Finding More Foodies& A Chance To Win $6,000
Hand Delivered California Sunshine
A few weeks ago my mother flew in from California for a week-long stay on the farm. Despite the fact that I was 45 minutes late picking her up at the airport, it had started to snow, and she really, really needed to pee, two seconds after a big hello hug she said, "I want to show you something!" and excitedly dove into her carry-on bag.
With a triumphant smile she pulled out a square plastic container the size of a sandwich and carefully pried off the lid, murmuring that she hoped "they didn’t get smashed." Nestled inside the container were six exquisite petits fours. Three looked like tiny pastel-colored, gift-wrapped packages, and three were shaped like animals. If I had squealed any louder I probably would have been escorted from the terminal by airport security.
Because I provide my mother with everything from overalls and turtlenecks to work gloves and rubber boots during her farm visits, there is plenty of available space in her luggage for transporting other, more important things. So along with the petits fours she arrived bearing two boxes of See’s Candy (custom-packed with my favorite varieties), The Garlic Lovers’ Cookbook Volumes I and II (which look absolutely delicious), a couple of baking books, the empty container that had held her homemade lunch, and 26 freshly picked limes from the little tree in her front yard. She never travels without an ice pack and a small insulated zipper pouch and once presented me with a chilled piece of pink and white wedding cake she'd nabbed from a recently attended wedding reception.
Since there is no point in returning home with an empty suitcase, when I dropped my mother off at the airport, her various bags were painstakingly crammed with four blueberry bran muffins, ten cranberry scones, a bag of baby coconut cookies, two dozen molasses ginger spice snaps, four chocolate walnut streusel bars, two apricot almond bars, two blueberry almond bars, half a dozen experimental ginger crunch things I’d made using a recipe clipped from a 1999 issue Gourmet magazine, a hunk of Chocolate Emergency Cake, a homegrown lamb salami sandwich on Farmhouse White (I swear I really will get around to posting this much requested recipe one of these days) with thinly sliced sharp cheddar and lots of mayonnaise, and two cans of pie cherries she found at the supermarket (because they cost so much less than they do back home). She once carried home a container of leftover roast leg of lamb and four loaves of my sourdough bread.
As you can see, foodieism runs in our family--and the secret is out. Knowing I would no doubt have the answer, last summer I received this concerned comment:
"This may sound a bit ridiculous coming from someone who has only just made her first batch of granola, and who only recently discovered breadmaking, but...... what are some of the symptoms of becoming a foodie? I fear I am beginning to develop them. Please, do tell!"
Rather than simply list a few of the characteristics that I personally think classify someone as a foodie, I decided it would be much more fun to put the question to Farmgirl Fare readers--and it was. Here are some of the responses I received. (Click here to read the rest.)
You know you’re a foodie if. . .
--You’ll only eat chocolate your Dutch friend brings you directly from Holland (unless it is a DIRE emergency, and then you’ll resign yourself to a local specialty shop).
--You own five or more kinds of vinegar.
--You own five or more kinds of salt.
--You put the final touch on a dessert by saying "It just needs a little orange blossom water," and you actually have a bottle of orange blossom water in the cupboard.
--All the magazines you subscribe to are about food.
--You’re lying awake at night because you can’t sleep from the excitement of conjuring up a new recipe.
--Your first word (before "mama" or "dada") was "cookie"--and your spouse’s first word was "cheese."
--You work at a bookstore, and when one of your colleagues excitedly tells you that five gorgeous young men have arrived, wearing only aprons and tight boxer shorts, to promote a new cookbook, your response is: "Ooh, did they bring food?"
--You return home from a family Christmas and take your entire bag of presents straight to the kitchen to unpack it.
--Your husband is embarrassed to take you out to eat because of the moaning noises you make while eating something incredible.
--You just won’t stop fiddling with old family recipes--and your mother actually thinks your versions are better.
--Before traveling to a new destination, the first thing you do is scour the Internet (and your friends’ brains) for information on the local dining scene.
--All your friends who are traveling call you first to ask if you know a good place to eat at their destination.
--Your husband has put you on a condiment moratorium, telling you that you must use up all the fancy-ass stuff you buy when you travel before you bring home any more.
