• Going to BlogHer 2008?
• Food photography through a new lens
• Race to the bottom
• Vote to promote healthy food
• BlogHer dirt

For the third year in a row, the San Francisco Food Bank has launched the Hunger Challenge, a week-long opportunity for bloggers and others to walk in the shoes of America’s hungry. The challenge: Eat for $4 per day per person, the current amount of the food stamp benefit provided to recipients.

Participants this year include veterans of the challenge and those brand new to it. In addition, California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma has joined the roster.

Hannah of Project Open Hand admitted that though the Hunger Challenge will provide a solid education in one facet of being poor in America, she’s working from a place of great advantage:

“As I walk in the shoes of a food stamp recipient, I realize that I will have a hot shower each morning, clean clothes to wear each day, a safe home to return to after a long day work, and a warm bed to sleep in at night. Thus, I will only encounter one of the many hardships endured by the poor every day. However, it is my hope that this experience will help me gain a better understanding of what I call the “food insecurity epidemic” and provide elucidation on ways people like me and you can help to alleviate this societal problem.”

Vinette Gutierrez of Hello Vinette! went slightly over budget during her shopping trip at the beginning of the challenge. “On my list of groceries, I got mostly carbohydrates and starchy items since they were the least expensive,” she said as she embarked on the week.

“I hope I’m not being overly confident and optimistic but I think I can handle this,” said Hello Cupcake. “At the very least, it’s only one week and as it stands now, I am very conscious of my food spending habits.”

Dana of The Food Stamp Diet had already run into a challenge starting on Day 1: she hadn’t gone shopping for her groceries yet, she woke up craving restaurant pancakes that wouldn’t fit in the budget for the week, and her boyfriend gave her a homemade piece of candy that, also, she could not eat while on the challenge.

“I’m not pleased. So now I guess I’m gonna go to maybe Safeway or maybe some fruterias on mission and see what I can get for cheap. I have $28 for the whole week but I’m not sure I’m going to spend it all today because I’m worried I won’t ration properly for the week and then I will run out. I am going to try to have some fruit and veggies this week even though I’m sure that will take all my money.

It’s gonna be a beans and rice kind of week I guess.”

The Day 1 challenge for Kate of Some Dreams Come True and her husband, Mark, was when her in-laws invited them over for dinner.

“One of the challenge rules is no accepting handouts – after all, you could just set up to be at another friend’s house for dinner every night.

But, it got me thinking about what would happen if we were really living on food stamps. Would that be the end of social eating? I really don’t think so. While I really wouldn’t think anything less of anyone using food stamps, I don’t think I’d be advertising it if I was. So, I did what I’d usually do – asked what I could bring.

Mark and I ended up bringing dessert. And, in the spirit of the challenge, I wanted to make something that would fit into our $8/day budget. I ended up whipping up another Strawberry Sour Cream Pie. The total cost for the pie was $5.18.”

Learn more about the program, and check out the full list of participating bloggers, at The Hunger Challenge’s site. It’s not too late to sign up and participate!

• Planning…and worrying a little…
• Bringing deprivation into stark relief
• Telling stories with the Hunger Challenge bloggers
• Hunger Challenge: Day One
• Good food/Good Food

The first time I visited the Iowa State Fair, I arrived armed with an annotated map.

My friend Leah, whose father is the Executive Director of the Iowa State Fair Foundation, grew up attending the fair. When she heard I was going for the first time in 2006, she told me she had a set of places she liked to go. At her cubicle, she used a marker to identify the best booths and the best food.

“Only the Campbell’s corndogs,” she said. “Look for the blue hats. Don’t eat any other kind. And there are lots of mini donuts, but you want the ones from the church, not the other kind. Also, the cheese curds are the best you will ever have. They’re here,” she said as she put an x marking the spot. “They’re in this triangle near the Agricultural Building.”

Leah did not steer me wrong. Of course, like an amateur, I tried to get through her entire list of food recommendations in my first hour and a half on the grounds. Do you know what happens when you do that? You can’t feel your feet for the next hour. Yes, those of you who are physicians, you SHOULD be alarmed by that symptom.

Read more at BlogHer…

• Just call me Templeton
• One step closer to funding for community food programs
• Just this side of awesome
• Going to BlogHer 2008?
• BlogHer dirt

I'm a BlogHer Voice of the Year!

I’m excited and honored to announced that one of my recent posts, A healing garden and an affirmation, has been selected as a finalist in the BlogHer ’10 Voices of the Year competition in the Opinion-Editorial category. The piece will be honored as part of a gala event and art auction benefiting the Nature Conservancy and Gulf restoration efforts. I’m so grateful to the judges for their consideration.

If you’re attending BlogHer ’10 and the gala, please come say hello! I’ll be there, too, checking out the art and the work of the other finalists.

