“The Food Matters Cookbook is the essential encyclopedia and guidebook to responsible eating, with more than 500 recipes that capture Bittman’s typically relaxed approach to everything in the kitchen. There is no finger-wagging here, just a no-nonsense and highly flexible case for eating more plants while cutting back on animal products, processed food, and of course junk. But for Bittman, flipping the ratio of your diet to something more virtuous and better for your body doesn’t involve avoiding any foods—indeed, there is no sacrifice here”–Simon & Schuster

Meet Cathy Erway, author of The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, and writer of the Not Eating Out In New York blog. As someone who eschews restaurant meals in favor of home-cooking, Cathy certainly fits the Plummelo Favorite Food Person profile. We took some time to ask Cathy about her book, her blog, and some of the cool features she’s added to her recipes.

You recently wrote The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, which chronicles the two years you spent cooking at home and not eating out. Can you tell us about some of the cooking adventures you describe in the book?

It was definitely a fun two years of food. In one chapter, I describe a seven-course meal I prepared for a dinner party where aphrodisiacs were the secret theme of the menu. In another, I tackled tripe for a menudo (aka Mexican hangover stew) brunch party for hungover friends. I boiled lobsters, braised beef cheeks, picked dandelions and berries from the park, and cooked 20 lbs of spaghetti for other incidents throughout. Just thinking about these makes me want to do lots more!

What was your inspiration for Not Eating Out In New York (NEOINY)?

My inspiration was simple: to save money, and maybe learn a few new tricks in the kitchen. I wanted to stay open to new ideas and inspirations as time went by, and they grew to include a curiosity about how food is produced, where it comes from, how healthy it is for yourself and the environment, and how to turn home cooking into a more interactive, social activity. There are always more inspirations that I take into my cooking, and blogging about it. For example, my interests in growing food spurred me to launch a new blog about rooftop gardening and cooking with homegrown food (and chicken eggs) at Lunch at Sixpoint.

What are your goals for NEOINY as you move ahead with the site?

I just want to be open and honest with readers as I continue to explore food and cooking, and aim to share those experiences that I think will be most useful and interesting with them. Eating more healthfully has become a bigger concern of mine lately; I’ve come to think of food as not just recreation for your tastebuds, but the fuel for your body, spirit, and mind.

Tell us about the Cost Calculator, Green Factor, and Health Factor you developed for the site.

These are at the end of every recipe. The Cost Calculator outlines the total cost of each ingredient used (scaled to how much was used for that recipe). One of the most common misconceptions about cooking and grocery shopping is that they are more expensive than eating out–I dare anyone who says so to take a glance at a few of these! Granted, they’re taken from my personal experience shopping in my neighborhood, often at the Greenmarket in Manhattan (which many complain to be overpriced). The Health Factor and Green Factor ratings are concise observations on how healthy and how environmentally friendly the dish was to make, respectively.

If you eat only one more meal on earth, what would it be (give us the starter, the entrée, the dessert, and the beverage)?

I have no idea! I’d probably pick a crisp, zesty salad of some sort for the appetizer, with smoked trout or some other tasty, cured fish (I’m totally going through a smoked and cured fish phase) in there. For the entree, it’d have to be my mom’s soy sauce chicken stew (“red-cooked” chicken, in Chinese) with stewed eggs, shiitake mushrooms, and tofu, over rice. Big bowl of homemade ice cream for dessert.

Do you eat out at all? If so, what place or what type of food do you splurge on?

I don’t think it’s necessary to “splurge” on good food if that’s what you’re looking for in a restaurant; in fact, overpriced food due to hype turns me off totally. I think good, clean, honest restaurant food that I cannot, in a thousand years, make as well myself would be where I’d eat out. These are usually ethnic food adventures in Brooklyn and Queens, like going to Dim Sum in Sunset Park.

In honor of Cathy’s love of ethnic foods, try out some of these ideas:

• A wide-range of Chinese-inspired recipes.
• Indian recipes you can make at home.
• Vietnamese recipes to keep you warm this fall.

Visit Cathy’s Website: Not Eating Out in New York Follow her on Twitter

Laura Troyani heads up Marketing and Business Development for Plummelo. Not content with just being another behind-the-scenes pencil pusher, Laura decided to give blogging a shot and writes practical, everyday tips for the home cook (or aspiring home cook). Laura’s favorite foods are ice cream, olive oil, ice cream, parmesan cheese, ice cream, and occasionally ice cream.

