Fish, Wonderful Fish

I could eat fish every day. Just love it.

When we went to Hudson, NY, recently, we stopped at a marina restaurant, Frank Guido’s Port of Call. It looked a little too casual for us, actually– as if some sailors might come swooning out of the low-roofed building. OK, I wasn’t expecting to walk into a lush joist that required suit and tie and cashmere throw– but I didn’t want a skeevy diner, either.

But a waitress took us to the back, by the lake. There was seating on an outdoor patio with a large awning providing shade from the burning sun. It was beautiful!! We watched small watercraft zip up and down the Hudson while we dined.

And look what I got!

Doesn’t it just make your mouth water???

I wish we didn’t live so far inland. Fish is horribly expensive where I live. Everyone says how nutritious it is, how good it is…. but who can afford it?! It’s so much easier to live on cheapo junk food these days. Why is healthy food so expensive?

Oh well, I’ll wallow in the memories of that great fish dinner. With tartar sauce. YUM.

Autumn Means Baking!

Oh I am looking forward to autumn. Soon I’ll be able to turn on the stove and bake again! Look what’s growing in my yard!

There were multitudes of blossoms in the spring, but oddly enough the apples are rather few and far between. I don’t know what happened along the way. Although I will add that right now the apples are small and green and perhaps I didn’t see them because they are camouflaged so well. Yah, I’ll have to break out my welch allyn or something, eh?

Oh well, even so I think there will be enough for a nice pie. Yum! I can smell it already!

Baking…. or… Baking?

I have this rule as soon as summer hits: NO BAKING in the house. With the sun scorching the asphalt parking lots all around my property, we do enough baking around here. :-p I cannot tolerate the heat and therefore the oven is OFF. Once or twice we’ve heated up pre-packaged burritos or frozen pizza, and I’ve always regretted it. It’s almost comical how the oven generates so much heat in the summertime but can’t seem to warm the kitchen enough in the wintertime. :-p If only we could bottle up summer’s horrible heat and dispense it throughout the winter, evenly. What a wonderful world it would be, lol.

A Twitter pal recently mentioned her recent baking exploits and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. BAKE? In July??? Then I realized that some folks have air conditioners, but…. around here we go nearly bankrupt from the expense. I have turned on my air conditioner (first one, ever!!! I’m a newbie!!) three days this summer and already the husband is bemoaning the electric bill.

Summer is a lousy season. I am smugly satisfied that some of my other Upstate friends hate it as much as I do. Summer is nice in that everything is green (I love the gardening) and you don’t have to bundle up in a billion layers to go outside… it’s also a great time for raleigh wedding photographers– can you imagine taking outdoor wedding photos during winter?! But it’s so dang hot that you can’t DO anything but sit and sweat.

Ground Turkey Recall

I usually don’t pay attention to food recalls. I know I should, especially in the summer when our purchases of processed meat rise (hotdogs, pre-made hamburgers, etc). But an Upstate news outlet had a very long story about the latest recall — this time it’s for Cahill ground turkey — and it got me thinking.

Cargill Value Added Meats Retail, a business unit of Wichita-based Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation, has announced an immediate Class I voluntary recall of approximately 36 million pounds of fresh and frozen ground turkey products produced at the company’s Springdale, Arkansas, facility from February 20, 2011, through August 2, 2011, due to possible contamination from Salmonella Heidelberg.

Thirty-six MILLION pounds of ground turkey?!?!

That amount is staggering. And it caused me to think about some of the other recalls from much larger meat manufacturers. There was a ground beef/hamburger recall earlier this year, and I remember another one for hotdogs and another one for lettuce or spinach. And always, the recalls are huge, huge amounts. Just huge. It made think about our food industry. More and more, the food industry is being controlled by the government and extremely large corporations. It makes me nervous — not just because of any recalls but because the great power and control these men have over our nation’s food.

I really believe we need to become more self-sufficient when it comes to our food. I wish I knew more local outlets that sold local food. In my area, the “locavore” movement is beginning to blossom, but finding outlets that sell food AND trying to afford the food (which in some cases can be 3 to 6 times more expensive than the factory-raised foods) is hard. Hey, I’m not asking for solid gold golf trophies or anything, I just would like to buy my sweet corn and turkey meat from local farmers. Finding them is one thing, paying is another.

I’m hoping that the local food movement really gets moving. At my local grocery store, I spotted sweet corn for sake by a local farmer, but 99.9% of the other stuff was from… where? China? Mexico? India? No idea. Given the choice, I KNOW American consumers want to know from where their food originates, and we’d always choose local if given a choice.

Ah, but that’s the caveat: given the choice. Right now, we’re kept largely in the dark. This must change.