• BlogHer dirt
• Plants under plastic
• Off to the Pleasure Island of tawdry food…
• Going to BlogHer 2008?
• Where the spice road led me

I have spent a good portion of my life trying to balance out time for creative work and time for work that actually pays the bills, fitting in art and writing at the edges. I write stories on planes, in that window of time when people have gathered around a conference room table but a meeting has not yet started, in the mornings before work when most people I know are still asleep. I carry my camera everywhere, shoot whenever I can, and process photos late at night because there’s no other time to do it.

But every now and then, I stop and devote a luxurious amount of time to the creative, and over the weekend, I carved out a full day to take a restaurant and street food & culture photography workshop with Penny De Los Santos in San Francisco.

Penny, who blogs about food and photography at Appetite, is an award-winning photographer whose work appears in Saveur Magazine, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Time, Latina and Texas Monthly.

Penny talks about making photos in a reactionary way–finding details and stories and moments in markets and homes and restaurants all around the world. In Penny’s aesthetic, the food you see is the food you could actually eat — she might rearrange the food on the plate to make it more photogenic, but she’s not going to use many of the inedible tricks of the trade food stylists use to make food look better in a magazine.

The two-part class started in my favorite restaurant in all the world, Contigo, where we photographed food as it came out of the kitchen (and, on occasion, snuck into the kitchen itself to make a photograph or eight), and continued in the afternoon around San Francisco’s Mission District, where Penny dispatched us with assignments designed to take us out of our comfort zone and make photographs that showed the food and culture of this rich neighborhood. Whether tasked with sitting down at a table with strangers and photographing them and their meal, or shifting perspective and really showing the Mission through unexpected images, Penny pushed us to find photographs that told stories through details.

Penny started her photographic life as a documentary photographer, and though she still documents life all around the world, she most often does so through the prism of food. She said other photographer colleagues and friends sometimes ask her why she has moved to primarily food photography. “I tell them you have no idea what you’re missing,” said Penny, who explained how the stories that arise from food and community are often the most compelling.

Penny taught a similar class, minus the out-in-the-street component, in Seattle in December, and I watched many of the participants tweet about it (including the photos of the incredible images they were making throughout the day). Rebekah Denn of Eat All About It shared her thoughts on the Seattle version of the workshop on her own blog, as well as a detailed list of what she learned from the class on Al Dente.

Paula Thomas of Paula Thomas Photography, who also took the class in Seattle, wrote an interesting comparison of that workshop with one given a few months earlier by Lou Manna:

“I found myself comparing Penny to Lou a lot and found they do things almost totally opposite each other. Here are a few of the differences I noticed. Penny uses natural light, Lou likes to shoot in studios with lights. Penny hand holds her camera, Lou uses a tripod. Penny uses auto white balance, Lou uses custom white balance. Penny likes to step back and get all the food in the shot, Lou likes to get in close. Penny doesn’t alter food to make it inedible, Lou adds inedible things to food to make it look pretty. Penny and Lou are both very successful food photographers. It just goes to show you there is no one right way to do things and there are lots of different styles out there. I think it’s great to hear from two people with completely different styles, it makes you see things differently.”

Though I only took the one class, the two-part component of it gave me two different approaches to the process of making photographs. (After all, the food on the plate doesn’t talk back to you when you try to take its picture.) And the opportunity to spend an entire day thinking only about how to improve my photography and think differently about the images I make — of food, of people, of places, of objects — was invaluable.

You can see my full set of photos from the day on Flickr, and there is a Flickr pool where our class’ work is going as people post it.

Here are some more posts about street food and food photography:

• Lara Ferroni of Cook & Eat describes street food as her “favorite,” and tells the tale of a three-day run of street food eating in New York.
• Kitchen Chick took a walk through Hong Kong, trying a variety of dishes and capturing images of food purveyors at work.
• Deb of Smitten Kitchen describes her approach to food photography.

• Celebrating BlogDay 2006
• Coolest mantis photos ever
• Call me stubborn
• The Inadvertent Gardener wants to hear from you
• Submit your idea for BlogHer Food ’12 in Seattle

The year is almost over, and it’s time to settle on the menu for New Year’s gatherings. I love using New Year’s Eve as an opportunity to serve rich, elegant food that celebrates the year past and the year to come. I also love serving small bites rather than a big meal: it provides flexibility so guests can arrive in their own time, and frees me up to enjoy the party rather than preparing dinner.

In honor of that, I offer up 12 suggestions for appetizers that would work well at a New Year’s party. They fall in three categories: cheese, seafood and meat.

Cheese

We’ll start with a simple, elegant crowd-pleaser. Baked Brie is always a party hit, and Elise of Simply Recipes serves up a sweet-yet-savory, creamy option that is sure to make your New Year’s guests happy.