So it has been with this newfangled idea they’re calling Meatless Monday. I’ve mostly ignored the background babble. Meatless Monday is a concept initiated by The Monday Campaigns in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

When I first heard about Meatless Monday it sounded to me a bit like Backwards Friday, an annual event we had in grade school when all the kids wore their clothes backwards. It was something you do once for the novelty of it–it wasn’t something anyone would make a lifestyle out of.

I have to admit that I didn’t initially investigate the concept or read up on the why and how of Meatless Monday, but it didn’t sound like something I’d try, much less permanently implement (even though I am generally quite content forgoing meat). But in the burgeoning movement to reduce one’s carbon footprint, and toward greater long-term health, my interest was slowly piqued by this one-day-a-week vegetarianism thing. After all, I do love a good eggplant parm. How hard could it be?

I’m particularly interested in a fresh start on Monday after gorging all weekend. The cheeseburger right off the grill at Saturday’s barbecue melted in my mouth (washed down by a bottle of beer), but following it with two pieces of The Pioneer Woman’s chocolate sheet cake was just unnecessary (but worth every bite!).

Monday is a new beginning. Monday speaks to me in tongues of crispy vegetables and protein sources low in saturated fat.

In his bestselling books, Michael Pollan has endorsed quasi-vegetarianism, and others are taking note. Giving up one-seventh of meat consumption (the equivalent of one day per week) is practicable, Pollan says, and I agree. I can do this.

So I mentioned it to my husband this weekend. “Honey, will you do Meatless Mondays with me?” I expected him to laugh and reply with a sarcastic, “Yeah, right.” But in a surprising moment of marital support, and without asking why, he said, “Sure. Starting tomorrow? Pasta Mondays.” I told him tomorrow we could indeed start with pasta–a win-win (easy for me to cook, even easier for him to like). But in my secret scheming, I plan to slowly intervene in this carb-lover’s lifestyle–after all, replacing a hearty protein with an empty carb is not helping anyone. Next week we’ll try a tofu or bean dish.

We’re aiming to try this for the long haul–for ourselves and for our planet. Meatless meals can be less expensive and easy to prepare. I’m all for that as a bonus. Are you on the bandwagon? Share with us.

Sarah Fullerton, content marketing & editing. Armed with a masters in journalism from Northwestern, a passion for all things cooking, and a perpetual oven mitt, Sarah loves nothing more than to camp out in the kitchen with a new recipe, interpret it creatively (a dash of this, a dash of that), and then surprise her husband and daughter, her friends, and herself with the results. She can be contacted at sarah [at] plummelo [dot] com.

But what exactly does local mean? And is it really all that important? (The answer, in my opinion, is yes–and no. But we’ll get to that in a bit.)

So first, what do people mean when they talk about local?

There are a number of definitions floating out there in cyberspace. Search “Local Food” on Wikipedia and you find that local could mean within city limits or within state limits–depending on who you ask. Whole Foods says local is anything that has traveled less than 7 hours by car or truck, and this local coop in New York City backs that up by saying local is up to 500 miles, or one day’s worth of driving.

Making matters worse, where the food is grown/raised isn’t the only issue:

“Where local food is determined by the distance it has traveled, the wholesale distribution system can confuse the calculations. Fresh food that is grown very near to where it will be purchased may still travel hundreds of miles out of the area through the industrial system before arriving back at a local store.”

Yikes, this is complicated.

Funny enough, my mom even asked her neighborhood grocer in California about fruit that was labeled local, yet came from Florida–and the store manager told her that the U.S.A. was local! Obviously, everyone has their own definition of what local really means.

It turns out that I’m not the only one trying to get to the bottom of this question. A number of bloggers have chronicled their attempts at eating locally. Inspired by Vermont’s recent “Eat Local Challenge,” Every Kitchen Table decided to try his hand at one week of eating foods produced within 100 miles of his home. Two bloggers in British Columbia decided to spend a year eating food grown within 100 miles, but soon ran into big problems:

“First was the expense. We used to eat a nearly vegan diet at home–our dwindling bank accounts emphasized how much cheaper [vegan] beans, rice and tofu are than wild oysters and organic boutique cheeses. Then, we wasted away. We were unable to find any locally grown grains–no more bread, pasta, or rice. The only starch left to us was the potato. Between us, we lost about 15 pounds in six weeks. Then there was a lack of variety. From March 21 until the farmers’ markets started in mid-May, the only locally grown vegetables available were humble fare like kale, cabbage, turnip, rutabaga, parsnip and leeks.”

That doesn’t sound like fun!

Perhaps the best example of someone trying to eat local is No Impact Man, aka Colin Beavan, a New Yorker who managed to convince his wife (and by extension their small child) that a year of living “no impact lives”–including eating only what they could find at farmer’s markets–was a good idea (to see the trailer for Colin’s fabulous documentary, check out my blog post). He manages to make eating locally look realistically challenging, yet intriguing at the same time–surely no small feat.

