Food Security Carnival Discussion Post.

[commodorified]

Solicit or offer ideas, cheer each other on, ask for or offer data or resources, team up and do a group-authored post or a mini-carnival cluster of posts, find a beta, be a beta ...

I would like to say: I am not at all worried about avoiding duplication, and suggest that nobody else be either.

If eight people do posts on How To Cook Eggs, they will all be different, they will all be right and useful, and each of them will be somebody's absolute most useful and favourite post of the whole carnival.

Carry on!

Comments

[bemused_leftist]

Another issue -- how to have everything get hot and on the table at the same time. EG, stuffing peppers with rice and meat may sound like a lot of work, but the work happens early and is less pressure than having to get three separate pans off the stove and into three separate serving dishes all hot at the same time.

Maybe that's what "one-dish meals" is all about?

[geeksdoitbetter]

"Maybe that's what "one-dish meals" is all about?"

so

much

this

!

[commodorified]

Timing is a mad bastard. It's true. Says the woman who did a three course meal for 8 last weekend.

[passerine]

Would small-child-related topics be helpful?

In particular, one of my kids tumbled from the top to the bottom of the growth charts and was diagnosed Failure To
Thrive (due to what turned out to be an undetected medical problem). I've also helped other moms out with this kind of stuff by sharing what we did with our daughter to get her more comfortable with eating and outside of what her doctor considered medically dangerous weight-for-length.

[indywind]

That would be welcome!

[ursula]

I'd love to do a set of "How do you make Fruit/Vegetable X into dinner?" posts (e.g. how to make a dinner that revolves around apples or beets or carrots or pomegranates), but I feel like this might be too advanced for the current theme?

[commodorified]

No, I think it would be good, especially as meals that revolve around one element ties into - at least to me - cooking for one without too many leftovers.

[ursula]

Heh, my strategy for cooking for one is apparently "cook for two and eat the leftovers for lunch".

Suggestion

[amazon_syren]

I used to get a box of veggies and fruits delivered every week. I eventually stopped doing this because they tended to rot before I could/would use them.

Part of this was because I was cooking for one, and the box was good for 3-4

More to the point, though, it was because I sucked at Cooking With What You Have (instead of what you feel like having) AND Prioritizing What To Eat First (when you've got a box of stuff, some of which will rot in two days, and some of which will keep for a week).


If someone (Ursula?) wants to tackle a post about bulk perishables and how to use them up well, that would be awesome.

Re: Suggestion

[libitina]

Prioritizing what to eat first takes up a huge amount of my processing capacity (luckily I enjoy thinking about food).

If you look through my food blog, a lot of it is list after list of what's in my refrigerator so that I can then pick out the items that have the shortest lifespan and plan meals around them.

If someone has an easier way, I'd love to learn it.

OTOH, if you want examples of this process, I have a few years' worth of these lists.

[nancylebov]

I found the amount of information a little intimidating on the first pass, and I already know some of it.

I'd like to see somewhat from people who learned to cook as adults about what was enough information to get them started, and more from people who aren't cooking but probably could be about what what makes getting started difficult for them.

On the cleaning side, I've got a couple of posts about scrubbing. It seemed to me that I had attention issues which made getting things clean difficult. I do, but it turned out that I also wasn't using hot enough water, and that expecting myself to get things clean on the first pass was like expecting myself to be able to write without needing to proofread.

A book which looks promising but which I haven't read: Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch -- Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods.

[adrian_turtle]

I would really appreciate advice about food prep constrained by joint problems. It seems like most of what I read on "cooking when one has a disability" addresses general lack of spoons, or food sensitivities (problems that make it seem like a good idea to roast a whole chicken, or make a big batch of something in the crockpot.) With the 2 weeks of shoulder pain-flare I had at the end of December, I couldn't lift a whole chicken. And maneuvering the crockpot is even harder.

[susan8020]

Yes, more on this would be good.

[jsl32.livejournal.com]

I'm just going to post this here. I had a big screed ready to go when you originally put this up, but life got in the way and anyway it would have been an overreaction. I did read this post and feel that it was just another narrowcast for a select group with extremely specific characteristics and yet it was presented as something broader in focus, but I sure didn't see that.

Plus the judging of primal/paleo in a context of 'not judging' with of course nobody having a problem with that just goes to my point about the narrowcasting. As well as the focus on a very small number of ingredients while talking about 'everyone has different notions of healthy food', but of course only a few things are even listed as stuff to eat at all.

It just had the tenor of being for a little clique and not for a broader group, to me, because I can't eat most of what was discussed, I don't cook for health and logistics reasons and rely on a spouse for that, I have a spouse and an infant, and I eat meat, but not by buying a whole animal and never any other option. And I eat primal/paleo-ly and I find the dismissal of all the numerous female voices in those spheres, of a mix of age ranges, very, well, honestly I suppose triggering is the best word. That community of people continues to be self-checking and supportive and I find that support valuable because so many people dismiss and insult those individuals, even non-judging types.

And you know, it's fine, this is probably not for me. I simply hoped it was because I certainly spent my time not cooking because I thought I was poor at it. Such is life. You all have a lovely New Year.

[commodorified]

I'm not sure how I missed seeing this.

All I can really say, especially as your comment is so generalised as to render your meaning pretty much completely opaque to me - seriously, why you feel unwelcome is the backwards of clear from this - and given that I am only willing to repeat a limited number of times that people should use their own judgement and write from their own position, so long as they're not invalidating other people's experiences or knowledge, is that yeah, it sounds like this carnival isn't going to be something you'll benefit from, and that's a shame, but the internet is full of a number of things and i hope you have better luck elsewhere.

[pinesandmaples]

Would a discussion about freezing foods--especially freezing one or two portions of something--be of interest to anyone?

There would be a little bit of food science (x ingredient doesn't freeze well, here's why!) as well as a check-list sort of thing to help people pick which recipes will stand up to the freezer and some advice about the best containers for the specific job at hand (bags versus foil packs versus jars). My wife has to get some use out of her O-Level GCE cert in food and nutrition somehow!

[daedala]

YES. I'm back to cooking for one, and knowing more about freezing stuff would be helpful! Most places that talk about freezing talk about the whole casserole or whatever, which does not solve the problem of getting tired of my own leftovers.

[pinesandmaples]

Awesome! I know what I'm doing tomorrow afternoon!

[commodorified]

I really truly do mean the bit about people using their own excellent judgement, but fwiw, that sounds brilliant.