Cooking

January 7, 2016January 7, 2016

Nibbles: Croissant history, Beer threat, Cereals & CC, Wild cereals, Public domain images, Tea history

The croissant explained.
Belgian beer in trouble. That can’t be good.
And not only beer.
Some people held out against agriculture.
NY Public Library shares ton of digital images, including of agriculture.
Still got an hour to spare after that? Check out this podcast on tea in China.

December 11, 2015December 11, 2015

Nibbles: Roots & tubers, Vegetables, Baobab sorbet, Grapevine breeding, Landscapes, CC & ag

Cassava in the spotlight.
Yeah but don’t forget your veggies.
Plus a tasty baobab dessert.
And of course you’ll need a glass of wine to go with such a nicely balanced meal.
Let’s bring all that together, shall we?
Before it’s too late.

December 2, 2015

Nibbles: Tree conservation, Seed fairs, Baobab powder, Simran’s book, Cheesy prince, Companies & CC, Organic breeding

Crowdfunding the Zero Tree Extinctions project.
Seed fairs for climate change adaptation in Zimbabwe.
Make mine a baobab smoothie.
Another great review of Simran Sethi’s new book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.
Blessed are the cheesemakers.
Big Food taking fright?
Breeding the organic breeders of the future.

December 1, 2015November 30, 2015

Nibbles: Ancient faba, Ampelography double, S. African cattle, CIMMYT in Ethiopia, Seed pix, Heirloom pix, Trifolium genome

Faba beans came before cereals in Galilee.
Wine is not quite so old in Georgia, but still pretty old. But will they be able to genotype it?
South Africa is a cattle melting pot.
Getting improved wheat out there in Ethiopia.
These seeds are definitely ready for their close-ups.
Speaking of close-ups: Amy Goldman has a new book out.
First forage clover genome. More and more difficult to think of firsts.

November 11, 2015November 11, 2015

Breeding locally for local cooks

I’m not sure if we’ve ever linked to the Culinary Breeding Network before. This is a bunch…

…of plant breeders, seed growers, fresh market farmers, chefs and produce buyers engaged in developing and identifying varieties and traits of culinary excellence for vegetable crops in the Pacific Northwest region.

It came to mind because they have a cool, very informative Instagram account, as you can see from a post from a couple of days back…

#tbt the #cbnvarietyshowcase With corn breeder Bill Tracy of Univ of Wisconsin-Madison and Maya Lovelace of Mae in Portland, OR at the corn table. In 2013, Bill began new efforts in developing non-sweet vegetable corns which now includes Chilean choclo corns (flint corn) and Mexican pozoleros and elotes. He is also improving many heirloom corn varieties for local production and identified two that have excellent corn flavor and nice texture – 'Early Golden Market' and 'Lindsey Meyer Blue'. Photo by @shawnlinehan with Bill holding his Chilean choclo (on left) and 'Blue Eyed Blonde' (on right) which @mayalovelace used in her featured dish.

A photo posted by Culinary Breeding Network (@culinarybreedingnetwork) on Nov 9, 2015 at 2:54pm PST

…and because of yesterday’s post here on how to measure diversity. As I tried to say at the time, sometimes, for all its faults, number of varieties can be a useful metric. And even when it’s not, the names of the varieties are often a lot of fun.