So now it’s time for me to throw my hat in the ring. While I’m certainly not an expert, I’ve found that my increasing awareness about food and sustainability issues makes for an incredibly depressing weekly trip to the grocery store. Everywhere I turn, even at the most eco-friendly and neighborhood grocery stores (like Russo’s, a favorite of mine that does cultivate relationships with local farms), I’m confronted with questions about where every potential piece of food has come from.

For an everyday consumer trying to make conscious, responsible choices with her food purchases, navigating the maze of the grocery aisles to find local food is a really tough and overwhelming assignment.

OK, so we know that local means a lot of things. Does this matter? If we can’t define it, should we really care about eating local?

My husband and I have been spending a lot of time talking about this very question–challenging ourselves to define how we will make food choices that sit right with our “inner compass.” And we’ve come up with two key takeaways.

1) Local is seasonal: Instead of spending all this time on what’s local, ask yourself: What naturally grows in abundance this month, or this season?

2) We’ve labeled ourselves The Practical Impact Jablows–perhaps not as snazzy a title as No Impact Man, but it sums us up pretty well. Do we want to eat locally and seasonally? Yes. We believe it’s better for our health, our taste buds, and our souls (and maybe even our wallets). Will we always be able to enforce this seasonal-only policy? No, of course not. In the end, we want to be proud of the choices we’re making, and if that means 80-90% of the time we’re able to adhere to our seasonal goals, we’ll be ok with that.

In New England, eating seasonally means lots and lots of apples. After all, how many apples can one woman eat?

Read about Ashley Jablow, author of The Changebase

Basically, winemakers would start with what they wanted for an end product and try to push the wines in that direction through a variety of technologies. What you end up with is the supermarket tomatoes of the wine world. Wines that are colorful and look pretty, but are lacking in flavor and completely soulless.

Can you remember your first experience biting into a perfectly ripened tomato handpicked from the garden? It’s this type of profound, yet simple experience that draws us out into the farmers’ markets and back into our kitchens this time of year. Fortunately, this same type of illuminating experience can still be found in the world of wine, if you know where to look.

Today’s most innovative and compelling winemakers all seem to have one thing in common–they are redefining what it means to call a wine natural. Admittedly, the term means something different to everyone. It covers the range from sustainable, organic, and biodynamic growing methods to natural techniques of fermentation to blatant (and often baseless) green marketing propaganda.

Forgetting about rules and regulations I think we all know what natural is when we taste it. It’s the difference between a supermarket tomato and the one from the farmer’s market–there’s just more there.

A wine that is gently crafted, rather than manipulated, allows the personality of the grapes, the region, and that growing season to shine through. These wines have the ability to transport you in one sip to the hillsides where they were grown, just like a summer ripe blueberry takes me camping in New Hampshire and a briny oyster sends me to Cape Cod.

Natural wines are often made in tiny quantities and aren’t supported by flashy advertising campaigns, so you might not be familiar with the labels or perhaps even the grape varietal or the region, but they are definitely discoveries worth seeking out.

Read about Kerri Platt and The Wine Bottega

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12919459@N08/ / CC BY 2.0

Part 1: Giving Something of Value

Every morning at 5:30, my 93-year-old grandpa would get up to do his exercises. We would have breakfast together, and his appetite was more robust than mine. I need coffee, while he needed nothing. It’s a little embarrassing.

I head off to work, and he headed out to the backyard garden. He somehow coaxed life out of arid, sandy California soil, and from what was once a plot of dirt now sprung a variety of vegetables. Yeah, the kind you eat. And they were tasty.

So why did he do it? Was it out of boredom? Was he a career farmer? Neither. For him, this was his way of giving something of value to me. As an immigrant, he had nothing but steely resolve to endure. He cherished our family and wished he could do more to contribute. His carefully grown vegetables were the manifestations of his love. Corny, but true.

Part 2: My Kid Hates Vegetables

Unless there is a dollop of ranch dressing, the veggies get no love. So, when my 7-year-old daughter, Libby, decided that she was going to plant a garden with her “BFF,” I snickered.

But there it was–a surprisingly neat row of sown seeds in a neat row of planter boxes. I’m proud of her.

Her mother and I have brown thumbs, so anyone with the ability to sustain plant life–even a cactus–is special to us. So, when our own 7-year-old DNA mash-up made the plant thing happen, you can imagine our surprise and joy.

