Daily Loaf

Here are some wonderful ways to green your festivities by starting a few planet friendly holiday traditions this year.

Here are five ideas to get you started:

1. Wrap it up. Think outside the wrapping paper aisle! Reuse old paper or make your own keepsake pieces with stamps and other art supplies. Borrow from Japanese culture and create a furoshiki, or traditional Japanese wrapping cloth – a beautiful scarf or embroidered towel can make a stunning and reusable gift wrap.
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In my family, Thanksgiving dinner always begins with the primi piatti, or first course. It’s the Italian way. Don’t even try to slap a turkey, stuffing and some sides on the table without first serving some type of soup, pasta or risotto dish! But, let’s face it: Who could possibly ingest, much less savor, turkey and all of the trimmings after scarfing down a plate full of homemade manicotti or porcini risotto?

Maybe that’s the reason why in Italian families, Thanksgiving dinner is usually an all day affair, with several “rest” periods between courses to enable diners to take short naps or walks around the block? That’s also why, if given the choice, I usually go for a soup.

When soup was on the holiday menu at our house, my mother usually made a big pot of Minestra Maritata, or Italian Wedding Soup. It’s a light, flavorful soup made with chicken stock, greens and little, tiny, light-as-air veal meatballs, and which by the way, has nothing to do with weddings. It was, and still is, a very popular dish, if not a predictable one. But, sometimes, I just want to stir things up and throw something unexpected into the mix. Here’s a dish that none of cooks in my Italian family would ever think of putting on their Thanksgiving table. None except me, that is. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out Vegan Thanksgiving part 1 and part 3.)

Vegan desserts are perhaps the most daunting undertaking of any new- or non-vegan, inspiring such questions as…

What should I use to replace eggs/milk/butter?

Can I bake for the same amount of time?

How do I make cookies that don’t taste like cardboard?

How do I know if my sugar is vegan?

I hear that some flour has bone in it. Truth or fiction?

Well, dearies, I don’t presume to have all the answers, but as both the maker and eater of countless vegan treats, I do know that there are ways to get around many of these questions. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this past week:

Reconstructing a historic bat tower in Temple Terrace and how to build your own bat roost- Grant Rimbey investigates efforts in Temple Terrace to reconstruct an historic tower for bats, discusses a large community bat roost he designed for the Florida Bat Conservancy, and tells how you can purchase (or build) your own bat roost for your yard.

Summer Solstice: A brief history- Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, occurs this Sunday- June 21st. Here are a few facts you might not have known about it, from Linda Taylor.

Organics: How to eat well without breaking your budget- With the increase of demand over organic food in the last ten years you would think that a wide range of these products would be easily accessible. Here’s some some advice from Kelly Rothwell on purchasing healthy, organic food in this region without breaking your budget.
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Along with Father’s Day we will honor the Summer Solstice on June 21 – precisely at 1:46 AM. How appropriate, as many native cultures respected Mother Moon and Father Sun. “Sol” and “stice” derives from a combination of Latin words meaning “sun” and “to stand still”.
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Because no holiday these days passes without some portion of the female population dressing up as “sexy” versions of whatever theme the holiday may comprise, we bring you the sexy girls of Saint Patrick’s Day. Does it matter if most of them aren’t Irish?

See more pics below the jump.

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Ok y’all, I know that Christmas is over, but there’s still time to eke out a little holiday spirit. After running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to finish our pre- and post-holiday activities, you probably don’t want to spend 4 1/2 hours baking these sugar cookies. But surely you have an extra two minutes to make these cute little Marshmallow Snowmen? Do this with your kids as you pack away the decorations until next year, as a final, tasty, easy hurrah to send off the season. I bet you will get a smile outta someone!

Read on for instructions. Read the rest of this entry »

Sooooo, I thought I’d get in the Christmas spirit and make Fancy Decorated Sugar Cookies.

With all of my baking adventures, I have never made decorated or worked with cut out cookies. Hmm, wonder why?I saw this post and this post over at Our Best Bites, and I was inspired. She gives a wonderful tutorial on both the cookie making and the glazing. And her cookies are adorable. Check them out.

Enough being nice, as I am still a little bitter. Making the dough was a cinch. Threw everything in my KitchenAid mixer and in 2 minutes it was done and chilling in the fridge. Easy peasy. Holiday cheer and joy flowing!

Then the pain in the assness began. The dough was too hard to roll, so I let it sit out for a bit to warm up. Ditzo me left it out for too long and it got too soft to roll. Back in the fridge. The my daughter proceeds to blow across the floured counter top, making it snow flour in my kitchen. Oh, happy day! Read the rest of this entry »

I know these cute little Ice Cream Cone Christmas Trees have been around forever. But aren’t they darling? The kids had such a great time with these, that is after they got past the sugar rush from eating the frosting by the spoon fulls!

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Craft Magazine and Make Magazine are tremendous periodicals for the 21st century DIY culture. And in true 21st century style their blogs are as important as their paper publications. Here’s the Craftzine blog, and here’s the Makezine blog.

I tell you this because they’re great zine/blogs and I thought you might be interested in them, but mostly to assuage my conscience since I’m about to totally rip off their image and post -

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The text on the Tastebook site calls its own product “stunning and unique.” For once, I’ll have to agree with the PR flunkies. With just a little effort, you can create a recipe book of your own family favorites that’s miles ahead of the old-fashioned box of handwritten note cards.

The process is simple: just upload you recipes (with a picture if you have one), tag them into sections, title your masterpiece and pay the $19.95 (plus shipping). The resulting cookbook has the classic Betty Crocker look, with a hard cover, labeled tabs delineating sections and full-color, ringbound pages.

You can also share recipes with the Tastebook community, pull recipes from its database for your cookbook, or order Tastebooks created by other people — some of them recognized chefs like the editors of Epicurious, Cooking Light or Food & Wine.

In these days of throw-away, consumable crap, a personalized cookbook like this is the kind of thing that people will hold onto for generations. If your recipes are any good, that is.

To give a cookbook as a gift is an act of nourishment. You hope that your offering will inspire and ultimately feed the recipient. You hope he/she will think of you while standing in the kitchen, excited and covered in flour.

Perhaps the year’s best cookbook, or at least the most lavish, isn’t nourishing to anything but your brain and fantasy life. A Day at elBulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods and Creativity of Ferran Adria (Phaidon Press Inc., $49.95) is less a cookbook than an act of highbrow food porn – and I mean that in a more literal sense than the term “food porn” usually conjures. The meticulous chronicling of “the best restaurant in the world” walks us through every aspect of the cutting-edge eatery in northern Spain, but it quickly becomes apparent that the true experience of elBulli is unattainable. We can look, but we can’t touch, and we certainly can’t taste. Read the rest of this entry »