--When you walk into Sur La Table with your teenaged daughter, she calls it "The Mothership."
--Some of your best friends are farmers, ranchers, and chefs.
--Your family knows better than to touch a beautiful plate of food until you’ve had a chance to photograph it.
--You’ve caught yourself dreaming of food and chewing it in your sleep.
Let's add to this list. Are you a foodie? How do you know? Was there some defining moment in your life when you realized you had crossed over the line between living on food and living for food--or did you gradually just keep coming down with more and more symptoms until the diagnosis was blatantly obvious?
Do you routinely harvest dinner in the dark? Has it been suggested to you that if you want your salad that fresh perhaps you should be out grazing with the sheep? After a week long visit with your mother, did your significant other turn to you and say, in a slightly uneasy whisper, "All you two talked about was food!"? Those would all be me. So what about you?
Win A New Kitchen Contest!
Now, what foodie couldn't use some extra cash to upgrade the state of his or her culinary preparation space? There's a wonderful new place for foodies to mingle called Group Recipes, and they're giving away $6,000 toward a new kitchen to celebrate their official launch.
All you have to do is join Group Recipes (which is free, takes about 2 minutes, and is something you'll want to do anyway), and you'll automatically be entered in the contest. The winner will receive a $6,000 gift card to their choice of one of the following stores: Lowe's, Home Depot, or Sears. (If you're outside the U.S. or don't have access to any of these stores, you'll receive the monetary equivalent.)
What is Group Recipes?
In their own words, "Group Recipes wants to be the world's neatest food site. The project's goal is to harness the tastebuds of the masses to create a really useful resource for food lovers."
At Group Recipes you can create your own food page, meet other foodies, have Roger the Recipe Robot learn about your tastes and predict recipes you will like or dislike, share & discover great places to eat in your home town, join and/or create groups of like-minded foodies (Food Styling & Photography, Chocolate Dreams, Comfort Foods, and Organic Sustainable Farming are some of the groups I belong to), and of course discover oodles of new recipes.
Don't want to commit to keeping a food blog? Share your recipes on Group Recipes instead!
Sounds pretty tasty, doesn't it? The contest ends at midnight on Tuesday March 6th, so don't delay--click here to join Group Recipes and enter the $6,000 New Kitchen Giveway today!
With a triumphant smile she pulled out a square plastic container the size of a sandwich and carefully pried off the lid, murmuring that she hoped "they didn’t get smashed." Nestled inside the container were six exquisite petits fours. Three looked like tiny pastel-colored, gift-wrapped packages, and three were shaped like animals. If I had squealed any louder I probably would have been escorted from the terminal by airport security.
Because I provide my mother with everything from overalls and turtlenecks to work gloves and rubber boots during her farm visits, there is plenty of available space in her luggage for transporting other, more important things. So along with the petits fours she arrived bearing two boxes of See’s Candy (custom-packed with my favorite varieties), The Garlic Lovers’ Cookbook Volumes I and II (which look absolutely delicious), a couple of baking books, the empty container that had held her homemade lunch, and 26 freshly picked limes from the little tree in her front yard. She never travels without an ice pack and a small insulated zipper pouch and once presented me with a chilled piece of pink and white wedding cake she'd nabbed from a recently attended wedding reception.
Since there is no point in returning home with an empty suitcase, when I dropped my mother off at the airport, her various bags were painstakingly crammed with four blueberry bran muffins, ten cranberry scones, a bag of baby coconut cookies, two dozen molasses ginger spice snaps, four chocolate walnut streusel bars, two apricot almond bars, two blueberry almond bars, half a dozen experimental ginger crunch things I’d made using a recipe clipped from a 1999 issue Gourmet magazine, a hunk of Chocolate Emergency Cake, a homegrown lamb salami sandwich on Farmhouse White (I swear I really will get around to posting this much requested recipe one of these days) with thinly sliced sharp cheddar and lots of mayonnaise, and two cans of pie cherries she found at the supermarket (because they cost so much less than they do back home). She once carried home a container of leftover roast leg of lamb and four loaves of my sourdough bread.
