sustainability | Hot, Cheap & Easy

Tag Archives: sustainability

Food and NCC: Oran Hesterman, Fair Food, and a Trip to Restoration Farm

(Update from Natalia: please see comments for a response from Dr. Hesterman!)

Spring has sprung upon me with flurry of all good things. Reunions, gardening, visits from family, coursework, channeling my inner drama queen for my film student cousin’s movies (!), learning opportunities, parties…It has been a terrific few weeks. However, it has left my blog community rather neglected! I have missed you too.

Dr. Hesterman and students (and me, bottom left)

Mind you, I have been cooking, but some of it has been experimentation that hasn’t quite worked out yet (falafel comes to mind). Other stuff has been tried and true recipes that you have read about before. And well, yes, I have been out to eat, ordered in, skipped meals, eaten a lot of salad (in anticipation of the shorts and T-shirt season), fed my son pizza (even for breakfast! oh, the shame…) and scavenged from my parent’s leftovers. So I don’t have as much as usual to report on the actual making-of-food front.

I do, however, want to share a few tidbits with you and happily, they involve a unification of my food world and my teaching world! (But if my students tell you I made them shovel shit, it is simply not true! Well, not entirely. Read on for details) Continue reading →

Tags: CSA, Dr. Oran Hesterman, environment, Fair Food Network, food, food stamps, food system, Nassau Community College, sustainability

Comments 16 Comments
Categories CSA, farming, Food, gardening

Smoked Salmon on Toast (an excuse to discuss salmon choices)

26 Nov

This is not really a recipe.It’s much more about making informed seafood choices, as you will see.

For our weekend breakfasts we:

Leandro’s plate of smoked salmon

Toast bread slices, spread with butter, pile on the smoked salmon on the side for Leandro.

Toast less bread, spread with butter, pile on the smoked salmon, a half teaspoon of finely chopped onion, and a half teaspoon of drained capers (drain well, as the caper juice will overpower the salmon) for me. You could also dollop on the sour cream or dab a bit of cream cheese.

That’s it.

What this really is is a chance to talk about selecting salmon.

Continue reading →

Tags: breakfast, choosing seafood, difference between ox and smoked salmon, food, recipes, smoked salmon, sustainability

Comments 9 Comments
Categories Food, Recipes, Seafood, Tapas

¡Comida Hispana! Recipes to unleash your inner Latino

Mango Mojitos With Ancho Chili Salt

It was another summer Friday in the neighborhood and that called for another festive cocktail. Riding high on the success of last session’s passionfruit mojitos, I decided to make mango mojitos. The drink itself followed much the same construction, but the mango was decidedly sweeter than the passionfruit, so I decided that it needed a […]
Passionfruit Mojitos by the Pitcher or Glass

Summer evenings in the neighborhood can be wonderful. Occasionally on a Friday some of us neighbors bring out folding chairs and sit together in one front yard for a bit of happy hour while the kids go mental on someone else’s lawn. It’s pretty much BYO, but we do mix up a pitcher of experimental […]
KID IN THE KITCHEN: Tembleque (Tropical Coconut Pudding)

We spent the better part of last summer in Puerto Rico, and among the tasty things that my little guy fell in love with was tembleque, a jiggly (temblar means to tremble) dessert that falls somewhere between pudding and flan. I promised him we’d make it back in New York, and this weekend, for a […]
Sangría Tropical (and rainforest paradise pictures)

When the heat gets tropical, so should the drinks. On a recent trip to the mountains of Puerto Rico, I was inspired by a wonderfully cooling and exotic sangría I had up around and about El Yumque (Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. Forest Service system) at Noelia’s, recommended to us […]
Salmorejo de jueyes (Land Crab Stew)

There are a number of land crab species skittering about Caribbean coastlines. Some are edible and the one we eat most here in Puerto Rico (although I am told they mostly are imported from Venezuela these days) is Cardisoma guanhumi which we call juey and — if you are English-speaking — you might call the […]