Today's electronic edition of The NY Times has a good take on the controversy around food v. bio-fuel here.

"A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggested that — absent new technologies — the United States, Canada and the European Union would require between 30 percent and 70 percent of their current crop area if they were to replace 10 percent of their transport fuel consumption with biofuels. And two recent studies suggested that a large-scale e...

The University of California, Berkely - Wellness Letter for March 2008 says,

    "Cooking vegetables boosts levels of some antioxidents, according to new Italian research in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the latest in a series of studies overturning conventional wisdom about the nutritional superiority of raw produce. The study looked at carrots, zuchini and broccoli, which were boiled, steamed or fried. Boiling and steaming were best at preserving carotenoids or even boostin...

Friday the 25th is Robbie Burns Birthday. Does everyone have their haggis and single malt? My haggis is coming from Heritage Foods and doesn't contain all the nasty bits that traditional haggis has - like lungs and pancreas and everything from the inside of the sheep along with some oatmeal and seasonings. I don't know what it has, but it isn't going to be very traditional. It does have oatmeal and liver, but isn't cooked in a sheep's stomack and seems to be lacking all

It&a...

   The January edition of Cook’s Illustrated has a nice article on slow roasting less expensive cuts of beef. I would like to quote from it, but my copy of the magazine has gone missing and the on-line version of the article consists of only the recipe that Cook’s developed to speed up this method. The gist of the article, not the recipe, is that beef can be slowly cooked and tenderized by running the oven at the same temperature to which you want the internal temperature t...