Calling It Like She Sees It

I've always found anger (or, to put it more nicely, extreme annoyance) to be a great motivator. This blog wouldn't exist if I hadn't read a certain icky-girly, badly written local e-mail newsletter and become peeved that adult women would be writing (much less reading) such immature trash. And I figured I couldn't do worse.

My editor at FoodDay, Martha Holmberg, seems to have had one of those moments when she listened to an interview on NPR's Day to Day with Christiane Jory about her book titled "The 99¢ Only Stores Cookbook." After listening to the author (and host Alex Cohen) wax poetic about how delicious all this food tasted that was made from stuff that comes from cans and boxes, and how cheap it was, Martha got busy.

She wrote "there are plenty of bogus cooking ideas out there; I should be inured to that. My problem is that while Jory contends there's great and inexpensive food to be had at the ultra-discount stores, and that the book is infused with some sense of fun and irony, she's sending a really dangerous message. Leaving aside the whole debate over what the true cost of cheap food is, the implication is that if you don't have much money, you have to eat inferior, unhealthful, unsavory, uncelebratory, uncool and downright icky food. And that is so not true."

Her solution was to devise her own recipes from decent ingredients from real stores that actually cost less per serving than the author's. And then she wrote about it for the paper. You go, girl!

Your Official Correspondent

Sometimes you take a class or start a project and you never know where it's going to lead. Like this blog, for instance. Who knew that it would be as much fun to write as it is more than 200 posts and a year and a half later? That its readership would be doubling every few months, or that such great people would take valuable time out of their day to read it?

The same thing happened when I opened the Oregonian's FoodDay section a couple of months ago and read that they were looking for people to report occasionally about the great products they were finding at the local farmers' markets. I wrote immediately and volunteered, and for the last few weeks have been doing a column called Market Watch that talks about the various markets in the metro area and the people and products that make them unique. Again, a fun reason to explore markets I'd never have bothered to check out before, and an opportunity to share these discoveries with people. (Hmmm...am I sensing a trend here?)

Then last week I got an e-mail from the editor, Martha Holmberg, saying, "I'm realizing now that you're our regular 'correspondent' for this! I thought at first that I'd have several volunteers, but you're the one who consistently delivers good stuff, along with our staffers, of course." So now it's official, and you can look for my column to appear on a fairly regular basis in FoodDay between now and Christmas. Who'd have thought?

Photos, from top: Micro Mercantes at the Hollywood Farmers' Market; Blooming Gardens at Lents International Farmers' Market; Woodfire Baked Brick Oven Bagels at Hillsdale Farmers' Market.