Easy as Pie Test Kitchen

Warm, black, fruity tea

Every year around Christmas, my family makes this drink we like to call "Russian tea". My husband, who is part Russian, likes to point out that pineapples are not exactly native to Russia. It's still good, though. It's a pretty easy and forgiving recipe (unless my mom is watching you make it, in which case, there are very precise steps and measurements you MUST NOT deviate from at ANY COST!)

Russian Tea

Be sure to have a very large pot, and enough containers to store about a gallon of tea in when you're done. This recipe makes about a gallon of tea when all is said and done.
1 gallon water
3 lemons, halved
2 oranges, halved
8-10 cloves
6-8 bags black tea
1 46 ounce can pineapple juice
2 cups of sugar or equivalent (I use 2 teaspoons of stevia extract)

Bring the water to a boil in your large pot. Add lemons, oranges, cloves, and tea. Simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Remove the fruit and let them cool a bit, then squeeze what's left of the juice in them into the tea. Pour the tea through a strainer into a bowl or pitchers to remove the excess pulp. Rinse out the pot and pour the tea back into it. Add pineapple juice and sugar or other sweetener. If you're using sugar or honey that needs to be heated to dissolve, heat over medium or medium-high heat for another hour or so. You can usually just add artificial sweeteners or stevia without the extra cook time--just heat it up to serve it. Store in the refrigerator (if it's not gone before you get a chance to put it away).

Warm tummy

It's been unusually rainy and could here in southern California, and I'm trying to be thorough about using the food I have before I make another big trip to the store. So, we've been eating a lot of soup. Nothing else can quite give you that same toasty-from-the inside feeling, can it?

One of my favorite restaurants is a Lebanese place. We go there so often we are now good friends with the owner, and he was kind enough to share his secret to their delicious lentil soup. Well, okay, he didn't so much share the recipe as he said it's a matter of putting some onions and lentils in a pot, boiling them, and adding lemon juice. Turns out that's actually about all there is to it. If only the garlic sauce he serves was so easy to reproduce!

Mediterranean Lentil Soup ($5.20)

3 tablespoons oil
1/2 yellow onion ($.50)
1 tablespoon minced garlic ($.10)
1 lb red lentils ($1)
3 cups chicken broth ($3, or free if you make your own)
3 cups water
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 cup lemon juice ($.50)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley ($.10)

Saute the garlic and onion in oil over medium high heat until onions are getting tender. Add the lentils, chicken broth, water, cumin, lemon juice, and salt. Bring to a boil and simmer until lentils soften and come apart. Ladle into bowls and sprinkle parsley on the top.

GM foods

I've always been a little skeptical of the hoopla over genetically modified foods. After all, messing with crop genes is supposedly what got us from being hunter/gatherers to farmers in the first place. Norman Borlaug probably saved millions of lives by messing with crop genes. Genetically modified foods just seem like an accelerated, test tube version of the hybridization we've been doing for millennia to improve our food.

However, considering the damage arguably good things like antibiotics and soda have done do my intestines (I said arguably! who doesn't like soda??), I do keep an eye out for indications that there may be a real problem and not just hype. I see headlines like the one on this article that claims GM corn damaged caused organ damage in rats in a study, and I start to wonder if I should avoid the stuff. Then I read the article... They used GM corn that's not currently in any products. I suspect that not all GM foods are alike, so it is a little hard to tell what the implications of this might be. For all I know, they could have made up some kind of crazy mutant corn for the study that no one ever had the foggiest notion of putting into food. I think I'm going to throw this one on the "hype" pile. Maybe someone will do some useful research, like a study using GM foods people might actually eat.

Looking for my fairy food-mother.

Since I make most of my food from scratch, getting fresh organic produce delivered every week or so right to my front door sounds like heaven. In theory, I could limit my grocery store trips to one visit to Costco and one to Trader Joe's each month to get meat, cheese, and grains. Since we just moved to a new place, I decided to resume my previously futile attempts to find my fairy food-mother.

I tried out Spud! for awhile. The great thing about their site is that they have a huge selection of products, and you can order as much or as little as you want as often as you like. Or you can just set it up to send you certain things automatically at a set frequency. In practice, the business seems to be having growing pains. They changed my delivery from FedEx to a courier, which saved me money, but they never updated the delivery dates on my online profile. It was a little frustrating when I wasn't sure whether my food would be delivered in time for key holiday meals. I had to wrangle with them to give me the $5 off from the coupon they sent with my order that just said "simply visit www.spud.com and place your next order to get an appreciation discount." They forgot to pick up my old packaging. Things like that. They have friendly customer service people who took care of things quickly, but it was still kind of a pain to have to ask them to in the first place. They have some good ideas, though, so I might try them again in 6 months or so once they've had a chance to get their feet wet.

In the meantime, I'm excited to try Farm Fresh to You in a few weeks. Their claim is that most of what I'll be getting comes from a farm north of here. They don't have as much flexibility as Spud! does, but the service is cheaper, and I've already heard good things about the produce they deliver and the reliability of the service from a couple of co-workers.

Who magically leaves food at your doorstep? What do you like/dislike about the service?