Enjoy brand-new, completely updated and revised versions of my classic books, Real Food: What to Eat and Why and Real Food for Mother and Baby! Be sure to buy the new editions with these gorgeous covers. Look for new introductions, forewords, afterwords…and all the latest science confirming that real food is good for you. Buy them now at your local bookseller or online.
Author: Nina Planck
Easter egg dyeing goes so quickly. Before you know it, four children have raced through six eggs each. So we also made tiny fairy handkerchiefs and national flags by tearing small squares of flour sack cloth, to color with wax crayons and dip in dye. Meanwhile, the egg colors set and changed subtly, so we revisited our eggs, with crayons, by rubbing off dye, or by over-dyeing. The natural dye (Eco-Eggs) works poorly on the eggshell, compared to good old Paas, but set beautifully on the flour sack cloth. Overnight, the Easter bunny put on a terrific egg hunt and…
Imagine my delight when a package full of ketchup came to our door, unannounced. The people at Sir Kensington’s, the not-too-sweet ketchup people, read the meatloaf recipe in The Real Food Cookbook and were touched, so they sent me a thank you note. I’d like you to note that I don’t receive industry freebies very often! There were also delicious mustards and flavored mayonnaises, though I don’t like mayonnaise unless it’s made with olive oil, and then, it’s fair to say, it doesn’t taste like most people expect mayo to taste. Ah, the recent triumph of the yellow grain and…
I gave a talk to a thousand people at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition on Saturday November 8, but was almost too weak to stand when I came home to our two boys. (Rob and Rose were in Florida.) All I could do was lie on the couch, so I let the (amazed) boys watch a movie. Still, in the kitchen were three pounds of organic garnet sweet potatoes, a pound of cranberries, and a fresh 11-pound free-range turkey. We will be guests this year, so I’d planned to make one small Thanksgiving meal early. Despite my lurgy, I could…
When I shop, by necessity or choice, from ordinary places (the corner deli, the “health food” shop, the big “natural” supermarket) I buy the same things over and over again, all the food tastes the same, and I quickly get depressed. So I was very happy to make it to the farmers’ market twice in one week, which seems like a miracle in these busy back-to-school, always-some-crisis-to-face days. Recently we had a nice piece of roast beef (good for school sandwiches), some superior hamburgers (ground from short ribs, very rich), both from Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, and a rack of lamb,…
I loved this review of my cookbook from the San Francisco Book Review: The Real Food Cookbook: Traditional Dishes for Modern Cooks Decadently adorned farmer’s market cookbooks, trying too hard to make vegetables appealing to the common consumer, often leave the home cook feeling overwhelmed by the intricate details and layouts involved in the ostentatious dishes presented. Planck sweeps pretentious fare from the farm table with her traditional, whole-ingredient, real kitchen approach to cooking. Frequent farm shoppers or CSA members will be excited to recognize every ingredient, and note that her dishes, without fanfare, just happen to be wholly seasonal,…