If you’re up for Brie but want a slightly different option, Lisa of My Own Sweet Thyme provides some taste-tested Brie appetizer ideas that also show off the creamy cheese to its best advantage.

Fondue is always a fun option, but not everyone has a fondue set. Luckily, this elegant appetizer is quite possible to pull off without special equipment. Stephanie of A Year of Slow Cooking puts a small slow cooker to use for her Fancy Cheese Fondue Little Dipper recipe.

If you’re a fan of Crab Rangoon but want a vegetarian alternative, the Scallion Cream Cheese Bites from Des of Life’s Ambrosia might just be what you’re looking for. “They are quick, they are easy, they are bite size and not to mention they look pretty good on your table,” Des wrote.

Seafood

Jen of Use Real Butter recommends her Crawfish Phyllo Turnovers as an elegant appetizer option. She made them for Christmas Day, but they would go well on a New Year’s holiday table, as well.

My Mom’s from Baltimore, so I grew up on blue crab, and love all crabby dishes I can get my hands on. Alanna of Kitchen Parade features some Mini Crab Bites that are simple, healthy, quick to make, and feature crab as the real star of the show. She’s been taking them to New Year’s celebrations since 1996, and I think it’s time anyone who loves crab start incorporating them in their New Year’s menu.

From French Cooking for Dummies comes an idea for Coconut Ceviche Appetizer Spoons. This fresh, tropical preparation also features a fun serving method.

Bea of La Tartine Gourmande offers up her Duo of Vegetable Mousses and its Tuna Tartar, an appetizer best served in small glasses so guests can see the beautiful layers.

Meat

A lovely way to work ahead is to make a mousse or pâté to spread on crackers or crostini. Julie of A Mingling of Tastes provides two wintry and celebratory options: Apple-Thyme Chicken Liver Mousse and Pistachio-Chicken Liver Pâté. Julie offers this advice to those who haven’t eaten or served a chicken liver dish before: “If you’re not so sure about chicken livers, consider this: they are so cheap and easy to prepare that you won’t be taking a big risk if you don’t like them. If you’re worried about squeamish friends and family, just call these dishes ‘country pâtés’ and hope they are too embarrassed to ask you to explain exactly what’s in it. After the first bite, they won’t care anymore.”

If I ever thought I wanted to be a vegetarian, meatballs would abuse me of that notion. This recipe for Teriyaki Meatballs from Karly of Buns in My Oven sounds like a delicious twist on the kinds I usually make.

Puff pastry is an incredibly easy way to dress up an appetizer. Though I’ll admit I’ve never tried to make my own puff pastry at home, I’ve found that buying frozen sheets of it works just fine, particularly for dishes like the Sausage in Puff Pastry suggested by Rita of Pink Bites. If you made the Baked Brie mentioned above, you might even have leftover puff pastry from that recipe that could be the perfect fit for this appetizer option.

Finally, Todd and Diane of White on Rice Couple offer up Vietnamese beef wrapped in wild betal leaves, or Bò Lá Lốt, which is one of the courses in the traditional Vietnamese Seven Courses of Beef. “These spicy, peppery Việt herb leaves add a nice, punch of flavor to these awesome, garlicky beef appetizers,” Todd and Diane wrote. “They can be eaten alone, straight off the skewers or wrapped in fresh springrolls.”

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Holiday Cocktails to Cheer Any Party features a list of liquor-based cocktails in a range of complexity levels.

If sparkling is more your speed, try my round-up of The Best Sparkling Holiday Cocktails.

This week, I’ll also post a round-up of appetizer ideas to help with your New Year’s planning. Stay tuned!

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Late last week, a food blogger friend of mine Tweeted about a Walmart press release advertising a $20 Thanksgiving dinner. According to the press release, the dinner, which was available starting on November 4, included the following list of ingredients:

• One 12-pound Grade A turkey
• Three 11 to 15.5-ounce cans Green Giant vegetables
• Two 14-ounce cans Ocean Spray cranberry sauce
• Three 6-ounce boxes of Stove Top stuffing
• One 5-pound bag of red potatoes
• One 12-count package of Sara Lee dinner rolls
• One 22-ounce pumpkin roll cake

The Tweet spawned a healthy debate in the Twittersphere, but, even though I’m usually happy to run my mouth in support of all things local, sustainable and organic, I didn’t think I could capture the nuance of my position on this in 140 characters or less.

This is a tough one. I firmly believe that Walmart’s pricing policies—the ones where they force their suppliers to lower and lower and lower their costs year after year, creating an artificial pricing structure and forcing jobs overseas to cut labor costs—are evil. Flat-out evil.

The only way that Walmart can offer such a deal—all that food for so little money—is if they’ve forced their suppliers to cut corners and offer the corporation similarly low prices, or Walmart used this as a loss leader to get people in the door of their stores. Neither of those options are particularly in the spirit of giving and thanks and being a good neighbor. They are Walmart’s brand of business. And I abhor that. I simply abhor it.