One great thing about Libby’s latest interest is that she’s learning that food doesn’t magically appear in our grocery stores, and that it takes effort and resources to produce something to put into our bodies. This personal experience is opening up her interest in eating more veggies. Yay.

But the greatest thing is that Libby is learning to give something of value. She’s always been a giver and delights in the act. Part of her plan is to share a portion of her bounty with a local food bank. Three generations removed from a great-grandpa she never knew, she somehow knows that the earth and the garden hold treasures valuable enough to give–and eat.

We’re striving to go greener at my house, but our biggest challenge these days is eating healthier as a family. Four family members, two vegetable haters, one fruit hater, four sweet teeth–it all adds up to a big challenge for the head chef. I’d like to increase my family’s overall appreciation of fruits and vegetables through a little bit of excitement about “our farm.”

My children have the amazing luxury of picky eating habits, and I appreciate teachable moments about the miracle of food in abundance whenever I can snatch one. They haven’t the foggiest idea of how food gets to the grocery store. It’s just there. I’m pretty good at making their meals nutritious while catering to their preferences, but we’ve gotten into a bit of a rut that I’d like to dig out of this summer.

Additionally, becoming shareholders means a more convenient opportunity to actually choose how our family’s food is grown. We will be nudged toward thinking more about the quality of care for the earth for future generations. Best of all, being part of a local farm means family time and fun.

Our farm share will cost $650 for 22 weeks, which works out to just less than $30 per week. The looming question is: what will we get and how much of it will be there? My sister in law is skeptical, “What will you do if one week you get three pounds of parsnips?” I hope that won’t happen, but the truth is that I have always planned first and shopped second. The CSA method might work out really well for me–I’ll get my produce first and then plan the meals around it.

Even a seasoned shopper of farmers’ markets and health food stores is likely to encounter challenges when faced with preparing food straight off the farm. The contents of my CSA farm box will be dependent upon the farmer’s field plan, the New England climate, and the effect of specific weather on the crops. But I’ll get by with a little help from my friends: cookbooks and the internet. Cheers to an adventurous and delicious summer!

Recommended reading: Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables/Seasonal Recipes and Stories from a Community Supported Farm by John Peterson and Angelic Organics

Read about Robin Horrigan

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/galant/ / CC BY 2.0

I might as well come out and admit it: I love meat. I love it. I love that blissful first bite of medium-rare steak. I love the flavor a single smoky sausage gives to an entire pot of stew. I love bacon with my eggs. When I tried vegetarianism several years back, fellow veg-heads kept telling me, “Don’t worry! You’ll stop craving meat! Just give it time!” Never happened. After four years of sighing every time I caught a whiff of something on the grill, I finally admitted that my body just wanted what it wanted. Meat.

But liking meat has become a real dilemma in the past several years. The issues pile higher every day. There are the E. coli outbreaks from poor meat processing, which is affected by poor living conditions in the feedlots, which in turn comes from the food that the animals are given and how they are treated. There’s the land it takes to raise all the animals. There are the health concerns that come with diet high in meat. There are economic factors involving government subsidies and struggling farmers. It gets overwhelming very quickly, doesn’t it?

As I stand in front of the meat case at our grocery store, all these concerns shout, clamor, and fight for attention in my head. You’d think it would be an easy choice to go for the free-range, organic, locally raised meat. But it’s not.

For me, it comes down to time and money. My grocery store doesn’t sell local meat (and I’m highly suspicious of the cryovac-ed packages labeled “organic”). Buying better, more humanely raised meat means a special trip to the market downtown. I hate to admit, but that extra trip often feels like one thing too many after a long day.

And that good quality meat also costs more, which it should given its quality. But when the price difference between a package of chicken at my regular grocery store and one at a place like Whole Foods gets to be more than a few dollars, my budget just can’t handle it.

There are some solutions and compromises. By eating less meat overall, I can theoretically afford the better quality products. I also plan one big trip to the market downtown and freeze extra meat for the weeks ahead. I buy fewer steaks now and more roasts, which are more affordable and can be stretched into meals like Pulled Pork Sugo or Shredded Pork Wraps. I buy whole chickens and have taught myself how to separate them into pieces.

My husband and I caught a break recently. We both received small raises at our respective jobs–not enough to drastically change our lifestyle, but enough that there’s a little left over at the end of the month. We talked about getting iPhones or saving up for trips. In the end, we decided to put most of this extra money toward our food budget. After years of feeling our guts twist every time we stood in front of the meat counter, we’re ready to really commit to only buying local meat from farms we trust.

This is such a complicated and personal matter, I’d love to hear your thoughts! What choices have you made about eating meat?

Read about Emma Christensen.

