’t Have Time
5. I Just Want to Eat Food: A Guide to Tasty Things You’ll Actually Have Time to Make
6. Food-Porn Free: 100 Delicious Dishes That Will Never Photograph Well, From Stew to Goulash
7. I Don’t Know Where to Buy Chia and Other First World Food Tribulations
8. One Ingredient Recipes
9. Make This Non-Vegan, Gluten-Filled, Sugar Dense Cake and Like It
10. Pick Up Lines for Foodies: Sexy Sentences to Find Your Mate
11. No More Big Ag in Your Breakfast
12. Home Alone on a Saturday and Crying: A Guide to Comfort Food
13. Sage, Fennel, and Rosemary: An A to Z Guide for Using Complicated Sounding Herbs
14. Make This in 11 Minutes But Make People Think It Took Two Hours

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: sling@flickr

The post 14 Awesome Cookbooks We Wish Someone Would Write: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnIngredients in the Foodie Underground pantry that inspire fun, healthy meals.

Delicious, healthy meals don’t have to be complicated. In fact, some of the best eating is just simple food done well. I hate the word “foodie” for this exact reason. It’s a word dripping of elitism and snobbishness, more about crazy reductions and Michelin star restaurants than a mere appreciation of food. It’s a problem of semantics, and our obsession with defining who we are and what we do, but ultimately, you don’t have to be rich and pretentious to like good food. An apple can be a culinary experience just as much as a five course dinner.

Lately, I’ve been delving into Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked and thinking a lot about this topic. The value that we put on healthy meals, how we are obsessed with cooking shows but rarely cook ourselves, and how less time in our own kitchens changes how we think about food. How when we cook for ourselves, we value the time and effort put into getting it onto the table.

As Pollan puts it, “But perhaps the most important thing I learned by doing this work is how cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and ecological relationships; with plants and animals, with soil, with farmers, with microbes both inside and outside our bodies, and, of course, with the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Above all else, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking connects.”

Cooking is what pulls us back down to earth. What connects us to the food we eat and the food around us.

But so many people find cooking healthy meals overwhelming and difficult. Even if they have decided that committing the time to making food is worth it, they don’t know where to start. I have often been asked how it is that I whip up dishes in a short amount of time. With no formal training, my cooking process has simply evolved through trial and error. And a well-stocked pantry. Above all, if you don’t have the ingredients to play with, it’s hard to make healthy meals.

With that in mind, here is the fully Foodie Underground approved list of particular ingredients that help for inspiring creative cooking. These are above and beyond your standard “fresh produce and eggs” category (both of which I highly recommend always having around), and in general I am a big believer of having a variety of whole grains, nuts, seeds and spices on hand. In short, these are 11 specific ingredients that I always keep on hand because they make it easy and fun to prepare healthy meals.

1. Millet

Millet is often overlooked in the world where quinoa reigns the list of trendy grains. But it should be. A tip I recently learned for preparing millet, is that before you boil it, place the millet in a saucepan without water. Put it over medium heat and stir every once in awhile to make sure the millet doesn’t burn. What you’re doing is essentially “toasting” it. When the millet has a nice golden color to it, add in your water and cook it. It makes for a delicious nutty flavor in the end product. Super easy dish: roast squash, stuff it with millet, sprinkle with olive oil and fresh herbs.

2. Fresh herbs

Even if your cooking turns disastrous, you can always sprinkle fresh herbs on top. I have mint, thyme and basil growing in my kitchen herb pots hanging from the balcony, and when I am at the market I will pick up a sprig of whatever is available; rosemary, sage, and beyond. You can never have enough, and things like rosemary are good for making delicious simple syrups out of. Rhubarb and rosemary syrup anyone?

3. Olive oil

I have turned into an olive oil freak. Reading Extra Virgin: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil was a bit of a wake up call, since olive oil makes its way into almost everything, even sweet baked goods. It’s a must have for preparing healthy meals.

4. Raw nuts

Beyond being stupid healthy for you, raw nuts can be used in a variety of dishes. I am a big fan of keeping hazelnuts and almonds on hand, and chopping them up to throw atop salads or a sauté, as well as grinding them into flour and making gluten-free baked goods. They’re also good if you want to start playing with pesto recipes. Looking healthy meals with nuts? Try kale and hazelnut pesto..

5. Buckwheat flour

Another recent obsession of mine, buckwheat flour, much like millet, is an overlooked flour. Sure, there are plenty of other flours in my pantry, but if I had to pick my favorite, it’s buckwheat. With its distinct flavor and health benefits, it’s far superior to any white, processed flour you can find. I like to use it for scones and instead of regular flour in a dutch baby.

