A Literary Culinary Journal
by Tamar Chamlian
Vitamin D is of vital importance to our bodies. Most of us know that simple exposure to the sun for up to 10 minutes a day is sufficient for the body to make its own vitamin D.
Now that winter is setting in, if you live in countries that barely see the sun for months on end, you will need to seek other sources of getting your vitamin D.
It’s actually simple and easy. Here are the top three foods that can provide you with Vitamin D, with suggestions on how to use them.
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Edible: good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.–Ambrose Bierce, c. 1900
Ambrose Bierce was American satirist and writer (1842-1914? He went off to join Sancho Villa and was never seen again).
When William Randolph Hearst asked Ambrose Bierce what he collected, he replied: “I collect words. And ideas. Like you, I also store them. But in the reservoir of my mind. I can take them out and display them at a moment’s notice. Eminently portable, Mr. Hearst. And I don’t find it necessary to show them all at the same time.”
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Our ongoing series of tapas photos from by food photographer Steve Homer of Sabor de Almería in the southeast of Spain.
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See more food photo compositions at Meeta K. Wolff or in our Food Art category.
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by Jonell Galloway
Better eat all the chocolate you can now. Seems global warming is going to hit West Africa, and it will affect chocolate production. Chocolate will only be for the rich in the not-so-far-off future.
Chocolate art in all its forms: photo exhibition of odd chocolate creations.
Chocolate is the star at Le Cordon Bleu Australia this month, and they will be exhibiting October 19 to 21, 2011, at the Paris Expo, held at the Porte de Versailles.
Roundup of chocolate events in Britain’s chocolate week.
Psychology Today says the feel-good chocolate effect only lasts 3 minutes.
Check out BBC Good Food’s wealth of chocolate recipes. There’s something to everyone’s taste, and recipes go from easy to difficult.
Just discovered: Death by Chocolate, by Alan Nolan, a comic writer.
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by Jonell Galloway
The word “fondue” means literally “melted” in French. In Switzerland, fondue is made by melting cheese with white wine, pepper, garlic and kirsch (cherry schnapps).
Photo courtesy of Fribourg Tourist Bureau.
Different regions use different cheeses and have different recipes however. In the canton of Valais, no starch, butter, or eggs are added, while in many other regions they are used for thickening. Today, many people use corn starch.
Fribourg fondue is different from other cantons in that it uses Fribourg Vacherin cheese. Both Gruyère and Fribourg make what is referred to as “half and half”, meaning they use half Gruyère and half Fribourg Vacherin cheese.In central Switzerland, it is common to use Gruyère, Emmental and Sbrinz, a hard cheese from central Switzerland that is claimed to be the oldest cheese in Europe.
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A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit, it turns into wine, something Brussels sprouts never do.–P.J. O’Rourke, 1997
Patrick Jake “P. J.” O’Rourke (born November 14, 1947) is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author.
His latest book, Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastard, was published in September 2010. Both Time and The Wall Street Journal have called him “the funniest writer in America.”
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What is food to one is to others bitter poison.–Lucretius, 50 BC
Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BCE – ca. 55 BCE) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying the foundations of Epicureanism, De Rerum Natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or sometimes On the Nature of the Universe.
Click here to read “The Answer Man,” a critique by Stephen Greenblatt in The New Yorker.
On the Nature of Things
No single thing abides; but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings-the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
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SandeeA is a food photographer and stylist. She also writes her column Food Play, which includes many playful food items such as this.
She runs the popular website La Receta de la Felicidad. Click here to learn how to make the potato pears.
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OLIVES: The Luscious Briny Fruits We Can’t Resist
Older than written language, source of light, heat, food, medicine and perfume, the olive is said to be over six thousand years old. And that is just its cultivation history. The tree’s ancestor, found in Italy in fossilized form shows it to have been around for 20 million years.
Athena’s gift to Zeus, the branch brought back by dove to Noah’s ark, long used in ceremonies of purification and blessing, the olive has long been a symbol of peace and glory.
We know the olive today as a savory health-giving fruit, the oil as ideal for dressings, marinades and cooking and the leaves for their medicinal qualities found in various tea blends.
In addition to all its ancient and present uses, the olive is now being championed by the Green movement as a renewable energy source and superb source of fuel, able to give off 250% more heat than wood.
Here is a poem that takes us beyond the pure visceral pleasure of eating olives, by American poet A.E. Stallings.
Olives
Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet,
For fruits that you can eat
Only if pickled in a vat of tears —
A rich and dark and indehiscent meat
Clinging tightly to the pit — on spears
Of toothpicks, maybe, drowned beneath a tide
Of vodka and vermouth,
Rocking at the bottom of a wide,
Shallow, long-stemmed glass, and gentrified;
Or rustic, on a plate cracked like a tooth —
A miscellany of the humble hues
Eponymously drab —
Brown greens and purple browns, the blacks and blues
That chart the slow chromatics of a bruise —
Washed down with swigs of barrel wine that stab
The palate with pine-sharpness. They recall
The harvest and its toil,
The nets spread under silver trees that foil
The blue glass of the heavens in the fall —
Daylight packed in treasuries of oil,
Paradigmatic summers that decline
Like singular archaic nouns, the troops
Of hours in retreat. These fruits are mine —
Small bitter drupes
Full of the golden past and cured in brine.
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A.E. Stallings, this year’s recipient of a ” target=”_blank”>MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, is the author of two collections of poems, Archaic Smile which received the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award and Hapax, awarded the 2008 Poets’ Prize. She has also earned a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the James Dickey Prize, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Athens, Greece.
This poem was first published in The New Criterion in June 2006.
This poem was contributed by our Poetry Editor, Christina Daub.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