There are times when I tried shopping the European way: buying only what I need and selecting the freshest foods that have traveled the smallest number of miles between their origin and my table. If I could make myself get used to this, I’d run into “the jicama problem” much less frequently. Inevitably, though, I find myself stumped as to what I’m going to do with the beautiful eggplant I brought home. Then I look at recipes only to find that I must go back to the store to make the eggplant dishes that appealed to me most. Now I’ve traded the jicama problem for an eggplant problem. But jicama/eggplant problems aside, it does work much better for my family if I plan first and shop later. Most of the time I am able to find the items I need.

A decade ago “going green” and buying organic or local seemed like more of a fad than anything; now these concepts are in the vernacular. Families are faced with even more product choices than ever, and the responsibilities can overwhelm the average shopper. Knowledge is responsibility, and I occasionally long for the days when I didn’t realize my mid-winter berry purchases had a true and lasting impact on so many aspects of the consumer food chain. Becoming a locavore has a certain amount of appeal, but I approach the idea with great trepidation as a New Englander used to long, cold winters, surviving on produce grown in warmer climates. I’m not really looking to become a pioneer woman.

I count myself among regular folks who are still a ways from making “eco friendly” our number one priority. I don’t know a single family that doesn’t worry about their two most precious commodities: time and money. My husband jokes that Whole Foods should be called “Whole Paycheck,” and although it is a mindset we are working to move past, he’s absolutely right. Stuff is pricey there. But it’s also the best shopping experience around with the highest quality product selection. Whole Foods’ marketing strategies make shopping with the earth and our health in mind very easy for us. I’ll pay a little extra for that inspiration. We’re on the waiting list for a local CSA farm share. I don’t know if I’m up for the challenge of being presented with a crate of produce every week and then figuring out how best to prepare and serve it. But I know I can use that bounty as the basis to plan my weekly shopping and feel good about it. I wonder if I’ll get any jicama…

On a lighter note, If you’re just in the mood to feel a little green this season, here are a few recipes that will inspire you with their verdant hue. A true vegetable hater tested the Spring Greens and Potato Soup, and he went back for a second bowl!  It would make a beautiful first course for a spring dinner party. Chocolate Cannoli Sandwich Cookies are dressed up with a sprinkling of lovely green pistachios. Lastly, when you have to buy a big bunch of cilantro for a single recipe (or are stuck with an exploded herb garden later next season) try Cilantro Pesto as a coating for simple grilled fish or shrimp or a light topping for pasta. If your vegetable drawer is overflowing with leftover arugula or flat-leaf parsley, try that instead for a different flavor.

The bar is rising every year. On the one hand, striving to be more eco-friendly is great for the earth–reducing the carbon footprint, supporting local agriculture and business and improving our health by limiting the chemicals we ingest. But on the other hand, it has the potential to leave us falling short of new expectations we set for ourselves and wondering if we’re really doing our part for this thing we like to call saving the earth.

Resolving to be a little eco-friendlier isn’t for everyone. (For many busy families, it’s often enough to get a healthy meal on the table, let alone worry about how to recycle the quart container the produce came in… and compost the scraps? Forget about it!) But if you have been dabbling in going green, read on.

Like with any resolution, if we set small goals for ourselves we are less likely to fail. Our kitchens and cooking lives are a good place to start. There are several places we can make a dent in embracing the eco-friendly: the way we do our grocery shopping, attempting to control our own wastefulness, recycling our food packaging and being conscious about our kitchen energy use.

For me, these are two environmental endeavors that are most sustainable (pun intended!).

Carnivore, Herbivore or Locavore?
It’s tough to find a sweet spot between shopping on a budget and buying local, organic or both. Ultra-fresh produce straight from the Farmers’ Market is umpteen times more sweet and delicious because it hasn’t had to travel from, say, Chile and/or be frozen and carted around in huge boxes.

Buying a few items from a local farm stand each week when fruits and vegetables are in season, and buying organic when we can will help both our local farmers and our health. I’m going to commit to two to three produce items each week this summer while my Farmers’ Market is up… strawberries in early summer and blueberries in late summer. My whole family will benefit (and so will the baked goods).

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Reusable grocery bags are so easy–if you remember to bring them with you. Try Envirosax or Baggu. They often come in sets of three or more, and they are so compact you can easily keep a few in your purse, backpack or car.

You’re ahead of the game if you have a recycling bin in your kitchen. If it’s out of sight it will be out of mind. Keep it close by, and know what is recyclable.

Tip: To get the plastic bags back to the grocery store to recycle them there, stuff them in your reusable grocery bags and empty them on your way into the store.

Stay tuned for more Eco topics this month.