Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Examine Your Foodprint: Resolve to Waste Less in 2012

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by Lindsay E. Brown · 12/29/11

Sometimes someone’s words really stick with you, whether it be a card, a conversation, a piece of sage advice, or even a tweet. A message that strikes a chord is rare in a time when there’s no shortage of opinions and no shortage of mediums with which to share them. In between our consumption of copious e-mails, texts, posts, tweets and videos, meaningful messages are few and far between.

That’s why you have to appreciate the gems when you see or hear ‘em.

I felt the weight of Maryam Henein’s words recently when she said this to me, “I think that we’re living in a time when we have an opportunity to raise our consciousness. When  people talk about 2012, it’s not really about the end of the world. I believe it to be the end of certain systems in place. Whether it’s big pharma, factory farming, etc., it’s all connected. These are outdated models that need to collapse. ”

Long after our conversation, I thought about Maryam’s thoughts on a changing landscape — the “systems” in place that aren’t lifting Americans up and the old ways we’re still doing things that are just so wrong.

I wondered: What’s the one thing we all have in common that we can change?
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cooking, Food, Home, waste

Ani Phyo’s Healthfully Decadent Raw Coconut Kream Recipe

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by Starre Vartan · 02/02/11

Dessert has always been my favorite part of any meal (though I do love apps!) and while I’ve managed to tame my sweet tooth in the last few years, I’ve by no means eliminated it. (By tame I mean I can get my sweet-happys from maple syrup, honey, and desserts made with fruit and less sugar.) Frankly, I’d rather carry around an extra five pounds than skip desserts, in all their toothsome glory. But I try to concoct or uncover desserts that are healthy as well as tasty. Just because it’s dessert doesn’t mean that it has to be a nutrition wasteland!

So stumbling upon Ani Phyo’s wonderful raw dessert cookbook (with 85 recipes!) was a coup. As you may already know, raw foods retain all sorts of wonderful enzymes, vitamins and minerals, plus are less ‘predigested’ (I know it’s a bit gross, but that’s basically what cooking is; partial digestion of food before you eat it). That means your body has to work a bit harder to digest, which makes you feel full longer and is actually really good for your gut. All of which means you get more nutrition and eat less when you go raw. While I’m not a raw foodist by any means, I’m going on my 19th year of vegetarianism and love the way whole foods that are minimally processed taste and make me feel. And the more I’ve read about the benefits of raw, the more I try to incorporate it into my diet.
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art, book, car, chocolate, Coconut Oil, cookbook, cooking, dessert, desserts, eating, epa, farm, filter, Food, fruit, health, healthy, Milk, natural, New York, ny, oil, raw, raw food, recipe, recipes, soda, sugar, Tea, vegan, vegetarian, vitamins, waste, water, Winter

Two Beautifully Useful Whole Foods Cookbooks

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by Starre Vartan · 08/23/10

See, I’m putting in serious effort at learning to cook!

My love of food comes from three main sources; one primal, one inculcated, the third learned as an adult. First, my natural appetite for delicious, healthy meals and snacks is fairly well-known (I think I can count on one hand the times in my life when I wasn’t hungry!), and I can eat absolutely anything, with no known food allergies or sensitivities.

Second, my grandma raised me on garden-fresh produce and a combo of Lebanese (hummous, tabouli and pilaf being staples), Armenian that she learned from her mother-in-law as a young wife (green bean and local beef stews, lentil dishes, chee kufta), Jewish (picked up through osmosis as she grew up in NYC- she made a killer matzoh ball soup for an Episcopalian!) and American food from the Joy of Cooking and the Settlement Cookbook (written in 1901 and hilariously subtitled “The Way to a Man’s Heart”). Grams was a legendary cook, and I was lucky to grow up in a home where 90% of what I ate was made from scratch (we even had our own apiary for the freshest of honey, and eggs from the chickens that roamed the woods between our house and our neighbors’. And homemade bread!).

Third, for three years, I wrote about food for The Fairfield County Weekly, a job that gave me a culinary education in my twenties I couldn’t have paid for. (Actually, I paid for it as I gained about 15 pounds during my tenure at that job! But honestly, it was kinda worth it.) I got to eat at pretty much every restaurant in Fairfield County, which is in Connecticut just north of New York City, and has a very rich combination of predominantly Italian and Greek cuisines, which has been supplemented more recently by excellent Indian and Asian, and in the last 5-7 years wonderful raw, vegetarian and health foods.

But truth be told, I’m not the world’s most accomplished cook, though I can put together a beautifully-sourced, complementary tableaux of appetizers. But when it comes to cooking a ‘real’ meal, my only saving grace is those great ingredients and some talent with baking pies and cookies (so at least I end on a good note!). The last few years, however, I’ve made a slow and determined march forward in teaching myself to cook, and recently have been enjoying the books below. While I’ve been vegetarian for 17 years, both these books are great for veg and non-veg alike (I use them regularly without problem, but there are plenty of meaty dishes in each too). What unites the two tomes is that they focus on local, healthy, seasonal, whole foods cooking, which I am naturally drawn to as it’s what I was raised on.

In the Green Kitchen, by Alice Waters

This is not a traditional cookbook, though it does contain plenty of recipes. But instead of simply a compendium of delicious food combinations, this book focuses on what kitchen pioneer Alice Waters (of Chez Panisse restaurant and Edible Schoolyard fame) has realized was missing from the aspiring conscious chef’s shelf: A technique-driven, full-of-instructions volume that includes how to’s from the prosaic to the intimidating.
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California, chefs, cookbook, cooking, Food, recipes, vegetarian