6. Chickpea Flour

Do you know how easy it is to make gluten-free crepes and flatbread? Seriously, why we in the US haven’t imported this popular ingredient of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking is beyond me, especially since chickpea production is on the rise in the US. And hello, you use it in everyone’s favorite dish, hummus.

7. Sea salt

Anyone that tells you sea salt is like normal salt is simply nuts. It’s the perfect finishing ingredient for all healthy meals. Fortunately sea salt is another ingredient that you don’t have to import from the other side of the world. On the west coast, you can get sea salt from the Oregon coast thanks to Jacobsen and on the east coast, from Amagansett, who harvests their salt from the Atlantic waters on Long Island, New York.

8. Cardamom

Ok, so unless you live in India, this isn’t a local product, but we have to pick our battles, and in the eating locally vs. importing battle, I choose to eat cardamom. Buy it in pods and grind the seeds down in a mortar and pestle. You can add it to sweet and savory dishes alike and even to your coffee.

9. Black lentils

Unlike other lentils which get mushy when you boil them up, the little black lentils stay nice and chewy, making them perfect for adding into salads, using as a base in a stew or simply mixing them up with a little olive oil, garlic and chopped walnuts.

10. Garlic

All healthy meals start with garlic. OK, that’s not true, but it can certainly make them all better. You don’t just have to eat it minced. My favorite way to eat it is to bake or roast it and use it as a spread.

11. Honey

Support honey bees (which are dying off if you missed the memo) and get the local, small batch produced stuff. Drizzle over various fruit (apples for example) and bake them, add it to basic vinaigrettes, use instead of sugar.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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Image: Lisa Norwood

The post The 11 Ingredients That Make Healthy Meals More Fun: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

There’s a world of unusual culinary herbs out there waiting to be explored that goes far beyond rosemary and thyme. This summer, try out a few new ones and expand your herb repertoire.

There’s nothing like cutting stalks of mint and basil from your own pots of kitchen herbs (doable in even the smallest of spaces) to add in to whatever you’re cooking. Fresh herbs can make all the difference in a dish after all. But why stop at the good old standards? Check out these culinary herbs worth adding into the mix.

1. Red Basil

Popular in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine, red basil has a bit of a stronger, spicier taste to its more popular counterpart. Like the more common sweet basil, it’s rich in vitamins and minerals which means you can’t go wrong adding it into your food. The easiest use is adding it fresh to salads, but it can also easily be used in making infused simple syrups, or for a summery treat, make a batch of Thai Basil and Coconut Ice Cream.

2. Lemon Verbena

This perennial herb is known for its delicious citrus smell. Common in soap and shampoo, if you’re looking for a citrus flavor that’s a little different than the average lemon, lemon verbena should be your go-to summer herb. Add it to whipped cream for summer cakes or make a flavored vinegar. The ultimate summer treat? A glass of lemon verbena lemonade.

3. Scented Geranium

There are more than 400 types of geranium plants, and with the scented versions you’ll get everything from rose to nutmeg smells, which can be used in a variety of dishes and drinks. Add it to a summer berry compote, infuse vodka or gin, or make a flavored sugar for sprinkling on baked goods.  And as it turns out, the plant even works as a mosquito repellent, pulling double summer duty.

4. Lovage

Some people mistake lovage for celery leaves. The herb has a very similar smell and flavor, which makes it a good base for soups and stocks, and anything savory. How about a Lovage and Lettuce Soup? And since it’s summer, you’re probably guzzling water; use lovage and make your own herbal essence to add just a little flavor when staying hydrated.

5. Chocolate Mint

A lot of people keep mint on hand, but if you’re going to add another herb to your collection, make it chocolate mint. It has a strong flavor, so you want to choose carefully where you use it. Steep a tea, chop finely and add to strawberries, whip up a chocolate mousse, make ice cream or even serve yourself a chocolate mint mojito.

6. Sorrel

Slightly tart and with a little bite, sorrel is one of those herbs that doesn’t make it onto most people’s ingredient list. And that’s a shame, because paired well it has a distinct and delicious flavor. There’s also a wild version that can easily be foraged. Start with beets and grapefruit and make a salad, for a variation on pesto, use sorrel instead of basil, or pair with strawberries for a smoothie.