As you can see, foodieism runs in our family--and the secret is out. Knowing I would no doubt have the answer, last summer I received this concerned comment:
"This may sound a bit ridiculous coming from someone who has only just made her first batch of granola, and who only recently discovered breadmaking, but...... what are some of the symptoms of becoming a foodie? I fear I am beginning to develop them. Please, do tell!"
Rather than simply list a few of the characteristics that I personally think classify someone as a foodie, I decided it would be much more fun to put the question to Farmgirl Fare readers--and it was. Here are some of the responses I received. (Click here to read the rest.)
You know you’re a foodie if. . .
--You’ll only eat chocolate your Dutch friend brings you directly from Holland (unless it is a DIRE emergency, and then you’ll resign yourself to a local specialty shop).
--You own five or more kinds of vinegar.
--You own five or more kinds of salt.
--You put the final touch on a dessert by saying "It just needs a little orange blossom water," and you actually have a bottle of orange blossom water in the cupboard.
--All the magazines you subscribe to are about food.
--You’re lying awake at night because you can’t sleep from the excitement of conjuring up a new recipe.
--Your first word (before "mama" or "dada") was "cookie"--and your spouse’s first word was "cheese."
--You work at a bookstore, and when one of your colleagues excitedly tells you that five gorgeous young men have arrived, wearing only aprons and tight boxer shorts, to promote a new cookbook, your response is: "Ooh, did they bring food?"
--You return home from a family Christmas and take your entire bag of presents straight to the kitchen to unpack it.
--Your husband is embarrassed to take you out to eat because of the moaning noises you make while eating something incredible.
--You just won’t stop fiddling with old family recipes--and your mother actually thinks your versions are better.
--Before traveling to a new destination, the first thing you do is scour the Internet (and your friends’ brains) for information on the local dining scene.
--All your friends who are traveling call you first to ask if you know a good place to eat at their destination.
--Your husband has put you on a condiment moratorium, telling you that you must use up all the fancy-ass stuff you buy when you travel before you bring home any more.
--When you walk into Sur La Table with your teenaged daughter, she calls it "The Mothership."
--Some of your best friends are farmers, ranchers, and chefs.
--Your family knows better than to touch a beautiful plate of food until you’ve had a chance to photograph it.
--You’ve caught yourself dreaming of food and chewing it in your sleep.
Let's add to this list. Are you a foodie? How do you know? Was there some defining moment in your life when you realized you had crossed over the line between living on food and living for food--or did you gradually just keep coming down with more and more symptoms until the diagnosis was blatantly obvious?
Do you routinely harvest dinner in the dark? Has it been suggested to you that if you want your salad that fresh perhaps you should be out grazing with the sheep? After a week long visit with your mother, did your significant other turn to you and say, in a slightly uneasy whisper, "All you two talked about was food!"? Those would all be me. So what about you?
Win A New Kitchen Contest!
Now, what foodie couldn't use some extra cash to upgrade the state of his or her culinary preparation space? There's a wonderful new place for foodies to mingle called Group Recipes, and they're giving away $6,000 toward a new kitchen to celebrate their official launch.
All you have to do is join Group Recipes (which is free, takes about 2 minutes, and is something you'll want to do anyway), and you'll automatically be entered in the contest. The winner will receive a $6,000 gift card to their choice of one of the following stores: Lowe's, Home Depot, or Sears. (If you're outside the U.S. or don't have access to any of these stores, you'll receive the monetary equivalent.)
What is Group Recipes?
In their own words, "Group Recipes wants to be the world's neatest food site. The project's goal is to harness the tastebuds of the masses to create a really useful resource for food lovers."
At Group Recipes you can create your own food page, meet other foodies, have Roger the Recipe Robot learn about your tastes and predict recipes you will like or dislike, share & discover great places to eat in your home town, join and/or create groups of like-minded foodies (Food Styling & Photography, Chocolate Dreams, Comfort Foods, and Organic Sustainable Farming are some of the groups I belong to), and of course discover oodles of new recipes.
Don't want to commit to keeping a food blog? Share your recipes on Group Recipes instead!
Sounds pretty tasty, doesn't it? The contest ends at midnight on Tuesday March 6th, so don't delay--click here to join Group Recipes and enter the $6,000 New Kitchen Giveway today!
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