When is Jam not Jam?

Shopping in a rush is NEVER a good idea. I was rushing earlier today in the health food store and picked up a jar of Cascadian farm Fruit Spread. Small jar - on sale - organic, how bad can it get? Well, that depends. Had I been in a regular supermarket I would never have put that jar in my cart without checking the ingredient list first. But since I was at the health food store and in a hurry, I didn't bother. Result? I have been duped and upset ever since. The "jam" turns out be more than 50% sugar. Every 19 grams of this jam contains 10 grams of sugar. The first ingredient in my fruit jam is: sugar.
Again, that wouldn't surprise me in a supermarket, mass marketed brand, but with a brand such as "Cascadian Farms" it was a letdown.
So, when is jam not jam? When it is more than 50% pure sugar.
So, I sat down to write them a good old fashioned letter, actually e-mail. Let's see if they will respond.
E-mail:

Hello!

As a longtime health food store shopper, vegetarian and food writer I wanted to share with you my disappointment when I - without reading the ingredient list first - picked up your Blackberry Fruit Spread. Had I known - should have checked - that the number one ingredient in your Fruit Spread is sugar - even if it is organic, I would never have purchased this product. I forgot to check the label because I simply trusted that a company such as yours would be concerned with the sugar content of its products. In a 19 gram serving more than half is pure sugar!
While I do understand the need to sweeten fruit to make a preserve, especially tart fruits such as berries I am not willing to eat a sugar/fruit half and half concoction. This is is really nothing more than a sugar spread with fruit flavoring where I was expecting it to be the other way around.
I gave it the benefit of doubt and opened it to taste - it is of course way too sweet.
I would understand if that was the only way to make jam - however at least two brands I checked - D'arbo and Bonne Maman are able to make their Blackberry jams without using sugar as the first ingredient.
I took the time to write to you since I feel that you may not realize that your average consumer does read labels and does realize that the first ingredient is the most important.
I will not purchase this product again.
Sincerely,
Moni Schifler
I will post this on my food blog: To see if others agree with me.

First Frost

We are expecting the first frost tonight here in Upstate New York and while I was outside all day picking and rescuing all of the basil and green beans I could, I was for the most part on the farm by myself.
For those of you not familiar, I am a member of a CSA and part of my share is produce that is too labor intense to be picked, so we have the opportunity to pick for ourselves. Sometimes the yield of certain crops is just so phenomenal in a particular season that the farmer will just open fields to everyone to pick unlimited amounts. Needless to say that that is an immense bargain right there, because you can truly pick to your hearts content and freeze anything that you can’t use right away for the winter months.
What is a bit strange is that in my experience with different CSAs over more than 10 years now, there is usually just a core group of members that will pick produce themselves, the rest never take advantage of this bargain. In my 200 member CSA - I would venture to say there are about 40 people more or less that will pick, and I think I am being generous here - the rest would rather not. Why? I have no idea!
And that brings us to a rather solemn point - whilst writing this there are literally 100s of pounds of green beans that will die tonight and the amount of basil that will freeze tonight would make enough pesto to supply all the restaurants of Manhattan for a month. Why does it have to go bad - I guess nobody really appreciated the amount of work and the resources that went into producing their share of basil and green beans - so they just let it rot…..

Mind your plate!

Are we tired of New Year’s resolutions yet? Did we already abandon the new diet - they never work, do they? Well here is another approach - one that actually makes sense.
 Something I have been doing since last December.

There is a new book out there - presented with the impressive amount of new diet books released for the New Year, that examines something I have been commenting on for years. About 10 or 15 years ago the size of dinner plates went up - drastically. I still remember where in New York City I bought my first set of these 12 inch diameter monsters, my mother would have used as serving platers. But that really was the beginning of the incredibly expanding dinner plate - whereas the standard diameter had been around 8½ to 9 inches (and still is in Europe) - you will have a really hard time finding a dinner plate that is that small today. All of the dinner plates I found at the mall recently were 11½ to 12½ inches. And of course that is not the only thing that has been expanding! With all these added inches in the plate department, the inches that we like to obsess about are not far behind. 
The aforementioned book - “The 9 inch Diet” estimates you will be able to reduce your calorie intake by a whopping 35% switching to smaller plates!

Why does this come in handy for Vegetarians on the Cheap? Because these 35% do not only apply to your calories, but also to your budget. Less food eaten, means less food you have to buy.

Trying this at home myself I kept cooking the same amounts, but simply could not fit all the food on the smaller salad plates I was using, and while I thought that the family would notice and complain and jump up to run for seconds, that never happened! Not once did anyone in my family state that they were left hungry - even though they consumed way less food than they would have otherwise.
 It is a known psychological fact that people tend to eat just as much food as you put in front of them - the old "finish your plate syndrome". I would take it a step further and assume that one of the biggest cues our brain processes when eating, is a visual one. Namely, "when the plate is clean - I am done and not hungry anymore". This really works!

Should you run out and buy either the book or new plates? 
 Not really - salad plates do an excellent job - just make your salad plate your new dinner plate and you should be in business. The book is visually entertaining, but since it gives you only some inspiration and no recipes, it is a fine thumb through - but not a must buy.

New Feature: FOOD CRIMES

Sometimes we do things to food that just aren’t right and I do not mean cooking greens until they turn grey.
The over abundance of tomatoes the last couple of weeks has let me to research what to do with them.
And here was the problem: Every single recipe for making tomato sauce describes in painstaking detail how to get rid of the tomato skin. Boil and blanch, and this and that. Nauseating! Why?
Because 90% of the nutritional value of the tomatoes is in that skin you are told to throw away, or else your sauce will be rubbery. One word - Rubbish!
Why would you waste the beautiful skin of these lovely, heirloom, ORGANIC tomatoes to make sauce? Actually it really helps in making sauce, and here is why.
Yes, there is fiber in the skin, but that is A - good for you and B - makes an awesome natural thickener for the sauce. I would skim off the extra water the tomatoes release, and save it for the next soup or add it to any recipe, that asks for water and just use the tomato water instead.
The way to naturally thicken the sauce is to ladle out the skin parts of the sauce and puree them in the blender. Your sauce will have a beautiful consistency and you do not have to fidget around endlessly to get the skin off, nature intended to stay on!