New Comfort Food Website

This blog has been pretty stale of late and the reason for that is that my wife and I moved the comfortfood.com domain to a new, fun social network we created (check out http://comfortfood.com for more). I don't know that I'll add any more posts to this blog now that the network is online, other than perhaps pointing out interesting content on the network here. Please visit the network, sign up, and/or let us know what you think. Regards,

Mark & Kim Drury

Raspberry Almond Mini Muffins

This recipe first came to me from my friend Karen, and it's been a family favorite for the last decade. Thanks Karen! You might as well take the leap and make a double batch, because they disappear FAST.

Enjoy!

INGREDIENTS:
2 Cups Flour
2/3 Cup Sugar
2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
1/4 Teaspoon Salt
1/4 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/2 Cup Butter, melted
2/3 Cup Milk
1 Egg
1.5 Teaspoons Almond Extract
1/2 Cup Raspberry Preserves

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Combine Flour, Sugar, Baking Powder, Salt, and Cinnamon together in medium bowl.
Melt Butter in microwave.
Stir together the dry ingredients, melted Butter, Milk, Egg, and Almond Extract. Mix well.
Spray mini-muffin tin with vegetable oil spray.
Fill muffin cups. Press 1 Teaspoon Raspberry Preserves into top of muffin batter. Gently fold the batter over most of the Preserves.
Bake 12-14 minutes until light golden brown.
Cool in pan 5 minutes before carefully removing.
Serve warm or at room temperature.

Makes 24 mini-muffins.

Et tu, Cadbury?

Apologies for the rant but I've had it. As both a parent and a consumer I've had it with Chinese food production safety issues. It isn't enough that Mars' brand M&Ms and Snickers -- Snickers! -- are made in China, where recent product shipped to Indonesia contained melamine. No, I now come to learn that Cadbury, the venerable English chocolatier with a near-200-year history as a company, is pimping out production to a Chinese firm which cannot kick a melamine habit. And I'm reasonably certain these reports are just the tip of a food safety iceberg that's on a collision course with a U.S. food industry rushing headlong to China's shores to save a buck or billion.


But the worst part is that I have no easy way of knowing where much of my packaged and "fresh" food comes from. Where it's grown and processed. Sure, I'd like to buy nothing but locally-grown foods but that isn't realistic for the vast majority of Americans, no matter the current popularity of farmers' markets in California and elsewhere. In digging a little I was amazed to learn how lax our country is in terms of "Country Of Origin Labeling" (COOL) for foods, how little is required and how many exemptions are in place. Dammit, we label our toys with country of manufacture; I see no reason why we can't require the same for our food, inarguably the more important of the two imports for which to have this information.

So, rather than just rant passionately if ineffectually in this blog I decided to do something about the issue. I created an online petition which I plan to send to Congress if I get more than a few signatures, and I'm asking you, dear reader, to read and sign that petition:

Require Country of Origin Labels on all U.S. Foods
...

Better, faster, cheaper takeout?

Yahoo! Food's Maggie Nemser wrote an interesting article about preparing your own fast food at home, entitled "Better and Faster Than Takeout." Lots of good recipes and the fare is certainly a bit healthier than your average Chinese takeout, to boot.

Ultimate Mac & Cheese, Redux

Do you have what you consider to be an excellent Mac & Cheese recipe? If so, you may wish to enter the Tillamook Macaroni & Cheese Cook-Off. From the contest website:

The third annual Tillamook Macaroni & Cheese Recipe Contest has evolved from past years and will be held during the cold weather months when comfort food is on everyone’s mind. No longer seen as just a simple, family meal, macaroni and cheese has many gourmet varieties. Last year saw more than 1,000 recipe submissions and we anticipate even greater participation this year. We’ll have cook-offs in six cities: Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Denver, CO; Chicago, IL: San Antonio, TX; and San Francisco, CA. Each regional cook-off winner will qualify to compete in a grand finale cook-off in Portland, OR (all travel expenses paid), for the chance to win $5,000 in cash and endless bragging rights....

Comfort food for breakups

An excellent Toronto Food & Drink Blog is carrying a review of Marusya Bociurkiw's new book, "Comfort Food For Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl." Despite the seemingly light-hearted title the book runs the emotional gamut. From the review:

Marusya Bociurkiw looks back at the personal highs and lows of her life through the food associated with each event. This collection of short stories and essays, interspersed with recipes, offers a glimpse into the Toronto-based writer and filmmaker’s life via what she ate and with whom.

She recounts the curry she cooked for her homeless brother, the coffee she drank on a visit to Ukraine, a torte brought by her mother on a trip, the rye bread from a Jewish bakery she visits with her father, a former prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. She tells of her various friends and lovers and the food she cooked for them and ate with them, as well as the food she ate to comfort herself when they were gone.

Comfort Food For Breakups is a beautiful collection of food memoirs, each one striking and poignant as they reveal Bociurkiw’s ongoing relationship between food and emotion, particularly love. The author paints a vivid picture of each person, each food, each place, as she describes all of the above with detail and care.

Good reading when chocolate and a sad movie aren't the answer, I guess.

Emotional Eating

The Toledo Free Press is running a story online today about Emotional Eating. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand lab at the University of Illinois, is quoted listing the usual reasons why we turn to comfort food, but has further:

broken down the types of comfort foods used based on sex and different moods. The No. 1 comfort food, to no one's surprise, is ice cream. After ice cream, women prefer chocolate and cookies and men prefer pizza, steak and casserole. Sad people prefer ice cream and cookies 40 percent of the time and bored people prefer potato chips 36 percent of the time.

The only thing I'd add to the men's list is just about any cold cereal, perhaps a quirk only my brothers and I share.