But I’m going to be straight up and honest here. It’s not like I never shop at Walmart. In fact, I bought probably 85 percent of my supplies for my trip to Burning Man at the Walmarts in Oakland and in Sparks, NV. The stuff I bought—including my ridiculous Miley Cyrus-brand pleated skirt short enough to shock even me—was cheap, and it didn’t matter if it got ruined in the dust of Black Rock City. I’ve also visited relatives in towns like Keyser, WV, where the Walmart was really the only place to shop for electronics, clothes and other consumer goods. So I can’t be one to cast stones—I don’t think it’s right that there are places in America where Walmart is your only shopping option, but I understand it’s the reality for more Americans than I’d like to count.

There’s another aspect of it, though, that checks me from fully passing judgment on Walmart. It has nothing to do with the company or the stores or the way they do business—I repeat…I abhor the way they do business—but it has to do with the families who might not be able to afford Thanksgiving this year if it weren’t for food banks, and industrial turkeys offered up for sale at Walmart.

At the end of the day, here is what I believe: I believe we have to make radical, dramatic changes to our food system. I believe no one should ever have to eat an industrial, processed, hormone- and antibiotic-laden turkey that might be cheap at the checkout counter but also will cost way more down the line in environmental and health costs. I believe industrial food has made America sick, and we’re only getting sicker. I believe the only way to turn this around is to find ways to make local, sustainably-grown, seasonal, and sometimes organic food available at better prices to people who cannot access nor afford that food right now.

But that work is going to take time. And in the meantime, while plenty of good and thoughtful people in this world are doing that work, I still want everyone in this country to be able to sit down on Thursday and celebrate Thanksgiving. As families. As friends. As neighbors. As a community. And if, to do that, they have to eat a meal that is artificially low-priced due to location or finances, so be it. I can’t, in good conscience, ask them to do anything different.

Here are some resources and ideas for making your Thanksgiving affordable and sustainable this year:

• Mir Kamin of BlogHer has some great tips for celebrating a frugal Thanksgiving.
• Hilary Meyer of the Eating Well Blog has ideas for making Thanksgiving dinner for less than $7 per person.
• Deanna Duke of Relish! asks her readers if sustainable food can be affordable.
• Alison of Discover(ing) Sustainability describes an effort to provide food baskets that contain locally grown or produced food items for the needy in her community–an effort that I applaud!

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It’s not logical, but it’s fun.

Thusly and therefore, I ended up invited to VDog’s Berkeley home last week, sitting just feet from Chris Mann, a genuinely nice and talented Sony Music artist who performed a house concert for a very select few of us. Oh, and for the Interwebs. But there were very few of us in the room.

While there, I met VDog’s mother-in-law, MC, who has her very own food blog and who was in town to take a bread baking class. Yay, lovely, hello, nice to meet you, all that jazz.

And then, this week, I noted on Twitter that VDog had invited me and our friend Deb Roby to stop by and pick up some of the extra bread left over from the baking class. I had already been to MC’s blog, and already had drooled on my computer screen over that biznass, so I required very little encouragement on this front.

I expected I might get to take home A loaf. A SINGLE loaf. But those ladies sent me out the door with nearly a half-dozen different kinds of freshly baked artisan bread. Flax. Pear-buckwheat. Millet. Corn. Whole wheat.

Sure, I blog for the sheer joy of writing. But when that leads to free artisan bread from a couple of rock star blog-ladies? I’m all over that.

• Voting in good taste
• I killed my Chi Pet
• The power of a minority vote
• We will not be outdone
• pH, which also stands for pHtttt

But instead? Instead, I am compelled to start the year by drawing your attention to Deb On The Rocks, a very, very funny woman who I met at BlogHer last year and who is facing a New Year’s Quandary.

Her dog peed on her neighbor’s lettuce. What to do?

According to Deb, there are more and more front yard vegetable gardens in her neighborhood, a trend that she blames on the old growth trees in everyone’s back yards. Regardless, I applaud this. Food in front, people. Food in front.

However, one of her neighbors planted what looks like it might be (based on her pictures) ornamental kale by their mailbox, and possibly some lettuce. There’s definitely Swiss chard there, and that’s definitely edible, but I don’t know what else in the mix is actually edible, as well.

Deb’s dilemma? To tell the neighbors or not to tell the neighbors?

Some of the commenters who have already weighed in share my viewpoint: If you’re going to grow things, you probably ought to wash them. Obviously other garden critters take a leak in the plot from time to time. But this does feel a little different to me. I mean, the dog was on a leash. With an owner. So does it merit a little more proactive apology? Or should Deb just run the other direction?

• Where it’s at: August 26
• State of the greens
• The lettuce is not plastic
• Where it’s at: September 10
• Bring the salad