Foodies

Hunting and Gathering: Tuscan Kale Salad

by Lisa Barlow

“Kale is the steak of vegetables!” my vegetarian friend would often exclaim. “Well, I‘d rather have the steak of meats” her carnivore husband would mutter. Blame it on dinner. The marriage didn’t last.

Here’s a kale salad recipe that just might have kept life happier for both of them, at least in the kitchen. The leafy green is massaged with salt and oil, reminding one of Kobe beef, and making it in my mind, indeed the steak of vegetables.

Hunting and Gathering: Valentine's Day Oysters

by Lisa Barlow

It’s Valentine’s Day and while you may be content to buy your love a pretty box of chocolates, there are a host of other foods that can convey your message more effectively.

Since ancient times clever cooks have concocted seductive recipes to tempt their paramours and the list of edible aphrodisiacs they have come up with is long and varied. Some foods merely look suggestive. Others have been clinically proven to help get the job done.

In the first category, bananas top the list. Mae West’s famous query says it all: Is that a banana in your pocket …or are you happy to see me? Asparagus and carrots, like figs and cherries, also arouse some fertile imaginations. But then just about anything can excite some folks. In her book Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses, Author Isabel Allende says she tested her recipes on friends over 40 “since even a cup of chamomile turns on the young.”

Hunting and Gathering: Super Bowl food

by Lisa Barlow

Hey Super Bowl fans, what are you planning to eat during the Big Game? Mac ‘n Cheese Jalapeno Poppers? Mile High Nachos? Grilled BBQ Potato Skins? Smokin’ Hot Buffalo Wings?

Football and food seem to go together so inextricably that even a fair weather fan like myself knows that I need get my game on in the kitchen this Sunday. And there is plenty of inspiration out there to help me plan my menu. Every celebrity chef with a TV show seems to have weighed in with his or her variation of a classic gridiron favorite. 

The statisticians are busy thinking about Super Bowl fare as well. But their numbers have often been a little wonky. It is probably closer to 8 million pounds of avocados used to make guacamole this weekend than the 80 million that is often reported. That’s still an awful lot of chip dip.

Hunting and Gathering: Melting Potatoes

by Lisa Barlow

I’ve been getting a lot of diet advice lately. Who hasn’t? It’s January and if you turn on the television, pick up a magazine in a doctor’s room, click open your email or drive past a billboard, you’re a target.  “Hey Fatty” one publication taunts, “those Iced Oreo Balls we told you to make for your office party last month, now you’re wearing them!” There’s penance to pay for holiday fun and everyone from Britney to Dr. Oz want to tell us how to reclaim our inner Skinny Bitches so we can fit into our new pajama jean britches.

Thus prompted by the media, this year I have begun my own reformation with the same dedication and rigor with which I begin every new year.  Each morning I drink a slimming protein shake laden with green powder, flax seeds and a series of unpronounceable berry extracts that are cultivated in the Himalayas, the Hunzu Valley of Pakistan and the Costa Rican rainforest. And I feel great!

Hunting and Gathering: Hoppin' John

by Lisa Barlow

There are myriad superstitions involving food that I ignore. But a few I hold fast to for no other reason than they are habit, and to question the ridiculousness of them would be living life a little too seriously.

If the wishbone makes it intact after carving a roast chicken, I grab my end, dream big and twist. At friends’ weddings, I throw rice or seeds like all the other guests, blessing the bride and groom with a fruitful union and messy hair. When salt is spilled in the kitchen, I throw a pinch over my left shoulder to stave off bad luck, if not the annoyance of the sprinkled person behind me.

And I always eat black-eyed peas on New Years day. The dish is called Hoppin’ John and there are lots of theories why some people eat it for good luck, with a slew of others as to how it got its name.

Hunting and Gathering: Christmas Tamales

by Lisa Barlow

Growing up, I thought it was just my family that had skewed tradition a little on Christmas day. The morning always began straight out of a storybook with a delicious slice of homemade Stollen bread, a mug of steaming hot chocolate and the frenzied unwrapping of Santa’s bounty. But for Christmas dinner, while the other families in our New York City apartment building were sitting down to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, we were tucking in to a pot full of spicy pork tamales.

It turns out we were just borrowing from another culture, and from my mother’s past. She had grown up in San Antonio, Texas, a beautiful city whose architecture and cuisine is influenced by its southern neighbor, the country it once belonged to. The population of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in San Antonio still outnumbers everyone else, and the Mexican-influenced food is some of the best in the country.