7. Culinary Lavender

Lavender isn’t unusual in and of itself, but as it’s more commonly used in soaps, potpourris and the like, not typically found among the culinary herbs. Yes, you can in fact eat lavender. Most varieties of lavender can be used for cooking but Lavandula angustifolia is the most prominent one; try to find an organic version. Lavender’s taste is strong, so start off easy and and taste as you go along before adding in more. Throw it on salads, use it as a meat rub, make a lavender aioli for serving with potatoes, or make a lavender simple syrup and indulge in a lavender margarita.

Images: hozinja, Dan Hurt, jacqueline, zormasa, thevonDOOMs, Jake, Theresa, Walter Smith

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ColumnHas the seduction of cookbooks made us forget how to actually cook?

In a bookstore last week, I headed for the cookbook aisle. It’s often a place of cheap inspiration; you don’t have to buy a new cookbook to get new ideas. I love cookbooks. The pages, the words, the stories… a good cookbook is a combination of all these things.

But I also get overwhelmed by cookbooks. Standing in the cookbook aisle looking at all of the bright covers – How to Bake Bread, How to Bake Bread That’s Not Really Bread, How to Stop Baking Bread and Make Cupcakes Instead – I had that feeling. You couldn’t cook fast enough to keep up with the proliferation of cookbooks.

In a world of up close food photos with a shallow depth of field, I find myself drawn to the books without photos. The books that leave a little up to the imagination. You don’t really know how that apple tart is going to turn out do you? But at least you now have a basic recipe.

So I picked up The Flavour Thesaurus, a book about flavors and pairings: categorizing what goes with what. Coffee and coriander? Why not. I flipped through a few pages, and saw only text. No photos at all. Just a reference book for new food ideas. I bought it immediately. (As a complete and utter side note: I was in a Swedish bookstore, bought the Swedish version Smaklexikon, only to later realize that it was originally written in English. Global cooking to say the least.)

I came home and began the introduction, where the author Niki Segnit has a great line about after 20 years of cooking, still questioning her ability to cook food. Had she really learned to cook food or was she just fairly good at following recipes? Then she follows with a line that stuck with me, “My mother is, just like my grandmother was, an amazing cook but owns only two cookbooks and a folder with old cut out recipes, and she rarely looks in any of them.”

I was staying with my own grandmother, who having raised four children, knows her way around the kitchen, and there are always fresh baked rolls and cookies in her apartment. But her cookbook stash is tiny. All she really uses is one from 1985 with a funny photo on the front of a woman with a Farah Fawcett haircut, and even then, it’s only because she wrote down a few family recipes in the blank pages at the end.

My mother’s own cooking base comes from a worn out blue three-ring binder that dates back all the way to when she moved from Sweden to the US with my American father, sometime in the mid-1970s. Pages fall out and get put back in, no matter what the order. Some of her best recipes are in that binder, but she rarely has to consult them.

My mind returned to the bookstore, and the overwhelming amount of shelves with books from what to pair with wine to how to bake with licorice (ok, still sort of upset I didn’t buy that one). In the proliferation of cookbooks, have we actually forgotten how to cook?

Cookbooks have somehow given us the illusion that we are interested in food. That we dream of food. That we think about food. That we know what to do with it. But go to anyone’s home with more than a few cookbooks and see how worn the pages are. Most cookbooks remain only an illusion of a life well lived; we buy them because they provide a break from our everyday reality, but sometimes, we never even use them. A sort of lifestyle porn. We’re seduced by the dream that we too could be serving three course dinners and fresh scones with homemade yogurt every morning for breakfast. But can you whip up a dessert with just a few ingredients or are you stuck to being guided by a recipe? Does everything fall apart when you realize you don’t have three tablespoons of soy sauce?

If, for every time you had to eat, you had to take out a cookbook, you’d never even have the time to leave your position standing in front of the bookshelf. Cooking is a combination of being inspired and learning new things and daring to experiment.

That doesn’t mean we’ll never buy a new cookbook again – I have plenty on my “want” list – but what are the cookbooks that work? The ones that are references. Guidebooks to navigating and understanding the world of food. My own favorite cookbooks are the simple ones. Text-heavy, simply illustrated and straightforward. A good recipe doesn’t have to hide behind a flashy image; it stands alone.

Have cookbooks changed how we cook? Most certainly. A good cookbook collection can provide culinary inspiration as well as guidance for the daily staples. But they have to be used. The pages must be worn. The recipes tried more than once. Notes written in the margins.

Food won’t happen just by having a colorful cookbook on your table. You have to step in to the kitchen and get your hands dirty.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: timsackton

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