Tax Day Tea Parties and The Blues!!

I love this.  

If I were having a tax day tea party, I would serve rooibus tea, boisenberry pie, and fruit with sliced lemon, honey, and mint leaves.  

WFUV has also been playing the blues all day -- how fabulous!  

Tax Day has become my new favorite day.

Youth Forum and Expo: Opportunities in Food, Farming and Active Living

All I can say is that I wish I could attend this event.  Further more, I wish that I would have attended something similar when I was in high school trying to figure out what to do with my life.  I have a feeling I may have chosen a different path.

Kudos to Hilary Baum who puts this event together.  Please check out their website here and see what incredible seeds these people are planting in the minds of our youth!!

Bittman: we're not all perfect.

I am a fan of Mark Bittman and I value his opinions.  Today, he blogged about TV food shows.  I share mixed and biased feelings on the subject.  He comments how shows are not real and that they should admit to mistakes being made in the kitchen - I think this is a bit of a stretch.  

Yes, of course, mistakes are made, but, shouldn't this go without saying?  I would hope that American viewers are not naive enough to think that the Food Network Studios lives in a perfect world.   

Lambertville, Food, & Film

A Lambertville Film Fest about Gardening, Food, and Water!!!  My good friend, Sarah (who is also producing the event), asked me to be a speaker for the film The World According To Monsanto, May 16th.

ACME Screening Room, 25 S. Union St. Lambertville, NJ 
[www.nickelodeonnights.org] 
SPECIAL “GREEN” FILM SERIES TO CELEBRATE THE PLANTING OF LAMBERTVILLE LIBRARY’S SUSTAINABLE GARDEN ON MAY 9th & 16th!
TICKET PRICE PER FILM: $7 in advance/$10 at door
BUY ADVANCE TICKETS ONLINE https://friends-of-lambertville-library.ticketleap.com  

May 9th
The Garden
5 pm & 6:25 pm
7:45 pm Post Film Speakers/Discussion: Meg Metz, Farmer’s Market Manager, Hunterdon Land Trust Alliance, Meredith Taylor, Senior Project Manager, Community Gardening and Nutrition, Isles, Julia Taylor, President, SEE Lambertville
A 2009 Oscar nominated documentary feature about the citizen fight for a 14-acre tract of South Central LA land, a farm that citizens cultivated from abandoned land after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992.  But when the City of Los Angeles and a powerful developer tried to evict the farmers and build warehouses, the citizens fought back.  Not Rated; 80 minutes, 2008
Thanks to this program’s co-sponsors: Hunterdon Land Trust Alliance (www.hlta.org  ), Isles (www.isles.org  )

May 16th
The World According to Monsanto
5 pm & 6:55 pm
8:45 pm Post Film Speakers/Discussion   “Food Glorious Food”
Jackie Ricotta, PhD, Associate Professor of Horticulture at Delaware Valley College [http://www.delval.edu], teaches courses on Sustainable Agriculture and Organic Crop Production and serves on the Board of the Bucks County Foodshed Alliance; Kendra Thatcher, Operations Coordinator, Food Network [http://www.foodnetwork.com/], writer of the Media Harvest blog [http://mediaharvest.blogspot.com/] and contributor to Dish Du Jour Magazine [http://www.dishdujourmagazine.com/default.aspx]; Kimberly Kaufmann, Leader Slow Food Bucks County and Co-Founder of Bucks County Foodshed Alliance [http://www.buckscountyfoodshedalliance.org/] bringing farmers, landowners, restaurateurs, educators, environmentalists and consumers together to foster and expand a comprehensive, local, sustainable food supply in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

A film by Marie-Monique Robin, documents the devastating cost of Monsanto’s race over the last decade to genetically engineer and patent the world’s crops.  Robin’s interviews with scientists, legislators, agricultural officials, farmers, shepherds, and families affected by genetically modified organisms (GMOs), has made this picture critically-acclaimed in every country where it has opened.  Not Rated; 108 minutes

*”Slow Food” is a movement to catalyze a broad cultural shift away from the destructive effects of an industrial food system and fast life; toward the regenerative cultural, social and economic benefits of a sustainable food system, regional food traditions, the pleasures of the table, and a slower and more harmonious rhythm of life. 

 
May 23rd
FLOW-For the Love of Water
5 pm & 6:40 pm
8:15 pm Post Film Speaker/Discussion “Drink Local-Flow Global”
Peggy Krist, Water Rights Activist, will speak briefly about how she’s made a difference globally through local projects sponsored by the Jonathan D. Krist Foundation, established in memory of her son.
Jim Waltman, Executive Director, Stony Brook Millstone Watershed Association will speak and lead a discussion on the status of our local water supply and how preservation of those natural resources impacts the global water supply.
A documentary that explores the disturbing reality that our crucial resource, Water, is dwindling at an alarming rate and our greed may very well be the cause. What do we do when we lose our very essence of life? This film explores the problems, solutions and what people are doing on a personal level to fight this battle.  Not Rated; 93 minutes, 2008

** “Take Back the Tap: Taste Test Challenge” will be held in the ACME lobby.  See if you can tell the difference between bottled water and tap!  Conducted by the NHS Environmental Club

What I'm thinking about this week...

Movies: The Future Of Food, The World According To Monsanto, Swamp Cabbage

Books: The Face on Your Plate, Persuasion

TV: All the cooking shows PBS, NYC TV & NJN can give me!

Projects: ACME food film fest, pod-casts, articles for Dish Du Jour, stuffing escarole, taxes, and finishing the guitar

Dish Du Jour Magazine

As some of you may know, I've started writing for Dish Du Jour Magazine - a quarterly, Queen's food publication.

Here is the link to my first article, Behind The Scenes: The Many Hats of a Recipe Developer.  Sarah Copeland is a good friend of mine and the energy behind the Good Food Gardens, which I am graciously a part of!

I'll be posting our conversation for which this article was based, later this week.  It will be my first of many pod-casts!

Have anything you want me to write about?  Let me know!!

Sunday Morning... yet again

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and the breeze, strong. Sunday Morning on CBS is on, NY Times on my lap top - I know, I know, I hate reading and watching and listening at the same time, but it's comforting today.

Joe and I are making banana pancakes this morning with some yummy coffee and juice. I'll be recovering from surgery for the next few weeks and thus catching up on writing, blogging, thinking, reading, and hopefully experiencing.

Cheers!